by John Lyons
Trump made clear during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s first meeting with him as President in February 2017 that he would be dramatically changing US policy. Standing next to Netanyahu, Trump appeared to abandon Washington’s long commitment to a two-State solution. ‘I’m looking at two-State and one-State, and I like the one that both parties like,’ he said.10
The editorial board of the New York Times, traditionally a strong supporter of Israel, noted after the meeting: ‘There is no conceivable one-state solution that both parties will like. Smiling by Mr Trump’s side, Mr Netanyahu, who has steadily undermined the prospect of a Palestinian state, clearly believed his vision was the one the new American President had in mind. The two leaders seemed almost giddy in their first official meeting, which was intended to show how Mr Trump can be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama was, even though Mr Obama completed a new 10-year, $38 billion defence agreement with Israel.’11
Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia Tim Fischer believes you cannot understand Israel’s power in the United States without studying an event that occurred on 8 June 1967, the fourth day of the Six Day War. On that day Israeli jets attacked one of the US’s most important naval intelligence ships, the USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors.
The US decided not to attack the attackers but made a strategic retreat, having been mauled by the Israeli Air Force. To use the word of Tim Fischer, the US ship ‘limped’ back to Malta.
Files about the incident – specifically, whether the attack was deliberate – have been sealed. Whether the attack was intentional, or accidental as Israel claimed, one thing is not disputed: the US reaction was almost nonexistent.
In the ensuing years, several US officials questioned why the US had not protested at the attack. Senator James Abourezk said: ‘The shame of the USS Liberty incident is that our sailors were treated as though they were enemies, rather than the patriots and heroes that they were. There is no other incident … that shows the power of the Israeli lobby by being able to silence successive American governments. Allowing the lies told by the Israelis and their minions in the US is disheartening to all of us who are proud of our servicemen.’12
Many became convinced that the attack was deliberate. Former congressman Paul Findley would write in 1985: ‘The attack was no accident. The Liberty was assaulted in broad daylight by Israeli forces who knew the ship’s identity … the President of the US led a cover-up so thorough that years after he left office, the episode was still largely unknown to the public – and the men who suffered and died have gone largely unhonoured.’13
Former Senator Adlai Stevenson III said in a 1980 interview: ‘Those sailors who were wounded, who were eyewitnesses, have not been heard from by the American public … [Their story] leaves no doubt but that this was a premeditated, carefully-reconnoitered attack by Israeli aircraft against our ship.’14 The deputy head of the US Mission in Cairo at the time, David Nes, said: ‘I don’t think that there’s any doubt that it was deliberate … [It is] one of the great cover-ups of our military history.’15
Tim Fischer has made a study of the USS Liberty incident and believes it has shaped US–Israeli relations. He told me it must have been ‘one of the lowest points in US military history’ to have left one of its ships on its own. ‘It flies in the face of the general military code to go in and help which is why the US military establishment have hushed it up … The US military have air-brushed it out of history because they are acutely embarrassed by it. Had the attackers been Chinese or Russian it would have been war.’
Mr Fischer added: ‘Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty and the non-reaction by America meant from then on Israel could do anything with impunity … If President Johnson was not going to send fighter jets in to protect one of his ships they were not going to do anything else. What happened to the Liberty may have changed the face of the Middle East. Little young Israel could do anything and get away with it. It could start building the atomic bomb on a scale and they knew the US would do nothing – they had these friends in Washington and that was enough.’
George Ball, Under-Secretary of State at the time, would write in 1992: ‘If American leaders did not have the courage to punish Israel for the blatant murder of American citizens, it seemed clear that their American friends would let them get away with almost anything.’16
History confirmed these words only too clearly. A letter from the US Ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, to the State Department, dated 25 July 1974, made it clear that the US was in on the plan to build settlements in the West Bank from the beginning. Keating wrote it the day after meeting Yigal Alon, the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs. He wrote: ‘I raised US concern over Israeli press stories on plans to establish new settlements in occupied territories and adverse effect these stories could have upon [peace] negotiations. Alon responded sympathetically to my remarks and said that he would make additional efforts to keep stories on this subject out of the press.’
The US–Israeli strategy was clear: to try to keep stories about settlements out of the media rather than to stop them.
‘For the last 40 years, a succession of Israeli governments has misled, manipulated or persuaded naïve US presidents that since Israel was negotiating to give up significant territory, there was no need to fight over “insignificant” settlements on some territory’, wrote Thomas Friedman. ‘Behind the charade, Israeli settlers bit more and more of the West Bank, creating a huge moral, security and economic burden for Israel and its friends.’17
At first I assumed he was a real journalist. Indeed, the way he introduced himself was impressive. ‘I work in the White House Press Corps,’ he told me. It was 16 December 2009 and I was in the West Bank settlement of Ariel for a conference about how the rest of the world viewed Israel. We’d just sat down to lunch. The man’s name was William Koenig, and he introduced himself as the White House correspondent for Koenig International News.
But the conversation took an odd turn when he told me that many of America’s natural disasters had followed criticism. He listed various disasters and attributed them to US criticism or ‘weakness’ relating to Israel. Criticise Israel and God will be angry. I quickly realised that William Koenig was no ordinary reporter. I discovered that he was a leader of the Christian Zionist movement, which ensures Israel has enough support in the Congress to expand its occupation.
Koenig has written Eye to Eye, a book that shows the links between 57 ‘major catastrophes and events’ and the ‘anti-Israel’ comments that caused them. Koenig argued that a ‘very large majority’ of President George W Bush’s political problems and the many natural catastrophes during his time in office ‘have a direct connection to his involvement with the Israeli–Palestinian peace process’. Koenig wrote: ‘Many world leaders believe that Israel is the key to peace when in reality the continued pressure upon Israel and the subsequent events will rapidly lead the world into the final battle: the battle of Armageddon – the battle for Jerusalem. We hope and pray this book helps you become better aware of why the world is rapidly moving into her final days and nearing the return of the Messiah to Jerusalem.’18
Koenig argued that ‘eleven of the twelve costliest hurricanes in US history have a direct tie-in to US-Israeli peace efforts’. Hurricane Katrina, for example, which at US$80 billion was the most expensive disaster in US history, was retribution for the fact that President George W Bush expressed pleasure at Israel’s withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza; Hurricane Andrew came during the Madrid peace talks; Hurricane Charley came as the George W Bush Administration pressured Israel to withdraw from unauthorised outposts; Hurricane Wilma came as the US froze Israel’s financial aid in response to settlement construction and Bush hosted Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at the White House; Hurricane Ivan came as the ‘Bush administration continued pressure on Israel’; Hurricane Rita was retribution for Bush’s hosting of Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House.
William Koenig even linked the September 11
, 2001 attacks to US policy on Israel. He writes:
In August and September of 2001, President Bush worked with Prince Bandar – the Saudi Ambassador to the US – Secretary of State Colin Powell and Daniel Kurtzer, the US Ambassador to Israel, to develop a comprehensive peace plan that Abdullah [of Saudi Arabia] would approve. Powell was to deliver the Bush plan to the UN General Assembly on September 24, 2001. The plan divided Israel and created a Palestinian state, in return for ‘peace and security’ guarantees to Israel. The plan’s completion and presentation were disrupted by the September 11, 2001, terror events. For a brief moment, the God of Israel lifted His protection as evil people attacked America.
Politically, what is important for Israel is that the US continues to support its settlement expansion – or, at least, never does anything more than issue statements that new settlements are ‘unhelpful’. For this reason, people like William Koenig are crucial.
He explained to me how he tried to ensure that Israel was not criticised. ‘We have eyes everywhere,’ he said. ‘We have eyes in the US, in Europe, in Australia. With the internet it is all so much easier. The moment one of our people sees something negative about Israel we jump. Someone hits back quickly.’
Aspiring members of Congress who challenge the Christian Zionist movement do so at their own peril. Christian Zionists argue against a Palestinian State. ‘We think Israel should have all the land out here,’ Koenig told me. The view that anyone who criticises Israel risks apocalyptic revenge has entered US mainstream politics. Even one-time Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann echoed this outlook. Responding to pictures of floods in South Carolina, she tweeted: ‘US turns back on Israel, disasters follow.’
Though the US has turned a blind eye to the settlements from the beginning of Israel’s occupation, occasionally an administration has expressed some resistance. Jimmy Carter was the only president to brand the settlements ‘illegal’, and from that moment the pro-Israel lobby in the US ran a campaign against him. When Carter announced, at 90, that he had cancer that had spread to his brain, this was seen by some as punishment for his views on Israel. As a Jewish website reported: ‘For some Jews (and evangelical Christians), the cause apparently is obvious. No, it’s not his genetic make-up, or the spread of a mass from his liver to his brain. It’s divine punishment for his behavior toward the Jews.’19 George Bush Senior threatened to stop the US from guaranteeing loans to Israel if it did not curtail settlements, and likewise the pro-Israel lobby ran a campaign against him. After George W Bush threatened loan guarantees to Israel if they continued settlements, the Republican Party received a backlash from pro-Israel supporters in the US, including the Christian Zionists.
Koenig described himself as ‘an evangelical’ and was scathing of some church groups which, he said, had made matters worse by supporting the peace process. ‘It’s all in the Bible. This land belongs to Israel. If Christian groups like the World Council of Churches and the Vatican had supported Israel for the last 40 years the whole situation wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in.’
In Eye to Eye Koenig explains Israel has a right to the West Bank ‘because God said so’. Supporting this, he quotes from the Bible, Genesis 13:14–17: ‘The Lord said to Abram, “Lift up now your eyes, and look from the place where you are northward, and southward, and eastward and westward: for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever.”’ Koenig argues that ‘God specifically declared “No Peace Deals”, citing Exodus 32: ‘“Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against Me.”’
I asked Koenig what should happen to the Palestinians. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They just will become part of a larger Israel.’
A key link in the Christian Zionist chain is the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem – the contact point in Israel for Christian Zionists. The day I met David Parsons, the head of the embassy, in October 2014, he had just come from a meeting with the Israeli Government.
Parsons once worked as a lobbyist in Washington. ‘We have a strong branch in the US but our strongest branch is in Europe,’ he said. ‘We have branch offices established in 80 countries, including in some Muslim majority countries that we really can’t name to protect them, but Christians there who support Israel. Our magazine goes to 140 countries, our email list to 150, our TV show is in probably 190 countries.’
Parsons said his followers had ‘a predisposition’ to support Israel. ‘We’re not anti-Arab, it’s just that we see the animosity towards Israel, and we say, “Hey Christians, especially in Europe where there’s so much history of Christian anti-Semitism, our churches made these mistakes for centuries, and we see the rest of the world buying into the lies now against the Jews in the form of the Jewish State, and it was a mistake to do it and it’s a mistake for you to do it.”’
So what is the goal of Christian Zionists, according to David Parsons? ‘There’s an effort to try to give fairness to the whole debate over Israel because of the way the Jews were so unfairly treated in the Christian world for centuries. It’s a basic faith principle that the way we read the Bible it says God loves the whole world but to reach the whole world with his redemptive plan he chose a certain vessel to do this through and that was the Jewish people.’
As a leader of the movement, did Parsons think there should be a Palestinian State? ‘I still believe that the Jewish claim to the entire land is superior historically and that the claim of Palestinian national identity is of more modern origin,’ he told me.
He said the support of Christians in the US reflected the community as a whole. ‘When you look at the polls in America concerning Israel it’s always been high 60s into the high 70s of support for Israel, generally. The evangelical community tracks just a little ahead of that, we’re the strongest but still not that far off from the general view in the US because a lot of it is based on shared values, shared democratic Judaeo-Christian values and traditions and such and they see Israel as a solid ally … There’s always been this Arabist bloc in the State Department that has tried to present the Arab point of view and the White House is always in between those two. This is Washington. The different White Houses over time and how they play that off and navigate that has always been interesting.’
Parsons rejected the notion that there was not a genuine discussion in Congress about Israel. ‘I think they voice the concerns of the people and they’re concerned about the Iranian threat, not just the threat to Israel but others in the region … [pro-Israel lobby] AIPAC is viewed as powerful but it’s just effective.’ AIPAC, he said, ‘knows how to speak to Americans and elected American officials.’
Jodi Rudoren from the New York Times has closely observed Israel and its influence in the US, particularly through its most powerful lobby group, AIPAC. She told me: ‘AIPAC and the related groups long ago built a system in which they operate in every congressional district, they raise enough money and mobilise enough small donors to influence every single congressional district.’
I asked Rudoren whether this was unhealthy for US democracy: ‘I don’t think there’s a very healthy debate in America over Israeli policy. There’s very much this notion that you’re with us or against us – betrayal, all that stuff.’
I asked Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar: does AIPAC distort the discussion of Israel? ‘I think they are an obstacle to the two-State solution which is the very idea of Zionism,’ he replied. ‘Without the two-State solution Zionism is kaput. As to why AIPAC is opposed to a two-State solution, the cynical answer would be that if there is peace and no embargoes on Israel there will be no need for those people and there are hundreds of people who make a living from the current situation. It’s similar to the weapons industry and the military lobby – if there is peace who needs to have such a big army in Israel, and so many arms dealers?’
I asked Eldar if American politicians were scared of Israel. He said:
They’re scared
of AIPAC. And they’re scared for a very good reason. AIPAC has many dead heads on their belt – skeletons – of congressmen who dared not to vote against Israel but who didn’t have a completely positive record on votes when it was about Israel or Iran.
I wrote a book called The Jerusalem Capital Ambush on how AIPAC was manipulating the Congress to pass a bill to move the [US] embassy to Jerusalem, embarrassing both Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin. And how did they do this? By playing Republicans and Democrats. There was a story in the New York Times about how they got rid of an incumbent congresswoman from a district that hardly saw a Jew there by pouring money into the political action committee. It was an African American against an African American and they decided to get rid of the incumbent because she didn’t have a clean record on Israel. AIPAC is considered to be one of the leading lobbies after the unions and gun lobby.
Eldar and other Israeli analysts believe that even though competition to AIPAC has emerged in recent years through groups more prepared to accommodate a two-State solution, such as J-Street, AIPAC still remains the Israel-related lobby group that US lawmakers fear.
It is impossible to examine the US factor in Israel without looking at the role of Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino billionaire who is one of America’s wealthiest men. Adelson supports a Greater Israel under which settlers take the West Bank and leave no possibility for a Palestinian State. An address he gave to the Israeli–American Council on 9 November 2014 offered an idea of his views: ‘I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy … God talked about all sorts of good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining a democratic state, and if Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state – so what?’
Adelson is a major backer of Benjamin Netanyahu through his free newspaper Israel Today, the most-read newspaper in Israel. Ehud Olmert told me over dinner in August 2012 that he believed Adelson had founded the paper in response to Olmert’s peace offer to the Palestinians.
