Ceasefire? A short history of Israel

The idea that Israel dictates US policy against its own interests, erroneous for reasons set out in several posts including US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, is not confined to antisemites, though the birth and subsequent behaviour of the self avowed “Jewish State” do nothing to help those who stand against all forms of racism, antisemitism included.

That term has long been taken to denote hatred of Jews, thereby excluding Semitic Palestinians but conferring “right of return” on Jews who seem – though this, as you’d expect, is contentious – non Semitic. ¹ Two years ago Simeon Chavel, a professor at the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, concluded a short piece on the subject with this:

We would do well to refer to hatred of Jews and things Jewish in those very terms and to cease using the esoteric, coded, misleading, and deeply troubled terms of “semitic” identity and “antisemitic” sentiment and behavior altogether.

I agree in principle, though (a) that ship has sailed, (b) ‘antisemitism’  has the merit of brevity, and (c) to die on this of all hills groups us with those who insist that ‘anarchy’ does not mean chaos, and those who say ‘less pudding’  but ‘fewer pies’. 

From here on in, its problematic nature duly noted, I’ll use the term in its universally accepted sense of “hatred of Jews and things Jewish”. This, by the way, applies to Christian Zionists who include two British prime ministers – Winston Churchill ² and Arthur Balfour – whose reasons for backing the “Jewish State” included a desire to drain Europe of ‘troublemakers’, Jews being disproportionately represented on the Left. In this they were as one with Adolf Hitler, prior to his adoption of a more final ‘solution’, though Ken Livingston was expelled from the British Labour Party for saying so.

Also worth noting is that (a) many Jews, including those – Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, Jeffrey Sachs, Katie Halper, Aaron Bastani, Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky – frequently cited by me, are highly critical of Israel while (b) the “self-hater” put-down seems to have fallen out of favour with those they incense. Nowadays Zionists, including a British Labour Party busy ridding itself of Jews opposed to Israel, go for the jugular. The latter are antisemites too!

Above, Orthodox ‘antisemites’; below,  secular ‘antisemites’ – both taken at a London march for Gaza on October 11 2025

But let me get back to that erroneous claim of Israel dictating US policy. Again, it’s not confined to antisemites. Two of its more prominent exponents are John Mearsheimer and the aforesaid Jeffrey Sachs. On this they concur, though on Washington’s antipathy to China they differ, Sachs correctly noting that US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, and hostility to China, are more closely related than Mearsheimer’s school of “offensive realism” ³ is capable, blind as it is to class and empire, of realising. ⁴

Having gone into these things elsewhere, I want to confine myself to a few prefatory remarks before handing over to Professor Mearsheimer. First, he and Professor Sachs have my respect as honest and in many ways highly effective brokers. Second, the belief that Washington takes orders from Tel Aviv arises from blindness to class. By speaking of ‘national interest’ as a thing homogenous and indivisible, a distinction between the interests of most Americans and those of the elites ruling them (see my recent post on the how of that) goes unnoticed. Specifically, US foreign policy is not in the interests of the many – some of whom will, if the Netanyahus and Lindsey Grahams get their way over Iran, come home in body bags – but, again for reasons set out in US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, is very much in the interests of said ruling elites.

My third remark instantiates my first. John Mearsheimer, for all my differences with the man, has proved an articulate champion of Palestinians. While this seventeen minute podcast, on Israel’s creation and inherent expansionism, contains nothing new to those familiar with the subject, it has two advantages. One, it is simple and clear and short. Two, it effectively links the irreducibly racist essence of Israel to the matter, addressed yesterday in withering tones by Caitlin and for which I apologise for taking so long to get to the point, of the already shattered “ceasefire”.

* * *

1. I recently saw a YouTube clip of a displaced Palestinian asking a blue-eyed “Israeli” Jew, raised in Argentina by parents of Ukraine stock, what entitles him to her land. It reminded me of that quip about how tough life must have been for Jesus, the only blue-eyed whitey in the Middle East …

   

2. On Churchill’s Zionism and antisemitism both, see my 2019 review of Stephen Gowans’ book, Israel: a beachhead. Early on I quote Churchill’s hagiographer official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, on his subject being:

   … a fervent believer in the right of the Jewish people to a state … in what we then called Palestine [but one who] shared the low-level casual anti-Semitism of his class and kind …

   Gilbert implies a paradox where none exists. Besides trivialising the antisemitism of the English upper classes as “low level” and “casual”, he disregards the truth of antisemitism having never stood in the way of Zionism with its long record – from Lawrence of Arabia, through cold war Afghanistan and backing of ISIS in Syria, to funding Hamas as a way of weakening Fatah – of weaponising an Islamism by no means ‘casually’ antisemitic.

3. This is a low bar but despite its limitations, Mearsheimer’s ‘Offensive Realism’ has far greater explanatory power than anything on offer from our debased politicans and systemically corrupt media.
4. A year ago I featured Sachs and Mearsheimer, friends and intermittent allies, going head to head. Sachs says Sinophobia and Russophobia have the same drivers in – my words, not his – an empire dying hence dangerously flailing, while Mearsheimer asserts every nation’s duty to pursue its interests in a Hobbesian world in which the post-USSR demise of Westphalia principles seems to have passed him by. This informs his failure to join the dots in claiming that Washington’s Russophobia, but not its Sinophobia, is irrational. That in turn holds a distorting mirror to a rift within the US ruling class, now resolved de facto, Greek tragedian style, by every administration from Obama onwards having witlessly pushed Beijing and Moscow (Tehran and Pyongyang as well, with New Delhi seemingly following suit) into closer embrace.