Why did Donald Trump post, on the X/Twitter platform owned by the world’s richest man and now a member of Trump’s team, a clip of Jeffrey Sachs – old school liberal and scourge of the Neocons – lambasting US policy on Israel? We can rule out altruism; that goes without saying. Ditto horror at decades of injustice and genocide on the Palestinian people. So is it because the businessman in Trump eyeballs Israel though a transactional lens, sees it as a loss maker and, being a man who hates losers, wanted Netanyahu cut down to size?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I don’t come with a pat answer in my back pocket. Other than a review I wrote almost five years ago at the request of its publishers, of Stephen Gowans’ Israel: a Beachhead in the Middle East, I paid little attention to Palestine prior to October 7, 2023.
Not because I saw it as unimportant but because I saw other issues – Syria, Russia, China – as equally so but less well understood, with even the basics subject to major disagreement on the anti-imperialist Left. 1 I read Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine of course, and followed Finkelstein, Sachs, Chomsky, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal and other critics (disproportionately Jewish as it happens) of the apartheid state, but wrote little on Palestine until the Gaza breakout fifteen months ago. Since when a huge slice of my output has focused on it, rivalled only by that on Washington’s proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine. Even the implications of China rising, dollar decline and curtain call on 500 years of Western supremacy have had to take a back seat.
(Though all grow less extricable from one another with each passing day, inexorably subsumed under the biggest issue – matched only by capitalist ecocide 2 – of our time. I speak of course of the decline of Western imperialism and refusal of its rulers and their figureheads to accept and adapt to the same.)
But back to the Donald’s choice, on the face of it surprising, to cite Professor Sachs. While I hold Jeffrey in high regard, his view of US foreign policy as dictated by Israel is simply wrong. It’s true that Israeli leaders are less pliant than Europe’s politicians – a low bar by any standards 3 – and yes, there is a dynamic interplay to US-Israeli relations, but in the final analysis I’m as one with Brian Berletic on the vexed question of whether ‘the tail is wagging the dog’:
People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three. [Edited]
For why the US is not “fighting Israel’s wars” – as Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter and others I take seriously believe 4 – but those of its own ruling elites, see my October posts on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right – Part 3 in particular.
So did the man who tomorrow assumes the US presidency order Bibi to make a ceasefire deal – after eight additional months of Gazan suffering beyond our widest measure – near identical to the one he was allowed to reject without the slightest penalty exacted by the quarter masters of his – and Team Biden’s – war crimes?
And if he did, why?
Here, for your Sunday edification, are Jon Helmer, Nora Barrows-Freidman, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley – better known to many of us as The Electronic Intifada – with one answer to that question.
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- See my posts on Syria, on the Ukraine conflict, and on China rising. Even if I am wrong on these issues (I’m not) what can’t be denied is the reality of a Left divided at root over all three. By contrast, while that Left is divided on important but subaltern questions – like that of a one-state or two-state solution, and whether Washington is ruled by Israel – not since the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila has the horrific and reactionary nature of the Zionist regime been disputed in broadly Left circles.
- “Capitalist ecocide” is another topic I seldom write about, and for a similar reason: others are doing a first rate job of showing that earth’s trashing is an inevitable consequence – ascertainable both logically and empirically – of a political-economic system which must prioritise private profit and accumulation over all other consideration. See my short post, Ecocide: the Mullah Nasruddin speaks!
- Here’s Radhika Desai. Asked by Dimitri Lascaris why most of Europe’s leaders are so obedient to Washington, she replied:
The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.
- Some who say Israel drives US policy are outright antisemitic but this is not true of those I name here, and for what it’s worth Jeffrey Sachs is, like many informed and relentless critics of Zionism, Jewish.