ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM

ERIC ZUESSE—Both the growing power and extremism of the Orthodox in Israel was highlighted in the last week of January when one of their most influential rabbis, Shmuel Eliyahu, publicly came to the defence of five students accused of murdering Aisha Rabi, a Palestinian mother of eight. Back in October they stoned her car near Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, forcing her off the road.

Eliyahu is the son of a former chief rabbi of Israel, Mordechai Eliyahu, and himself sits on the Chief Rabbinical Council, which controls many areas of life for Israelis. He is also the municipal rabbi of Safed, a city that in Judaism has the equivalent status of Medina in Islam or Bethlehem in Christianity, so his words carry a great deal of weight with Orthodox Jews. 

A. MARTYANOV—The Iron Dome is nothing but a short to very short-range system designed specifically to fight slow ballistic “dumb” projectiles from Palestinian “Katyushas” and is not designed to operate in the modern battlefield. But the political factor is understandable and Israel is in a geostrategic pickle because she can see how her main sponsor and “defender”, meaning enabler, the United States is teetering on the edge of political and economic catastrophe and the only country which can mitigate Israel’s “regional issues” is Russia.

PHILIP GIRALDI—The fact is that President Donald Trump was second to none when it came to pandering to Israel even when that country’s interests do real damage to the United States, though his claim that he is so popular in Israel that he could be elected Prime Minister is absurd. He is not a Jew and could not even emigrate to Israel even if he chose to do so. As president, he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he accepted brutal Israeli settlement and control of the Palestinian West Bank, approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and ignored repeated Israeli war crimes using US provided weapons. Nevertheless, the response from the usual suspects was immediate, with the ever-vigilant Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL calling the Trump comments both insulting and disgusting while his colleague Oren Segal goes one step further, claiming that the statement has “shattered” a general feeling of safety among American Jews.

When the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Mossadegh government in 1953, it brought rent-a-mobs into the streets of Tehran to provide cover for the coup. Were the riots that broke out in Iran last week the latest iteration of the CIA’s rent-a-mob coup strategy?

JEFFREY SACHS—The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world. It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence. Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated. Yet in the “battle for Ukraine,” the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.