James Petras, War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America

Clear Day Books, pp.132, Atlanta, Georgia, 2010.
A REVIEW ARTICLE

Frederic Clairmonte was for many years a permanent senior economic affairs officer in the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He is one of the world’s leading international marketing and financial analysts.

1. James Petras, teacher and humanist of a rare , encyclopedic, analytical intelligence, author of this compact masterwork, has long been recognized as the foremost social scientist of the United States. I would go one step further without indulging in hyperbole , as I believe that most readers of this publication would concur with me, that his voluminously enduring creations forged over decades have clambered to the highest summits of world journalism and scholarship . Is it not obvious that he, and the noble causes worldwide that he has championed, should be the object of obloquy, loathing and persecution by the adversaries of all liberation struggles?

2. The memory of the ongoing crimes of what I have called the Zio-fascist state depicted with such matchless brio in this work never be ephemeral. This is so because these acts of colonial bestiality rank among the most atrocious in the annals of mankind’s tortured history. Long after the tribunals of history have met and proclaimed their irrevocable verdict of guilty, the sheer scale and horrors of these crimes will neither be forgiven nor forgotten. This creation is destined to become a classic not only in the history of colonialism but because it reveals the indomitable spirit of resistance of the Palestinians that have stood up and fought back at times with little more than sticks, stones and their bare fists against a murderous oppressor. Thus the Intifada will rank as one of the greatest epic struggles of resistance of all times.

3. The parturition of Israel was born in blood and torture, imprisonment and mass murder. The start of this genocidal thrust is Al Naqba (1947) that marked the advent of this mass pillage and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in a struggle that is still unfinished and which has endured for almost seven decades. A grisly process that can only be eradicated by the end of this ignominious occupation ; and not the fake quest and wicked charade of what has been brandished ‘ a negotiated settlement’. The masters of the Zion- fascist state are not alone in their crimes against humanity for the enemies of the Palestinian peoples are also rooted in the United States, the European Union, certain Arab states notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt , Jordan and the Arab League that have been the unquestioned accomplices to their crimes.

4. The creation of Greater Israel which is one of the quintessential pivots of Zionist ideology owes its provenance to the Nazi-inspired racialist doctrine of the Herrenvolk, or the master race, among whose paramount practitioners were Heydrich and Himmler and their killer caste. In this perspective, the Zio-fascist state that labels itself Israel and considers all Arabs as the Untermensch, whose lands and people are legitimate plunder to be used and junked, stands forth as the legatus apostolicus of Nazidom. It is therefore not an aberration that Rabbi Obadiah Josef, leader of the Shays party and one of the country’s most revered clerics ((some of whose members are in Netanyahu’s cabinet including the minister of the interior and the deputy prime minister) in his sermon for Rosh Hashanah ( the New Year) could clamor for the death of the Palestinian political leadership and the physical annihilation by missiles and bombs of all Arabs and Palestinians “ who are evil enemies of Israel.”

No doubt the same pseudo religious rantings apply to the peoples of Iran that are also fated for the nuclear chopping bloc. To make sure that his audience fully grasped his message of exterminism he stressed at the end of his benediction that in the execution of this act of annihilation “there can be no place for mercy and pity”.

5. The findings of B Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, remind us of the scale of these huge land grabs, euphemistically peddled under the innocuous nostrum of ‘settlements’. The aggregate land grabs (300,000) have gobbled up 42% of the West Bank plus another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. The agony has not run its course. . This is what the masters of the Zio-fascist state have labeled “facts on the grounds”. Most of these ‘settlements’ are being funded by the big money bags of Zionist finance capital which, with the blessing of the US Treasury, are tax deductible.

6. Excluding the huge German reparations, since 1950 Israel has received yearly $5bn (that is the private sector payouts from international Jewry plus the US government) which works out to around $300bn over six decades and that in a land of about 6 million. Any move to halt this financial hemorrhage from a stricken US economy to Israel would be knifed by the Zionist cabals. Such massive unrelenting accumulation combined with the exploitation of an undifferentiated mass of Palestinian labour toiling for subsistence wages have rocketed the fortunes of Israeli capitalism now firmly meshed into the moorings of global imperialism.

Not surprisingly, its per capita GDP is now 65% of its US counterpart. And growing faster. Thanks to its US financial moguls the Zio-fascist state has now been rocketed into the ranks of the OECD of rich countries… It is a de facto member of the European Union as well as NATO as Bush jubilantly proclaimed. I have underscored from of these salient facts that will enrich our understanding of the nature of what the author perceptively calls the Zionist Fifth Colunm in America.

7. His creation revolves around what he designates as the Zionist Power Configuration. The categorization is accurate but I would have preferred another designation that I have called the Zio-fascist complex so as to accentuate and throw into sharper relief the horrors of its being . The operative word is ‘fascist’ for, as Fidel Castro scathingly noted at the time of the genocidal assault against the defenseless people of Gaza, Israel is a brazen, despicable, Fascist monster. The mobilization and propagation of its power in the United States, on behalf of Israel, is exercised by elected and appointed Zionist officialdom. One of the keys to its awesome firepower is that it is a mass grassroots organization buttressed by the financial support of scores of millionaires, dozens of billionaires and an irreversibly corrupt mass media that is its handmaiden.

8. It hegemonizes, and in many instances has paralyzed the workings of the US Congress and the Executive. The United States and its military-political caste oligarchy is the epicenter of Zio fascist firepower and the unique propellant of Israeli war aims in the Middle East, strikingly so towards Iran now threatened with the nuclear bludgeon. This Zio- fascist phalanx not only acts as a foreign agent of Israel now, but has overtly done so over the last five decades. Influence is focused with laser-like accuracy on the epicenters of power: the Congress, the Treasury, the State Department, National Security and the Pentagon and all leading Congressional committees that relate to Israeli expansionism.

The career profiles of the all intrusive power of its professionals that are the quintessence of the Fifth Column are to be found in every nook and cranny of Wall Street, the globe-girdling corporate law firms, the insurance industry, the big three stock market rating agencies and the big three accounting oligopoly. A point that the author makes clear when he emphasizes that “in effect pro-Israel career patterns and projections of power have established a kind of Judeo-Zionist hegemony of US public life.” In this perspective the regime scaffolded since 1947 must be seen as a totalitarian regime that continues to obliterate the most rudimentary forms of human rights and democratic aspirations; a feat that it has engineered with the concurrence of the US caste oligarchy.

9. This is one of the salient traits of the operational Fifth Column that operates within the United States. The retention of its grip is vastly magnified by the stranglehold on the major media outlets notably on the Middle East that is a primordial concern of Israel’s foreign policy. This is seen, as the author argues, by the power exercised by Israel First academics that straddle the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and almost exclusively the entire print media. Its power extends to the major TV media: Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN as well as secondary outlets.

It would be difficult to do justice to the prodigious research which sheds light on the interlocking directorates in every domain over which the Fifth Column has exercised its paramount influence. In understanding the parameters of the system it must not be ignored that the ramifications of the Zionist behemoth are by no means solely confined to the kingdom of the US political caste oligarchy. Indeed its tentacles are globalized. It is exhibited in strength in all the major EU countries. Among its ventriloquist dummies will be found the likes of Kouchner and Miliband, Berlusconi and Aznar.

10. There is an overarching unity in Petras’ entire work sanctified by an alluring stylistic grace and elegance where le mot juste is never remote. A work that conjures up the dictum of the great Bossuet (1627-1704) spring to mind: ‘le style c’est l’homme.” It is this stunning assemblage of words and ideas , the relentless pursuit of truth , and not the fakery of one hundred footnotes per page, that has rocketed him into the ranks the world’s leading social scientists, publicists, broadcasters and public figures.

The sheer expanse of his reach is not confined to a single continent illumining the planetary scope of his creations. In short, his all-encompassing and militant internationalism exposes ruthlessly the logic and genocidal madness of imperialism and its works. When the war criminals in Israel and their henchmen are flung to the tribunal of justice, as ineluctably they must and will be, this poignant work which is an indictment of their crimes, will be a salutary reminder of the scale of these crimes.

11. Like many of his life-long readers, I have been the benefactor of what I regard as his enduring teachings. Some have called him a sociologist but such professional categories fail to grasp the essence of his work as do other attributes as political scientist and economist. This is an attribute he shares with Marx whose Promethean creations transcends such wholly trivial professional pigeon holes. Like Marx and Keynes he has combined seamlessly meshed the creative flows of journalism and scholarship.

12. As his adversaries have long recognized he is a social scientist of a special breed. One whose exalted moral commitments, militancy and impassioned combat merge with his revolutionary strivings. It is this that demarcates him from the pedestrian academic herd of bourgeois scholarship whose pseudo academic dribblings are wedded to the perpetuation of the prevailing propertied order. And hence the bulk of those who market themselves under the name of social scientists have pursued trajectories that have transformed them, directly and indirectly, into the apparatchiks of imperialism.

13. A social scientist I might add of a special breed in that he has swept aside contemptuously the trappings of a decadent and irrevocably corrupt academic order that has prostituted itself in the market place . The ranks of the upper crust of this caste have swelled over time and with the lush pickings and prospects of corporate droppings and other insidious forms of political office holding.

14. This inspired humanist with unbending single-mindedness has clung through thick and thin of the social, political and ideological struggles. He stands in the forefront of all social and political struggles for the making of a better world — a world in which the terrors of class rule, exploitation and social injustices spawned by capitalism and imperialism will be consigned to the rubbish can of history… What matters in this context is not the savagery and duration of the battle but the belief that ultimately the forces of evil can brought to book. In this respect he could be likened to what the Red Army would have called a Frontovnik: a combatant on the front line who battles on relentlessly, knowing well that bulldozing the system into its fetid grave can only be achieved by those that grasp the logic ( and illogic) of the system’s rapacity..

15. It is the bold uncompromising marshaling and analysis of these interlocking facts that helps to explain how the US caste oligarchy subjected to the assaults of an omnipresent Zionist Fifth Column has become the major accomplice of Israeli war crimes amid unanimous worldwide condemnation. It is the surfacing of these facts which help also to elucidate the utterly depraved conduct of the Obama White House and the fact that nine-tenths of the US Congress excoriated the Goldstone Report. Since this book went to press the preparations for the obliteration of Iran have gathered speed. Almost unanimously the Congress has demanded even ‘more crippling sanctions’ – the term is that of Clinton - as though the already existing body of criminal sanctions and embargoes were inadequate.. The vote in Congress was galvanized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and boisterously acclaimed by all the major 51 American Jewish organizations.

16. The upsurge of Zionism as he notes is a virulent form of tribal-religious identity linked to a foreign power. Its overwhelmingly successful hegemonic inroads have been abetted by the abject capitulation of the US ruling class oligarchy and its failure to recognize a US national identity. The US political complex and successive administrations with no exception have become part of the interlaced web of Zionist power that is ramified in every nook and cranny of all sectors of American capitalism. It was revelatory that there was not a whimper from the zionized White House when Israel’s foreign minister was brazen enough to pontificate that if had not been for the Gulf oil calamity, the Obama war machine ( no doubt with the support of Israel) would have nuked Iran. No less revelatory was that there was not a solitary member of Congress that that bellowed his indignation against this outrageous remark.

17.In conclusion , it is to be hoped that Petras’ grand body of scholarship embodying years of painstaking research will be translated into all languages and be read by many people of our planet with their diverse cultures, creeds and political persuasions. What ought never be obscured is that the creation of this combatant and humanist is not merely a pitiless dissection of the Zio-fascist complex , but no less important, I am confident, is that it will long find its niche as an irrepressible documentation that raises its rebel voice against these sordid crimes against humanity. It is thus a cri de coeur for human dignity and decency that imperialism and its acolytes have always consigned to the gutter.

18. In a recent encounter with President Shimon Peres, an entrenched Zionist and implacable hater of Palestinians , which is not incompatible with his confessed boundless love for occupied Palestinian land , an obsequious Obama raised the question. “What can we do for Israel?” Given the fact that Obama is a political money-raising hustler of long standing the question was obviously touted for publicity reasons: to solicit funds from the Zionist money-bags in the United States that have always lavishly bankrolled the Democratic party. We are not privy to the retort of Peres whose open contempt for the US presidential stooges of Israel requires no publicity. But I presume his riposte runs something like this:

“Just keep on groveling as you and other Presidents have done. If we spit in your face as we did to Biden and bombard your warships, just give us your other cheek. . And forget it. Make sure, however, that you keep on shoveling your debased dollars into our money boxes. . And, above all, keep going through the motions of the crapulous babble of negotiated settlements for as you well know there is nothing to negotiate… The facts on the ground already speak for themselves.”