Interview with Jeffrey Blankfort (Part 2)

from San Francisco Independent Media Center

20 November 2006

SF-IMC: So let's talk about Zionists in the progressive left . . .

Jeffrey Blankfort: They're almost synonymous.

SF-IMC: . . . what are we gonna do here? They have so much control over the Left. What are we gonna do?

Jeffrey Blankfort: My position is basically to criticize them constructively when I can. It's very difficult because people will bring up this thing of a circular firing squad . . . the Left gets in a circle and fires on each other. But, frankly, when I look on some of these people, I don't see them on my side. United For Peace and Justice is an example. Leslie Cagan, who runs it out of New York, one of the important persons, is a long time Zionist. She denies it now, but in 1982, there was a huge anti-nuclear march in New York, a demonstration, a rally, on June 12th it was, and there was one here, which I was one of the organizers of, and inconveniently, the week before, Israel had invaded Lebanon. So what was the response in New York for 800,000 people? They had a Lebanese person on the stage who was not allowed to speak.

Now out here there was a major struggle, and even the Palestinian support movement opposed a vigil that was called by a Lebanese woman in front of Dolores Church where people were going to gather the next day at Mission Dolores before the rally, but there was a vigil. People slept overnight on the traffic island on Dolores. So even the Palestinian support movement has been so dominated mentally by Zionists, that's what happened is you have Marxist groups (quote, unquote) like Line of March being involved with the Palestinians. Line of March's position was, "We can move the Democratic party to the left." That was the position of Irwin Silber, its chairman. Palestinian organizations seem to believe that they have to attach themselves to some American Left organization that essentially pimp them.

We see the International Socialist Organization, which was almost dead, begin to suddenly arise, and one of the first issues they started talking about was Palestine. But when the Afghan War started and we were going to have a big march, and a number of us wanted to bring up the issue of Israel and the Occupation, the ISO opposed that.

I wanted to debate one of the ISO leaders, who happens to channel Chomsky without even quoting him. (We can get into Chomsky later.) And he agreed to do it and discuss the Israel Lobby. I was going to give them all the money from the proceeds. And then he wrote back that, "I've been told that we don't really have time to have me debate you."

And then we have ANSWER, the Workers World Party. They also opposed . . . all the Left groups have opposed the Palestinian issue being made a major part of the anti-war movement until fairly recently.

SF-IMC: Why?

Jeffrey Blankfort: For various reasons, some that are obvious but not valid. None of them are valid. One is labor. The American labor movement is part and parcel of the Israel Lobby. Seventeen hundred unions own over five billion dollars worth of Israel Bonds. That obliges them to support Israel to make sure the investment of their members' dues, made without their members' knowledge, is secure.

Twenty three states have also invested in Israel Bonds as well. This is taking taxpayers' money and investing in the economy of a country that is dependent economically and politically on the United States. This makes all these people lobbyists for Israel. Very clever on their part.

So the argument is that if we put a Palestinian issue in there, labor will not participate. Well, the truth of it is that the American labor movement is a joke. When I was in Europe, European workers would ask, "What is it with the American labor movement?"

And I tried to explain to them as best I could, the purging of the unions of Leftists after WWII, , the lack of working class consciousness, unless somebody's own job is threatened there is a lack of solidarity. But, in fact, when you had these major anti-war marches, major mobilizations, the labor participation is minimal. They were just happy to have the secretary of the Labor Council, Walter Johnson, speak instead of mobilizing a lot of workers. Or you'll have the Longshore Union's Drill Team but few longshoremen. It's a charade, but they want the endorsement of the labor unions, then the churches.

Now back in '82, when I was on the steering committee of this anti-nuke march, somebody who thought better of it later, who was not Jewish, said, "We ought to have a rabbi speak."

I objected to having a rabbi speak. There was no reason to have a rabbi speak, I said, but if a rabbi speaks, it's on one condition, that that rabbi should have taken a position of opposing Israeli Occupation of Palestinian territory. And there was a vote. And I won the vote eight to seven.

However, then the churches said the rabbis are being held to a litmus test that no one else is being held to. I asked, what other people that would speak that would represent a people that is occupying anyone else's country? Israel is a unique situation. Why have a rabbi speak who represents an oppressive country that is oppressing somebody else? And not only that, whose soldiers are throughout Latin America and Africa, helping oppress other people who have never oppressed them.

Well, when the churches said they would pull out, I finally backed off, but the only person who was willing to speak, that was a rabbi, was Michael Lerner. A fast learner, Michael Lerner.

So you see that pressure . . . and the steering committee, which was made up of a number of political activists, was threatened when Israel invaded Lebanon. They wanted to keep it off the agenda. But, in San Francisco, it was mentioned by quite a few speakers from the podium.

The other reason is money. Jews, historically, are known for their philanthropy.

SF-IMC: Philanthropy is good.

Jeffrey Blankfort: Some is good. A lot of it is good. Historically, they have funded the Left. This even before Israel. They were the major funders of the Civil Rights Movement. They were the funders of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. If people were arrested, and they needed bail, progressive Jews provided the bail, and the lawyers were mostly Jewish.

So what happens is you have all these pressures, and there's no countervailing pressure from the Palestinian community or the Arab American community or the Muslim community. There is no similar history of political struggle in those communities here. Going back into the thirties, you have Jews active in the unions, active in every radical movement. That's the tradition I grew up in. It no longer exists. As a matter of fact, it's been erased from Jewish history. Young Jews growing up in America today have no idea of the Jewish radical past in this country. That was the Jewish radical past I connected with. Since it no longer exists, I have no connection to the Jewish community. It's as simple as that. There is no radical Jewish community. There are some radical Jews, individuals that are anti-Zionist, but the community as a grouping, there isn't any. And this is a critical situation.

And I don't know how to overcome it because there doesn't seem to be the kind of pressure to do so. People will make rationalizations, for example, for politicians who are good on every other issue but Israel/Palestine, who would not make the same rationalizations if they were good on every other issue but apartheid in South Africa.

Now you have Tom Ammiano, who several years ago went over to Israel as part of a delegation, a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender delegation, and declared his support for Israel, saying that the Queer struggle and the Israeli struggle are the same thing. And so I put this out on the internet. It was in the Jewish Bulletin. And I only got one response, from a Latino brother, who said that nobody was going to respond. He was right. It was ignored. I tried to question Ammiano about it at an event where he appeared. There's a mural in the Mission district, at 21st St., a Palestinian mural, which was disfigured, and they finally covered it up. They held a press conference, and Ammiano showed up. He was very nervous and mealy mouthed about the attacks on the mural. I had a microphone. I wanted to ask him about his statement in the Jewish Bulletin. And he may have been worried about it, concerned about it at the time. He wanted to talk to a cop who was there. He said, "I'm in a hurry. I can't talk now," and after speaking briefly with the cop, off he went.

Now, to me, if he had said, "Ah, South African apartheid, ah, I love it, this is like Queer struggle," it would have been unacceptable, but it's inherent racism on the part of the movement which stems from the fact, the fact. . . I can't say it's a fact, but my belief that most Jews are anti-Arab at some level or another and protective of Jews at the same time, that they have been saddled with the baggage of anti-Semitism. They believe that for two thousand years, Jews have suffered, a tale that has been vastly exaggerated. Before the Holocaust, on a world scale, it wouldn't even appear. The people of the Congo have suffered more than the Jews have suffered, including the Holocaust. They're still suffering. Nobody here speaks about the Congo.

I've met people who survived El Salvador and other places who don't demand the same kind of sympathy as the "Eternal Victim." But this thing of being the "Eternal Victim" is a belief that Jews are conditioned with from childhood in this country and in other parts of the Diaspora, and, of course, in Israel they are taught, that non-Jews are born "suckling," as former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said, "anti-Semitism with their mother's milk."

This is, of course, nonsense, but many Jews believe it. They live in a different world, in which they're so Jewish identified that they think people look at them as Jews. I remember an experience I had in the army. I went into a Western Airlines ticket office with a friend in my unit who lived in Beverly Hills, who came from a very wealthy Jewish family, and we bought our return tickets to Ft. Ord. And when we left the airline agency . . . it was a young blond woman who sold us our tickets .he turned to me and he said, "You know, she knew we were Jewish."

I said, "What!?!"

He said, "She knew we were Jewish. I know."

I said, "David, you're nuts!"

He said, "No, I know these things."

Well, I wasn't raised this way. But many Jews . . . I think most Jews . . . are raised this way. I was not bar mitzvahed, thank god!. (chuckles) Even the high school I went to, which was a largely Jewish high school, was very secular. The community was very secular. Unfortunately, it isn't any more.

So I can see where this Jewish problem is coming from in the Movement because, for example, if you try to raise the issue of the Lobby in the Movement, you are told you are provoking anti-Semitism, that it's not Marxist, it's not socialist, and that it's all US imperialism. So, poor old US imperialism, it's bad enough as it is, but there are some things that it's not responsible for. And the influence of the Israel Lobby, of the Jewish Lobby in the Middle East is manifest. It's also manifest in that there is no debate in Congress on military spending. There's no debate.

Now why is there no debate? Why do the Democrats not object to it? Because the Democrats are a subsidiary of the Israel Lobby. They get most of their money from it. As has been published in many newspapers and magazines, at least sixty percent of the major large funding of the Democratic Party comes from wealthy American Jews. And they don't do this as an altruistic gesture. Politicians are given money to do someone else's bidding. And so the Democratic Party does not fight arms spending. They're as much for it as are the Republicans. And this, I believe, and I make the argument, this is part of the influence of the Israel Lobby.

Now the Christian Zionists are an important part of the Lobby. But this was happening before there were Christians Zionists. There are certain people, who happen to be Jewish, on the Left, who love the presence of the Christian Zionists, because now they can talk about the Christian Zionists as being more important than the Jewish Zionists, which is nonsense because they're important in the states where there aren't many Jews, and they do contribute some money, but they're not lobbyists in the same sense.

SF-IMC: Let's talk about that for a minute. I watch Comcast cable TV. The people who run it must be devout Christians. There's a lot of Christian programming. There's a lot of overt Christian Zionism. They have Hagee, Robertson, Falwell, for example. They have this show where they raise money to move Russian Jews to Israel. There's another guy, his name slips my mind, lectures on the coming apocalypse and the Biblically foretold vital role that Israel plays in the preordained "end times." This is propaganda being broadcast to a major metropolitan area. These Christian Zionists, they scare me.

Jeffrey Blankfort: But they're not the owners of Comcast. Clear Channel, maybe, but not Comcast. Comcast, as far as I know, is Jewish owned.

SF-IMC: Interesting.

Jeffrey Blankfort: Clear Channel is not.

SF-IMC: But they're on the cable there, selling Israel to the Bay Area . . .

Jeffrey Blankfort: The Israel Lobby was indomitable before the Christian Zionists were brought in. They were brought in, by the way, by Menachem Begin, who, when he got elected in '78, invited Jerry Falwell to Israel. This was also the time when they started talking about Israel as a strategic asset of the United States because before that, the US/Israel relationship was never questioned because the people who ran Israel, the Labor Party, were basically Democrats, and when Begin was elected, it created a real problem for American Jews because he had been identified as a fascist by people like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and so on. So they had to find a rationalization for continued support of Israel. And as General Matty Peled, an Israeli general who was a friend of mine, said, this is when they introduced the idea of Israel being an asset, because they had to find a justification for Israel still getting the support from the United States.

In the beginning, the major Jewish organizations were very uncomfortable with Christians like Falwell and the Moral Majority. As Israel and the Jewish community moved to the right, however, this displeasure changed to the point where a couple of years ago, on the first of May, or the first week of May, there was a prayer breakfast held at the Israeli embassy, hosted by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And the very same week, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition had one of his speeches published in an ad by the Anti-Defamation League, which had been one of the foremost critics of the Christian Zionists.

So what's happened is that as Israel becomes more right wing and fascistic, and Israel and its supporters seem to need support from wherever they can get it, they have now embraced the Christian Zionists, and encouraged them to come to Israel. Of course, Israel wants them to do that. They've given them a plot of land in Israel in order to build some kind of a center. So you have an incredible combination, working on a system that is the antithesis of democracy.

Thanks to the interpretation of a Supreme Court Decision of 1886, that gave corporations the same rights as an individual, and a later interpretation that said that donating money to politicians is a form of free speech, the American political system is obviously the most corrupt in the advanced world. What in other countries would be considered bribery is legal here. And so, the Zionist Lobby has made great use of this.

SF-IMC: Politics make strange bedfellows rich.

Jeffrey Blankfort: It isn't just the money, however. Money is very important, but it's the way they approach politicians. AIPAC, for example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is the only foreign lobby that isn't required to register as a foreign agent. They hold regional meetings around the country, at which they invite supervisors, mayors, city council people, public officials from the area, to come to these luncheons and dinners, where the speaker will be a US Senator or some very important government official, who will come into town, unknown to the media, with no notice to the media. He or she will make no other speeches, give no press conferences, and will leave. It will be reported in the local Jewish paper, but it will not be reported in the state where the person lives, except perhaps in the Jewish press there. And there's no interest in the media in following up why, for example, Senator Christopher Dodd, when he comes to San Francisco, or Mario Cuomo when he speaks out in Danville, why does he not have a press conference and talk to the media here.

In any case, they go to this meeting, and they, these Congress people . . I'm speaking from knowledge here because I joined AIPAC and I went to one of these luncheons . . .

SF-IMC: (laughs) Good for you.

(snip)