Obama’s Hagel test
By all accounts President Obama wants to nominate Chuck Hagel, the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska to replace Leon Panetta at the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense, but a coalition led by the Zionist lobby is mounting a smear campaign against Hagel.

Why? It hopes to persuade Obama that he would be foolish to nominate Hagel because he is unlikely to be confirmed by a Senate in which many members are content to do Zionism’s bidding in order to protect their own backs.

I’ll get to what it is about Hagel’s record that troubles and even frightens the Zionist lobby in a moment, but first can we, please, get the terminology right. Almost everybody who speaks and writes about the Israel-Palestine conflict does not get it right. And that creates an obstacle to understanding.

The monster that controls Congress and ties any president’s hands on policy for dealing with Israel-Palestine is not the “Jewish lobby” and not the “Israel lobby.”

It is wrong to describe it as the Jewish lobby for two reasons.

One is that such a description implies that it represents and speaks for all Jews. It most certainly does not.

The other is that it’s not only Jews who make up the lobby. Another key element of it is composed of the “Bring on Armageddon” Christian fundamentalists.

It is wrong to describe it as the Israel lobby because such a description implies that it represents and speaks for all of Israel’s Jews and the nearly one quarter of its citizens who are Arabs. It most certainly does not.

The most accurate long description of the Zionist lobby would be that it is composed of those of all faiths and none who give and demand unconditional support for the Zionist (not Jewish) state of Israel right or wrong. In my view the most practical short form of that is Zionist lobby. (Some call it the “Likud lobby”. That was a case for doing so in the past, but today there are emerging fascist forces in Israel even further to the right than Likud, and the Zionist lobby speaks for them, too).

Even the term “pro-Israel” is an obstacle to understanding. When it is used without qualification, as it almost always is, it can mean either pro an Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war, or pro an Israel in occupation of the West Bank (in defiance of international law) and laying siege to the Gaza Strip. Politicians who declare themselves to be “pro-Israel” should be asked which Israel they are pro.

So what is it about Hagel’s views that put him today at the temporary top of the Zionist lobby’s verbal hit-list?