The Petro-Diplomatic Complex -- Pro-Arab Since Israel's Founding

Contrary to the false insinuations of Walt-Mearsheimer, the Petro-Diplomatic Complex that has dominated American Middle Eastern policy since before World War 2 has always --or nearly always-- been anti-Israel since before its founding. I L Kenen, founder of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], wrote this long ago. I doubt that AIPAC today would dare to say what Kenen said years ago.

From the very beginning, Israel has been opposed by the petro-diplomatic complex -- an array of oil lobbyists, Arabists, Central Intelligence Agency agents, missionaries, and diplomats.
[I L Kenen in Jewish Digest, December 1975, condensed from The Jewish Chronicle of London]

Kenen is also providing a convenient definition of the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, which we have discussed before on Emet m'Tsiyon. It seems that Zbig Brzezinski and several State Department veterans on Barack Obama's team [i.e., Daniel Kurtzer, Robert Malley (Malley's father was a Communist ideologue, just by the way), etc.] belong to this array of Israel's enemies in Washington. Kenen went on to point out that an ostensibly private, anti-Israel lobbying organization, the American Friends of the Middle East, was actually founded and funded by the CIA.

It was no coincidence that the "American Friends of the Middle East" came into existence in 1951, when the American Zionist Council was reactivated. The great difference, however, was that the AZC's lobbying budget totalled about $50,000 [per year] while the CIA was secretly putting an estimated $430,000 a year into AFME's treasury via a paper conduit. [Ibid.]

Just incidentally, the National Security Act of 1947 that set up the CIA explicitly forbids the CIA to make political propaganda within the United States itself. So much for the CIA's observance of American law.

The American Zionist Council was a forerunner of AIPAC. In the past few years, some of its officials have been prosecuted for allegedly doing something very commonly done in Washington: they received information from a government employee named Larry Franklin who worked for the Defense Department. Various circumstances and testimony at the trial indicate that Franklin was deliberately sent to set up these two officials for prosecution, since he seems to have volunteered information that they had not asked for.

Be that as it may, Israel has some enemies in official and semi-official Washington circles. The Washington embassies of Arab states also enjoy a privileged relationship with the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, and indeed Saudi Arabia has often been especially favored in Washington. Michael Moore, known as a "leftist," showed this in his movie Fahrenheit 9-11, but he seems not to have absorbed the meaning of the facts that he showed in his own movie. The "Left" that styles itself "anti-capitalist" and "anti-imperialist" seems to have trouble dealing with the special status of Arab states and their money in the capital of the United States.
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Coming: jimmy carter strikes again, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Land of Israel, propaganda, peace follies, etc.

A Gem of Absurdity from walt-mearsheimer

UPDATINGS at bottom -- original quote here below as of 12-2-2007

Finally got a look at walt-mearsheimer's magnum opus, a rather inflated tome called The Israel Lobby. Anyhow, I had a chance to read some of their slick but shallow arguments. Just leafing through the pages, I found a gem. In the chapter on Israel's moral case, they write that Israel's supporters could --in Israel's defense-- point to Arab threats to destroy Israel in several wars, 1948, 1967, 1973, etc. W-M admit that in 1948, some Arab leaders called for "throwing the Jews into the sea." But then they claim that the Arab leaders really didn't mean it. It was all just for domestic consumption, walt-mearsheimer claim. They go on to argue that this was because the Arab leaders knew that they couldn't destroy Israel. So here W-M make a leap of logic: Because the Arab leaders allegedly knew that the Arabs couldn't win the war against Israel, this means that they didn't want to destroy Israel.

Of course the whole argument is full of holes like swiss cheese --and it stinks like moldy cheese too. The Arab spokesmen were threatening war at the UN before the UN General Assembly made its partition recommendation on 29 November 1947. At that time, and up to 15 May 1948, Israel was not yet an established state. It was a dream, an idea, a hope. It had lightly armed forces that stayed in the underground during British rule. But it could not bring in heavy weapons as long as the British forces remained in the country, unless they could be smuggled past the British --who were actively pro-Arab at that time. So why would the governments of Arab states, that could bring in heavy weapons, and did get British supplies, know that they couldn't defeat the as yet unborn state of Israel? How do walt-mearsheimer know what the Arab leaders knew or believed at that time? The Arab League governments were NOT saying: We can't defeat the Jews. Indeed, they were boasting in their usual bellicose Arab rodomontade that they could win, and this view was shared by high officials in the British and US governments, for instance. Such as expert opinions produced by the UK & US governments that the Jews could not hold out against the Arabs. Abdul-Rahman Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League, warned the UN that Arab states would use force against any partition plan and boasted of a bloody Arab victory in the coming war with the Jews:

'This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.
'[Ahkbar Al-Yom, October 11, 1947 quoted in Jewish Agency for Palestine, Memorandum 1948; Howard Sachar dates this statement to the Spring of 1948, in his A History of Israel (New York: Alfred Knopf 1976), p 333; Leonard Davis & Moshe Decter date the statement to 15 May 1948, in Myths and Facts 1982 (Washington, DC: Near East Research 1982), p 20]

Can we imagine Arab officials telling each other at the Arab League conference at Bludan, Syria, in June 1946, as they reached a consensus to send forces to the Land of Israel to prevent emergence of a Jewish state: Of course, we can't win the war. And we really don't want to throw the Jews into the sea. But we must fight for the sake of fanatic domestic public opinion and we will be just delighted when we are defeated in a humiliating fashion. Public opinion will be delighted too. This defeat will bring us all closer together, governments and the fanatics in the street. Then we will plan together on how to lose the next war.

There may have been some well-informed and thoughtful Arabs who had doubts, who thought that maybe the Arabs couldn't drive Israel into the sea. However, since the Arab states had been established as states, they had been able to build regular armies, train troops, and import weapons -- which weapons exporting states were quite willing, if not eager, to supply [in the United Kingdom's case]. Further, the Arab Legion [al-Jaysh al-`Arabi] of Transjordan was British-commanded [by Sir John Bagot Glubb] , British-financed and equipped, and most senior officers were British.

Why should the Arab leadership have believed differently from the UK and US government experts?? Moreover, given their traditional contempt for Jews who were traditionally at the bottom of the social ladder in the Arab-Muslim countries, given the age-old Arab/Muslim teachings about their own military superiority and the inferiority of the Jews, what else could a normal Arab-Muslim, educated in his own tradition, think but that the Arabs would be gloriously victorious? Furthermore, the UK and US were urging the Arab League states to go to war against the as yet unborn state [about US policy, see the research of Professor Shlomo Slonim].

Now, the widely known Arab journalist, Muhammad Hassanayn Haykal [Mohamed Hassanein Heikal], wrote --on the eve of Soviet leader Khrushchov's visit to Egypt [1964]-- that the British had urged Egypt to go to war against the soon to be proclaimed Jewish state. He added that the British had given the Egyptian army weapons and ammunition from British stocks in the Suez Canal Zone, at that time under British control [of course, the Egyptian army had to go through the Suez Canal Zone in order to get to Israel, which may have been so obvious to Haykal that he didn't bother to point it out]. Haykal also claimed --after the fact [in 1964]-- that he had known in 1948 that the Arabs could not win and that he had discussed this with prime minister Nuqrashy Pasha who knew it too. Here, Haykal does what walt-mearsheimer do. He too indulges in after the fact psychologizing. He argues that the British knew that Egypt could not win and wanted Egypt to be defeated in the war with Israel in order to weaken Egypt's negotiating position when negotiations came up with Britain over the Suez Canal's status. That's why the UK pressured Egypt to get into the war, Haykal claimed.

Be that as it may, the decision-makers in Arab League states [in Egypt the king] decided to destroy Israel at birth. And their threats of war and massacre were heard at the UN General Assembly too. Here is the crucial question for Walt & Mearsheimer. Can they produce records of the deliberations at the Arab League meetings that decided to go to war? If so, can these records or minutes or protocols or proceedings demonstrate that the majority of Arab states at that time admitted an Arab military incapacity to defeat Israel?

Walt-Mearsheimer claim that the bellicose threats to Israel, the Arab rodomontade, were for domestic consumption. Indeed, there were attacks, pogroms, on Jews in Arab countries in that period, such as in self-governing Egypt and in Aden which was under British control. So the Arab home front or "street" wanted to kill Jews. But if the leaders knew that they could not win a war against the Jews, then why would they rationally send their armies into a certainly humiliating defeat [any defeat at the hands of the despised Jews would be humiliating!!]? Such a defeat could and DID lead to the overthrow of existing Arab governments --as in Egypt and Syria. They could instead have loudly and for a long time condemned Britain for not preventing a Jewish state from emerging, or a similar diplomatic-political subterfuge, engaging in a lot of sound and fury to satisfy the fanatics at home, with little shooting.

The argument and the book are ridiculous. Mearsheimer has even admitted, in so many words, that he was lying. As we recall, one of the charges made in the original w-m article in the London Review of Books in 2006 [Nota Bene: the London Review] was that Israel and/or the Israel Lobby had pushed the Bush administration into the war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. However, in an interview on National Public Radio, Mearsheimer stated that the war on Iraq had been decided on by the US Govt before Israeli officials knew about it. According to Mearsheimer in this interview, the Israelis suggested that if there were to be a war, it should be against Iran, which Israel saw as more threatening an enemy at that time. But the Bush Administration decided otherwise. As to Walt-Mearsheimer, they knew that they were lying. As competent political scientists with the status of consultants to the State Department, they were part of policy making. They were in a position to know the truth. They lied knowingly and deliberately.

Now what are the context and the purpose of the w-m lies???
They and their article, book, media appearances, etc. are part of a concerted anti-Israel propaganda campaign by the Petro-Diplomatic Complex. Others taking part are former president Carter, James Baker-Lee Hamilton, Professor William Polk-George McGovern, etc. All those named have recently produced tracts that argue against either Israel's morality or moral rights, or against Israel's usefulness to the United States, that is, to US interests, or both. One problem is What are American interests abroad generally, and in the Middle East in particular? Another issue is: Who is to decide what these interests are? Is it the Petro-Diplomatic Complex that has had the upper hand in the US's Middle East policymaking over the years? The purpose of the campaign appears to be to besmirch Israel in public opinion in the US so much so that Israel is softened up for a diplomatic crushing at an international "peace" conference, which Secretary of State Rice is conveniently preparing for the end of November. This conference will be a conference in favor of Arab terrorism. It will reward Arab anti-Israel terrorism. Rice has already pressured Israel to release terrorist prisoners in order to supposedly support the "moderate" Mahmud Abbas [Abu Mazin].

The aims of the w-m book and of the campaign by carter, baker, et al., are objectively genocidal.

As evidence that US policy --especially under Bush-- is anti-Israel, Bush is the first US president to come out unequivocally for an Arab state to be named "palestine" to be set up in the Land of Israel. Such a state would inevitably threaten Israel militarily and economically. The Arabs are not now ready to make a real peace with Israel on any reasonable terms. Another sign of Bush's hostility to Israel were his demands at the beginning of Israel's anti-terrorist offensive in 2002 --the Defensive Shield operation-- that Israel's army immediately withdraw from the areas assigned to the Palestinian Authority --areas from which the mass murder bombers were coming. These demands are forgotten now in the present surreal air of political deception in which we live.

UPDATING #1-- There was a precedent for throwing a hated ethnic group into the sea: In 1922 Turkish nationalist forces led by Kemal Ataturk drove the Greek population of Smyrna into the sea. Smyrna had been a Greek-speaking city for more than 2,000 years. It remained predominantly Greek in population even after the Ottoman Empire conquered Smyrna from the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire hundreds of years before 1922. Smyrna also had a Turkish-Muslim minority, a Jewish quarter, an Armenian quarter, and many Europeans and Americans who had come for purposes of trade or were there for religious/missionary purposes. There were also Levantines, people with mixed European and Greek or Armenian ancestry. These Levantines too were mainly involved in trade and services for the European and American communities. In 1922 the Turkish nationalist army of Ataturk drove the Greeks out of the city, while it massacred the surviving Armenians in the city and set fire to Greek and Armenian neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the fleets of the major Western powers sat at anchor in the harbor of Smyrna. They had orders not to interfere with the slaughter perpetrated by the Kemalist forces and were reluctant to help the refugees. Greece sent a motley assortment of boats to take out the refugees, including surviving Armenians. Since the expulsion of the Greeks and the massacre of the Armenians, the city has been officially called Izmir. This is a historical precedent for what those Arabs may have been thinking who called for driving the Jews into the sea, as walt-mearsheimer admit they said.
Sources:
Ernest Hemingway, "On the Quay at Smyrna," in In Our Time [starting with the 1930 edition of the anthology In Our Time; New York, Scribner's]. This is a fictionalized account of the events at Smyrna that rings true. Hemingway was a reporter in Anatolia and the Balkans in that period. See his description of a Kemalist official in this post.
George Horton, The Blight of Asia -- Horton was the US consul in Smyrna in 1922, that is, he was an eyewitness.
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
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UPDATING #2 as of 12-2-2007 Original Quote from walt-mearsheimer

. . . some argue that the Arabs precipitated wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973 in order to "drive Israel into the sea."
While there is no question that Israel faced serious threats in its early years, the Arabs were not attempting to destroy Israel in any of these wars. This is not because the Arabs were happy about the presence of a Jewish state in their midst --they were not-- but rather because they have never had the capability to win a war against Israel, much less defeat it decisively. There is no question that some Arab leaders talked about "driving the Jews into the sea" during the 1948 war, but this was largely rhetoric designed to appease their publics. In fact, the Arab leaders were mainly concerned with gaining territory for themselves at the expense of the Palestinians, one of the many occasions when Arab governments put their own interests ahead of the Palestinians' welfare. [Walt & Mearsheimer, pp 83-84]

For more commentary on walt-mearsheimer: see this link.

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Coming: UK journalopropagandist, Max Hastings, gushes over the w-m book, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, peace follies, propaganda, etc.

Bush Threatens Middle East Peace with a "peace conference" -- Condoleeza soft on Hamas, like Tony

What's the background to George Bush II's threat to Middle East peace in the form of a "peace conference" to help Abu Mazen, the terrorist in a suit?

George the Second has earned fame for his pretense to be fighting a "war on terror." But when the chips are down, George follows his family's traditions. He comes from a family of Israel's enemies. Dubya's father, George I, was the patron of Jim Baker whose damage to life in the Middle East has been monumental. In the 1980s, George I, while vice president, encouraged Arafat to keep on fighting Israel in Lebanon [1982]. George I and Jim encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, thus necessitating a huge American and allied military expedition to get the Iraqis out of there. In the interim between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the start of American bombing of Baghdad in January 1991, Baker found time to help Hafiz Assad complete his takeover of Lebanon [see link above]. In other words, the final US position was that it was wrong for Saddam Hussein to take over Kuwait, an action which threatened the favorite old friends in the Middle East of the American Petro-Diplomatic Complex, the Wahhabite Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But at the same time, it was OK for Syria to take over Lebanon [see link].
So much for James Baker.

George II has been advertising himself as an enemy of terrorism, fighting a "war on terror." Yet, his secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice [her first name is taken from the Italian phrase Con Dolcezza = sweetly, although Riso Amaro = Bitter Rice, fits her better] has her sympathies for some terrorists. Despite the official US position allegedly rejecting Hamas, which included some unfriendly remarks about Hamas in Bush's speech announcing the "international peace conference," Condi sees Hamas differently. Condi thinks that Hamas has been a "resistance movement" all along and now has an opportunity to become "political," just as Tony Blair was trying to promote a "political" Hamas as far back as 2002. This is the old illusion or cynical ploy that perhaps extremist fanatics can be made reasonable by having to bear the responsibilities of state power [which Hamas now holds in Gaza]. This illusion was broadcast about Hitler after his constitutional rise to power in Germany in January 1933, when the state president Hindenburg, appointed Hitler chancellor [= prime minister]. But Rice's sympathetic remarks about Hamas are a sinister foreboding of what Bush's "peace conference" could turn out to be. Just bear in mind the sinister consequences of Jim Baker's Madrid "peace conference" in 1991. It is plain that such conferences give Judeophobic empires, like the UK, the opportunity to gang up on Israel with the "peace" slogan as a pretext for aiding Nazis, in this case Hamas, just as Britain aided Hitler to get ready for World War 2 by means of the 1938 Munich "peace conference." Bush is holding out a carrot to Hamas and that can only encourage other terrorists to think that their crimes will be forgiven by the United States if they only promise to be good boys after their major crimes have been committed. Of course, taking the side of either Abu Mazen or Hamas on territorial and other issues in dispute with Israel can only encourage all of Israel's enemies to attack Israel and its people --and to raise their demands on Israel. Meanwhile, pro-Nazi "leftist" intellectuals like Ian Buruma, no`am chomsky, Pascal Boniface, Tariq Ramadan and others play the game of the empires.
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Coming: more on James Baker & US policy toward Israel, peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron, etc.

James Baker and US Foreign Policy towards Israel -- Part 4

Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Petro-Diplomatic Complex worked to undermine Israel in American public opinion. One way was to set up the American Friends of the Middle East, which enjoyed government funding. This group lobbied the Congress on behalf of pro-Arab policies, although it was probably illegal for a body supported by government funds [up to $400,000 per year] to lobby its own funder, the US government. I L Kenen points out that this subsidy was not ended until 1967 on account of a Congressional investigation of CIA operations [Kenen, Israel's Defense Line, pp 115-116]. The publications of the Arabian-American Oil Co. [ARAMCO] too, like ARAMCO World, also served to provide the Arabs with a favorable image in the United States. For instance, the barbarous kingdom with its cruel, bigoted medieval laws, based on Wahhabi Islam, was described as: "A Desert Democracy." Likewise, the National Geographic and publications of the Arab League offices in the USA also published pro-Saudi, pro-Arab propaganda. The Luce publications --Time and Life-- did the same, although inconsistently. For instance, after the Six Day War had raised Israel's prestige in the United States, the Luce publications were pro-Israel for a while in accord with public opinion.

Gurfinkiel writes that starting in the early 1960s with the Kennedy Administration, through the Johnson Administration, and into the Nixon Administration of the early 1970s,

Washington began a rapprochement with Jerusalem, . . . In the eyes of the oil men and their friends, the most powerful lobby in the country, this deviation could only be explained by the action of a "Jewish lobby" at least as powerful; a classic case of projection on the adversary of one's own behavior.
[Michel Gurfinkiel, "Rapport sur Baker," France-Israel Information, Oct-Nov-Dec 2006]

This is an important insight. The extremely powerful oil lobby that was able to arrange vast tax advantages for itself and its Arab allies, like application of the Foreign Tax Credit to oil payments to Saudi Arabia, among other tax favors, accused the Jewish lobby of being all-powerful. In fact, the paranoid loathing of a Jewish or pro-Israel lobby interfering in the plans of empires came to the surface in remarks by certain influential Britishers around the time of the reestablishment of Israel and in later years. For instance, various prominent British personalities, such as Dennis Brogan, an influential British political scientist, complained about the Jewish lobby in the United States interfering with British designs for the Land of Israel.

Gurfinkiel believes that the Israel-American partnership of the sixties and seventies had much to do with the Soviet alignment of important Arab states, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, and Libya. Furthermore, the OPEC states, the Arab members first and foremost, had greatly raised the price of crude oil. For this reason and on account of the hostile Arab attitude [including that of Saudi Arabia] in that 1973-74 period, some have claimed, the United States was contemplating seizing the Persian Gulf oil fields. Be that as it may, certainly many Americans were very angry at the Arab oil states for making life more expensive for Americans and the rest of the world. The greatest damage of the sharp rise in oil prices was no doubt to the world's very poorest countries which lacked valuable natural resources and were not exporting manufactured goods. Parenthetically, we should point out that apologists for the Arabs in that period, claimed that the sharp rise in oil prices was "good" for the Third World as a whole, that is, for the poor countries too. These apologists had no shame then just as today apologists for the Arabs are still shameless.

Gurfinkiel also points to the rise of fanatical Islam, as another factor encouraging an Israeli-American partnership. Nevertheless, the Pro-Arab lobby did not go away. The territorial situation created by the Six Day War gave new opportunities to pro-Arab propaganda.

The Pro-Arab Lobby Counter-Attacks
The Six Day War furnished it [the pro-Arab lobby] with a less cynical argument than the interest in oil alone.

During this conflict, the Jewish state had taken control of [not "occupied"] territories situated outside of the demarcation line [armistice line] established in 1949 at the end of the first Israel-Arab war (the Green Line). . . It had also occupied territories situated beyond the international borders of former mandatory Palestine: the Golan, Sinai. The pro-Arab lobby stated that the Arab and Muslim countries --or at least "the more moderate ones"-- would make peace with Israel when Israel had returned these conquests: "Territory for peace." The slogan was striking in its simplicity and its seeming equity. In fact, it made it possible to avoid the true questions: Why had the Arab countries refused the partition of Palestine in 1947? Why did they subsequently refuse to recognize Israel? Why did they multiply attacks on Israel [political attacks in international bodies, attacks by terrorist infiltrators, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, etc] before 1967, when it did not occupy any territory beyond the Green Line? Why did they refuse after 1967 [after the Six Day War] an Israeli offer for comprehensive negotiations [a refusal embodied in the Three Noes of Khartoum]? How can Israel ensure its security in the long term against repeated aggressions without the strategic depth provided by the conquests [of the Six Day War]? [Gurfinkiel, ibid.]

Indeed, these are all important questions glossed over by the peace-mongers. The Arab states had refused to make peace with Israel when it was in its restricted frontiers of the 1949 armistice lines. Why would they make peace with Israel or keep a peace accord with Israel if Israel went back to those restricted, difficult to defend armistice lines? Why not consider Judea-Samaria or the West Bank area as a parallel --at least in military-strategic terms-- to the protective function of the Sudetenland for Czechoslovakia in 1938? As we know, the Czechs --under British and French pressure-- gave up the Sudetenland in late 1938, in the name of self-determination for the Sudeten Germans and of "peace." Just a few months later, in March 1939, the Germans took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hence, the Munich Pact for peace had resulted in the total subjugation of Czechoslovakia to the German Nazis and an improved strategic situtation for Germany in its plans to attack Poland later in 1939. In short, the Munich Pact for peace had made war more certain by improving the German strategic situation against Poland, thus facilitating a future attack on Poland. Combining the terms used then and those used nowadays, we may say that the appeasement movement or peace process of the 1930s reached its peak with the inception of World War Two in September 1939. By the way, in accord with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, both the Nazis and Soviet Communists invaded Poland from the west, north and south [the Germans] and from the east [the Soviets]. In the fall of 1939, the Communist USSR and Nazi Germany officially declared a joint Struggle for Peace. Is something like this grim scenario the purpose of today's "peace process"?

Note that Gurfinkiel avoids saying that Judea-Samaria were "occupied" by Israel in 1967. He is aware that these areas were part of the Jewish National Home set up by the San Remo Conference in 1920, endorsed by the League of Nations in 1922 and later by the United States in an accord with Britain. He knows that this status was not cancelled by the General Assembly partition recommendation of 29 November 1947.
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Coming: More on James Baker and US-Israel relations, Jews in Jerusalem & Hebron, peace follies, propaganda, etc.

Who Is James Baker?? -- Part 3

President Harry Truman essentially defied the policy wish of the State Department, War Department [now called "Defense Dept"], and the CIA when he supported Israel's rebirth in 1948, albeit only lukewarmly. We have shown this in previous posts. Now, let's resume quotes from Michel Gurfinkiel's article "Report on Baker" [Rapport sur Baker]. After pointing out that Truman supported Israel's reestablishment in the 1947-1948 period, he points out that this friendly, if not warmly supportive, policy did not last.

From 1949 to 1961, during the major part of Truman's second term, and during Eisenhower's two terms, America adopted a cold, if not hostile, attitude towards Israel: No economic aid (with the exception of 'charitable' gifts from the Jewish community), no military aid (an embargo forbid even in that period the export of American military equipment to the Jewish state), no diplomatic cooperation (the United States imposed the immediate evacuation of Sinai [on Israel] after the Suez Campaign in 1956).

First a minor correction, there was some very minor US economic aid to Israel in this period, mostly involving purchases of US food. However, starting in 1951, the USA started a policy of enriching Saudi Arabia's royal parasites through ARAMCO. This policy had the Saudis legislate a per barrel "oil income tax" on ARAMCO. Then, ARAMCO was allowed to deduct the full amount of this "tax" [really a royalty] from its US corporate income tax on the grounds of the Foreign Tax Credit Law. This meant a heavy US subsidy for the Saudis, a disguised form of foreign aid. Hence, Saudi Arabia has probably received more US foreign monetary aid than any other state.

Gurfinkiel goes on to point out that starting in the 1960s with the Kennedy Administration, and then under Johnson and Nixon,

Washington started a rapprochement with Jerusalem

This relationship resulted in major sales of US weapons to Israel, including fighter aircraft, whereas Israel had fought and won the Six Day War of 1967 with an air force almost entirely made up of French military aircraft. In that war, the Egyptian and Syrian air forces were mainly Soviet. The Israeli victory gave French military aircraft a very good reputation among the world's air forces, leading to increased sales. France did not return the favor. Instead, De Gaulle declared an embargo on major military sales to Israel just as the USA was eliminating its embargo.

Nevertheless, not everyone was pleased with the US-Israel alliance. The Petro-Diplomatic Complex was not happy.

In the eyes of the oil men and their friends, the most powerful lobby in the country [America], this [pro-Israel] 'deviation' could only be explained by the action of a 'Jewish lobby," at least as powerful [as itself]. This was a classic case of projecting on one's adversary one's own behavior.

Gurfinkiel does not mention it, but one of the ways that the Petro-Diplomatic Complex countered pro-Israel forces in the United States was to work through foundations like the Ford Foundation, which in turn directed and funded all sorts of fake "human rights" and "peace" groups to unfairly attack and libel Israel. The pro-Arab, anti-Israel bodies agitating at the 2001 Durban Conference to smear Israel were to a large extent coordinated and/or funded by the Ford Foundation, according to articles by Edwin Black for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Source: Michel Gurfinkiel, "Rapport sur Baker," France-Israel Information no. 335, Oct-Nov-Dec 2006.

UPDATE ON THE PETRO-DIPLOMATIC COMPLEX: See this article by John R MacArthur on the Saudi Lobby in the USA and on its friends in the Petro-Diplomatic Complex.
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Coming: more on James Baker, on Carter's support for apartheid against Jews, Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron, Jewish antiquities, peace follies, propaganda, etc.