In order to be selected to run as president here in the United States, the field of “hopefuls” must pay homage to Israel, AIPAC, and the “New York money men,” as Wesley Clark has noted. Thus senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech designed “to remove any doubts that the Democratic Party’s donors and constituents, many of whom are Jewish, may have about his support for Israel,” according to Haaretz.

“My view is that the United States’ special relationship with Israel obligates us to be helpful to them in the search for credible partners with whom they can make peace, while also supporting Israel in defending itself against enemies sworn to its destruction,” said the Illinois Democrat. “Israelis want more than anything to live in peace with their neighbors, but Israel also has real—and very dangerous—enemies.”

Obviously, this “special relationship” consists of the United States acting as a nanny and cash cow for the Zionist state. Since 1973 alone, the blinkered taxpayers of America have forked over $1.6 trillion to Israel, estimated to be more than $5,700 per person, according to Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. “Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years,” the Christian Science Monitor noted in December, 2002.

“Since 1949 the US has given Israel a total of $84,854,827,200,” explains the Palestine Monitor. “The interest costs born by US taxpayers on behalf of Israel are $49,937,000,000—making the total amount of aid given to Israel since 1949 $134,791,507,200 (more than $134 billion).”

As for the myth Israel wants “more than anything to live in peace with their neighbors,” Mr. Obama should read the Personal Diary of Moshe Sharett. Please understand Moshe Sharett wasn’t your garden-variety antisemite—in fact, he was a former Prime Minister of Israel (1954-55) and director of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department and Foreign Minister (1948-56). “Sharett’s diary reveals in explicit language that the Israeli political and military leadership never believed in any Arab danger to Israel,” writes Ralph Schoenman. “They sought to maneuver and force the Arab states into military confrontations which the Zionist leadership were certain of winning so Israel could carry out the destabilization of Arab regimes and the planned occupation of additional territory.”

The Sharett diaries document a longstanding program of Israel’s leaders from both Labor and Likud: to “dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement and create puppet regimes under regional Israeli power.” Sharett cites cabinet meetings, position papers and policy memoranda which prepared wars “to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming Israel into the major power in the Middle East.” Sharett reveals that far from Israel “reacting” to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal for its war of October 1956, the Israeli leadership had prepared this war and had it on their agenda from autumn 1953, one year before Nasser came to power. Sharett recounts how the Israeli cabinet had agreed that international conditions for this war would mature within three years. The explicit intent was “the absorption of the Gaza territory and of the Sinai”. A timetable for conquest was decided at the highest military and political level. The occupation of Gaza and the West Bank was prepared in the early 1950s. In 1954, David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan developed a detailed plan to instigate internal Lebanese conflict in order to fragment Lebanon.

In the preface of Livia Rokach’s “Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary and Other Documents” (Livia Rokach is the late daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the Sharett regime), Naseer H. Aruri writes:

The policy portrayed [in Sharett’s diary], in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett’s records document this policy of “sacred terrorism” and expose the myths of Israel’s “security needs” and the “Arab threat” that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard “Israel’s security” against an “Arab threat,” but by a drive for lebensraum.

The Israeli “policy” of provocation and ethnic cleansing was further elucidated in 1982 “while advance preparations were being completed for the invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinians in the camps around Beirut, Sidon and Tyre,” according to Schoenman.

The author of this further explanation was Oded Yinon, formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Yinon’s article, first published in Kivunim (Directions), the journal of the Department of Information of the World Zionist Organization, revived “the idea of former Labor Foreign Minister Abba Eban that the Arab East is a ‘mosaic’ of ethnic divergence,” Schoenman continues. “The form of rule, therefore, appropriate to the region is the Millet system of the Ottoman Empire, wherein administrative rule was based upon local functionaries presiding over discrete ethnic communities…. The ‘new’ strategy of the eighties is the old imperial dictum of divide and rule, which depends for its success upon the securing of corrupt satraps to do the bidding of an aspiring imperial order.”

Israel would implement this “new strategy” on several occasions in Lebanon with deadly consequence. “Lebanon was the model, prepared for its role by the Israelis for thirty years, as the Sharett diaries revealed. It is the expansionist compulsion set forth by Herzl and Ben Gurion even as it is the logical extension of the Sharett diaries. The dissolution of Lebanon was proposed in 1919, planned in 1936, launched in 1954 and realized in 1982,” and once again attempted in 2006 with disastrous consequence for both the people of Lebanon and the Israeli military.

Of course, the “expansionist compulsion” of Herzl and Ben Gurion—and in recent times Netanyahu, Sharon, Olmert, and indeed the entire political caste of Israel—is almost completely obfuscated, buried under a meticulously engineered series of myths portraying noble Israelis as victims of venal and hateful Arabs.

In recent years, Israel’s “New Historians,” including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev, have systematically dissected these convenient myths, although predictably their conclusions—most notably the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Israel’s military superiority over its Arab neighbors, and the indisputable fact it is primarily to blame for the absence of peace in the region—have endured consistent and repeated criticism from historians and corporate media scribes shucking the official mythology.

For Obama and the Democratic leadership, these criticisms are not only anathema, they are indeed almost entirely nonexistent in a political milieu dominated by AIPAC and the “New York money men.”

As Shmuel Rosner writes for Haaretz, the so-called “Israel Factor” panelists—including Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs—need “more time to trust him,” that is to say they are waiting for an unequivocal endorsement of the Israeli state from Obama. “A position paper outlining Obama’s views is in the making, and will be distributed to as many Jewish voters as possible,” writes Rosner.

Obama is not finished, not by a long stretch, Rosner tells us. “This week I was told that while the venue has yet to be selected, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs conference in Washington at the end of February is one possibility. There’s also a chance that he will make his comments on Israel at a Washington rally calling for the release of the abducted Israeli soldiers [i.e., captured on the Lebanese side of the border] or while speaking to a group of Chicago Jews. One thing is quite clear: It will happen in the next two to three weeks.”