October 6, 2003

Once upon a time there were Zionists like Judah Magnes(1877-1948), first president of the Hebrew University, who favored a tolerant bi-national Arab/Jewish state. Perhaps one could say that the recently departed Edward Said was in the Magnes tradition, on the Arab side.

The question now becomes: how did one go from Judah Magnes Israel to the current "transnational crazy state" Israel? The short answer is that when Menachem Begin became the first Likud Prime Minister in 1977, Israel began to resuscitate European fascist traditions of the 1920’s, which have become tangled up with the Reagan/Thatcher "conservative revolutions" beginning around 1979-81, when they took power. This has now culminated in the neo-con Zionist "silent coup" with Washington becoming a policy-colony. The simple fact that Reagan and Thatcher did threaten sanctions against South Africa in 1985 shows they were ultimately not neo-con Zionists. The neo-con Zionists immediately saw that if Nelson Mandela the Communist could be made acceptable to Reagan/Thatcher, then Arafat, if he got ten percent of the same kind of backing, could emerge as Mandela II. This is one reason the neo-con Zionists are always frantic…their ultimate nightmare is the Arafat as Mandela II scenario. This is also one of the reasons why Ehud Olmert and the other Likud leaders are so obsessed by Arafat.

One can see this radicalization process—the Magnes to Begin arc—in the drift of Israeli think tanks to the far right. Take the famous Begin-Sadat Center, called BESA for short.

They say of themselves:

"The Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies is a non-partisan and independent institute, affiliated with the Political Studies department at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. The Center was founded in 1991 by Thomas O. Hecht, a Canadian Jewish community leader, and is named in memory of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, whose efforts in pursuing peace lay the cornerstone for future conflict resolution in the Middle East."

You would think "naively" that a think tank named after Sadat and presenting itself as a peace research place, would adopt a moderate negotiation-oriented tone. You’d be quite wrong!

BESA Boardmemebers include:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney
Prof. Yuval Neeman
Maj. Gen. (res.) Ori Orr
Amb. Meir Rosenne
Prof. Eugene V. Rostow
Hon. Yitzhak Shamir
Lt. Gen. (res.) Dan Shomron
Amb. Zalman Shoval
Gen. Alexander M. Haig
Maj. Gen. (res.) Mordechai Hod
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman

This is the usual far-right assemblage of intransigents with a couple of non-Jewish useful "manipulables" like Haig and Mulroney and the late Senator Moynihan.

Moshe Arens was the Israeli official Bush Senior tangled with in 1991/1992 over the Israel loan guarantees. Neeman and others, such as Rostow, are Moslem-bashers and rabid "Islamophobes" affiliated with the Jewish Institute for Western Defence, Jerusalem (see Part VI of this series).

Shoval is one of the most militant Likud annexationists around Sharon. Like Dore Gold, he foresees a "collapsible bantustan" for the Palestinians, followed by Jordan-is-Palestine as the "final solution."

BESA’s International Academic Advisory Board includes: Prof. Eliot A. Cohen
SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. You will remember it was Cohen who helped pushed Bush over the edge into the current Iraq War via private discussions with Bush about Cohen’s book, "Supreme Commander" on the eve of the war. The book implies that presidents like Bush, if they want to achieve greatness, should overrule their careful "fuss-and-feathers’ generals and plunge ahead. Hence, the Iraq War was depicted by Cohen as Bush’s chance to achieve greatness for him and his dynasty. Bush swallowed the Cohen/BESA bait whole.

One sees immediately three things coming together:

1. the evolution from Judah Magnes "left" Israel to a far-right "transnational crazy state"(TCS) Israel, as symbolized by BESA’s boardmembers above.
2. How the neo-con Zionists like Cohen have captured the White House and Congress on behalf of this Israeli, post-Magnes TCS.
3. The radicalization of the Israeli institutes like BESA has caused and been caused by a parallel process in America with the parallel movement to the crazy right of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and so on.

This is the ideological crosstie in the Israelization of Washington policy.

Go to: http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/besa/about.html