Megan's Reviews > Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic

This isn’t my best review, but please keep in mind I’m also quite tired (which always seems to be the case when I’m writing reviews, lol).

My second book by the brilliant academician Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, stops telling us what the majority of people already educated on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle are aware of: the inevitable, incredulous truth behind the creation of the state of Israel - how it was founded not on some random patch of deserted Middle Eastern land as a “homeland for oppressed Jews” - but rather, the extremist ideological movement of Zionism, fundamentally nationalist in character and always with the end goal being to eliminate or best segregate “the other”(Arabs, once the indigenous peoples, now called the Palestinians).

As we have seen time and time again, the Israeli military and government has become more radical, more brutal in its repression and violence against the remaining Palestinian civilian population - blatantly ignoring the findings, publishings, evidence, and calls from human rights watch organizations to end the occupation and economic stranglehold over Palestine - instead opting to destroy as much of the Palestinian people and culture as it can, while the rest of the world continues to turn a blind eye.

But this is nothing new. It’s been happening ever since the Zionists first started officially building settlements on land that didn’t belong to them, thanks to the ill-conceived Balfour Declaration, culminating in the departure of the British in 1947, leading to Partition and war, and the day of Israel’s independence in 1948. A day of celebration for the Israelis, the darkest day for the region’s Arab population - or the Nakba as it is most commonly called (Arabic for “catastrophe”).

The Six Day War of 1967 would further entrench the Palestinians into a nightmarish occupation, a state of apartheid, with many global outcries and attempts by world leaders to restore the country to its pre-1967 borders for decades to come.

The significance in this book isn’t in telling us what we already know about these atrocities and the later “operations” carried out by the Israeli government to continue their goals of eradication and segregation, but rather, why they continue to occur, despite the incontrovertible truths which have been revealed and the seeming agreement by the global community that Israel is not engaging in any practical measure of self-defense, but rather, in ethic cleansing and other clear acts of crimes against humanity.

Not only is it explained just how important Israel’s technology and “battled-tested” security weapons and tactics (on the occupied Palestinian territories) have become to repressive regimes the world over - including, of course, its main ally and big brother sponsor state, the U.S. - in Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, this book furthers our understanding of how Israel has continued, with complete impunity, to act outside the realms of international law.

By aggressively becoming the most powerful and well-financed lobbying groups in the UK and the U.S. throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially capitalizing on “Holocaust propaganda” - the pro-Zionist groups often made strange bedfellows: wealthy anti-Semitic businessmen and powerful politicians, for example - rallying in concert with pro-Zionist Jews.

Let us not be mistaken: while MOST extreme Zionists are Jews, not ALL (or even most) Jews are Zionists who support Israel and its goals. The Zionist cause only goes so far in their support of Jews worldwide: they’re willing to look the other way when other states abuse their Jewish populations - just so long as these states keep funding and supporting the Jews in the state of Israel.

The only true goal they have is an extremist nationalist one, one that won’t permit for the death of even one Jew inside the borders of Israel without massive retaliation; yet as mentioned in the paragraph above, has little concern for any abuses of Jews not living in “the holy land.”

As the back of the book states, ”Over 150 years, Zionist lobbying groups transformed Israel into an untouchable state. This is a magisterial history of the most successful advertising campaign the world has ever seen.”

Over the years, these lobbying groups have effectively grown, become more powerful, and gained more influence and allies inside Congress and Parliament. Lies and propaganda perpetrated by the Zionist groups stopped being challenged and instead became established policy, even if these policymakers weren’t entirely sure as to why they were being forced to take a certain position in which they knew little about.

The few that have challenged the incredibly powerful Zionist lobbying groups have seen their careers ruined, as even the most innocuous statement of support for equality between Israelis and Palestinians became tantamount to anti-Semitism. As Pappe has observed, the death of 1200 civilian Jews is certainly a tragedy, but to continue to compare all events such as these with the Holocaust risks downplaying the significance of that singular world tragedy.

Even Pappe himself, an Israeli historian, has been chased out of Israel and now resides in the UK (“shockingly”, he moved there in 2008, while his breakthrough book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine was published in 2006. Coincidence? Certainly not). He even mentions in the book’s prologue how, in 2015, during a conference at the U.K.’s University of Exeter (where he currently teaches Palestinian Studies) he and a small group of his graduate students and younger colleagues had organized an academic conference to share their papers on “Settler Colonialism in Palestine.”

He further explains that this is not some widespread, well-known event, but an invite-only conference in which a handful of individuals would present their papers. Yet, a small mention on the university’s website managed to attract the attention of the pro-Israel lobby, which immediately called for the event’s cancellation, branding it, as usual, as “anti-Semitic.” While the university allowed the conference to continue, they did give in to negotiations with the lobbyists, who insisted on having “two pro-Israel lobbyists allowed to take part in the conference.”

What was so bizarre about this request was the fact that these were just random lobbyists. They weren’t academic scholars, looking to debate the pro-Palestinian argument in any meaningful way. They simply wanted to shut any criticism down, and when that failed, they were forced to awkwardly sit and monitor it, with no actual academic points to contribute.

I bring this part up so extensively because it goes to show just how wide-reaching these lobbying groups are, and how much of an overreaction they have to a small, scholarly conference. That begs the question of just how much have they meddled in events/votes/policies which actually affect the state of Israel, and how far they’ve gone to silence any dissent against Israeli government policies.

The book does a phenomenal job of detailing just to what extent the pro-Israel lobby has involved itself in US and UK affairs over the beginning of the 1900s, all of the way through Joe Biden’s current White House tenure. Alas, I had taken quotes and notes while reading this book, but failed to keep them together and organized.

I’d check out my GR pal Randall’s four-star review for a more thorough and informative read. For me, it’s essential reading as all pro-Palestinian history should be, and because of this importance, I’m rounding up from 4 1/2 stars. (Also, I see pro-Zionist bots who clearly haven’t read the book have rated it one-star, so it’s also important to offset that).