NY Times weaves a Netanyahu-Romney conspiracy tale
Leo Rennert, AMERICAN THINKER
There it is above the fold on the front page of the Sunday, April 8, New York Times, a tale of a long friendship between GOP presidential aspirant Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with insinuations aplenty that it could become an unprecedented and worrisome Israeli influence conduit reaching directly into the Oval Office. (“A Friendship Dating to 1976 Resonates in 2012 – Shared Experiences Connect Romney and Netanyahu”).
The story, by Michael Barbaro, begins in 1976 when the Boston Consulting Group hired both men as corporate advisers — the seed of a lasting, personal friendship. So far, it seems an innocent enough happenstance, but Barbaro is quick to cast it in dark hues, with innuendoes, inferences and hints that this would give Israel automatic control of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Or, as Barbaro puts it, “a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, is now rich in political intrigue.”
Fleshing out his theme of an extraordinary and potentially problematic bond between Romney and Netanyahu, Barbaro recounts how the relationship was nurtured “over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem and heightened by their conservative ideologies.”
Having sown his alarms about the two men’s dubious ties, Barbaro proceeds to speculate what the history of such friendship actually might portend for life-and-death White House decisions in a Romney presidency — a “history that could well influence decision-making at a time when the United States may face crucial questions about whether to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities or support Israel in such action.”
In other words, Bibi could end up calling the shots for a complaisant President Romney. Barbaro notes ominously that Romney has suggested “that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu.” Wow! But what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t Obama consult with Britain’s David Cameron or Germany Chancellor Merkel on NATO decisions affecting them? Aren’t consultations with close allies a perfectly normal part of U.S. diplomacy? Why, even Winston Churchill slept in the White House during World War 2 without being able to twist FDR around his little finger. When the chips are down, U.S. presidents act according to their views of U.S. national interests.
Barbaro, however, declares that, when it comes to Israel getting some input on strategic U.S. Mideast decisions, it would amount “to a level of deference that could raise eyebrows given Mr. Netanyahu’s polarizing reputation, even as it appeals to the neoconservatives and evangelical Christians who are fiercely protective of Israel.” Raised eyebrows by whom, besides the New York Times?
But thus doth Barbara pump up his conspiracy tale by picturing Bibi as opening the way for neoconservatives and Christian evangelicals to appropriate Mideast decision-making in a Romney White House.
Undaunted, Barbaro buttresses his view that U.S. consultations with Israel would constitute a dangerous camel’s-nose-under-the-U.S.-tent leverage for Israel by quoting Martin Indyk, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration. Indyk, of course, is ready and willing to authenticate his conspiracy theory. According to Indyk, a readiness by Romney to consult with Netanyahu on matters affecting Israel, “whether intentional or not, implies that Romney would subcontract Middle East policy to Israel (and) that of course, would be inappropriate.”
All this because of two years of on-and-off concurrent work by Bibi and Mitt at Boston Consulting in the mid-1970s (the two men never worked together on a project). Barbaro, however, emphasizes that the friendship continued beyond that. Later, he notes, after decamping to Bain & Company, “Romney worked closely with Fleur Cates, Mr. Netanyahu’s second wife.” But even after Bibi divorced his second wife, “Ms. Cates remains in touch with Mr. Romney.”
Remember, dear reader, the name of Fleur Cates, a gray eminence navigating somewhere between Bibi and Mitt. What a conspiratorial tale! The only thing missing are the graphics to give it even more heft than just splashing it on the front page.
What next in the New York Times — a piece legitimizing the original bogus Jewish conspiracy tale, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”?
Leo Rennert is a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief of McClatchy Newspaers
@ CuriousAmerican:
Okay, here’s the rest of it.
— my arse:
The White Paper’s terms violated an international treaty: the 3 December 1924 Anglo-American Convention on Palestine — which instrument, containing incorporated within in it both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate Charter, had been duly ratified by the US Senate & proclaimed by Pres. Calvin Coolidge on 5 December 1925: and thus (like all Senate-ratified, U.S. treaties) been rendered part of internally binding, U.S. domestic law.
That treaty placed the US — notwithstanding its non-membership in the League itself [owing to senatorial refusal to ratify the 1919 Versailles Treaty (containing the League Covenant as its “Article One”)] — on an equal footing with League members as to the Palestine Mandate: thus making the USA a lawful party to the League’s contractual relation with, and supervisory position over, the Palestine Mandatory [i.e., HMG].
The Anglo-American Convention had provided that no change might be made in the Mandate without U.S. consent [Article 7], and it emplaced upon, and vested in, this country’s government [US] a duty — identical to that of the League — to demand & require that Britain, as Mandatory, honor her legitimate Mandate obligations.
Professor Nathan Feinberg, of the Academy of International Law in The Hague, summarized what attempts were, in fact, made — on Capitol Hill — to adhere to the 1924 Convention:
But after all the speeches were delivered & all the memoranda written & all the letters mailed — this country did nothing whatsoever to bring His Britannic Majesty’s Government to its senses in the matter of the White Paper of 1939.
But NOT because any of it was “altogether quite legal by International Law.”
Any possibility of policy reversal was to be overtaken by world events: Review of the matter had, in fact, been calendared by the PMC for 8 September. But German tanks, planes & troops crossed the Polish frontier on 1 September, Britain (and France) declared war on Germany on 3 September, and the flaccid and long-moribund League finally gave up the ghost. . . .
The progression of events was such that, “after the outbreak of war, the League Council no longer met. Thus the White Paper was not ratified and it did not, strictly speaking, acquire international sanction. But after 1 September 1939, no one bothered any longer about legal niceties.” [Laqueur, op cit., p. 529]
The MacDonald White Paper was left, effectively, to set itself in stone, and Britain, writes Shmuel Katz, proceeded to “execute the White Paper policy as if Palestine had been a British possession — and the White Paper, an Act of Parliament.” [Samuel Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine (Bantam, NY, 1973; 3d Edition, Steimatzky, NY, 1985), p. 75].
For European Jewry, it was indeed a Death Warrant.
But nothing about it was legal in International Law.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Yes.
No.
It was not legal by International Law.
Part of the provision of the Mandate System included the League of Nations’ oversight bureau — a watchdog agency, if you will: the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC).
Each mandatory authority was required to submit an annual Report to the Commission for approval.
The seven international PMC members present at the Geneva hearings throughout June of that year: the French, Portuguese, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, Swiss & British commissioners unanimously took note of the naked perfidy reflected in this White Paper, although the language of their rebuke was more bland in observing the violations.
The PMC’s subsequent Report two months later confirmed the Commission’s four-member, majority opinion — declaring, with reference to the present document’s newest, most severe immigration & land purchase restrictions as well as the White Paper’s plans for a British handover to Arab rule, that “[t]he policy set out in the White Paper is not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the Mandatory Power and the [League] Council, the Commission has placed on the Palestine Mandate” [i.e., to expedite the creation of a Jewish National Home].
It was an exquisitely delicate way of placing the ever-proper Brits on notice that what they were doing constituted not only a high-handed and shameful betrayal of the Mandate’s sacred trust but also a grossly and outrageously illegal one.
[The three-member minority (including the HMG delegate, Lord Hankey) asserted that circumstances might warrant a change of policy — if the League Council would not object to it.]
President Franklin Roosevelt — unlike his own State Department — had also questioned the White Paper’s legality:
“Frankly,” wrote the President to Foggy Bottom on the day of the White Paper’s release, 17 May 1939, “I do not see how the British Government reads into the original Mandate or [even] into the White Paper of 1922 [which the present Paper had cited as its basis, and whose ‘fulfillment,’ asserted Secretary MacDonald (at the PMC hearings), was embodied in the present Paper — dw] any policy that would limit Jewish immigration” — stating further, at that time, that he regarded the White Paper strictures as “something that we cannot give approval to by the United States.” [17 May 39, 867N. 01/1556 ½; cited in Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle for the Holy Land, 1935-48 (Putnam, NY, 1979), p. 69]
“Roosevelt did not share the British view that it would be ‘illegal’ to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against Arab wishes. In his view, the reference to maintaining the ‘civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities’ meant only that the Arabs could not be deprived of citizenship or the right to take part in government. It did not mean that they could not be deprived of their majority status. The impression given to the whole world at the time of the Mandate, he wrote, was that Palestine would be converted into a Jewish Home ‘which might very possibly become predominantly Jewish within a comparatively short time.” [Ibid., pp. 69-70]
“I was at Versailles,” declared FDR to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, “and I know that the British made no secret of the fact that they promised Palestine to the Jews. Why are they now reneging on their promise?” [cited in Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (Alfred Knopf, NY, 1983), p. 134]
THEN, AGAIN, TO BE SURE, the President, in the end, did not withhold that “approval” of the White Paper.
The President himself never paid anything more than lip service to his position in the quarrel over the document. There was, after all, the matter of keeping Sa’udi oil flowing into U.S. tankers [petroleum, originally contracted between producer & consumer-importer, has been “pooled” — sold on the open commodities market — only since the 1950’s], and anything concrete & substantive in the way of U.S. support for lifting White Paper restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine might have caused the Sa’udi oil spigot to sputter, or at least belch.
And not to be ignored either were the “fragile” negotiations of FDR’s Interior Secretary — America’s first-ever “Energy Czar,” the crusty Harold Ickes — with the Sa’udis, to facilitate AR-AMCO’s construction of an oil pipeline connecting Sa’udi refineries to the Mediterranean; nor to be overlooked, the proposal to build an American airbase near the US oil entrepôt of Dharan, while providing Lend-Lease assistance to the Sa’udi ‘democracy.’ Nothing would be permitted to upset these precarious dealings.
[Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem: American Jews and the State of Israel (NY, 1970), p. 239 et seq.; Joseph B. Schechtman, The United States and the Jewish State Movement; the Crucial Decade, 1939-1949 (NY, 1966), p. 74 et seq.; both cited in Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, NY, 1972), pp. 554-55]
This is gonna be too long to keep Ted from putting my head on a pike, so I’ll finish it in another post.