The Transfer Agreement
Edwin Black
Dialog Press, 2009 edition.

When you write a polemic, one meant to justify victory in a war, it would be best to deliver checkmate—that is, irrefutable proof that the correct side had won and that lives had not been sacrificed in vain. Edwin Black’s 1984 volume The Transfer Agreement, which chronicles the secret pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, is one such polemic. It’s filled with nail-biting drama and larger-than-life characters; it gives us suspense and intrigue, and embodies the agony and ecstasy of Jewish triumphalism on almost every page. As far as histories go, it’s well-paced, extensively researched, and thought-provoking. Ultimately, however, it delivers everything but checkmate.

Indeed, if anything, The Transfer Agreement casts a sympathetic light on the Nazis and reveals how unnecessary, preventable, and essentially Jewish the Second World War really was.

All of this, of course, is unintentional. Black asserts in his Introduction to his 2009 edition that just because Nazis worked with Zionists in the 1930s to establish the commercial, financial, and industrial infrastructure which would become the backbone of Israel does not mean that the Nazis deserve praise or are no longer the despised enemies of humankind. The cognitive dissonance of such a relationship apparently caused Black much anguish and confusion. Yet he persevered to tell this painful yet utterly crucial story of Jewish redemption:

The message of The Transfer Agreement was in fact the chronicle of the anguish of choice—itself the quintessential notion of Zionism’s historical imperative. This book and its documentation posit one question: when will the Jewish people not be compelled to make such choices? Indeed, when will all people similarly confronted be freed from the desperation of such choices?

I know. I gagged too. Dressing up Jewish causes as universal while ignoring or dismissing equally urgent white European causes is a tack Black resorts to often in The Transfer Agreement. For example, in the book’s Introduction, Black lies thusly:

The Zionists were indeed in the company of all mankind—with this exception: The Jews were the only ones with a gun to their heads.

That Black ignores how the disproportionately Jewish Bolsheviks had conquered Russia and contributed to the murder or starvation of millions of Soviet citizens prior to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, reveals the fundamental dishonesty of The Transfer Agreement. A gun was certainly pointing in the other direction as well.

Such a batter mixed with half-truths can only result in a half-baked product, which makes The Transfer Agreement such a frustrating read. Yet, like Black himself, I persevered. I persevered to reach the inevitable conclusion which Black so unwittingly draws: that without the vituperative neuroticism of a worldwide network of Eastern European Jews, the Second World War would never have happened, and tens of millions would not have died for nothing.

The opening chapters strike one most for the sheer bellicosity of American Jews who immediately found the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler intolerable. Also on display was their awesome power. Rabbi Stephen Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJC) spoke the loudest and with the greatest scorn, and soon influential Jews across America were debating whether to instigate a comprehensive boycott of Germany. These were no idle threats. Jews controlled many industries, including much of the press, even back then. With enough agitation from the right people, whole cities could rise up in protest against the Third Reich.

If there was any European country back then that could not afford to be boycotted, it was Germany. With millions unemployed and the nation wracked with inflation, Germany was still struggling to pay its war reparations stipulated in the treaty of Versailles. The 800,000 Germans who died of malnutrition at the end of the First World War due to the Allied blockade, as well as the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, were still fresh in the minds of many. Things were economically miserable in Germany, and with millions of jobs dependent upon the foreign market, “export was the oxygen, the bread, and the salt of the German workforce. Without it, there would be economic death.”

Black explains further:

Just before the decade closed, on October 24, 1929, Wall Street crashed. America’s economy toppled, and foreign economies fell with it. For Germany, intricately tied to the all the economies of the Allied powers, the fall was brutal. Thousands of businesses failed. Millions were left jobless. Violence over food was commonplace. Germany was taught the painful lesson that economic survival was tied to international trading partners and exports.

So when American Jewish Congress vice-president Joseph Tenenbaum threatened that “[a] bellum judaicum—war against the Jews—means boycott, ruin, disaster, the end of German resources, and the end of all hope for the rehabilitation of Germany.” Hitler, the Nazis, and the suffering German people who elected them knew right away that they were beset by powerful enemies bent upon their utter destruction. Of course, such men were not peculiar to America. Black chronicles how the anti-Nazi boycott movement spread quickly around the world, gaining traction in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Further, the movement was well-funded and organized with protestors often looking to the AJC in New York for cues.

The alacrity and vehemence with which the Jews reacted to Hitler’s ascension to power were indeed astonishing. With Hitler’s chancellorship not even six-months old, the anti-German boycott had already cost the Third Reich hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks.

One curious aspect of this was Poland. Black does not go into it as much as I would have liked, but he asserts in several places that Polish Jews were indeed behind Polish anti-German truculence throughout the 1930s. The Jews of Vilna were especially vicious, and soon infected the rest of Poland with anti-Nazi fever, which they quite shrewdly framed as national rather than ethnic. The protests quickly grew violent, and in Upper Silesia became “altogether unbearable” according to the German Foreign Ministry. Adding to the insult, the Polish Undersecretary of State told Reich Ambassador Hans Moltke that the Polish government was uninterested in interfering with the boycott.

While Black provides many details surrounding anti-Jewish attacks in Nazi Germany, he offers none on anti-German attacks in Poland, other than that they were “violent.” Things grew further out of hand as Poland, along with Czechoslovakia, began rattling sabers after Hitler, according to Black, threatened to “seize the Versailles-created territorial bridge” (i.e., the Polish Corridor). This led to Poland’s militarization of its western border and serious talks about invading Germany while it was still weak. Thus, the image of Poland being the poor and innocent victim of Nazi aggression gets exploded on the pages of The Transfer Agreement.

We can also thank Edwin Black for writing the following three enlightening sentences:

Polish Jews had successfully enflamed Poland from defensive concern to war hysteria through their violent anti-German boycott and protest movement. German officials were in fact astonished that the historically anti-Semitic Polish people would allow Jewish persecution in Germany to become the pretext for a war. But it was happening.

Why were Jews everywhere so distraught? Hitler barely had time to get his seat warm in the chancellor’s office when Jews were already declaring him an unmitigated catastrophe and were mobilizing with the utmost urgency. Well, according to Black in numerous places, Adolf Hitler had already planned the complete destruction of German Jewry, so the Jews had no choice but to strike back as hard as they could in self-defense. And boycott, along with disruptive protests, picket lines, public humiliations, and libelous editorials were their weapons of choice. “Germany,” Black declares, “would have to be crushed, not merely punished.”

Yet according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Black’s accusations of Nazi genocidal plans back in 1933 are simply not true.

Did the Nazis always plan to murder the Jews? No. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they did not have a plan to murder the Jews of Europe. However, the Nazis were antisemitic. They saw Jews in Germany as a problem. One of the major questions for the Nazis was: How do we get rid of the Jewish population in Germany?

One finds this fairly often in The Transfer Agreement. Black will make some hysterical claim and then footnote it with a source that does not support his hysterical claim. For example, after a brief biography of German banker and early Hitler ally Hjalmar Schacht, Black writes:

It was Schacht who now pledged to his Führer to reestablish Germany’s financial integrity and build a war economy designed for territorial and racial aggression.

Neither of his sources—William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) and Schacht’s 1956 autobiography Confessions of “The Old Wizard”—mention anything about “racial aggression” on the pages Black specifies (204–205, 265–266, 284, and 358–359 for the former and 2, 6, and 14 for the latter). Shirer does claim that Schacht was most helpful in “furthering [Germany’s] rearmament for the Second World War”—as if Hitler and the Nazis were plotting Stalingrad and the Battle of Britain way back in 1933. But unlike Black, Shirer does not even offer footnotes. So Black bases his assertion on Shirer’s, which is, it turn, baseless.

Black’s most astonishing faux pas occurs on pages 262–263 in Chapter 28. He writes:

At the height of Germany’s unemployment panic, on July 2 Hitler reassured a nationwide gathering of SA leaders that while the tactics might become more restrained, there was no thought of altering the ultimate goal of National Socialism: the speedy annihilation of Jewish existence.

Black’s lone source for this is an article entitled “Jews Throughout Germany Dismissed Wholesale, Bank Head Flees to Switzerland” from the Jewish Daily Bulletin, July 5, 1933. Here is the link, and below is a reproduction of the article itself. See if you can find anything about the “speedy annihilation” of Jews.

Perhaps this was a simple error, but it survived till the 2009 edition which was published 25 years after the first. And it is a pretty big error to boot.

Black also lacks self-awareness in spots, at times argues against himself—which only makes him look foolish. He glorifies the anti-German boycott often in the Transfer Agreement, and approvingly relays a story in which AJC vice-president W.W. Cohen shouted “No!” at a restaurant when the waiter offered him an imported Bavarian beer. Afterwards, Cohen attended a rally and announced that “any Jew buying one penny’s worth of merchandise made in Germany is a traitor to his people!” A few pages later, after the Germans quite understandably respond in kind against German Jews, Black is suddenly against boycott and wishes to direct our sympathy towards its innocent victims:

But this boycott would be a systematic economic pogrom that would plague every Jewish business and household. No one would be spared. What professional could survive if he could not practice? What store could survive if it could not sell?

This obvious double standard is so appalling that not only should Black not be taken seriously whenever he demonizes Nazis or complains about anti-Semitism, neither should his publisher or editors. Here are three more examples that remove any doubt that Edwin Black is little more than a shameless shill for the Jews.

On page 78, he claims without a source that the Nazis “regarded the Zionists as their enemy personified, and from the outset carried out a terror campaign against them in Germany.” But on page 175, he changes his tune and states how Zionist German Jews actually enjoyed more freedom under the Nazis than did non-Zionist Jews. The Zionist newspaper Juedische Rundschau was allowed relative press freedom; Hebrew was encouraged in all Jewish schools; Zionists were allowed to raise a Star of David flag when ordinary Jews were not allowed to raise the Swastika; and youth groups were permitted to wear Jewish uniforms, “the only non-Nazi uniform allowed in Germany.”

Some enemy. Some terror campaign.

Chapters 18 and 28 also shed harsh light on Black’s blatant hypocrisy. In the former, he congratulates the Jews for going global with their pro-Jewish, anti-Nazi vitriol, and in the latter, he frets over how anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi movement was going . . . wait for it . . . global.

Further, on page 25, Black writes [emphasis mine]:

But when Hitler and his circle saw Germany deadlocked in depression, they did not blame the world depression and the failures of German economic policy. They blamed the Bolshevik, Communist, and Marxist conspiracies, all entangled somehow in the awesome imaginary international Jewish conspiracy.

At this point, Black’s editors, proofreaders, research assistants, or the publisher himself should have taken their clueless author aside and gently reminded him that his entire book is about an international Jewish conspiracy. Just about on every third page you have Jews in one country or continent writing, phoning, or cabling Jews in another country or continent. The big meetings in Prague and Geneva which Black reports on late in his book consist of Jews from all over the place arguing over how best to smother the Third Reich in its cradle. How is this anything other than an international Jewish conspiracy?

How could Edwin Black not see how much of The Transfer Agreement not only justifies some of the worst anti-Jewish stereotypes, but also exonerates the Nazis for understanding the truth about Jews and frankly being so patient with them?

Here is a list of all the things Black records in The Transfer Agreement which point to the Nazi leadership being at least somewhat reasonable—not necessarily innocent, mind you, but reasonable—in the face of international Jewish pressure:

• Hitler, Hermann Goering, and other high-level Nazis demanded that Nazis not commit acts of violence. (pp. 49, 52)
• Hitler promised not to boycott German Jews only after world Jewry stop boycotting the Third Reich. (pp. 59–60)
• The Nazis provided special treatment for German Zionist Jews, as mentioned above. (pp. 174–175)
• In June 1933, Hitler personally allowed the AJC and other groups to send a multimillion-dollar relief fund to German Jews. (p. 185)
• After Hitler called off the April 1 anti-Jewish boycott, provincial Nazis continued to boycott Jews despite orders from Berlin not to do so. (p. 219)
• Hitler bailed out a large Jewish-owned department store chain and then strictly forbade mass arrests and harassment of businessmen and industrialists. (p. 220–221)
• In order to outlaw atrocities, suppress anti-Jewish acts, and prevent a “second revolution” by fanatical Nazis, Goering ordered mass arrests of dissident Nazi units. (p. 223)
• Goering promised the death penalty for “atrocity mongers” among the Nazi rank and file. (pp. 224–225)
• When followers of Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher illegally arrested 300 Jewish shopkeepers, the authorities released them immediately. (p. 224)
• The Nazis actually encouraged Jewish religious, cultural, and athletic activities in the cities. Black writes: “The Nazis delighted in the Jewish subculture and demanded that it thrive. Indeed, every Jewish gathering was approved and attended by Gestapo. For Aryans, an active Jewish subculture provided reinforcement that Jews were an alien people who had no place in Germany.” (p. 373)

Black’s own analysis reveals that the Nazi leadership at least made an effort to crack down on their own radical followers. It seems that a good deal of the atrocity propaganda Black cites from 1933—minus all exaggerations and lies—happened in spite of Adolf Hitler not because of him. Yet none of this means a whit to Black. The Nazi leadership should be condemned as guilty not for what they were doing in 1933 but for what they were going to do ten years later.

This is entirely unreasonable, and it ignores the role the Jews themselves played in so maliciously provoking war with Germany throughout the 1930s. What I wrote about Benjamin Ginsburg’s How the Jews Defeated Hitler­­—another book about 1930s Jewish warmongering—applies also to The Transfer Agreement. And it has everything to do with legerdemain:

How does a magician cause objects to vanish or appear out of nowhere? Through a technique called misdirection, he can draw your attention away from something magical that is about to happen by manipulating your ability to anticipate or remember. In a sense, the magician interferes with your sense of time. Ginsburg and other authors accomplish a similar sleight of hand when discussing Nazi Germany prior to the war. According to their specious logic, because the Nazis committed war crimes during the war, the Nazis must also be considered guilty of the same crimes before the war. Therefore, promoting war against the Nazis during the 1930s is perfectly justified and honorable.

Again, this is not to say that the Nazis were entirely innocent or didn’t say or do horrible things to Jews. They certainly did. They were socialist totalitarians, and so could act with ruthless, top-down efficiency when they wanted to. By virtue of being both eugenic-minded and pro-German in nature, they took a dim view of the subversive Jewish outgroup. Hence the unsubtle hints for Jews to leave; hence the transfer agreement. But did some Nazis do heinous things? Sure. I think it is safe to assume that not all of the reports of murders, beatings, incarcerations, and other outrages were lies or embellishments. Furthermore, Nazi leaders starting with der Führer himself said a few things you just can’t easily unsay.

On page 62, Black describes how Hitler raged in the presence of the Italian ambassador when informed of Mussolini’s disapproval of Nazi anti-Semitism:

“I have the most absolute respect for the personality and the political action of Mussolini. Only in one thing I cannot admit him to be right and that is with regard to the Jewish question in Germany, for he cannot know anything about it.” Hitler continued that he alone was the world’s greatest authority on the Jewish question in Germany, because he alone had examined the issue for “long years from every angle, like no one else.” And, shouted Hitler, he could predict “with absolute certainty” that in five or six hundred years the name of Adolf Hitler would be honored in all lands “as the man who once and for all exterminated the Jewish pest from the world.”

Such a statement is impossible to defend—and yes, I went to the source, and it checks out (John Toland’s 1976 Adolf Hitler, p. 325—although Black mistakenly lists it as page 424). Hitler did say this. Immense moral quandaries aside, if you agree with such a genocidal statement, then you are giving Jews like Stephen Wise all the reason they need to act preemptively against Germay and with extreme prejudice. After all, in a fight, one’s opponent has the right to fight back.

The best way to address this conundrum is to allow Black to lead us to deep water, and then go deeper, where he is unprepared to go. Why were so many Germans, and Nazis in particular, so indignant about the Jewish presence in Germany? Why would Hitler declare such enmity for Jews and not for any other non-Aryan ethnic group in Germany?

Well, given that all the negative stereotypes about Jews back then—usury, alcohol peddling, prostitution, pornography, business tribalism, etc.—can arguably be balanced by their accomplishments in a host of other fields—including medicine, science, and music—the best way to respond would be to point to the Soviet Union and all its unspeakable enormities as a model of Jewish supremacy. Then we can ask why the protagonists of The Transfer Agreement—as well as Black himself—never suggest that perhaps the millions of people already slaughtered or starved by the disproportionately Jewish Soviet leadership by 1933 was the reason the Nazis had such a massive a chip on their shoulder. As Michael Kellogg demonstrated in his 2005 The Russian Roots of Nazism, the Nazis were well aware of the apocalyptic nature of Bolshevism as well as its undeniable link to Jews. They did not want what happened in 1917 Russia to happen in 1933 Germany. And who can blame them?

Hitler said he wanted to exterminate the Jewish pest? Fine. In his 1990 work Stalin’s War Against the Jews, author Louis Rapoport quotes Jewish Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev saying the following in 1917:

We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

And you know what? The tragic irony here is that Zinoviev was underselling the destructive power of his own government. Had only 10 million Russians been “annihilated” by the Soviets throughout their 75–year history, it would have been a good thing—compared to what actually happened! That number in fact is much higher.

One last thing, small but poignant. Black describes Congressman Samuel Dickstein as a close friend of Wise. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, it was revealed that Dickstein had been a paid agent for the murderous NKVD. This raises a lot of questions which Black doesn’t care to ask. Further, this knowledge—along with all of the books linked above—came out before the 2009 edition of The Transfer Agreement. Black has no excuse for ignoring such damning evidence against his case.

But what about the transfer agreement itself? Well, here’s where I start saying nice things about Edwin Black. All credit to him for writing an absorbing and well-researched history on this secret pact between Nazis and Zionists. When he is not mendaciously overstating the Nazi menace or eulogizing Jews for trying to destroy Germany, he’s actually quite level-headed and has a reporter’s knack for sticking to only what compels the narrative. His chapter entitled “April First” epitomizes excitement as it depicts, almost like a thriller movie, all the intricate twists and turns of one day in this riveting plot as both Germans and Jews lurch recklessly towards economic war.

On the Jewish side, the struggle boiled down to the belligerent, anti-Gentilic Eastern European Jews (as represented by Stephen Wise, the AJC, and Samuel Untermyer and his World Jewish Economic Federation) versus the more conservative and assimilated Western European Jews (as represented by B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee). Where the former were calling for economic warfare the moment Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the latter were calling for calm and measured diplomatic responses.

Many of the men leading B’nai B’rith and the Committee were German Jews themselves or had friends and family back home. They understood that many of the atrocity reports (known as Greuelpropaganda) coming out of Germany at the time were either lies or gross exaggerations, which was a real sore spot for the Nazi leadership. In some cases, Jews had become victims of violent attack because they were Jews. In other cases, they were victims because they were communist troublemakers who refused to cooperate with Nazi authorities. And when atrocity-mongering reporters like Jacob Leschinsky picked up such stories, they weren’t going to be terribly diligent in making such distinctions.

The German diaspora Jews also understood how serious the Nazis were. If men like Wise, Untermyer, and others kept provoking them, they would retaliate either by making German Jews feel the brunt of the boycott or the brunt of oppression. Many of these Jews were desperate to stop the boycott.

Sadly, the Eastern European Jews won this struggle through will, charisma, and the ability to recruit gullible Christians to their cause. Within months, Jews everywhere were tightening the vise on Germany, hoping to make it crack by winter.

On the opposite side of the coin were the Zionists. Where most Jews saw catastrophe in the Nazis, Zionists saw opportunity. Black is honest enough to admit the ideological similarity between the two, which perhaps is why the Nazis tolerated Zionist Jews most of all. He actually undermines the Jewish supremacist default positions of people like Wise and Untermyer by approvingly quoting common sense from Zionist pioneer Theodore Herzl:

Where [anti-Semitism] does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country.

What we now know as Israel effectively began on March 25, 1933 when German Zionist Federation Kurt Blumenfeld horned his way into an emergency meeting with Goering and other German-Jewish leaders. Goering intended to pressure these Jews into stopping the international Jewish boycott—seemingly operating under the fallacy that they could do this by virtue of being Jews. And according to Black, they really did try.

The Zionists, however, were different. They wanted nothing from the Germans except leave to leave. Goering liked this idea, and promised to play ball as long as the Zionists could do what the other German Jews could not: bring Stephen Wise and Samuel Untermyer to heel. The problem was that in order to entice the 550,000 Jews living in Germany to depart for the undeveloped British-controlled Middle East, each emigre would need to possess the considerable sum of ₤1,000 (now worth £91,566.55 or $114,029) to qualify as refugees according to British law. They would also need to be able to keep a significant percentage of their capital. Two very daunting tasks, but the Zionists were up for the challenge.

This is the struggle Black depicts on the pages of The Transfer Agreement. In it we discover a marvelous array of subplots and subterfuge that, again, could support a decent thriller. Beyond the bitter rivalry among the American Jewish Congress (the largest Jewish activist organization, composed of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and more prone to radicalism than other Jewish organizations dominated by wealthy Jews from Germany), the American Jewish Committee, and the B’nai B’rith and the obvious Nazi vs. Jew divide, we have German Zionist Federation director Georg Landauer pitted against shady independent businessman Sam Cohen. The former was a true believer and the latter, well, let’s just say he might have been more interested in rescuing German-Jewish capital than German-Jews themselves. He always seemed to stay one step ahead of the Zionists when it came to making deals with the Germans as well. Then you have the loose cannon ideologue Chaim Arlosoroff and his struggles with the “Jewish Hitler” Vladimir Jabotinsky and his Revisionist movement in Palestine. And, as competing alpha-Jews, Wise and Untermyer butted egos quite often.

Everything came to a head at the so-called Political Committee meeting in Prague in August 1933. Here, the world’s most powerful Jews were about to officially declare their anti-German boycott when the Zionists finally revealed the ace up their sleeve: the details of the transfer agreement. In a nutshell, Jewish emigres would leave the majority of their wealth in frozen assets called sperrmarks, which were managed by a Zionist-friendly bank. A collection of Nazi-friendly Zionist businesses (including the one owned by Sam Cohen) would then sell German goods in Palestine and other places, while German exporters would pay themselves with sperrmarks. It was a brilliant scheme, a win-win for the ethnonationalists. It also caused a great deal of kvetching among the Jews in Prague, not least of whom was Stephen Wise—because according to the transfer agreement they could have boycott or Zionism, but not both.

Given that Wise was such a villain throughout this narrative, his getting stymied in the end was satisfying.

To conclude with another chess analogy, there is something known in chess as a helpmate. This is a puzzle which challenges both players to checkmate one side in a certain number of moves. Thus, one player is actually working to checkmate himself. The Transfer Agreement is not quite that bad, but sometimes it does approach helpmate levels of suicide when it comes to Jewish apologetics and the Third Reich. A better analogy would be that Edwin Black is simply a poor player who ultimately captures fewer pieces than his opponent (i.e., the well-read, discerning reader) and ends up in a worse position than when he started. But he still manages to capture pieces. Yes, Nazis said and did things which are difficult if not impossible to defend nearly a century after the fact. So what? The people he champions said and did worse. And Black is not exactly in a hurry to tell us about it.

Often in The Transfer Agreement Black describes the international Jewish struggle against Nazi Germany as economic or propagandistic war. Stephen Wise takes it further in the book’s final chapter when on September 23, 1933, he hinted darkly of real war against Germany. He stated that boycott “is a weapon, but it is not the weapon. . . . The president of the United States and the prime minister of England can do more than a hundred boycotts.”

So war it is.

But this raises an interesting question: if the first casualty of war is always the truth, and the Jews are always at war, then when can we ever rely on Jews to tell the truth?

The rationale for America’s participation in the proxy war in Ukraine rarely articulates itself with the language of national interests or security concerns. Instead it’s sold as a war over “our values” and the maintenance of a “rules-based liberal international order”. In the words of Joe Biden, “We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression.” Rather than a regional territorial dispute, it’s a cosmic struggle for freedom and democracy. But in this grand battle, democracy might not mean what you think.

Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country that has banned rival political parties, shut down television news stations, and passed a law to drastically limit press freedom. The very meaning of democracy has been silently reconceptualised. If once it meant non-fraudulent voting and a free press, now it means something altogether different. Italians voting, democratically, for Giorgia Meloni, was viewed by President Biden as a threat to democracy:

Democracy is at stake… You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election. You’re seeing what’s happening around the world. And the reason I bother to say that is we can’t be sanguine about what’s happening here either.

Biden expressed a similar view about Poland and Hungary while giving an assessment of then-President Trump’s foreign policy: “You see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world, and as well, this president embraces all the thugs in the world.” This way of speaking of Poland and Hungary is far from unusual in the English-speaking media.

Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin summed up what’s being fought for in Ukraine. Accusing Moscow of being “a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export” he concluded “In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views.” Framed in this way it is unsurprising that the proxy war finds its most rabid adherents among Democrats. Homosexuality is entirely legal in Russia and yet Western liberals will use gay rights, trans rights and feminism to foment a surreal new jingoism that bolsters support for spending billions to fund a proxy war against a nuclear-armed power.  “Nation building” means teaching Afghans about the artistic merit of latrines, “democracy” means trans rights, and “a rules based international order” means America doing whatever it wants.

For Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, gay and transgender rights are the dividing line between Russia and the UK. “With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine”, he tweeted at the start of the war, “we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights”.

In the 1960s political radicals opposed America’s military-industrial complex. Today they donate to it. Judith Butler, the primary originator of radical gender ideology, donated to Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign. Harris is now the primary saleswoman for arming Ukraine and escalating the conflict.

A professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews expressed some typical delusions of Western liberals:

Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, have led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights.

American commentators have painted the conflict in Ukraine as a literal culture war and Putin is happy to reciprocate. In the midst of the conflict he expressed support for Harry Potter author JK Rowling, comparing her “cancellation” over trans issues to the sanctions meted out against Russia by Western nations. In an Address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow, Putin promised to “protect our children from degradation and degeneration” emanating from the West:

Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children… They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages… Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? …Millions of people in the West realise that they are being led to a spiritual disaster. Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy.

In his sermon on Forgiveness Sunday, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia spelt out the nature of the ideological cleavage between NATO and Russia:

In the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is such a test for the loyalty of this government, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible “freedom”. Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible. … In order to enter the club of those countries, it is necessary to hold a gay pride parade. Not to make a political statement “we are with you”, not to sign any agreements, but to hold a gay parade. And we know how people resist these demands and how this resistance is suppressed by force.

This is, continues Kirill, “a test of loyalty to that very powerful world.” He isn’t wrong. Writing in The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wants to fight Russia so that a pride parade can be held in Mariupol:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for. Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose.” … LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol.

The LGBT community has become a strange proxy of US power. Kyiv Pride is sponsored by the United States embassy in Ukraine and by the United States Agency for International Development, alongside the Canadian and German governments. In 2021 the Kyiv Pride account tweeted “KyivPride invades eastern Ukraine. The KyivPride: going East project aimed at mobilizing the LGBT+ community in Donbas started in May. In other words, let’s make Donbas queer”.

One typical apparatchik of the American empire in the current year is the “non-binary” lesbian Masha Gessen, who has said of marriage:

Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change, and again, I don’t think it should exist.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the United States of spreading “a cultural revolution” around the world that consisted of political correctness “taken to the extreme”. Opposition to the American war machine is the only sensible response.

The new Israeli government is by far the most radically right in its history—and that’s saying a lot. As a result, there have been a number of protests against Israel and Zionism both in Israel and on American college campuses recently. These are likely to increase in number and intensity because of the new government which is the result of a long process of demographic change resulting from the high fertility of Orthodox and strongly ethnonationalist Jews. As we are well aware, demography is indeed destiny.

Recently there was a large protest against Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in Washington. Since the new government was installed, there has been increased settler and IDF violence, and “Smotrich called for the Palestinian village of Huwwara to be ‘wiped out.’ His remarks have received widespread condemnation. The U.S. State Department called them “disgusting,” but approved Smotrich’s visa.”

This is a typical U.S response to Israel—big on words but no action. Smotrich also told an audience in Paris that “there’s no such thing as “Palestinian people”—again the U.S. complained but again, nothing will change. Smotrich outlined his belief that Israel has exclusive Jewish, God-ordained rights to the land, and the lectern was adorned with a map of Israel that included the occupied Palestinian territory and the country of Jordan as part of Israeli territory.” And after Jordan, all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates as promised in Genesis. After the speech, Jordan says it is reviewing its relationship to Israel

This is having repercussions in the U.S., at least among liberals. What Israel is doing is the direct opposite of the Wokeness promoted by the left in the U.S.:

For the first time in Gallup’s polling, going back to 2000, Democrats said they sympathized with Palestinians more than with Israelis in the long-standing conflict between the two: 49% of Democrats said they sympathized more with Palestinians, 38% with Israelis and 13% said they favored neither side.

Overall, a majority of Americans, 54%-31%, sympathize more with the Israelis, the poll found, but the gap between the two in U.S. opinion has narrowed significantly. Much of the shift in U.S. opinion has come from millennials, whose sympathy for the Israelis has dropped sharply over the last decade.

The old guard in the Israel Lobby and the big money are still on the side of whatever Israel does. But over time, the skepticism many younger Americans have about the use of U.S. power overseas will likely change American policy as Israel becomes an increasing embarrassment to the woke West.

A particular focus of the protests is the attempt to have the Knesset, which is decidedly on the right, be able to override Supreme Court decisions which have “repeatedly defended the rights of vulnerable populations in Israel, including Arab Israelis, LGBTQ people, non-Orthodox Jews and women.” So progressive American Jews in the U.S. are furious:

The Progressive Israel Network, a coalition that includes J Street, Americans For Peace Now, T’ruah, and the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, organized a demonstration outside [Smotrich’s] hotel that also targeted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul. “This is a moral emergency,” said National Council of Jewish Women CEO Sheila Katz during a speech at the event. “We must name this deep pain that so many of us feel for what’s happening in Israel right now, a place that we love.”

Various Reform rabbis are calling it an existential crisis for American Jews (the word ‘existential’ will appear quite a bit in this article), and Israel’s president has warned “He who thinks that a real civil war, one that costs lives, is a line we won’t reach, is out of touch. In this moment, of all moments, in the 75th year of the state of Israel, the abyss is within reach.” Moreover, the protests are

taking place without a constitution. This means, for instance, that the government can decide to hold elections once every ten years instead of the standard four-year limit still in effect, and no one can override it; or it could pass laws granting the government total control over the media, or it could put LGBTQ people in jail. But the true crisis will emerge when the Israeli High Court of Justice repeals the judicial reforms and regards them as illegal — that is when the state will enter a constitutional crisis without a solution. Who will the Israeli security apparatus obey: the government or the judiciary?

Ironically, Biden called Netanyahu urging some kind of compromise, even though many in his own party want to pack SCOTUS to achieve permanent dominance of the left in the U.S.

While all this is going on, the recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China is another huge concern for Israel and its supporters because it portends an ever-wider coalition arrayed against the West—China and Russia (which are already allied), Iran (allied with Russia), Syria (the Saudis had been supporting the rebels, while Iran and Russia have been supporting Assad), other Arab countries (Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are reviewing the relations with Israel, undoing Jared Kushner’s work in the Trump administration), and quite possibly India—Prime Minister Modi recently spoke of India’s “unbreakable friendship” with Putin and pushed to avoid any joint communique because of disagreement about the war in the recent G7 meetings.

What this confrontation is really about is the globalist, woke West still tolerant of Israel versus nations that reject the Western model of exporting wokeness in defense of their own traditions and culture. Putin’s recent speech emphasizes this:

Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages. Bless their hearts, let them do as they please. Here is what I would like to say in this regard. Adult people can do as they please. We in Russia have always seen it that way and always will: no one is going to intrude into other people’s private lives, and we are not going to do it, either. …

The Western imposition of wokeness is already happening in Ukraine. Christopher Caldwell of the usually neocon friendly Claremont Institute and author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020), notes that

Few people have paid attention to how rapidly Ukrainian society has been evolving since the Maidan protests [of 2014]. In a recent interview in the New Left Review, the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko described a power bloc that has lately come into being, uniting Ukraine’s globalizing oligarchs, Western-funded progressive foundations, and Ukrainian nationalists The latter argued for ripping up the Minsk accords and ripping out the Russian roots of Ukrainian public life and high culture, leaving Ukraine with a hard-line form of [pro-Western] political correctness.

Opponents were driven out of public life. All of these countries have traditional cultures that are out of step with the West’s wokeness. Caldwell calls attention to Western NGOs pushing wokeness, such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Hungary requires that NGOs that get donations from abroad be publicly labeled as foreign funded, and Russia has banned several foreign NGOs linked to politics, including the Open Society Institute and Amnesty International. Because of the saliency of Soros as a funder of woke causes (including liberal-radical prosecutors, such as Alvin Bragg who indicted Trump) and the fact that he is well known to be Jewish, the activist Jewish community has attempted to ban any mention of Soros as funding the left.  When Trump highlighted Soros’s support for Bragg, the JTA wrote that he had “once again invoke[d] the name of a Jewish billionaire who is at the center of antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

Putin emphasizes U.S. warmongering since 9/11 and its support for imposing neoliberal totalitarian values on the rest of the world.

According to US experts, almost 900,000 people were killed during wars unleashed by the United States after 2001, and over 38 million became refugees. Please note, we did not invent these statistics; it is the Americans who are providing them. They are now simply trying to erase all this from the memory of humankind, and they are pretending that all this never happened. However, no one in the world has forgotten this or will ever forget it.

None of them cares about human casualties and tragedies because many trillions of dollars are at stake, of course. They can also continue to rob everyone under the guise of democracy and freedoms, to impose neoliberal and essentially totalitarian values, to brand entire countries and nations, to publicly insult their leaders, to suppress dissent in their own countries and to divert attention from corruption scandals by creating an enemy image. We continue to see all this on television, which highlights greater domestic economic, social and inter-ethnic problems, contradictions and disagreements. …

Russia is an open country and at the same time, a distinct civilisation. There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours — that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them….

This message of preserving traditional cultures is obviously at odds with the woke values that the West is attempting to impose on the rest of the world. It’s a message that undoubtedly resonates with many societies with unwoke cultures that would like to preserve and may well be one of the main reasons we are seeing the new alignment mentioned above.

Putin continues:

Step by step, they proceeded to revise the existing international order, to dismantle security and arms control systems, and plotted and carried out a series of wars around the world. To reiterate, all of that was done for the sole purpose of dismantling the post-WWII architecture of international relations. This is not a figure of speech. This is how it all unfolded in reality. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they sought to perpetuate their global dominance regardless of the interests of modern Russia or other countries for that matter.

The Western elite make no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, “Russia’s strategic defeat.” What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.

An existential threat. I take him at his word, and that means that the feel they cannot lose this war, which could lead to a nuclear Armageddon because the West apparently also sees it as existential given their full-on, ever-escalating support of Ukraine. What our elites really hate is Putin’s claim that “There is no claim to exclusivity or superiority in this statement, but this civilisation of ours — that’s what matters. Our ancestors passed it to us and we must preserve it for our descendants and pass it on to them.” This is an anti-globalist manifesto. Combined with Russia’s attitudes on LGBTQ+, it’s easy to see why Western elites are furious.

Recently Putin complained that NATO is proposing to expand to countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, further exacerbating Russian paranoia.

Putin’s claim that the West has sought to perpetuate its dominance resulting from the fall of the Soviet Union is quite correct. In the 1990s Jewish neoconservatives saw a unipolar world as in the interests of Israel, surrounded by hostile countries in the Middle East. From a paper I wrote in 2004, “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement”:

With the end of the Cold War, neoconservatives at first advocated a reduced role for the U.S., but this stance switched gradually to the view that U.S. interests required the vigorous promotion of democracy in the rest of the world. This aggressively pro-democracy theme, which appears first in the writings of Charles Krauthammer and then those of Elliot Abrams, eventually became an incessant drumbeat in the campaign for the war in Iraq. Krauthammer also broached the now familiar themes of unilateral intervention and he emphasized the danger that smaller states could develop weapons of mass destruction which could be used to threaten world security. A cynic would argue that this newfound interest in democracy was tailor-made as a program for advancing the interests of Israel. After all, [despite the reality of Israel as an apartheid state], Israel is advertised as the only democracy in the Middle East, and democracy has a certain emotional appeal for the United States, which has at times engaged in an idealistic foreign policy aimed at furthering the cause of human rights in other countries. …

Krauthammer was on the cutting edge of neocon thinking on how to respond to the unipolar world created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Krauthammer has consistently urged that the U.S. pursue a policy to remake the entire Arab world—a view that represents the “party line” among neoconservatives (e.g., Michael Ledeen, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Richard Perle). In a speech at the AEI in February 2004, Krauthammer argued for a unilateral confrontation with the entire Arab-Muslim world (and nowhere else) in the interests of “democratic globalism.” He advocated a U.S. foreign policy that is not “tied down” by “multilateralism”: “the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will—and interests—of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet—ours.”

Krauthammer’s claim that this is in “our” interests is clearly an attempt—common among neoconservatives—to present themselves as American patriots, but his declaring war on the Islamic world is clearly far more in the interests of Israel than it is in the interests of the United States. Continuing from my 2004 paper:

Democratic globalism is aimed at winning the struggle with the Arab-Islamic world [quoting Krauthammer]:

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries…. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in an … existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious.

“Existential.” Meanwhile, neoconservatives with their post-racial framing of the West welcome Third World immigration throughout the West from Muslim countries. Again, it’s hard to see how this is in “our” interests.,

This post-racial neocon interest in “promoting democracy continues today, except that once again, as in Soviet days when a formative influence on the neocon movement was that Jews were gradually being pushed out of the Soviet elite. But now the target is Russia. It’s interesting that Max Boot, formerly a self-described neocon, has recanted, tweeting: “I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking.” But he’s all in on the Ukraine war which has also been advertised as a war for democracy. In fact, he’s become a liberal interventionist typical of MSNBC and CNN and fits right in with The Washington Post, where he puts out op-eds quite compatible with their far-left views. The neocons (or whatever they call themselves now that the term has come into disrepute because of previous disasters like the Iraq war) attempt to dominate both sides of U.S. foreign policy, as the Israel Lobby has always done. They are now well ensconced in the Biden Administration, the notorious Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (main operative in the 2014 coup against the pro-Russian government), Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken—all Jewish and all involved in masterminding the war in Ukraine.

The neocon interest in destroying the Arab-Muslim world intersects with their interest in destroying Russia via victory in the Ukraine war. As noted, Russia has supported both Iran and Syria, both of which, especially Iran, are seen as enemies of Israel. It’s thus no surprise that today’s neocons (including veteran neocon Bill Kristol) went ballistic when Ron DeSantis (along with the much-hated Donald Trump—who can forget neocon “Never Trump” hysteria in the 2016 election campaign when comparisons to Hitler abounded) stated that the dispute between Russia and Ukraine is a simple territorial dispute and not relevant to U.S. national interests. In the mainstream media, Tucker Carlson has also championed such views.

Chiming in with Kristol were other prominent Jewish neocons (Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Mark Levin, Jonah Goldberg) and their gentile allies (Rick Wilson, David French, Adam Kinzinger, etc.). This list includes “ex-neocon” Max Boot who retweeted one of Bill Kristol’s meltdown tweets against DeSantis.

The Saudi-Iran deal is important because for decades Israel has been attempting to make peace with the Arab world while continuing to oppress the Palestinians. The agreement also signals that the Arab world is pulling away from the U.S. and the West, likely reasoning, like Russia and probably China, that aligning with the West intent exporting wokeness is definitely not in their interest. The U.S. is once again complaining about Israeli behavior, as they have done since the 1967 war, but this will have no effect on the fanatics now running Israel and the powerful Israel Lobby will continue to dominate US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The multipolar world is coming into being and is being speeded up by the war in Ukraine. For the neocons in charge of U.S. foreign policy, it’s an existential moment because their much yearned for unipolar world run by the U.S. in close alliance with Israel may be unraveling, in large part because of their own ambitions to destroy Russia—a hatred borne of old grievances specific to the long sojourn of Jews in Russia, where anti-Jewish attitudes have a long history, as recounted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 200 Years Together, and even under Bolshevism. Then there was Putin’s banishing of politically involved Jewish oligarchs like Michael Khordorkovsky who dominated the Russian economy and media after the fall of the Soviet Union,  Russia’s alliances with Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, their rejection of globalism in favor of nationalism (the ADL considers calling out any Jew for supporting globalism as “anti-Semitic“), and their support for traditional Russian Christian culture rather than, e.g., LGBTQ+ which is championed by powerful Jewish organizations throughout the West. Recently White House spokesman John Kirby said that supporting LGBTQ+ is a “core part of our foreign policy,” presumably including funding drag queen shows in Ecuador.

It’s interesting therefore that in a recent UN General Assembly vote, earlier this month calling for an end to the fighting and Moscow’s immediate withdrawal from Ukraine, Russia voted against, while China, India and South Africa abstained. Add to that the recent Saudi-Iran rapprochement along with Syria and the U.S. may well be looking at an alliance among Russia, China, India, and much of the Islamic world that rejects what the West has become—promoting globalism at the expense of nationalism (which comes down to a small cadre of Western oligarchs and multinationals as represented by the World Economic Forum running the world) and moral crusades at the expense of traditional cultures which are inevitably seen as retrograde and change-worthy by the woke elites that run the West.

Ukraine’s transformation under Zelensky is paradigmatic. This transformation is clearly top-down exactly like those that have occurred in all Western countries beginning with the elite media and academic culture. I suppose that this transformation has a long way to go to capture the hearts and minds of Ukrainians, but, as with the West, control of the media and academic culture along with Zelensky’s heavy-handed methods of handling dissent (banning political parties and religions that dissent from the war despite constantly be advertised in the West as a democracy) may prevail in the long run in whatever is left of Ukraine.

In summary, there is quite a bit of evidence that U.S. hegemony has become intolerable for much of the world and this hostility is rapidly creating a multipolar world centered around the China, Russia, Iran and the Arab countries, and perhaps the emerging economic powers of India and Brazil at a time of U.S. decline. The BRICS coalition

has become the hottest ticket in geopolitics. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS) have been toying with the idea of forming a political/monetary counterweight to U.S. dominance since 2001. But beyond some aggressive gold buying by Russia and China, there was more talk than action.

Then the floodgates opened. Whether due to the pandemic’s supply chain disruptions, heavy-handed sanctions imposed by US-led NATO during the Russia-Ukraine war, or just the fact that de-dollarization was an idea whose time had finally come, the BRICS alliance has suddenly become the hottest ticket in town. [Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies, and Russia is using the yuan to trade with Africa, Latin America, and Asia.] In just the past year, Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Egypt have either applied to join or expressed an interest in doing so. And new bilateral trade deals that bypass the dollar are being discussed all over the place.

Combine the land mass, population, and natural resources of the BRICS countries with those of the potential new members and the result is more or less half the world. …

• If the BRICS have the commodities and the US and its allies are left with finance, pricing power for crucial things like oil and gold will shift to Russia, China, and the Middle East.

• Falling demand for dollar-denominated bonds as reserve assets will send trillions of dollars now outside the US back home, raising domestic prices (which is to say lowering the dollar’s purchasing power and exchange rate).

• The loss of its weaponized reserve currency will lessen the US’ ability to impose its will on the rest of the world (witness China as Middle-East peacemaker and India buying Russian oil with rupees).

None of these countries has any particular love for Israel.

What does this mean for White interests?

First, anything that weakens or discredits the U.S. establishment is good for us given that the system is completely broken and can’t be reformed at the ballot box. Granted the neoconservative disaster in Iraq did not result in them losing power, but this time, if U.S. hegemony is seriously weakened, it could be very different. The U.S. has benefited greatly from having the world’s reserve currency, for example by lowering borrowing costs and being able to impose economic sanctions on countries it doesn’t like. Quite clearly, this nascent alliance is motivated to end dollar supremacy, especially given the sanctions imposed on Russia and Iran, both of which have already been trading Russian oil in rubles. Such a transition would bring economic repercussions to the US addicted as it is to massive deficit spending that has allowed it to fund our foreign wars while funding the huge entitlement programs that keep millions of Americans reasonably content. But this transformation would affect all Americans negatively. Ideally, a sane America that was not spending trillions to export wokeness and impose it here could right the ship. But I can’t see that happening.

And since Israel is linked to the West, it would also hurt Israel, as it will remain an outsider in this rising alliance. The Israel Lobby remains in the driver’s seat because of its financial clout, but surely at some point, wiser heads will see that neoconservative foreign policy centered around wokeness and the interests of Israel is an ongoing disaster. Nevertheless, the U.S. political system runs on money, and there is no evidence that Jewish financial clout—~75% of Democrat money and ~ 50% of Republican money—is diminishing.