Alastair Crooke: Pushback Re Rumblings In Israel

This morning Judge Nap did his usual highly interesting interview with former Brit diplomat and MI6 operative Alastair Crooke. The interview covers both Palestine as well as Ukraine. You can listen to the full 34 minutes here: Alastair Crooke: Warning Signs - "Untenable Positions".

The first portion of the interview, regarding Israel, covers much the same ground as my first post this morning re Rumblings in Israel. Crooke pours cold water all over my notion that something is afoot. He maintains that Benny Gantz is a “weak” personality who has gone along with everything policy the Israeli War Cabinet has put forward. While he agrees that Gantz is “breaking all the rules” by going to DC to discuss, presumably, Gaza with Kama Sutra and Sullivan, he maintains that nothing will come of it: Israeli support for genocide is strong and Netanyahu will be able to continue for 8 more months. The Zhou regime cannot influence Israel. In support of this view he cites very recent local elections in Israel in which the clear winners were the radical Zionists of Itamar Ben Gvir’s party, while the older liberal Ashkenazi establishment of the Labor Party were the clear losers. Support for more genocide remains strong, including among younger Israelis.

Crooke has a lot of experience in the Middle East, both in the Arab world as well as in dealing with the Israelis. Nevertheless, I want to at least offer a bit of a tempering of his remarks. First of all, while Israeli support for genocide remains strong, support for Netanyahu personally is not so strong. Gantz, whose actual views on the war remain ambiguous—as Crooke observes, he has not openly opposed any war policies—would probably not be going to DC except for two reasons.

First, the Zhou regime is looking for an alternative to Netanyahu—not out of humanitarian concerns but because of unrest in the Dem base over Israel’s genocide. Zhou has reportedly called Netanyahu an “asshole”, which seems the consensus of most people who ever had to deal with him. The pressure of domestic US politics is building to a point that Crooke may not appreciate, even after the Michigan debacle. But the Dems do appreciate the danger they’re in. Further, the US Deep State must be very concerned at the degree to which the US finds itself isolated in the world as a result of standing alone for genocide in Palestine. Today’s announcement that Pakistan has applied to joing BRICS—and remember, the “I” in BRICS stands for India—had to have been a jolting wake up call. The shambles of the American failure to break the Houthi blockade of Suez is another factor. Neither were discussed.

Secondly, the Zhou regime presumably sounded out Gantz before the rule breaking trip was set up—it’s not credible that the trip was a spur of the moment, unilateral decision by Gantz alone. That suggests that the Zhou regime must have received some inkling that Gantz might be open to some revision of Israel’s war policy. In that regard, I note that there was no discussion of the military resignations that appear to have been motivated by the events in Rafah. To suggest that the Israeli military establishment is split with regard to Netanyahu’s policies doesn’t indicate any “softness” on their part—only a disagreement on how to prosecute the war. Netanyahu is not a military professional. Gantz is. Both the Israeli military and the Israeli public might accept some form of regime change in this situation.

Now, as usual, Crooke makes much of the divisions in Israeli society. My caution is this. Israeli society may be even more divided than Crooke suggests. Typically, Crooke distinguishes Ashkenazi (“European”) Jews—represented by Gantz—from “Mizhrahi” (“Middle Eastern”) Jews, whom Crooke identifies with Ben Gvir. This may be an oversimplification on both counts. My suggestion is that, on the one hand, the traditional Ashkenazi Jews who support a secular Israel and the Labor Party, are to be distinguished from Russian/Ukrainian Jews, who tend to be more rabidly anti-Palestinian. Russian/Ukrainian Jews, in my understanding, are strong supporters of the “settler” movement. By the same token, “Mizrahi” is a misleading term, embracing, as it does, very diverse groups—North African Jews, Yemeni Jews, Syrian and Iraqi Jews, Persian Jews, and more. In reality, the highly nationalist parties in Israel include both Russian/Ukrainian Jews (Bezalel Smotrich, for example) as well as Middle Eastern Jews (Ben Gvir is an Iraqi Jew). The fractious nature of Israeli politics probably reflects a more complex diversity than Crooke is taking into account. Thus, the fact that the Gantz (a Hungarian Jew) is said to outpoll Netanyahu (a Polish Jew, but supported by the religious parties) may be an indicator that, while Israel is moving from its secular roots toward a theocratic mindset, the political landscape in Israel may be more fractious than it appears to Crooke.

We shall see. Give Crooke a listen.

One additional note. Judge Nap and Crooke also discuss the Michigan debacle for the Dems as well as George Galloway’s “thumping” victory in the UK. The similarity between the two elections is that foreign policy was to the fore in both instances, and in both cases the electorate sent strong messages of disapprobation to the political establishment that is controlled by the Israel Lobby. In addition, what we see in both countries is an increasing move toward what can loosely be called “populism”—the view that the political establishment cares little or not at all for the interests of the subject population and is controlled by interests that care little for the native country of the subject population. Galloway, indeed, evoked the idea of a UK “Uniparty” in colorful terms, speaking of Labor’s Keir Starmer and the Tories’ Rishi Sunak as “two cheeks of the same backside.”

I saw on X today a quote attributed to Napoleon—whether accurately or not I can’t say. It went like this: War is when the government tells you who the enemy is; revolution is when you figure it out for yourself. That seems to be the sentiment behind the alarming—for the ruling class—rise of “populism” in the West. A combination of rebellion against the financialize economies that only work for the ruling class, as well as a rebellion against forever wars that also enrich the ruling class.