Why Joe Biden Won’t Stop Gaza Genocide: Israel Lobby’s Campaign Cash

UPDATE: Media reports that the two key hosts of the Biden fundraiser, Haim Saban and Casey Wasserman had COVID and did not attend.  A major blow to its success.  It’s hard to believe that two key players at this fundraiser would each get COVID at the same time.

Joe Biden attended a Hollywood fundraiser yesterday hosted by billionaire, Haim Saban.  They latter once played a role on behalf of Israeli intelligence in an Aipac-related Congressional scandal.

Several media outlets speculated at the time that Saban was the individual portrayed in NSA transcripts attempting to sabotage a Justice Department probe against Aipac.  The NSA described the phone caller as “an Israeli intelligence agent.”  None of the reports connected the two statements. To wit, if Saban was the caller, then US intelligence considered him an Israeli intelligence asset.  Further, it means that it has evidence that Saban had served such interests in the past. To be clear, I do not have conclusive evidence that Saban was the caller or that the NSA considered him an Israel agent.  But I consider the circumstantial evidence persuasive.

LA fundraiser attendees paid up to $250,000 per seat to his presidential campaign. All that campaign cash is a huge quid pro quo making Biden deeply indebted to these pro-Israel donors and the Lobby itself, which they represent.

Most of America is bewildered by Biden’s doubling down on Israeli genocide.  Three US vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire; acquiescence to Israeli plans to ethnically-cleanse Gazans; begging Israel (and failing) to secure humanitarian aid for Gaza; wholesale support for Gaza slaughter while feigning concern for civilian slaughter.  How is it possible that a US president would ignore public opinion, which is massively opposed to his approach?  If we didn’t understand the reason, we do now: money, lots of it.

The fundraising gala organizers included a who’s who of the wealthy Los Angeles pro-Israel community:

Co-host Leslie Gilbert-Lurie is a former television executive who has written a book about her experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and co-host Nicole Mutchnik is vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League. Other co-hosts include Casey Wasserman, chair of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee; StubHub co-founder Eric Baker; former Obama Ambassador to Germany John Emerson and former studio chief Bob Daly.

Other major players attended:

…Includ[ing] Jane Fonda, ITV America boss Adam Sher, Greg Proops and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg is serving as campaign co-chair.

This single event will raise millions, possibly tens of millions for Biden.  Other similar events in other cities hosted by a similar group of pro-Israel donors will raise tens of millions more. All told, pro-Israel donors will contribute hundreds of millions to his campaign.  In the money vs morals political dialectic, money always wins.

Rep. Summer Lee, herself a target of the Lobby, says that Aipac and its three affiliated PACs will raise $100-million to defeat progressive Democratic Congressional candidates, including members of the Squad like her. And this is just targeting Congressional campaigns.  It doesn’t include donations to Republican Congressional campaigns (AIPAC donated to 106 GOP candidates who voted to decertify the 2020 presidential election) or Biden’s re-election effort.

Biden calculates that the war will end before the election (preferably sooner rather than later).  Democratic voters will forget the mayhem and realize that they have a stark choice between him and Trump.  They will have no choice but to back him, despite his cowardice on one of the great moral causes of our time. He is profoundly mistaken. The question is how much of his base he loses. If it’s enough, he loses the election. Even to a scumbag like Trump.

Haim Saban–Israeli agent of influence

An added word on Haim Saban. He is a billionaire former Hollywood mogul who’s among the town’s wealthy elite.  He is also one of the country’s premier donors to Democratic Party candidates.  He wields his power almost entirely over US policy toward Israel. Oh, and he hates Muslims.

The nexus between campaign cash and influence on US foreign policy is fraught with potential corruption.  Quid pro quos involving exchange of cash in return for political favors constitute bribery.  Many a politician has gone to prison for crossing that fine line.

Saban is the Lobby’s go-to guy when the it needs a heavy-hitter to go to bat with the White House. According to a media accounts of a 2009 Congressional scandal, an unnamed Israeli intelligence agent invoked his name to get something Aipac desperately needed (see below).

In 2005, Steven Rosen stood accused of passing on US intelligence reports on Iran to an Israel diplomat.  The FBI had him dead to rights, and under ordinary circumstances he would have been tried and possibly convicted of espionage or a related charge.  His employer, Aipac, began a lobbying campaign leaning on members of Congress to call off the FBI investigation.

One of them was Rep. Jane Harman. She was in line to be chair of the House Intelligence committee. If she had won the position, she would be in a position to keep Israel informed of US intelligence findings of interest to Israel.  She spoke to an individual the FBI described as an “Israeli agent,” who sought her help in killing the Justice Department probe against Rosen, in return for lobbying Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Intelligence committee assignment.

The conversation was picked up by the NSA, presumably because it intercepted the communications of foreign individuals. Ironically, Harman was an avid Congressional  supporter of NSA wiretapping.

In exchange for her intervention with the White House on behalf of Aipac, the Israeli agent offered for Saban to threaten Speaker Nancy Pelosi to withhold donations unless she named Harman chair of the committee. Saban claimed to have “no idea” about the arrangement.

Eventually, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales did drop the case. The Times reports that Gonzales did so in exchange for her lobbying the New York Times not to publish an explosive report detailing NSA warrantless wiretapping.  It did delay the story for a year.  Eventually it did publish it–and won a Pulitzer Prize.

It is extraordinary that a powerful member of Congress and Aipac, both schooled in the workings of DC politics, would break the law so flagrantly (according to knowledgeable sources quoted in these linked reports).  The Lobby likes to think of itself as a subtle, savvy political operator. In this case, it was anything but.

Harman was never named committee chair. Given the fallout over the scandal, she couldn’t have been even if Pelosi wanted her to (she didn’t).  After being passed over by the Obama administration for a Homeland Security position (how could she have even thought this was possible?), she landed a cushy post at the Wilson Center.

This incident serves as a perfect example of the inner workings of the Israel Lobby in Washington.  It exerts power publicly and exerts even more power behind the scenes. As Rosen himself once said: Aipac is “like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”

Nor is Saban the only Israeli intelligence asset who’s thrived in Hollywood entertainment circles.  Arnon Milchan is a prolific film producer who played a key role in stealing US enriched uranium for an Israeli nuclear bomb.  He has also used his Hollywood connections to help the Mossad in various ways.  More recently, he was a Netanyahu family confidant who provided $100,000 worth of gifts in return for help obtaining an extended US visa.  The gifts secured Netanyahu’s repeated approach to then-secretary of state John Kerry requesting that he intercede on Milchan’s behalf. This is one of the four corruption charges Bibi faces.

We only know about this story because the principals were sloppy and desperate.  Imagine, how much we don’t know about Israeli influence on Congress and US foreign policy, because these particular assets do their job subtly, carefully and “professionally?