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lobbying groups in the USA that support Israeli apartheid, there is in fact a much broader
Zionist lobby. (It is worth repeating: not every Jew is a Zionist, and not every Zionist is a
Jew.) On July 9, 2002, for example, nearly 400 orthodox North American Jews arrived as
immigrants to Israel in a $2 million drive by American conservative fundamentalist Christians
to return Jews to ‘their’ alleged biblical homeland, thereby supposedly hastening the New
Testament Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Much of this money was raised by
the Chicago-based International Federation of Christians and Jews. Another example of such
an organization is the Jerusalem-based ‘International Christian Embassy’, which says ‘the
Bible commands gentiles to bless the natural seed of the patriarch Abraham – the Jews’. The
state of Israel has actively courted such circles for decades, although average Israelis show
scant understanding for the allegedly Christian motivation behind the support for what in
reality amounts to an exacerbation of the Jewish invasion of Palestine and a concomitant
expulsion of Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and others.
No less than 44 per cent of US Americans believe that God gave the land of Israel to
the Jews. So, for these people, there can be no question of invasion or theft in the present
version of Israel, which is somehow supposed to correspond to the ancient state, and whose
nationals (not necessarily citizens) are supposed to correspond to the ancient figures,
presumably by some manner of incestuous means of keeping the ethnicity pure. And 36 per
cent of US Americans believe that the state of Israel is a fulfilment of the biblical prophecy of
the second coming of Jesus.
The vast majority of Americans who believe both of these ideas are white, but yet
another example of non-Jewish Zionists are the Black Hebrews, a group of around 2,500
black Americans, who were recently accorded permanent residency rights in Israel after 34
years’ wait. This group of people lives in the Israeli desert according to Old Testament
traditions, including polygamy, and claim that they are descendants from one of the Bible’s 10
‘lost tribes’ of Israel, by way of Africa and the Atlantic slave trade. They are still not
recognized as Jews by Israel’s rabbinate, but they are eligible for citizenship from 2008 and
are able to serve in Israel’s army since July 2003. During the 1970s, some Black Hebrews
were deported, but authorities avoided a wholesale expulsion, citing concerns that the Jewish
state could be accused of racism. Postmodern or ‘cultural’ racism has been a strong feature of
Israeli policy from the very beginning of the modern Jewish state, but of course biological or
traditional racism lingers, as well, for instance in the basic tenets of classical Zionism, a
typical 19 th -century European construct. Finally, although no US president since 1948 has
publicly identified himself as a Christian Zionist, there are plenty of indications that Christian
Zionism has been a constant factor in US government policy since the formation of the
modern state of Israel. 655
The overwhelmingly pro-Israeli producers and screenwriters of Hollywood, another
pillar of US global power (next to militarization, state-imposed capitalism on other states on
US terms, de-secularization and other features described in the last section of Part I, above),
also oblige Israel with their cliché images of Muslims and Arabs in general and Palestinians in
particular: evil and dangerous, fanatics and terrorists, blood-thirsty, cruel, cowardly and
devious. Since the advent of Gorbachev, they have become the unambiguously ‘bad guys’ par
excellence of the world’s ‘dream factory’, which is sometimes provided unpaid assistance –
especially in these ultimately profit-driven, but also deeply ideological and racist endeavors –
by the US Defense Department.
Indeed, Hollywood is now plausibly being accused of providing the world with images
655 Heller, C.: U.S. Christians Fund Jewish Newcomers to Israel, 2002. See also Berkowitz: Conservative Watch:
Strangers in a Strained Land, 2002; Steinberg: One Man and His God, 2004; Williams: Israel Grants “Black
Hebrews” Permanent Residency, 2003. On US governmental Christian Zionism see Merkley: American
Presidents, Religion, and Israel: The Heirs of Cyrus, 2004. On Christian Zionism in general, especially in its
adopted homeland, see also Hubers: “Christian Zionism” and the Myth of America, 2003; Wagner: Bible and
Sword: US Christian Zionists Discover Israel, 2003.