Another One Voice youth role model, Thomas Pickering, 87, was early in his career a Special Assistant to Henry Kissinger, a man who killed well over a million youths, mainly Vietnamese, but also Chileans and others, during his grisly career. Eizenstat moved on to the highest echelons of the US Foreign Service. He then moved sideways within the elite of the US military-industrial complex to become Senior VP at Boeing until 2006 when Boeing was embroiled in unusually massive corruption scandals.
ISRAEL – AN APARTHEID STATE
The UN’s Judge Goldstone has found Israel guilty of grave ‘war crimes’ the recent Gaza massacres. Israel is increasingly seen as an ‘apartheid state’, impossible to defend on any open public forum. The momentum towards a worldwide campaign of boycott of the apartheid state is growing. The UN Human Rights Rapporteur, Jewish-American Prof. Richard falk, has recently said that Israel's policies against the Palestinians are tantamount to a "crime against humanity". His predecessor, John Dugard, was bitterly critical of Israeli apartheid. Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, President of the United Nations General Assembly, on 24 November 2008, called for a campaign of boycott against the apartheid state of Israel.
Israel’s supporters are forced to switch to campaigning for ‘peace’ without justice and empty and cynical ‘dialogue’ to try to head off action for human rights. One such Zionist-led initiative is One Voice.
ONE VOICE
The character of a movement or campaign is not determined by those who may be duped into supporting it, but by the leaders who determine the goals and methods to be used. One Voice has a Board of Advisors which “provides guidance as solicited throughout the year”.
A large majority of the 43 Members of the One Voice Board divided into several groups: the first group is well-entrenched in the upper echelons of the US political and intelligence establishments; the second is made up of their militarised Israeli counterparts; a third group comprises leaders of major international bureaucracies linked intimately to these same centres of power; a bevy of corporate billionaires or their direct agents comprise another major group of One Voice leaders.
Taken together these are easily seen as determined enemies of anything most of us understand as human rights, for example as enshrined in UN resolutions and international law.It is simply ludicrous to suggest that the same people responsible for plunging our world into the hell of war can play a role in bringing about peace. Those who dominate One Voice, which calls for “grass roots youth activity” which is “independent of governments” are militant supporters of the US and Israeli Governments and their policies.
US COLD WARRIORS ON THE ONE VOICE BOARD
The US political establishment is represented in this so-called ‘grass roots’ youth movement by, among others, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, Abraham Sofaer, Stuart Eizenstat and Thomas Pickering One Voice Board Member Martin Indyk is, at 57, one of the younger members of the guidance group for this ‘youth movement’. Indyk was twice US Ambassador to Israel and started his career as a Research Director for AIPAC (American Israel Political Action Committee) and later joined the US National Security Council, the heart of the US intelligence establishment.
In 1985 Indyk founded the Washington Institute for Near East Peace (WINEP) which pushes the policies of leading Israeli political and military figures. WINEP was to the fore in the post-Cold War hunt for an Islamic alternative to the previous threat from Moscow. WINEP opposes democracy in US allies such as Egypt and Jordan, since popular sentiment is opposed to US invasions and their local stooge regimes. (King Abdullah of Israel’s protectorate, Jordan, supports One Voice. Lunatic right-winger Martin Kramer works with Indyk for WINEP, where he rubs shoulders with neo-cons Martin Peretz, Deputy Director Patrick Clawson, and militant Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, an Associate Scholar with WINEP.
Today, Indyk is Director of the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, personally recruited by Haim Saban Saban is among the hundred richest people in the US and a supporter of Ariel Sharon, who, he says, “moved me to the right. Very far to the right." Saban urges nuclear-armed Israel to devastate Iran: “When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. ...attack! In Iran you go in and wipe out their infrastructure completely. Plunge them into darkness. Cut off their water."
One Voice Board Member Dennis Ross, 60, works for a US-dominated ‘peace’ with pieces such as one on New Republic TV last April 25, entitled How to make Tehran Obey.
In 1981, notorious neo-con Wolfowitz, who described 9/11 as "this opportunity", selected Ross for his staff; the whole team would later spearhead the campaign to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ross is a co-founder of AIPAC, which sponsored fellow-One Voice Board Member Martin Indyk’s WINEP in the 1980s. Ross later led Clinton’s negotiating team at Camp David in 2000. A member of the Ross-led negotiating team later revealed how they frequently acted as "Israel's lawyer...we listened to and followed Israel's lead” and that Ross had a “policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first” before presenting anything for ‘negotiation’.
The Oslo process ended when Ross and Clinton blamed the Palestinians for refusing to sign up to Israel’s demands.
Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, named Ross as a member of the "Israeli lobby" in the United States. Somewhat bizarrely, Ross denied the assertion; he is currently in Israel chairing a programme with Netanyahu (an open advocate of complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians) and top AIPAC leaders.
Ross caps his credentials as a peace campaigner by working as a Foreign Affairs Analyst for the notoriously right-wing, pro-war, Fox News network.
Abraham Sofaer, 70, also serves on the One Voice Board. While Legal Advisor to the U.S. State Department, Sofaer produced the notorious legal ‘justification’ for the 1986 US bombing of the Libyan Head of State’s compound in Tripoli which killed Ghaddaffi’s infant daughter. He has written on the need for the US to attack other states in so-called pre-emptive action.
Sofaer also provided the legal cover for the Reagan administration which allowed the ditching of the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty and a huge surge in the nuclear arms race.
Stuart Eizenstat, 65, received a Courage and Conscience Award from the Israeli government for his work on tracing assets looted by the Nazis during WWII. Either his courage or his conscience failed him, though, for he refuses to comment on well-documented Zionist looting of Palestinian property years later, during 1948 and since.
Eizenstat was U.S. ambassador to the EU from 1993 to 1996 and co-chairman of the European-American Business Council. Eizenstat also serves on the Board of Advisors of the Global Panel Foundation alongside General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO until 2000. (“Global Panel works primarily behind the scenes in support of governments, institutions and the private sector.”)
Another One Voice youth role model, Thomas Pickering, 87, was early in his career a Special Assistant to Henry Kissinger, a man who killed well over a million youths, mainly Vietnamese, but also Chileans and others, during his grisly career. Eizenstat moved on to the highest echelons of the US Foreign Service. He then moved sideways within the elite of the US military-industrial complex to become Senior VP at Boeing until 2006 when Boeing was embroiled in unusually massive corruption scandals.
Board Member Toni G. Verstandig (age unknown) was until January 2001 Deputy Assistant Secretary of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, directing and coordinating U.S. economic and commercial policies in the Middle East. Verstandig, who has particular expertise in water issues, has never raised Israeli theft of Palestinian nor its apartheid water regime in the occupied territories. She currently works for the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, specializing in international terrorism policy. She serves on the Centre for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation with S. Daniel Abraham of the Israeli Government-funded Birthright Israel Foundation, who is dedicated to Israel's security.
ISRAELI ETHNIC CLEANSERS ON THE ONE VOICE BOARD
The One Voice Board is advised by cadres from the heart of the Israeli political-military class. General Daniel Rothschild served as Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, which activities are known to include murder, kidnapping of elected Palestinians representatives and routine torture of detainees.
General Rothschild is a Governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which has a long record of expelling Palestinians from their homes to expand its campuses. Rothschild is also President of the Council for Peace and Security, made up of over 1,000 former senior officers, which also styles itself the Association of National Security Experts in Israel. Rothschild recently gave a talk on how to overturn the democratic verdict of the Palestinian people.
Efraim Sneh, 64, is a former general, was briefly Deputy Defence Minister in the current Government, now heads the Strong Israel Party and is committed to attacking Iran. Sneh was a commander of Israel’s illegal occupation zone in South Lebanon, during which torture and abuse in Israel’s Al Khiam prison pioneered the techniques later used on other Arabs at Abu Ghraib and many other locations. Israel was driven out by a determined guerilla campaign against its military; Sneh opposed ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanese territory. General Sneh’s last role in the Israeli Military was as head of the civilian administration (sic) of the West Bank until 1987, presiding again over an illegal occupation and well-documented human rights abuses.
Sneh was replaced as Deputy Minister of Defence in June 2007 by Matan Vilnai, another One Voice sponsor and the man who in 2008 notoriously threatened the people of Gaza, mainly refugees from earlier waves of Israeli ethnic cleansing, with a ‘holocaust’ if they did not cease resistance and accept the justice of Zionist ethnic cleansing.
Uriel Reichman, 66, joined the new Kadima Party of Ariel Sharon in 2005, calling the old butcher “our father figure, a true and brave leader.” From 1994 to 2006, Reichman was President of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, which organises the Herzliya Conferences, a who's who of the Israeli and Zionist security, academic, commercial and diplomatic worlds.
Avishai Braverman, 60, was many years a senior official with the World Bank. Braverman is aligned with the political faction of Ami Ayalon, a past Head of Shin Bet, with responsibility for assassinations of political opponents. Braverman brings to the peace table his open endorsement of Sharon-supporter Ayalon as a fighter against Palestinian refugees’ campaign to reverse Israel’s waves of ethnic cleansing.
Alon Liel, is a former Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Israeli Ambassador to its doppelganger apartheid regime in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994. Liel openly admits the numerous parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa: "If we take the magnitude of the injustice done to the Palestinians by the state of Israel, there is a basis for comparison with apartheid. If we take the magnitude of suffering, we are in the same league...from the point of view of outcome, we are in the same league."
Like the honest savage Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who documents Israel’s pre-planned and skillfully executed ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians but then goes on to argue that the process should have further, Alon Liel still supports the illegal Wall on political grounds as social separation (the meaning of apartheid in Afrikaans):
"At present, political and physical separation (including the removal of settlements beyond a fence) is the only way to avoid rule by a Jewish minority over an Arab majority in just a few years. Accordingly, the construction of that fence between Israelis and Palestinians should be seen throughout the world as separation to prevent apartheid. Linguistically this sounds absurd..."
In the crazy mental universe of Israel, where the government deals in ‘present absentees’ (Palestinians still present in Israel but who have had their property looted anyway) Alon Liel wants ‘ethnic separation’ to prevent apartheid. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this Chair of the Israel-Syria Peace Society wants 'peace' with Syria to isolate Palestine for continued Israeli treatment.
Note that it is no impediment to Membership of One Voice’s Board, which supposedly advises on how to achieve Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace’, to argue that peace with the people of Palestine is impossible.
Rabbi Michael Melchior, 54, a Danish immigrant to Israel, served in two governments led by Ariel Sharon, and was three times Minister of Diaspora affairs Melchior fights for the restitution of the property of Jewish Holocaust victims while denying Palestinians any right to recover the property pillaged by Zionist gangs and then ‘legally’ seized by the Zionists’ new state.
Melchior’s Meimad Party is based on the ideas of Yehuda Amital, who pioneered religious schools, Yeshivas, that combine religious study and militarism, a toxic brew that was a break from traditional Orthodox Judaism, which had for long opposed Zionism as sacrilegious. Melchior stands on the shoulders of a founder of the fundamentalist-military fusion that has given us the armed fanatics of the Jewish fundamentalist movement in Israel.
Yoel Hasson, 35 was Head of the Beitar Youth Movement, from 1998 to 2001. Beitar no longer wear the brownshirts the movement once considered de rigeur, when it aped and openly admired Italian fascism. The Beitar-sponsored football team of the same name are infamous for their visceral racism and public hatred of ‘Arabs’. Hasson is a supporter of the most militant Hebron settlers, the few hundred violent thugs who make life an utter misery for any of the good people of Hebron who cross their path when they sortie from their illegal settlement in the centre of the Old City.
Collette Avital, 68, serves on the Investigative Commission for the Identification and Return of the Property of Holocaust Victims & currently chairs the Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee. In the first role she refuses to concede that Palestinians have any right to the return of their pillaged property. As Absorption Minister, she works to stimulate immigration to Israel by Jews from anywhere in the world at the same time as Israel works day and night to drive Palestinians out of Palestine by making life as harsh as possible.
BILLIONAIRES AND THEIR SATRAPS
One Voice claims to work for grass-roots empowerment of young people. Supposedly working for this goal are Board Members such as: himself. Society wants to reach an agreement with Syria to isolate the Palestinians: “...we prefer peace with Syria, first, because we think that negotiations with Syria are possible and... second, because we think that peace with the Palestinians today is unrealistic.”
- Irwin Mark Jacobs, 75, ranked 181 among the richest Americans with an estimated fortune of $1.7b
- Jeff Solomon, who runs a foundation for the fifth wealthiest man in Canada.
- Stanley Litow, a Vice President of IBM
- Mike Medavoy, 67, the CEO of Phoenix Pictures
- Gary Gladstein was Head of Soros Fund Management until his retirement in 2000.
- Stanley Gold is currently Director of iPass, Inc., and a former director of The Walt Disney Company
- Stephen B Heintz is President of the Rockefellers Brothers Fund
INTERNATIONAL BUREAUCRATS
International foundations linked to the US and Israeli elites are also represented on the One Voice Board of Advisors.
Three One Voice Board Members also serve at the highest levels in the East West Institute:
John Edwin Mroz is EWI President. Stephen B. Heintz, is an EWI Board Member, and also President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Marshall Bennet is a wealthy real estate developer, and EWI Director. An Honorary EWI Chair is Bush Senior; and a former EWI Director is Condleeza Rice.
The CEOs of Pepsi, and the vast agribusiness corporation Cargill, Inc., also serve on the EWI Board alongside One Voice Board Members. One of EWI’s Distinguished Fellows, Ambassador Henry A. Crumpton had a 24-year career with the CIA as a Clandestine Service operations officer and led the CIA’s brutal Afghanistan campaign in 2001 and 2002.
(The EWI’s motto is: ‘We work to make the world a safer place’) But the East West Institute clearly works to make the world safe for the most rapacious US and multi-national corporations.
Klaus Schwab, 70, is President of the World Economic Forum, best known for its Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland which brings together top business and political leaders, together with selected intellectuals and journalists.
OTHERS
A clutch of rabbis also serve on the One Voice Board, including Sir Jonathan Sacks, 60, who describes as one of his "loveliest friendships" his connection with Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister and the Chancellor who bankrolled Britain’s participation in the US’ genocidal invasion of Iraq.
Among the 43 members listed is the great Muhammed Ali, the man who brilliantly fused his opposition to US racism and the US invasion of Vietnam when he said, “No Vietcong ever called me n*****!” But Ali has advanced Parkinsons disease now and wrote three years ago of " how much this disease has diminished the quality of my life.”
CONCLUSION
One Voice must arouse the gravest suspicion since it is led by people who either have very blood-stained hands themselves, or are the political representatives of the same elites who manage and benefit from the war machine that has brought carnage to Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and threatens us all.
Further reading:
WINEP: The Pro-Sharon Thinktank, Joel Beinin, Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2003
Mick Napier
Edinburgh
December 14, 2008
