Last spring Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer authored a well-circulated obituary to American Jewish power. The left and the right, through excesses of racial identity politics and the promulgation of populism and illiberal ideologies, are converging to squeeze Jews out of public life in the land of milk and honey: the USA.

The article relies heavily on individually relayed, anecdotal claims of anti-Semitism, largely related to popular revulsion over Israel’s behavior in the Gaza war, but is scant in the way of hard data. Many Jewish commentators have pointed to this alleged rise in anti-Semitism as the true cause of American imperial decline, the arrogant implication being that when Jewish authority figures are criticized it is because the institutions themselves are on their last legs.

The problem for Foer and others is that data reveals that Jews today enjoy virtually unopposed power within key American institutions, largely due to maintaining the overrepresentation they established after the Second World War while simultaneously replacing the white Gentile majority with a wide variety of ethnic minorities. As Jewish sources themselves admit, policies that enabled this were largely spearheaded by Jews, potentially with today’s outcome in mind. In this series, we will investigate US power nodes, how they really work, and the known-unknown forces driving American policy and life — at times against the will of the majority of the population.

Ivy League Law

Legal scholars at elite universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, are among some of the most influential figures in America. Graduates from Ivy League law schools are often fast tracked into key advisory positions in the government and in major corporations. Eight of nine current Supreme Court Justices attended either Harvard or Yale. According to a survey by the BAR Association, 18% of all federal judges in the country earned their J.D. from Ivy League Schools, with Harvard first (111 judges) and Yale second (72).

For this reason, Ivy League law professors play a disproportionate role in sculpting the priorities and mindset of tomorrow’s managerial class, as well as functioning as behind-the-scenes brain trusts for major government, business, judicial, and international matters. Eccentric theories that could never survive general democratic scrutiny often escape from the ivory tower to impact everyday culture and law in a wide variety of ways, as seen by the history of “Critical Race Theory,� which began as a fad in the 1980s at the Harvard Law Department.

Some Jewish circles have warned that their influence has been slipping in these schools due to the “DEI� agenda classified them as “white� and sweeping them out. A 2022 entry into the SAPIR Journal of Jewish Studies claimed, with nebulous evidence, that an uptick of anti-Israel sentiment in some corners of Yale and Harvard was a product of Jews losing ground in the world of elite law.

To test this claim, let us look at the ethnic makeup of those currently engineering the leaders, policies and laws of tomorrow. The methodology used for distinguishing ethnic Jews from white Gentiles meticulously examined the biographies of Ivy League faculty members, many who are nepotistic hires (the sons, daughters, and wives of current and former professors) or have pseudo-aristocratic public wedding announcements in publications such as the New York Times.

The numbers presented are almost certainly undercount, as some professors have non-Jewish names and no background information available. For example, Harvard Law Dean John F. Manning would’ve been classified as a white Gentile by default were it not for publicly disclosed information announcing that he is Jewish. Elizabeth Hinton, a visibly black woman who teaches African-American Studies, History and Law at Yale would have been classified simply as black were it not for an interview she gave to an obscure blog about her Jewish mother.

For the sake of brevity, we will only count full time faculty for three of America’s top law schools: Harvard, Columbia and Yale. Harvard and Columbia have in particular been subject to accusations of campus anti-Semitism, which is particularly questionable as these schools host several Israeli law professors and have entire departments dedicated to advancing Israeli law and defending them from international human rights bodies.

On the other hand, white Gentiles are heavily underrepresented as professors, introducing the likelihood of anti-white discrimination at these schools at the hands of largely Jewish presidents and board members.

Harvard University Law— 120 Full-Time Professors

Jewish: 51 (43%)

White Gentile: 25 (21%)

Columbia University Law — 87 Full-Time Professors

Jewish: 35 (40%)

White Gentile: 22 (25%)

Yale University Law — 96 Full-Time Professors

Jewish: 47 (49%)

White Gentiles: 24 (25%)

It is common knowledge that Jews are well-overrepresented in the legal profession more broadly, but the number of attorneys of Jewish ancestry nationally (estimated at around 10% of all lawyers) viz-a-viz overrepresentation (and underrepresentation of white Gentiles) at Ivy League law departments defies the laws of probability, suggesting a variable besides merit — nepotism, white-exclusion, or corruption — being involved.

Raising such a possibility is by no means a conspiracy theory. It is common consensus that Ivy League schools prior to the 1960s had covert ethnic quotas aimed at Jews in both faculty positions and as students, though physical evidence of this policy is scant.

In Joining The Club: A History of Jews and Yale, Dan Oren writes that caps on Jews in higher learning were instituted in the 1920s and 30s, unofficially implemented through a “Gentleman’s Agreement� — as portrayed in the titled 1946 movie about the conspiracy of polite WASP anti-Semitism. According to Oren, the selective admissions process used by Ivy League schools today — SAT scores, an interview, favoring specific schools (usually with Protestant majorities at the time) — were hatched in a WASP effort to keep Jews at bay while avoiding accusations of anti-Semitism. For example, both the faculty hiring and student admission process included questions about a job prospects ethnicity.

Various congressional sub-committees and the Civil Rights Act put the spotlight on alleged Ivy League WASP Anti-Semitism after WWII, wiping away any vestige of such a practice. By 1971, at least 25% of Ivy League students and faculty were Jewish.

A cursory look at other Harvard Departments in the Social Sciences, Medicine, etc reveals that Jews remain roughly a quarter of the faculty. But in law, perhaps the most politically powerful discipline, they approach almost half of the professorship in many cases.

Global media outlets are discussing the importance of recent elections in France, Britain and Iran as if they are groundbreaking developments.

On the surface, there were notable surprises. In both France and the UK, the right-wing — split in half into conservative and “populist� camps — suffered outcomes that ranged from disappointing to devastating. In Iran, the country’s first ever non-Persian president was narrowly elected on a platform of restoring ties with the United States and Europe, as well as implications that he will liberalize some of the nation’s domestic laws governing hijab-wearing.

Yet in all three cases, nothing major is expected to change. The Labour and Conservative Party in Britain have largely converged on issues such as foreign policy and immigration. In France, the parliament will be split between leftists, neo-liberals, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, making it likely that Macron will either keep the current gay Jewish Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, or appoint a caretaker government after meeting with his American backers at the upcoming NATO summit. In Iran, incoming “reformist� president Masoud Pezeshkian has already began distancing himself from his campaign promises and deferred to the nation’s Guardian Council regarding plans to continue deepening ties with Russia and continuing to fully support Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Business is expected to continue as usual, but there are still some takeaways worth discussing.

Britain

The British Conservative Party’s 14-year rule was brought to an end last week in the Tories’ worst performance in their two-century history.

Under the Conservatives, mass migration has reached record numbers and the stagnant British economy has been downgraded by some to “emerging market� status. Adding insult to injury, the Tories have effectively transformed Britain into a vassal of the United States, following Washington into the Red Sea debacle against the Houthis, emptying their armory to support the Ukraine’s flailing war effort, and joining AUKUS, a Pacific facing military alliance aimed at antagonizing China, the UK’s fifth largest trade partner.

Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which apparently ran fake A.I. generated candidates to vacuum the anti-immigration protest vote, successfully carved out 14.3% of the vote to Rishi Sunak’s 23.7%. The Reform Party’s performance relative to the Tories should be seen as a resounding rejection of the latter, but thanks to the “first-past-the-post� system designed to protect the UK’s duopoly, Sunak’s conservatives were still able to net 121 seats to Farage’s meager five.

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was able to capitalize on Sunak’s abysmal performance by winning 33.7% of the vote, a modest increase over Jeremy Corbyn’s 32.1% in 2019, though Starmer won fewer votes overall than Corbyn.

Britain’s new Prime Minister, who does not appear to have any grassroots support, has spent his tenure making the Labour Party palatable to the British establishment by engaging in a wave of internal purges of anti-war and anti-Zionist voices, which the Jewish press in Britain characterized as “anti-Semites.� The end-result could comfortably be described as the return of Tony Blair, the architect of New Labour and the most despised Prime Minister in British history.

During debates, it was difficult to distinguish between Labour and the Tories. Starmer’s new foreign secretary, a black man named David Lammy, has been described as a foreign agent with a single-minded focus: to further the political and economic interests of the US government and Wall Street in London. John Healey, the new regime’s defense secretary, is a career warmonger who enthusiastically supported the 2003 Iraq war.

Domestically, Starmer’s cabinet is expected to use its technical victory as permission to continue or accelerate all of the Conservative Party’s policies restricting freedom of speech, inviting massive waves of immigration, and cannibalizing the British economy for the benefit of the Washington and New York elite.

France

The disappointing result of Jordan Bardella’s National Rally has been hailed as a defeat of fascism, but this theatrical declaration could not be more far removed from the facts.

The surging coalition of communists and Greens in the New Popular Front, Emmanuel Macron’s “Together,� and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally overlapped on many policy positions, particularly on the matter of the Ukraine war.

Bardella, who is known as the “Tik Tok King� due to his popularity on social media, has embraced Giorgia Meloni as his model. Meloni has mastered the art of masking her government’s Macronist liberal policies with largely aesthetic, watered-down verbal appeals to Italian nationalism.

Under Bardella, the National Rally — which was co-founded by a member of the Waffen-SS and was once known for its anti-Zionism and Gaullist anti-Americanism — spent much of this election cycle aggressively pandering to Jews and big business. This turned out to be a bad gamble, as these forces already enjoy the full acquiescence of Macron without any of NR’s baggage.

The young technocratic leader did away with Le Pen’s 2022 platform, which combined radical socialist proposals with an anti-immigration stance, and instead expressed support for most of Macron’s highly unpopular pro-business economic reforms. NR has also caused tension with activists of its own party by announcing that they will continue French support for the Ukraine war and weaken plans to support national industries.

Birthright citizenship is repealed. Special agents round up illegal immigrants at construction and agricultural work sites to be instantly sent home. A concrete wall is constructed and garrisoned with soldiers surveilling the border with drones and radars.

These are not the empty promises of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni or the British Tories, they are the reality of Luis Abinader’s Dominican Republic.

The bloody history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic has created a unique racial and ethnic dynamic on Hispaniola that continues to influence the latter’s politics.

Following the success of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines decreed in 1804 that all white people on the island were to be killed on sight. Following the success of this gruesome act of genocide, Haitian forces sought to export their revolution by invading the Spanish side of the island, which had a much smaller, sparse population, though they encountered resistance in this crusade due to the high percentage of mixed race and white people living there. Dominicans racially classified as white, which included some light-skinned African-mixed people, were stripped of their citizenship and land by the Haitian constitution and forced out of their cattle ranching trade to work for blacks in slavery conditions in the cash crop industry.

A group of multiracial and white Dominican nationalists called the Trinitarios, led by Spanish descendant Juan Pablo Duarte, led a rebellion against Haitian dictator Charles Rivière-Hérard and expelled his forces from the eastern portion of the island in 1844, establishing the divide that exists today. Though the occupying army was numerically superior to the Dominicans, Rivière-Hérard was himself undermined from within by an uprising of Haitian blacks enraged by the fact that their leader himself had some European ancestry.

Today, the trauma of Haitian rule continues to inform Dominican identity. This national sentiment helped Abinader, of Spanish and Lebanese ancestry, successfully win the 2020 election on a platform of ending Haitian migration and cutting through red tape to deport those already in the country. It was estimated at the time of Abinader’s victory that Haitians, most of them in the country illegally, numbered somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million out of the Dominican Republic’s 11 million population.

Soon after taking office, Abinader began preparations to keep his promise. His Modern Revolutionary Party, with consensus support including from opposition groups, passed a law in 2022 to form a new immigration enforcement police unit that would specialize in targeting job sites known to hire Haitian illegals for unannounced mass round ups. In 2013, a constitutional reassessment removed birthright citizenship from all those born to foreign parents since 1929, which granted the Dominican government the powers needed to detain and remove 170,000 Haitians from the country by the end of 2022.

The next year, what the US State Department has condemned as “mass deportations� reached unprecedented levels. That year, 250,000 Haitians living within Dominican territory were identified by immigration authorities and expelled, while an additional 200,000 voluntarily repatriated. A substantial portion of these Haitians had their citizenship retroactively revoked under the 2013 constitutional amendment, which means they are not recognized as either Dominican or Haitian citizens, but this did not stop Abinader from sending them back at a rate of 50,000 immigrants per month. In one instance during this crackdown, 20,000 Haitians were deported in a time span of nine days. The small and relatively poor Dominican Republic now has one of the most active and prolific immigration enforcement systems on the planet.

From January to April in 2024, the rate of deportations fell to a total of 30,000 in four months, but this reduced level of enforcement is more of a testament to the government’s effectiveness in removing Haitian migrants in previous years rather than any dampening of their burning enthusiasm. Last May, the Abinader government completed a 250-mile concrete wall, modeled after Israel’s barrier to Syria in the Golan Heights (which, in the Israeli case, the United States supports), permanently preventing Haitians from illegally crossing into the country. The Dominican government has adamantly refused to host any Haitian refugees in its territory and has rejected demands from the UN that it grant citizenship or residency permits to multi-generational migrants regardless of how long they have resided in the country.

Within the Dominican landscape, Abinader’s policies are uncontroversial. He was recently re-elected in a landslide and all of the major parties support his anti-migrant efforts. The opposition to these policies is restricted largely to outsiders: Washington, the United Nations, and various foreign funded non-governmental organizations who have sought to undermine the effort.

Much like in America and Western Europe, business interests in the tourism, construction and agricultural sectors warned from the onset that preventing them from hiring Haitian immigrant labor would cause the economy to go into recession and inflation to skyrocket. These predictions were proven false. Three years into the mass expulsion program, the Dominican economy is triving while inflation has been tamed.

For over a decade, the US government and its “civil society� allies have attempted to browbeat the Dominicans out of enforcing its immigration laws and protecting its border. A 2015 Atlantic article demonizing the country by Jonathan Katz helped trigger this moral panic from the start, when deportations were comparatively much lower. A deluge of negative press coverage and accusations of “racism� and “Anti-Haitianism� from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on — along with official complaints condemning the Dominican Republic by the US State Department — have flooded the conversation uninterrupted for the past decade. In 2023, the Jewish-controlled Associated Press published a pack of largely anonymous accusations intended to demonize Dominican immigration enforcement authorities as rapists.

America’s foreign troop deployments are yet again causing international incidents. Citizens in nations hosting these bases are increasingly demanding US soldiers out of their country, but their leadership is unresponsive.

Soldiers typically engage in elevated levels of criminal activity during war, but what makes US military personnel unusual is their long and sordid history of assaulting, murdering and raping the nearby population during peacetime.

In the latest outrage, a 25-year-old black US Air Force mechanic stationed in Okinawa, Brennon Washington, has been indicted for the abduction and rape of a Japanese girl believed to be 13 or 14-years-old.

Last December, Washington allegedly lured the girl into his car at a public park then raped her at his off-base residence. Under the US’ Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Japan, local authorities are not allowed to detain and question American soldiers suspected of committing crimes against Japanese citizens until they are formally charged, with the sole exception being rape and murder. This arrangement often prevents local prosecutors from holding American criminals accountable, leading to a sense of impunity.

Approximately 26,000 US troops are stationed on the islands of Okinawa. American authorities routinely ignore or even refuse to accept complaints filed by the Okinawan Prefecture demanding they crack down on the violent and chaotic behavior of their troops and civilian contractors. American soldiers engage in multiple sex crimes against Japanese women every year, but military authorities generally refuse to punish them beyond rank demotions and fines.

Japanese civil society groups and the foreign ministry have asked US ambassador Rahm Emmanuel to condemn violence by American servicemen against Japanese citizens to no avail. Emmanuel, who is Jewish, has previously taken to X to promote the thoroughly debunked Hamas rape hoax.

The lack of respect for the basic dignity of local people has stirred controversy and resentment. Last year, authorities sentenced American soldier Ridge Alkonis to three years in prison for reckless driving after he fell asleep at the wheel and killed an elderly Japanese woman and her son-in-law. Alkonis nodded off after a long hike with his family, neglecting his legal obligation to pull his car over.

The soldier’s lawyers brought in a US Navy doctor who testified that he may have fallen unconscious after suffering from acute mountain sickness, a dubious claim refuted in advance by medical reports showing he was descending from the mountain and simply drove while drowsy. This bad faith American-style defense strategy enraged the Japanese judge, who interpreted it as a lack of remorse, leading to a stiff sentence.

After serving 507 days in a local prison, President Joe Biden asked the Japanese government to transfer Alkonis to the United States under an agreement where he would serve the remainder of his three-year sentence in California. Upon return to the US, this understanding was quickly betrayed and Alkonis was freed 30 days later.

In Germany, the NATO SOFA grants law enforcement even less power over US soldier conduct, as even murderers must be handed over to military authorities for internal punishment. Last summer, a group of American soldiers descended upon the small Rhineland-Palatinate town of Wittlich, where they began terrorizing people at the family-friendly Säubrennerkirmes fair. Following a dispute, the annoying thugs stabbed a young German security guard to death.

The identities of the two suspects remains a mystery due to German privacy laws and the opacity of the US military court system. Following their detention by German police, they were handed over to American military officials for prosecution and the case was closed, infuriating relatives of the victim and locals. The incident rattled the town, prompting Mayor Joachim Rodenkirch to declare, “We’ve never experienced anything like this here.”

In the United States, the media has created the impression that people in Germany, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere see American soldiers as liberators and protectors, but the facts show otherwise.

Okinawans have twice elected Denny Tamaki, the mixed-race son of an American Marine who abandoned him as a baby, on a platform of removing US forces from the region.

The pro-US Liberal Democratic Party has spent enormous amounts of money to defeat Tamaki, but he remains popular. The LDP, which was created by the CIA and has ruled Japan on Washington’s behalf as a one-party state since 1955, has repeatedly held that the World War II American military occupation’s presence is non-negotiable.

Germans face a similar challenge on this matter. Surveys show Germans want the US troop presence in their land reduced or removed completely. Foreign policy analysts have warned Donald Trump to stop threatening Western Europe with removal of NATO forces if they don’t start subsidizing them because the people don’t want them there to begin with. In Foreign Policy, Michael John Williams put it succinctly: “Bases in Europe have always aided American hegemony more than local defense.�

As in the case of Japan’s LDP, Germany’s two post-war institutional parties — the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party — were created by the Allies and propped up by the CIA to manage the country in Washington’s interest. The founder of the CDU, Konrad Adenauer, was installed into power by American authorities following an informal agreement to support the Atlanticist project against parties seeking greater German sovereignty. Separating the German state from the American one is difficult due to the long chancellorships pro-US CDU officials have typically had, with Adenauer serving for 14 years and both Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl ruling for 16 years each.

Institutional anti-white racism appears to be playing a role in the permissiveness of military officials and the anarchy being exported. The Rand Corporation, which was tasked earlier this year with uncovering hidden bias against minorities in the military’s judicial system, instead found that while blacks and Mexicans were more likely to be tried for violations and crimes, they suffered court martials and expulsions at lower rates than whites accused of the same offenses.

On July 14th, 2006, two days into Israel’s bombing campaign against Lebanon, Hezbollah announced a special televised address from Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

During his speech, he promised the Lebanese people a cathartic surprise. “Now, in the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has attacked the infrastructure, people’s homes, and civiliansâ€� he teed up, “look at it burning.â€� Viewers followed his instruction and looked onto the Mediterranean sea with disbelief when, right on Nasrallah’s cue, the Israeli naval vessel parked off their coast was suddenly engulfed by a bright orange fireball. Hezbollah’s anti-ship missiles, which Israelis were unsure they possessed until this strike, successfully penetrated the American-built Israeli warship, the INS Hanit, killing multiple sailors and decommissioning it for the rest of the war’s duration.

This was just one of 33 days of embarrassments the Israelis endured during their last confrontation with the Shia nationalists in South Lebanon.

Expecting a hit-and-run insurgency, poorly trained IDF soldiers were astonished to find fortified fighting positions and a professional army capable of holding ground and defeating them in set-piece battles. IDF Commander Dan Halutz, who was later forced to resign as the scapegoat for Israel’s abysmal performance in the conflict, had focused his battle doctrine entirely on Iraq war style “shock and awe� aerial bombing, except in his case, in lieu of any coherent plan for a follow-up ground invasion. This strategy was a failure from the start. Hezbollah had prepared to counter Israeli air supremacy by orienting their logistics around a network of underground bunkers and tunnels. When all was said and done, just 7% of Hezbollah’s military resources were damaged by the Israeli Air Force.

In addition to miniaturizing the Israeli artillery and air power advantage, Hezbollah possessed a multitude of effective counters to Israel’s sophisticated surveillance tools, drones, Merkava tanks, and diplomatic scams.

Upon driving Israeli forces out of South Lebanon in 2000, effectively ending an 18 year occupation, Nasrallah wisely ignored American and UN promises to ensure respect for Lebanese territory and began immediately preparing for the Zionists to return with a vengeance.

Hezbollah’s foresight paid off in dividends six years later, when the first Israeli Merkava tank used to cross into Lebanese territory in violation of the UN’s imaginary “blue line� was blown to pieces along with its crew by a perfectly laid anti-tank mine. Up to this moment, Merkava tanks were advertised to the Israeli public as practically indestructible. Another surprise weapon, Russian made Kornet ATGMs, helped destroy countless more tanks and vehicles.

Looking back on the conflict, pop historians and mainstream journalists have refused to grant Hezbollah victory and instead settled on referring to the outcome of the 2006 war as a stalemate. But this view is not held by experts with skin in the game, such as Matt M. Matthews of the US Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, who has written about Israel’s performance in the war as a textbook example of what a catastrophic military failure looks like. The Israeli government’s own 2007 Winograd Commission excoriated every facet of the campaign, from the top generals to the average soldiers to the IDF’s core doctrine, prompting Nasrallah to react with praise for the candidness of the Israeli investigators.

The key to understanding Hezbollah’s approach to Israel is in Nasrallah’s view that Jews are weak and opportunistic bullies. Nasrallah holds that the Israeli public is a fragile “spider web,� one which constantly cries out for Arab blood but simultaneously has a low threshold for pain and inconvenience. By inflicting heavy military casualties and forcing Israelis in towns and cities either into bunkers or to flee their homes, Hezbollah believes the Zionist state can collapse under its internal contradictions.

Following the October 7th attacks by Hamas, these contradictions have come to the surface. Two of the most hawkish figures on Lebanon in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bazalel Smotrich, were put into power by a Haredi voting bloc that, while loudly demanding war, has tirelessly fought the Israeli state since its inception in 1948 to be exempt from military service. Analysts, many of them Jews, fear that this lack of civic virtue among the Haredim is demoralizing the secular majority of Israel, who could respond to the hypocrisy by taking their sons out of the country to dodge the draft if the war expands.

Hezbollah has also succeeded in turning Israeli territory, which lacks strategic depth, into the frontline of the ongoing skirmishes, forcing 60,000 Jewish citizens to flee their settlements to the center of the country. This has angered the Israeli hoi polloi, causing the internally displaced to issue infantile demands to Netanyahu that he needs to quickly crush Hezbollah so that their children can start school on time in September.

The typical Israelis ambitions are completely out of sync with their actual will power and abilities. This petulant and craven citizenry’s inability to connect actions to reactions is so stunning that it has prompted IDF army chief Herzl Halevi to issue a statement telling the public that they do not seem to understand the magnitude of the consequences that await them once the war in Lebanon formally begins.

That is not to say they are completely out of touch with reality. Israelis have a secret weapon too: the unopposed Zionist control of Western capitals.

The US and France, two of the parties responsible for intercepting Iran’s April counter-strike on Israel, have dispatched emissaries to Lebanon under the guise of trying to negotiate an end to hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hezbollah’s sole demand is that Israel permanently end its brutal war on the Palestinian people, but this has become a non-starter largely due to the absurd dynamic in the talks.

America’s envoy in the effort, Amos Hochstein, is an Israeli businessman and well-established Zionist ideologue serving in the Biden administration. France’s representative, Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné, is the gay boyfriend of Jewish Prime Minister Gabriel Attal — an unprecedented, obscene and comical display of nepotism. These “referees� have a dog in the fight, and for this reason, diplomacy has gone nowhere.

The latest reports from Hochstein point to the United States getting ready to follow Israel into south Lebanon, a mission the two Zionist powers trained for during last year’s Juniper Oak exercises. The US congress’ move to quietly modernize America’s military conscription system gives us a glimpse into the types of conversations happening behind closed doors. What could complicate matters is that all of Israel’s likely co-belligerents — USA, UK and France — will soon be having national elections, which is unlikely to significantly effect the big-picture calculus, but could raise at least some unknown variables.