From Wright To Wexner

How we became suicidal

“Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau;”-the commentary of the Beit Ha Levi says that this prayer by Yaakov seems to involve unnecessary repetition, for Yaakov only had one brother. Actually, he prays to be delivered both from the wickedness and the kindness of Esau, Esau acting as an evildoer and Esau acting as a brother.

This article was inspired by two fantastic documents. You should read both. They’re really not very long. The first is an interview with Edwin Wright, a prototypical American Arabist. The second is a report by the Lavi Organization on the Wexner Foundation’s Wexner Senior Leaders program. The documents are opposites, a first person narrative versus an organizational analytical report, the one motivated by a deep hostility to Israel as a Jewish state, the other by sympathy for it. One deals with the birth and childhood of the State of Israel, the other with its old age and senility. But their subject matter is the same: they are bookends on the development of the relationship between America’s imperial government and the Government of Israel over the 75 year long existence of the latter.

Wright

Wright’s story is an archetypical Arabist one. He was born in the 19th century to an American Protestant missionary family in Iran and spoke Armenian, Persian, Turkish and Arabic. He spent his career in academia in the Middle East and the US. At some point, Wright had lost what abstract late high-Protestant faith he’d inherited from his missionary ancestors, choosing instead to trust the science. “I take the point of view that the Bible is a mixture of Hebrew legends and myths and cannot be used as an element in U.S. foreign policy…well-known and competent scholars support my view.”

When World War 2 started, Wright was 63 years old and was recruited into the OSS as a Middle East expert. He spent the war in Persia, Cairo and Palestine. He studied the Zionists closely, reading Herzl and interviewing the mainstream Zionist leadership, including Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Teddy Kolleck and the father of Israeli intelligence, Reuven Shiloah-Zaslani.

You can imagine what Wright thought of them: “all these people changed their names later on.”

After the war, Wright was tasked by the Department of Defense with Middle Eastern area studies, with a focus on the petroleum industry. He then worked for the State Department as a Middle East area expert. As part of his work, he pioneered the sub rosa cooperation between the American deep state and the media to drive policy while appearing to be an objective civil servant. “I was very fortunate in my relationships with these newspapermen; not one of them ever betrayed me. They did not quote my name and they didn't give away secret material, but we were able to use the information the State Department had to get across to the public what I looked upon as an educational program.” This model continues to the present day, the New York Times serving as an interdepartmental memo system for the US government via industrial-scale leakage.

Dealing with post-WW2 US policy, Wright and his colleagues felt frustrated. How could it be that they, the experts, unanimously opposed to the creation of a Jewish state, were defeated? Obviously, the issue was an American Zionist conspiracy. “The Zionists well knew that these specialists in the State Department were people opposed to Zionism; that we were dangerous people from the point of view of Zionism…When they found me as assistant to Loy Henderson, who was advising against their Zionist state, they felt that this was a conspiracy of certain groups of people that must be purged from Government.”

Wright’s description of the Zionists seeps upper class post-Protestant distaste. He sees the Zionists as “very deceitful”, Zionism as “a thinly veiled theocracy”. “I found that the area had not yet emancipated itself from the theocratic point of view of the world. Such ideas as we had in the West had never penetrated the Middle East. They are just beginning to penetrate now; technology and the objective and secular point of view. These people are introspective, they live in a world of imagination and mythology which they interpret as reality. This is true of Golda Meir, Ben Gurion and all the rest of them.”

In fact, it’s not just Zionists that are a problem. The very concept of Jews is problematic. “No one has ever been able to define what a Jew is…the Zionists have a specific meaning of Judaism that is racist; it has to do with a theory of birth. You are born a Jew, you have to have a Jewish mother…Orthodox Judaism is an indoctrination system”

Wright goes on to describe various Zionist pre-1948 shenanigans with such distaste that I can only assume that contemporary American politics was otherwise conducted through gentlemanly appeals to reason, lobbying unheard of and corruption only known through history books. In their own eyes, Wright and his peers were simply patriotic Americans defending objective American interests in the Middle East against the scheming of Jewish propagandists applying a “silent terrorism” to the State Department. This terrorism continued until the time of the interview in the late 1970s, resulting in Israel constantly taking more land, on their way to establishing their empire “from the Suez Canal clear north to the mountains of Cappadocia,” on the American dime.

The Zionists, in Wright’s view, had herded Jews into Israel and were keeping them there despite their will. “I'm sure right now if we said, "We'll take 3 million Jews from Israel," they'd line up in front of our consulates.” Of course, they were also hurting Arabs, and the United States. “What do we get out of supporting Israel? Nothing but problems, bills, debts, and embarrassment. Natural friends from the point of view of strategy, anti-communism, and oil, are all allied to the Arab world.” The worst of the worst, the Uber-Zionists, as it were, were the settlers: “it was folly for the United States to support a State composed of such neurotic groups as I witnessed in Palestine (1942-46). The Orthodox Rabbis wanted to turn the clock back to 1200 B.C. Theocracy-and were really fanatic. They have produced such irrational and Expansionist groups as the Gush Emunim group…Jews of a Zionist persuasion cannot separate the Transcendental from the Mundane”

Finally, Wright sees the relationship of the Jews to the US as similar to that of the Jews to the Persians in the story of Purim: “Esther got her Gentile King drunk, then wheedled his signet ring and sent out an order to the Jews--so they slew 75,000 innocent Persians. The Book of Esther is not history. It is parody. The Ahasuerus of Esther is probably the Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes (165 B.C.) and Mordechai is probably a symbol for Judas Maccabeus. Esther represents the beautiful dream of a Messianic Jewish State. There is a lesson nevertheless in this immoral and violent story. A political marriage of any political power with Messianic Zionism is certain to produce disaster.”

The outcome? An inevitable loss of Jewish “control of the US government, press and public,” followed by “returning Israel to its pre-1967 boundaries…to the Zionist-a death sentence. Their 30 year dream of "Eretz Gadohl 1'Am Gadhol"-(a great land for a great people) will be shattered. I doubt if Israel can long survive such a blow. Jews will no longer emigrate to such a small non-viable state. Israelis will leave in increasing numbers.”

There’s a lot of hubris and vitriol to deal with in there. Let me just say that during Israel’s War of Independence, the US government, terrorized and controlled by a Zionist cabal as it was…levelled an arms embargo on Israel. At the time, Israel had been invaded by seven Arab countries’ forces and was fighting for its existence, so you’d think that the Zionists would have used their leverage and control to impose their will on this issue. Wright also believed a bunch of stuff about equitable use of global resources, the evils of racism and the primitive and outdated nature of religion and so on that would fit right in at any liberal Western institution today. The point is that this is more or less how respectable American foreign policy officials saw the State of Israel from its inception until the 1980s. Genteel hostility and a certain desire to see the Zionist Entity…well, you know, from the River to the Sea, etc. Israel’s leaders reciprocated in kind.

The Wexner Foundation

There’s a second viewpoint, that of the subject of the other document: the Wexner Foundation, set up by an American billionaire named Les Wexner. You may have heard of Wexner’s money manager, a bright Jewish guy named Jeff Epstein who came to an untimely end. Epstein was a foundation trustee for 15 years, though the foundation denies he made any meaningful decisions in that capacity. The foundation also paid several million dollars to Ehud Barak. In short, the foundation is covered in the fingerprints of American and Israeli deep state creeps.

Specifically, the report deals with the Wexner Senior Leaders and Wexner Israel Fellowship. The former sends senior Israeli officials to Harvard to earn their Master’s in Public Administration. The latter is run in a short seminar format.

At the time the report was written in 2018, Wexner Foundation program alumni filled many positions of the highest influence in Israeli society: “six IDF Generals, ten judges including one on the Supreme Court, and dozens of senior officials in the State Prosecutor’s Office are all part of the WSL network…there are graduates of the program in NGOs including two Former Directors of the New Israel Fund, a Director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a Director of the Geneva Initiative, the Director of the Physicians for Human Rights group, and the heads of many other NGOs…In their publications, the Wexner Foundation claims that graduates of their programs have changed the face of Israeli society in terms of civil rights, watchdog organizations, education, security, and more.” Two Wexner graduates, consecutive heads of the New Israel Fund (a major vehicle by which American funds flow into various social engineering and influence operations in Israel,) founded the Wexner Graduates Group for “the development of collective consciousness and the formation of a network among the graduates.”

The Foundation explicitly refers to its alumni as “change agents”, levers of systemic influence. The alumni network functions as an influence coordination and patronage distribution mechanism, a mafia. “Himman-Pesach describes the participants’ beginning of their studies through the Wexner Fellowship as like “entering a family”…there is strong solidarity among the members of the group that derives from the “process of acceptance to the fellowship, the scope of the fellowship, and the institute of studies, which lead to the high prestige of the program. As a result, the graduates feel part of a distinguished group. The potential for trust as a ‘group of equals’ is quite high and any request sent to a fellow graduate is likely to be answered with affirmation.””

Wexner alumni in various arms of government lend their legitimacy to initiatives created by other Wexner alumni in NGOs. Those initiatives in turn serve to anchor the policies of the civil servants. Conventional patronage schemes abound, as does bureaucratic cross coverage: “After Member of Knesset (MK) Moti Yogev called on Wexner Fellowship Graduate, Justice Uzi Fogelman, to “leave his judicial robes behind and join the (Arab) Joint List in whose spirit his legal decisions are written,” fifty-five past and present senior public officials and graduates of Wexner programs sent a letter to Justice Minister Ayalet Shaked, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Education Minister Naftali Bennett demanding that they condemn the words of Moti Yogev against Justice Fogelman. The letter sent by the Wexner Graduates on behalf of Justice Fogelman, neglected to mention that Justice Fogelman himself was a graduate of the program (Wexner Israel Fellowship Class 1).”

More complicated and coordinated schemes to ensure the promotion of Wexner alumni to key governmental positions also occur: “After it was announced that Prime Minister Netanyahu intended to appoint Ofra Bracha as Civil Service Commissioner, a large media campaign was organized against the appointment claiming that Bracha lacked the necessary experience. The Wexner Women’s Forum, which is formed of female past and present senior officials in public service, joined the campaign by writing to the Prime Minister demanding a Civil Service Commissioner appointee with the requisite experience running large organizations and with a background in public service. In addition, the Wexner Women’s Forum created a list of individuals whom they felt were properly qualified for the position…Among those appearing on the list of Wexner Women’s Forum recommended appointees for Civil Service Commissioner were: Ron Tzur, Michal Tzuk, Tziyona Yair King, and Rachel Tevet Weisel. The Wexner Women’s Forum described themselves as needing to “mobilize” on behalf of this issue. A “surprising and almost precedent-setting” ruling by a set of Supreme Court Judges headed by Justice Uzi Fogelman, a Wexner Fellowship Graduate himself, issued a restraining order barring the Commission from approving the appointment of Ofra Bracha as Civil Service Commissioner.”

This looks very much like the nefarious Zionist cabal Wright describes as terrorizing the naive and helpless US government of his day. What ideologies and policies does this squid promote, through its tentacles with which it grasps the very vital organs of Israeli government and society? Is it a racist, Zionist theocracy, stretching from the Cappadocian Mountains to the Suez Canal? Is it rule by the reactionary rabbis of Gush Emunim, incapable of separating the transcendent from the mundane?

In fact, the Wexner change agent network spreads the purest leftist poz. The only thing Wright would find objectionable is the nose size of the alumni. To wit, the agenda: “Equitable Public Policy for the Arab Population”, “Advancing Career Opportunities for Arabs in Israel”, a campaign “against Jewish National Fund activities in the ‘West Bank’”, “advancement of the Two-State Solution…and the goal of Israel as a light unto the nations,” “Cooperation with Breaking the Silence,” “Subsidized Medical Treatment for African Infiltrators,” etcetera, etcetera, so forth.

The Wexner Foundation is not some lone progressive Leviathan floating in a cold abyss of Israeli reaction. It exists in an ecosystem of foundations and programs whose purpose is to move American funds and influence into Israel, and use them to drive Israeli institutions and society leftward, resulting in their paralysis or hijacking against Israel’s national interests. For another example, the Mandel Foundation is focused on turning IDF officers into change agents, so that they can “educate the rest of Israeli society” in progressive value, which makes sense, since most Israeli youth, except for Haredim and Arabs, spend years subject to the discipline and indoctrination of the IDF.

Summary

What the hell happened here? How did we get from Wright’s nightmares of a Zionist empire terrorizing US government employees through its omnipresent American mafia representatives to this swamp? Wright, a hater of Israel, describes a two-state solution, a return to pre-1967 borders, as lethal to Israel. The Wexner network sees a return to those borders and the promotion of the interests of every possible fifth column within them as its highest goals. In other words, the network represents a dominant fraction of the elites of the State of Israel dedicated to the destruction of that same state.

It is possible that the foundations took on a life of their own through what nerds refer to as structural factors. Meaning, they hijacked themselves, and guys like Wexner and Mandel just don’t have any more say in their functioning; rather, they have become like a zombie ant infected by a cordyceps fungus. This is doubtful, because the foundation founders are very much alive, kicking, and seem to be involved in the functioning of their foundations. Wexner specifically is a formidable guy and it’s difficult to believe that he would quietly tolerate his foundation running amok (see the postscriptum.)

Another possibility is that the foundations represent leverage by which an American-Israeli oligarchy can treat the State of Israel and its people as a private asset. The progressive values it promotes serve to prevent national cohesion and a sovereign Jewish leadership from emerging, and ensure the continued existence of our own internal enemy. That is, the backers of the Wexner Foundation and its peers do not actually believe in those progressive values themselves but see great utility in them, as those values allow them to effectively control the State of Israel and its subjects.

A third possibility is that the foundations represent Curtis Yarvin’s Cathedral as it exists today. Wright represented an older, more primitive version of the Cathedral, that of the American academic and missionary world up to the 1960s. The original Zionists were a pretty hard-bitten bunch of guys, capable of standing up to Wright’s Cathedral or doing end runs around it using any means necessary, especially after they’d been forced to defer to it during World War 2, standing by idly during the Holocaust or even collaborating with the Nazis in the service of Anglo-American imperial interests.

Pre-1973 Israel was quite able to stand up to hostile pressure by the American empire’s elite, or at least deflect, bribe and outmaneuver that part of the elite hostile to it. Israel’s Jewish American backers played a key part in that resistance. However, as Israel found itself drawing closer to the US politically after the crisis of the Yom Kippur War, it found both its elites and their Jewish friends in the US inexorably subverted. The power dynamic was reversed, and the friendship of Esau accomplished what his enmity could not.

PS: The Wexner Foundation has recently pulled out of its arrangement with Harvard, due to the response of the latter to the Simchat Torah massacre. I doubt it will repent and dedicate its massive resources to promoting Israeli sovereignty over the entire Land. Rather, the foundation and its peers will have to renegotiate their arrangements with the Cathedral, so that their backers can continue laundering Cathedral prestige and ideas into control of Israeli institutions. In any case, we will have to continue to live ruled by the network of its change agents whose ideology is fundamentally hostile to our national existence.