The construction of the U.S. color revolution apparatus, & its origins in the project for Zionist normalization

This is a part from the book I’m writing, which will be called “When Tears Can’t Save Them: Why The Pro-Palestine Movement Failed To Stop A Holocaust, & How It Can Still Win.” The photo above shows Iranian opposition activists in 2021.

The resistance towards Zionism from within the Jewish community did not start during the counterculture movement of the 1970s, as this narrative says; as soon as the Jewish state was founded, there came substantial pushback from American Jewish individuals and organizations, which felt a great kinship with the Palestinians who they saw being persecuted. The response from the Zionist establishment was to co-opt these Jewish Palestinian sympathizers, and work to turn them in a liberal Zionist direction.

A key reason behind why Zionists have been able to successfully hide the history of pre-1970s Jewish anti-Zionism is that when dissenting Jews started looking for ways to combat the persecution of the Palestinians, the CIA was ready to provide them with resources. Resources that would come at the cost of their movement’s independence, thereby letting the imperial state discard and marginalize them when they were no longer useful to the empire’s strategic objectives. And when pro-Palestine sentiment became more prominent within the Jewish community, liberals could keep the pro-Palestinian element tied to “soft” Zionism, because the CIA itself had captured this political current decades ago.

It was a CIA-funded NGO, the American Friends of the Middle East, that provided ample funding and organizational assistance to the work which was done by Palestine supporters during that era. As documented by the author Geoffrey Levin, AFME would facilitate investigations into the Palestinian refugee crisis by Palestine sympathizers, including Rabbi Morris Lazaron. Through the findings from his 1953 trip to Lebanon, Lazaron would expose the conditions that the Zionist entity had forced the Palestinians into, with AFME publishing Lazaron’s book about the visit in 1955. The CIA was promoting journalism that brought scrutiny upon the occupier; but this wouldn’t last, and the CIA of course had an ulterior motive.

The only reason why Washington applied this pressure to “Israel” during that time was because in the early stages of the occupier state’s history, the U.S. empire sought a more restrained posture when it came to waging the war against Palestine. The hegemon was always going to facilitate a project at colonizing Palestine; Palestine’s location makes it too strategically important for Washington to afford to leave it alone. But initially, the U.S. foreign policy establishment put more effort into restraining “Israel” than it does today, which made AFME’s view on the Palestinian refugees compatible with the CIA’s agenda at that stage. And it’s clear that this view is still shared by the empire’s NGO wing; but since that view was never going to win out within “Israel,” the NGO wing’s role now is purely to recapture pro-Palestine sentiment.

The CIA used to think it could use the NGOs to rein in the Zionist entity, and this did work to an extent. But the only way to control the entity is by threatening to cut off its economic and military support, which Washington showed it would never be seriously willing to do. Within a few years, the U.S. project to moderate Zionism’s evils had come to be largely motivated by Washington’s hopes of winning over Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led Egypt’s 1952 revolution. By the end of the decade, the hegemon had given up on swaying President Nasser, so in 1960 it cut off support to AFME’s Zionist-targeted pressure campaign.

Speaking truth to power, as the sincere actors within AFME tried to do, will not work when the targets of your scrutiny feel above any real repercussions. The NGO wing never had any hope for saving the Palestinians from the conditions they’re now in. This isn’t because “Israel” controls the United States, as the proponents of the "Jewish question" narrative assert; but because the hegemon’s strategy in Palestine would inevitably shift from attempting mediation, to letting the genocide intensify with virtually no restraints. Any “solution” to the injustices against Palestinians that comes from our ruling class is nothing more than a cover for designs to further Palestine’s destruction; the mistake of Palestine supporters who accepted the CIA’s help was to believe colonized and colonizer could come to get along without the colonization stopping.

Instead of rescuing the Palestinians, AFME’s legacy has been to let the CIA exercise much more control over the student movement in particular; AFME also helped promote Arab anti-communism and worked to sway the Arab states towards a pro-U.S. stance, but campus activism was the realm in which its operations had the most dramatic success.

The CIA’s backing of Palestinian refugee advocates was part of the same project to capture the left that Ramparts reported on. It went along with efforts to gain control over student activism in not just the USA, but also Iran; in 1952, the AFME co-founded the Confederation of Iranian Students, which would be key in enabling decades of U.S. meddling within the country. After the 1953 U.S. coup in Iran, the CIA and its partnered organizations would help lead the movement to overthrow the Shah; which was predictable, as the student element usually goes in a left-wing direction. But because the CIA had laid those foundations for NGO involvement, the imperialists would be able to gain a stronger foothold within Iran, and better cultivate a pseudo-radical layer that could be manipulated by the color revolution machine.

Washington’s modern NGO destabilization network is a continuation of the left-wing anti-communist project which the U.S. undertook in response to the rise of the New Left. Under Carter’s National Security Advisor Kazimierz Brzeziński, the foreign policy establishment decided that it was best not to fight the counterculture movement, but to weaponize it against the hegemon’s enemies. If not for this pseudo-revolutionary campaign, the Zionist entity wouldn’t have gotten nearly this far in its aggressions.

The NGO wing’s ideology of imperialism-compatible rebellion got the left behind Syrian regime change, and has weakened the resistance towards Washington’s war on Iran in crucial areas. Whenever our government attacks Iran, or uses its NGOs to foment unrest within the country, or lets its Zionist proxy murder Iranian scientists, these actions are greatly enabled by the prevalence of this destructive doctrine; a doctrine where refusing to take sides in the fight between imperialism and its challengers is seen as the principled position.

These are the kinds of ideological forces that will come to dominate your movement when you’ve accepted the assistance that the empire’s NGO wing offers to activists: forces which are only able to become prominent because they serve the empire’s interests, and that will be discarded by the system as soon as they’re no longer useful. This was the bait-and-switch that the mid-century Jewish Palestinian advocates experienced; though they were able to find financial backing and a platform at first, in time they found themselves without the support which they’d relied on, and they were pushed out of their circles in favor of those who promoted the “Israeli” government’s line.

A key part of this marginalization process was when the Zionist establishment convinced a crucial number of Palestinian advocates to concede towards Jewish supremacist narratives, and affirm the belief about Jews supposedly needing to have a state in Palestine. The notion that this state could be compatible with Palestinian freedom was the essential part of the narrative; it was the idea that could actually bring Palestine sympathizers towards a Zionist stance.

This was the core idea promoted by the organization Breira: A Project of Concern in Diaspora-Israeli Relations. When Breira was founded in 1973, it became the first national Jewish group to support the creation of a Palestinian state; which would have been a positive development, if it were to take a pro-resistance position. Instead, Breira’s members were motivated by a desire to neutralize the resistance by placating the Palestinian people; they wanted a two-state solution because they believed it was the best way to ensure the Jewish state’s survival, not because they wanted an end to the colonial project.

This position is attractive to many Palestine sympathizers who don’t fully understand settler-colonialism, so it continues to gain traction within parts of the left; but it’s an inescapably pro-colonial stance, which is obviously not morally sound. Moreover, it’s not even beneficial to Palestine as a way of incremental change, or of “moving the overton window.” The only scenario that can realistically come about from taking this stance is that the ultra right-wing Zionists will win out, because the “soft” Zionists have already surrendered the debate. That was what happened with Breira.

Despite Breira’s best efforts to clarify how pro-“Israel” it was, it didn’t get acceptance from the most powerful Jewish organizations and leaders. Following Breira’s meeting with leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1976, it was widely attacked as anti-”Israel,” and many of the more dovish Jewish figures came under pressure to denounce the group. The stresses from this exacerbated infighting within Breira, which led the group to eject its executive director Robert Loeb. The Samuel Rubin Foundation, which Breira heavily relied on, reacted to this by withdrawing its support.

In 1977, the same year when Breira ended, the Likud Party came to power; which signified the end of the era when it seemed like the “progressive” Zionists could influence “Israel” into making any serious concessions to the Palestinians. Or at least it had seemed that way to the more naive observers; this illusion was made much harder to sell when the “socialist” occupier government got replaced by something which doesn’t try to hide its Nazistic nature behind “Marxist” rhetoric.

1977 was also the year when Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s president, visited Jerusalem to start off an unprecedented project for Arab normalization of the occupier. In 1978, the Camp David Accords were signed, which precipitated an official peace treaty between Egypt and the occupier the following year. This was a moment when the Zionist project had come to feel a new level of impunity, and it got this win only a few years after the 1973 Saudi oil embargo against countries supporting “Israel.” These events correlated with the triumph of neoliberal economics, and the Cold War maneuvers that would greatly contribute towards the USSR’s collapse.

Our ruling class exploited the oil crisis and its connected recession to declare war against the workers, exporting the neoliberal policies from Chile’s dictatorship across the globe. Washington’s project to back the Mujahideen dragged the Soviets into a war in Afghanistan, with the USSR’s 1979 intervention exacerbating internal problems that the Soviet counterrevolutionaries would take advantage of. It was during these years of advance by the reactionary forces, and growing uncertainty for the revolutionary forces, that the empire would adopt Brzeziński’s doctrine of weaponizing the left.

The left had already been co-opted through the infiltration of 1970s social activist culture, and the basis for this co-optation had been constructed via the CIA’s meddling within student politics. Now Washington would use the left as a major weapon against the ruling communist parties, and against all other enemies of transnational finance. The actors who carried out the following color revolutions would appropriate revolutionary rhetoric, but they came from a patronage network that’s fundamentally reactionary, as it’s tied into the system of monopoly finance capital.

It was after the empire adopted the Brzeziński strategy, where a country’s popular discontent gets channelled into pro-imperialist projects, that Washington became able to exert as much leverage over the Arab world as it does now. Washington’s early foreign policy differences with the Zionist entity were centrally about U.S. fears that giving “Israel” too much support would drive the Arab states towards siding with the USSR. Faced with Nasser’s staunch defiance, the hegemon was forced to partly give up on maintaining that balance between the Zionist entity and its neighbors. But Egypt’s post-Nasser embrace of normalization provided it with great encouragement in the effort to reconcile this Zionist-Arab contradiction. The next step, so decided Washington, would be to use the left as a cudgel against all governments that stood up to Zionism.

With the Brzeziński strategy, the essence of what Washington has been doing is to take advantage of the bourgeois influences that still exist–not just in the Arab countries, but in Iran, as well as every other place on earth where the NGOs can get their fingers into. The left anti-communist, pro-appeasement, and otherwise U.S.-compatible forces throughout West Asia and North Africa have been instrumental in ensuring that the normalization plans would get as far as they now have. And, crucially, that these plans would be made doable by the same political elements that have been sold as “radical” and “revolutionary.”

The destruction of Africa’s richest democracy in Libya was marketed as a triumph for supposedly leftist Libyan “freedom fighters.” Syria’s fall to the Salafists was presented as a victory over a reactionary “dictatorship,” with the psyop machine having at one point even portrayed Assad as a puppet of “Israel.” The hegemon has used its left-wing pro-imperialist allies in Iran to help limit the influence of the revolutionaries within the country, and to lift up liberal actors who seek compromise with the U.S.-Zionist aggressors. (Which has not succeeded in making “Israel” normalized within Iranian diplomacy, but has made the resistance weaker in key areas.) In every society that the NGOs touch, the vulnerabilities of the anti-imperialist forces are exploited to the fullest extent, bringing total catastrophe unless these forces are prepared to combat this malign influence network.

This method for capturing and corralling popular energy has been just as effective when applied within the United States itself, at least so far. When the U.S. pro-Palestine movement exploded after October 7, the color revolution machine would greatly empower those who still promote that discredited old liberal Zionist narrative. The narrative about how if only we have more dialogue, or better leadership on “both sides,” then we’ll get “Israel” and Palestine to coexist.

The Zionist entity’s transition from being “socialist” to being an unmasked fascist regime should have been what ended all versions of left-wing or “worker” Zionism. It should have shattered the myth that Palestinians can come to live in “peace” with a state which is determined to erase them. But the efforts to launder colonialism through a “progressive” angle have persisted, because the imperial system has needed to prop up that political tendency. The question is how many Palestine supporters will enable the actors which keep propagating this tendency’s arguments.

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