Going back years.
A subtler variation of Greenwald’s cartoonish approach is on display in the work of James Bamford. Heralded as our finest investigative journalist covering the NSA—he is the author of three books about the agency—Bamford has spent the last five years repeating his favorite cautionary tale, the one about how America’s spymasters are secretly powered by Israeli cunning. Last year, for example, Bamford wrote a story in Wired titled “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA,” revealing the role two Israeli technology firms play in making the agency’s surveillance infrastructure possible.
“In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,” Bamford wrote, “Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market.”
It sounds like pretty damning stuff, unless one realizes two key facts. The first is that Bamford’s “rare and candid admission”—a term crucial to creating an aura of mystery and intrigue around what would have otherwise been just another one of the myriad commercial transactions that occur daily in a globalized economy—was anything but: The Israeli army’s contribution to that country’s technology scene in general, and Unit 8200’s involvement in particular, is widely discussed, including by members of the unit itself, and it formed much of the thesis of Start-Up Nation, the 2009 best-seller by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
But even those forest-dwellers who may be honestly surprised to learn that Western armies develop and use advanced technologies—such as, to name but one prominent example, the Internet, which owes its existence to the U.S. Department of Defense—would surely not be surprised to learn that nations also sell each other stuff. Last month, for example, a report noted that the U.S. Army will pay $77 million to replace old M4 rifles with shiny, new M4A1s. The latter are produced by FN Herstal, a subsidiary of the Herstal Group, a corporation that is entirely owned by the Walloon Region of Belgium, which is to say, by a foreign government. But don’t expect Bamford et al., to evoke the same ominous hum about the infiltration of the Walloons; foreign military contracts, apparently, are only a terrifying evil that threatens to undermine American democracy when the foreign companies are Israeli.
It would be crass, and largely inaccurate, to chalk up Bamford’s and Greenwald’s obsessive focus on Israel’s supposed role in evil global conspiracies to simple anti-Semitism. Instead, the ideology that drives their tendency to see the NSA and Israel as two heads of the same Satanic beast is more complex and ideologically-driven—an attack on the doctrines of exceptionalism that fueled the rise of both America and Israel. Beginning in the 1960s, this idea that America and Israel were virtuous nations apart began to drive a certain segment of the global left nuts, and so they set off on a search for new heroes. “The native,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in the introduction to Frantz Fanon’s explosive The Wretched of the Earth, “has only one choice, between servitude or sovereignty. … Violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.” Men of the left saw no problem with lending their reputations to terrorist organizations with nationalist aspirations that shared nothing of their humanistic and universalist ideologies, as long as these groups also hated America and Israel. In order for history to progress as it should, the New Chosen People had to displace the old, even if it meant a bizarre redrawing of political coalitions. We see remnants of this ideology still, in the philosopher Judith Butler’s argument that Hamas and Hezbollah are somehow part of the global left, or in the recent movements against “homonationalism,” dedicated to condemning gay Israelis for being proud of their nation’s generally progressive policies regarding gay rights.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/glenn-greenwald-nsa-leaks-snowden
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