LaRouche on Freeing Israel from the Grip of London’s ‘Great Game’ Players

In May 1981, U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche wrote an article on how to free Israel from being used as a wrecking ball on behalf of British imperial interests. He was in communication with Israeli networks to promote what later became his “Oasis Plan,” a major infrastructure project to provide fresh water for Israel and its Arab neighbors, to “green the desert.” The “LaRouche Doctrine” begins with the idea of cooperation among sovereign states for mutual benefit. By providing an incentive for peace for all parties, it is as relevant today as it was then.

The following is excerpted from “The ‘LaRouche Doctrine’ on Israel and the Holocaust” (Executive Intelligence Review, May 19, 1981).

“Repeatedly, from within Israel, there has emerged to a leading position some political faction determined to change the situation, to move developments into directions consistent with the policy we have outlined. Each time, Arab leaders who should have encouraged this have bent to pressures, and have failed to make the public response required to foster this effort from within Israel. More significantly, the great powers, including the British-influenced United States, have failed to provide the credible, required, open support for such ephemeral Israeli initiatives. In practice, Israel has been left to maneuver by extreme Machiavellian expedients within the circumstances defined by the continuing, bloody heritage of British intelligence’s ‘Great Game’ in the region. This is best understood in examining the history of the tiny nation of Israel under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion.

“Lacking credible outside support for peace-oriented policy initiatives from among its own political forces, Israel’s policy has been chiefly one of expedient strategic maneuver within the terms of the ‘Great Game’ rigged chiefly, in turn, by the cupidity or other form of folly of the great powers. Israel has existed predominantly by functioning as a virtual ‘multiple agent’ of the principal factions of the great powers in that region, playing off the follies of one or another patron … against those of others.

“There can be no effective, proper foreign policy toward the Middle East unless this pattern of behavior by the great and lesser powers toward the Middle East is changed. Essentially, the principal powers must give credible forms of support to those political initiatives from within Israel’s leading political circles which strengthen them, by reinforcing the impulses within Israel, toward the objectives we have broadly identified above. When a Begin attempts to follow courses of action to destabilize the Middle East situation, credible and efficient deterrents must be quickly applied to the included effect of discrediting that impulse within Israel. Contrary to the record of past great-power performance generally, whenever political initiatives from within Israel are even tentatively in the direction needed to effect genuine solutions, the electorate of the tiny nation of Israel must have credible evidence that such initiatives from Israel will have full and efficient support. In this, we must be blind to all arguments on behalf of Zionism, but fixed on the objective of the forms of Israeli nationalism which are consistent with the principles of the sovereign nation-state.

“The keystone of efficient policy toward Israel today is the interrelated matter of Israel’s foreign debt and internal inflation. The key to strengthening Israel’s capacity to become a sovereign nation-state republic in outlook, is to aid it in achieving the internal conditions of life consistent with a sovereign nation-state dedicated to technological progress. The debt must be reorganized, a ‘heavy currency’ reform instituted as part of that package, and sufficient credits for technology provided to enable Israel to export needed categories of technology for the economic development of those among its neighbors which desire improved technologies in water, nuclear, and other categories. That sort of assistance to a political leadership seeking to change the patterns of Middle East relations will provide indirect benefits of inestimable great value to the nations which act in concert to bring peace to the Middle East on this basis. That assistance, if combined with action to terminate at last the old British ‘Great Game’ in the region, is the concrete policy we must seek the opportunities to implement.”