by Philip Weiss on May 12, 2010

I failed to pick up on this last week, but a high government official in Israel held a public meeting with Itamar Marcus, who is evidently a member of the Marcus family that owns a fabric store on Sixth Avenue in New York that serves as the address for tax-deductible American donations to the settler movement. We covered the Marcus operation a lot last year on this site: the Central Fund of Israel. It has gotten money from Ace Greenberg, formerly of Bear Stearns, Kirk Douglas, and Michael Milken, formerly of the X-shaped junkbond-trading desk. And some of the money went to militias in the West Bank for urgent security needs. So the Israeli government and our government continue to subsidize the violent colonization of the West Bank. And ultra-Zionists depend as they always have on American support. We are one! as Zionist Melvin Urofsky titled his book on Diaspora support for Israel, in a word, the lobby.

Here is Hanan Ashrawi in the Hill of all places, God bless the Hill, picking up on the collusion of an extremist government with an extremist movement, which the American press still hasn’t cottoned to:

At a press conference last week, Israel”s Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon appeared alongside Itamar Marcus, a right-wing settler and director of an Israeli NGO called Palestinian Media Watch, to receive a report produced by PMW. Later in the week, Marcus appeared on Capitol Hill to present his report to Congress. In the U.S., PMW has been running ads on major television networks of late echoing the accusations of incitement against President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad.??

What Ayalon and Marcus failed to mention is that PMW is closely connected to the New York-based Central Fund of Israel, which gives money to some of the most extreme elements in Israel”s settler movement, including a yeshiva in a West Bank settlement that is home to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who published a book last year justifying the killing of gentile babies on the grounds they might grow up to pose a threat to the state.??