For those of you who may not know, I have been tapped by an Iranian media outlet to answer a series of questions around the Arab-Israel conflict and have agreed to do so.
4- Who are the main leaders of Zionism?
5- Are they really the main determiner of US policies or not?I take question number four as a little odd because the fact of the matter is that the movement for Jewish nationalism, also known as "Zionism," fulfilled its mission in May of 1948 with the reestablishment of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.
In truth, if "Zionism" has leaders these leaders seem to have virtually no followers. I know of no single Jewish supporter of the State of Israel that follows any "Zionist" leader. There are a number of pro-Israel organizations that have the name "Zionist" in their organizations' titles, such as the Zionist Organization of America, but such usage is a throwback to an earlier era when Jews were still endeavoring to establish Israel as the Jewish State. Now that Israel has been established as a Jewish State, Zionism is basically over with.
There are some people who continue to use the word "Zionism" to indicate support for Israel, however, and there are many people who use it as an epithet and as a negative code word for Jews, in general.
As for whether or not these non-leaders are the main determiners of US policies, the answer is absolutely not, as I indicated in a previous answer to a previous question. If AIPAC, for example, really had much influence over the United States government then the US would have recognized Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish State of Israel long ago, but they have refused to do so.
And, again, this notion that Jews (or "Zionists") are behind the scenes, pulling the strings, is a very old and paranoid anti-Semitic trope that people should be exceedingly leery of promoting lest they intend to promote hatred and violence toward the tiny Jewish minority. It is, needless to say, a staple of the anti-Jewish rhetoric that comes out of the small and largely irrelevant hard-right racist groups that we have in the United States, such as Neo-Nazis or "Skin heads." It is also a prominent trope embedded in the much, much larger movement for political Islam that is rising throughout the Muslim Middle East.
This obsessive hatred for Jews, and this toxic anti-Zionism that we find among many Muslim leaders throughout the world, is little more than a means by which to deflect the failings of their own societies onto a Jewish scapegoat.
