Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell who emerged as a leading critic of the neoconservatives. In remarks to Mass Peace Action last June, he made some bracing assertions about Israel that I just saw the other day:Israel won’t exist as a state in 20 years because it is delegitimizing itself as an apartheid state.Israel is a “strategic liability of the first order” for the United States and is “the most likely state in the world to take the United States to Armageddon.”The U.S. ought to tell Israel now to “change swiftly” or it will cease to fund and protect Israel, but the U.S. will not do so.The neoconservative agenda in the Middle East was “to set the Levant on fire, to keep Israel’s enemies so at one anothers’ throats” that they could not give Israel trouble.Wilkerson is a fellow at the Quincy Institute and teaches at the College of William and Mary.
It turns out that Wilkerson has said some other stuff over the years that clearly crossed the line from criticism of Israel into antisemitism.
In 2005, he said that the US went to war in Iraq partially for Israel: "'I use the acronym OIL,' he said, 'O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.'" He added that Ariel Sharon controlled President Bush.
In 2007, Wilkerson claimed that American foreign policy was dominated by "the Jewish lobby" and pointed to Jewish officials like Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle for proof.
In 2013, he defended the Syrian regime and claimed that Israel had used chemical weapons in Syria in a "false flag" operation.
In 2018, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times accusing Jewish billionaires of pushing the US into war with Iran.
In 2019, he claimed that Israel intends to conquer parts of Lebanon and Jordan to create "Greater Israel" to fulfill Biblical prophecies.
Wilkerson is a conspiracy theory nutcase on matters outside Israel and Jews. But because he sasy what he says about Jews, Mondoweiss has elevated this lunatic as a sober realist.
Which tells you all you need to know about Mondoweiss and modern antisemitism.
And if you doubt that Iran's "anti-Zionism" is antisemitic, check out how this story was illustrated by the official Iranian Fars news agency:
