By Rima Najjar
How Mossad’s spyware, America’s silence, and the weaponization of loyalty expose a crisis in alliance, narrative, and justice
Despite billions in military aid, cutting-edge technological support, and unflinching diplomatic shielding, the United States is routinely surveilled by the very ally it sustains. Through Mossad, Israel reciprocates not with loyalty but with layered espionage — described by former CIA operative Andrew Bustamante as gifts laced with spyware and collaboration steeped in distrust. For many Americans, this moral asymmetry cuts against the intuitive link between generosity and allegiance.
In a now-viral segment of Julian Dorey’s Podcast #224, Bustamante recounts how Mossad would offer the CIA “presents” — usually tech or intelligence tools — routinely embedded with spyware. The anecdote isn’t exceptional; it’s emblematic. Mossad’s ethos, shaped by a Zionist statecraft that privileges domination over accountability, is unapologetic: deception over transparency, survival over solidarity, interests over alliances. Its guiding credo, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war,” isn’t rhetorical flourish. It’s a tactical doctrine where manipulation is sacred, ethical boundaries expendable, and strategic betrayal, even of benefactors, fully normalized.
While the CIA navigates diplomatic constraint and executive oversight, Mossad operates with doctrinal autonomy. The asymmetry is both operational and philosophical, and it reverberates negatively against Palestinians through policymaking, intelligence norms, and the moral language of alliance.
The asymmetry at the heart of the U.S.–Israel alliance — where unconditional aid meets strategic betrayal — is not a diplomatic fluke. It’s structural. Mossad’s ethos of deception, embedded in Zionist doctrine, offers a blueprint for unaccountable power: surveillance recast as partnership, aggression disguised as preemption. And U.S. policy doesn’t just tolerate this calculus — it amplifies it.
Take the 2021 Iron Dome funding debate. Despite evidence that the system shielded bombing campaigns in Gaza, lawmakers across the aisle framed it as a humanitarian imperative, divorced from on-the-ground realities. U.S.–Israel intelligence collaboration, including joint surveillance tools and biometric databases, has empowered Shin Bet’s predictive policing — marking Palestinian youth as preemptive threats based on algorithmic suspicion.
Mossad’s operations targeting U.S. diplomats or breaching counterintelligence norms are met with silence — not for lack of evidence, but because the alliance is sacrosanct. Within this schema, deception is valorized as strategic brilliance. The result: policy frameworks that privilege impunity over principle, alliance over accountability, and erasure over evidence.
Zionist statecraft doesn’t limit deception to espionage. It encodes it into the very architecture of governance. In Gaza, Israel’s doctrine of “mowing the lawn” — a euphemism for routine mass bombardment — reframes civilian annihilation as counterterrorism. The 2024 ICJ ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank is illegal was met with escalated settlement expansion and settler militia violence, especially in Area C. These militias, often armed and protected, displace Palestinian shepherds and Bedouin communities under the guise of “security zones.” Western diplomatic cover transforms ethnic cleansing into a strategic imperative.
Such logic has precedent. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Ha’avara Agreement with Nazi Germany exemplify how Zionist institutions have historically leveraged imperial power to entrench colonial dominance. Today, the pattern persists — this time through the U.S., enabling Israel’s impunity via normalized apartheid. Land seizures, movement restrictions, and denial of citizenship are branded as defensive maneuvers against a population rendered suspect by design. In this matrix, security is no longer protection — it is pretext. Realpolitik is not pragmatism — it’s the ideological lubricant for a project of erasure.
Israel’s impunity is insulated not just by military superiority or diplomatic muscle, but also by narrative armor. It re-codes transgression as necessity, dominance as defense. This ideological scaffolding leans heavily on Holocaust memory, existential anxiety, and the language of perpetual threat. Israel, as it professes to the world, does not merely defend itself — it defends “civilization” against barbarism. In this schema, preemptive strikes, indefinite detentions, and siege warfare are rebranded as moral imperatives.
Consider Mossad’s extrajudicial assassinations — across sovereign states from Lebanon to Malaysia. Rarely condemned, they’re framed as tactical genius, immortalized in Hollywood, and repackaged as heroic innovation. The logic: Israeli violence is uniquely legible, rooted in historical trauma and the burden of Jewish survival. Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance — regardless of its alignment with international anti-colonial norms — is treated as structurally illegitimate.
More insidiously, Zionist exceptionalism weaponizes the language of liberal democracy to obscure apartheid. Israel brands itself “the only democracy in the Middle East” while imposing dual legal regimes: one for Jewish settlers, another for Palestinians under occupation. Anti-Semitism discourse is instrumentalized to collapse critique of Israeli policy into hatred of Jewish people. This isn’t accidental — it’s tactical. It recasts settler colonialism as a civilizational crusade, where indigenous erasure becomes a sacred necessity.
In intelligence, this logic mirrors Mossad’s playbook: deceive, distort, dominate — not in defiance of moral codes, but in their name. Spyware-laced “gifts,” institutional infiltration, and normalization of double agency are strategic affirmations of a sacred mission. Subversion is sanctified — deception, a birthright.
The U.S. response to Mossad’s tactics isn’t shaped by ignorance. Americans working in tech are aware that Israeli industrial actors not only conduct corporate espionage frequently, but when suspected and reported, US agencies routinely refuse to investigate and prosecute flagrant incidents happening right under their noses, even when they acknowledge them. Israel’s supposed tech innovations in surveillance, monitoring, and data processing are almost never of Israeli origin.
This is because American foreign policy reflects ideological alignment with Israel guided by beliefs that frame power as virtue. Through exceptionalism, the U.S. views itself as morally superior and selectively applies standards of accountability. Liberal hegemony drives efforts to remake the world in its image, promoting democracy and markets through military and diplomatic dominance. Coupled with a commitment to military primacy, these ideologies filter which actions are condemned, and which are excused. This framework makes criticism of allies like Israel politically off-limits.
These US ideological blinders find a parallel in Zionist exceptionalism, a belief system that frames Israel as uniquely entitled to moral and political legitimacy regardless of its actions. Zionist exceptionalism positions Israeli identity as singularly virtuous or historically burdened, allowing its violence to be rationalized while Palestinian resistance is pathologized. Through this lens, institutions — from media to academia — internalize and reproduce a hierarchy of legitimacy that shields Israeli conduct from scrutiny and casts Palestinian survival as suspect:
· Media Framing
Western news outlets routinely sanitize Israeli violence. Airstrikes on Gaza become “clashes,” settler pogroms morph into “tensions,” and apartheid infrastructure is relabeled as “security measures.” Palestinian death tolls are framed as collateral, not structural. When Pegasus spyware infiltrates journalists’ devices, the story is tech anomaly — not political scandal. This reframing immunizes Israel from the condemnation reserved for other regimes.
· Academic Gatekeeping
In elite institutions, Palestine is cordoned into conflict studies or security modules, where strategy is foregrounded and ethics obscured. Pro-Israel funding shapes hiring, grants, and symposia — curbing inquiry. Palestinian scholars face visa barriers, censorship, and academic isolation. Epistemic sovereignty itself becomes suspect. The unspoken rule: only certain voices may speak on occupation.
· Diplomatic Shielding
Despite mounting documentation — UN reports, ICC investigations, human rights testimonies — Israel evades accountability. U.S. vetoes act as firewall. Joint intelligence agreements elevate Mossad as a strategic partner, even amid exposed deception. The irony is brutal: the very tools of international law and diplomacy are weaponized to preserve Zionist impunity.
The network of global complicity described above doesn’t just excuse asymmetry — it operationalizes it. Mossad’s espionage becomes cleverness; Israeli apartheid is cast as pragmatism; Palestinian survival is treated as threat.
Challenging U.S. indulgence is not an editorial choice — it is a geopolitical imperative. To confront Zionist impunity, we must dismantle the narratives that sustain it. That means building systems where Palestinian testimony, memory, and resistance are treated not as exceptional — but as authoritative. It means decoupling legitimacy from militarized alliances, and redefining security not as domination, but as dignity.
This is a moral reckoning. It demands stripping espionage of glamour, exposing diplomacy’s complicity, and confronting the ideological machinery that enables betrayal. In doing so, we don’t merely name the asymmetry — we reject it. We counter it with frameworks of accountability, transparency, and liberation — rewriting the script that has too long cast domination as Palestine’s destiny. That script is over.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
16 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
