As you surely know, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has solidified the rightwing bent of his government by naming “his longtime confidant” Dore Gold to run the Foreign Ministry. Gold all but explicitly opposes the formation of a Palestinian state. Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times got an interview with Gold who told her, “We have to have defensible borders.” When I met Gold at the American Enterprise Institute many years ago, he and Richard Perle were also proselytizing against a Palestinian state with the same mantra: “defensible borders.”

At that time, Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. who was born in Connecticut, got $96,000 a year from the American Enterprise Institute as a “scholar” in Jerusalem. That payment went on for at least five years.

Well now Gold is listed as president of the Center for Jewish Community Studies in Baltimore– an organization devoted to “Jewish peoplehood”– and in that capacity receives $227,000 in 2013, the latest figures available.

It sure sounds like a no-show job, for a good friend of Israel, and because he is this era’s equivalent of the silvertongued ambassador Abba Eban. Eban said “Auschwitz borders,” referring to the old green line; Gold says “defensible borders”.

Not surprisingly, the Center for Jewish Community Studies is supported by Sheldon Adelson, the supporter of Republican presidential candidates and friend of Netanyahu’s who wants to nuke Iran. Adelson gave this much to the Center:

$1 million in 2013 $1 million in 2012 $500k in 2011 $500k in 2010 $250k in 2009

So the same guy who is trying to buy the American presidential election is slipping money to Netanyahu’s close confidant, who is now his top aide in the Foreign Ministry. I don’t imagine it’s illegal, but it’s not good for democracy.

In Watergate they told us to follow the money, but journalists resist this lesson when it comes to the Israel lobby, though there’s obviously a lot of money sloshing around if you support Israel.

Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz comments acidly on this “Jewish money” having corrupted the Jewish state in the Ehud Olmert case, the former Prime Minister who was sentenced to prison for corruption.

Some of Olmert’s fellow favored members of the club are Avigdor Lieberman, Ehud Barak and Arye Dery, who have all enjoyed the largess of money-men from Vienna to Vegas. And of course Olmert’s successor Benjamin Netanyahu has only streamlined this sordid relationship by accepting the patronage of Sheldon Adelson and his Bibi-supporting Israel Hayom freesheet. Jewish money corrupted the politics of the Jewish State decades ago, and it was a wonder that Olmert hadn’t been caught much earlier.

Yes, Pfeffer says this happens in all western democracies, and not just by Sheldon Adelson. But Jewish money is a theme for him; earlier this year he likened American Jewish billionaires Adelson and Haim Saban to the anti-Semitic caricatures of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You’re allowed to talk about this kind of thing in Israel, not here.