Reply #3: As I read the article, Petras is making a specific reference to ... [View All]

[struggle4progress]

political lobbying by a militaristic faction in the World Zionist Organization WZO. I do not think Petras intends his readers to interpret his remarks as supporting broad-based conspiratorial theories.

Perhaps the following help establish context:

WZO is the current name of what was once the Zionist Organization ZO: this is perhaps the oldest and most influential Zionist political organization, as suggested (for example) by the following link from the American Friends of Likud website: http://www.thelikud.org/Archives/Structure%20of%20the%20World%20Zionist%20Organization.htm

Weizman became president of the WZO around 1920. Here, from the WZO website, is an account of the origin of the Balfour Declaration:

Arthur James, First Earl of Balfour (1848-1930)
By: Rochelle Mass

... In l909, a meeting took place in Manchester, England between Chaim Weizmann and Lord Balfour:

Balfour asked Weizmann: "Why should Palestine - and Palestine alone - be the basis for Zionism?

"Anything else would be idolatry!" Weizmann protested, adding: "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London. Would you take it?"

"But, Dr. Weizmann," Balfour retorted. "We already have London."

Weizmann rejoined: "That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a merely a marsh." http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1546&subject=78

Ben-Gurion was also ZO president at one time. Jabotinsky was on their executive committee before the Revisionist split around 1923. From a recent Boston Globe piece:

Jabotinsky's ghost...
<see article for photo>
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (left). A photo of Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) loomed over former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he spoke at the Likud Party convention in August, 2004. (Getty Images Photo / Pedro Ugarte)

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft | August 13, 2006

... Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall" ...

All of this dismayed Weizmann ... He went further. Today only the bitterest enemy of Israel would call its government fascist, but that was just the accusation once made-by other Zionists-against the Revisionists. In 1929, Weizmann even told a friend, the New York lawyer Morris Rothenberg, that the Jewish extremists displayed ``Hitlerism in its worst possible form." (This was before Hitler came to power .. and Weizmann would scarcely have used this phrase later. But it was startling even then) ...

Shortly after the creation of the new state, Begin visited America, and was fiercely denounced in a letter to The New York Times from 28 eminent Jewish liberals, among them Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Einstein. Begin was a ``terrorist, right-wing chauvinist," they said, whose movement was ``closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties" ...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/13/jabotinskys_ghost/?p1=MEWell_Pos4
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.boston.com

Some discussion of Jabotinsky's relation to the ZO:

Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze'ev; 1880-1940)

... For a time Jabotinsky worked for the World Zionist Organization trying to gain Ottoman support, but at the outbreak of World War I he was sent to Western Europe as roving correspondent for a Moscow newspaper. While in Alexandria, with Joseph Trumpeldor, he suggested raising a Jewish Legion to join the Allies in liberating Erez Israel from Turkish rule ... After the war, the Legion was disbanded despite Zionist protests.Anticipating anti-Jewish violence by Arab extremists, in 1920 Jabotinsky organized the Haganah in Jerusalem ... In 1923, after disagreement over Zionist acquiescence in the British role in Palestine, Jabotinsky left the Zionist Organization and tried to draw attention to the shortcomingsof its policies, calling for greater militancy and for mass immigration to Palestine. The failure of an agreement with David Ben-Gurion to ease the internal conflict of Zionism, now faced with the growing Nazi menace, led Jabotinsky to found his own New Zionist Organization (NZO) ... Following the Arab riots of 1936, Jabotinsky became supreme commander of the terrorist IZL in 1937 ... http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/people/BIOS/jabo.html

It should be clear from these links that the WZO has been politically effective in the past and that it, and allied organizations, have sometimes experienced significant factionalism related to questions related to militarism.