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The History of US-Israel Relations Part One
How the “special relationship” was created
by Alison Weir
While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests (an analysis that benefits Israel and is particularly promoted by Israel partisans and former partisans), the facts don’t support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.
Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S. [1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision by the word “lobby.”
It is considerably more powerful, far more pervasive, and consistently more deceptive than any other. And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique power over public knowledge.
The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.
It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.
What is less widely known is how profoundly damaging this movement has been to the United States itself.
It has targeted every sector of American society for manipulation; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and almost catastrophically costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; determined which candidates may be contenders for the U.S. presidency; promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture; caused Americans to be exposed to escalating risk; and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause) to foment irrational fears that are enabling the dismemberment of some of our nation’s most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.
All this for a nation that today has reached a peak population of a little over seven million people; smaller than New Jersey.[2]
The beginnings
The Israel Lobby is just the tip of an older and far larger iceberg known as “political Zionism,” an international movement that began in the late 1800s with the goal of creating a Jewish state somewhere in the world. In 1897 this movement, led by a European journalist named Theodore Herzl [3], coalesced in the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basle, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing approximately 120 groups the first year; 900 the next. [4]
While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, and Texas, [5] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 95 percent Muslim and Christian, who owned 99 percent of the land. [6] As numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show, these non-Jews were simply going to be pushed out – financially, if possible; by the sword if necessary.[7]
The Board of Deputies of American Israelites
In the U.S. Zionism largely began in the 1880s, although an earlier project with both a domestic and international focus called “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites” was organized in 1861, which coalesced to block an effort by the Union during the Civil War to prepare a constitutional amendment declaring America a Christian nation. [8]
In 1870 the group organized protest rallies around the country and lobbied Congress to take action against reported Romanian pogroms that had killed “thousands” of Jews. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that such reports might be exaggerated, but under pressure from “Israeliete” board, the Senate ordered the committee to take up the matter with the State Department. Eventually, it turned out the total killed had been zero. [9]
In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state began popping up around the country. Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade. [10] What was to become the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[11]
Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basle, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in almost every American city with a large Jewish population. [12]
By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. [13] Between December 1897 and the summer of 1898 numerous Zionist societies were founded in the East and the Midwest. In 1898 the first annual conference of American Zionists convened in New York on, ironically, the 4th of July, where they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ). [14]
Turkey ambassadorship: “quasi-Jewish domain”
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, establishing a precedent that every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed for the next 30 years. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents recognized the importance of the Turkish embassy for Jewish Americans:
“...especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government. During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain.” [15]
By 1910 the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Even in its infancy, when it was still considered relatively weak, Zionism was becoming a movement to which Congressmen, particularly in the eastern cities, began to listen. [16]
It continued to expand, and by 1914 several additional Zionist groups had cropped up. The religious Mizrachi faction was formed in 1903, the Labor party in 1905 and Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, in 1912. And this was just the beginning. [17]
A Zionist official writing in 1912 proudly proclaimed “the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies.” [18]
The State Department Objects
The State Department – not dependent on votes and campaign donations, and charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity – were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. In memo after memo, year after year, U.S. diplomatic and military experts pointed out that Zionism was counter to both U.S. interests and principles. [19]
Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, when the Zionist Literary Society approached President Taft for an endorsement, Knox turned them down flat, noting that “problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.” [20]
While Zionists suffered one small setback in 1912, they garnered a far more significant victory in the same year; one that was to have enormous consequences both internationally and in the United States and that was part of a pattern of influence that continues through today.
Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the “Parushim”
In 1912 prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis, who was to go on to become a Supreme Court Justice, became a Zionist. Within two years he became head of the international Zionist Central Office, which had moved to America from Germany a little while before. [21]
While Brandeis is an unusually well-known Supreme Court Justice, very few Americans are aware of his significant and clandestine role in World War I, of his connection to Palestine, and of his actions that provide a kernel of factual basis for claims made decades later by antiwar activists called “anti-Semitic” for suggesting them.
Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work on the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Author Peter Grose writes:
“Brandeis created an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society. As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath 'to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.'” [22]
At the secret initiation ceremony, the new member was told:
"You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation." [23]
‘We must work silently, through education and infection’
An early recruiter explained: “An organization which has the aims we have must be anonymous, must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise.” He wrote that to work openly would be "suicidal" for their objective.
Grose reports their methodology:
“The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause long before official government planners had come up with anything. For example, as early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a former declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.” [24]
Brandeis was a close personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this position to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.
In 1916 President Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Although Brandeis officially resigned from all his private clubs and affiliations, including his leadership of Zionism, behind the scenes he continued this Zionist work, receiving daily reports in his Supreme Court chambers and issuing orders to his loyal lieutenants. [25]
When the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) was reorganized in 1918, Brandeis was listed as its “honorary president.” However, he was more than just “honorary.”
As historian Donald Neff writes, “Through his lieutenants, he remained the power behind the throne.” One of these lieutenants was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another particularly well-regarded justice, and another whose Zionist activities have largely gone unnoted. [26]
Zionist membership expanded dramatically during World War I, despite the efforts of some Jewish anti-Zionists, who called the movement a “foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.” [27]
World War I & the Balfour Declaration
Zionists played a role in America’s entry into World War I. Whether this was a major role, as Zionists claimed and British leaders believed, or a minor one, is unclear.
What is clear, however, is that: (1) The Zionist role, whether large or small, in the American entry into Britain’s side in the “Great War” was a significant factor in world history, [28] and (2) this fact has been almost completely covered up in U.S. history classes.
From the very beginning of their movement, Zionists realized that if they were to succeed in their goal of creating a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited by non-Jews, they needed Great Power backing. They tried the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at the time, but were turned down (although they were told that Jews could settle throughout other parts of the Ottoman empire and become Turkish citizens). [29]
They then turned to Britain, which was also initially less than enthusiastic. Famous English Arabists such as Gertrude Bell pointed out that Palestine was Arab and that Jerusalem was sacred to all three major monotheistic faiths.
Future Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon similarly stated that Palestine was already inhabited by half a million Arabs who would “not be content to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.” [30]
However, once the British were embroiled in World War I, and particularly during 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies, Zionists were able to play a winning card. They promised the British government that Zionists in the U.S. would push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised them they would support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward. [31]
This pledge helped push Britain to support Zionism and resulted in the famous “Balfour Declaration,” a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild (which, while signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, was actually written by secret Zionist Leopold Amery [32]).
In this declaration Britain promised to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” It then qualified this somewhat by stating: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The “non-Jewish communities” were 90 percent of Palestine’s population at that time.
While this was a less than ringing endorsement of Zionism, Zionists considered it a major breakthrough as it cracked open a door that they would later force wider and wider open.
These Balfour-WWI negotiations are referred to in various documents. For example, Samuel Landman, a leader of the Zionist-revisionists and secretary of the world Zionist organization, described them in a 1935 article in World Jewry:
“After an understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and [Zionists] Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and for support in the USA for the Allied cause, so as to bring about a radical pro-Ally tendency in the United States." [33]
British Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1923, reminded his colleagues:
“The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world... and it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists...did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.” [34]
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to this deal, telling a British commission in 1935:
“Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, writes of Balfour:
“The pledge was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers.” [35]
In 1917 President Wilson, who had been voted into office by Americans who believed his promises that he would keep them out of the war, changed course and plunged the U.S. into a tragic and pointless European conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed and injured. [36] Over 1,200 American citizens who opposed the war despite the rousing song about “Over There” were rounded up and imprisoned, some for years. [37]
Paris Peace Conference 1919: Zionists defeat Christian leaders’ calls for self-determination
The influence of Brandeis and other Zionists in the U.S. had enabled Zionists to form an alliance with Britain, one of the world’s great powers, a remarkable achievement for a non-state group and a measure of Zionists’ immense power. As historian Kolsky states, the Zionist movement was now “an important force in international politics.” [38]
After the war was over, American Zionists sent a delegation to Paris to join with other Jewish organizations at the conference, particularly the World Zionist Organization, to lobby for a Jewish “home” [39] in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords. [40] They were strengthened by the fact that the American delegation to the Peace Conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists.
Zionists were opposed in Paris by American Christian leaders from Mideast churches and colleges, a group that consistently supported Palestinian rights to self-determination through the years. Despite their efforts, joined by numerous prominent Christian leaders – including two of the most celebrated pastors of their day – they were, as a a pro-Israel author notes, “simply outgunned.” [41]
The most prominent American in the Middle East at the time, Dr. Howard Bliss, President of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), traveled to Paris to urge forming a commission to determine what the people of the Mideast wanted for themselves, a suggestion that was embraced by the U.S. diplomatic staff in Paris. [42]
Princeton’s Professor Philip Brown asserted that Zionism would be disastrous for both Arabs and Jews and went to Paris to lobby against it. [43]
William Westermann, director of the State Department’s Western Asia Division, similarly opposed the Zionist position, writing that "[it] impinges upon the rights and the desires of most of the Arab population of Palestine.” He and other US diplomats felt that Arab claims were much more in line with Wilson’s principles of self-determination and circulated Arab material. [44]
President Wilson decided to send a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation in person. After spending six weeks in the area interviewing both Jews and Palestinians, the commission, known as the King-Crane commission41, recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state. [45]
The commissioners stated that the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine could be accomplished only with “the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” pointing out that to subject the Palestinians “to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination] and of the peoples’ rights...” [46]
They went on to point out that “the well-being and development” of the people in the region formed “a sacred trust, that the people of the region should become completely free, and that the national government should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.” [47]
The report also noted:
“...the places which are most sacred to Christians–those having to do with Jesus–and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under these circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands.” [48]
Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation, however, and managed to have the report suppressed until years after the Peace Accords were enacted. As a pro-Israel historian noted,“ with the burial of the King-Crane Report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.”47 [49] The US delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.48 [50]
Claiming “Polish anti-Semitism” to promote Zionism: Brandeis and Frankfurter vs U.S. diplomat
Long before Hitler, Zionists were pushing alleged European “anti-Semitism” as a way to procure support for their movement. In 1919 a brilliant young diplomat named Hugh Gibson was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Poland. After he arrived in Poland, he began to report that there were far fewer anti-Semitic incidents than being alleged. He wrote his mother: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.” [51]
His dispatches came to the attention of Brandeis and his protégé (and future supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who demanded a meeting with Gibson. Gibson later wrote of their accusations:
“I had [Brandeis and Frankfurter claimed] done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said...that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work.... They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.” [52]
Frankfurter hinted that if Gibson continued these reports, Zionists would block his confirmation by the Senate.
Gibson was outraged and sent a 21-page letter to the State Department. In it he shared his suspicions that this was part of “a conscienceless and cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad that they must turn to Zionism for relief.”
In 1923 another American diplomat in Poland, Vice Consul Monroe Kline, confirmed Gibson’s analysis:
“It is common knowledge that Zionists are continually and constantly spreading propaganda, through their agencies over the entire world, of political and religious persecution,” adding “The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way.” [53]
By 1922 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S. and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million.52 [54] The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 only one New York Yiddish newspaper failed to qualify as Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927. [55]
Zionists and Nazis
Using “anti-Semitism” to promote the Zionist agenda continued during the rise of Hitler, when Zionists sabotaged refugee efforts and at times collaborated with Nazis in their quest to convince the world of the necessity of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. [56]
Journalist Erskine B. Childers, son of a former Irish Prime Minister, wrote:
“One of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept. This was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP [displaced persons] camps. It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.” [57]
When FDR made several efforts to provide havens for Nazi refugees, Zionists opposed these projects because they did not include Palestine. Morris Ernst, FDR’s international envoy for refugees, wrote:
“...active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration in order to undermine political Zionism... Zionist friends of mine opposed it.” [58]
Ernst wrote that he found the same fanatical reaction among all Jewish groups and their leaders, who, he found, were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own. [59]
FDR finally gave up, telling Ernst: “We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” [60]
Fabricating “anti-Semitism” in Iraq
While Zionists wished a massive “in-gathering of Jews,” most Iraqi Jews wanted nothing to do with it, Iraq’s Chief Rabbi stating: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism. Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1,000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation.” [61]
Zionism, worked to change that. Author and former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland reports:
"In an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in the synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel... most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population." [62]
Similarly, Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author who later lived in Israel and the U.S., writes:
“Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it.” [63]
End Notes
[1] In Israel it is typically called “the Jewish lobby,” perhaps reflective of the fact that today virtually all the mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S., both religious and secular – the ADL, Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Relations Councils, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Studies departments, etc – advocate for Israel. However, such unanimity was only created after years of strenuous and sometimes secretive effort, and even now, JJ Goldberg’s contention, made in his informative book Jewish Power, is may not be too far off the mark: “...the broader population of Americans Jews... are almost entirely unaware of the work being done in their name.”
Goldberg, Jonathan J. Jewish Power: inside the American Jewish Establishment. Reading, Mass. [u.a.: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Print. 7. http://fwd4.me/0xuD - http://fwd4.me/0xuC [accessed July 21, 2011]
[3] . Herzl’s seminal book The Jewish State is online at: http://fwd4.me/0xuB
“Herzl devoted all his time to this movement, eventually dying at the age of 44 leaving his family penniless. An article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that his daughter Pauline suffered from emotional problems from youth and eventually died of morphine addiction. His son Hans converted to Christianity in 1924, at which time he was abandoned by the Jewish community and denounced publicly. He committed suicide following his sister’s death. A book about Herzl’s children was written in the 1940s but was suppressed by the World Zionist Organization, which decided to bury Pauline and Hans in Bordeaux, despite their wish to be buried beside their father in Austria, “probably to avoid tarnishing Herzl's image.”
– Uni, Assaf. "Hans Herzl's Wish Comes True - 76 Years Later." Ha'aretz [Israel] 19 Sept. 2006. Print.
[4] Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. First Paperback Printing ed. Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000. Print.
Davis, John Herbert. The Evasive Peace: a Study of the Zionist-Arab Problem. First American ed. [N.Y.]: New World, 1970. Print. 1.
It was first just called the Zionist Organization; its name officially changed to the WZO in 1960. Most people use the two names interchangeably.
According to the WZO website, today the organization “consists of the following bodies:
The World Zionist Unions, international Zionist federations; and international organizations that define themselves as Zionist, such as WIZO, Hadassah, Bnai-Brith, Maccabi, the International Sephardic Federation, the three streams of world Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), delegation from the CIS – Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union), the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), and more.” http://fwd4.me/0xu9
[5] Mulhall, John W., CSP. America and the Founding of Israel: an Investigation of the Morality of America's Role. Los Angeles: Deshon, 1995. Print. 47, 51-52.
[6] Khalidi, Walid. "The Palestine Problem: An Overview." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xu8
The best resources on the pre-Israel population are:
Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. Print.
McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.
Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Print.
A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, by the British Mandatory Commission, 1946. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Two volumes. Print.
Supplement to Survey of Palestine Notes Compiled for the Information of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. Washington, D.C.: Inst. of Palestine Studies, 1991. Print.
[7] Nur, Masalha. Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of "transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Fourth ed. Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001. Print.
[8] Goldberg, 97
[9] Goldberg, 98-99 http://fwd4.me/0xu7
[11] Sarna, Jonathan D., Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosovsky. The Jews of Boston. New Haven, London : Yale University Press, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 2005. 252. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xts
Encyclopaedia Britannica; online at http://fwd4.me/0xtt
[12] Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews against Zionism: the American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Print. 24.
[13] Kolsky, 24.
[14] In a 1918 reorganization the FAZ renamed itself the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Kolsky, 26.
[15] Dalin, David G. “At the Summit: Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews.” Jews in American Politics. Editors: Maisel Louis Sandy, Ira N. Forman, Donald Altschiller, and Charles Walker Bassett. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print. 32-34.
(The appointee was Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned Macy’s Department Store and whom TR later named to his cabinet. Dalin reports a humorous incident that occurred at a dinner years later for Straus and Roosevelt:
“In his remarks, Roosevelt had stated that Straus had been appointed on the basis of merit and ability alone; the fact that he was Jewish had played no part in Roosevelt’s decision to appoint him. A few minutes later, in introducing Straus, [another speaker, the Jewish financier and philothropist Jacob] Schiff, who was a bit deaf and had evidently not heard Roosevelt’s remarks, recounted how Roosevelt had sought his advice as to who would be the most suitable and eminent Jewish leader to appoint to his cabinet.”
[16] Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Reprint Edition. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002. 8.
Neff, the author of five books on Israel, was Jerusalem Bureau Chief and then a Senior Editor for Time magazine.
[17] Kolsky, 25.
[18] Stevens, Richard P. American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970. New York: Pageant, 1962. Print. 20
[19] Neff, 9.
[20] Neff, 10.
[21] Neff, 10. Christison, 28. John, Robert, and Sami Hadawi. The Palestine Diary 1914-1945 Britain's Involvement (Vol. I). Reprint of Third Ed. Charleston: BookSurge, 2006. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee. Print. 59.
[22] Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print. 53.
The Menorah Society was also a secretive Zionist organization. An essay from the time states that the Menorah Society “camouflaged its Zionism by organizing itself as a purely nonpartisan body so as to obtain a larger membership.” The writer reports that “practically all the leaders and active workers in the Menorah organization are Zionists... the thing of which the Menorah boasts now...is its little list of prize conversions to Zionism. – Kosofsky, 256.
[23] Schmidt, Sarah. "The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65.Dec (1975): 121-39. Print.121. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xtu
Schmidt writes: "The image that emerges of the Parushim is that of a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way."
[24] Grose, p. 54.
American professor Horace Kallen was a major mover and the original founder of the Parushim.
Powerful journalist Walter Lippmann and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were among those recruited by Brandeis to work for Zionism.
-- Gurock, Jeffrey S. American Zionism Mission and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Read online at: http://fwd4.me/0xtr
[25] Neff, Pillars, p. 12.
Brandeis also “played a decisive role in planning Wilson’e economic program, and particularly in formulating the Federal Reserve.”
-- Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993. Print. 93
[26] Neff 12; John & Hadawi, p. 59-60.
Felix Frankfurter’s work on behalf of Zionism spanned many years. FDR was to appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1939, and even before this time he used his “access to the president to bring Zionist issues to his attention and urge his intercession on behalf of the Zionist cause. – Christison, 47
[27] Kolsky, 25, 32.
[28] Britannica Encyclopaedia: http://fwd4.me/0xu6
[29] Mulhall, 50. http://fwd4.me/0xu5
[30] Mulhall p. 66. This was a sadly deft prognosis, writing of Jerusalem in the early 1960s, the American Consul General in Jerusalem found: “I think I can safely make the general comment that in present-day Israel... the Arabs are very much of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’” for the dominant Israelis – Wilson, Evan M. Jerusalem, Key to Peace. Washington: Middle East Institute, 1970. 33.
[31] John, p 68-70: “The British government was advised that ‘previous overtures to American Jewry to support the Allies had received no attention was because the approach had been to the wrong people. It was to the Zionist Jews that the British and French governments should address their parleys.’ Sir Mark Sykes was particularly weighed down by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had promised that the British would support Arab independence, insisting that it was impossible to offer Palestine to the Jews. He was told that Brandeis had just become a Supreme Court Justice, and that he had President Wilson’s ear. This began the negotiations with the Zionists.
[32] "Balfour Declaration Author Was a Secret Jew, Says Prof." JWeekly (Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco) Jan 15 (1999). Print. Accessed at http://fwd4.me/0xu4
Rubinstein, William D. "The Secret of Leopold Amery." History Today 49. Feb (1999). Print.
Online at http://fwd4.me/0xu3
Amery, who had kept his Jewish roots secret, worked for Zionism in a number of ways. A pro-Israel writer reports: “As assistant military secretary to the Secretary of State for War, Amery played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Jewish Legion, consisting of three battalions of Jewish soldiers who served, under Britain’s aegis, in Palestine during the First World War and were the forerunners of the IDF. ‘I seem to have had my finger in the pie, not only of the Balfour Declaration, but of the genesis of the present Israeli Army’, he notes proudly.
“As Dominions Secretary (1925-29) he had responsibility for the Palestine Mandate, robustly supporting the growth and development of the Yishuv – Weizman recalled Amery’s “unstinting encouragement and support” and that Amery “realized the importance of a Jewish Palestine in the British imperial scheme of things more than anyone else. He also had much insight into the intrinsic fineness of the Zionist movement”. In 1937, shortly after testifying before the Peel Commission on the future of Palestine, Amery helped to organise a dinner in tribute to the wartime Jewish Legion at which his friend Jabotinsky was guest of honour. Amery became an increasingly vociferous critic of the British government’s dilution of its commitments to the Jews of Palestine in order to appease the Arabs, and fulminated in the Commons against the notorious White Paper of 1939, which set at 75,000 the maximum number of Jews to be admitted to Palestine over the ensuing five years. ‘I have rarely risen with a greater sense of indignation and shame or made a speech which I am more content to look back upon’, he remembered. And he became an arch-critic of Chamberlain and Appeasement.”
[33] World Jewry, March 1, 1935, cited by John, p. 72.
[34] Davidson, Lawrence, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 11-12.
[35] Wilson, Evan M. Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1979. Print. p. xv.
Moshe Menuhin, scion of a distinguished Jewish family that moved to Palestine during the early days of Zionism (and father of the renowned musicians), also writes about this aspect. In addition, he states that the oft-repeated claim that the British rewarded Weizman for his “discovery of TNT” was false, quoting Weizmann’s autobiography Trial and Error, p. 271:
“For some unfathomable reason they always billed me as the inventor of TNT. It was in vain that I systematically and repeatedly denied any connection with, or interest in, TNT. No discouragement could put them off.” – Menuhin, Moshe. The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969. Print. 73-74.
[36] Deaths and injuries were 364,800: http://fwd4.me/0xu2 [accessed July 21, 2011]
[37] Wilson’s Alien and Sedition acts resulted in the jailing 1,200 American citizens:
“Walter C. Matthey of Iowa was sentenced to a year in jail for applauding an anticonscription speech. Walter Heynacher of South Dakota was sentenced to five years in Leavenworth for telling a younger man that ‘it was foolishness to send our boys over there to get killed by the thousands, all for the sake of wall Street.’...Abraham Sugarman of Sibley County, Minnesota, was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth for arguing that the draft was unconstitutional and remaking, ‘This is supposed to be a free country. Like Hell it is.’” – Kauffman, Bill. Ain't My America: the Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-imperialism. New York: Metropolitan, 2008. Print. 74.
The song “Over There” was written by George M. Cohan, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for it in 1940, when America was about to join another world war:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/cohan.htm
[38] Kolsky 12.
[39] While this subterfuge was used in the beginning years, the goal was to create a state, as Felix Frankfurter wrote: “ ‘I need not tell you that the phrase, ‘that Palestine be established as a Jewish Home’ was a phrase of purposeful ambiguity.” [John, p. 118]. In the Zionists’ Memorandum to the Peace Conference they stated that Palestine “shall be placed under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will ensure the establishment therein of the Jewish national home and ultimately render possible the creation of an autonomous Jewish commonwealth. [John, p. 125]
[40] John, p. 115
[41] Merkley, Paul Charles. Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2001. Print. 6.
Harry Emerson Fosdick - http://fwd4.me/0xu1
Henry Sloane Coffin http://fwd4.me/0xu0 - http://fwd4.me/0xtz - http://fwd4.me/0xty
[42] Mulhall, 76-77; John, 129; Davidson, 20.
[43] Mulhall, p 77
[44] Mulhall p. 77
[45] Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: Palestine between 1914-1979. New-York: Caravan, 1979. Print. 17-18.
[46] Mulhall, p. 79.
[47] Mulhall, 78.
[48] Grose, 88.
[49] Melvin Urofsky, cited in Mulhall, 80
[50] Mulhall, p. 80.
[51] Neff, p. 20. Grose, 94-95.
[52] Pillars, p. 20, Grose, 94-95.
[53] Pillars, 20
[54] Neff, p. 17. Tivnan, p. 30
[55] Stevens, Richard P., American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy 1942-1947. New York: Pageant Press. Inc. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970, p. 20.
[56] The article “Denying Nazi-Zionist collusion: The Sacramento Bee, Darrell Steinberg, and Islamophobia” refers to the various books that described this: http://ifamericansknew.org/media/sacbee.html
This was well known in the State Department. For example, State Dept. Near East expert Harry N. Howard states: “...there was discussion of liberalizing American immigration laws in this period. The Zionists opposed that liberalization on the ground that this would not be a solution as far as they were concerned. They wanted a political, not necessarily a humanitarian, solution --that is, they wanted a state.” - Oral History Interview with Harry N. Howard, Truman Library, Washington, D.C., June 5, 1973: http://fwd4.me/0xtx [accessed July 2011]
[57] Hadawi, 38: Citation: The Spectator (London) Magazine, 22 July 1960.
[58] Mulhall, 109.
[59] Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? 50th Anniversary ed. Haverford, PA: Infinity.com, 2004. Print. 27. Citing So Far So Good, by Morris L. Ernst (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 170-177.
[60] Mulhall, P. 109.
[61] Lilienthal, 151.
[62] Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East. London: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print. 48.
For more on Eveland see Barrett, Mary. "In Memoriam: A Respectful Dissenter: CIA's Wilbur Crane Eveland." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (1990). 28. http://fwd4.me/0xtw
[63] Naeim, Gilad. "The Jews of Iraq." The Link April-May (1998). Print. http://fwd4.me/0xtv
How the “special relationship” was created
by Alison Weir
While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests (an analysis that benefits Israel and is particularly promoted by Israel partisans and former partisans), the facts don’t support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.
Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S. [1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision by the word “lobby.”
It is considerably more powerful, far more pervasive, and consistently more deceptive than any other. And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique power over public knowledge.
The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.
It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.
What is less widely known is how profoundly damaging this movement has been to the United States itself.
It has targeted every sector of American society for manipulation; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and almost catastrophically costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; determined which candidates may be contenders for the U.S. presidency; promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture; caused Americans to be exposed to escalating risk; and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause) to foment irrational fears that are enabling the dismemberment of some of our nation’s most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.
All this for a nation that today has reached a peak population of a little over seven million people; smaller than New Jersey.[2]
The beginnings
The Israel Lobby is just the tip of an older and far larger iceberg known as “political Zionism,” an international movement that began in the late 1800s with the goal of creating a Jewish state somewhere in the world. In 1897 this movement, led by a European journalist named Theodore Herzl [3], coalesced in the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basle, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing approximately 120 groups the first year; 900 the next. [4]
While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, and Texas, [5] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 95 percent Muslim and Christian, who owned 99 percent of the land. [6] As numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show, these non-Jews were simply going to be pushed out – financially, if possible; by the sword if necessary.[7]
The Board of Deputies of American Israelites
In the U.S. Zionism largely began in the 1880s, although an earlier project with both a domestic and international focus called “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites” was organized in 1861, which coalesced to block an effort by the Union during the Civil War to prepare a constitutional amendment declaring America a Christian nation. [8]
In 1870 the group organized protest rallies around the country and lobbied Congress to take action against reported Romanian pogroms that had killed “thousands” of Jews. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that such reports might be exaggerated, but under pressure from “Israeliete” board, the Senate ordered the committee to take up the matter with the State Department. Eventually, it turned out the total killed had been zero. [9]
In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state began popping up around the country. Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade. [10] What was to become the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[11]
Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basle, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in almost every American city with a large Jewish population. [12]
By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. [13] Between December 1897 and the summer of 1898 numerous Zionist societies were founded in the East and the Midwest. In 1898 the first annual conference of American Zionists convened in New York on, ironically, the 4th of July, where they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ). [14]
Turkey ambassadorship: “quasi-Jewish domain”
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, establishing a precedent that every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed for the next 30 years. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents recognized the importance of the Turkish embassy for Jewish Americans:
“...especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government. During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain.” [15]
By 1910 the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Even in its infancy, when it was still considered relatively weak, Zionism was becoming a movement to which Congressmen, particularly in the eastern cities, began to listen. [16]
It continued to expand, and by 1914 several additional Zionist groups had cropped up. The religious Mizrachi faction was formed in 1903, the Labor party in 1905 and Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, in 1912. And this was just the beginning. [17]
A Zionist official writing in 1912 proudly proclaimed “the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies.” [18]
The State Department Objects
The State Department – not dependent on votes and campaign donations, and charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity – were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. In memo after memo, year after year, U.S. diplomatic and military experts pointed out that Zionism was counter to both U.S. interests and principles. [19]
Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, when the Zionist Literary Society approached President Taft for an endorsement, Knox turned them down flat, noting that “problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.” [20]
While Zionists suffered one small setback in 1912, they garnered a far more significant victory in the same year; one that was to have enormous consequences both internationally and in the United States and that was part of a pattern of influence that continues through today.
Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the “Parushim”
In 1912 prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis, who was to go on to become a Supreme Court Justice, became a Zionist. Within two years he became head of the international Zionist Central Office, which had moved to America from Germany a little while before. [21]
While Brandeis is an unusually well-known Supreme Court Justice, very few Americans are aware of his significant and clandestine role in World War I, of his connection to Palestine, and of his actions that provide a kernel of factual basis for claims made decades later by antiwar activists called “anti-Semitic” for suggesting them.
Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work on the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Author Peter Grose writes:
“Brandeis created an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society. As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath 'to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.'” [22]
At the secret initiation ceremony, the new member was told:
"You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation." [23]
‘We must work silently, through education and infection’
An early recruiter explained: “An organization which has the aims we have must be anonymous, must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise.” He wrote that to work openly would be "suicidal" for their objective.
Grose reports their methodology:
“The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause long before official government planners had come up with anything. For example, as early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a former declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.” [24]
Brandeis was a close personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this position to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.
In 1916 President Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Although Brandeis officially resigned from all his private clubs and affiliations, including his leadership of Zionism, behind the scenes he continued this Zionist work, receiving daily reports in his Supreme Court chambers and issuing orders to his loyal lieutenants. [25]
When the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) was reorganized in 1918, Brandeis was listed as its “honorary president.” However, he was more than just “honorary.”
As historian Donald Neff writes, “Through his lieutenants, he remained the power behind the throne.” One of these lieutenants was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another particularly well-regarded justice, and another whose Zionist activities have largely gone unnoted. [26]
Zionist membership expanded dramatically during World War I, despite the efforts of some Jewish anti-Zionists, who called the movement a “foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.” [27]
World War I & the Balfour Declaration
Zionists played a role in America’s entry into World War I. Whether this was a major role, as Zionists claimed and British leaders believed, or a minor one, is unclear.
What is clear, however, is that: (1) The Zionist role, whether large or small, in the American entry into Britain’s side in the “Great War” was a significant factor in world history, [28] and (2) this fact has been almost completely covered up in U.S. history classes.
From the very beginning of their movement, Zionists realized that if they were to succeed in their goal of creating a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited by non-Jews, they needed Great Power backing. They tried the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at the time, but were turned down (although they were told that Jews could settle throughout other parts of the Ottoman empire and become Turkish citizens). [29]
They then turned to Britain, which was also initially less than enthusiastic. Famous English Arabists such as Gertrude Bell pointed out that Palestine was Arab and that Jerusalem was sacred to all three major monotheistic faiths.
Future Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon similarly stated that Palestine was already inhabited by half a million Arabs who would “not be content to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.” [30]
However, once the British were embroiled in World War I, and particularly during 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies, Zionists were able to play a winning card. They promised the British government that Zionists in the U.S. would push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised them they would support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward. [31]
This pledge helped push Britain to support Zionism and resulted in the famous “Balfour Declaration,” a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild (which, while signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, was actually written by secret Zionist Leopold Amery [32]).
In this declaration Britain promised to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” It then qualified this somewhat by stating: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The “non-Jewish communities” were 90 percent of Palestine’s population at that time.
While this was a less than ringing endorsement of Zionism, Zionists considered it a major breakthrough as it cracked open a door that they would later force wider and wider open.
These Balfour-WWI negotiations are referred to in various documents. For example, Samuel Landman, a leader of the Zionist-revisionists and secretary of the world Zionist organization, described them in a 1935 article in World Jewry:
“After an understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and [Zionists] Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and for support in the USA for the Allied cause, so as to bring about a radical pro-Ally tendency in the United States." [33]
British Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1923, reminded his colleagues:
“The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world... and it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists...did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.” [34]
Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to this deal, telling a British commission in 1935:
“Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”
American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, writes of Balfour:
“The pledge was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers.” [35]
In 1917 President Wilson, who had been voted into office by Americans who believed his promises that he would keep them out of the war, changed course and plunged the U.S. into a tragic and pointless European conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed and injured. [36] Over 1,200 American citizens who opposed the war despite the rousing song about “Over There” were rounded up and imprisoned, some for years. [37]
Paris Peace Conference 1919: Zionists defeat Christian leaders’ calls for self-determination
The influence of Brandeis and other Zionists in the U.S. had enabled Zionists to form an alliance with Britain, one of the world’s great powers, a remarkable achievement for a non-state group and a measure of Zionists’ immense power. As historian Kolsky states, the Zionist movement was now “an important force in international politics.” [38]
After the war was over, American Zionists sent a delegation to Paris to join with other Jewish organizations at the conference, particularly the World Zionist Organization, to lobby for a Jewish “home” [39] in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords. [40] They were strengthened by the fact that the American delegation to the Peace Conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists.
Zionists were opposed in Paris by American Christian leaders from Mideast churches and colleges, a group that consistently supported Palestinian rights to self-determination through the years. Despite their efforts, joined by numerous prominent Christian leaders – including two of the most celebrated pastors of their day – they were, as a a pro-Israel author notes, “simply outgunned.” [41]
The most prominent American in the Middle East at the time, Dr. Howard Bliss, President of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), traveled to Paris to urge forming a commission to determine what the people of the Mideast wanted for themselves, a suggestion that was embraced by the U.S. diplomatic staff in Paris. [42]
Princeton’s Professor Philip Brown asserted that Zionism would be disastrous for both Arabs and Jews and went to Paris to lobby against it. [43]
William Westermann, director of the State Department’s Western Asia Division, similarly opposed the Zionist position, writing that "[it] impinges upon the rights and the desires of most of the Arab population of Palestine.” He and other US diplomats felt that Arab claims were much more in line with Wilson’s principles of self-determination and circulated Arab material. [44]
President Wilson decided to send a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation in person. After spending six weeks in the area interviewing both Jews and Palestinians, the commission, known as the King-Crane commission41, recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state. [45]
The commissioners stated that the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine could be accomplished only with “the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” pointing out that to subject the Palestinians “to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination] and of the peoples’ rights...” [46]
They went on to point out that “the well-being and development” of the people in the region formed “a sacred trust, that the people of the region should become completely free, and that the national government should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.” [47]
The report also noted:
“...the places which are most sacred to Christians–those having to do with Jesus–and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under these circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands.” [48]
Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation, however, and managed to have the report suppressed until years after the Peace Accords were enacted. As a pro-Israel historian noted,“ with the burial of the King-Crane Report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.”47 [49] The US delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.48 [50]
Claiming “Polish anti-Semitism” to promote Zionism: Brandeis and Frankfurter vs U.S. diplomat
Long before Hitler, Zionists were pushing alleged European “anti-Semitism” as a way to procure support for their movement. In 1919 a brilliant young diplomat named Hugh Gibson was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Poland. After he arrived in Poland, he began to report that there were far fewer anti-Semitic incidents than being alleged. He wrote his mother: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.” [51]
His dispatches came to the attention of Brandeis and his protégé (and future supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who demanded a meeting with Gibson. Gibson later wrote of their accusations:
“I had [Brandeis and Frankfurter claimed] done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said...that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work.... They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.” [52]
Frankfurter hinted that if Gibson continued these reports, Zionists would block his confirmation by the Senate.
Gibson was outraged and sent a 21-page letter to the State Department. In it he shared his suspicions that this was part of “a conscienceless and cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad that they must turn to Zionism for relief.”
In 1923 another American diplomat in Poland, Vice Consul Monroe Kline, confirmed Gibson’s analysis:
“It is common knowledge that Zionists are continually and constantly spreading propaganda, through their agencies over the entire world, of political and religious persecution,” adding “The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way.” [53]
By 1922 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S. and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million.52 [54] The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 only one New York Yiddish newspaper failed to qualify as Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927. [55]
Zionists and Nazis
Using “anti-Semitism” to promote the Zionist agenda continued during the rise of Hitler, when Zionists sabotaged refugee efforts and at times collaborated with Nazis in their quest to convince the world of the necessity of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. [56]
Journalist Erskine B. Childers, son of a former Irish Prime Minister, wrote:
“One of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept. This was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP [displaced persons] camps. It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.” [57]
When FDR made several efforts to provide havens for Nazi refugees, Zionists opposed these projects because they did not include Palestine. Morris Ernst, FDR’s international envoy for refugees, wrote:
“...active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration in order to undermine political Zionism... Zionist friends of mine opposed it.” [58]
Ernst wrote that he found the same fanatical reaction among all Jewish groups and their leaders, who, he found, were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own. [59]
FDR finally gave up, telling Ernst: “We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” [60]
Fabricating “anti-Semitism” in Iraq
While Zionists wished a massive “in-gathering of Jews,” most Iraqi Jews wanted nothing to do with it, Iraq’s Chief Rabbi stating: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism. Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1,000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation.” [61]
Zionism, worked to change that. Author and former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland reports:
"In an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in the synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel... most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population." [62]
Similarly, Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author who later lived in Israel and the U.S., writes:
“Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it.” [63]
End Notes
[1] In Israel it is typically called “the Jewish lobby,” perhaps reflective of the fact that today virtually all the mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S., both religious and secular – the ADL, Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Relations Councils, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Studies departments, etc – advocate for Israel. However, such unanimity was only created after years of strenuous and sometimes secretive effort, and even now, JJ Goldberg’s contention, made in his informative book Jewish Power, is may not be too far off the mark: “...the broader population of Americans Jews... are almost entirely unaware of the work being done in their name.”
Goldberg, Jonathan J. Jewish Power: inside the American Jewish Establishment. Reading, Mass. [u.a.: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Print. 7. http://fwd4.me/0xuD - http://fwd4.me/0xuC [accessed July 21, 2011]
[3] . Herzl’s seminal book The Jewish State is online at: http://fwd4.me/0xuB
“Herzl devoted all his time to this movement, eventually dying at the age of 44 leaving his family penniless. An article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that his daughter Pauline suffered from emotional problems from youth and eventually died of morphine addiction. His son Hans converted to Christianity in 1924, at which time he was abandoned by the Jewish community and denounced publicly. He committed suicide following his sister’s death. A book about Herzl’s children was written in the 1940s but was suppressed by the World Zionist Organization, which decided to bury Pauline and Hans in Bordeaux, despite their wish to be buried beside their father in Austria, “probably to avoid tarnishing Herzl's image.”
– Uni, Assaf. "Hans Herzl's Wish Comes True - 76 Years Later." Ha'aretz [Israel] 19 Sept. 2006. Print.
[4] Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. First Paperback Printing ed. Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000. Print.
Davis, John Herbert. The Evasive Peace: a Study of the Zionist-Arab Problem. First American ed. [N.Y.]: New World, 1970. Print. 1.
It was first just called the Zionist Organization; its name officially changed to the WZO in 1960. Most people use the two names interchangeably.
According to the WZO website, today the organization “consists of the following bodies:
The World Zionist Unions, international Zionist federations; and international organizations that define themselves as Zionist, such as WIZO, Hadassah, Bnai-Brith, Maccabi, the International Sephardic Federation, the three streams of world Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), delegation from the CIS – Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union), the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), and more.” http://fwd4.me/0xu9
[5] Mulhall, John W., CSP. America and the Founding of Israel: an Investigation of the Morality of America's Role. Los Angeles: Deshon, 1995. Print. 47, 51-52.
[6] Khalidi, Walid. "The Palestine Problem: An Overview." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xu8
The best resources on the pre-Israel population are:
Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. Print.
McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.
Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Print.
A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, by the British Mandatory Commission, 1946. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Two volumes. Print.
Supplement to Survey of Palestine Notes Compiled for the Information of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. Washington, D.C.: Inst. of Palestine Studies, 1991. Print.
[7] Nur, Masalha. Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of "transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Fourth ed. Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001. Print.
[8] Goldberg, 97
[9] Goldberg, 98-99 http://fwd4.me/0xu7
[11] Sarna, Jonathan D., Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosovsky. The Jews of Boston. New Haven, London : Yale University Press, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 2005. 252. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xts
Encyclopaedia Britannica; online at http://fwd4.me/0xtt
[12] Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews against Zionism: the American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Print. 24.
[13] Kolsky, 24.
[14] In a 1918 reorganization the FAZ renamed itself the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Kolsky, 26.
[15] Dalin, David G. “At the Summit: Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews.” Jews in American Politics. Editors: Maisel Louis Sandy, Ira N. Forman, Donald Altschiller, and Charles Walker Bassett. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print. 32-34.
(The appointee was Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned Macy’s Department Store and whom TR later named to his cabinet. Dalin reports a humorous incident that occurred at a dinner years later for Straus and Roosevelt:
“In his remarks, Roosevelt had stated that Straus had been appointed on the basis of merit and ability alone; the fact that he was Jewish had played no part in Roosevelt’s decision to appoint him. A few minutes later, in introducing Straus, [another speaker, the Jewish financier and philothropist Jacob] Schiff, who was a bit deaf and had evidently not heard Roosevelt’s remarks, recounted how Roosevelt had sought his advice as to who would be the most suitable and eminent Jewish leader to appoint to his cabinet.”
[16] Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Reprint Edition. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002. 8.
Neff, the author of five books on Israel, was Jerusalem Bureau Chief and then a Senior Editor for Time magazine.
[17] Kolsky, 25.
[18] Stevens, Richard P. American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970. New York: Pageant, 1962. Print. 20
[19] Neff, 9.
[20] Neff, 10.
[21] Neff, 10. Christison, 28. John, Robert, and Sami Hadawi. The Palestine Diary 1914-1945 Britain's Involvement (Vol. I). Reprint of Third Ed. Charleston: BookSurge, 2006. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee. Print. 59.
[22] Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print. 53.
The Menorah Society was also a secretive Zionist organization. An essay from the time states that the Menorah Society “camouflaged its Zionism by organizing itself as a purely nonpartisan body so as to obtain a larger membership.” The writer reports that “practically all the leaders and active workers in the Menorah organization are Zionists... the thing of which the Menorah boasts now...is its little list of prize conversions to Zionism. – Kosofsky, 256.
[23] Schmidt, Sarah. "The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65.Dec (1975): 121-39. Print.121. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xtu
Schmidt writes: "The image that emerges of the Parushim is that of a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way."
[24] Grose, p. 54.
American professor Horace Kallen was a major mover and the original founder of the Parushim.
Powerful journalist Walter Lippmann and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were among those recruited by Brandeis to work for Zionism.
-- Gurock, Jeffrey S. American Zionism Mission and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Read online at: http://fwd4.me/0xtr
[25] Neff, Pillars, p. 12.
Brandeis also “played a decisive role in planning Wilson’e economic program, and particularly in formulating the Federal Reserve.”
-- Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993. Print. 93
[26] Neff 12; John & Hadawi, p. 59-60.
Felix Frankfurter’s work on behalf of Zionism spanned many years. FDR was to appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1939, and even before this time he used his “access to the president to bring Zionist issues to his attention and urge his intercession on behalf of the Zionist cause. – Christison, 47
[27] Kolsky, 25, 32.
[28] Britannica Encyclopaedia: http://fwd4.me/0xu6
[29] Mulhall, 50. http://fwd4.me/0xu5
[30] Mulhall p. 66. This was a sadly deft prognosis, writing of Jerusalem in the early 1960s, the American Consul General in Jerusalem found: “I think I can safely make the general comment that in present-day Israel... the Arabs are very much of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’” for the dominant Israelis – Wilson, Evan M. Jerusalem, Key to Peace. Washington: Middle East Institute, 1970. 33.
[31] John, p 68-70: “The British government was advised that ‘previous overtures to American Jewry to support the Allies had received no attention was because the approach had been to the wrong people. It was to the Zionist Jews that the British and French governments should address their parleys.’ Sir Mark Sykes was particularly weighed down by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had promised that the British would support Arab independence, insisting that it was impossible to offer Palestine to the Jews. He was told that Brandeis had just become a Supreme Court Justice, and that he had President Wilson’s ear. This began the negotiations with the Zionists.
[32] "Balfour Declaration Author Was a Secret Jew, Says Prof." JWeekly (Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco) Jan 15 (1999). Print. Accessed at http://fwd4.me/0xu4
Rubinstein, William D. "The Secret of Leopold Amery." History Today 49. Feb (1999). Print.
Online at http://fwd4.me/0xu3
Amery, who had kept his Jewish roots secret, worked for Zionism in a number of ways. A pro-Israel writer reports: “As assistant military secretary to the Secretary of State for War, Amery played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Jewish Legion, consisting of three battalions of Jewish soldiers who served, under Britain’s aegis, in Palestine during the First World War and were the forerunners of the IDF. ‘I seem to have had my finger in the pie, not only of the Balfour Declaration, but of the genesis of the present Israeli Army’, he notes proudly.
“As Dominions Secretary (1925-29) he had responsibility for the Palestine Mandate, robustly supporting the growth and development of the Yishuv – Weizman recalled Amery’s “unstinting encouragement and support” and that Amery “realized the importance of a Jewish Palestine in the British imperial scheme of things more than anyone else. He also had much insight into the intrinsic fineness of the Zionist movement”. In 1937, shortly after testifying before the Peel Commission on the future of Palestine, Amery helped to organise a dinner in tribute to the wartime Jewish Legion at which his friend Jabotinsky was guest of honour. Amery became an increasingly vociferous critic of the British government’s dilution of its commitments to the Jews of Palestine in order to appease the Arabs, and fulminated in the Commons against the notorious White Paper of 1939, which set at 75,000 the maximum number of Jews to be admitted to Palestine over the ensuing five years. ‘I have rarely risen with a greater sense of indignation and shame or made a speech which I am more content to look back upon’, he remembered. And he became an arch-critic of Chamberlain and Appeasement.”
[33] World Jewry, March 1, 1935, cited by John, p. 72.
[34] Davidson, Lawrence, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 11-12.
[35] Wilson, Evan M. Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1979. Print. p. xv.
Moshe Menuhin, scion of a distinguished Jewish family that moved to Palestine during the early days of Zionism (and father of the renowned musicians), also writes about this aspect. In addition, he states that the oft-repeated claim that the British rewarded Weizman for his “discovery of TNT” was false, quoting Weizmann’s autobiography Trial and Error, p. 271:
“For some unfathomable reason they always billed me as the inventor of TNT. It was in vain that I systematically and repeatedly denied any connection with, or interest in, TNT. No discouragement could put them off.” – Menuhin, Moshe. The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969. Print. 73-74.
[36] Deaths and injuries were 364,800: http://fwd4.me/0xu2 [accessed July 21, 2011]
[37] Wilson’s Alien and Sedition acts resulted in the jailing 1,200 American citizens:
“Walter C. Matthey of Iowa was sentenced to a year in jail for applauding an anticonscription speech. Walter Heynacher of South Dakota was sentenced to five years in Leavenworth for telling a younger man that ‘it was foolishness to send our boys over there to get killed by the thousands, all for the sake of wall Street.’...Abraham Sugarman of Sibley County, Minnesota, was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth for arguing that the draft was unconstitutional and remaking, ‘This is supposed to be a free country. Like Hell it is.’” – Kauffman, Bill. Ain't My America: the Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-imperialism. New York: Metropolitan, 2008. Print. 74.
The song “Over There” was written by George M. Cohan, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for it in 1940, when America was about to join another world war:
http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/cohan.htm
[38] Kolsky 12.
[39] While this subterfuge was used in the beginning years, the goal was to create a state, as Felix Frankfurter wrote: “ ‘I need not tell you that the phrase, ‘that Palestine be established as a Jewish Home’ was a phrase of purposeful ambiguity.” [John, p. 118]. In the Zionists’ Memorandum to the Peace Conference they stated that Palestine “shall be placed under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will ensure the establishment therein of the Jewish national home and ultimately render possible the creation of an autonomous Jewish commonwealth. [John, p. 125]
[40] John, p. 115
[41] Merkley, Paul Charles. Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2001. Print. 6.
Harry Emerson Fosdick - http://fwd4.me/0xu1
Henry Sloane Coffin http://fwd4.me/0xu0 - http://fwd4.me/0xtz - http://fwd4.me/0xty
[42] Mulhall, 76-77; John, 129; Davidson, 20.
[43] Mulhall, p 77
[44] Mulhall p. 77
[45] Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: Palestine between 1914-1979. New-York: Caravan, 1979. Print. 17-18.
[46] Mulhall, p. 79.
[47] Mulhall, 78.
[48] Grose, 88.
[49] Melvin Urofsky, cited in Mulhall, 80
[50] Mulhall, p. 80.
[51] Neff, p. 20. Grose, 94-95.
[52] Pillars, p. 20, Grose, 94-95.
[53] Pillars, 20
[54] Neff, p. 17. Tivnan, p. 30
[55] Stevens, Richard P., American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy 1942-1947. New York: Pageant Press. Inc. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970, p. 20.
[56] The article “Denying Nazi-Zionist collusion: The Sacramento Bee, Darrell Steinberg, and Islamophobia” refers to the various books that described this: http://ifamericansknew.org/media/sacbee.html
This was well known in the State Department. For example, State Dept. Near East expert Harry N. Howard states: “...there was discussion of liberalizing American immigration laws in this period. The Zionists opposed that liberalization on the ground that this would not be a solution as far as they were concerned. They wanted a political, not necessarily a humanitarian, solution --that is, they wanted a state.” - Oral History Interview with Harry N. Howard, Truman Library, Washington, D.C., June 5, 1973: http://fwd4.me/0xtx [accessed July 2011]
[57] Hadawi, 38: Citation: The Spectator (London) Magazine, 22 July 1960.
[58] Mulhall, 109.
[59] Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? 50th Anniversary ed. Haverford, PA: Infinity.com, 2004. Print. 27. Citing So Far So Good, by Morris L. Ernst (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 170-177.
[60] Mulhall, P. 109.
[61] Lilienthal, 151.
[62] Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East. London: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print. 48.
For more on Eveland see Barrett, Mary. "In Memoriam: A Respectful Dissenter: CIA's Wilbur Crane Eveland." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (1990). 28. http://fwd4.me/0xtw
[63] Naeim, Gilad. "The Jews of Iraq." The Link April-May (1998). Print. http://fwd4.me/0xtv