The History of US-Israel Relations Part One B
Descriptions of the massacres, by both Palestinians and Israelis, are nightmarish. An Israeli eyewitness reported that at the village of al-Dawayima:
“The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead....One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.” [128]
One woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife. [129]
Swiss Red Cross representative Jacques de Reynier was one of the first to arrive at the massacre of the small, neutral Palestinian village, Deir Yassin in April 1948 (before a single Arab army had joined the conflict). Author George Ball (who had been undersecretary of state under Johnson and Kennedy, and ambassador to the United Nations) writes that the representative “found 150 bodies thrown into a cistern and another 40 to 50 at one side. He counted in all 254 dead, including 145 women, of whom 35 were pregnant.” [130]
The attackers reportedly lined up families – men, women, grandparents and children, even infants – and shot them.
An eyewitness and future colonel in the Israeli military later wrote of the Irgun and Stern members:
“They didn’t know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good.” [131]
Reynier wrote in his diary that when he arrived members of the Zionist underground militia known as the Irgun, [132] were still entering houses with guns and knives. He saw one young Jewish woman carrying a blood-covered dagger, saw another stab an old couple at the doorway of their home. Reynier wrote that the scene reminded him of S.S. troops he had seen in Athens.
Richard Catling, British assistant inspector general for the criminal division, reported:
“There is... no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested.” [133]
The attack was perpetrated by two Zionist militias (whose heads, Menachem Begin and Ytzakh Shamir, were later to become Prime Ministers of Israel) and was coordinated with the main Zionist forces, whose elite unit participated in part of the operation. [134]
Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun who later became Prime Minister of Israel, sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:
“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” [135]
Approximately six months later, Begin (who had also publicly taken credit for a number of other terrorist acts, including blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had killed 91 people) came on a tour of America. The tour’s sponsors included such prominent Americans as playwright Ben Hecht, a fervent Zionist who applauded Irgun violence[cxxvi], and eventually included 11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressmen, 17 Justices, and numerous other public officials.
As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee remarked:
“Put any petition with the name Jew on it before a candidate in an election year, and you can get anyone to sign anything.” [136]
The State Department, fully aware of his violent activities in Palestine, tried to reject Begin’s visa but was overruled by Truman. [137]
Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?” Begin proclaimed, “In the Middle East? In all the world!” [138]
Terrorists set up U.S. front groups
The Irgun had been operating in the U.S. since the 1930s. As one of their leaders later wrote, “It was in Europe of those days that the idea of transferring the focal point of our activity to the United States was born, and it was from there that we left on a mission that lasted far longer than originally planned...” [139]
The “we” referred to a small group known as the Irgun Delegation that operated in the U.S. from the late 1930s until 1948 and that formed a half dozen front organizations for what they themselves called “a military operation” and that largely consisted of propaganda aimed at the American public. [140]
Two of the leaders were Yitshaq Ben-Ami (father of the founder of today’s J-Street) and “Peter Bergson,” the pseudonym of the senior Irgun officer working outside Palestine, Hillel Kook. The group is often called the Bergson Group. [141]
Among their numerous activities they lobbied Congress and the White House, organized a march on Washington, D.C. of 500 Rabbis, placed full-page ads in newspapers around the U.S., and produced a pageant “We Will Never Die!” celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Moss Hart, featuring music by Kurt Weil, and starring Edward G. Robinson.
Forty thousand attended its New York performances. It then went on to play in most of America’s largest cities. [142]
While the various organizations created by the Irgun Delegation frequently pushed for rescuing European Jews, one of the major demands was for the creation of a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” This was a goal that Revisionist Zionists had sought even before the Nazi holocaust had begun and is believed to have had a mixed agenda. Author William Rubinstein writes:
“It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, than with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.” [143]
Critics point out that the delegation did not manage to rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust. [144]
Bergson-Kook’s uncle was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, originally from Eastern Europe, who became the “Chief Rabbi of Palestine,” worked toward the Balfour Declaration in Britain, and most importantly, devised an ideology that merged a kabalistic version of religious Judaism (the Cabbala holds that every non-Jew is an embodiment of Satan) with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues today. [145]
Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated:
“The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews... is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” [146]
In addition to spanning the Jewish religious-secular continuum, the Delegation spanned the political spectrum, its historian Judith Baumel writing that it “evinced many of the unique characteristics of Eastern European protofascism” while also forming partnerships with communists and Jews who belonged to left-wing American groups.
All of this was hidden from view, however, as the “Bergson Boys” aimed for the American man in the street, using tantalizing slogans, illustrated advertisements, and “seductive curiosity-whetting gimmicks.” As Baumel notes, the Irgun Delegation’s primary triumph was to understand “the power of Madison Avenue.” [147]
Another terrorist front group, the Political Action Committee for Palestine, was formed by Rabbi Baruch Korf, who indirectly admitted that the financing of terrorism was among its activities.
In 1948 Korf published a large advertisement in the New York Post calling a State Department policy against enforcing partition “pure and simple anti-Semitism... plain everyday anti-Semitism, incorporated in the hearts and minds of those who govern free America.” [148]
Author Grant Smith, filing numerous Freedom of Information Requests, has uncovered information on numerous such illegal Zionist activities. The Truman administration, with Feinberg as a major campaign donor, failed to act on CIA reports about Feinberg and Zionist illicit arms trafficking from the US. [149]
Among these was the “Sonnenberg Institute,” named after its founder, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family from Baltimore. [150]
Sonnenberg had first met Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1919 when Sonneborn, at the behest of family friend Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, had traveled to the Versailles peace conference as secretary of a Zionist delegation and afterward gone on a tour of Palestine. [151]
In 1945 Sonnenberg and Ben Gurion hosted a meeting of 17 well-connected guests at Sonnenberg’s Manhattan penthouse. They came from Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Newark, New Haven and New York. One was a rabbi, five were lawyers, the others were highly successful businessmen.
The purpose, Ben Gurion explained, was to create a secret underground organization that would be the American arm of the Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, the Haganah. The organization was to have a representative in at least 35-40 industry groups, and in one month alone there were meetings in Memphis, Ohio, New Jersey, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Washington DC, and 40 more were scheduled. [152]
Their objective was to raise money and support “for purposes which could not be publicized or even fully disclosed.” A variety of front groups were created for military arms and equipment smuggling of everything from machine guns to B-17s. [153]
US authorities tried to stop what were not only illegal but also extremely damaging activities.
In 1948 the Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, filed a top-secret report with the Secretary of Defense about the Zionist arms trafficking. He warned:
“U.S. National security is unfavorably affected by these developments and it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the ‘implements of war.’” [154]
Author Grant Smith reports that under Truman “the role of Feinberg and Haganah operative groups active in arms trafficking within the US, like the terrorist charges, would only be lightly investigated and seldom prosecuted.”
Infiltrating displaced person’s camps in Europe to funnel people to Palestine
A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated Europe’s displaced person’s camps to orchestrate a clandestine operation to funnel people to Palestine.
When it turned out that only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a Zionist report by Rabbi Klaussner concluded that “the people must be forced to go to Palestine.”
Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that numerous means were employed, including confiscation of food rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights; in one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.” [155]
The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well-organized and well-funded operation behind this (including $25 million from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) was hidden from view.
A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy credited with the buildup for the Normany invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, publicly noted that many of the refugees were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their travels.
Morgan commented:
“The Jews seem to have an organized plan for becoming a world force, a weak force numerically, but one which will have a generating power for getting what they want.”
He was attacked viciously by the press and others; comedian Eddie Cantor took out a New York Times ad saying, “I thought Hitler was dead.”
The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgans allegation of ‘ secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine’ is... fanatically untrue.”
Morgan was forced to apologize, despite, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan’s analysis of the situation was quite correct.” [156]
The Sieff group: Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration
Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.
The Sieff group was, as historian Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis’s Parushim.”
While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel through official Washington during the last years of FDR’s presidency and the critical first years of Truman’s.
Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan, in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman. Grose reports:
“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.” [157]
When State Department and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, were about to issue a “reverse Balfour” declaration on July 27, 1943 calling on these activities to cease, the Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David Niles, Bernard Baruch, et al took emergency, and successful, action to block it. [158]
Palestinian refugees
By 1949 as a result of Israel’s “War of Independence” and its campaign to cleanse the land of as many non-Jews as possible,[159] there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:
“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster. .....Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.” [160]
The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million. U.S. Diplomats in Cairo and Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of Arab countries inundated by desperate, starving Palestinian refugees were stretched almost to the breaking point.
The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated $11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.” [161]
During this time, the report noted, “...the total direct relief offered...by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.” [162]
Meanwhile, Israel had acquired properties worth at least $480 million in 1947 dollars; one estimate put the figure at $35 billion in 1990 dollars. [163]
Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:
“In the process of 'Judaizing' Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion.
"The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.” [164]
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes. His main representative working on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.
Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:
“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife...” [165]
The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters George C. McGhee delivered the message to the Israeli ambassador and later described his response:
“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it... Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President wished to dissociated himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan.” [166]
Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-47, was the subject of an oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. As he stated when this was completed:
“The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature--one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.” [167]
Zionist influence in the media
As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success. [168]
From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position. Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news’.” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:
"The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.” [169]
At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State Marshall wrote:
“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.” [170]
Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the amount of information on this from reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.” [171]
As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:
“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” [172]
When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.
The magazine was inundated with vitriolic mail, subscriptions cancelled, and advertising withdrawn. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.” [173]
This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, they used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:
“If ‘voluntary’ compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.” [174]
Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.
“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective. The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.” [175]
Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all .[176]
When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”
In fact, Professor Burrows’ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven. [177]
When the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian, wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was begun against her as a Christian “anti-Semite.”[178]
Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East. She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail. In her memoir, she attributed such failures to "the Zionist control of the media of communication." [179]
Dorothy Thompson, played by Katharine Hepburn & Lauren Bacall
America’s most famous female journalist of the time also attempted valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to tell Americans about Palestinian refugees.
According to the Britannica encyclopedia, Dorothy Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.” [180]
Her column was in newspapers all over the country, her radio program listened to by tens of millions of Americans, she had been married to one of America’s most famous novelists, graced the cover of Time magazine, been profiled by America’s top magazines and was so well-known that “Woman of the Year,” a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on Thompson. [181]
She had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then after the war had visited the region in person. She began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight [182], and condemned Jewish terrorism.
Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.” She wrote of this organized attack:
“...when letter after letter is couched in almost identical phraseology I do not think the authors have been gifted with telepathy.” [183]
She was dropped by the New York Post, whose editor Ted Thackry, and his wife, Dorothy Schiff, were said by other Post editors to be close to the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Begin, the Irgunists, the Stern Gang and other Zionists organizations had what was termed “inordinate access” to the Post’s editorial board. [184]
(Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff and owner of the Post, later divorced Thackry and married Rudolf Sonneborn. [185])
Thompson’s mail was filled with ferocious accusations that she was “anti-Semitic.” One such correspondent told her that her “filthy incitements to porgroms” would not be tolerated by New York’s Jews. [186]
Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.
In the coming decades other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, lives and careers destroyed; history distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.
Very few people know this history.
The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, even those who focus on the Middle East. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.
George Orwell once wrote: “'Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'.” [187]
Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and save the future.
[128] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.
[129] Mulhall, p. 153.
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a number of others wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning this and other actions by Begin and his group. The letter, which was published December 4, 1948, provides considerable information on the situation: http://fwd4.me/0xuW
[130] The Passionate Attachment, America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, pp. 28-29.
[131] McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” McGowan, Daniel A., and Marc H. Ellis. Remembering Deir Yassin: the Future of Israel and Palestine. New York: Olive Branch, 1998. Print. 35-46.
Israeli military historian Col Pa’il, who was then a member of the Haganah, was there as an observer to evaluate the fighting ability of the Irgun and Stern Gang.
[132] Irgun Zevai Leumi, normally just called the Irgun. While this is often portrayed as a small, rogue element within the Zionist underground, it’s interesting to note that it had units in 23 countries worldwide (including in the U.S.), engaged in fund-raising, recruiting, hiring, training, purchasing, and shipping operations.” Green, p. 47.
[133] Mulhall, 153.
See also Sheila Cassidy, “Assault and Massacre.” Remembering Deir Yassin. Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis. 47-49.
From the same book see also Pat McDonnel Twair, “The Surviving Children of Deir Yassin” 50-51. Survivor testimonies can be read at http://www.deiryassin.org/survivors.html [accessed July 21, 2011]
e.g.: Ms. Haleem Eid stated: "A man [shot] a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife."
[134] Menachem Begin, who became prime minister in 1977, was head of the Irgun; Yitzhak Shamir, who was elected Prime Minister in 1983, was a head of the Stern Gang. Neither was at Deir Yassin personally. The attack was coordinated ahead of time with the Haganah, which thereby broke an agreement that had been made with the mayor of Deir Yassin in which both sides had agreed that neither would fire against the other. The Haganah’s Palmach unit took part in the attack, but reportedly left before the worst of the massacre.
–McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” Remembering Deir Yassin, 35-46.
[135] Ball, p. 29.
Author Kathleen Christison notes that when Begin became Prime Minister, for the U.S. media “it became generally unacceptable to use the word [terrorist] with respect to either Begin or his successor Yitzhak Shamir, whose pre-state underground organization, the Stern Gang, had also committed acts of terrorism.” – Perceptions of Palestine, 172
Shamir had approved the pre-Israel assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish Count who had helped rescue thousands of Jews from the Nazis. He had also ordered the assassination of a top British official, Lord Moyne.
See Kati Marton's book on the assassination of Bernadotte, A Death in Jerusalem. In 1991 some of the assassins regaled the audience of a live TV broadcast with details about how they killed Benadotte "to the appreciative laughter" of the studio audience (Marton, 257). Shamir was the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. His adopted name "Shamir" in Hebrew "means either a particularly hard rock or, according to legend, a tiny worm that broke up rocks for the construction of the Temple." (Marton 102)
[136] Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 79
[137] In response to the bombing of the King David Hotel, Hecht wrote: “Every time you let go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” - Lilienthal, What Price Israel? 33.
The bombing killed 41 Palestinians, 28 British, and 17 Jews. - Neff, Pillars, 40.
[138] Howe, Russell Warren. “Fighting the ‘Soldiers of Occupation’ From WWII to the Intifada.” Curtiss, Richard H., and Janet McMahon. Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997. Print. 38-39.
[139] Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. The "Bergson Boys" and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005. Print. 1. The speaker is Alexander Rafaeli. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xuV [accessed July 2011]
[140] Baumel, 1.
[141] The group was close to Jabotinsky and included his nephew
Baumel, p.8.
Medoff, Rafael. "The Bergson Group vs. The Holocaust – and Jewish Leaders vs. Bergson." The Jewish Press June 6 (2007).
http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/21747 [accessed July 2011].
Among the groups they formed were “American League for a Free Palestine,” “Hebrew Committee for National Liberation,” and “the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry", often with a dual message: demanding the rescue of European Jews and the opening up of Palestine to Jewish immigration. Most Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations opposed the Bergson group, but it managed to enlist a number of prominent Americans, from Ben Hecht to Eleanor Roosevelt. http://fwd4.me/0xuU [accessed July 23, 2011]
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states:
“Bergson's primary assignment in the United States was to mobilize support for the IZL and for the creation of Jewish military units, and, later to gather support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Bergson set out to accomplish these tasks by creating a series of interlocking organizations, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the American League for a Free Palestine, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation. Supporters of these organizations included Harry Truman, Dorothy Parker, Herbert Hoover, Will Rogers, Jr., Labor leader William Green, U.S. Solicitor General Fowler Harper, and U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.”
-- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Peter Bergson.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007041. Accessed July, 2011:
[142] Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. 97.
[143] Rubinstein, Myth, 98.
[144] Baumel, p. 261. See also Rubinstein, Myth, 98.
[145] "Time Line for Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (1865-1935)." Rabbi Kook on Weekly Torah Portion (Parsha), Jewish Holidays and Psalms (Tehillim). Web. July 2011. http://www.ravkooktorah.org/timeline.htm.
Shahak, Israël, and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London: Pluto, 1999. Print. ix, xiii, 55-69.
Professors Shahak and Mezvinski emphasize the writings in English intentionally obscure many facts. “The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according to the Cabbala is every non-Jew, has been minimized or not mentioned by authors who have not written about the Cabbala in Hebrew.” (p. 58)
“According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
Dr. Israel Shahak, was a holocaust survivor and, until his death in 2001, a highly regarded Israeli professor of biochemistry; Dr. Norton Mezvinsky was a professor of history (now retired) who in 2002 was named by the Connecticut State University Board of Trustees an official "Connecticut State University Professor...a signal honor, reserved for faculty members who fulfill the highest ideals of outstanding teaching, scholarly achievement and public service."
Another book on this subject matter is Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years. London [etc]: Pluto, 1997. Print., which can be read at: http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html
[146] Shahak & Mezvinsky, ix.
Brownfeld, Allan. C. "Book Review: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (2000): 105-06. Print.
[147] Baumel, 258-259.
[148] Stevens, 192.
[149] Smith, Grant F. Declassified Deceptions: the Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007. Print. 34.
"The Israel Lobby Archive." Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy: http://irmep.org/ILA/default.asp
Ball, p. 24: “This weapons smuggling and other Zionist preparations for war were well-known to British and American analysts, who knew from the beginning that the Arabs would be certain losers in a war with Zionists, whose well-trained and armed combatants would outnumber the Arabs’ similar combatants by at least four to one. Analysts were also aware that the Zionists planned to expand beyond the partition allotment.”
[150] Slater, Leonard, The Pledge, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. P. 21-23.
[151] Slater, p. 94-123.
[152] Slater, p. 124.
Smith, Grant. Chapter 4.
[153] Smith, Grant, p. 63.
[154] Smith, 37.
[155] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 148-150.
[156] Grose, 207-210
[157] Grose,177
[158] Grose, 178-182.
[159] For details, see The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, and Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, by Rosemarie M. Esber
[160] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.
[161] Neff, Pillars, p. 69. Transjordan’s entire government budget at the time was only $5 million.
[162] Neff, Pillars, p. 69.
[163] Neff, Pillars, p. 72.
[164] Strindberg, Anders. "Forgotten Christians." American Conservative May 24 (2004). Print. Online at: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2004/may/24/00013/
[165] Neff, Pillars, p. 75.
[166] Neff, Pillars, pp. 76-77. Citation: George McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World: Adventures in Diplomacy (New York: Harper & Row), 1983) p. 37.
[167] Oral History Interview by Richard D. McKinzie for the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum with Edwin M. Wright. General staff G-2 Middle East specialist, Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, advisor on intelligence 1950-55. The interview was conducted in Wooster, Ohio on July 26, 1974. On April 3, 1977 Wright added a letter and footnotes to the interview. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm [Accessed July 21, 2011]
[168] Stevens, p. 207.
[169] Christison, p. 40
[170] Neff, Pillars, 67.
[171] Neff, Pillars, 73.
[172] Lilienthal, Price, p. 94.
[173] Lilienthal, Price, 103.
[174] Lilienthal, Price, 94
[175] Christison, 81.
[176] Lilienthal, p. 97.
[177] Lilienthal, pp. 97-98
[178] Berger, pp. 35-38.
Dean Gildersleeve, a Protestant Christian, had been the only woman member of the U.S. UN delegation in San Francisco. For more information on her see: http://www.vgif.org/a_vg.shtml
[179] Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron. Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Print. p. 412.
[180] "Dorothy Thompson." Encylopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. http://fwd4.me/0xuS
[181] The information from this section comes largely from American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, by Peter Kurth; Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in her Time, by Marion K Sanders; Personal History, by Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy & Red (Dorothy Thompson & Sinclair Lewis), by Vincent Sheean.
[182] “Sands of Sorrow” by Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, 1950. View online
Descriptions of the massacres, by both Palestinians and Israelis, are nightmarish. An Israeli eyewitness reported that at the village of al-Dawayima:
“The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead....One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.” [128]
One woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife. [129]
Swiss Red Cross representative Jacques de Reynier was one of the first to arrive at the massacre of the small, neutral Palestinian village, Deir Yassin in April 1948 (before a single Arab army had joined the conflict). Author George Ball (who had been undersecretary of state under Johnson and Kennedy, and ambassador to the United Nations) writes that the representative “found 150 bodies thrown into a cistern and another 40 to 50 at one side. He counted in all 254 dead, including 145 women, of whom 35 were pregnant.” [130]
The attackers reportedly lined up families – men, women, grandparents and children, even infants – and shot them.
An eyewitness and future colonel in the Israeli military later wrote of the Irgun and Stern members:
“They didn’t know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good.” [131]
Reynier wrote in his diary that when he arrived members of the Zionist underground militia known as the Irgun, [132] were still entering houses with guns and knives. He saw one young Jewish woman carrying a blood-covered dagger, saw another stab an old couple at the doorway of their home. Reynier wrote that the scene reminded him of S.S. troops he had seen in Athens.
Richard Catling, British assistant inspector general for the criminal division, reported:
“There is... no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested.” [133]
The attack was perpetrated by two Zionist militias (whose heads, Menachem Begin and Ytzakh Shamir, were later to become Prime Ministers of Israel) and was coordinated with the main Zionist forces, whose elite unit participated in part of the operation. [134]
Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun who later became Prime Minister of Israel, sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:
“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.” [135]
Approximately six months later, Begin (who had also publicly taken credit for a number of other terrorist acts, including blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had killed 91 people) came on a tour of America. The tour’s sponsors included such prominent Americans as playwright Ben Hecht, a fervent Zionist who applauded Irgun violence[cxxvi], and eventually included 11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressmen, 17 Justices, and numerous other public officials.
As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee remarked:
“Put any petition with the name Jew on it before a candidate in an election year, and you can get anyone to sign anything.” [136]
The State Department, fully aware of his violent activities in Palestine, tried to reject Begin’s visa but was overruled by Truman. [137]
Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?” Begin proclaimed, “In the Middle East? In all the world!” [138]
Terrorists set up U.S. front groups
The Irgun had been operating in the U.S. since the 1930s. As one of their leaders later wrote, “It was in Europe of those days that the idea of transferring the focal point of our activity to the United States was born, and it was from there that we left on a mission that lasted far longer than originally planned...” [139]
The “we” referred to a small group known as the Irgun Delegation that operated in the U.S. from the late 1930s until 1948 and that formed a half dozen front organizations for what they themselves called “a military operation” and that largely consisted of propaganda aimed at the American public. [140]
Two of the leaders were Yitshaq Ben-Ami (father of the founder of today’s J-Street) and “Peter Bergson,” the pseudonym of the senior Irgun officer working outside Palestine, Hillel Kook. The group is often called the Bergson Group. [141]
Among their numerous activities they lobbied Congress and the White House, organized a march on Washington, D.C. of 500 Rabbis, placed full-page ads in newspapers around the U.S., and produced a pageant “We Will Never Die!” celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Moss Hart, featuring music by Kurt Weil, and starring Edward G. Robinson.
Forty thousand attended its New York performances. It then went on to play in most of America’s largest cities. [142]
While the various organizations created by the Irgun Delegation frequently pushed for rescuing European Jews, one of the major demands was for the creation of a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” This was a goal that Revisionist Zionists had sought even before the Nazi holocaust had begun and is believed to have had a mixed agenda. Author William Rubinstein writes:
“It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, than with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.” [143]
Critics point out that the delegation did not manage to rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust. [144]
Bergson-Kook’s uncle was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, originally from Eastern Europe, who became the “Chief Rabbi of Palestine,” worked toward the Balfour Declaration in Britain, and most importantly, devised an ideology that merged a kabalistic version of religious Judaism (the Cabbala holds that every non-Jew is an embodiment of Satan) with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues today. [145]
Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated:
“The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews... is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” [146]
In addition to spanning the Jewish religious-secular continuum, the Delegation spanned the political spectrum, its historian Judith Baumel writing that it “evinced many of the unique characteristics of Eastern European protofascism” while also forming partnerships with communists and Jews who belonged to left-wing American groups.
All of this was hidden from view, however, as the “Bergson Boys” aimed for the American man in the street, using tantalizing slogans, illustrated advertisements, and “seductive curiosity-whetting gimmicks.” As Baumel notes, the Irgun Delegation’s primary triumph was to understand “the power of Madison Avenue.” [147]
Another terrorist front group, the Political Action Committee for Palestine, was formed by Rabbi Baruch Korf, who indirectly admitted that the financing of terrorism was among its activities.
In 1948 Korf published a large advertisement in the New York Post calling a State Department policy against enforcing partition “pure and simple anti-Semitism... plain everyday anti-Semitism, incorporated in the hearts and minds of those who govern free America.” [148]
Author Grant Smith, filing numerous Freedom of Information Requests, has uncovered information on numerous such illegal Zionist activities. The Truman administration, with Feinberg as a major campaign donor, failed to act on CIA reports about Feinberg and Zionist illicit arms trafficking from the US. [149]
Among these was the “Sonnenberg Institute,” named after its founder, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family from Baltimore. [150]
Sonnenberg had first met Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1919 when Sonneborn, at the behest of family friend Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, had traveled to the Versailles peace conference as secretary of a Zionist delegation and afterward gone on a tour of Palestine. [151]
In 1945 Sonnenberg and Ben Gurion hosted a meeting of 17 well-connected guests at Sonnenberg’s Manhattan penthouse. They came from Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Newark, New Haven and New York. One was a rabbi, five were lawyers, the others were highly successful businessmen.
The purpose, Ben Gurion explained, was to create a secret underground organization that would be the American arm of the Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, the Haganah. The organization was to have a representative in at least 35-40 industry groups, and in one month alone there were meetings in Memphis, Ohio, New Jersey, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Washington DC, and 40 more were scheduled. [152]
Their objective was to raise money and support “for purposes which could not be publicized or even fully disclosed.” A variety of front groups were created for military arms and equipment smuggling of everything from machine guns to B-17s. [153]
US authorities tried to stop what were not only illegal but also extremely damaging activities.
In 1948 the Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, filed a top-secret report with the Secretary of Defense about the Zionist arms trafficking. He warned:
“U.S. National security is unfavorably affected by these developments and it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the ‘implements of war.’” [154]
Author Grant Smith reports that under Truman “the role of Feinberg and Haganah operative groups active in arms trafficking within the US, like the terrorist charges, would only be lightly investigated and seldom prosecuted.”
Infiltrating displaced person’s camps in Europe to funnel people to Palestine
A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated Europe’s displaced person’s camps to orchestrate a clandestine operation to funnel people to Palestine.
When it turned out that only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a Zionist report by Rabbi Klaussner concluded that “the people must be forced to go to Palestine.”
Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that numerous means were employed, including confiscation of food rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights; in one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.” [155]
The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well-organized and well-funded operation behind this (including $25 million from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) was hidden from view.
A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy credited with the buildup for the Normany invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, publicly noted that many of the refugees were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their travels.
Morgan commented:
“The Jews seem to have an organized plan for becoming a world force, a weak force numerically, but one which will have a generating power for getting what they want.”
He was attacked viciously by the press and others; comedian Eddie Cantor took out a New York Times ad saying, “I thought Hitler was dead.”
The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgans allegation of ‘ secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine’ is... fanatically untrue.”
Morgan was forced to apologize, despite, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan’s analysis of the situation was quite correct.” [156]
The Sieff group: Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration
Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.
The Sieff group was, as historian Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis’s Parushim.”
While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel through official Washington during the last years of FDR’s presidency and the critical first years of Truman’s.
Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan, in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman. Grose reports:
“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.” [157]
When State Department and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, were about to issue a “reverse Balfour” declaration on July 27, 1943 calling on these activities to cease, the Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David Niles, Bernard Baruch, et al took emergency, and successful, action to block it. [158]
Palestinian refugees
By 1949 as a result of Israel’s “War of Independence” and its campaign to cleanse the land of as many non-Jews as possible,[159] there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:
“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster. .....Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.” [160]
The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million. U.S. Diplomats in Cairo and Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of Arab countries inundated by desperate, starving Palestinian refugees were stretched almost to the breaking point.
The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated $11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.” [161]
During this time, the report noted, “...the total direct relief offered...by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.” [162]
Meanwhile, Israel had acquired properties worth at least $480 million in 1947 dollars; one estimate put the figure at $35 billion in 1990 dollars. [163]
Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:
“In the process of 'Judaizing' Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion.
"The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.” [164]
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes. His main representative working on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.
Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:
“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife...” [165]
The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters George C. McGhee delivered the message to the Israeli ambassador and later described his response:
“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it... Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President wished to dissociated himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan.” [166]
Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-47, was the subject of an oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. As he stated when this was completed:
“The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature--one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.” [167]
Zionist influence in the media
As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success. [168]
From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position. Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news’.” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:
"The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.” [169]
At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State Marshall wrote:
“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.” [170]
Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the amount of information on this from reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.” [171]
As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:
“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” [172]
When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.
The magazine was inundated with vitriolic mail, subscriptions cancelled, and advertising withdrawn. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.” [173]
This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, they used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:
“If ‘voluntary’ compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.” [174]
Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.
“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective. The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.” [175]
Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all .[176]
When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”
In fact, Professor Burrows’ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven. [177]
When the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian, wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was begun against her as a Christian “anti-Semite.”[178]
Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East. She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail. In her memoir, she attributed such failures to "the Zionist control of the media of communication." [179]
Dorothy Thompson, played by Katharine Hepburn & Lauren Bacall
America’s most famous female journalist of the time also attempted valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to tell Americans about Palestinian refugees.
According to the Britannica encyclopedia, Dorothy Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.” [180]
Her column was in newspapers all over the country, her radio program listened to by tens of millions of Americans, she had been married to one of America’s most famous novelists, graced the cover of Time magazine, been profiled by America’s top magazines and was so well-known that “Woman of the Year,” a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on Thompson. [181]
She had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then after the war had visited the region in person. She began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight [182], and condemned Jewish terrorism.
Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.” She wrote of this organized attack:
“...when letter after letter is couched in almost identical phraseology I do not think the authors have been gifted with telepathy.” [183]
She was dropped by the New York Post, whose editor Ted Thackry, and his wife, Dorothy Schiff, were said by other Post editors to be close to the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Begin, the Irgunists, the Stern Gang and other Zionists organizations had what was termed “inordinate access” to the Post’s editorial board. [184]
(Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff and owner of the Post, later divorced Thackry and married Rudolf Sonneborn. [185])
Thompson’s mail was filled with ferocious accusations that she was “anti-Semitic.” One such correspondent told her that her “filthy incitements to porgroms” would not be tolerated by New York’s Jews. [186]
Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.
In the coming decades other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, lives and careers destroyed; history distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.
Very few people know this history.
The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, even those who focus on the Middle East. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.
George Orwell once wrote: “'Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'.” [187]
Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and save the future.
[128] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.
[129] Mulhall, p. 153.
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a number of others wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning this and other actions by Begin and his group. The letter, which was published December 4, 1948, provides considerable information on the situation: http://fwd4.me/0xuW
[130] The Passionate Attachment, America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, pp. 28-29.
[131] McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” McGowan, Daniel A., and Marc H. Ellis. Remembering Deir Yassin: the Future of Israel and Palestine. New York: Olive Branch, 1998. Print. 35-46.
Israeli military historian Col Pa’il, who was then a member of the Haganah, was there as an observer to evaluate the fighting ability of the Irgun and Stern Gang.
[132] Irgun Zevai Leumi, normally just called the Irgun. While this is often portrayed as a small, rogue element within the Zionist underground, it’s interesting to note that it had units in 23 countries worldwide (including in the U.S.), engaged in fund-raising, recruiting, hiring, training, purchasing, and shipping operations.” Green, p. 47.
[133] Mulhall, 153.
See also Sheila Cassidy, “Assault and Massacre.” Remembering Deir Yassin. Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis. 47-49.
From the same book see also Pat McDonnel Twair, “The Surviving Children of Deir Yassin” 50-51. Survivor testimonies can be read at http://www.deiryassin.org/survivors.html [accessed July 21, 2011]
e.g.: Ms. Haleem Eid stated: "A man [shot] a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife."
[134] Menachem Begin, who became prime minister in 1977, was head of the Irgun; Yitzhak Shamir, who was elected Prime Minister in 1983, was a head of the Stern Gang. Neither was at Deir Yassin personally. The attack was coordinated ahead of time with the Haganah, which thereby broke an agreement that had been made with the mayor of Deir Yassin in which both sides had agreed that neither would fire against the other. The Haganah’s Palmach unit took part in the attack, but reportedly left before the worst of the massacre.
–McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” Remembering Deir Yassin, 35-46.
[135] Ball, p. 29.
Author Kathleen Christison notes that when Begin became Prime Minister, for the U.S. media “it became generally unacceptable to use the word [terrorist] with respect to either Begin or his successor Yitzhak Shamir, whose pre-state underground organization, the Stern Gang, had also committed acts of terrorism.” – Perceptions of Palestine, 172
Shamir had approved the pre-Israel assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish Count who had helped rescue thousands of Jews from the Nazis. He had also ordered the assassination of a top British official, Lord Moyne.
See Kati Marton's book on the assassination of Bernadotte, A Death in Jerusalem. In 1991 some of the assassins regaled the audience of a live TV broadcast with details about how they killed Benadotte "to the appreciative laughter" of the studio audience (Marton, 257). Shamir was the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. His adopted name "Shamir" in Hebrew "means either a particularly hard rock or, according to legend, a tiny worm that broke up rocks for the construction of the Temple." (Marton 102)
[136] Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 79
[137] In response to the bombing of the King David Hotel, Hecht wrote: “Every time you let go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” - Lilienthal, What Price Israel? 33.
The bombing killed 41 Palestinians, 28 British, and 17 Jews. - Neff, Pillars, 40.
[138] Howe, Russell Warren. “Fighting the ‘Soldiers of Occupation’ From WWII to the Intifada.” Curtiss, Richard H., and Janet McMahon. Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997. Print. 38-39.
[139] Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. The "Bergson Boys" and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005. Print. 1. The speaker is Alexander Rafaeli. Online at http://fwd4.me/0xuV [accessed July 2011]
[140] Baumel, 1.
[141] The group was close to Jabotinsky and included his nephew
Baumel, p.8.
Medoff, Rafael. "The Bergson Group vs. The Holocaust – and Jewish Leaders vs. Bergson." The Jewish Press June 6 (2007).
http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/21747 [accessed July 2011].
Among the groups they formed were “American League for a Free Palestine,” “Hebrew Committee for National Liberation,” and “the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry", often with a dual message: demanding the rescue of European Jews and the opening up of Palestine to Jewish immigration. Most Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations opposed the Bergson group, but it managed to enlist a number of prominent Americans, from Ben Hecht to Eleanor Roosevelt. http://fwd4.me/0xuU [accessed July 23, 2011]
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states:
“Bergson's primary assignment in the United States was to mobilize support for the IZL and for the creation of Jewish military units, and, later to gather support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Bergson set out to accomplish these tasks by creating a series of interlocking organizations, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the American League for a Free Palestine, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation. Supporters of these organizations included Harry Truman, Dorothy Parker, Herbert Hoover, Will Rogers, Jr., Labor leader William Green, U.S. Solicitor General Fowler Harper, and U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.”
-- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Peter Bergson.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007041. Accessed July, 2011:
[142] Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. 97.
[143] Rubinstein, Myth, 98.
[144] Baumel, p. 261. See also Rubinstein, Myth, 98.
[145] "Time Line for Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (1865-1935)." Rabbi Kook on Weekly Torah Portion (Parsha), Jewish Holidays and Psalms (Tehillim). Web. July 2011. http://www.ravkooktorah.org/timeline.htm.
Shahak, Israël, and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London: Pluto, 1999. Print. ix, xiii, 55-69.
Professors Shahak and Mezvinski emphasize the writings in English intentionally obscure many facts. “The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according to the Cabbala is every non-Jew, has been minimized or not mentioned by authors who have not written about the Cabbala in Hebrew.” (p. 58)
“According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
Dr. Israel Shahak, was a holocaust survivor and, until his death in 2001, a highly regarded Israeli professor of biochemistry; Dr. Norton Mezvinsky was a professor of history (now retired) who in 2002 was named by the Connecticut State University Board of Trustees an official "Connecticut State University Professor...a signal honor, reserved for faculty members who fulfill the highest ideals of outstanding teaching, scholarly achievement and public service."
Another book on this subject matter is Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years. London [etc]: Pluto, 1997. Print., which can be read at: http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html
[146] Shahak & Mezvinsky, ix.
Brownfeld, Allan. C. "Book Review: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (2000): 105-06. Print.
[147] Baumel, 258-259.
[148] Stevens, 192.
[149] Smith, Grant F. Declassified Deceptions: the Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007. Print. 34.
"The Israel Lobby Archive." Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy: http://irmep.org/ILA/default.asp
Ball, p. 24: “This weapons smuggling and other Zionist preparations for war were well-known to British and American analysts, who knew from the beginning that the Arabs would be certain losers in a war with Zionists, whose well-trained and armed combatants would outnumber the Arabs’ similar combatants by at least four to one. Analysts were also aware that the Zionists planned to expand beyond the partition allotment.”
[150] Slater, Leonard, The Pledge, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. P. 21-23.
[151] Slater, p. 94-123.
[152] Slater, p. 124.
Smith, Grant. Chapter 4.
[153] Smith, Grant, p. 63.
[154] Smith, 37.
[155] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 148-150.
[156] Grose, 207-210
[157] Grose,177
[158] Grose, 178-182.
[159] For details, see The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, and Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, by Rosemarie M. Esber
[160] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.
[161] Neff, Pillars, p. 69. Transjordan’s entire government budget at the time was only $5 million.
[162] Neff, Pillars, p. 69.
[163] Neff, Pillars, p. 72.
[164] Strindberg, Anders. "Forgotten Christians." American Conservative May 24 (2004). Print. Online at: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2004/may/24/00013/
[165] Neff, Pillars, p. 75.
[166] Neff, Pillars, pp. 76-77. Citation: George McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World: Adventures in Diplomacy (New York: Harper & Row), 1983) p. 37.
[167] Oral History Interview by Richard D. McKinzie for the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum with Edwin M. Wright. General staff G-2 Middle East specialist, Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, advisor on intelligence 1950-55. The interview was conducted in Wooster, Ohio on July 26, 1974. On April 3, 1977 Wright added a letter and footnotes to the interview. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm [Accessed July 21, 2011]
[168] Stevens, p. 207.
[169] Christison, p. 40
[170] Neff, Pillars, 67.
[171] Neff, Pillars, 73.
[172] Lilienthal, Price, p. 94.
[173] Lilienthal, Price, 103.
[174] Lilienthal, Price, 94
[175] Christison, 81.
[176] Lilienthal, p. 97.
[177] Lilienthal, pp. 97-98
[178] Berger, pp. 35-38.
Dean Gildersleeve, a Protestant Christian, had been the only woman member of the U.S. UN delegation in San Francisco. For more information on her see: http://www.vgif.org/a_vg.shtml
[179] Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron. Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Print. p. 412.
[180] "Dorothy Thompson." Encylopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. http://fwd4.me/0xuS
[181] The information from this section comes largely from American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, by Peter Kurth; Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in her Time, by Marion K Sanders; Personal History, by Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy & Red (Dorothy Thompson & Sinclair Lewis), by Vincent Sheean.
[182] “Sands of Sorrow” by Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, 1950. View online
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Also available at http://fwd4.me/0xuR
[183] Kurth, 384 [184] Kurth, 384. “The Press: Free Speech for the Boss,” Time, Nov. 17, 1958. Online at: http://fwd4.me/0xuQ [186] Kurth, 383. [187] Nineten Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Interestingly, a biographer states: “In his last years, unlike several of his |
comrades around Tribune, Orwell had little sympathy with Zionism and opposed the creation of the state of Israel, as attested by his friend and Tribune colleague Tosco Fyvel in his book George Orwell: A Personal Memoir.” http://fwd4.me/0xuP
Another discussion is here
Another discussion is here