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THINK-ISRAEL |
"A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place
or period is the pursuit of governments of policies contrary to their
own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of
government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere,
wisdom which may be available information, is less operative and more
frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often
act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interests
suggest? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to
function?"
—Barbara W. Tuchman, The March Of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
If one were to capture the entire period of the given discourse on Israel's history in one word, that word would be "betrayal". Upon reflection, excerpts from The Secret War Against the Jews — How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People by John Loftus and Mark Aarons serves to provide a suitable introduction.
According to Loftus and Aarons, the major powers of the world have repeatedly planned covert operations to bring about the partial or total destruction of Israel. They add to this their thesis that the secret bias of Western governments against the Jews was and is the single largest obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Presented is a shameful history of racism, greed, and secret betrayal that is so sickening that it will be difficult for many Western readers to accept. For more than twenty centuries, the Jewish people, more than any other segment of humanity, have been persecuted, uprooted and annihilated. The period stretching from the end of World War I to just after the end of World War II, was characterized by three very evil men: Jack Philby, a British spy; Ibn Saud, his Arab protégé; and Allen Dulles, an American spy and Wall Street lawyer specializing in international finance. Between them, these three men built the very foundations of the modern Middle East. They were the architects of the oil weapon, the instigators of war, and the manipulators of history. Philby's and Ibn Saud's political and philosophical allegiance was to Nazi Germany, while much of Dulles's profits came from the same source.
Thanks to Jack Philby, the Americans quickly learnt that a good dose of old fashioned anti-Semitism did not go astray in Jidda. He established a relationship with Eichman in the mid-1930's from whom he learnt how to ransom the Jews for profit. In the early days of the Third Reich, there was no formal plan for genocide — only the outlines of anti-Semitic philosophy spelled out in Mein Kampf. Hitler was content to make living conditions so deplorable in Germany that the Jews would choose to immigrate, leaving all their wealth behind. After 1934 most of those with money or influence wanted to immigrate, but few countries would take in more than a handful. Eichman had to find someplace for the Jews to go to. His original idea was to send them all to Palestine. This turned out to be a disaster since the last thing the Arabs wanted was more Jews.
It was no secret that Ibn Saud had more than a little sympathy for the German position on the Zionist issue. His extreme anti-Jewish feelings were made clear to a British diplomat in 1937. The king said his "hatred for the Jews" stemmed from "their persecution and rejection" of Christ and "their subsequent rejection" of Mohammed. Ibn Saud added that "for a Muslim to kill a Jew [in war], or for him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him an immediate entry in heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty.
In April 1943, while the Holocaust was in full operation, British and American officials meeting at a conference in Bermuda decided that nothing should be done about it, ruling out all plans for mass rescue. Both the British Foreign Office and the US State Department were afraid that the Third Reich would be quite willing, indeed eager, to stop the gas chambers, empty the concentration camps, and let hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jewish survivors emigrate to freedom in the West. The former "revealed in confidence" to the latter its fear that Hitler might permit a mass exodus; confirming the reality that not a single Allied nation wanted to have the Jews settle in their respective country. Apparently, the Jews were expendable to the Allied war effort! After the war, Marshall of the RAF Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris declared "that a rescue plan was perfectly feasible, but I was never asked to undertake it".
On February 1945, just before he died, President Roosevelt personally met Ibn Saud. Much to the shock of Roosevelt, Ibn Saud reminded him that Palestine had already taken "its fair share of refugees from Europe". Apparently, the choice for the US was one of assisting the Jews to move to Palestine or it could enjoy Saudi Arabia's oil, but not both. Roosevelt made the choice by stating that he "would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people".
At this juncture, further insights into the relationship of the World of Islam and the impact of the Nazis on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem are instructive. To this end, two powerful and important books serve as a useful reference. Jihad And Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism And The Roots Of 9/11 illustrates the continuing influence of Nazi ideas on Islamists. Tracing the influence of European fascism on the Arab and Islamic world this book makes a major contribution to the understanding of radical Islamism. The author, Matthias Kuntzel, drawing extensively on German language sources, analyses the close relationship that began in the 1930's between Nazi leaders and Muslim extremists, especially the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Mufti of Jerusalem. This book provides compelling documentation of the Nazi roots of what became Islamo-fascism and jihadist terror. It provides in historical detail how the Muslim Brotherhood has consistently placed the hatred of Jews at the center of its ideology and policies through an incendiary rhetoric that interweaves passages from the Koran hostile to Jews with elements of Nazi style world conspiracy theories. It further demonstrates how ancient prejudice and modern fantasies have become a deadly combination.
Kuntzel also explains a phenomenon seldom appreciated in that the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 has resulted in a shift of the center of global Anti-Semitism to the Arab world, laying the foundation for radical Islamist currents in and around the Muslim Brotherhood and more recent terrorist organizations.
The author convincingly shows that Anti-Semitism is not simply a supplementary feature of modern Jihadism, and most definitely not an afterthought, but its defining ideological core. This hatred extends far beyond questions of Zionism and Israel as once emphasized by Martin Luther King. For Islamism, not only is everything Jewish evil, but every evil is Jewish, as the writings of Sayyid Qutb and the Charter of Hamas clearly explain to those willing to read them. It was this Jew-hatred that fueled the Jihad of the 9/11 terrorists [http://www.Think-Israel.org/kuntzel.jewhatejihad.html, September-October 2007].
Nazi Propaganda For The Arab World by Jeffrey Herf focuses on an earlier time, the 1930's-40, and the major effort to by Hitler and his minions to transmit their ideas to the Middle East. The author focuses on summary accounts of Nazi shortwave radio broadcasts in the Arabic language that were generated over 3 years by the US Embassy in Cairo. These detailed broadcasts focused on the pursuit of 2 themes; stopping Zionism and promoting Islamism. As such, it concerned itself with a sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Palestine was the key according to these broadcasts. Flattering Arabs and extending Hitler's grand theory that Jews wanted to take over Arab counties and eventually the whole world, it alleged that [a] Allied powers being pawns in a Zionist conspiracy, and [b] Germany was leading the resistance to them.
While Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had both been translated into Arabic by the 1930's, the Nazis quoted the Koran instead, working to convince their Muslim audience that Islam called on them to eliminate the Jews. The Nazis attempted to turn Arab rage to the issue of British Mandatory Palestine, claiming that efforts to create a modern Jewish state were part of a widespread Jewish effort to "rule the whole world". Ideas the Nazis helped spread in the Middle East have had an enduring legacy. They built on existing prejudice against Jews to transform it into something far more paranoid and murderous.
IN CHAPTER 3 of his much acclaimed book, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, Samuel [Shmuel] Katz, distinguished author, member of the high command of the Irgun and member of the first Knesset of Israel, discusses the origin of the dispute between the Arabs and Israel. He notes that it is impossible and, indeed pointless and misleading to explain, or trace the development of Arab hostility to Zionism and the origins of Arab claims in Palestine without examining the policy of the British rulers of the country between 1919 and 1948.
On December 2, 1917, Lord Robert Cecil said at a large public meeting in London: "The keynote of our meeting this afternoon is liberation. Our wish is that the Arabian countries shall be for the Arabs, Armenia for the Armenians and Judea for the Jews." Indeed, at that time there was acknowledgement for the Zionist assistance to the Arabs and the British in the major diplomatic campaign both at the Paris Peace Conference and in Washington. In a letter to Felix Frankfurter on March 3, 1919, the Emir Faisal stated: "Dr. Weizmann has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness." Further, his letter wished the Jews a most hearty welcome home and confirmed the Zionist proposals to be moderate and proper while considering differences between the parties as not being questions of principle. Rather they were matters of detail, readily adjusted by mutual good will in working together for a reformed and revived Near East. On September 19, of the same year, the London Times, in those days a leading voice for the British government called for the inclusion of eastern Palestine as essential to the Jewish state and urged a "good military frontier" for Palestine to the east of the Jordon River "as near as may be to the edge of the desert." The paper was very clear that the Jordan "will not do as Palestine's eastern boundary. Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life."
Despite the given positive events, Katz provides much evidence in support of his thesis on British negative responses to the birth of the Jewish state and its development. His observations commence with British behavior in 1947. In that year, when the Arabs rejected the partition of Palestine, the British administration then governing Palestine under the Mandate, refused to carry out the recommendations of the UN to implement the partition plan. This edict took the form of not carrying out the orderly transfer of any functions to the Jewish authorities prior to the end of the Mandate. Everything was left in a state of disorder. Not only that, the British:
YEARS OF WRATH, DAYS OF GLORY by Yitshaq Ben-Ami described as memoirs of the Irgun is an extraordinary partial autobiography covering the period from the first Aliyah to Palestine in [1882-1890], which included the author's grandparents, through to the Israeli War of Independence. As a conclusion to the book, the author has a Post Scriptum from a visit to the Mount Olives, Jerusalem in 1980. "No one people have yearned for peace more than the Jews ...And yet, very few, throughout man's history suffered as much as the Jews ... But they failed to learn one cruel truth, that physical strength is a condition for survival and that survival is a prerequisite to a just society. The short history of modern Israel has not been tranquil, and the new nation will be exposed to grave dangers for years to come. But Israel has relearned some of its age old creeds and understands that, though no nation can live by the sword alone, woe unto it if it does not have one."
Yitzhak Ben Ami's remarkable journey covers events in Palestine, Europe and the US, and represents a personal tour de force. Briefly, his biography reads as follows. He was the first child born in Tel Aviv and his life span commenced in 1913 and terminated in 1985. He joined the Irgun at an early age and engaged himself in protecting neighborhoods from Palestinian Arab terrorism in the 1930s. During 1937, the Irgun dispatched Ben Ami to Europe to assist in organizing Aliyah Bet transports. At the end of 1938, Ben Ami was sent to the US to seek political and financial support for the immigration campaign. He established the American Friends of a Jewish Palestine, the forerunner of the Bergson Group. Subsequently, Ben Ami became one of the leaders of the Committee for a Jewish Army and the Emergency Committee to save the Jewish People of Europe. After serving in the US army from 1943 to 1945, he returned to the US and resumed his role with the Bergson Group.
Until 1931, Ben Ami was largely associated with leftist movements. With the advent of the Arab riots in Jerusalem during 1929, following which Arab gangs assaulted Jews and invaded Jewish settlements throughout Palestine, the siege in Be'er Tuvia, where Jewish farmers had lived peacefully alongside their Arab neighbors, and the lack of support from British, his socialist ideology had been severely tested. Incidents such as a remark by the wife of the Colonial Secretary, Sidney Webb, to Zionist Establishment leader Chaim Weitzmann, "I can't understand why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed in Palestine. As many are killed every week in London in traffic accidents", did not pass him by. But it was his recall of the catastrophic 1930 Passfield White Paper and his conversations with Mordechai N, whom he met while studying agriculture in Portici, Italy during Spring 1931 which finally decided him in "no longer [being] the innocent, sheltered seven year old expecting all of Europe to embrace me in the struggle for universal brotherhood." The Passfield White Paper was undoubtedly a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration reiterating the cultural nature of the national Home as defined in the 1922 Churchill White Paper. It was clearly pro-Arab and anti-Zionist in tone.
At this point Ben Ami, "had already decided to look up acquaintances in the Jabotinsky movement and to do some reading." He then recognized that neither Russian Marxists nor British Socialists had stepped forward in support of their "brothers". At the time, Mordechai N, a hardened revisionist, provided him an illuminating response in the form of a commentary. "We Jews everywhere are facing grave times and we are not prepared for them...when [in 1917] the British made it possible to return home, the Jews of the Diaspora chose to stay in exile...By 1920 the British reneged on their promises and it was too late...Now the Labor Zionists think that by obtaining a few thousand immigration certificates...by permission to buy some land, they will eventually build a society of select Jews who will live in harmony with all their neighbors...But this is all fantasy/...the British...want just enough of us in Palestine to keep us and the Arabs at each other's throats...Divide and conquer is the rule of all good empires...As long as they can keep the Jews and Arabs off-balance, they can have oil and the other resources of the area at their disposal...those Zionists who still talk in terms of 'selecting' Jews for immigration to Palestine are living in another world...Germany and other European nations will not let Britain rule the world alone; vicious nationalism and a deteriorating economic situation will lead to war...And the Jews will be blamed for it, as they always have been...The British will see to it that Arab reactions are prompt, violent and in the interest of 'security', the door will once more be slammed shut on the Zionist dream...When this happens, the only thing left for us will be armed revolt." Mordechai concluded his prophetic beliefs with an observation that the Jews would rebel against the British Empire and force it "out of our Eretz-Israel" and requested Yitzhak Ben Ami not to be discouraged by the "tiny toehold political Zionism has in Eretz-Israel".
Ben-Ami notes that for two thousand years — since the loss of "our" independence — we have been exiles. "We" suffered terrible defeats. "Our" last great political-leader, King Agrippa, was poisoned by the Romans [44CE]. Then came the zealots' revolts and the Temple was destroyed. Finally, Bar Kochba's rebellion was crushed [135CE]. These defeats traumatized us permanently. We lost our home. We never forgot that more than half of the Jews of Judea were killed, enslaved or exiled. We came to abhor arms. We became unlike all other people. Ever since, we have been a dispersed — I would say crippled — people, held together only by the threads of our spiritual heritage. It held us together, but never led us home.
On April 30, 1938, Ben Ami left Vienna, nine months after Eri Jabotinsky and David Raziel had sent him to meet Moshe Galili there. The latter had served the Irgun in their illegal immigration efforts. It must be understood that the efforts towards ethnic cleansing of Jews was fully supported by the Nazis during that period, but considered illegal by the British who were engaged in restrictive practices to Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Gestapo even authorized the opening of an office for the purpose of aiding the Irgun in their efforts. According to Ben Ami, not only did the Zionist establishment fail to help the Irgun, they actually increase their opposition. On the other hand, while Adolph Eichman's moods were unpredictable, despite all the pyrotechnics, he cooperated with the Irgun. Following Kristallnacht, Britain laid the groundwork to intensify its intervention against the Jewish immigrants along the Mediterranean through increased patrols. "It was doing its best to make sure that Hitler's noose would not slip."
As he traversed Europe in a strenuous effort to promote and assist Aliyah, this was Yitshaq Ben Ami's observations, "The Jews of Poland, the hundreds of thousands of small storekeepers, artisans and unemployed workers; the brilliant intellectuals and the handful of rich; and the Orthodox — the poor shtetl dwellers in their medieval garb — what hadn't they tried to keep alive? And yet how many would survive?" His graphic description of the brutality exacted on early Holocaust survivors and what they had observed on those who perished is beyond belief. We are invited to understand the differences between practical, political and military Zionism. In this, Zeev Jabotinsky is viewed as political with the author, Jabotinsky's son Eri, Hillel Kook, David Raziel, Avraham Stern, Menachem Begin, Shmuel Katz, Shamuel Merlin, Mordechai Strelitz, Ben Eliezer, and Haim Lubinsky the activists favoring a military option primarily directed at the British. Menachem Begin is quoted as stating that, "...if we create our military strength, the salvation of the diaspora will come. The world is indifferent...its conscience ignores what is happening to our people. The League of Nations is impotent. We cannot continue on this road. We want to fight."... "To win or to die".
It was at a meeting in Paris during February, 1939 as darkness descended, shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland that the revisionists literally mobilized for the eleventh hour. The non-Jew, Josiah C. Wedgwood MP's simple message to the group about fighting for their freedom apparently touched Jabotinsky, who until then could not see his way beyond diplomacy and political persuasion in the struggle for independence. It was felt that in addition thereto, he had been stirred by the June 29, 1938 execution of Shlomo Ben Yosef, the first Jew to have suffered this fate in the Land of Israel; and the British brutal torture of Irgun suspects. From this horrid story, two significant items emerged. Ben Yosef and his colleagues did not murder anyone. All they had done was to fire one revolver shot into the air and throw a fake grenade at a speeding bus full of Arabs who did not live in the area. This occurred at a time following the Arab murder of five Jews in a taxi and when the Jews in Palestine were being subjected to hundreds of murders in the face of British inactivity. It was a time at the crest of the 1936-1938 Arab Revolt. The British were determined to thwart all illegal immigration efforts by the revisionists. They, the British, elected to make an example of Ben Yosef and his two friends, while little was done by the Jewish establishment in their defense. Ben Yosef's hanging triggered the beginning of a revisionist revolt that would grow over time until freedom would be won. Wedgewood established himself as a true friend of the Jews in his opposition to the 1920 partition of Palestine and in the mid-1930's was most critical of British appeasement policies and the limitation of immigration by Jews seeking to migrate to Palestine [White Paper of 1939]. "I want to see in Palestine once again a fighting nation, free and courageous like the Maccabees ...An army of forty thousand fit to defend what is dear to them and to me...".
With the advent of a continuous struggle to raise funds in Europe in support of illegal immigration to Palestine, Yitzhaq Ben Ami set forth for the US, arriving there on Mach 30, 1939. He was soon to learn that his myopic vision of America could only be described as mythical. Struggling to raise itself up out of a debilitating depression, the US suffered from a goodly share of anti-Semitism. Ben Ami was to become aware of the active opposition to revisionist Zionism at the State Department, where too many of the Near Eastern experts served in Arab countries, or were connected with the oil companies, or the American University of Beirut.
In the early days of his time in the US, Ben-Ami found violent condemnation to the Ha'apalah [illegal immigration] efforts from almost everyone, from the assimilationist "Bund" to the Zionist Abba Hillel Silver, to the ultra-orthodox Agudath Israel. Despite concerted efforts, the US Irgun group of 5 enjoyed little progress. After reading a column published in a 1941 in a liberal NY paper by Ben Hecht, an assimilated Jew, they were to enjoy their greatest recruiting achievement by winning him over. His immortal words are a testimony to the Jewish spirit. "I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under violent and ape-like attack. My way of defending myself is to answer as a Jew." He was to become the most important exponent of the Irgun in America.
Following the formation of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the Irgun were able to launch their campaign through a Hecht created advertisement headlined, "Jews Fight for the Right to Fight", published in many of the leading newspapers. It bore the signatures of a cross section of notable Americans. Parlor meetings were held in private homes and Congress was lobbied, despite severe financial crises. Sadly, Ben-Ami reports that, "by the end of 1940, our mass rescue work was nearing its end. Our mission in the United States was a financial failure." As late as 1938 and 1939, Ben-Ami recognized that the Germans were determined to rid Europe of Jews, but that they did not contemplate mass annihilation. However the idea grew on them as they observed the passivity of the nations around the world. Because the Jewish Establishment did not have the courage for an all out rescue campaign and the nations of the free world did not care — the Jews of Europe gradually became worthless to the Nazis.
The outbreak of war struck a terrible blow to the work of the revisionists. The difficulties of obtaining boats and moving people across borders became insurmountable. Until 1941, and as late as April 1945, there were German officials ready to deal for Jewish lives. It must be remembered that it was not until January 20, 1942 that the Wannsee Conference was held, around which time "the final solution of the Jewish question" to systematically kill the Jews of Europe evolved.
With this assessment, the NY based Irgun/Bergson Group elected to de-emphasize their campaign for a Jewish army and concentrated on saving the Jews of Europe. In December of 1942, they placed a 2 page advertisement in the New York Times entitled, "Proclamation of the Moral Rights of Stateless and Palestinian Jews". This was followed by a Ben Hecht pageant, "We Will Never Die", which played to a forty thousand audience at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943 and was repeated in Constitution Hall, Washington DC. These 2 events prepared public opinion for more concrete action. Surprisingly, Ben-Ami hardly mentions the significant and memorable "Rabbis' March" which they arranged on October 6, 1943 in Washington DC, three days before Yom Kippur. The protest march, comprising 400-500 Orthodox rabbis included Rabbis Moshe Feinstein and Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, travelled to the US Capital, Lincoln Memorial and the White House, pleading US intervention on behalf of European Jews and was joined by the Jewish War Veterans of the US and a number of Congressmen. When victory for the Allies over the Germans began to look possible around late 1943, the Bergson Group felt encouraged although they realized that they were running out of possibilities.
For Ben-Ami, "Nineteen forty-three was one of the most difficult years of my life; every day thousands of our people were being killed, and yet many people still saw the war and the exterminations as two separate events. For the disciples of Jabotinsky, they were irrevocably linked. "We never let up our agitation, no matter how much it disturbed the Zionist Establishment, the White House and the State Department." His assessment was that British officials liked the Jews less than they liked the Arabs, contrary to US officials and functionaries who were anti-Semitic out of sheer provincialism and ignorance. The Hebrew revolt in Palestine was proclaimed on February 1, 1944, in a lengthy document posted on walls and kiosks throughout the country. The Proclamation consisted of 3 parts:
[A] A summary of the significant events of the first 4 years of the war, including the cease-fire observed by the Irgun since September 1, 1939, contributions the Yishuv had made to the war effort and actions by both the Nazis and the British which had affected European Jewry.
[B] With millions of its people dead, the Hebrew nation was not being given international recognition; it was still not permitted to form an army, and the gates to the homeland remained closed to survivors. As a consequence, the British had no moral right to occupy Palestine and the armistice was declared ended.
[C] The goals of the Proclamation were defined — Palestine was to be turned over to a Provisional Hebrew Government, a Hebrew army would be formed, European Jews would be evacuated to Palestine, peaceful relations would be established with the Arab neighbors, equal rights would be afforded to the Arab population, and extra-territorial status would be granted to the holy Christian and Moslem places.
On April 20, 1943, as the Bermuda Conference was due to open, the Bergson Group ran a full page advertisement in the Washington Post with the headline, "On the field of battle, soldiers die...on the field of massacres, civilization dies!" The Bermuda Conference had been only a flimsy curtain behind which Washington and London hid their inaction, and even tried to hide the facts of the extermination. As if this was the Evian Conference of 1938 all over again. Harold Dodds, the chief American delegate, never once mentioned "Jews" in his opening and closing remarks. Although the Arabs had turned against Britain in the war, the British held fast to their old excuse for keeping the doors of Palestine closed — they did not want to antagonize the Arabs. Through Hitler's reign of terror, the Jews were expected to do nothing but remain quiet, and the overwhelming majority did. As Ben Hecht wrote at the time:
"Four million Jews waiting for death
Oh hang and burn out — Quiet Jews!
Don't be bothersome; save your breath —
The world is busy with other news.
Oh world be patient — it will take
Sometime before the murder crews
are done. By Christmas you can make
Your Peace on Earth, without Jews."
On February 24, 1942, a ship named Struma, with 760 refugees aboard, including 103 children and babies, en route to Palestine was turned back by the Turks on instructions from the British. It was subsequently learned that the British Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne had blood on his hands in that he was personally responsible for inducing the Turks to tug the unseaworthy makeshift immigrant ship from Istanbul harbor, condemning all passengers to a certain death. A Soviet torpedo inadvertently struck the ship which resulted in its sinking. There was only one survivor, David Stoliar, to tell the story. On November 6, 1944, two young Lehi fighters, assassinated Moyne in Cairo, an act for which they paid with their lives in that they were sentenced to death by the British and hanged on March 22, 1945.
Around October, 1945, Ben-Ami notes that in Palestine, Europe and the US, the Zionist Establishment still refused to admit their mistakes and once again mobilized their superior resources, not to topple the power [British] occupying the homeland, but rather to destroy the Irgun. With the gas chambers still working, the Establishment instigated their own version of the "St. Bartholomew night" against the Irgun, the pretext being the assassination of Lord Moyne by the Lehi group on November, 1944. Known as the "season", the period declared by David Ben-Gurion when his followers became British informers on the Irgun/Lehi planned activities, and in some cases even engaged in handing over their adversaries to the British. Apparently, the shooting of Moyne enraged Churchill, but even his indignation had been exceeded by the Zionist Establishment.
The destruction of the British military headquarters in the south wing of the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946 by the Irgun shook Jerusalem and had wide repercussions. The heavy casualties were the end result of a series of tragic missed signals.
By May, 1947, the British "did not indicate any willingness to open the doors of Palestine or cease military action, neither did the Irgun." Shortly before May 4, 1947, Menachem Begin held a meeting of the Irgun Command in Tel Aviv. Yet another step in the Irgun's armed struggle with the British in Palestine was planned and took place i.e. to attack Acre prison where many of the Jewish underground fighters were incarcerated. The raid was intended to free exactly forty-one prisoners — eleven Lehi men, and the rest Irgun men, several officers among them. When the raid was over, twenty-nine key Irgun and Lehi men had been freed, nine were dead and five had been arrested. The operation badly shook up the British, both in Jerusalem and London, and helped spark an unprecedented event in the UN. This was in the form of the Soviet delegate, Andrei Gromyko openly acknowledging that the British policies in Palestine were bankrupt.
The British admitted that but for the efforts of the Irgun, England would not have left Palestine. In the publicly stated words of Colonel Arthur-Cust, Secretary of the British Government in Eretz Israel, "the hanging of two British sergeants did more than anything to get us out", in reference to the final withdrawal from Palestine
IT CAN BE SAID that both Shmuel Katz and Yitzhaq Ben-Ami were largely influenced by Zev Jabotinsky. Heading the Zionist revisionist movement in opposition to the establishment leaders, Chaim Weitzman and David Ben Gurian, Jabotinsky was severely denigrated by the liberal press. So much so, that he found it necessary to explain himself to the public at large. Quoted below are extracts from an article he had published in the Russian, Razsviet, of November 4, 1923 and subsequently in English in the South African Herald on November 26, 1937, entitled 'The Iron Wall [We and the Arabs].'
"The author of these lines is considered to be an enemy of the Arabs, a proponent of their expulsion, etc. This is not true. My emotional relationship to the Arabs is the same as it is to al other peoples — polite indifference. My political relationship is characterized by two principles. First: the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine — which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. Second: I am proud to have been a member of that group which formulated the Helsingfors Program. We formulated it, not only for Jews, but for all peoples, and its basis is the equality of all nations ...But it is absolutely another matter if it will be possible to achieve our peaceful aims through peaceful means. This depends not on our relationship with the Arabs, but exclusively on the Arabs' relationship to Zionism. ...Any native people — its all the same whether they are civilized or savage — views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs...They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. ...This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population - an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our [Revisionist] policy towards the Arabs."...there are no meaningful differences between our 'militarists' and our 'vegetarians'. One prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of British bayonets, the third proposes an agreement with Bagdad, and appears to be satisfied with Bagdad bayonets. ... But the only path to such an [peace] agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight."
In the early 1930's Jabotinsky cut to the heart of the matter:
"Either Zionism is usually good or it is morally bad...this problem should have been solved before we became Zionists...If it is just — justice must be achieved without regard to anyone's agreement or disagreement...Popular slogans are used against Zionism: democracy, the right of a majority...[i.e.] since the Arabs are presently a majority in Eretz-Israel, they have the right to self-determination...[However, this] does not mean that he who grabbed a piece of territory must always remain its owner and he who was forcibly expelled from his land should be the eternal wanderer. There are between fifteen and sixteen million Jews in the world. Half of them today lead, in plain terms the life of homeless dogs. There are thirty-eight million Arabs. They occupy Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the whole Arabian Peninsula...an area [excluding the deserts!] as large as half of Europe...Eretz-Israel is only one hundred and seventieth the size of the vast area on which the Arabs have settled...But when a homeless Jewish people demands Eretz-Israel for itself, it is regarded as 'unethical' because the local population finds it unpleasant...To take a piece of land from an over-endowed nation in order to provide a home for a wandering nation is an act of justice...a sacred truth which must be accomplished by force, nevertheless remains a sacred truth."
Quoting Jabotinsky from his appearance in front of the Royal Peel Commission in London on February 11, 1937, "I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority, it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab state number 4, number 5, number 6 — that I quite understand; but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite verses the claims of starvation."
Zev Jabotinsky's comprehension of the Arab's rejection to Zionism is echoed in a series of lectures arising from a conference held at the Zalman Shazar Center in 1983. These essays as submitted have been published in a book edited by Shmuel Almog under the title "Zionism and the Arabs". The foreword by Professor Shmuel Ettinger states,"... it is clear that all the Zionist executives, and virtually all streams of Zionism, wrongly assessed the strength of Arab nationalism and under-estimated the weight of its opposition to Zionist aspirations." Of course, all, but not Jabotinsky ; and the use of the word "Zionism" clearly means a sovereign Jewish State situated in Eretz-Israel.
Josef Neto points out that after the First World War, a Palestinian Arab national movement had developed in Eretz-Israel. Once it had been established, its leaders and spokesman raised two parallel sets of arguments in the course of their struggle against the Yishuv. One was to prove the Arab right to the country and the other to rebut the Jewish claim. In summary:
To reinforce this set of arguments, the Palestinian Arab leaders...advanced another set of reasons to explain why the Jews did not have a claim to Palestine:
The Arab countries...gradually supplanted the Arabs of Palestine as the standard bearers of the fight against the Jewish Yishuv and Zionism.
FROM THE PRECEDING TEXT, the role of betrayal on the part of England is amply displayed. It is largely pertaining to the earlier years, whereas the American experience is greater from the time of modern day Israel's birth. The US effort to balance support for Israel with placating the Arabs began in 1948 when Truman showed signs of wavering on partition and advocating trusteeship. After the surrounding Arab states invaded Israel, the US maintained an arms embargo that severely restricted the Jews' ability to defend themselves. An interesting observation on US policy dating back to 1975 is found in Gil Carl Alroy's, The Kissinger Experience, in which he states, "Seeking American hegemony and peace in the area by wooing the Arabs with Israeli-held territor y was an ancient State Department approach, indeed the only one it ever really knew and approved. Lest one mistake the pressure for Israeli withdrawal as occasioned by the unprecedented circumstance of the Jewish state's holding large occupied areas since 1967, it must be recalled that the same approach was pressed by the State Department before."
A sampling of further events follows:
1945 — FDR assured Ibn Saud that he "would take no action which might prove hostile to the Arab people."
1953 — Israel's request for a $75 million loan is turned down due to Israel's non-compliance to halt work on a Jordan River hydroelectric project.
1956 — Following the Suez War when Israel had allied with Britain and France, US pressure forced Israel to withdraw from territory it conquered.
1973 — The Americans put pressure on Israel not to completely demolish Egypt's Third Army [Yom Kippur War].
1981 — US strongly criticized Israel for raid on Iraqi Osirak nuclear plant, referring to it as "shocking".
1981 — Israel extends its law to the Golan Heights and the US participates in a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the move and declaring the annexation "null and void". President Ronald Reagan suspended a strategic cooperation agreement.
1988 - Secretary of State George Schultz announces the US decision to open a public, formal and "substantive dialogue with the PLO" — a major blow to Israel. 1991 — President Bush seeks delay in an Israeli loan guarantee request to assist in absorbing Soviet and Ethiopian Jews because of his disagreement with Israel's settlement policy.
In his Introduction to the 2004 Edition of The Chatham House Version produced by Elie Kedourie, David Pryce-Jones notes, "In one Arab country after another, and beyond in the Third World, independence brought tyranny, not freedom, to people in no position to defend themselves." This refers to the period following World War 1. Reading on into the first chapter of the book, one finds statements which resemble the works of modern day media "experts" ; e.g. "The prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day, and the newest turbulence as the necessary and beneficent prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice". We have just witnessed the release of Gilad Shalit under questionable circumstances and the slaying of Moammar Gadhafi under equally questionable circumstances. In all this, we are reminded of the meaningful observation of Cynthia Ozick, "the result of hallucinating moderation in one's most deadly enemies is, especially in the Middle East, like the result of hallucinating an oasis in the midst of the desert — one ends up choking to death on sand".
Alex Rose is an engineering consultant. He was formerly on the Executive of Americans for a Safe Israel and a founding member of CAMERA New York. He made Aliyah in 2003 and now resides in Ashkelon, Israel. Contact him at alexrenee.rose@gmail.com
This article was submitted
October 24, 2011.