The Controversy of Zion
By Douglas Reed
Chapter 43
By Douglas Reed
Chapter 43
THE ZIONIST STATE
The revolution, having spread into the half of Europe held clear for it by the Western Allies, did one
more thing: in the manner of a serpent striking, it thrust out a tongue that reached to the southern shores of
Europe, across the Mediterranean and into the tiny land called Palestine. The money, equipment, escort and
convoy were provided by the West, but the revolution supplied the two indispensable constituents of the
Zionist State: the people to invade it and the arms which made its conquest certain.
The West connived, but the Zionist state in the last analysis was the creation of the revolution, which
in this manner fulfilled the Levitical doctrine of "the return". These incursions into Europe and into Arabia
were the sole "territorial gains" reaped from the Second War, in the early stages of which the Western
"premier-dictators" for a second time had publicly renounced all thought of territorial gain. The result of
these two developments was to leave, in bisected Europe and bisected Palestine, two permanent detonation
points of new war, which at any moment could be set off by any who might think to further their ambitions
by a third war.
The reader will recall that in the years preceding the Second War Zionism was in collapse in Palestine;
and that the British Parliament in 1939, having been forced by twenty years of experience to realize that the
"Jewish National Home" was impossible to realize, had decided to abandon the unworkable "Mandate" and
to withdraw after ensuring the parliamentary representation of all parties in the land, Arab, Jews and others. The reader then beheld the change which came about when Mr. Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940
and privately informed Dr. Weizmann (according to Dr. Weizmann's account, which has not been
challenged) that he "quite agreed" with the Zionist ambition "after the war . . . to build up a state of three or
four million Jews in Palestine".
Mr. Churchill always expressed great respect for parliamentary government but in this case, as a
wartime potentate, he privily and arbitrarily overrode a policy approved, after full debate, by the House of
Commons. After that, the reader followed Dr. Weizmann in his journeys to America and saw how Mr.
Churchill's efforts "to arm the Jews" (in which he was opposed by the responsible administrators on the spot)
received support from there under the "pressure" of Dr. Weizmann and his associates.
That was the point at which the reader last saw the Zionist state in gestation. Throughout 1944, as Mr.
Churchill records in his war memoirs, he continued to press the Zionist ambition.
"It is well known I am
determined not to break the pledges of the British Government to the Zionists expressed in the Balfour
Declaration, as modified by my subsequent statement at the Colonial Office in 1921. No change can be made in
policy without full discussion in Cabinet" (June 29, 1944). The policy had been changed after full discussion in
Cabinet and Parliament, in 1939. Here Mr. Churchill simply ignored that major decision on policy and reverted to
the earlier one, echoing the strange words of another Colonial Secretary (Mr. Leopold Amery, earlier quoted)
that this policy could not change.
Again, "There is no doubt that this" (the treatment of Jews in Hungary) "is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world . . . all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved . . .
Declarations should be made in public,
so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death" (July 11, 1944).
Here Mr. Churchill, like President Roosevelt and Mr. Eden, implicitly links the execution of captives solely with their crimes against Jews, thus relegating all other sufferers to the oblivion in to which, in fact, they fell. Incidentally, the reader saw in the last chapter that Jews were among the tormentors, as well as among the victims.
To continue: "I am anxious to reply promptly to Dr. Weizmann's request for the formation of a Jewish fighting force put forward in his letter of July 4" (July 12, 1944). "I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Central Europe and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction in the United States. I believe it is the wish of the Jews themselves to fight the Germans everywhere. It is with the Germans they have their quarrel" (July 26,1944). If Mr. Churchill, as stated by Dr. Weizmann, had agreed to the building up "of a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine", he must have known that the Zionists had a much larger quarrel with the population of Arabia, and that any "Jewish fighting force" would be more likely to fall on these innocent third parties than on the Germans.
Here Mr. Churchill, like President Roosevelt and Mr. Eden, implicitly links the execution of captives solely with their crimes against Jews, thus relegating all other sufferers to the oblivion in to which, in fact, they fell. Incidentally, the reader saw in the last chapter that Jews were among the tormentors, as well as among the victims.
To continue: "I am anxious to reply promptly to Dr. Weizmann's request for the formation of a Jewish fighting force put forward in his letter of July 4" (July 12, 1944). "I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Central Europe and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction in the United States. I believe it is the wish of the Jews themselves to fight the Germans everywhere. It is with the Germans they have their quarrel" (July 26,1944). If Mr. Churchill, as stated by Dr. Weizmann, had agreed to the building up "of a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine", he must have known that the Zionists had a much larger quarrel with the population of Arabia, and that any "Jewish fighting force" would be more likely to fall on these innocent third parties than on the Germans.
Mr. Churchill's last recorded allusion (as wartime prime minister) came after the fighting in Europe
ended: "The whole question of Palestine must be settled at the peace table. . . I do not think we should take the
responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place while the Americans sit back and criticise. Have you ever addressed yourselves to the idea that we should ask them to take it over? . . . I am not aware of
the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task.
Somebody else should have their turn now" (July 6, 1945).
This passage (considered together with President Roosevelt's jocular remark to Stalin, that the only
concession he might offer King Ibn Saoud would be "to give him the six million Jews in the United States")
reveal the private thoughts of these premier-dictators who so docilely did the bidding of Zion. Mr. Churchill
wished he could shift the insoluble problem to the American back; Mr. Roosevelt would gladly have shifted it
on to some other back. In this matter the great men, as an unwary remark in each case shows, behaved like
the comedian who cannot by any exertion divest himself of the gluey flypaper. Mr. Churchill, in this interoffice memorandum, ws not aware "of the slightest advantage that has ever accrued to Great Britain
from this painful and thankless task". But in public, when Zion was listening, he continued (and to the
moment of writing this book continues) to applaud the Zionist adventure in a boundless manner which
aroused the curiosity even of Jewish critics (as will be seen).
At the time when Mr. Churchill dictated this last memorandum his words about "settling the question
of Palestine at the peace table" were so irrelevant that he might have had humorous intent in using them. The
issue was closed, for the Zionists had arms, the men to use these arms were to be smuggled through Europe
from the revolutionary area by the West (as shown in the last chapter), and both major political parties in
England and America were ready to applaud any act of aggression, invasion or persecution the transmigrants
committed with the arms they had obtained.
This was particularly evident in the case of the Socialist party in England, which at that time was still
the country chiefly involved in the fate of Palestine. The Labour party (as it called itself) in England presented
itself as the champion of the poor, defenceless and oppressed; it had been born and bred in the promise of
old-age pensions, unemployment relief, free medicine and the care and relief of the destitute, poor or humble
generally.
As the war drew towards its end this party at long last saw before it the prospect of office with a
substantial majority. Like the Conservative party (and both parties in America) it apparently calculated that
victory was even at this stage not quite certain and that it could be ensured by placating Zion. Thus is placed
at the head of its foreign policy the aim to drive from a little country far away some people who were poorer, more friendless and longer oppressed than even the British worker in the worst days of the Industrial
Revolution. In 1944 its leader, Mr. Clement Attlee, proclaimed the new, crowning tenet of British Socialism:
"Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out" (of Palestine) "as the Jews move in. Let them be handsomely
compensated for their land, and their settlement elsewhere be carefully organized and generously financed"
(twelve years later nearly a million of these people, encouraged to move out by bombs, still languished in the
neighbour Arab countries of Palestine; and the British Socialist Party, at every new turn of events, was more
clamant than ever for their further chastisement).
The British Socialists, when they made this statement, knew that the Zionists, under cover of the war against Germany, had amassed arms for the conquest of Palestine by force. General Wavell, the commander in the Middle East, had long before informed Mr. Churchill that "left to themselves, the Jews would beat the Arabs" who had no source of arms-supply).General Wavell's view about the Zionist scheme was that of all responsible administrators on the spot, and for that reason he was disliked by Dr. Weizmann. The reader has already seen, as far back as the First War, that Dr. Weizmann's displeasure was dangerous even to high personages and it may have played a part in General Wavell's removal from the Middle East command to India. The official British History of the War in the Middle East describes General Wavell as "one of the great commanders in military history" and says tiredness, caused by his great responsibilities, was aggravated by the feeling that he did not enjoy the full confidence of Mr. Churchill, who bombarded his Middle East commander with "irritating" and "needless" telegrams about "matters of detail". By his relegation General Wavell may have been another victim of Zionism, and British military prowess have suffered accordingly in the war; this cannot be established but it is a reasonable surmise.
In 1944 assassination again appeared in the story. Lord Moyne, as Colonial Secretary, was the Cabinet
minister then responsible for Palestine, the post earlier held by Lord Lloyd (who had been rudely rebuked by
Mr. Churchill for tardiness in "arming the Jews" and had died in 1941). Lord Moyne was the friend of all
men, and sympathetic to Judaism, but he shared the view of all his responsible predecessors, that the Zionist
enterprise in Palestine would end disastrously. For that reason, and having sympathy for suffering mankind in
general, he was inclined to revive the idea of providing land in Uganda for any Jews who truly needed to find
a new home somewhere.
This humane notion brought him the mortal hatred of the Zionists, who would not brook any diversion of thought from the target of their ambition, Palestine. In 1943 Lord Moyne modified his view, according to Mr. Churchill, who suggested that Dr. Weizmann should go to Cairo, meet Lord Moyne there and satisfy himself of the improvement. Before any meeting could come about Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo (November 1944) by two Zionists from Palestine, one more peacemaker thus being removed from a path strewn with the bones of earlier pacifiers. This event for a moment disturbed the flow of Mr. Churchill's memoranda to his colleagues about "arming the Jews", and the responsible men in Palestine once again urgently recommended that Zionist immigration thither be suspended. Mr. Churchill's reply (November 17, 1944) was that this would "simply play into the hands of the extremists", whereon the extremists were left unhindered in their further plans and their tribe increased.
As the Second War approached its end in Europe Mr. Churchill's hopes of some spectacular transaction which would happily integrate the Khazars in Arabia faded. If his suggestion (that Ibn Saoud be made "lord of the Middle East, provided he settles with you", i.e. Dr. Weizmann) was ever conveyed by Dr. Weizmann to President Roosevelt, an episode of 1944 may have been the result of it. An American, Colonel Hoskins, ("President Roosevelt's personal representative in the Middle East"; Dr. Weizmann) then visited the Arab leader. Colonel Hoskins, like all qualified men, had no faith in the plan to set up a Zionist state but was in favour of helping Jews to go to Palestine (if any so wished) in agreement with the Arabs. He found that King Ibn Saoud held himself to have been grossly insulted by Dr. Weizmann of whom he spoke "in the angriest and most contemptuous manner, asserting that I" (Dr. Weizmann), "had tried to bribe him with twenty million pounds to sell out Palestine to the Jews"; and he indignantly rejected any suggestion of a deal on such terms. Therewith all prospect of any "settlement" vanished and Colonel Hoskins also passed from the story, another good man defeated in his attempt to solve the insoluble problem posed by Mr. Balfour.
Thus, as the war entered its last months, only two alternatives remained. The British Government,
abandoning the decision of 1939, could struggle on, trying to hold the scales impartially between the native
inhabitants and their besiegers from Russia; or it could throw up "the Mandate" and withdraw, whereupon
the Zionists would expel the native inhabitants with arms procured from the European and African theatres
of war.
This second great moment in the Palestinian drama approached. Mr. Roosevelt had been told by Dr.
Weizmann that the Zionist's "could not rest the case on the consent of the Arabs" but had remained noncommittal. Mr. Churchill, according to Dr. Weizmann, had committed himself, in private, and in 1944 Dr.
Weizmann grew impatient to have from Mr. Churchill a public committal in the form of an amended Balfour
Declaration which would award territory (in place of the meaningless phrase, "a national home") to Zion (in
1949 he was still very angry that Mr. Churchill, on the "pretext" that the war must first be finished, refrained
from making this final public capitulation).
Like Macbeth, Dr. Weizmann's "top-line politicians" flinched and shrunk as the moment for the deed approached. Neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt would openly command their soldiers to do it and the Zionists furiously cried "Infirm of purpose!" Then Mr. Roosevelt went to Yalta, wearing the visage of doomed despair which the news-reel pictures recorded, arranged for the bisection of Europe, and at the end briefly informed Mr. Churchill (who was "flabbergasted" and "greatly disturbed" by the news, according to Mr. Hopkins) that he was going to meet King Ibn Saoud on board the U.S. cruiser Quincy.
What followed remains deeply mysterious. Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Mr. Churchill had any right to bestow Arab land on the lobbyists who beleaguered them in Washington and London; nevertheless, what was demanded of them was, in appearance, so small in comparison with what had just been done at Yalta, that Mr. Roosevelt's submission and same harsh ultimatum to King Ibn Saoud would have surprised none. Instead, he suddenly stepped out of the part he had played for many years and spoke as a statesman; after that he died.
He left Yalta on February 11, 1945, and spent February 12, 13 and 14 aboard the Quincy, receiving King Ibn Saoud during this time. He asked the king "to admit some more Jews into Palestine" and received the blunt answer, "No". Ibn Saoud said that "there was a Palestine army of Jews all armed to the teeth and. . . they did not seem to be fighting the Germans but were aiming at the Arabs". On February 28 Mr. Roosevelt returned to Washington. On March 28 Ibn Saoud reiterated by letter his verbal warning (since confirmed by events) of the consequences which would follow from American support of the Zionists. On April 5 President Roosevelt replied reaffirming his own pledge verbally given to Ibn Saoud that:
"I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government which might prove hostile to the Arab people". On April 12 he died. This pledge would never have become known but for the action of an American statesman, Secretary of State James G. Byrnes, who published it six months later (October 18, 1945) in a vain attempt to deter Mr. Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, from taking the very "action hostile to the Arabs" which President Roosevelt swore he would never commit.
Mr. Roosevelt's pledge was virtually a deathbed one, and another of history's great unanswered questions is, did he mean it? If by any chance he did, then once more death intervened as the ally of Zionism. His intimate Mr. Harry Hopkins (who was present at the meeting and drafted a memorandum about it) sneered at the suggestion that it might have been sincerely intended, saying that President Roosevelt was "wholly committed publicly and privately and by conviction" to the Zionists (this memorandum records Mr. Roosevelt's statement that he had learned more from Ibn Saoud about Palestine in five minutes than he had previously learned in a lifetime; out of this, again, grew the famous anecdote that Ibn Saoud said, "We have known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn"). However, Mr. Hopkins may conceivably not be a trustworthy witness on this one occasion, for immediately after the meeting he, the president's shadow, mysteriously broke with Mr. Roosevelt, whom he never saw again! Mr. Hopkins shut himself in his cabin and three days later, at Algiers, went ashore, "sending word" through an intermediary that he would return to America by another route. The breach was as sudden as that between Mr. Wilson and Mr. House.
What is clear is that the last few weeks and days of Mr. Roosevelt's life were overshadowed by the controversy of Zion, not by American or European questions. Had he lived, and his pledge to Ibn Saoud become known, Zionism, which so powerfully helped to make and maintain him president for twelve years, would have become his bitter enemy. He died. (The pledge was categorical; it continued, "no decision will be taken with regard to the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews"; this was direct repudiation of Dr. Weizmann, who had told him, "we could not rest the case on Arab consent").
Thus, cloaked in a last-moment mystery, Mr. Roosevelt too passed from the story. A parting glimpse of the throng which had gathered round him during his twelve-year reign is given by the senior White House correspondent, Mr. Merriman Smith; this description of a wake shows that the carousing of Yalta accompanied the president even to his grave:
"Most of the people on the train were members of the Roosevelt staff. Before the train was out of sight of the crepe-hung Hyde Park depot, they started what turned out to be a post-funeral wake. Liquor flowed in every compartment and drawing-room. The shades were drawn through out the train and from the outside it looked like any train bearing mourners home. But behind those curtains, the Roosevelt staff had what they thought was a good time. Their Boss would have approved. . . I saw one of the top New Dealers hurl a tray of empty glasses into a toilet and shout in mock bravado, 'Down the hatch, we won't need you any more'. Porters and club stewards bustled up and down the corridors with gurgling, sloshing trays. If you hadn't known the people in the drawing room, you would have thought they were on their way home from a football game. Some of the people were using whisky as an antidote for worry over their jobs. . . I could hear an alcoholic chorus of Auld Lang Syne. . ."
Such were the trappings of statesmanship, during those last days when "the boys" toiled towards another "victory", when the Communist armies seized half of Europe, and the Zionists from Russia were convoyed by the West towards the invasion of Palestine.
In this question of Palestine, Mr. Roosevelt was liberated from his dilemma by death. Mr. Churchill was left to face his. He had courted Zionist favour from the days of the 1906 election. He had been a member of the British Government in 1917, of which another member (Mr. Leopold Amery, quoted in a Zionist paper in 1952) said, "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state. . . We envisaged not a divided Palestine, which exists only west of the Jordan".
Mr. Churchill never publicly stated any such intention (indeed, he denied it), but if it was his view this means that even the Zionist state set up after the Second World War by no means fulfils the intention of those who made the Balfour Declaration, and that further conquests of Arab lands have yet to be made by war.
The governing word in the passage quoted is "if"; "if the Jews could become a majority. . ." By 1945 three decades of Arab revolt had shown that the Zionists never would become a majority" unless the Arabs were driven out of their native land by arms. The question that remained was, who was to drive them out? Mr. Roosevelt had sworn not to. Dr. Weizmann, ever quick to cry "I stay here on my bond", liked to claim that Mr. Churchill was committed as far as Dr. Weizmann wanted him to go.
Even Mr. Churchill could not do this deed. He, too, then was liberated from his dilemma; not by death, but by electoral defeat. His memoirs express wounded pride at this rebuff; "All our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs".
It was not as simple as that. The future historian has to work from such material, but the living participant knows better, and I was in England and saw the election when Mr. Churchill was "dismissed". In truth the British electorate could hardly have been expected to see in the outcome of the war (of which Mr. Churchill is the bitterest critic) cause for a vote of thanksgiving to Mr. Churchill, but there were other reasons for his defeat than mere disillusionment.
As in American elections, so in this British one of 1945 the power to "deliver the vote" was shown. Mr. Churchill had gone far in "arming the Jews" and in privately committing himself to Zionism, but not far enough for Dr. Weizmann. In England at the mid-century control of the press was virtually complete, in this question; Zionist propaganda at the election turned solidly against Mr. Churchill and was waged in behalf of the Socialists, who had given the requisite promise of support for "hostile action" against the Arabs ("The Arabs should be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in . . . "). The block of Jewish Members of Parliament swung over in a body to the Socialist party (and was strongest in the left wing of it, where the Communists lurked). With high elation the Zionists saw the discomfiture of their "champion" of 1906,1917 and 1939. Dr. Weizmann says that the Socialist victory (and Mr. Churchill's "dismissal") "delighted all liberal elements". This was the requital for Mr. Churchill's fort y years of support for Zionism; he had not actually ordered British troops to clear Palestine of Arabs and, for a while, was an enemy.
Thus Mr. Churchill was at least reprieved from the task of deciding what to do about Palestine and should not have been so grieved as he depicts himself, when he was dismissed soon after "victory". The British Socialists, at last provided with a great majority in parliament, then found at once that they were expected by forcible measures to "encourage the Arabs to move out". When they too shrank from the assassin's deed the cries of "betrayal" fell about their ears like hailstones. Dr. Weizmann's narrative grows frantic with indignation at this point; the Socialist government, he says, "within three months of taking office repudiated the pledge so often and clearly, even vehemently, repeated to the Jewish people". During forty years Lord Curzon seems to have been the only leading politician caught up in this affair to realize that even the most casual word of sympathy, uttered to Dr. Weizmann, would later be held up as "a pledge", solemnly given and infamously broken.
Among the victorious Socialists a worthy party-man, one Mr. Hall, inherited the Colonial Office from Lord Lloyd, Lord Moyne and others dead or defamed, and was barely in it when a deputation from the World Zionist Congress arrived:
"I must say the attitude adopted by the members of the deputation was different from anything which I have ever experienced. It was not a request for the consideration by His Majesty's Government of the decisions of the Zionist conference, but a demand that His Majesty's Government should do what the Zionist Organization desired them to do". Ten years later an American ex-president, Mr. Truman, recalled similar visits during his presidency in similar terms of innocent surprise; in 1945 the thing had been going on since 1906 without disturbing Mr. Hall's political slumbers. Soon after this he was ousted from the Colonial Office, his suitability for a peerage suddenly being realized.
The Socialist government of 1945, which in domestic affairs must have been nearly the worst that a war-weary country, in need of reinvigoration, could have received, in foreign affairs did its country one service. It saved, of honour, what could be saved. Under pressure from the four corners of the world it refused to play the assassin's part in Palestine; if it did not protect the Arabs, and by that time it probably could not protect them, at least it did not destroy them for the Zionist taskmaster. [WTF, you want a pat on the back? D.C ]
This achievement was the sole work of a Mr. Ernest Bevin, in my estimation the greatest man produced in British political life during this century. According to report, King George VI, the most unobtrusive of monarchs, urged the incoming Socialist prime minister, Mr. Attlee, to make his best and strongest man Foreign Secretary, because the state of the world so clearly demanded this. Mr. Attlee thereon revised a list already drafted, expunging the name of some worthy "liberal" who might have involved his country in the coming pogrom of Arabs, and inserting that of Mr. Bevin.
By 1945 Palestine was clearly too big an issue for Colonial Secretaries to handle; it was, and will long remain, the major preoccupation of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries, Presidents and Secretaries of State in England and America, because it is the most inflammable source of new wars. In 1945, as soon as "victory" was won, it was seen to dominate and pervert the politics of all nation-states. Without awe, Ernest Bevin, the farm lad from Somerset and the dockers' idol, took up the bomb and sought to remove the fuse. Had he received support from one leading man in any Western country he might have saved the day. They all fell on him like wolves; there was something of the camp-meeting and of revivalist hysteria in the abandon of their surrender to Zionism.
He was a robust man, with the beef and air of the West Country in his bones and muscle and its fearless tradition in his blood, but even he was physically broken within a few years by the fury of unremitting defamation. He was not spiritually daunted. He realized that he had to do with an enterprise essentially conspiratorial, a conspiracy of which the revolution and Zionism were linked parts, and he may be unique among politicians of this century in that he used a word ("conspiracy") which has a dictionary meaning plainly applicable to this case. He bluntly told Dr. Weizmann that he would not be coerced or coaxed into any action' contrary to Britain's undertakings. Dr. Weizmann had not experienced any such instruction, at that high level, since 1904, and his indignation, surging outward from him through the Zionist organizations of the world, produced the sustained abuse of Mr. Bevin which then followed.
Mr. Churchill, had he remained prime minister, would apparently have used British arms to enforce the partition of Palestine. That seems to be the inescapable inference from his memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff Committee (January 25,1944), in which he said "the Jews, left to themselves, would beat the Arabs; there cannot therefore be any great danger in our joining hands with the Jews to enforce the kind of proposals about partition which are set forth. ." The reader may see how greatly circumstances alter cases. The bisection of Europe was for Mr. Churchill "a hideous partition, which cannot last". Partition in Palestine was worthy to be enforced by "joining hands with the Jews".
Mr. Bevin would have no truck with such schemes. Under his guidance the Socialist government announced that it "would not accept the view that the Jews should be driven out of Europe or that they should not be permitted to live again in these" (European) "countries without discrimination, contributing their ability and talent towards rebuilding the prosperity of Europe".
The words show that this man understood the nature of Zionist chauvinism, the problem posed by it and the only solution. They depict what will inevitably happen one day, but that day has been put back to some time after another ruinous era in Palestine, which will probably involve the world. He was either the first British politician fully to comprehend the matter, or the first to act with the courage of his knowledge.
The Socialist government of 1945 was driven, by responsible office, to do what all responsible governments before it had equally been forced to do: to send out one more commission of enquiry (which could but repeat the reports of all earlier commissions) and in the meantime to regulate Zionist immigration and to safeguard the interest of the native Arabs, in accordance with the pledges of the original Balfour Declaration.
Dr. Weizmann considered this "a reversion to the old, shifty double emphasis on the obligation towards the Arabs of Palestine" and the Zionist power went to work to destroy Mr. Bevin, on whose head, for the next two years, a worldwide campaign was turned. It was concentric, synchronised and of tremendous force. First, the Conservative party was sent into action. The Socialists had defeated them by capitulations to Zionism, which brought them the help of the controlled press. The Conservatives, being out of office, played this trump card against the Socialists, and in turn made their capitulations to Zion. This was at once made clear: the party proclaimed that it would combat the domestic and support the foreign policy of the Socialists, but from the moment of the Socialist declaration about Palestine it made one exception to the second rule; it began a sustained attack on the Socialist government's policy about Palestine, which meant, on Mr. Bevin.
At that point Mr. Churchill, safe in opposition, demeaned himself by accusing Mr. Bevin of "anti-Jewish feelings", a shot taken from the locker of the Anti-Defamation League (which added a new epithet, "Bevinism", to its catalogue of smear words). No such traducement of a political adversary ever came from Mr. Bevin, Mr. Churchill's outstanding colleague during the long war years.
Thus Mr. Bevin, at the post of greatest danger, received the full support of the opposition party in all matters of foreign policy save one, Palestine. He might yet have saved the day but for the intervention of the new American president, Mr. Harry S. Truman, with whose automatic elevation (on the death of the incumbent) from the Vice-Presidency the story of the 20th Century resumed the aspect of Greek tragedy (or of a comedy of errors). Mr. Truman involved his country up to the neck in the Palestinian imbroglio at the very moment when in England, at long last, a man had arisen who was able and staunch enough to liquidate the disastrous venture.
Unless a man has that genius which needs no basis in acquired knowledge, a small town in the Middle West and Kansas City are poor places for learning about world affairs. Mr. Truman, when the presidency was thrust upon him, had two major disqualifications for the office. One was native remoteness from world politics, and the other was too close acquaintance with ward politics, of which he had seen much. In Kansas City he had watched the machine at work; he knew about patronage, ward bosses and stuffed ballot-boxes. He had received the impression that politics were business, and essentially simple in the basic rules, which allowed no room for high-falutin' ideas.
A middle-sized, hale, broadly-smiling man who was to sign the order for an act of destruction unprecedented in the history of the West, he strode briskly on to the stage of great events. He decided at Potsdam that "Uncle Joe" was "a nice guy" and there completed Mr. Roosevelt's territorial rearrangements in Europe and Asia. He arranged for the atom-bombing of defenceless Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No comparable series of acts ever fell to the lot of a once-bankrupt haberdasher precipitated into the office of a "premier-dictator". Then he turned his gaze on domestic affairs and the next Congressional and presidential elections. In these, he knew (and said), the Zionist-controlled vote was decisive..
While Mr. Bevin strove to undo the tangle, Mr. Truman undid Mr. Bevin's efforts. He demanded that a hundred thousand Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine, and he arranged for the first partisan commission of enquiry to go to Palestine. This was' the only means by which any commission could ever be expected to produce a report favourable to the Zionist scheme. Two of its four American members were avowed Zionists; the one British member was Zionist propagandist and a left-wing enemy of Mr. Bevin. This "Anglo-American Commission" went to Palestine, where Dr. Weizmann (for perhaps the tenth time in some thirty years) was the chief personage heard. It recommended (though "cautiously") the admission of one hundred thousand "displaced persons" (the term was presumably meant to mislead the public masses and was at the moment of some importance; no truly displaced persons wanted to go to Palestine).
Therewith the fat of the next war was in the fire, and an American president publicly supported "hostile action" against the Arabs, for it was that. The next Zionist Congress (at Geneva in 1946) joyfully recorded this new "pledge" (Mr. Truman's "suggestion" and the partisan commission's "cautious recommendations"). This was a characteristic Zionist Congress, being composed chiefly of Jews from Palestine (who had already migrated there) and from America (who had no intention of going there); the herded-mass, to be transported thither, was not represented. Dr. Weizmann's description of the decisions taken are of great significance.
He says the congress "had a special character" and showed "a tendency to rely on methods. . . referred to by different names: 'resistance', 'defence', 'activism'. " Despite these "shades of meaning" (he says) "one feature was common to all of them: the conviction of the need for fighting against British authority in Palestine, or anywhere else, for that matter".
Dr. Weizmann's guarded remarks must be considered in the context of his whole book and of the entire history of Zionism. What he means is that the Zionist World Congress at Geneva in 1946 decided to resume the method of terror and assassination which had proved effective in Russia in the germinating stage of the two-headed conspiracy. The congress knew this to be the method "referred to by different names" during its discussions, for it had already been resumed in the assassination of Lord Moyne and many terrorist exploits in Palestine. The prompting impulse for the Congress's decision (which in fact it was) came from the American president's recommendation that a hundred thousand people should be forcibly injected into Palestine. The Zionists took that to be another "pledge", committing America to approval of anything they might do, and they were right.
Dr. Weizmann knew exactly what was at stake and in his old age shrank from the prospect that reopened before him: reversion to the worship of Moloch, the god of blood. He had seen so much blood shed in the name of revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, the two causes which had dominated his parental home and home town in the Pale. In his youth he had exulted in the riots and revolutions and had found the assassinations a natural part of the process; in his maturity he had rejoiced in the ruin of Russia despite the decades of bloodshed which ensued, For fifty-five years he had cried havoc and unloosed dogs of war. Almost unknown to the masses embroiled in two wars, he had, become one of the most powerful men in the world. Beginning in 1906, when he first wheedled Mr. Balfour, he had gradually risen until his word in the lobbies was law, when he could command audience of monarchs and obedience of presidents and prime ministers. Now, when the enterprise he had so long schemed for was on the brink of consummation, he recoiled from the bloodstained prospect that opened immeasurably before him; blood, and more blood, and at the end. . . what? Dr. Weizmann remembered Sabbatai Zevi.
He was against "truckling to the demoralizing forces in the movement", the cryptic phrase he uses to cover those referred to by Mr. Churchill as "the extremists", and by the administrators on the spot as "the terrorists". This meant that he had changed as his end approached, for without terrorism Zionism would never have established itself at all and if, in 1946, his Zionist state was to be achieved, this could only be done by violence. Thus at the last Dr. Weizmann realized the futility of his half-century of "pressure behind the scenes" and no doubt saw the inevitable fiasco that lay ahead, after the Zionist state had been born in terror. Psychologically, this was a moment of great interest in the story. Perhaps men grow wise in their old age; they tire of the violent words and deeds which seemed to solve all problems in their conspiratorial youth, and this revulsion may have overtaken Chaim Weizmann. If it did, it was too late to alter anything. The machine he had built had to continue, of its own momentum, to its own destruction and that of any in its path. The remaining future of Zionism was in the hands of "the demoralizing forces in the movement", and he had put it there.
He was denied a vote of confidence and was not re-elected president of the World Zionist Organization. Fort y years after Herzl, he was cast aside as he had cast Herzl aside, and for the same essential reason. He and his Chazars from Russia had overthrown Herzl because Herzl wanted to accept Uganda, which meant renouncing Palestine.
He was overthrown because he feared to re-embark on the policy of terror and assassination, and that also meant renouncing Palestine. The note of despair sounded even earlier, in his allusion s to Lord Moyne's murder: "Palestine Jewry will . . . cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst. . . this utterly un-Jewish phenomenon". These words were addressed to Western ears and were specious; political murder was not "an utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" in the Talmudic areas of Russia where Dr. Weizmann spent his revolutionary and conspiratorial youth, as he well knew, and a series of similar deeds stained the past. Indeed, when he spoke to a Zionist audience he candidly admitted that political murder was not an "utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" but the opposite: "What was the terror in Palestine but the old evil in a new and horrible guise".
This "old evil", rising from its Talmudic bottle to confront Dr. Weizmann at Geneva in 1946, apparently accounts for the note of premonition which runs through the last pages of his book of 1949 (when the Zionist state had been set up by terror). The Moyne murder, he then forebodingly said, "illumines the abyss into which terrorism leads". Thus in his last days Dr. Weizmann saw whither his indefatigable journey had led: to an abyss! He lived to see it receive a first batch of nearly a million victims. From the moment of his deposition effective control passed into the hands of "the terrorists", as he calls them, and his belated cry of "Back!" fell on empty air. The "activists" (as they prefer to call themselves) were left with power to ignite a third world conflict when they pleased. Dr. Weizmann survived to play a determining part in the next stage of the venture but never again had true power in Zionism
From 1946 the terrorists took command. They set to work to drive the British from Palestine first, and knew they could not fail in the state of affairs which had been brought about during the Second War. If the British defended either themselves or the semitic Arabs the cry of "anti-semitism" would rise until the politicians in Washington turned on the British; then, when the British left, the. terrorist s would drive out the Arabs.
The terror had been going on for many years, the Moyne murder being only one incident in it; indeed, one of the harassed Colonial Secretaries, Mr. Oliver Stanley, in 1944 told the House of Commons that it had sensibly impeded "the British war effort", or in other words, prolonged the war (he is a trustworthy witness, for he was hailed by the Zionist s at his death as "a staunch friend"). In 1946 and 1947, after the Geneva Congress, it was intensified, hundreds of British soldiers being ambushed, shot while asleep, blown up and the like. The terror was deliberately given the visible appearance of "the old evil" when two British sergeants were slowly done to death in an orchard and left hanging there. The choice of this Levitical form of butchery ("hanging on a tree", the death "accursed of God") signified that these things were done under the Judaic Law.
The British government, daunted by the fury of the American and British press, under common constraint, feared to protect its officials and soldiers, and one British soldier wrote to The Times: "What use has the army for the government's sympathy? It does not avenge those who are murdered, nor does it prevent any further killings. Are we no longer a nation with sufficient courage to enforce law and order where it is our responsibility to do so?"
This was the case. The great Western governments had fallen, under "irresistible pressure", into a nerveless captivity, and Britain and America had ceased, anyway for the time, to be sovereign nations. At length the British government, in despair, referred the problem of Palestine to the new organization in New York called "the United Nations" (which had as little right to dispose of Palestine as the League of Nations before it).
Delegates from Haiti, Liberia, Honduras and other parts of "the free world" thronged to Lake Success, a forlorn, suburban pond outside New York. There was an hissing in the world at this time and from the parent UNO bodies called COBSRA, UNRRA, UNESCO uncoiled. On this particular day something called UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) rendered to UNO its report recommending "the partition of Palestine".
Dr. Weizmann (though deposed by the Zionist Organization for his warnings against terrorism) was once more the chief authority heard by UNSCOP in Jerusalem, and then quickly returned to New York where, in October and November of 1947, he dominated the hidden scene as lobbyist supreme. "Irresistible pressure" operated with relentless force. The delegates whom the public masses saw on the moving-picture screens were puppets; the great play was all behind the curtain and in that, Chesterton's "real world", of which the multitude saw nothing, two great operations were in progress, by means of which the fate of Palestine was settled far from the debating halls of the United Nations. First, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe were being smuggled across Western Europe to invade Palestine. Second, the approach of an American presidential election was being used by the Zionists as a means to set the rival parties there bidding against each other for Zionist support, and thus to ensure that the decisive American vote in the United Nations would be cast for the invasion.
In each case, and as in the preceding three decades, men arose who strove to disentangle their countries from its consequences. The secret convoying of the Eastern Jews across Western Europe was revealed by a British general, Sir Frederick Morgan (to whose work in planning the invasion of Normandy General Eisenhower's book pays tribute). When the fighting ended General Morgan was lent by the British War Office to "UNRRA", the offspring-body of the United Nations which was supposed to "relieve and rehabilitate" the sufferers from the war. General Morgan was put in charge of the most hapless of these (the "displaced persons") and found that "UNRRA", which cost the American and British taxpayer much money, was being used as an umbrella to cover the mass-movement of Jews from the eastern area to Palestine. These people were not "displaced persons". Their native countries had been "liberated" by the Red Armies and they were able to live in them, their welfare ensured by the special law against "anti-semitism" which all these communized countries received from their Communist overlord. They had not been "driven from Germany", where they had never lived. In fact, these were, once more, the Ostjuden, the Khazars, being driven by their Talmudic masters to a new land for a conspiratorial purpose.
In this way a new war was being cooked over the embers of the dying one and General Morgan twice (in January and August 1946) publicly stated that "a secret organization existed to further a mass movement of Jews from Europe, a second Exodus". Senator Herbert Lehman, a prominent Zionist who was Director General of UNRRA, said this warning was "anti-semitic" and demanded General Morgan's resignation. He relented when General Morgan disclaimed "anti-semitic" intent, but when the general repeated his warning eight months later he was summarily dismissed by the new Director General, a Zionist sympathizer and former Mayor of New York, Mr. Fiorello La Guardia, known to New Yorkers as The Little Flower. Mr. La Guardia then appointed a Mr. Myer Cohen in General Morgan's place. The British government hastened to punish General Morgan by retiring the celebrated invasion-planner, stating (falsely) that this was at his request.
Two independent bodies of high status confirmed General Morgan's information; in the servient condition of the press their disclosures received little publicity. A Select Committee on Estimates of tile British Rouse of Commons reported (November 1946) that "very large numbers of Jews, almost amounting to a second Exodus, have been migrating from Eastern Europe to the American zones of Germany and Austria with the intention in the majority of cases of finally making their way to Palestine. It is clear that it is a highly organized movement, with ample funds and great influence behind it, but the Subcommittee were unable to obtain any real evidence who are the real instigators". A War Investigating Committee sent to Europe by the United States Senate said that "heavy migration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the American zone of Germany is part of a carefully organized plan financed by special groups in the United States".
The picture, once again, is of a conspiracy supported by the Western governments, in this case the American one in particular. The "organization" in America disposed of American and British public funds lavishly, and effected the mass-transfer of population under the cloak of war-relief. Its leaders were able summarily to dismiss high officials, publicly-paid, who exposed what went on, and the British government supported this action. Although by that time (1946-1947) the perfidy of the revolutionary state was supposed to have been realized by the Western politicians (so that "cold war" was waged with it), the three governments of Washington, London and Moscow acted in perfect accord in this one matter. The "exodus" came from Russia and from the part of Europe abandoned by the West to the revolution. No man may leave the Soviet state without permission, most rarely granted, but in this one case the Iron Curtain opened to release a mass of people, just large enough to ensure immediate war and permanent unrest in the Near East. Just as smoothly, thirty years before, the frontiers and ports of Germany (an enemy), England (an ally) and America (a neutral) had opened to allow the revolutionaries to go to Russia. On both occasions, at this supreme level of policy, the super-national one, there were no allies, enemies or neutrals; all governments did the bidding of the supreme power.
One of the British Colonial Secretaries earliest involved in Zionism and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Mr. Leopold Amery, had said: "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state". In 1946-1948, at last, this thought was being realized, in the only way possible: by the mass-transplantation of Eastern Jews to Palestine. Only one thing still was needed: to obtain from "the United Nations" some act of mock-legalization for the invasion about to occur. To ensure that, the capitulation of the American president was necessary; and the way to bring that about was to threaten his party-advisers with the loss of the approaching presidential election, which lay a year ahead.
A third war was in truth being hatched, in the thinning fog of the second war, by this clandestine movement of population, and in America (after the dismissal of General Morgan in Europe) the two men whose offices made them directly responsible tried to nip the peril in the bud. One was General Marshall, whose interventions in the question of invading Europe and later in that of China have been shown by their consequences to have been most ill-omened. In the question of Palestine he showed prudence. In 1947 he was Secretary of State and was thus chiefly responsible, under the president, for foreign policy. He strove to ward off his country's involvement in the Palestinian fiasco and, as in all such cases, his relegation soon followed.
The other man was Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. He was a successful banker, brought in to government in wartime for his executive ability; he was wealthy and only the impulse to serve his country can have moved him to take office. He foresaw disastrous consequences from involvement and died believing he had utterly failed in his effort to avert it. Of all the men concerned during two generations, he alone left a diary which fully exposes the methods by which Zion controls and manipulates governors and governments.
Mr. Truman went further than even President Roosevelt 'in taking foreign policy and national security out of the province of the responsible ministers, and in acting contrary to their counsel under the pressure applied through electoral advisers. The story is made complete by Mr. Forrestal's Diary, Mr. Truman's own memoirs, and Dr. Weizmann's book.
The struggle behind the scenes for control over the American president, and therewith of the Republic itself, lasted from the autumn of 1947 to the spring of 1948, that is, from the United Nations debate about the partition of Palestine to the proclamation of the Zionist state after its forcible seizure.
Dates are important. In November 1947 the Zionists wanted the "partition" vote and in May 1948 they wanted recognition of their invasion. The presidential election was due in November 1948, and the essential preliminary to it, the nomination contests, in June and July 1948. The party-manager s instructed Mr. Truman that re-election was in the Zionist gift; the opposition candidate received similar advice from his party-managers. Thus "the election campaign to ok on the nature of an auction, each candidate being constantly under pressure from his organizers to outbid the other in 'supporting the invasion of Palestine. In these circumstances the successful candidate could only feel that election was a reward for "supporting partition" in November 1947 and "granting recognition" in May 1948; nothing could more clearly illustrate the vast change which the mass-immigration of Eastern Jews, in the period following the Civil War, had brought about in the affairs of the American Republic. Mr. Forrestal left a full account of the chief moves in this fateful, hidden contest.
The time-bomb planted by Mr. Balfour thirty years earlier reached its explosion-moment when the British government in 1947 announced that it would withdraw from Palestine if other powers made impartial administration there impossible; this was the reply to President Truman's proposal that 100,000 "displaced persons" be allowed to enter Palestine immediately. Mr. Truman's responsible advisers at once informed the American government of the consequences which would flow from a British withdrawal. General Marshall told the American Cabinet that such a British withdrawal "would be. followed by a bloody struggle between the Arabs and Jews" (August 8, 1947), and his Under Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Lovett, pointed to the danger of "solidifying sentiment among all the Arabian and Mohammedan peoples" against the United States {August 15, 1947).
This warning was at once answered by the voice of party-politics. At a Cabinet lunch Mr. Robert Hannegan (Postmaster General, but previously national chairman of the President's party, the Democratic Party) urged the President to "make a statement of policy on Palestine" demanding "the admission of 150,000 Zionists". Thus the party-man's counsel was that President Truman should respond to the British warning by increasing his bid for Zionist electoral support, from 100,000 to 150,000 persons. Mr. Hannegan said this new demand "would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee" and, as proof of what he promised, added that the earlier demand (related to 100,000 immigrants) had produced the result that "very large sums were obtained from Jewish contributors and they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the President did on Palestine".
Thus the issue from the outset was presented to the President in the plainest terms of national interest on the one hand and party-contributions, party-votes and party-success on the other. It was argued throughout the months that followed and finally determined on that basis, without any gloss.
Mr. Forrestal's alarm became acute. He held that if state policy and national security (his province) were to be subordinated to vote-buying the country would pass under Zionist control and earlier (in 1946) had asked the President if Palestine could not be "taken out of politics". Mr. Truman at that time had "agreed about the principle" but evinced the feeling "that not much will come of such an attempt, that political manoeuvring is inevitable, politics and our government being what they are".
In September 1947, Mr. Forrestal spurred by his misgivings, laboured tirelessly to have Palestine "taken out of politics". His idea was that both contending parties must contain a majority of people who could be brought to agree, in the paramount national interest, that major foreign issues be set above dispute, so that Palestine could not be used for huckstering at election-time. He found only disdain for this idea among the men of "practical politics".
Deeply disturbed by Mr. Hannegan's above-quoted remarks of September 4, Mr. Forrestal at a Cabinet lunch on September 29, 1947 openly asked President Truman "whether it would not be possible to lift the Jewish-Palestine question out of politics". Mr. Truman said "it was worth trying to do, although he was obviously sceptical". At the next Cabinet lunch (October 6) the party-boss rebuked the responsible Cabinet officer:
"Mr. Hannegan brought up the question of Palestine. He said many people who had contributed to. the Democratic campaign were pressing hard for assurances from the administration of definitive support for the Jewish position in Palestine".
Mr. Forrestal foresaw Mr. Truman's capitulation and his alarm increased. He saw the Democratic party-manager, Mr. J. Howard McGrath (November 6, 1947) and again could make no headway. Mr. McGrath said, "There were two or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question". Mr. Forrestal made no impression with his rejoinder, "I said I would rather lose those states in a national election than run the risks which I felt might develop in our handling of the Palestine question".
The next day he again received support from General Marshall, who told the Cabinet that the Middle East was "another tinder box", and Mr. Forrestal then "repeated my suggestion . . . that a serious attempt be made to lift the Palestine question out of American partisan politics . . . Domestic politics ceased at the Atlantic Ocean and no question was more charged with danger to our security than this particular one" (November 7, 1947).
The "partition" vote was by this time near and Mr. Forrestal made another appeal to. Mr. McGrath , the Democratic party-manager, showing him a secret report on Palestine provided by the governmental intelligence agency. Mr. McGrath brushed this aside, saying Jewish sources were responsible for a substantial part of the contributions to the Democratic National Committee and many of these contributions were made "with a distinct idea on the part of the givers that they will have an opportunity to express their views and have them seriously considered on such questions as the present Palestine question. There was a feeling among the Jews that the United States was not doing what it should to solicit votes in the United Nations General Assembly in favour of the Palestine partition, and beyond this the Jews would expect the United States to do its utmost to implement the partition decision if it is voted by the United Nations through force if necessary '. "
This quotation reveals the process of progressively raising the bid for Zionist funds and the Zionist vote which went on behind the scenes. At the start only United States support for the partition proposal had been "expected". Within a few weeks this "expectation" had risen to the demand that the United States should "solicit" the votes of other countries in support of partition and should use American troops to enforce partition, and the party-manager was quite accustomed to such notions (if American troops in the 1950's or 1960's find them selves in the Near East, any of them who have read Mr. Forrestal's Diaries should know how they came to be there). Mr. Forrestal must have acted from a sense of duty, not of hope, when he implored Mr. McGrath "to give a lot of thought to this matter because it involved not merely the Arabs of the Middle East, but also might involve the whole Muslim world with its four hundred millions of people: Egypt, North Africa, India and Afghanistan".
While Mr. Forrestal fought this losing battle behind the curtained windows of the White House and of party-headquarters, Dr. Weizmann, in Washington, New York and Lake Success was indefatigably organizing "the vote" on partition. He was having his difficulties, but was rescued from them at this culminant moment when he found "a welcome and striking change" among some of those "wealthy Jews" who formerly had opposed Zionism. At this belated stage in his narrative he first mentions Mr. Bernard Baruch, saying that Mr. Baruch had formerly been "an oppositionist Jew", one of the "rich and powerful Jews who were against the idea of the Jewish National Home, but they did not know very much about the subject".
One can only speculate about the exact composition and nature of the "Jewish International" which Dr. Kastein described as having come into existence around the start of this century. It is permissible, in the light of all that has happened in these fifty years, to envisage it as a permanent, high directorate, spread over all nation-state boundaries, the membership of which probably changes only when gaps are left by death. If that is its nature, a reasonable further inference would be that Dr. Weizmann was a very high functionary, perhaps the highest functionary, subordinate to it, but that undoubtedly there was a body superior to him. In that case, I would judge that its four most important members, in the United States at that period, would have been Mr. Bernard Baruch, first, and Senator Herbert Lehman, Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior and Justice Felix Frankfurter, next. If there were a doubt, it would previously have attached to Mr. Baruch, who had never publicly associated himself with "leftist" causes or with Zionism. His great crony, Mr. Winston Churchill, quoted Mr. Baruch's "negative view" about Zionism to Dr. Weizmann, who in consequence (as he says) "took great care not to touch on the Jewish problem" when he earlier met Mr. Baruch in America.
Nevertheless, at this decisive moment Mr. Baruch suddenly "changed a great deal" (Dr. Weizmann) and his support, added to the Zionist "pressure" that was being exerted on American politics, was determining. Dr. Weizmann, as he hurried round the lobbies at Lake Success, learned that the American delegation was opposed to the partition of Palestine. Thereon he enlisted the "particularly helpful" support of Mr. Baruch (until then, for forty years or more, regarded as an opponent of Zionism even by such intimates as Mr. Winston Churchill!), and also of the junior Mr. Henry Morgenthau (whose name attaches to the plan of "blind vengeance" adopted by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill at Ottawa in 1944).
Mr. Baruch presumably did not hold Dr. Weizmann in the awe which seems to have seized the Western politicians at the Zionist leader's approach. Therefore his sudden support of Zionism must denote either an abrupt conversion or the revelation of a feeling earlier concealed; in either case, his intervention was decisive as will be seen.
Dr. Weizmann was well supported by the other powerful Jews in the Democratic Party. Senator Lehman was head of UNRRA when it was used to smuggle the Eastern Jews across Europe to Palestine, and had demanded General Morgan's resignation for publicly calling attention to this mass-movement of people; his part in the drama was already plain. Mr. Justice Frankfurter was equally busy; Mr. Forrestal was told by Mr. Loy Henderson (in charge of Middle Eastern Affairs in the State Department) that "very great pressure had been put on him as well as Mr. Lovett to get active American solicitation for United Nations votes for the Palestine partition; he said Felix Frankfurter and Justice Murphy had both sent messages to the Philippines delegate strongly urging his vote" (this is the same Mr. Frankfurter who called on Mr. House at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris "to talk about the Jews in Palestine"; he was also the devoted instructor of Mr. Alger Hiss at the Harvard Law School).
Having such support, Dr. Weizmann was a besieging general backed by superior armies when he called on the citadel's commander, President Truman, on November 19, 1947, to demand that the United States support the partition of Palestine, and furthermore, that the Negev district (to which Dr. Weizmann attached "great importance") be included in the Zionist territory.
Mr. Truman's discipline was exemplary: "he promised me that he would communicate at once with the American delegation" (Dr. Weizmann). Out at Lake Success the chief American delegate, Mr. Herschel Johnson, as he was about to inform the Zionist representative of the American decision to vote against the inclusion of the Negev, was called to the telephone and received, through President Truman, Dr. Weizmann's orders. With that the deed was done and on November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended (Zionist propaganda always says "decided") that "independent Arab and Jewish states, and the specific international régime for the City of Jerusalem" should come into existence after termination of the British "Mandate" on August l, 1948.
The vote was 31 against 13 with 10 abstentions. The manner in which the American vote was procured has been shown. As to some of the other votes, Under Secretary Robert Lovett said at the next Cabinet lunch (December l, 1947) that "he had never in his life been subject to so much pressure as he had been in the last three days". The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which had a concession in Liberia, reported (he said) that it had been asked by telephone to instruct its representative in Liberia "to bring pressure on the Liberian Government to vote in favour of partition ". (Mr. Loy Henderson's account of the "great pressure" used to get American "solicitation" of the votes of small countries has already been quoted). Thus was the "vote" of "the United Nations" produced in the most explosive issue of this century's world affairs.
At the Cabinet lunch immediately after this "vote" Mr. Forrestal returned to the attack: "I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists' pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine. . . The decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country". He then discussed the question (December 3, 1947) with Mr. James F. Byrnes, who had ceased to be Secretary of State earlier in the year (his relegation was foreseeable; it was he who disclosed President Roosevelt's pledge to Ibn Saoud).
Mr. Byrnes said President Truman's actions had placed the British Government "in a most difficult position" and added that Mr. David K. Niles and Judge Samuel Rosenman "were chiefly responsible" for it. Both these men had been brought into the White House among the "Palace Guard" with which Mr. Roosevelt surrounded himself; Mr. Niles (of Russian-Jewish descent) was the "adviser on Jewish affairs" and Judge Rosenman had helped write presidential speeches. These men (said Mr. Byrnes) told Mr. Truman "that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position on Palestine, and had insisted that unless the President anticipated this moment New York State would be lost to the Democrats".
Here Mr. Byrnes gave another glimpse of the behind-the-scenes auction. The two candidates for the highest office in the United States (Mr. Thomas Dewey was the prospective nominee of the other party," the Republican) in these portrayals look like children, incited against each other by the offer of a dangling bag of sweets. Mr. Truman, by doing the Zionist bidding in the matter of partition, had by no means ensured the Democrats of the prize, for the election was still a year distant and during that time the Zionists were to demand more and more, and the Republican party to bid higher and higher for the dangling reward.
Mr. Forrestal, in desperation, now tried to convince the Republican Mr. Dewey: "I said the Palestine matter was a matter of the deepest concern to me in terms of the security of the nation, and asked, once more, if the parties could not agree to take this question out of their electoral campaigning". Governor (of New York State) Dewey's response was much the same as President Truman's: "It was a difficult matter to get results because of the intemperate attitude of the Jewish people who had taken Palestine as the emotional symbol, because the Democratic party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish vote". Thereon Mr. Dewey continued to try and outdo the Democratic politicians in his bid for "the Jewish vote" (and to his own surprise nevertheless lost the election).
Mr. Forrestal next tried to strengthen the hand of the State Department, in its resistance to the President, by a memorandum (January 21, 1948) in which he analyzed the dangers to American national security flowing from this [445] entanglement: "It is doubtful if there is any segment of our foreign relations of greater importance or of greater danger. . . to the security of the United States than our relations in the Middle East". He warned against doing "permanent injury to our relations with the Muslim world" and "a stumble in to war". He said he had found "some small encouragement" among individual Republicans for his proposal to take the question "out of party-politics", but among the Democrats had met a feeling "that a substantial part of the Democratic funds come from Zionist sources inclined to ask in return for a lien upon this part of our national policy".
The last nine words are explicit and are literally correct. The Zionists demanded the submission of American state policy and offered in return a four year tenure of the presidency to the highest bidder. Whether they were in truth able to deliver what they offered has never been tested; the party-managers took them at their word and the candidates of both parties put on the sackcloth of submission before they were nominated, knowing (or believing) that they would not even achieve nomination unless they wore it. [yeah reread that DC]
Mr. Forrestal urged the Secretary of State (General Marshall) to remonstrate with the President, pointing out that a large body of Jews "hold the view that the present zeal of the Zionists can have most dangerous consequences, not merely in their divisive effects in American life, but in the long run on the position of Jews throughout the the world".
Under-Secretary Lovett, on reading Mr. Forrestal's memorandum, produced one already prepared by the Planning Staff of the State Department. This informed the President that the partition plan was "not workable" (exactly as British governments had been warned by their colonial administrators that "the Mandate" was "not workable"); that the United States was not committed to support it if it could not be effected without force; that it was against American interest to supply arms to the Zionists while refusing them to the Arabs; that the United States should not take on itself to enforce the "recommendation" of partition and should try to secure withdrawal of the partition proposal.
Mr. Lovett added, "the use of the United Nations by others as a propaganda platform is complicating our conduct of foreign relations" and said the State Department was "seriously embarrassed and handicapped by the activities of Niles at the White House in going directly to the President on matters involving Palestine". On that very day, the Under-Secretary complained, he had once more been under "pressure"; Mr. Niles had telephoned from the White House "expressing the hope that the embargo on the sales of arms to the Zionists would be lifted". [Outrageous conduct DC]
At that point Mr. Forrestal evidently became an acute annoyance to the powers behind the White House and his elimination was decided. First he received a visit from Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt junior. Whatever the father's deathbed pledge not to take "hostile action against the Arabs", the son (a New York politician, with presidential hopes) was an extreme Zionist partisan. Mr. Forrestal pointedly said, "I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely on scandal". He records (as if with surprise) that his visitor "made no threats" in response to this, and he then explained his proposal to "lift the question out of politics" by agreement between the parties.
Mr. Roosevelt, his father's son, replied that "this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed, and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans to gain by such an agreement". Mr. Forrestal answered that "failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California;" (the "pivotal states" earlier mentioned by party-manager McGrath) "I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States".
No comment by Mr. Roosevelt is recorded, but he was a harbinger of ill for Mr. Forrestal because on this same day (February 3, 1948) came the intervention of Mr. Bernard Baruch. Mr. Baruch, earlier an opponent of Zionism, was now so zealous in the cause that he advised Mr. Forrestal "not to be active in this matter. . . I was already identified, to a degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine".
Ominous words for Mr. Forrestal! The annals here record for the first time a specific intervention by Mr. Baruch in high affairs, and its nature. His counsel was that Mr. Forrestal, a Cabinet officer, consider his own interest, which was endangered; until that time Mr. Forrestal as a responsible Cabinet officer had considered only the interest of his country. Mr. Forrestal does not say whether he saw in this advice anything threatening; his allusion to Mr. Roosevelt on the same day shows that the thought of "threats" was in his mind.
He then gave way to the fear which in the end cowed nearly all men who strove against the thrall of Zion. Four days later (February 7, 1948) he drew up a last paper on the subject which he never submitted to the President, but which contains something of historical importance. He said that on February 6 "Eisenhower told me that effective United States participation in a Palestine police force would involve about one division with appropriate supporting units". At that time, therefore, General Eisenhower (then Chief of Staff) was drafting plans for the potential engagement of American troops in Palestine. Mr. Forrestal put away this last memorandum. On February 12 and 18 he made two final appeals to General Marshall to contend with the President and the party-managers and at that point his efforts ceased.
His desisting availed him nothing for within a twelvemonth he was literally hounded to death. His end needs to be described here, before the armed seizure of Palestine is recorded; it is the classic case of persecution by defamation, leading to death.
I first went to America early in 1949 and was perplexed by the venom of the attacks, in the press and radio, on one Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. I knew nothing of him but his name, and the part he played in this affair (as above recorded) was then entirely unknown to the public. Nevertheless they read or heard daily that he was insane, a coward who had left his wife to be attacked by a burglar, a tax defaulter, and all manner of other things. By chance I met a friend of his who told me that he had been so reduced by this persecution that those near to him were gravely alarmed. A few weeks later he threw himself from a high window, leaving in his room some copied verses from Greek tragedy which ended with the refrain" "Woe, woe! will be the cry . . ."
American libel laws are liberal and differ from state to state, and litigation is long. Even a successful action may not bring redress. Hardly any limit is in practice set to what may be said about a man singled out for defamation; the slanders are printed in the language that incites mob-passions and when broadcast are uttered in rabid accents that recalled to me the voices of primitive African tribespeople in moments of catalepsy. Among Mr. Forrestal's effects was found a scrapbook full of these attacks, and towards the end he could not listen to the radio. The refuse of calumny was emptied on his head and at the end two broadcasters joined for the kill. One of them announced (January 9, 1949) that President Truman would "accept Forrestal's resignation within a week" (and followed this with some slander about shares in the German Dye Trust). On January 11 the second broadcaster told the millions that President Truman would by that time have accepted Mr. Forrestal's resignation, had not the first broadcaster anticipated the event (the jewel robbery story was added to this). A few weeks earlier President Truman had told the Press that he had asked Mr. Forrestal not to resign; on March 1 he sent for Mr. Forrestal and demanded his immediate resignation, without explanation, to be effective from May 1. Mr. Forrestal committed suicide on May 21. At the funeral ceremony Mr. Truman described him as "a victim of the war"!
(In parentheses, at that time another man was being hounded to the same death, which he escaped, later in the same year, only by the failure of his suicide attempt. His persecution came from the same defamationist source, though his offence was in the other field, Communism. Mr. Whittaker Chambers sinned by his efforts to expose Communist infiltration of the American Government. I was in America at the time of his ordeal, which is described in his book; this contains the striking example, to which I earlier alluded, of the Talmudic practice of "cursing by an angry, fixed look" (the Jewish Encyclopaedia). Literal Talmudists would presumably see in Mr. Chambers's suicide attempt, and in the ill-health which subsequently afflicted him, a token of the literal efficacy of "the Law" in this respect).
After Mr. Forrestal's retreat into silence, at the warning of Mr . Baruch, the responsible men at the State Department continued their struggle, headed by General Marshall. (All this while, in England, Mr. Bevin was carrying on his lonely fight against the Conservative opposition and against the mass of his own party alike). At one point, for the first time since 1917, the responsible Cabinet officers and officials in both countries seemed to have won the day.
This was in March 1948. Violence in Palestine had so greatly increased after the United Nations' "recommendation" for the country' s bisection that the Security Council grew alarmed and beat a retreat. Even President Truman was shaken and his representative in the Security Council announced the reversal of American policy, proposing (March 19, 1948) that the partition proposal be suspended, that a truce be arranged, and that the end of the "Mandate" be followed by a "Trusteeship" (this was in effect the proposal of the State Department memorandum of January).
At the last moment the idea of "the Jewish state" thus seemed about to collapse. The post-war return to reason was beginning (that process which Mr. Lloyd George, thirty years before, had warningly called the "thaw") and if the coup now failed only a third world war could provide another opportunity. The "Trusteeship" would be the "Mandate" in a new form, but with the United States as the country chiefly involved, and in another ten or twenty years America, foreseeably, would find the "Trusteeship" as "unworkable", under Zionist pressure, as the British had found the "Mandate".
It was then or never, and the Zionists struck at once. They presented the "United Nations" with the accomplished fact by bisecting Palestine themselves. The terrorist deed by means of which this was accomplished was the result of the policy adopted at the World Zionist Congress of 1946, where "the demoralizing forces in the movement" (Dr. Weizmann's words) had recommended methods of "Resistance. . . defence. . . activism", and Dr. Weizmann, who knew what was meant, had been deposed for objecting to them.
Dr. Weizmann then had called "the terror in Palestine" the "old evil in a new and horrible guise". April 9, 1948 showed what he meant, and in particular why he called it the old evil. On that day the "activists", the terror-and-assassination group of Zionism, "utterly destroyed" an Arab village in exact and literal fulfilment of "the Law" laid down in Deuteronomy (which, the reader will recall, is the basic Judaic law but was itself an amendment of the original Mosaic law of the Israelites).
This was the most significant day in the entire story of Zionism. To the Arabs (who knew the Torah and "had known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn") it meant that the savage Law of Judah, devised by the Levites between 700 and 400 BC., was to be resurrected and imposed on them in full force and violence, with the support of the Christian West and of Communized Russia alike. The symbolic massacre, they knew, was intended to show what would happen to all of them if they stayed. Thereon almost the entire [449] Arab population of Palestine fled into the neighbouring Arab states.
The massacre at Deir Yasin was briefly reported in the West, for instance Time magazine of New York said:
"Jewish terrorists of the Stem Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi stormed the village of Deir Yasin and butchered everyone in sight. The corpses of 250 Arabs, mostly women and small children, were later found tossed into wells".
At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 Dr. Weizmann had declared, "The Bible is our mandate", and the words sounded good to Western ears. This event showed what they meant, and the same words were repeated by the Zionist leaders in Palestine thirty years after Dr. Weizmann used them. The massacre at Deir Yasin was an act of "observance" of the ancient "statutes and commandments", including the relevant passage in Deuteronomy, "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out. . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou . . . then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them", and the related passage, "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them". There are seven Arab states today, and each of them has its share of the fugitives of 1948, who for eight years now have been a living reminder to them of the common future fate with which Zionism threatens them under the ancient Law.
The passive condonation of this deed by Jewry as a whole showed more clearly than anything else the change which Zionism had wrought in the Jewish mind in a few years. Writing in 1933 (only fifteen years before Deir Yasin), Mr. Bernard J. Brown quoted the above passage from Deuteronomy as the reason for Arab fears, and added, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his bible literally, and that he is a kind and charitable person and would not be so cruel to his fellow-man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of the historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". The Arabs were right and Mr. Brown was wrong; this enlightened Western Jew could not conceive, in 1933, that Zionism meant a full return to the superstition of antiquity in its most barbaric form.
Probably Deir Yasin remained an isolated incident only because its meaning was so clear that the Arabs left the country. Mr. Arthur Koestler is definite about this cause-and-effect. He was in Palestine and says the Arab civilian population, after Deir Yasin, at once fled from Haifa, Tiberia, Jaffa and all other cities and then from the entire country, so that "by May 14 all had gone save for a few thousand". All impartial authorities agree about the intention and effect of Deir Yasin, and from April 9, 1948 no doubt remained about the governing force of the ancient Judaic Law on all future acts and ambitions of Zion. Deir Yasin explains the fear of the surviving Arab states today as fully as it explains the flight of the Palestinian Arabs.
Deir Yasin, for a little while, solved the Zionists' problem. The partition of Palestine had been achieved, by force. At the same time the event revealed (to the Arabs, if not then to the West) the nature of Dr. Weizmann's "abyss into which terrorism leads". From April 9, 1948 the West itself stood on the brink of this abyss, dug by the acts of two generations of its politicians.
Thus the situation changed completely between March 19, 1948, when the American Government decided that partition was "unworkable" and reversed its policy, and April 9, 1948, when terrorism effected partition. Dr. Weizmann must still have been haunted by his fears, but now that the territory for the Jewish state had been cleared he would not or could not withdraw from "the abyss". The aim now was to achieve a second reversal of American policy, to gain an expression of approval for what had been done by terrorism, and to this end, once more, Dr. Weizmann bent all his efforts. At the first reversal of American policy he had been urgently summoned from London to Lake Success by letters, cables and telephone calls, and the day before it was announced he was again closeted with President Truman. As the days passed, and the news from Deir Yasin flickered briefly over the tapes, he laboured tirelessly at his supreme task: the winning of "recognition" for the Jewish State set up by the terrorists at Deir Yasin.
Dr. Weizmann's energy was extraordinary. He conducted a one-man siege of the entire "United Nations" (of course, he was everywhere received as the representative of a new kind of world-power). He was "in close contact", for instance, with the delegates of Uruguay and Guatemala, whom he calls "the ever gallant defenders" of Zionism, and with the Secretary General of the United Nations, at that time a Mr. Trygve Lie from Norway. In mid-April, with the tidings from Deir Yasin rising to its very nostrils, the General Assembly of the United Nations met. The American vote was clearly to be decisive, and Dr. Weizmann remarks that he "began to be preoccupied with the idea of American recognition of the Jewish state". In other words, American state policy, formed in the constitutional process of consultation between the Chief Executive and his responsible Cabinet officers, was once more to be reversed at the demand of Chaim Weizmann.
Dates are again significant. On May 13, 1948 Dr. Weizmann saw President Truman; the contest for the presidential nominations then lay immediately ahead and the presidential election a few months beyond, so that this was the ideal moment to apply "irresistible pressure". Dr. Weizmann informed President Truman that the British mandate would end on May 15 and a provisional government would then take over "the Jewish state". He urged that the United States "promptly" recognize it and the President acted with zealous alacrity.
On May 14 (Palestine time) the Zionists in Tel Aviv proclaimed their new state. A few minutes later "unofficial news" reached Lake Success that President Truman had recognized it. The American delegates (who had not been informed) "were incredulous", but "after much confusion" they made contact with the White House and received from it Dr. Weizmann's instructions, transmitted through the President. Dr. Weizmann forthwith repaired to Washington as the President of the new state and President Truman received his guest, thereafter announcing that the moment of recognition was "the proudest of my life".
Eight years later President Truman in his memoirs depicted the circumstances in which his "proudest moment" came about, and his account may appropriately be cited here. Describing the six-month period (from the "partition-vote" in November 1947 to "recognition" in April 1948), he says:
"Dr. Chaim Weizmann. . . called on me on November 19 and a few days later I received a letter from him". Mr. Truman then quotes this letter, dated November 27; in it Dr. Weizmann refers to "rumours" that "our people have exerted undue and excessive pressure on certain" (United Nations) "delegations" and, speaking for himself, says "there is no substance in this charge". Mr. Truman comments, "The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders - actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats - disturbed me and annoyed me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly."
The "political threats" mentioned here obviously related to President Truman's approaching re-election campaign; this is the only reasonable interpretation of the words. Mr. Truman (according to Dr. Weizmann) promised, at the interview on November 19, "to communicate at once with the American delegation" and the United States vote was then given, on November 29, to the "recommendation" that Palestine be partitioned. Thus President Truman's anger (as recorded in his narrative of 1956) at the methods used in no wise delayed his capitulation to them in 1947 (if that were not made plain the reader of his Memoirs might gain a different impression).
Mr. Truman (in 1956) recorded the outcome of the "solution" (the partition recommendation) supported by him in November 1947: "every day now brought reports of new violence in the Holy Land". He also found that his capitulation of November and Dr. Weizmann's disclaimer of "undue pressure" had no effect at all in the months that followed: "The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the United Nations. Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that and the other" (Disraeli's picture of "the world being governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes").
The President sought refuge in retreat: "As the pressure mounted, I found it necessary to give instructions that I did not want to be approached by any more spokesmen for the extreme Zionist cause. I was even so disturbed that I put off seeing Dr. Weizmann, who had returned to the United States and had asked for an interview with me". Mr. Truman, in 1956, evidently still held the postponement of an interview with Dr. Weizmann to have been so drastic a measure as to deserve permanent record. He was then visited (March 13, 1948) by an old Jewish business associate "who was deeply moved by the sufferings of the Jewish people abroad" (this was less than a month before the massacre at Deir Yasin) and who implored him to receive Dr. Weizmann, which President Truman at once did (March 18).
This was the day before American support was withdrawn from the partition recommendation (March 19). Mr. Truman says that when Dr. Weizmann left him (on March 18) "I felt he had reached a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted". Mr. Truman then passes over the bloody weeks that followed without a word (he does not mention Deir Yasin), except for an incidental statement that "the Department of State's specialists on the Near East were, almost without exception, unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state. . . I am sorry to say that there were some among them who were also inclined to be anti-Semitic". He resumes his narrative two months later (May 14, after Deir Yasin and the accompanying bloodshed) then saying, "Partition was not taking place in exactly the peaceful manner I had hoped, but the fact was that the Jews were controlling the area in which their people lived. . . Now that the Jews were ready to proclaim the State of Israel I decided to move at once and give American recognition to the new nation. About thirty minutes later, exactly eleven minutes after Israel had been proclaimed a state, Charlie Ross, my press secretary, handed the press the announcement of the de facto recognition by the United States of the provisional government of Israel. I was told that to some of the career men of the State Department this announcement came as a surprise".
Mr. Truman does not in his Memoirs recall his statement of 1948 that this was "the proudest moment of my life", or explain why he felt it to be so; after many months of such "pressure" and "political threats" at the beleaguered White House that at one moment he was led to deny himself, if only for a short time, even to Dr. Weizmann! For the purposes of this narrative he now virtually passes from the story, having served his turn. He was elected president six months after his proudest moment and at the date of this book looks fit to live another twenty years, a dapper, hearty man on whom the consequences of the acts with which his name is identified apparently had as little effect as the fury of the ocean cyclone has on the bobbing cork. (In 1956 he joined the company of those who have been awarded an honorary degree by the ancient University of Oxford, a woman don there raising a lonely and unheeded voice against its bestowal on the Chief Executive whose name is best known from its association with the order to atom bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima).
After President Truman's proud recognition of what had been done in Palestine between November 1947 and May 1948 the debate at the "United Nations" lost importance and Dr. Weizmann (who in his letter to President Truman of November 27, 1947 had warmly denied the use of "undue pressure") set to work to muster other recognitions, so that the issue should be put beyond doubt. He learned that Mr. Bevin, in London, "was bringing pressure to bear on the British Dominions. . . to withhold recognition", and he at once showed who was the greater expert in applying "pressure".
Historically regarded, this was a moment of the first importance, because it showed for the first time that Zionism, which had so deeply divided Jewry, had divided the nations of the British Empire, or Commonwealth; what no warlike menace or danger had ever achieved, "irresistible pressure on international politics" smoothly accomplished. Suddenly Zion was shown to be supreme in capitals as far from the central scene as Ottawa, Canberra, Cape Town and Wellington. .
This gave proof of superb staffwork and synchronization; miracles of secret organization must have been performed, in a few decades, to ensure the obedience, at the decisive moment, of the "top-line politicians" in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. These countries were remote from Palestine; they had no interest in implanting the fuse of new world war in the Middle East; their Jewish populations were tiny. Yet submission was instantaneous. This was world power in operation.
The great significance of what transpired may need explaining to non-British readers. The bonds between the British island and the overseas nations sprung from it, though they were intangible and rested on no compulsion, had in emergency repeatedly shown a strength, mysterious to outsiders. An anecdote may illustrate:
The New Zealand Brigadier George Clifton relates that when he was captured in the Western Desert in 1941 he was brought before Field Marshal Rommel, who asked, "Why are you New Zealanders fighting? This is a European war, not yours! Are you here for the sport?"
Brigadier Clifton was perplexed to explain something which to him was as natural as life itself: "Realizing he was quite serious and really meant this, and never having previously tried to put into words the, to us, self-evident fact that if Britain fought then we fought too, I held up my hand with the fingers together and said, 'We stand together. If you attack England, you attack New Zealand and Australia and Canada too. The British Commonwealth fights together'."
That was true, in respect of people, but it was no longer true in respect of "topline politicians". Through them, the conspiracy from Russia had found the chink in the armour. The "pressure" in Wellington (and the other capitals) was as powerful and effective as it was around the White House. In this particular case [454] (New Zealand) a typical figure of that time and group of helots was a Mr. Peter Fraser, Prime Minister of New Zealand. None could have had less cause to hate, or even to know anything about Arabs, but he was their implacable enemy, because he had somehow become another captive of Zionism. This poor Scottish lad, who went to the other edge of the world and found fame and fortune there, apparently picked up the infection during impressionable youthful years in London (when it was spreading among ambitious young politicians there) and took it with him to the new country, so that decades later he applied all his energies and the power of his office to the destruction of harmless folk in Palestine! When he died in 1950 a Zionist newspaper wrote of him:
"He was a convinced Zionist. . . He was busy leading the United Nations delegation of his country at the Paris Assembly, but gave much time and attention to the Palestine issue. . . sitting day after day at the Political Committee when Palestine was discussed. He never left the room for one moment; no detail escaped his attention. . . He was the only Premier on the committee and left it as soon as Palestine was dealt with . . . Time and again Peter Fraser found himself voting against the United Kingdom, but he did not care . . . He remained a friend until his last day".
A man with this alien ambition in his heart certainly thought quite differently from Brigadier Clifton and his kind, and had he known how his Prime Minister felt Brigadier Clifton might have been much more puzzled to know how to reply to Field Marshal Rommel. Being so much preoccupied with Zionism Mr. Fraser could not be expected to be wholehearted in his country's interest and New Zealand went into the Second War all unready, so that when he met New Zealand survivors from Greece and Crete at Port Said in 1941 they were "haggard, unshaven, battle-stained, many of them wounded, all badly worn both physically and mentally, all worried by the loss of so many good 'Cobbers'; Mr. Fraser was responsible, in part, for this" (Brigadier Clifton). With this man as prime minister, New Zealand's quick recognition of what had been done in Palestine was assured, little though the New Zealanders knew it.
In South Africa, Dr. Weizmann, in his moves to discomfort Mr. Bevin, turned at once to General Smuts, whom the reader met long ago. By chance I was in South Africa at that moment. A well-known Zionist emissary came speeding from New York by air and when I read of his arrival I foresaw what would follow. (This man appeared before a Zionist audience and told it that "the Jews need not feel themselves bound by any frontiers which the United Nations might lay down"; the only remonstrance against this, seen by me, came from a Jewish objector, who said such words boded ill for future peace).
General Smuts received this airborne visitor and then announced "recognition" at once, being beaten in promptness only by President Truman and the Soviet dictator Stalin, (who in this one question were perfectly agreed): This was, I believe, General Smuts's last political act, for he was defeated at an election two days later. His son strongly warned him against recognition, holding that it would lose him votes. General Smuts brushed the advice aside (rightly, from the electioneering point of view, for his opponents no doubt were ready to bid for the Zionist vote and South Africa contained no Arab voters).
General Smuts's renown throughout the British Commonwealth (and his unpopularity with most of his fellow Boers) rested entirely on the popular belief that he was the architect of "Anglo-Boer reconciliation" and a champion of the great-family concept. In this one question he deserted the hard-pressed government in London with the unquestioning obedience of long-instilled discipline. I achieved an old ambition to meet him at that time. His days were ending and he too now disappears from this tale, but before he died he, like Dr. Weizmann, had seen "the abyss" which he had helped dig: "in the problem of Palestine" (he told his son later in the same year, l948) "there is tragedy at our doorstep . . . No wonder Britain is getting sick and tired of it all. Failure in Pa!estine will not only be a British failure. Other nations have also taken a hand, including America, and they have also failed. Pa!estine . . . is one of the great problems of the world and can have a great effect on the future of the world . . . We have thought to let the Arabs and Jews fight it out, but we cannot do that. Power is on the move, and Palestine lies on the road".
So he spoke privately, but not publicly. Apparently politicians, like the clown in the opera, feel they must ever wear the mask in public: Like Mr. Truman, he did what Dr. Weizmann commanded without delay and even in 1949, for the benefit of a Zionist audience, said he was "happy to have been associated with at !east one thing in my life which has been successful".
The retreat from London became a rout. Dr. Weizmann records that the New Zealand representative, Sir Carl Berendsen, then "won support from Australia", and soon the "top-line politicians" in Canada followed suit. When the British Dominions followed Mr. Truman and Generalissimo Stalin the smaller states thronged to give "recognition"; they could not refuse to tread where these great ones had rushed in, and thus "the Jewish state" took shape "de facto", the fact being the massacre at Deir Yasin.
Although he became its president, this is in truth the point at which Dr. Chaim Weizmann passes from the narrative, after fifty years of an activity, essentially conspiratorial, in which he encompassed the capitulation of all political leaders of the West and left "tragedy", like a foundling, on its common doorstep. I would not know where to look for a more fascinating life and another writer might be able to depict it in heroic tones. To me it seems to have been given to a destructive purpose and Dr. Weizmann, whose years were nearly done when he reached his triumph, found triumph a bitter, perhaps a lethal cup.
So I judge, at all events, from his book, the last part of which is of absorbing interest. It was published in 1949, so that he could have brought his account to the point now reached by this one, at least. He did not. He closed it in 1947. Now, why did he do that?
I think the answer is obvious. In 1946 he had warned the World Zionist Organization against "terror" and depicted "the abyss" into which "the old evil" must lead, and had been deposed in consequence. Then he had become president of the new state set up by "terror". I think he wished to leave his warning to Jewry on record and could not bring himself to discuss the deeds of terror and assassination in which the new state was born, so that he pretended to have ended the manuscript before they occurred.
He put the date of completion as November 30, 1947, the day after his triumph at Lake Success (when President Truman, at his prompting, telephoned the American delegation to vote for partition). Evidently he wished the book to end on that note. The reversal of American policy, and the deeds against which he had uttered warning, soon followed, and as the book was not to appear until 1949 he had plenty of time to express his opinion of them. All he did was to add an epilogue in which he did not even mention the determining deed at Deir Yasin, the contemptuous answer to his warnings. Moreover, he again went out of his way to say that this epilogue was finished in August 1948; this saved him the need to make any reference to the next determining deed of terrorism, the assassination of Count Bernadotte, which occurred in September 1948. Obviously Dr. Weizmann quailed. He had identified himself with both massacre and murder by accepting and retaining the presidency of the new state.
For that reason his earlier warnings are of the greatest significance; he could have deleted them before publication. For instance, he charged "the terrorists" (into whose hands he delivered the future of Palestine, and of much more than Palestine) with trying to "force the hand of God". This, obviously was the heresy of Zionism, and of all those who supported it, whether Jew or Gentile, from the very start, and of Dr. Weizmann more than most others. He added, "the terrorist groups in Palestine represented a grave danger to the whole future of the Jewish state; actually their behaviour has been next door to anarchy". It was anarchy, not neighbour to anarchy, and Dr. Weizmann's life's effort was anarchic. Even in this argument he was not moved by moral recoil; his complaint was not against the destructive nature of anarchy itself, but merely that it was inexpedient, "because the Jews have hostages all over the world"
On the very day after his triumph at Lake Success he returned to his new theme: "There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs. . . The Arabs must be given the feeling that the decision of the United Nations is final, and that the Jews will not trespass on any territory outside the boundaries assigned to them. There does exist such a fear in the hearts of many Arabs and this fear must be eliminated in every way . . . They must see from the outset that their brethren within the Jewish state are treated exactly like the Jewish citizens . . . We must not bend the knee to strange gods. The Prophets have always chastised the Jewish people with the utmost severity for this tendency, and whenever it slipped back into paganism, whenever it reverted, it was punished by the stern god of Israel. . . I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs". [They are screwed DC]
Thou sayest! Here Dr. Weizmann put on the robes of an Israelite prophet, or perhaps the crown of Canute bidding the tide retreat. When these words were published the Arabs had already been driven from their native lands, the Jews had "trespassed" on territory outside the boundaries earlier "recommended", the Arabs were not being treated "exactly like the Jewish citizens" but were homeless and destitute fugitives. Dr. Weizmann pretended not to know all that! He ignored all that had happened and said it must not happen. As an example of published hypocrisy this can hardly be excelled even in politics. The probable explanation is that he still could not bring himself to denounce what had been done but, as his death approached, felt he must point out its consequences; those consequences to which his life's work from the start was bound to lead, if it were successful. At the last he cried "Back!", and all in vain.
A greater man than he cried out in horror and linked the consequences to the deeds, which he did not fear to name. Dr. Judah Magnes was in the direct line of the Israelite remonstrants of old. Born in America in 1877, like Dr. Weizmann he had given his life to Zionism, but in a different spirit. He was a religious Zionist, not a political one, and did not presume "to force God's hand". From the start he had worked for the establishment of an Arab-Jewish binational state and had attacked Zionist chauvinism from its first appearance. He became"Chancellor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem in 1925 (having strongly objected to Dr. Weizmann's pompous foundation-stone ceremony in 1918), was its president from 1935, and in 1948 was in Jerusalem. He was appalled by the emergence of "the old evil in a new and horrible guise" and left a valedictory lament condemning the Zionists and the Western politicians alike:
"Refugees should never be made use of as a trump in the hands of politicians. It is deplorable, incredible even, after all that the Jews in Europe have gone through, that an Arab problem of displaced persons should be created in the Holy Land".
He died immediately after saying this and I have not been able to discover the circumstances of his death; references to it in Jewish literature are often cryptic and resemble those concerning the breakdown and sudden death of Dr. Herzl. For instance, one such allusion (in the foreword to Rabbi Elmer Berger's book of 1951) says he "died of a broken heart".
In Dr. Magnes another Jewish peacemaker joined the group of responsible men who for fifty years had vainly sought to keep the West (and the Jews) out of the grip of a Talmudic conspiracy from Russia. He founded and left an organization, the Ihud Association, which still speaks with his voice, and even from Jerusalem. Its organ there, NER, in December 1955 said, "Ultimately we shall have to come out with the truth openly: We have no right whatever, on principle, to prevent the return of the Arab refugees to their soil. . . What should Ihud strive for? To transform the perennial powder keg (which is the State of Israel, according to Minister Pinhas Lavon) into a place of peaceful habitation. And what weapons is the Ihud to use? The weapons of truth. . . We had no right to occupy an Arab house without first paying its price; and the same is true of the fields and groves, the stores and factories. We have had no right whatever to colonize and materialize Zionism at the expense of others. This is robbery; this is banditry. . . We are once more among the very rich nations, but we are not ashamed to rob the property of the fellaheen".
This is a still small voice in Jewry at the present moment (incidentally, Dr. Albert Einstein spoke with the same voice: "My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest; I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain", 1950), but it is the only one which gives Jewry the hope of ultimate salvation from the Zionism of the Khazars. Today the probability, if not the certainty, is that this salvation can only come after the final tribulation in which the wanton adventure in Palestine must involve the multitudes of the West, the Jews among them.
One final point remains to be established about the creation, "de facto", of the Zionist state; namely, that it was the child of the revolution. The revolution enabled the Jews "to become a majority in Palestine", as the British authors of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had desired, and this transformation in Palestine could not have been effected in any other way, for no large body of Jews anywhere else in the world could have been brought to go there. The mass-movement was only possible in the case of these Eastern Jews who for centuries had lived in close Talmudic regimentation, and the manner of their transportation to Palestine has been shown. In 1951 Israeli Government statistics showed that of the "majority" which had been achieved (about 1,400,000 Jews), 1,061,000 were foreign-born, and 577,000 of these came from the communist countries behind the Iron curtain, where non-Jews were not allowed to move even from one town to another without police and other permits. (Most of the remaining 484,000 were North African or Asiatic Jews who arrived after the establishment of the state and took no part in its violent acquisition).
The invaders, therefore, were the Eastern Jews of Tartar-Mongol stock, but force of numbers alone would not have ensured their success. They needed arms for that. During the war General Wavell had informed Mr. Churchill that the Jews, if allowed to, could "beat the Arabs", and he evidently based this judgment on the arms which, as he knew, the Zionists had then amassed. At that time these could only have been British or American arms, clandestinely obtained from the depots of the Allied armies operating in North Africa and the Middle East (a process at least winked at, if not officially approved, by the political leaders in London and Washington, as has been shown). General Wavell, though his opinion proved correct, may at the time have overestimated the Zionist strength or have underestimated Arab resistance, for the Zionists, after the event, did not attribute it to the Allied weapons obtained by them. On the contrary, they believed that they owed their victory in the six months of fighting (between the "partition" vote and Deir Yasin) to the arms they received from the revolution. The Iron Curtain, which had opened to let the invaders of Palestine leave, opened again to allow arms to reach them in decisive quantities.
This was the first major consequence of General Eisenhower's order, issued under President Roosevelt's direction, to halt the Allied armies west of the Berlin-Vienna line and allow Czechoslovakia to fall to the Soviet; the arms came from that captive country, where the great Skoda arsenal, as a result of his order, had merely passed from Nazi into Communist hands. A few weeks after President Truman's recognition of the Zionist state the New York Herald-Tribune published this report from Israel:
"Russian prestige has soared enormously among all political factions . . . Through its consistent espousal of Israel's cause in the United Nations, the Soviet Union has established a goodwill reservoir with leftists, moderates and right wing elements. Perhaps of more importance to a new nation fighting for its existence has been a fact less generally known: that Russia provided practical help when practical help was needed . . . Russia opened its military stores to Israel. From the Soviet satellite nation of Czechoslovakia, Jews made some of their most important and possibly their most sizable bulk purchases. Certain Czech arms shipments which reached Israel during critical junctures of the war played a vital role . . . When Jewish troops marched in review down Tel Aviv's Allenby Street last week, new Czechoslovak rifles appeared on the shoulders of infantry soldiers" (August 5, 1948).
At that time the Zionist and Zionist-controlled press throughout the West began explicitly to identify "anti-Semitism", with "anti-Communism" (the attribution of Jewish origins and leadership to Communism had long been denounced as the mark of the "anti-Semite"). The Jewish Sentinel of Chicago, for instance, in June 1946 had already declared, "We recognize anti-Sovietism for what it really is. . . Did you ever hear of any anti-Semites anywhere in the world who were not also anti-Soviet? . . . We recognize our foes. Let us also recognize our friends, the Soviet people". In the schools of the new state itself the flag of the revolution was flown and its hymn sung on May Day, an ostentatious acknowledgement of affinity if not of parenthood. In January 1950 the Tel Aviv correspondent of the London Times reported that Czechoslovakia was still the source of arms supply for the Zionist' state.
So much for the birth of "Israel" and the pains it caused to others. No offspring of political illegitimacy was ever ushered into the world by so many sponsors; the "recognitions" poured in and the peacemakers were everywhere discomfited. Mr. Bevin continued in office for a few years and then resigned, soon to die; General Marshall and Mr. Forrestal were dropped at the first opportunity, obviously for the discouragement of others who might take their responsible duty seriously.
Within a few weeks the new state took another step towards "the abyss" of "the old evil". The "United Nations", having accepted the accomplished bisection of Europe and recommended the bisection of Palestine, showed a tardy concern for "peace" and appealed to Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to go to Palestine and mediate between the parties. Count Bernadotte had always given himself to the mitigation of human suffering, particularly to the relief and rescue of Jewish victims during the Second War. He worked in the sign of the Cross (the red one) and was killed at the very place where the Cross first became a symbol of faith and hope. No deed can be more atrocious than the murder of an accepted peacemaker and mediator by one of the combatant parties, and within four months of its creation the Zionist state added this second symbolic act to its calendar.
Count Bernadotte (like Mr. Forrestal) kept a diary, published after his death. This records that, after accepting the mission of peace, he passed through London and was visited by Dr. Nahum Goldman, then vice-president of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist state's representative, who told him that: "the state of Israel was now in a position to take full and complete responsibility for the acts committed by the Stern Gang and the members of Irgun".
These were the killer-groups whose deed at Deir Yasin effected the clearance of territory for the Zionists and was implicitly "recognized" by the West. They were the "activists" against whom Dr. Weizmann had uttered warning at the Zionist Congress of 1946. Deir Yasin had shown that they had the power, by calculated acts of terrorism, to change the whole course of world affairs, irrespective of anything said by Zionist leaders, by politicians in the West, or by the "United Nations".
They have this power in 1956, and will continue to have it. They can at any time precipitate the world into new war, for they have been placed in the most inflammable spot in the world, rightly described as "the powder keg" by an American Secretary of State, a British Foreign Secretary and the Zionist Premier himself. Up to the time when Dr. Nahum Goldman made the above-quoted statement to Count Bernadotte a pretence had been kept up that they were beyond the control of the "responsible" Zionist leaders, who deplored their acts. Dr. Goldman's assurance was presumably meant to convince Count Bernadotte that his work of mediation would not be wantonly destroyed by any such act as that of Deir Yasin. The terrorists then murdered Count Bernadotte himself, and in the sequel (as will be shown) the Israeli government took responsibility for them and their deeds.
Count Bernadotte, after hearing these reassuring words, set out to pacify. In Egypt he saw the Prime Minister, Nokrashi Pasha, who said he "recognized the extent of Jewish economic power, since it controlled the economic system of many countries, including the United States, England, France, Egypt itself and perhaps even Sweden" (Count Bernadotte did not demur to the last statement). Nokrashi Pasha said the Arabs did not expect to escape that domination. However, for the Jews to achieve economic domination of the whole of Palestine was one thing; what the Arabs would not accept, and would resist, was the attempt by force and terrorism, and with the assistance of international Zionism, to set up a Zionist state based on coercion. After this King Farouk told Count Bernadotte that if the war continued (it has not yet ended) it would develop into a third world war; Count Bernadotte agreed and said he had for that reason accepted the task of Mediator.
He also mentioned that in the war he had had "the privilege of rescuing about 20,000 persons, many of them Jews; I myself had been in charge of this work". He evidently thought this would qualify him for Zionist respect, and was wrong. Within a few days he had persuaded the Arabs (on June 9, 1948) to agree unconditionally to a cease-fire, but then read a fanatical Zionist attack on himself for "having forced the truce on the Jews". "I began to realize what an exposed position I was in . . . the friendliness towards me would unquestionably turn to suspicion and ill will if, in my later activities as Mediator, I failed to study primarily the interest of the Jewish party but sought to find an impartial and just solution of the problem".
Irgun (for which the Zionist government through Dr. Goldman in London had claimed "full and complete responsibility") then broke the truce (June 18-30, 1948) by landing men and arms. Count Bernadotte and his observers "were unable to judge the number of Irgun men landed or the quantity of war material unloaded" because the Zionist government refused to allow them near the spot. In the first week of July "the Jewish press made very violent attacks on me". The defamationist method (used against Mr. Forrestal) was now employed and Count Bernadotte's efforts to rescue Jewish victims during the war were turned against him; the insinuation was made that his negotiations with the Nazi Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, towards the war's end about the liberation of Jews had been of dubious character. "It was unjust to cast aspersions on me", (the innuendo was that Count Bernadotte was "a Nazi") "my work having been the means of saving the lives of about 10,000 Jews".
That meant as little to the Zionists as Alexander II's and Count Stolypin's efforts to "improve the lot of the Jews" forty years earlier; Count Bernadotte's mortal offence was impartiality. Between July 19 and August 12 he had to tell Dr. Joseph, Zionist military governor of Jerusalem, that according to his observers' reports "the Jews were the most aggressive party in Jerusalem". On September 16, on the historic peacemaker's path "to Jerusalem" (the title of his book) Count Bernadotte in effect wrote his own death warrant; on that day he sent his "Progress Report" as Mediator from Rhodes to the United Nations, and within twenty-four hours he was murdered.
The reason lay in his proposals. He accepted the "de facto" establishment of the Zionist state but, building on that basis, sought to reconcile and pacify by impartial proposals, as just to each party as the accomplished fact would allow. His chief concern was for the civilian Arab population, driven by the pogrom at Deir Yasin from its native villages and huddled beyond the frontiers. Nothing like this had ever been done under the wing of the West, and Count Bernadotte was fresh from efforts to rescue Jews from Hitler. Thus he proposed:
(1) that the boundaries of the Zionist state should be those envisaged in the "recommendation" of the United Nations on November 29, 1947, the Negev to remain Arab territory and the United Nations to ensure that these boundaries were "respected and maintained";
(2) that (as also "recommended") Jerusalem be internationalized under United Nations control;
(3) that the United Nations should "affirm and give effect to" the right of the Arab fugitives to return to their homes.
Having despatched these proposals on September 16, 1948, Count Bernadotte, before they could reach New York, flew to Jerusalem (September 17). He and his party, unarmed and defenceless, drove towards Government House when their car was halted by a Zionist jeep pulled across the road. Their movements were clearly as well known as the contents of Count Bernadotte's report; three men jumped from the jeep, ran to his car, and with sten guns killed him and his Chief Observer in Jerusalem, the French Colonel Serot.
The survivors, in an appendix to his diary, describe the killing in detail. Their accounts show its efficient preparation and execution and plainly point to the identity of the chief organizer. The actual murderers escaped without hindrance, two in the jeep and one across country. None was arrested or charged (report, probably credible, says that a waiting aeroplane removed the murderers to communist Czechoslovakia). The subsequent Israeli enquiry stated that:
"The murder as it was actually carried out and all the preparations that went with it are predicated on the following points:
(a) a clear decision to assassinate Count Bernadotte and the elaboration of a detailed plan for its carrying out;
(b) a complex spy network capable of keeping track of the Count's movements during the time of his stay in Jerusalem so as to enable those responsible for the operation to fix its place and time;
(c) men experienced in this kind of activities or who had received in good time training for it;
(d) appropriate arms and methods of communication as well as safe refuge after the murder;
(e) a commander well experienced and responsible for the actual perpetration" .
For such men the new state had declared itself "fully responsible". Three days later a French news agency received a letter expressing regret that Colonel Serot, had been killed in mistake for the Mediator's Chief-of-Staff, the Swedish General Lundstrom, he being "an anti-Semite" (General Lundstrom was in another seat of the car). This letter was signed "Hazit Moledeth"; the Israeli police report stated that this was the name of the secret terrorist group within the Stern Gang.
General Lundstrom announced (September 18) that "These deliberate murders of two high international officials constitute a breach of the truce of the utmost gravity and a black page in Palestine's history for which the United Nations will demand a full accounting". No such demand was to be expected from the United Nations which (as this account has shown) responds only to the strongest pressure exerted behind the scenes. It has (or then had; none can say what wondrous transformation the future might bring) no morality of its own; it was an oracle, worked by a hidden mechanism, and it did not trouble itself about the murder of its Mediator any more than the Washington and London governments had troubled about the persecution of Mr. Forrestal and the murder of Lord Moyne. It ignored the Mediator's proposals; the Zionists took and kept what territory they then wanted (including the Negev), refused to let the Arabs return, and proclaimed that they would not allow Jerusalem to be internationalized (they are implacable in these points today, eight years later). The world-newspapers brought out the editorial which they seemed to keep in standing-type for such occasions ("Incalculable harm has been done to the Zionist cause. . . ") and then resumed their daily denunciations of any who pleaded the Arab case as "anti-Semites". The Times of London even blamed Count Bernadotte for his own murder; it said the proposal to internationalize Jerusalem "undoubtedly incited certain Jews to kill Count Bernadotte", and in the common understanding the word "incite" imputes blame.
In Israel four months later two Stern Group leaders named Yellin and Shmuelevitz were sentenced to eight and five years imprisonment in this connection by a special court, the president of which, in reading the judgment, said there was "no proof that the order to kill Count Bernadotte had been given by the leadership". The two men (according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency) "scarcely paid heed to the proceedings in view of the fact that the State Council was expected to approve a general amnesty", and within a few hours of their sentencing they were released, then being escorted in triumph to a popular reception. The "Commander-in Chief" of Irgun, a Mr. Menachem Begin, some years later made "a triumphal tour" of Western cities, being received in Montreal, for instance, by "a guard of honour of the Montreal police headed by Rabbis bearing Scrolls of the Law" (the South African Jewish Herald). Speaking at Tel Aviv during an election campaign in 1950 Mr. Begin claimed credit for the foundation of the Zionist state, through the deed at Deir Yasin. He said the Irgun had "occupied Jaffa", which the government party "had been ready to hand over to the Arabs", and added:
"The other part of the Irgun's contribution was Deir Yasin, which has caused the Arabs to leave the country and make room for the newcomers. Without Deir Yasin and the subsequent Arab rout, the present government could not absorb one-tenth of the immigrants".
Throughout the ensuing years, to this day, Mr. Begin continued to make sanguinary threats against the neighbouring Arab states*, to whom the presence of the Palestinian Arabs within their borders was a constant reminder of Deir Yasin and of the dire meaning of his menaces. For five years the public pretence was maintained that "the terrorists" had acted without authority at Deir Yasin and then, in April 1953, four Irgun men wounded at Deir Yasin claimed compensation. The Israeli government, through its Ministry of Security, denied the claim on the ground that the attack was "unauthorized", whereon the Irgun commander produced a letter from the official Zionist military headquarters in Jerusalem authorizing the action. By that time the signatory was Israeli Minister in Brazil.
* Begin Calls For War: Jerusalem. Attack the Arabs smash one weak spot after another, crush one front after another until victory is assured. . . this was the essence of the speech which Mr. Menahem Begin, leader of the Herut Party made last week in Jerusalem. He was speaking from the balcony of a hotel overlooking Zion Square filled with a few thousand persons. 'Our losses in such an action will not be negligible but at any rate they will be much less than when we face the combined Arab armies in the field', he said, '. . . today the Defence Forces are stronger than all the Arab armies combined . . Moses needed ten blows to take the Israelites out of Egypt; with one blow we can throw the Egyptians out of Israel', he said, referring to the Gaza Strip." (Johannesburg Zionist Record, August 20, 1954).
In the city where the "United Nations" had their headquarters, a strong reason offered why no "accounting" for Count Bernadotte's murder should be demanded. When it happened the American presidential election was close at hand. The campaign was at full heat and both candidates (Mr. Truman and Mr. Thomas Dewey) held the Zionist vote to be indispensable to success. They were vying for it and Palestine was a long way from New York. Mr. Truman was the better-qualified aspirant, for he had recognized the new state and proclaimed the act "the proudest" of his life. On another occasion he said it was one guided by "the highest humanitarian purpose". A few weeks after the murder on the road to Jerusalem he was elected president; at the year's end he gave White House employees a bookmarker with the words, "I would rather have peace than be President" .
By 1948 Colonel House's electoral strategy of 1910 had been developed into a high-precision instrument controlled by the Zionist international; the master switch being in New York State. The machine and company-flotation era added a new verb to the English language: "to rig", meaning to arrange or manipulate. Experts are able to "rig" machines. An example is the gambling-or-slot-machine in America. John Doe inserts his coin in the vague belief that the machine is operated by the laws of chance, and that if he is chance' s favourite its entire contents will pour into his hands; in fact the machine is expertly adjusted so that a precisely-calculated proportion of its receipts (probably between eighty and ninety percent) go to the gambling syndicate and the residue goes in small windfalls to John Doe.
The "rigging" of the American electoral system is the determining factor in the events of the 20th Century. A mechanism originally designed to enable John Doe to express his opinion about policies and parties has been adjusted to such a point of nicety, almost precluding error, that he is left without voice in his national affairs; no matter what coin he inserts in which slot, the governing syndicate wins.
The electoral system itself might at the start have been designed to make easy the task of "a foreign group" bent on dictating the course of American state policy. An election always impends: a Congressional one every second, a presidential one every fourth year. No sooner is a Congress or President elected than the "pressure-groups" begin to work on the aspirants for the next election; the party-managers begin to worry about the next contest; and the would be Senators, Congressmen and Presidents start to feel, and respond to, "the pressure". There is no breathing-space in which prudence might prevail and the stranglehold be broken (in 1953, as will be seen, even the struggle for the mayoralty of New York City produced an abrupt, major reversal of American state policy, the issue being "support for Israel". The intensification of "pressure" at these recurrent moments, and the consequent warnings from the party-managers to incumbents in Congress or the White House, bring about these back-somersaults, which upset the whole edifice of policy laboriously erected by responsible ministers and competent permanent officials).
In these circumstances the new "state" set up in Palestine in 1948 was never, and never can be, a "state" in any meaning of the word formerly used in recorded history. It was the outpost of a world organization with special access to every government, parliament and foreign office in the Western world (and most especially to the government, parliament and foreign office of the United States, which in the 1950's was the most powerful country in the world), and its chief function was to exercise control over the American Republic, not to afford "a home" for the Jews of the world. The prospect opened by this state of affairs was that of increasing American involvement in an explosive situation in the Levant, artificially created and pregnant with the danger of world war.
When 1948 ended, thirty-one years after the first triumph of the dual conspiracy (the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik revolution) the Zionist state had been set up. Mr. Truman, the pacemaker in "recognition", had been advised by his responsible officers that the partition forcibly effected at Deir Yasin would lead to a third world war; all leading Western politicians had received the same counsel from their responsible advisers. None of the "top-line politicians" concerned can have been in doubt about the shape which their support of Zionism would give to the future, and their public utterances about it cannot have expressed their private knowledge or belief. The American politicians of the 1940's and 1950's, like Mr. Leopold Amery and Mr. Winston Churchill during the earlier decades, evidently were captive to the belief that, for some reason never disclosed, "policy" in this one matter could never "change". The captivity of the London and Washington governments, and the identity of the captors, even today (1956) is not realized by the American and British masses (though the now apparent danger of a new world war beginning in and spreading outward from Zionised Palestine is for the first time disquieting them). In the rest of the world it has long been understood. As long ago as the 1920's for instance, the Maharajah of Kashmir asked Sir Arthur Lothian (as that British diplomat relates), "why the British government was establishing a 'Yehudi ka Raj' (Rule of the Jews) in India. I demurred to this description, but he insisted that it was true, saying the Viceroy, Lord Reading, was a Jew, the Secretary of State, Mr. Edwin Montague, was a Jew, the High Commissioner, Sir William Meyer, was a Jew, and what more evidence did I want?" Thus a remote Indian Maharajah, thirty years ago, clearly saw the true shape of coming events in the Western world.
I quoted earlier the statement of the Egyptian Prime Minister to Count Bernadotte, that "Jewish economic power controlled the economic system of. . . the United States, England, France, Egypt itself. . ." In the seven years that have passed the leaders of all the Arab states have openly and repeatedly charged that the American government has become merely the instrument of Zionist ambitions and have pointed to their own experience as the proof.
Far on the other side of the world the effect of the "rigged" electoral machine in New York was felt in its other manifestation: support of the revolution. Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader, was driven by similar shifts in American state policy from the Chinese mainland (where Communism with American support established itself) to the island of Formosa, where for the time being he again received some measure of American support. A well-known American broadcaster, Mr. Tex McCrary, visited him there and reported back to the listening millions of New York State: "I squirmed with embarrassment when I was told, 'We have learned never to trust America for more than eighteen months at a time, between elections' ".
This control of American state policy, through control of the election machine, led in 1952 to a culminating act of the Talmudic vengeance, wreaked this time on the half of Germany which had been left "free" by the bisection. This half of Germany was forced to pay tribute to the Zionist state, set up three years after Germany's defeat in the Second War!
After the First War the Western victor powers tried to exact tribute ("reparations") but failed; what was received was merely by book-entry, for it was cancelled out by American and British loans. After the Second War the revolution exacted tribute from captive East Germany by simply helping itself. The Western victor powers made no demand for "reparations" on their own account, but extorted it for Zion.
As the years passed the alarm of responsible men in the Middle East again made itself felt in the State Department. It was constantly reminded by its advisers on the spot that the seven Arab States had never accepted the deed of 1948, that they held themselves still to be in a state of war with the interloping state, and held the United States to be paying for arms to be used against themselves.
Thus the idea was born, several years after the war's end, of making the "free" half of Germany pay "reparations" to a state which had not even existed during the Second War; the continued propping-up of the new state was to be ensured and the true source of its support obscured. The idea was long bruited behind the scenes and (like the judgment of Nuremberg) then was suddenly given symbolic realization on the eve of the Jewish High Holy days in 1952 (or, as Time magazine of New York put it, "In the last week of the Jewish year 5711"). It formed the dominant theme of the ensuing Judaic celebrations, one Jewish newspaper remarking that it was "The finest New Year present for Jewry we could think of".
The Chancellor of occupied West Germany, Dr. Adenauer ("waxy pale") informed the Bundestag at Bonn of "the obligation to make moral and material amends". His Minister for Justice, Dr. Dehler, spoke differently to an audience at Coburg: "The agreement with Israel was concluded at the wish of the Americans, because the United States, in view of the feeling in the Arab countries, cannot continue to support the state of Israel in the same way as heretofore".
The American presidential election of 1952 was then immediately at hand. The West German government was constrained to pay, over a period of twelve to fourteen years, 822 million dollars to Israel, mostly in goods. The picture resulting from this transaction somewhat strikingly recalls Stehlin's summary of passages from the Cabala depicting the Messianic consummation: "But let us see a little after what manner the Jews are to live in their ancient country under the Administration of the Messiah. In the first place, the strange nations, which they shall suffer to live, shall build them houses and cities, till them ground and plant them vineyards; and all this, without so much as looking for any reward of their labour". This picture is not far different from that offered by the British, American and German taxpayers under the different forms of constraint (hidden in the first two cases, open in the third case) to which they have been subjected in the matter of tribute for Zionism.
The Western masses were not informed about the manner in which this payment of tribute was extorted; it was presented to them as an independent act of the West German government, prompted by high moral feeling. Jewish readers, on the other hand, were as well informed as Dr. Dehler's audience at Coburg. To quote two examples: the Jewish Telegraph Agency "revealed that the United States Government has played a very important role in pushing Western Germany to make a decent reparations offer to the Jews; the British government has also done its share, although to a smaller extent"; and the Johannesburg Zionist Herald said, 'The agreement with Germany could not have been possible without the active and very effective support of the United States government in Washington and of the United States High Commissioner's office in Germany". The entire Arab press reported similarly, and an American newspaperman who sought to make his way in to one of the Arab refugee camps was rebuffed with the words, "What is the use of talking with you? We Arabs know very well that in America no newspaper dares to tell the whole truth about the Palestine question" .
In England the official version was given to parliament by Lord Reading, Foreign Under Secretary and son of the Viceroy mentioned in the Maharajah of Kashmir's question to Sir Arthur Lothian thirty years earlier. Lord Reading's statement was prompted by the usual expedient of a "question", on this occasion from a Socialist peer, Lord Henderson, who began by saying that "over six million Jews were done to death". Lord Reading's answer is of permanent interest; he said that the West German payments to the new state would be: "in the nature of some measure of reparation of moral, even more than material value", and that they would be "based upon the calculated cost of resettlement in Israel of Jews driven out of Europe by the Nazis".
This statement implicitly reasserts the principle that the only Nazi crime morally reparable was the treatment of Jews; none ever suggested that West Germany should pay the cost of resettling Poles, Czechs and all other victims. Its peculiar interest lies in the allusion to "reparation of moral value"; when it was made nearly a million Arabs had been "driven out" of Palestine by the Zionists and their claim to return to their homes had been repeatedly, even contemptuously rejected.
Probably the most characteristic passage in this typical statement is that which refers to "resettling Jews driven out of Europe by the Nazis". Israel is the one place in the world where the numbers of the Jewish population may with accuracy be learned. According to Israeli government statistics, it was about 1,400,000 in 1953, and among these were only 63,000 Jews (less than five percent) from Germany and Austria. These 63,000 were the only inhabitants of Israel who by any stretch of imagination might have been said to have been driven out of Europe and to resettle in Israel. The great mass came from Poland, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria some time after the war's end (and certainly were not "driven out" as they were protected in those countries by special laws and preference in state employment) or from North Africa.
No moral basis existed for the extortion of tribute from the West Germans for the Zionist state, and if any had ever existed, in respect of the 63,000, it had long been cancelled by the Zionists' "driving out" of nearly a million Arabs. The affair is unique in Western history and proves only the extent of the American and British government's submission to Zionism.
West Germany was compelled to bear a large part of the cost of the new state's armaments and development; therewith the likelihood of another great war was brought nearer and the out look for the Arabs was made much worse. The Zionist state was at length propped up and the consequences at once began to flow. The exertion of "pressure" on the West German government in this matter was about the last major act of American state policy under President Truman, whose term was about to expire. *
* As a footnote to the West German affair, the Western Powers in Vienna, (on this occasion acting in perfect accord with the Soviet state) at the same bidding humbled little Austria (Hitler's first victim) by vetoing a law of amnesty and restitution which might have benefited some non-Jews. The Austrian government (at that time supposed to be "sovereign" again) protested in writing to the American High Commissioner, specifically accusing him of submitting to the orders of "emigrants from Austria" who were on his staff as "Jewish advisers". No intelligible account of this episode reached the British or American newspaper reader.
Like Macbeth, Dr. Weizmann's "top-line politicians" flinched and shrunk as the moment for the deed approached. Neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt would openly command their soldiers to do it and the Zionists furiously cried "Infirm of purpose!" Then Mr. Roosevelt went to Yalta, wearing the visage of doomed despair which the news-reel pictures recorded, arranged for the bisection of Europe, and at the end briefly informed Mr. Churchill (who was "flabbergasted" and "greatly disturbed" by the news, according to Mr. Hopkins) that he was going to meet King Ibn Saoud on board the U.S. cruiser Quincy.
What followed remains deeply mysterious. Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Mr. Churchill had any right to bestow Arab land on the lobbyists who beleaguered them in Washington and London; nevertheless, what was demanded of them was, in appearance, so small in comparison with what had just been done at Yalta, that Mr. Roosevelt's submission and same harsh ultimatum to King Ibn Saoud would have surprised none. Instead, he suddenly stepped out of the part he had played for many years and spoke as a statesman; after that he died.
He left Yalta on February 11, 1945, and spent February 12, 13 and 14 aboard the Quincy, receiving King Ibn Saoud during this time. He asked the king "to admit some more Jews into Palestine" and received the blunt answer, "No". Ibn Saoud said that "there was a Palestine army of Jews all armed to the teeth and. . . they did not seem to be fighting the Germans but were aiming at the Arabs". On February 28 Mr. Roosevelt returned to Washington. On March 28 Ibn Saoud reiterated by letter his verbal warning (since confirmed by events) of the consequences which would follow from American support of the Zionists. On April 5 President Roosevelt replied reaffirming his own pledge verbally given to Ibn Saoud that:
"I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government which might prove hostile to the Arab people". On April 12 he died. This pledge would never have become known but for the action of an American statesman, Secretary of State James G. Byrnes, who published it six months later (October 18, 1945) in a vain attempt to deter Mr. Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, from taking the very "action hostile to the Arabs" which President Roosevelt swore he would never commit.
Mr. Roosevelt's pledge was virtually a deathbed one, and another of history's great unanswered questions is, did he mean it? If by any chance he did, then once more death intervened as the ally of Zionism. His intimate Mr. Harry Hopkins (who was present at the meeting and drafted a memorandum about it) sneered at the suggestion that it might have been sincerely intended, saying that President Roosevelt was "wholly committed publicly and privately and by conviction" to the Zionists (this memorandum records Mr. Roosevelt's statement that he had learned more from Ibn Saoud about Palestine in five minutes than he had previously learned in a lifetime; out of this, again, grew the famous anecdote that Ibn Saoud said, "We have known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn"). However, Mr. Hopkins may conceivably not be a trustworthy witness on this one occasion, for immediately after the meeting he, the president's shadow, mysteriously broke with Mr. Roosevelt, whom he never saw again! Mr. Hopkins shut himself in his cabin and three days later, at Algiers, went ashore, "sending word" through an intermediary that he would return to America by another route. The breach was as sudden as that between Mr. Wilson and Mr. House.
What is clear is that the last few weeks and days of Mr. Roosevelt's life were overshadowed by the controversy of Zion, not by American or European questions. Had he lived, and his pledge to Ibn Saoud become known, Zionism, which so powerfully helped to make and maintain him president for twelve years, would have become his bitter enemy. He died. (The pledge was categorical; it continued, "no decision will be taken with regard to the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews"; this was direct repudiation of Dr. Weizmann, who had told him, "we could not rest the case on Arab consent").
Thus, cloaked in a last-moment mystery, Mr. Roosevelt too passed from the story. A parting glimpse of the throng which had gathered round him during his twelve-year reign is given by the senior White House correspondent, Mr. Merriman Smith; this description of a wake shows that the carousing of Yalta accompanied the president even to his grave:
"Most of the people on the train were members of the Roosevelt staff. Before the train was out of sight of the crepe-hung Hyde Park depot, they started what turned out to be a post-funeral wake. Liquor flowed in every compartment and drawing-room. The shades were drawn through out the train and from the outside it looked like any train bearing mourners home. But behind those curtains, the Roosevelt staff had what they thought was a good time. Their Boss would have approved. . . I saw one of the top New Dealers hurl a tray of empty glasses into a toilet and shout in mock bravado, 'Down the hatch, we won't need you any more'. Porters and club stewards bustled up and down the corridors with gurgling, sloshing trays. If you hadn't known the people in the drawing room, you would have thought they were on their way home from a football game. Some of the people were using whisky as an antidote for worry over their jobs. . . I could hear an alcoholic chorus of Auld Lang Syne. . ."
Such were the trappings of statesmanship, during those last days when "the boys" toiled towards another "victory", when the Communist armies seized half of Europe, and the Zionists from Russia were convoyed by the West towards the invasion of Palestine.
In this question of Palestine, Mr. Roosevelt was liberated from his dilemma by death. Mr. Churchill was left to face his. He had courted Zionist favour from the days of the 1906 election. He had been a member of the British Government in 1917, of which another member (Mr. Leopold Amery, quoted in a Zionist paper in 1952) said, "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state. . . We envisaged not a divided Palestine, which exists only west of the Jordan".
Mr. Churchill never publicly stated any such intention (indeed, he denied it), but if it was his view this means that even the Zionist state set up after the Second World War by no means fulfils the intention of those who made the Balfour Declaration, and that further conquests of Arab lands have yet to be made by war.
The governing word in the passage quoted is "if"; "if the Jews could become a majority. . ." By 1945 three decades of Arab revolt had shown that the Zionists never would become a majority" unless the Arabs were driven out of their native land by arms. The question that remained was, who was to drive them out? Mr. Roosevelt had sworn not to. Dr. Weizmann, ever quick to cry "I stay here on my bond", liked to claim that Mr. Churchill was committed as far as Dr. Weizmann wanted him to go.
Even Mr. Churchill could not do this deed. He, too, then was liberated from his dilemma; not by death, but by electoral defeat. His memoirs express wounded pride at this rebuff; "All our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs".
It was not as simple as that. The future historian has to work from such material, but the living participant knows better, and I was in England and saw the election when Mr. Churchill was "dismissed". In truth the British electorate could hardly have been expected to see in the outcome of the war (of which Mr. Churchill is the bitterest critic) cause for a vote of thanksgiving to Mr. Churchill, but there were other reasons for his defeat than mere disillusionment.
As in American elections, so in this British one of 1945 the power to "deliver the vote" was shown. Mr. Churchill had gone far in "arming the Jews" and in privately committing himself to Zionism, but not far enough for Dr. Weizmann. In England at the mid-century control of the press was virtually complete, in this question; Zionist propaganda at the election turned solidly against Mr. Churchill and was waged in behalf of the Socialists, who had given the requisite promise of support for "hostile action" against the Arabs ("The Arabs should be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in . . . "). The block of Jewish Members of Parliament swung over in a body to the Socialist party (and was strongest in the left wing of it, where the Communists lurked). With high elation the Zionists saw the discomfiture of their "champion" of 1906,1917 and 1939. Dr. Weizmann says that the Socialist victory (and Mr. Churchill's "dismissal") "delighted all liberal elements". This was the requital for Mr. Churchill's fort y years of support for Zionism; he had not actually ordered British troops to clear Palestine of Arabs and, for a while, was an enemy.
Thus Mr. Churchill was at least reprieved from the task of deciding what to do about Palestine and should not have been so grieved as he depicts himself, when he was dismissed soon after "victory". The British Socialists, at last provided with a great majority in parliament, then found at once that they were expected by forcible measures to "encourage the Arabs to move out". When they too shrank from the assassin's deed the cries of "betrayal" fell about their ears like hailstones. Dr. Weizmann's narrative grows frantic with indignation at this point; the Socialist government, he says, "within three months of taking office repudiated the pledge so often and clearly, even vehemently, repeated to the Jewish people". During forty years Lord Curzon seems to have been the only leading politician caught up in this affair to realize that even the most casual word of sympathy, uttered to Dr. Weizmann, would later be held up as "a pledge", solemnly given and infamously broken.
Among the victorious Socialists a worthy party-man, one Mr. Hall, inherited the Colonial Office from Lord Lloyd, Lord Moyne and others dead or defamed, and was barely in it when a deputation from the World Zionist Congress arrived:
"I must say the attitude adopted by the members of the deputation was different from anything which I have ever experienced. It was not a request for the consideration by His Majesty's Government of the decisions of the Zionist conference, but a demand that His Majesty's Government should do what the Zionist Organization desired them to do". Ten years later an American ex-president, Mr. Truman, recalled similar visits during his presidency in similar terms of innocent surprise; in 1945 the thing had been going on since 1906 without disturbing Mr. Hall's political slumbers. Soon after this he was ousted from the Colonial Office, his suitability for a peerage suddenly being realized.
The Socialist government of 1945, which in domestic affairs must have been nearly the worst that a war-weary country, in need of reinvigoration, could have received, in foreign affairs did its country one service. It saved, of honour, what could be saved. Under pressure from the four corners of the world it refused to play the assassin's part in Palestine; if it did not protect the Arabs, and by that time it probably could not protect them, at least it did not destroy them for the Zionist taskmaster. [WTF, you want a pat on the back? D.C ]
This achievement was the sole work of a Mr. Ernest Bevin, in my estimation the greatest man produced in British political life during this century. According to report, King George VI, the most unobtrusive of monarchs, urged the incoming Socialist prime minister, Mr. Attlee, to make his best and strongest man Foreign Secretary, because the state of the world so clearly demanded this. Mr. Attlee thereon revised a list already drafted, expunging the name of some worthy "liberal" who might have involved his country in the coming pogrom of Arabs, and inserting that of Mr. Bevin.
By 1945 Palestine was clearly too big an issue for Colonial Secretaries to handle; it was, and will long remain, the major preoccupation of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries, Presidents and Secretaries of State in England and America, because it is the most inflammable source of new wars. In 1945, as soon as "victory" was won, it was seen to dominate and pervert the politics of all nation-states. Without awe, Ernest Bevin, the farm lad from Somerset and the dockers' idol, took up the bomb and sought to remove the fuse. Had he received support from one leading man in any Western country he might have saved the day. They all fell on him like wolves; there was something of the camp-meeting and of revivalist hysteria in the abandon of their surrender to Zionism.
He was a robust man, with the beef and air of the West Country in his bones and muscle and its fearless tradition in his blood, but even he was physically broken within a few years by the fury of unremitting defamation. He was not spiritually daunted. He realized that he had to do with an enterprise essentially conspiratorial, a conspiracy of which the revolution and Zionism were linked parts, and he may be unique among politicians of this century in that he used a word ("conspiracy") which has a dictionary meaning plainly applicable to this case. He bluntly told Dr. Weizmann that he would not be coerced or coaxed into any action' contrary to Britain's undertakings. Dr. Weizmann had not experienced any such instruction, at that high level, since 1904, and his indignation, surging outward from him through the Zionist organizations of the world, produced the sustained abuse of Mr. Bevin which then followed.
Mr. Churchill, had he remained prime minister, would apparently have used British arms to enforce the partition of Palestine. That seems to be the inescapable inference from his memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff Committee (January 25,1944), in which he said "the Jews, left to themselves, would beat the Arabs; there cannot therefore be any great danger in our joining hands with the Jews to enforce the kind of proposals about partition which are set forth. ." The reader may see how greatly circumstances alter cases. The bisection of Europe was for Mr. Churchill "a hideous partition, which cannot last". Partition in Palestine was worthy to be enforced by "joining hands with the Jews".
Mr. Bevin would have no truck with such schemes. Under his guidance the Socialist government announced that it "would not accept the view that the Jews should be driven out of Europe or that they should not be permitted to live again in these" (European) "countries without discrimination, contributing their ability and talent towards rebuilding the prosperity of Europe".
The words show that this man understood the nature of Zionist chauvinism, the problem posed by it and the only solution. They depict what will inevitably happen one day, but that day has been put back to some time after another ruinous era in Palestine, which will probably involve the world. He was either the first British politician fully to comprehend the matter, or the first to act with the courage of his knowledge.
The Socialist government of 1945 was driven, by responsible office, to do what all responsible governments before it had equally been forced to do: to send out one more commission of enquiry (which could but repeat the reports of all earlier commissions) and in the meantime to regulate Zionist immigration and to safeguard the interest of the native Arabs, in accordance with the pledges of the original Balfour Declaration.
Dr. Weizmann considered this "a reversion to the old, shifty double emphasis on the obligation towards the Arabs of Palestine" and the Zionist power went to work to destroy Mr. Bevin, on whose head, for the next two years, a worldwide campaign was turned. It was concentric, synchronised and of tremendous force. First, the Conservative party was sent into action. The Socialists had defeated them by capitulations to Zionism, which brought them the help of the controlled press. The Conservatives, being out of office, played this trump card against the Socialists, and in turn made their capitulations to Zion. This was at once made clear: the party proclaimed that it would combat the domestic and support the foreign policy of the Socialists, but from the moment of the Socialist declaration about Palestine it made one exception to the second rule; it began a sustained attack on the Socialist government's policy about Palestine, which meant, on Mr. Bevin.
At that point Mr. Churchill, safe in opposition, demeaned himself by accusing Mr. Bevin of "anti-Jewish feelings", a shot taken from the locker of the Anti-Defamation League (which added a new epithet, "Bevinism", to its catalogue of smear words). No such traducement of a political adversary ever came from Mr. Bevin, Mr. Churchill's outstanding colleague during the long war years.
Thus Mr. Bevin, at the post of greatest danger, received the full support of the opposition party in all matters of foreign policy save one, Palestine. He might yet have saved the day but for the intervention of the new American president, Mr. Harry S. Truman, with whose automatic elevation (on the death of the incumbent) from the Vice-Presidency the story of the 20th Century resumed the aspect of Greek tragedy (or of a comedy of errors). Mr. Truman involved his country up to the neck in the Palestinian imbroglio at the very moment when in England, at long last, a man had arisen who was able and staunch enough to liquidate the disastrous venture.
Unless a man has that genius which needs no basis in acquired knowledge, a small town in the Middle West and Kansas City are poor places for learning about world affairs. Mr. Truman, when the presidency was thrust upon him, had two major disqualifications for the office. One was native remoteness from world politics, and the other was too close acquaintance with ward politics, of which he had seen much. In Kansas City he had watched the machine at work; he knew about patronage, ward bosses and stuffed ballot-boxes. He had received the impression that politics were business, and essentially simple in the basic rules, which allowed no room for high-falutin' ideas.
A middle-sized, hale, broadly-smiling man who was to sign the order for an act of destruction unprecedented in the history of the West, he strode briskly on to the stage of great events. He decided at Potsdam that "Uncle Joe" was "a nice guy" and there completed Mr. Roosevelt's territorial rearrangements in Europe and Asia. He arranged for the atom-bombing of defenceless Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No comparable series of acts ever fell to the lot of a once-bankrupt haberdasher precipitated into the office of a "premier-dictator". Then he turned his gaze on domestic affairs and the next Congressional and presidential elections. In these, he knew (and said), the Zionist-controlled vote was decisive..
While Mr. Bevin strove to undo the tangle, Mr. Truman undid Mr. Bevin's efforts. He demanded that a hundred thousand Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine, and he arranged for the first partisan commission of enquiry to go to Palestine. This was' the only means by which any commission could ever be expected to produce a report favourable to the Zionist scheme. Two of its four American members were avowed Zionists; the one British member was Zionist propagandist and a left-wing enemy of Mr. Bevin. This "Anglo-American Commission" went to Palestine, where Dr. Weizmann (for perhaps the tenth time in some thirty years) was the chief personage heard. It recommended (though "cautiously") the admission of one hundred thousand "displaced persons" (the term was presumably meant to mislead the public masses and was at the moment of some importance; no truly displaced persons wanted to go to Palestine).
Therewith the fat of the next war was in the fire, and an American president publicly supported "hostile action" against the Arabs, for it was that. The next Zionist Congress (at Geneva in 1946) joyfully recorded this new "pledge" (Mr. Truman's "suggestion" and the partisan commission's "cautious recommendations"). This was a characteristic Zionist Congress, being composed chiefly of Jews from Palestine (who had already migrated there) and from America (who had no intention of going there); the herded-mass, to be transported thither, was not represented. Dr. Weizmann's description of the decisions taken are of great significance.
He says the congress "had a special character" and showed "a tendency to rely on methods. . . referred to by different names: 'resistance', 'defence', 'activism'. " Despite these "shades of meaning" (he says) "one feature was common to all of them: the conviction of the need for fighting against British authority in Palestine, or anywhere else, for that matter".
Dr. Weizmann's guarded remarks must be considered in the context of his whole book and of the entire history of Zionism. What he means is that the Zionist World Congress at Geneva in 1946 decided to resume the method of terror and assassination which had proved effective in Russia in the germinating stage of the two-headed conspiracy. The congress knew this to be the method "referred to by different names" during its discussions, for it had already been resumed in the assassination of Lord Moyne and many terrorist exploits in Palestine. The prompting impulse for the Congress's decision (which in fact it was) came from the American president's recommendation that a hundred thousand people should be forcibly injected into Palestine. The Zionists took that to be another "pledge", committing America to approval of anything they might do, and they were right.
Dr. Weizmann knew exactly what was at stake and in his old age shrank from the prospect that reopened before him: reversion to the worship of Moloch, the god of blood. He had seen so much blood shed in the name of revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, the two causes which had dominated his parental home and home town in the Pale. In his youth he had exulted in the riots and revolutions and had found the assassinations a natural part of the process; in his maturity he had rejoiced in the ruin of Russia despite the decades of bloodshed which ensued, For fifty-five years he had cried havoc and unloosed dogs of war. Almost unknown to the masses embroiled in two wars, he had, become one of the most powerful men in the world. Beginning in 1906, when he first wheedled Mr. Balfour, he had gradually risen until his word in the lobbies was law, when he could command audience of monarchs and obedience of presidents and prime ministers. Now, when the enterprise he had so long schemed for was on the brink of consummation, he recoiled from the bloodstained prospect that opened immeasurably before him; blood, and more blood, and at the end. . . what? Dr. Weizmann remembered Sabbatai Zevi.
He was against "truckling to the demoralizing forces in the movement", the cryptic phrase he uses to cover those referred to by Mr. Churchill as "the extremists", and by the administrators on the spot as "the terrorists". This meant that he had changed as his end approached, for without terrorism Zionism would never have established itself at all and if, in 1946, his Zionist state was to be achieved, this could only be done by violence. Thus at the last Dr. Weizmann realized the futility of his half-century of "pressure behind the scenes" and no doubt saw the inevitable fiasco that lay ahead, after the Zionist state had been born in terror. Psychologically, this was a moment of great interest in the story. Perhaps men grow wise in their old age; they tire of the violent words and deeds which seemed to solve all problems in their conspiratorial youth, and this revulsion may have overtaken Chaim Weizmann. If it did, it was too late to alter anything. The machine he had built had to continue, of its own momentum, to its own destruction and that of any in its path. The remaining future of Zionism was in the hands of "the demoralizing forces in the movement", and he had put it there.
He was denied a vote of confidence and was not re-elected president of the World Zionist Organization. Fort y years after Herzl, he was cast aside as he had cast Herzl aside, and for the same essential reason. He and his Chazars from Russia had overthrown Herzl because Herzl wanted to accept Uganda, which meant renouncing Palestine.
He was overthrown because he feared to re-embark on the policy of terror and assassination, and that also meant renouncing Palestine. The note of despair sounded even earlier, in his allusion s to Lord Moyne's murder: "Palestine Jewry will . . . cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst. . . this utterly un-Jewish phenomenon". These words were addressed to Western ears and were specious; political murder was not "an utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" in the Talmudic areas of Russia where Dr. Weizmann spent his revolutionary and conspiratorial youth, as he well knew, and a series of similar deeds stained the past. Indeed, when he spoke to a Zionist audience he candidly admitted that political murder was not an "utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" but the opposite: "What was the terror in Palestine but the old evil in a new and horrible guise".
This "old evil", rising from its Talmudic bottle to confront Dr. Weizmann at Geneva in 1946, apparently accounts for the note of premonition which runs through the last pages of his book of 1949 (when the Zionist state had been set up by terror). The Moyne murder, he then forebodingly said, "illumines the abyss into which terrorism leads". Thus in his last days Dr. Weizmann saw whither his indefatigable journey had led: to an abyss! He lived to see it receive a first batch of nearly a million victims. From the moment of his deposition effective control passed into the hands of "the terrorists", as he calls them, and his belated cry of "Back!" fell on empty air. The "activists" (as they prefer to call themselves) were left with power to ignite a third world conflict when they pleased. Dr. Weizmann survived to play a determining part in the next stage of the venture but never again had true power in Zionism
From 1946 the terrorists took command. They set to work to drive the British from Palestine first, and knew they could not fail in the state of affairs which had been brought about during the Second War. If the British defended either themselves or the semitic Arabs the cry of "anti-semitism" would rise until the politicians in Washington turned on the British; then, when the British left, the. terrorist s would drive out the Arabs.
The terror had been going on for many years, the Moyne murder being only one incident in it; indeed, one of the harassed Colonial Secretaries, Mr. Oliver Stanley, in 1944 told the House of Commons that it had sensibly impeded "the British war effort", or in other words, prolonged the war (he is a trustworthy witness, for he was hailed by the Zionist s at his death as "a staunch friend"). In 1946 and 1947, after the Geneva Congress, it was intensified, hundreds of British soldiers being ambushed, shot while asleep, blown up and the like. The terror was deliberately given the visible appearance of "the old evil" when two British sergeants were slowly done to death in an orchard and left hanging there. The choice of this Levitical form of butchery ("hanging on a tree", the death "accursed of God") signified that these things were done under the Judaic Law.
The British government, daunted by the fury of the American and British press, under common constraint, feared to protect its officials and soldiers, and one British soldier wrote to The Times: "What use has the army for the government's sympathy? It does not avenge those who are murdered, nor does it prevent any further killings. Are we no longer a nation with sufficient courage to enforce law and order where it is our responsibility to do so?"
This was the case. The great Western governments had fallen, under "irresistible pressure", into a nerveless captivity, and Britain and America had ceased, anyway for the time, to be sovereign nations. At length the British government, in despair, referred the problem of Palestine to the new organization in New York called "the United Nations" (which had as little right to dispose of Palestine as the League of Nations before it).
Delegates from Haiti, Liberia, Honduras and other parts of "the free world" thronged to Lake Success, a forlorn, suburban pond outside New York. There was an hissing in the world at this time and from the parent UNO bodies called COBSRA, UNRRA, UNESCO uncoiled. On this particular day something called UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) rendered to UNO its report recommending "the partition of Palestine".
Dr. Weizmann (though deposed by the Zionist Organization for his warnings against terrorism) was once more the chief authority heard by UNSCOP in Jerusalem, and then quickly returned to New York where, in October and November of 1947, he dominated the hidden scene as lobbyist supreme. "Irresistible pressure" operated with relentless force. The delegates whom the public masses saw on the moving-picture screens were puppets; the great play was all behind the curtain and in that, Chesterton's "real world", of which the multitude saw nothing, two great operations were in progress, by means of which the fate of Palestine was settled far from the debating halls of the United Nations. First, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe were being smuggled across Western Europe to invade Palestine. Second, the approach of an American presidential election was being used by the Zionists as a means to set the rival parties there bidding against each other for Zionist support, and thus to ensure that the decisive American vote in the United Nations would be cast for the invasion.
In each case, and as in the preceding three decades, men arose who strove to disentangle their countries from its consequences. The secret convoying of the Eastern Jews across Western Europe was revealed by a British general, Sir Frederick Morgan (to whose work in planning the invasion of Normandy General Eisenhower's book pays tribute). When the fighting ended General Morgan was lent by the British War Office to "UNRRA", the offspring-body of the United Nations which was supposed to "relieve and rehabilitate" the sufferers from the war. General Morgan was put in charge of the most hapless of these (the "displaced persons") and found that "UNRRA", which cost the American and British taxpayer much money, was being used as an umbrella to cover the mass-movement of Jews from the eastern area to Palestine. These people were not "displaced persons". Their native countries had been "liberated" by the Red Armies and they were able to live in them, their welfare ensured by the special law against "anti-semitism" which all these communized countries received from their Communist overlord. They had not been "driven from Germany", where they had never lived. In fact, these were, once more, the Ostjuden, the Khazars, being driven by their Talmudic masters to a new land for a conspiratorial purpose.
In this way a new war was being cooked over the embers of the dying one and General Morgan twice (in January and August 1946) publicly stated that "a secret organization existed to further a mass movement of Jews from Europe, a second Exodus". Senator Herbert Lehman, a prominent Zionist who was Director General of UNRRA, said this warning was "anti-semitic" and demanded General Morgan's resignation. He relented when General Morgan disclaimed "anti-semitic" intent, but when the general repeated his warning eight months later he was summarily dismissed by the new Director General, a Zionist sympathizer and former Mayor of New York, Mr. Fiorello La Guardia, known to New Yorkers as The Little Flower. Mr. La Guardia then appointed a Mr. Myer Cohen in General Morgan's place. The British government hastened to punish General Morgan by retiring the celebrated invasion-planner, stating (falsely) that this was at his request.
Two independent bodies of high status confirmed General Morgan's information; in the servient condition of the press their disclosures received little publicity. A Select Committee on Estimates of tile British Rouse of Commons reported (November 1946) that "very large numbers of Jews, almost amounting to a second Exodus, have been migrating from Eastern Europe to the American zones of Germany and Austria with the intention in the majority of cases of finally making their way to Palestine. It is clear that it is a highly organized movement, with ample funds and great influence behind it, but the Subcommittee were unable to obtain any real evidence who are the real instigators". A War Investigating Committee sent to Europe by the United States Senate said that "heavy migration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the American zone of Germany is part of a carefully organized plan financed by special groups in the United States".
The picture, once again, is of a conspiracy supported by the Western governments, in this case the American one in particular. The "organization" in America disposed of American and British public funds lavishly, and effected the mass-transfer of population under the cloak of war-relief. Its leaders were able summarily to dismiss high officials, publicly-paid, who exposed what went on, and the British government supported this action. Although by that time (1946-1947) the perfidy of the revolutionary state was supposed to have been realized by the Western politicians (so that "cold war" was waged with it), the three governments of Washington, London and Moscow acted in perfect accord in this one matter. The "exodus" came from Russia and from the part of Europe abandoned by the West to the revolution. No man may leave the Soviet state without permission, most rarely granted, but in this one case the Iron Curtain opened to release a mass of people, just large enough to ensure immediate war and permanent unrest in the Near East. Just as smoothly, thirty years before, the frontiers and ports of Germany (an enemy), England (an ally) and America (a neutral) had opened to allow the revolutionaries to go to Russia. On both occasions, at this supreme level of policy, the super-national one, there were no allies, enemies or neutrals; all governments did the bidding of the supreme power.
One of the British Colonial Secretaries earliest involved in Zionism and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Mr. Leopold Amery, had said: "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state". In 1946-1948, at last, this thought was being realized, in the only way possible: by the mass-transplantation of Eastern Jews to Palestine. Only one thing still was needed: to obtain from "the United Nations" some act of mock-legalization for the invasion about to occur. To ensure that, the capitulation of the American president was necessary; and the way to bring that about was to threaten his party-advisers with the loss of the approaching presidential election, which lay a year ahead.
A third war was in truth being hatched, in the thinning fog of the second war, by this clandestine movement of population, and in America (after the dismissal of General Morgan in Europe) the two men whose offices made them directly responsible tried to nip the peril in the bud. One was General Marshall, whose interventions in the question of invading Europe and later in that of China have been shown by their consequences to have been most ill-omened. In the question of Palestine he showed prudence. In 1947 he was Secretary of State and was thus chiefly responsible, under the president, for foreign policy. He strove to ward off his country's involvement in the Palestinian fiasco and, as in all such cases, his relegation soon followed.
The other man was Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. He was a successful banker, brought in to government in wartime for his executive ability; he was wealthy and only the impulse to serve his country can have moved him to take office. He foresaw disastrous consequences from involvement and died believing he had utterly failed in his effort to avert it. Of all the men concerned during two generations, he alone left a diary which fully exposes the methods by which Zion controls and manipulates governors and governments.
Mr. Truman went further than even President Roosevelt 'in taking foreign policy and national security out of the province of the responsible ministers, and in acting contrary to their counsel under the pressure applied through electoral advisers. The story is made complete by Mr. Forrestal's Diary, Mr. Truman's own memoirs, and Dr. Weizmann's book.
The struggle behind the scenes for control over the American president, and therewith of the Republic itself, lasted from the autumn of 1947 to the spring of 1948, that is, from the United Nations debate about the partition of Palestine to the proclamation of the Zionist state after its forcible seizure.
Dates are important. In November 1947 the Zionists wanted the "partition" vote and in May 1948 they wanted recognition of their invasion. The presidential election was due in November 1948, and the essential preliminary to it, the nomination contests, in June and July 1948. The party-manager s instructed Mr. Truman that re-election was in the Zionist gift; the opposition candidate received similar advice from his party-managers. Thus "the election campaign to ok on the nature of an auction, each candidate being constantly under pressure from his organizers to outbid the other in 'supporting the invasion of Palestine. In these circumstances the successful candidate could only feel that election was a reward for "supporting partition" in November 1947 and "granting recognition" in May 1948; nothing could more clearly illustrate the vast change which the mass-immigration of Eastern Jews, in the period following the Civil War, had brought about in the affairs of the American Republic. Mr. Forrestal left a full account of the chief moves in this fateful, hidden contest.
The time-bomb planted by Mr. Balfour thirty years earlier reached its explosion-moment when the British government in 1947 announced that it would withdraw from Palestine if other powers made impartial administration there impossible; this was the reply to President Truman's proposal that 100,000 "displaced persons" be allowed to enter Palestine immediately. Mr. Truman's responsible advisers at once informed the American government of the consequences which would flow from a British withdrawal. General Marshall told the American Cabinet that such a British withdrawal "would be. followed by a bloody struggle between the Arabs and Jews" (August 8, 1947), and his Under Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Lovett, pointed to the danger of "solidifying sentiment among all the Arabian and Mohammedan peoples" against the United States {August 15, 1947).
This warning was at once answered by the voice of party-politics. At a Cabinet lunch Mr. Robert Hannegan (Postmaster General, but previously national chairman of the President's party, the Democratic Party) urged the President to "make a statement of policy on Palestine" demanding "the admission of 150,000 Zionists". Thus the party-man's counsel was that President Truman should respond to the British warning by increasing his bid for Zionist electoral support, from 100,000 to 150,000 persons. Mr. Hannegan said this new demand "would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee" and, as proof of what he promised, added that the earlier demand (related to 100,000 immigrants) had produced the result that "very large sums were obtained from Jewish contributors and they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the President did on Palestine".
Thus the issue from the outset was presented to the President in the plainest terms of national interest on the one hand and party-contributions, party-votes and party-success on the other. It was argued throughout the months that followed and finally determined on that basis, without any gloss.
Mr. Forrestal's alarm became acute. He held that if state policy and national security (his province) were to be subordinated to vote-buying the country would pass under Zionist control and earlier (in 1946) had asked the President if Palestine could not be "taken out of politics". Mr. Truman at that time had "agreed about the principle" but evinced the feeling "that not much will come of such an attempt, that political manoeuvring is inevitable, politics and our government being what they are".
In September 1947, Mr. Forrestal spurred by his misgivings, laboured tirelessly to have Palestine "taken out of politics". His idea was that both contending parties must contain a majority of people who could be brought to agree, in the paramount national interest, that major foreign issues be set above dispute, so that Palestine could not be used for huckstering at election-time. He found only disdain for this idea among the men of "practical politics".
Deeply disturbed by Mr. Hannegan's above-quoted remarks of September 4, Mr. Forrestal at a Cabinet lunch on September 29, 1947 openly asked President Truman "whether it would not be possible to lift the Jewish-Palestine question out of politics". Mr. Truman said "it was worth trying to do, although he was obviously sceptical". At the next Cabinet lunch (October 6) the party-boss rebuked the responsible Cabinet officer:
"Mr. Hannegan brought up the question of Palestine. He said many people who had contributed to. the Democratic campaign were pressing hard for assurances from the administration of definitive support for the Jewish position in Palestine".
Mr. Forrestal foresaw Mr. Truman's capitulation and his alarm increased. He saw the Democratic party-manager, Mr. J. Howard McGrath (November 6, 1947) and again could make no headway. Mr. McGrath said, "There were two or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question". Mr. Forrestal made no impression with his rejoinder, "I said I would rather lose those states in a national election than run the risks which I felt might develop in our handling of the Palestine question".
The next day he again received support from General Marshall, who told the Cabinet that the Middle East was "another tinder box", and Mr. Forrestal then "repeated my suggestion . . . that a serious attempt be made to lift the Palestine question out of American partisan politics . . . Domestic politics ceased at the Atlantic Ocean and no question was more charged with danger to our security than this particular one" (November 7, 1947).
The "partition" vote was by this time near and Mr. Forrestal made another appeal to. Mr. McGrath , the Democratic party-manager, showing him a secret report on Palestine provided by the governmental intelligence agency. Mr. McGrath brushed this aside, saying Jewish sources were responsible for a substantial part of the contributions to the Democratic National Committee and many of these contributions were made "with a distinct idea on the part of the givers that they will have an opportunity to express their views and have them seriously considered on such questions as the present Palestine question. There was a feeling among the Jews that the United States was not doing what it should to solicit votes in the United Nations General Assembly in favour of the Palestine partition, and beyond this the Jews would expect the United States to do its utmost to implement the partition decision if it is voted by the United Nations through force if necessary '. "
This quotation reveals the process of progressively raising the bid for Zionist funds and the Zionist vote which went on behind the scenes. At the start only United States support for the partition proposal had been "expected". Within a few weeks this "expectation" had risen to the demand that the United States should "solicit" the votes of other countries in support of partition and should use American troops to enforce partition, and the party-manager was quite accustomed to such notions (if American troops in the 1950's or 1960's find them selves in the Near East, any of them who have read Mr. Forrestal's Diaries should know how they came to be there). Mr. Forrestal must have acted from a sense of duty, not of hope, when he implored Mr. McGrath "to give a lot of thought to this matter because it involved not merely the Arabs of the Middle East, but also might involve the whole Muslim world with its four hundred millions of people: Egypt, North Africa, India and Afghanistan".
While Mr. Forrestal fought this losing battle behind the curtained windows of the White House and of party-headquarters, Dr. Weizmann, in Washington, New York and Lake Success was indefatigably organizing "the vote" on partition. He was having his difficulties, but was rescued from them at this culminant moment when he found "a welcome and striking change" among some of those "wealthy Jews" who formerly had opposed Zionism. At this belated stage in his narrative he first mentions Mr. Bernard Baruch, saying that Mr. Baruch had formerly been "an oppositionist Jew", one of the "rich and powerful Jews who were against the idea of the Jewish National Home, but they did not know very much about the subject".
One can only speculate about the exact composition and nature of the "Jewish International" which Dr. Kastein described as having come into existence around the start of this century. It is permissible, in the light of all that has happened in these fifty years, to envisage it as a permanent, high directorate, spread over all nation-state boundaries, the membership of which probably changes only when gaps are left by death. If that is its nature, a reasonable further inference would be that Dr. Weizmann was a very high functionary, perhaps the highest functionary, subordinate to it, but that undoubtedly there was a body superior to him. In that case, I would judge that its four most important members, in the United States at that period, would have been Mr. Bernard Baruch, first, and Senator Herbert Lehman, Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior and Justice Felix Frankfurter, next. If there were a doubt, it would previously have attached to Mr. Baruch, who had never publicly associated himself with "leftist" causes or with Zionism. His great crony, Mr. Winston Churchill, quoted Mr. Baruch's "negative view" about Zionism to Dr. Weizmann, who in consequence (as he says) "took great care not to touch on the Jewish problem" when he earlier met Mr. Baruch in America.
Nevertheless, at this decisive moment Mr. Baruch suddenly "changed a great deal" (Dr. Weizmann) and his support, added to the Zionist "pressure" that was being exerted on American politics, was determining. Dr. Weizmann, as he hurried round the lobbies at Lake Success, learned that the American delegation was opposed to the partition of Palestine. Thereon he enlisted the "particularly helpful" support of Mr. Baruch (until then, for forty years or more, regarded as an opponent of Zionism even by such intimates as Mr. Winston Churchill!), and also of the junior Mr. Henry Morgenthau (whose name attaches to the plan of "blind vengeance" adopted by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill at Ottawa in 1944).
Mr. Baruch presumably did not hold Dr. Weizmann in the awe which seems to have seized the Western politicians at the Zionist leader's approach. Therefore his sudden support of Zionism must denote either an abrupt conversion or the revelation of a feeling earlier concealed; in either case, his intervention was decisive as will be seen.
Dr. Weizmann was well supported by the other powerful Jews in the Democratic Party. Senator Lehman was head of UNRRA when it was used to smuggle the Eastern Jews across Europe to Palestine, and had demanded General Morgan's resignation for publicly calling attention to this mass-movement of people; his part in the drama was already plain. Mr. Justice Frankfurter was equally busy; Mr. Forrestal was told by Mr. Loy Henderson (in charge of Middle Eastern Affairs in the State Department) that "very great pressure had been put on him as well as Mr. Lovett to get active American solicitation for United Nations votes for the Palestine partition; he said Felix Frankfurter and Justice Murphy had both sent messages to the Philippines delegate strongly urging his vote" (this is the same Mr. Frankfurter who called on Mr. House at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris "to talk about the Jews in Palestine"; he was also the devoted instructor of Mr. Alger Hiss at the Harvard Law School).
Having such support, Dr. Weizmann was a besieging general backed by superior armies when he called on the citadel's commander, President Truman, on November 19, 1947, to demand that the United States support the partition of Palestine, and furthermore, that the Negev district (to which Dr. Weizmann attached "great importance") be included in the Zionist territory.
Mr. Truman's discipline was exemplary: "he promised me that he would communicate at once with the American delegation" (Dr. Weizmann). Out at Lake Success the chief American delegate, Mr. Herschel Johnson, as he was about to inform the Zionist representative of the American decision to vote against the inclusion of the Negev, was called to the telephone and received, through President Truman, Dr. Weizmann's orders. With that the deed was done and on November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended (Zionist propaganda always says "decided") that "independent Arab and Jewish states, and the specific international régime for the City of Jerusalem" should come into existence after termination of the British "Mandate" on August l, 1948.
The vote was 31 against 13 with 10 abstentions. The manner in which the American vote was procured has been shown. As to some of the other votes, Under Secretary Robert Lovett said at the next Cabinet lunch (December l, 1947) that "he had never in his life been subject to so much pressure as he had been in the last three days". The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which had a concession in Liberia, reported (he said) that it had been asked by telephone to instruct its representative in Liberia "to bring pressure on the Liberian Government to vote in favour of partition ". (Mr. Loy Henderson's account of the "great pressure" used to get American "solicitation" of the votes of small countries has already been quoted). Thus was the "vote" of "the United Nations" produced in the most explosive issue of this century's world affairs.
At the Cabinet lunch immediately after this "vote" Mr. Forrestal returned to the attack: "I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists' pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine. . . The decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country". He then discussed the question (December 3, 1947) with Mr. James F. Byrnes, who had ceased to be Secretary of State earlier in the year (his relegation was foreseeable; it was he who disclosed President Roosevelt's pledge to Ibn Saoud).
Mr. Byrnes said President Truman's actions had placed the British Government "in a most difficult position" and added that Mr. David K. Niles and Judge Samuel Rosenman "were chiefly responsible" for it. Both these men had been brought into the White House among the "Palace Guard" with which Mr. Roosevelt surrounded himself; Mr. Niles (of Russian-Jewish descent) was the "adviser on Jewish affairs" and Judge Rosenman had helped write presidential speeches. These men (said Mr. Byrnes) told Mr. Truman "that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position on Palestine, and had insisted that unless the President anticipated this moment New York State would be lost to the Democrats".
Here Mr. Byrnes gave another glimpse of the behind-the-scenes auction. The two candidates for the highest office in the United States (Mr. Thomas Dewey was the prospective nominee of the other party," the Republican) in these portrayals look like children, incited against each other by the offer of a dangling bag of sweets. Mr. Truman, by doing the Zionist bidding in the matter of partition, had by no means ensured the Democrats of the prize, for the election was still a year distant and during that time the Zionists were to demand more and more, and the Republican party to bid higher and higher for the dangling reward.
Mr. Forrestal, in desperation, now tried to convince the Republican Mr. Dewey: "I said the Palestine matter was a matter of the deepest concern to me in terms of the security of the nation, and asked, once more, if the parties could not agree to take this question out of their electoral campaigning". Governor (of New York State) Dewey's response was much the same as President Truman's: "It was a difficult matter to get results because of the intemperate attitude of the Jewish people who had taken Palestine as the emotional symbol, because the Democratic party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish vote". Thereon Mr. Dewey continued to try and outdo the Democratic politicians in his bid for "the Jewish vote" (and to his own surprise nevertheless lost the election).
Mr. Forrestal next tried to strengthen the hand of the State Department, in its resistance to the President, by a memorandum (January 21, 1948) in which he analyzed the dangers to American national security flowing from this [445] entanglement: "It is doubtful if there is any segment of our foreign relations of greater importance or of greater danger. . . to the security of the United States than our relations in the Middle East". He warned against doing "permanent injury to our relations with the Muslim world" and "a stumble in to war". He said he had found "some small encouragement" among individual Republicans for his proposal to take the question "out of party-politics", but among the Democrats had met a feeling "that a substantial part of the Democratic funds come from Zionist sources inclined to ask in return for a lien upon this part of our national policy".
The last nine words are explicit and are literally correct. The Zionists demanded the submission of American state policy and offered in return a four year tenure of the presidency to the highest bidder. Whether they were in truth able to deliver what they offered has never been tested; the party-managers took them at their word and the candidates of both parties put on the sackcloth of submission before they were nominated, knowing (or believing) that they would not even achieve nomination unless they wore it. [yeah reread that DC]
Mr. Forrestal urged the Secretary of State (General Marshall) to remonstrate with the President, pointing out that a large body of Jews "hold the view that the present zeal of the Zionists can have most dangerous consequences, not merely in their divisive effects in American life, but in the long run on the position of Jews throughout the the world".
Under-Secretary Lovett, on reading Mr. Forrestal's memorandum, produced one already prepared by the Planning Staff of the State Department. This informed the President that the partition plan was "not workable" (exactly as British governments had been warned by their colonial administrators that "the Mandate" was "not workable"); that the United States was not committed to support it if it could not be effected without force; that it was against American interest to supply arms to the Zionists while refusing them to the Arabs; that the United States should not take on itself to enforce the "recommendation" of partition and should try to secure withdrawal of the partition proposal.
Mr. Lovett added, "the use of the United Nations by others as a propaganda platform is complicating our conduct of foreign relations" and said the State Department was "seriously embarrassed and handicapped by the activities of Niles at the White House in going directly to the President on matters involving Palestine". On that very day, the Under-Secretary complained, he had once more been under "pressure"; Mr. Niles had telephoned from the White House "expressing the hope that the embargo on the sales of arms to the Zionists would be lifted". [Outrageous conduct DC]
At that point Mr. Forrestal evidently became an acute annoyance to the powers behind the White House and his elimination was decided. First he received a visit from Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt junior. Whatever the father's deathbed pledge not to take "hostile action against the Arabs", the son (a New York politician, with presidential hopes) was an extreme Zionist partisan. Mr. Forrestal pointedly said, "I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely on scandal". He records (as if with surprise) that his visitor "made no threats" in response to this, and he then explained his proposal to "lift the question out of politics" by agreement between the parties.
Mr. Roosevelt, his father's son, replied that "this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed, and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans to gain by such an agreement". Mr. Forrestal answered that "failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California;" (the "pivotal states" earlier mentioned by party-manager McGrath) "I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States".
No comment by Mr. Roosevelt is recorded, but he was a harbinger of ill for Mr. Forrestal because on this same day (February 3, 1948) came the intervention of Mr. Bernard Baruch. Mr. Baruch, earlier an opponent of Zionism, was now so zealous in the cause that he advised Mr. Forrestal "not to be active in this matter. . . I was already identified, to a degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine".
Ominous words for Mr. Forrestal! The annals here record for the first time a specific intervention by Mr. Baruch in high affairs, and its nature. His counsel was that Mr. Forrestal, a Cabinet officer, consider his own interest, which was endangered; until that time Mr. Forrestal as a responsible Cabinet officer had considered only the interest of his country. Mr. Forrestal does not say whether he saw in this advice anything threatening; his allusion to Mr. Roosevelt on the same day shows that the thought of "threats" was in his mind.
He then gave way to the fear which in the end cowed nearly all men who strove against the thrall of Zion. Four days later (February 7, 1948) he drew up a last paper on the subject which he never submitted to the President, but which contains something of historical importance. He said that on February 6 "Eisenhower told me that effective United States participation in a Palestine police force would involve about one division with appropriate supporting units". At that time, therefore, General Eisenhower (then Chief of Staff) was drafting plans for the potential engagement of American troops in Palestine. Mr. Forrestal put away this last memorandum. On February 12 and 18 he made two final appeals to General Marshall to contend with the President and the party-managers and at that point his efforts ceased.
His desisting availed him nothing for within a twelvemonth he was literally hounded to death. His end needs to be described here, before the armed seizure of Palestine is recorded; it is the classic case of persecution by defamation, leading to death.
I first went to America early in 1949 and was perplexed by the venom of the attacks, in the press and radio, on one Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. I knew nothing of him but his name, and the part he played in this affair (as above recorded) was then entirely unknown to the public. Nevertheless they read or heard daily that he was insane, a coward who had left his wife to be attacked by a burglar, a tax defaulter, and all manner of other things. By chance I met a friend of his who told me that he had been so reduced by this persecution that those near to him were gravely alarmed. A few weeks later he threw himself from a high window, leaving in his room some copied verses from Greek tragedy which ended with the refrain" "Woe, woe! will be the cry . . ."
American libel laws are liberal and differ from state to state, and litigation is long. Even a successful action may not bring redress. Hardly any limit is in practice set to what may be said about a man singled out for defamation; the slanders are printed in the language that incites mob-passions and when broadcast are uttered in rabid accents that recalled to me the voices of primitive African tribespeople in moments of catalepsy. Among Mr. Forrestal's effects was found a scrapbook full of these attacks, and towards the end he could not listen to the radio. The refuse of calumny was emptied on his head and at the end two broadcasters joined for the kill. One of them announced (January 9, 1949) that President Truman would "accept Forrestal's resignation within a week" (and followed this with some slander about shares in the German Dye Trust). On January 11 the second broadcaster told the millions that President Truman would by that time have accepted Mr. Forrestal's resignation, had not the first broadcaster anticipated the event (the jewel robbery story was added to this). A few weeks earlier President Truman had told the Press that he had asked Mr. Forrestal not to resign; on March 1 he sent for Mr. Forrestal and demanded his immediate resignation, without explanation, to be effective from May 1. Mr. Forrestal committed suicide on May 21. At the funeral ceremony Mr. Truman described him as "a victim of the war"!
(In parentheses, at that time another man was being hounded to the same death, which he escaped, later in the same year, only by the failure of his suicide attempt. His persecution came from the same defamationist source, though his offence was in the other field, Communism. Mr. Whittaker Chambers sinned by his efforts to expose Communist infiltration of the American Government. I was in America at the time of his ordeal, which is described in his book; this contains the striking example, to which I earlier alluded, of the Talmudic practice of "cursing by an angry, fixed look" (the Jewish Encyclopaedia). Literal Talmudists would presumably see in Mr. Chambers's suicide attempt, and in the ill-health which subsequently afflicted him, a token of the literal efficacy of "the Law" in this respect).
After Mr. Forrestal's retreat into silence, at the warning of Mr . Baruch, the responsible men at the State Department continued their struggle, headed by General Marshall. (All this while, in England, Mr. Bevin was carrying on his lonely fight against the Conservative opposition and against the mass of his own party alike). At one point, for the first time since 1917, the responsible Cabinet officers and officials in both countries seemed to have won the day.
This was in March 1948. Violence in Palestine had so greatly increased after the United Nations' "recommendation" for the country' s bisection that the Security Council grew alarmed and beat a retreat. Even President Truman was shaken and his representative in the Security Council announced the reversal of American policy, proposing (March 19, 1948) that the partition proposal be suspended, that a truce be arranged, and that the end of the "Mandate" be followed by a "Trusteeship" (this was in effect the proposal of the State Department memorandum of January).
At the last moment the idea of "the Jewish state" thus seemed about to collapse. The post-war return to reason was beginning (that process which Mr. Lloyd George, thirty years before, had warningly called the "thaw") and if the coup now failed only a third world war could provide another opportunity. The "Trusteeship" would be the "Mandate" in a new form, but with the United States as the country chiefly involved, and in another ten or twenty years America, foreseeably, would find the "Trusteeship" as "unworkable", under Zionist pressure, as the British had found the "Mandate".
It was then or never, and the Zionists struck at once. They presented the "United Nations" with the accomplished fact by bisecting Palestine themselves. The terrorist deed by means of which this was accomplished was the result of the policy adopted at the World Zionist Congress of 1946, where "the demoralizing forces in the movement" (Dr. Weizmann's words) had recommended methods of "Resistance. . . defence. . . activism", and Dr. Weizmann, who knew what was meant, had been deposed for objecting to them.
Dr. Weizmann then had called "the terror in Palestine" the "old evil in a new and horrible guise". April 9, 1948 showed what he meant, and in particular why he called it the old evil. On that day the "activists", the terror-and-assassination group of Zionism, "utterly destroyed" an Arab village in exact and literal fulfilment of "the Law" laid down in Deuteronomy (which, the reader will recall, is the basic Judaic law but was itself an amendment of the original Mosaic law of the Israelites).
This was the most significant day in the entire story of Zionism. To the Arabs (who knew the Torah and "had known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn") it meant that the savage Law of Judah, devised by the Levites between 700 and 400 BC., was to be resurrected and imposed on them in full force and violence, with the support of the Christian West and of Communized Russia alike. The symbolic massacre, they knew, was intended to show what would happen to all of them if they stayed. Thereon almost the entire [449] Arab population of Palestine fled into the neighbouring Arab states.
The massacre at Deir Yasin was briefly reported in the West, for instance Time magazine of New York said:
"Jewish terrorists of the Stem Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi stormed the village of Deir Yasin and butchered everyone in sight. The corpses of 250 Arabs, mostly women and small children, were later found tossed into wells".
At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 Dr. Weizmann had declared, "The Bible is our mandate", and the words sounded good to Western ears. This event showed what they meant, and the same words were repeated by the Zionist leaders in Palestine thirty years after Dr. Weizmann used them. The massacre at Deir Yasin was an act of "observance" of the ancient "statutes and commandments", including the relevant passage in Deuteronomy, "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out. . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou . . . then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them", and the related passage, "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them". There are seven Arab states today, and each of them has its share of the fugitives of 1948, who for eight years now have been a living reminder to them of the common future fate with which Zionism threatens them under the ancient Law.
The passive condonation of this deed by Jewry as a whole showed more clearly than anything else the change which Zionism had wrought in the Jewish mind in a few years. Writing in 1933 (only fifteen years before Deir Yasin), Mr. Bernard J. Brown quoted the above passage from Deuteronomy as the reason for Arab fears, and added, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his bible literally, and that he is a kind and charitable person and would not be so cruel to his fellow-man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of the historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". The Arabs were right and Mr. Brown was wrong; this enlightened Western Jew could not conceive, in 1933, that Zionism meant a full return to the superstition of antiquity in its most barbaric form.
Probably Deir Yasin remained an isolated incident only because its meaning was so clear that the Arabs left the country. Mr. Arthur Koestler is definite about this cause-and-effect. He was in Palestine and says the Arab civilian population, after Deir Yasin, at once fled from Haifa, Tiberia, Jaffa and all other cities and then from the entire country, so that "by May 14 all had gone save for a few thousand". All impartial authorities agree about the intention and effect of Deir Yasin, and from April 9, 1948 no doubt remained about the governing force of the ancient Judaic Law on all future acts and ambitions of Zion. Deir Yasin explains the fear of the surviving Arab states today as fully as it explains the flight of the Palestinian Arabs.
Deir Yasin, for a little while, solved the Zionists' problem. The partition of Palestine had been achieved, by force. At the same time the event revealed (to the Arabs, if not then to the West) the nature of Dr. Weizmann's "abyss into which terrorism leads". From April 9, 1948 the West itself stood on the brink of this abyss, dug by the acts of two generations of its politicians.
Thus the situation changed completely between March 19, 1948, when the American Government decided that partition was "unworkable" and reversed its policy, and April 9, 1948, when terrorism effected partition. Dr. Weizmann must still have been haunted by his fears, but now that the territory for the Jewish state had been cleared he would not or could not withdraw from "the abyss". The aim now was to achieve a second reversal of American policy, to gain an expression of approval for what had been done by terrorism, and to this end, once more, Dr. Weizmann bent all his efforts. At the first reversal of American policy he had been urgently summoned from London to Lake Success by letters, cables and telephone calls, and the day before it was announced he was again closeted with President Truman. As the days passed, and the news from Deir Yasin flickered briefly over the tapes, he laboured tirelessly at his supreme task: the winning of "recognition" for the Jewish State set up by the terrorists at Deir Yasin.
Dr. Weizmann's energy was extraordinary. He conducted a one-man siege of the entire "United Nations" (of course, he was everywhere received as the representative of a new kind of world-power). He was "in close contact", for instance, with the delegates of Uruguay and Guatemala, whom he calls "the ever gallant defenders" of Zionism, and with the Secretary General of the United Nations, at that time a Mr. Trygve Lie from Norway. In mid-April, with the tidings from Deir Yasin rising to its very nostrils, the General Assembly of the United Nations met. The American vote was clearly to be decisive, and Dr. Weizmann remarks that he "began to be preoccupied with the idea of American recognition of the Jewish state". In other words, American state policy, formed in the constitutional process of consultation between the Chief Executive and his responsible Cabinet officers, was once more to be reversed at the demand of Chaim Weizmann.
Dates are again significant. On May 13, 1948 Dr. Weizmann saw President Truman; the contest for the presidential nominations then lay immediately ahead and the presidential election a few months beyond, so that this was the ideal moment to apply "irresistible pressure". Dr. Weizmann informed President Truman that the British mandate would end on May 15 and a provisional government would then take over "the Jewish state". He urged that the United States "promptly" recognize it and the President acted with zealous alacrity.
On May 14 (Palestine time) the Zionists in Tel Aviv proclaimed their new state. A few minutes later "unofficial news" reached Lake Success that President Truman had recognized it. The American delegates (who had not been informed) "were incredulous", but "after much confusion" they made contact with the White House and received from it Dr. Weizmann's instructions, transmitted through the President. Dr. Weizmann forthwith repaired to Washington as the President of the new state and President Truman received his guest, thereafter announcing that the moment of recognition was "the proudest of my life".
Eight years later President Truman in his memoirs depicted the circumstances in which his "proudest moment" came about, and his account may appropriately be cited here. Describing the six-month period (from the "partition-vote" in November 1947 to "recognition" in April 1948), he says:
"Dr. Chaim Weizmann. . . called on me on November 19 and a few days later I received a letter from him". Mr. Truman then quotes this letter, dated November 27; in it Dr. Weizmann refers to "rumours" that "our people have exerted undue and excessive pressure on certain" (United Nations) "delegations" and, speaking for himself, says "there is no substance in this charge". Mr. Truman comments, "The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders - actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats - disturbed me and annoyed me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly."
The "political threats" mentioned here obviously related to President Truman's approaching re-election campaign; this is the only reasonable interpretation of the words. Mr. Truman (according to Dr. Weizmann) promised, at the interview on November 19, "to communicate at once with the American delegation" and the United States vote was then given, on November 29, to the "recommendation" that Palestine be partitioned. Thus President Truman's anger (as recorded in his narrative of 1956) at the methods used in no wise delayed his capitulation to them in 1947 (if that were not made plain the reader of his Memoirs might gain a different impression).
Mr. Truman (in 1956) recorded the outcome of the "solution" (the partition recommendation) supported by him in November 1947: "every day now brought reports of new violence in the Holy Land". He also found that his capitulation of November and Dr. Weizmann's disclaimer of "undue pressure" had no effect at all in the months that followed: "The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days following the partition vote in the United Nations. Individuals and groups asked me, usually in rather quarrelsome and emotional ways, to stop the Arabs, to keep the British from supporting the Arabs, to furnish American soldiers, to do this, that and the other" (Disraeli's picture of "the world being governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes").
The President sought refuge in retreat: "As the pressure mounted, I found it necessary to give instructions that I did not want to be approached by any more spokesmen for the extreme Zionist cause. I was even so disturbed that I put off seeing Dr. Weizmann, who had returned to the United States and had asked for an interview with me". Mr. Truman, in 1956, evidently still held the postponement of an interview with Dr. Weizmann to have been so drastic a measure as to deserve permanent record. He was then visited (March 13, 1948) by an old Jewish business associate "who was deeply moved by the sufferings of the Jewish people abroad" (this was less than a month before the massacre at Deir Yasin) and who implored him to receive Dr. Weizmann, which President Truman at once did (March 18).
This was the day before American support was withdrawn from the partition recommendation (March 19). Mr. Truman says that when Dr. Weizmann left him (on March 18) "I felt he had reached a full understanding of my policy and that I knew what it was he wanted". Mr. Truman then passes over the bloody weeks that followed without a word (he does not mention Deir Yasin), except for an incidental statement that "the Department of State's specialists on the Near East were, almost without exception, unfriendly to the idea of a Jewish state. . . I am sorry to say that there were some among them who were also inclined to be anti-Semitic". He resumes his narrative two months later (May 14, after Deir Yasin and the accompanying bloodshed) then saying, "Partition was not taking place in exactly the peaceful manner I had hoped, but the fact was that the Jews were controlling the area in which their people lived. . . Now that the Jews were ready to proclaim the State of Israel I decided to move at once and give American recognition to the new nation. About thirty minutes later, exactly eleven minutes after Israel had been proclaimed a state, Charlie Ross, my press secretary, handed the press the announcement of the de facto recognition by the United States of the provisional government of Israel. I was told that to some of the career men of the State Department this announcement came as a surprise".
Mr. Truman does not in his Memoirs recall his statement of 1948 that this was "the proudest moment of my life", or explain why he felt it to be so; after many months of such "pressure" and "political threats" at the beleaguered White House that at one moment he was led to deny himself, if only for a short time, even to Dr. Weizmann! For the purposes of this narrative he now virtually passes from the story, having served his turn. He was elected president six months after his proudest moment and at the date of this book looks fit to live another twenty years, a dapper, hearty man on whom the consequences of the acts with which his name is identified apparently had as little effect as the fury of the ocean cyclone has on the bobbing cork. (In 1956 he joined the company of those who have been awarded an honorary degree by the ancient University of Oxford, a woman don there raising a lonely and unheeded voice against its bestowal on the Chief Executive whose name is best known from its association with the order to atom bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima).
After President Truman's proud recognition of what had been done in Palestine between November 1947 and May 1948 the debate at the "United Nations" lost importance and Dr. Weizmann (who in his letter to President Truman of November 27, 1947 had warmly denied the use of "undue pressure") set to work to muster other recognitions, so that the issue should be put beyond doubt. He learned that Mr. Bevin, in London, "was bringing pressure to bear on the British Dominions. . . to withhold recognition", and he at once showed who was the greater expert in applying "pressure".
Historically regarded, this was a moment of the first importance, because it showed for the first time that Zionism, which had so deeply divided Jewry, had divided the nations of the British Empire, or Commonwealth; what no warlike menace or danger had ever achieved, "irresistible pressure on international politics" smoothly accomplished. Suddenly Zion was shown to be supreme in capitals as far from the central scene as Ottawa, Canberra, Cape Town and Wellington. .
This gave proof of superb staffwork and synchronization; miracles of secret organization must have been performed, in a few decades, to ensure the obedience, at the decisive moment, of the "top-line politicians" in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. These countries were remote from Palestine; they had no interest in implanting the fuse of new world war in the Middle East; their Jewish populations were tiny. Yet submission was instantaneous. This was world power in operation.
The great significance of what transpired may need explaining to non-British readers. The bonds between the British island and the overseas nations sprung from it, though they were intangible and rested on no compulsion, had in emergency repeatedly shown a strength, mysterious to outsiders. An anecdote may illustrate:
The New Zealand Brigadier George Clifton relates that when he was captured in the Western Desert in 1941 he was brought before Field Marshal Rommel, who asked, "Why are you New Zealanders fighting? This is a European war, not yours! Are you here for the sport?"
Brigadier Clifton was perplexed to explain something which to him was as natural as life itself: "Realizing he was quite serious and really meant this, and never having previously tried to put into words the, to us, self-evident fact that if Britain fought then we fought too, I held up my hand with the fingers together and said, 'We stand together. If you attack England, you attack New Zealand and Australia and Canada too. The British Commonwealth fights together'."
That was true, in respect of people, but it was no longer true in respect of "topline politicians". Through them, the conspiracy from Russia had found the chink in the armour. The "pressure" in Wellington (and the other capitals) was as powerful and effective as it was around the White House. In this particular case [454] (New Zealand) a typical figure of that time and group of helots was a Mr. Peter Fraser, Prime Minister of New Zealand. None could have had less cause to hate, or even to know anything about Arabs, but he was their implacable enemy, because he had somehow become another captive of Zionism. This poor Scottish lad, who went to the other edge of the world and found fame and fortune there, apparently picked up the infection during impressionable youthful years in London (when it was spreading among ambitious young politicians there) and took it with him to the new country, so that decades later he applied all his energies and the power of his office to the destruction of harmless folk in Palestine! When he died in 1950 a Zionist newspaper wrote of him:
"He was a convinced Zionist. . . He was busy leading the United Nations delegation of his country at the Paris Assembly, but gave much time and attention to the Palestine issue. . . sitting day after day at the Political Committee when Palestine was discussed. He never left the room for one moment; no detail escaped his attention. . . He was the only Premier on the committee and left it as soon as Palestine was dealt with . . . Time and again Peter Fraser found himself voting against the United Kingdom, but he did not care . . . He remained a friend until his last day".
A man with this alien ambition in his heart certainly thought quite differently from Brigadier Clifton and his kind, and had he known how his Prime Minister felt Brigadier Clifton might have been much more puzzled to know how to reply to Field Marshal Rommel. Being so much preoccupied with Zionism Mr. Fraser could not be expected to be wholehearted in his country's interest and New Zealand went into the Second War all unready, so that when he met New Zealand survivors from Greece and Crete at Port Said in 1941 they were "haggard, unshaven, battle-stained, many of them wounded, all badly worn both physically and mentally, all worried by the loss of so many good 'Cobbers'; Mr. Fraser was responsible, in part, for this" (Brigadier Clifton). With this man as prime minister, New Zealand's quick recognition of what had been done in Palestine was assured, little though the New Zealanders knew it.
In South Africa, Dr. Weizmann, in his moves to discomfort Mr. Bevin, turned at once to General Smuts, whom the reader met long ago. By chance I was in South Africa at that moment. A well-known Zionist emissary came speeding from New York by air and when I read of his arrival I foresaw what would follow. (This man appeared before a Zionist audience and told it that "the Jews need not feel themselves bound by any frontiers which the United Nations might lay down"; the only remonstrance against this, seen by me, came from a Jewish objector, who said such words boded ill for future peace).
General Smuts received this airborne visitor and then announced "recognition" at once, being beaten in promptness only by President Truman and the Soviet dictator Stalin, (who in this one question were perfectly agreed): This was, I believe, General Smuts's last political act, for he was defeated at an election two days later. His son strongly warned him against recognition, holding that it would lose him votes. General Smuts brushed the advice aside (rightly, from the electioneering point of view, for his opponents no doubt were ready to bid for the Zionist vote and South Africa contained no Arab voters).
General Smuts's renown throughout the British Commonwealth (and his unpopularity with most of his fellow Boers) rested entirely on the popular belief that he was the architect of "Anglo-Boer reconciliation" and a champion of the great-family concept. In this one question he deserted the hard-pressed government in London with the unquestioning obedience of long-instilled discipline. I achieved an old ambition to meet him at that time. His days were ending and he too now disappears from this tale, but before he died he, like Dr. Weizmann, had seen "the abyss" which he had helped dig: "in the problem of Palestine" (he told his son later in the same year, l948) "there is tragedy at our doorstep . . . No wonder Britain is getting sick and tired of it all. Failure in Pa!estine will not only be a British failure. Other nations have also taken a hand, including America, and they have also failed. Pa!estine . . . is one of the great problems of the world and can have a great effect on the future of the world . . . We have thought to let the Arabs and Jews fight it out, but we cannot do that. Power is on the move, and Palestine lies on the road".
So he spoke privately, but not publicly. Apparently politicians, like the clown in the opera, feel they must ever wear the mask in public: Like Mr. Truman, he did what Dr. Weizmann commanded without delay and even in 1949, for the benefit of a Zionist audience, said he was "happy to have been associated with at !east one thing in my life which has been successful".
The retreat from London became a rout. Dr. Weizmann records that the New Zealand representative, Sir Carl Berendsen, then "won support from Australia", and soon the "top-line politicians" in Canada followed suit. When the British Dominions followed Mr. Truman and Generalissimo Stalin the smaller states thronged to give "recognition"; they could not refuse to tread where these great ones had rushed in, and thus "the Jewish state" took shape "de facto", the fact being the massacre at Deir Yasin.
Although he became its president, this is in truth the point at which Dr. Chaim Weizmann passes from the narrative, after fifty years of an activity, essentially conspiratorial, in which he encompassed the capitulation of all political leaders of the West and left "tragedy", like a foundling, on its common doorstep. I would not know where to look for a more fascinating life and another writer might be able to depict it in heroic tones. To me it seems to have been given to a destructive purpose and Dr. Weizmann, whose years were nearly done when he reached his triumph, found triumph a bitter, perhaps a lethal cup.
So I judge, at all events, from his book, the last part of which is of absorbing interest. It was published in 1949, so that he could have brought his account to the point now reached by this one, at least. He did not. He closed it in 1947. Now, why did he do that?
I think the answer is obvious. In 1946 he had warned the World Zionist Organization against "terror" and depicted "the abyss" into which "the old evil" must lead, and had been deposed in consequence. Then he had become president of the new state set up by "terror". I think he wished to leave his warning to Jewry on record and could not bring himself to discuss the deeds of terror and assassination in which the new state was born, so that he pretended to have ended the manuscript before they occurred.
He put the date of completion as November 30, 1947, the day after his triumph at Lake Success (when President Truman, at his prompting, telephoned the American delegation to vote for partition). Evidently he wished the book to end on that note. The reversal of American policy, and the deeds against which he had uttered warning, soon followed, and as the book was not to appear until 1949 he had plenty of time to express his opinion of them. All he did was to add an epilogue in which he did not even mention the determining deed at Deir Yasin, the contemptuous answer to his warnings. Moreover, he again went out of his way to say that this epilogue was finished in August 1948; this saved him the need to make any reference to the next determining deed of terrorism, the assassination of Count Bernadotte, which occurred in September 1948. Obviously Dr. Weizmann quailed. He had identified himself with both massacre and murder by accepting and retaining the presidency of the new state.
For that reason his earlier warnings are of the greatest significance; he could have deleted them before publication. For instance, he charged "the terrorists" (into whose hands he delivered the future of Palestine, and of much more than Palestine) with trying to "force the hand of God". This, obviously was the heresy of Zionism, and of all those who supported it, whether Jew or Gentile, from the very start, and of Dr. Weizmann more than most others. He added, "the terrorist groups in Palestine represented a grave danger to the whole future of the Jewish state; actually their behaviour has been next door to anarchy". It was anarchy, not neighbour to anarchy, and Dr. Weizmann's life's effort was anarchic. Even in this argument he was not moved by moral recoil; his complaint was not against the destructive nature of anarchy itself, but merely that it was inexpedient, "because the Jews have hostages all over the world"
On the very day after his triumph at Lake Success he returned to his new theme: "There must not be one law for the Jew and another for the Arabs. . . The Arabs must be given the feeling that the decision of the United Nations is final, and that the Jews will not trespass on any territory outside the boundaries assigned to them. There does exist such a fear in the hearts of many Arabs and this fear must be eliminated in every way . . . They must see from the outset that their brethren within the Jewish state are treated exactly like the Jewish citizens . . . We must not bend the knee to strange gods. The Prophets have always chastised the Jewish people with the utmost severity for this tendency, and whenever it slipped back into paganism, whenever it reverted, it was punished by the stern god of Israel. . . I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs". [They are screwed DC]
Thou sayest! Here Dr. Weizmann put on the robes of an Israelite prophet, or perhaps the crown of Canute bidding the tide retreat. When these words were published the Arabs had already been driven from their native lands, the Jews had "trespassed" on territory outside the boundaries earlier "recommended", the Arabs were not being treated "exactly like the Jewish citizens" but were homeless and destitute fugitives. Dr. Weizmann pretended not to know all that! He ignored all that had happened and said it must not happen. As an example of published hypocrisy this can hardly be excelled even in politics. The probable explanation is that he still could not bring himself to denounce what had been done but, as his death approached, felt he must point out its consequences; those consequences to which his life's work from the start was bound to lead, if it were successful. At the last he cried "Back!", and all in vain.
A greater man than he cried out in horror and linked the consequences to the deeds, which he did not fear to name. Dr. Judah Magnes was in the direct line of the Israelite remonstrants of old. Born in America in 1877, like Dr. Weizmann he had given his life to Zionism, but in a different spirit. He was a religious Zionist, not a political one, and did not presume "to force God's hand". From the start he had worked for the establishment of an Arab-Jewish binational state and had attacked Zionist chauvinism from its first appearance. He became"Chancellor of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem in 1925 (having strongly objected to Dr. Weizmann's pompous foundation-stone ceremony in 1918), was its president from 1935, and in 1948 was in Jerusalem. He was appalled by the emergence of "the old evil in a new and horrible guise" and left a valedictory lament condemning the Zionists and the Western politicians alike:
"Refugees should never be made use of as a trump in the hands of politicians. It is deplorable, incredible even, after all that the Jews in Europe have gone through, that an Arab problem of displaced persons should be created in the Holy Land".
He died immediately after saying this and I have not been able to discover the circumstances of his death; references to it in Jewish literature are often cryptic and resemble those concerning the breakdown and sudden death of Dr. Herzl. For instance, one such allusion (in the foreword to Rabbi Elmer Berger's book of 1951) says he "died of a broken heart".
In Dr. Magnes another Jewish peacemaker joined the group of responsible men who for fifty years had vainly sought to keep the West (and the Jews) out of the grip of a Talmudic conspiracy from Russia. He founded and left an organization, the Ihud Association, which still speaks with his voice, and even from Jerusalem. Its organ there, NER, in December 1955 said, "Ultimately we shall have to come out with the truth openly: We have no right whatever, on principle, to prevent the return of the Arab refugees to their soil. . . What should Ihud strive for? To transform the perennial powder keg (which is the State of Israel, according to Minister Pinhas Lavon) into a place of peaceful habitation. And what weapons is the Ihud to use? The weapons of truth. . . We had no right to occupy an Arab house without first paying its price; and the same is true of the fields and groves, the stores and factories. We have had no right whatever to colonize and materialize Zionism at the expense of others. This is robbery; this is banditry. . . We are once more among the very rich nations, but we are not ashamed to rob the property of the fellaheen".
This is a still small voice in Jewry at the present moment (incidentally, Dr. Albert Einstein spoke with the same voice: "My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest; I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain", 1950), but it is the only one which gives Jewry the hope of ultimate salvation from the Zionism of the Khazars. Today the probability, if not the certainty, is that this salvation can only come after the final tribulation in which the wanton adventure in Palestine must involve the multitudes of the West, the Jews among them.
One final point remains to be established about the creation, "de facto", of the Zionist state; namely, that it was the child of the revolution. The revolution enabled the Jews "to become a majority in Palestine", as the British authors of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had desired, and this transformation in Palestine could not have been effected in any other way, for no large body of Jews anywhere else in the world could have been brought to go there. The mass-movement was only possible in the case of these Eastern Jews who for centuries had lived in close Talmudic regimentation, and the manner of their transportation to Palestine has been shown. In 1951 Israeli Government statistics showed that of the "majority" which had been achieved (about 1,400,000 Jews), 1,061,000 were foreign-born, and 577,000 of these came from the communist countries behind the Iron curtain, where non-Jews were not allowed to move even from one town to another without police and other permits. (Most of the remaining 484,000 were North African or Asiatic Jews who arrived after the establishment of the state and took no part in its violent acquisition).
The invaders, therefore, were the Eastern Jews of Tartar-Mongol stock, but force of numbers alone would not have ensured their success. They needed arms for that. During the war General Wavell had informed Mr. Churchill that the Jews, if allowed to, could "beat the Arabs", and he evidently based this judgment on the arms which, as he knew, the Zionists had then amassed. At that time these could only have been British or American arms, clandestinely obtained from the depots of the Allied armies operating in North Africa and the Middle East (a process at least winked at, if not officially approved, by the political leaders in London and Washington, as has been shown). General Wavell, though his opinion proved correct, may at the time have overestimated the Zionist strength or have underestimated Arab resistance, for the Zionists, after the event, did not attribute it to the Allied weapons obtained by them. On the contrary, they believed that they owed their victory in the six months of fighting (between the "partition" vote and Deir Yasin) to the arms they received from the revolution. The Iron Curtain, which had opened to let the invaders of Palestine leave, opened again to allow arms to reach them in decisive quantities.
This was the first major consequence of General Eisenhower's order, issued under President Roosevelt's direction, to halt the Allied armies west of the Berlin-Vienna line and allow Czechoslovakia to fall to the Soviet; the arms came from that captive country, where the great Skoda arsenal, as a result of his order, had merely passed from Nazi into Communist hands. A few weeks after President Truman's recognition of the Zionist state the New York Herald-Tribune published this report from Israel:
"Russian prestige has soared enormously among all political factions . . . Through its consistent espousal of Israel's cause in the United Nations, the Soviet Union has established a goodwill reservoir with leftists, moderates and right wing elements. Perhaps of more importance to a new nation fighting for its existence has been a fact less generally known: that Russia provided practical help when practical help was needed . . . Russia opened its military stores to Israel. From the Soviet satellite nation of Czechoslovakia, Jews made some of their most important and possibly their most sizable bulk purchases. Certain Czech arms shipments which reached Israel during critical junctures of the war played a vital role . . . When Jewish troops marched in review down Tel Aviv's Allenby Street last week, new Czechoslovak rifles appeared on the shoulders of infantry soldiers" (August 5, 1948).
At that time the Zionist and Zionist-controlled press throughout the West began explicitly to identify "anti-Semitism", with "anti-Communism" (the attribution of Jewish origins and leadership to Communism had long been denounced as the mark of the "anti-Semite"). The Jewish Sentinel of Chicago, for instance, in June 1946 had already declared, "We recognize anti-Sovietism for what it really is. . . Did you ever hear of any anti-Semites anywhere in the world who were not also anti-Soviet? . . . We recognize our foes. Let us also recognize our friends, the Soviet people". In the schools of the new state itself the flag of the revolution was flown and its hymn sung on May Day, an ostentatious acknowledgement of affinity if not of parenthood. In January 1950 the Tel Aviv correspondent of the London Times reported that Czechoslovakia was still the source of arms supply for the Zionist' state.
So much for the birth of "Israel" and the pains it caused to others. No offspring of political illegitimacy was ever ushered into the world by so many sponsors; the "recognitions" poured in and the peacemakers were everywhere discomfited. Mr. Bevin continued in office for a few years and then resigned, soon to die; General Marshall and Mr. Forrestal were dropped at the first opportunity, obviously for the discouragement of others who might take their responsible duty seriously.
Within a few weeks the new state took another step towards "the abyss" of "the old evil". The "United Nations", having accepted the accomplished bisection of Europe and recommended the bisection of Palestine, showed a tardy concern for "peace" and appealed to Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to go to Palestine and mediate between the parties. Count Bernadotte had always given himself to the mitigation of human suffering, particularly to the relief and rescue of Jewish victims during the Second War. He worked in the sign of the Cross (the red one) and was killed at the very place where the Cross first became a symbol of faith and hope. No deed can be more atrocious than the murder of an accepted peacemaker and mediator by one of the combatant parties, and within four months of its creation the Zionist state added this second symbolic act to its calendar.
Count Bernadotte (like Mr. Forrestal) kept a diary, published after his death. This records that, after accepting the mission of peace, he passed through London and was visited by Dr. Nahum Goldman, then vice-president of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist state's representative, who told him that: "the state of Israel was now in a position to take full and complete responsibility for the acts committed by the Stern Gang and the members of Irgun".
These were the killer-groups whose deed at Deir Yasin effected the clearance of territory for the Zionists and was implicitly "recognized" by the West. They were the "activists" against whom Dr. Weizmann had uttered warning at the Zionist Congress of 1946. Deir Yasin had shown that they had the power, by calculated acts of terrorism, to change the whole course of world affairs, irrespective of anything said by Zionist leaders, by politicians in the West, or by the "United Nations".
They have this power in 1956, and will continue to have it. They can at any time precipitate the world into new war, for they have been placed in the most inflammable spot in the world, rightly described as "the powder keg" by an American Secretary of State, a British Foreign Secretary and the Zionist Premier himself. Up to the time when Dr. Nahum Goldman made the above-quoted statement to Count Bernadotte a pretence had been kept up that they were beyond the control of the "responsible" Zionist leaders, who deplored their acts. Dr. Goldman's assurance was presumably meant to convince Count Bernadotte that his work of mediation would not be wantonly destroyed by any such act as that of Deir Yasin. The terrorists then murdered Count Bernadotte himself, and in the sequel (as will be shown) the Israeli government took responsibility for them and their deeds.
Count Bernadotte, after hearing these reassuring words, set out to pacify. In Egypt he saw the Prime Minister, Nokrashi Pasha, who said he "recognized the extent of Jewish economic power, since it controlled the economic system of many countries, including the United States, England, France, Egypt itself and perhaps even Sweden" (Count Bernadotte did not demur to the last statement). Nokrashi Pasha said the Arabs did not expect to escape that domination. However, for the Jews to achieve economic domination of the whole of Palestine was one thing; what the Arabs would not accept, and would resist, was the attempt by force and terrorism, and with the assistance of international Zionism, to set up a Zionist state based on coercion. After this King Farouk told Count Bernadotte that if the war continued (it has not yet ended) it would develop into a third world war; Count Bernadotte agreed and said he had for that reason accepted the task of Mediator.
He also mentioned that in the war he had had "the privilege of rescuing about 20,000 persons, many of them Jews; I myself had been in charge of this work". He evidently thought this would qualify him for Zionist respect, and was wrong. Within a few days he had persuaded the Arabs (on June 9, 1948) to agree unconditionally to a cease-fire, but then read a fanatical Zionist attack on himself for "having forced the truce on the Jews". "I began to realize what an exposed position I was in . . . the friendliness towards me would unquestionably turn to suspicion and ill will if, in my later activities as Mediator, I failed to study primarily the interest of the Jewish party but sought to find an impartial and just solution of the problem".
Irgun (for which the Zionist government through Dr. Goldman in London had claimed "full and complete responsibility") then broke the truce (June 18-30, 1948) by landing men and arms. Count Bernadotte and his observers "were unable to judge the number of Irgun men landed or the quantity of war material unloaded" because the Zionist government refused to allow them near the spot. In the first week of July "the Jewish press made very violent attacks on me". The defamationist method (used against Mr. Forrestal) was now employed and Count Bernadotte's efforts to rescue Jewish victims during the war were turned against him; the insinuation was made that his negotiations with the Nazi Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, towards the war's end about the liberation of Jews had been of dubious character. "It was unjust to cast aspersions on me", (the innuendo was that Count Bernadotte was "a Nazi") "my work having been the means of saving the lives of about 10,000 Jews".
That meant as little to the Zionists as Alexander II's and Count Stolypin's efforts to "improve the lot of the Jews" forty years earlier; Count Bernadotte's mortal offence was impartiality. Between July 19 and August 12 he had to tell Dr. Joseph, Zionist military governor of Jerusalem, that according to his observers' reports "the Jews were the most aggressive party in Jerusalem". On September 16, on the historic peacemaker's path "to Jerusalem" (the title of his book) Count Bernadotte in effect wrote his own death warrant; on that day he sent his "Progress Report" as Mediator from Rhodes to the United Nations, and within twenty-four hours he was murdered.
The reason lay in his proposals. He accepted the "de facto" establishment of the Zionist state but, building on that basis, sought to reconcile and pacify by impartial proposals, as just to each party as the accomplished fact would allow. His chief concern was for the civilian Arab population, driven by the pogrom at Deir Yasin from its native villages and huddled beyond the frontiers. Nothing like this had ever been done under the wing of the West, and Count Bernadotte was fresh from efforts to rescue Jews from Hitler. Thus he proposed:
(1) that the boundaries of the Zionist state should be those envisaged in the "recommendation" of the United Nations on November 29, 1947, the Negev to remain Arab territory and the United Nations to ensure that these boundaries were "respected and maintained";
(2) that (as also "recommended") Jerusalem be internationalized under United Nations control;
(3) that the United Nations should "affirm and give effect to" the right of the Arab fugitives to return to their homes.
Having despatched these proposals on September 16, 1948, Count Bernadotte, before they could reach New York, flew to Jerusalem (September 17). He and his party, unarmed and defenceless, drove towards Government House when their car was halted by a Zionist jeep pulled across the road. Their movements were clearly as well known as the contents of Count Bernadotte's report; three men jumped from the jeep, ran to his car, and with sten guns killed him and his Chief Observer in Jerusalem, the French Colonel Serot.
The survivors, in an appendix to his diary, describe the killing in detail. Their accounts show its efficient preparation and execution and plainly point to the identity of the chief organizer. The actual murderers escaped without hindrance, two in the jeep and one across country. None was arrested or charged (report, probably credible, says that a waiting aeroplane removed the murderers to communist Czechoslovakia). The subsequent Israeli enquiry stated that:
"The murder as it was actually carried out and all the preparations that went with it are predicated on the following points:
(a) a clear decision to assassinate Count Bernadotte and the elaboration of a detailed plan for its carrying out;
(b) a complex spy network capable of keeping track of the Count's movements during the time of his stay in Jerusalem so as to enable those responsible for the operation to fix its place and time;
(c) men experienced in this kind of activities or who had received in good time training for it;
(d) appropriate arms and methods of communication as well as safe refuge after the murder;
(e) a commander well experienced and responsible for the actual perpetration" .
For such men the new state had declared itself "fully responsible". Three days later a French news agency received a letter expressing regret that Colonel Serot, had been killed in mistake for the Mediator's Chief-of-Staff, the Swedish General Lundstrom, he being "an anti-Semite" (General Lundstrom was in another seat of the car). This letter was signed "Hazit Moledeth"; the Israeli police report stated that this was the name of the secret terrorist group within the Stern Gang.
General Lundstrom announced (September 18) that "These deliberate murders of two high international officials constitute a breach of the truce of the utmost gravity and a black page in Palestine's history for which the United Nations will demand a full accounting". No such demand was to be expected from the United Nations which (as this account has shown) responds only to the strongest pressure exerted behind the scenes. It has (or then had; none can say what wondrous transformation the future might bring) no morality of its own; it was an oracle, worked by a hidden mechanism, and it did not trouble itself about the murder of its Mediator any more than the Washington and London governments had troubled about the persecution of Mr. Forrestal and the murder of Lord Moyne. It ignored the Mediator's proposals; the Zionists took and kept what territory they then wanted (including the Negev), refused to let the Arabs return, and proclaimed that they would not allow Jerusalem to be internationalized (they are implacable in these points today, eight years later). The world-newspapers brought out the editorial which they seemed to keep in standing-type for such occasions ("Incalculable harm has been done to the Zionist cause. . . ") and then resumed their daily denunciations of any who pleaded the Arab case as "anti-Semites". The Times of London even blamed Count Bernadotte for his own murder; it said the proposal to internationalize Jerusalem "undoubtedly incited certain Jews to kill Count Bernadotte", and in the common understanding the word "incite" imputes blame.
In Israel four months later two Stern Group leaders named Yellin and Shmuelevitz were sentenced to eight and five years imprisonment in this connection by a special court, the president of which, in reading the judgment, said there was "no proof that the order to kill Count Bernadotte had been given by the leadership". The two men (according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency) "scarcely paid heed to the proceedings in view of the fact that the State Council was expected to approve a general amnesty", and within a few hours of their sentencing they were released, then being escorted in triumph to a popular reception. The "Commander-in Chief" of Irgun, a Mr. Menachem Begin, some years later made "a triumphal tour" of Western cities, being received in Montreal, for instance, by "a guard of honour of the Montreal police headed by Rabbis bearing Scrolls of the Law" (the South African Jewish Herald). Speaking at Tel Aviv during an election campaign in 1950 Mr. Begin claimed credit for the foundation of the Zionist state, through the deed at Deir Yasin. He said the Irgun had "occupied Jaffa", which the government party "had been ready to hand over to the Arabs", and added:
"The other part of the Irgun's contribution was Deir Yasin, which has caused the Arabs to leave the country and make room for the newcomers. Without Deir Yasin and the subsequent Arab rout, the present government could not absorb one-tenth of the immigrants".
Throughout the ensuing years, to this day, Mr. Begin continued to make sanguinary threats against the neighbouring Arab states*, to whom the presence of the Palestinian Arabs within their borders was a constant reminder of Deir Yasin and of the dire meaning of his menaces. For five years the public pretence was maintained that "the terrorists" had acted without authority at Deir Yasin and then, in April 1953, four Irgun men wounded at Deir Yasin claimed compensation. The Israeli government, through its Ministry of Security, denied the claim on the ground that the attack was "unauthorized", whereon the Irgun commander produced a letter from the official Zionist military headquarters in Jerusalem authorizing the action. By that time the signatory was Israeli Minister in Brazil.
* Begin Calls For War: Jerusalem. Attack the Arabs smash one weak spot after another, crush one front after another until victory is assured. . . this was the essence of the speech which Mr. Menahem Begin, leader of the Herut Party made last week in Jerusalem. He was speaking from the balcony of a hotel overlooking Zion Square filled with a few thousand persons. 'Our losses in such an action will not be negligible but at any rate they will be much less than when we face the combined Arab armies in the field', he said, '. . . today the Defence Forces are stronger than all the Arab armies combined . . Moses needed ten blows to take the Israelites out of Egypt; with one blow we can throw the Egyptians out of Israel', he said, referring to the Gaza Strip." (Johannesburg Zionist Record, August 20, 1954).
In the city where the "United Nations" had their headquarters, a strong reason offered why no "accounting" for Count Bernadotte's murder should be demanded. When it happened the American presidential election was close at hand. The campaign was at full heat and both candidates (Mr. Truman and Mr. Thomas Dewey) held the Zionist vote to be indispensable to success. They were vying for it and Palestine was a long way from New York. Mr. Truman was the better-qualified aspirant, for he had recognized the new state and proclaimed the act "the proudest" of his life. On another occasion he said it was one guided by "the highest humanitarian purpose". A few weeks after the murder on the road to Jerusalem he was elected president; at the year's end he gave White House employees a bookmarker with the words, "I would rather have peace than be President" .
By 1948 Colonel House's electoral strategy of 1910 had been developed into a high-precision instrument controlled by the Zionist international; the master switch being in New York State. The machine and company-flotation era added a new verb to the English language: "to rig", meaning to arrange or manipulate. Experts are able to "rig" machines. An example is the gambling-or-slot-machine in America. John Doe inserts his coin in the vague belief that the machine is operated by the laws of chance, and that if he is chance' s favourite its entire contents will pour into his hands; in fact the machine is expertly adjusted so that a precisely-calculated proportion of its receipts (probably between eighty and ninety percent) go to the gambling syndicate and the residue goes in small windfalls to John Doe.
The "rigging" of the American electoral system is the determining factor in the events of the 20th Century. A mechanism originally designed to enable John Doe to express his opinion about policies and parties has been adjusted to such a point of nicety, almost precluding error, that he is left without voice in his national affairs; no matter what coin he inserts in which slot, the governing syndicate wins.
The electoral system itself might at the start have been designed to make easy the task of "a foreign group" bent on dictating the course of American state policy. An election always impends: a Congressional one every second, a presidential one every fourth year. No sooner is a Congress or President elected than the "pressure-groups" begin to work on the aspirants for the next election; the party-managers begin to worry about the next contest; and the would be Senators, Congressmen and Presidents start to feel, and respond to, "the pressure". There is no breathing-space in which prudence might prevail and the stranglehold be broken (in 1953, as will be seen, even the struggle for the mayoralty of New York City produced an abrupt, major reversal of American state policy, the issue being "support for Israel". The intensification of "pressure" at these recurrent moments, and the consequent warnings from the party-managers to incumbents in Congress or the White House, bring about these back-somersaults, which upset the whole edifice of policy laboriously erected by responsible ministers and competent permanent officials).
In these circumstances the new "state" set up in Palestine in 1948 was never, and never can be, a "state" in any meaning of the word formerly used in recorded history. It was the outpost of a world organization with special access to every government, parliament and foreign office in the Western world (and most especially to the government, parliament and foreign office of the United States, which in the 1950's was the most powerful country in the world), and its chief function was to exercise control over the American Republic, not to afford "a home" for the Jews of the world. The prospect opened by this state of affairs was that of increasing American involvement in an explosive situation in the Levant, artificially created and pregnant with the danger of world war.
When 1948 ended, thirty-one years after the first triumph of the dual conspiracy (the Balfour Declaration and the Bolshevik revolution) the Zionist state had been set up. Mr. Truman, the pacemaker in "recognition", had been advised by his responsible officers that the partition forcibly effected at Deir Yasin would lead to a third world war; all leading Western politicians had received the same counsel from their responsible advisers. None of the "top-line politicians" concerned can have been in doubt about the shape which their support of Zionism would give to the future, and their public utterances about it cannot have expressed their private knowledge or belief. The American politicians of the 1940's and 1950's, like Mr. Leopold Amery and Mr. Winston Churchill during the earlier decades, evidently were captive to the belief that, for some reason never disclosed, "policy" in this one matter could never "change". The captivity of the London and Washington governments, and the identity of the captors, even today (1956) is not realized by the American and British masses (though the now apparent danger of a new world war beginning in and spreading outward from Zionised Palestine is for the first time disquieting them). In the rest of the world it has long been understood. As long ago as the 1920's for instance, the Maharajah of Kashmir asked Sir Arthur Lothian (as that British diplomat relates), "why the British government was establishing a 'Yehudi ka Raj' (Rule of the Jews) in India. I demurred to this description, but he insisted that it was true, saying the Viceroy, Lord Reading, was a Jew, the Secretary of State, Mr. Edwin Montague, was a Jew, the High Commissioner, Sir William Meyer, was a Jew, and what more evidence did I want?" Thus a remote Indian Maharajah, thirty years ago, clearly saw the true shape of coming events in the Western world.
I quoted earlier the statement of the Egyptian Prime Minister to Count Bernadotte, that "Jewish economic power controlled the economic system of. . . the United States, England, France, Egypt itself. . ." In the seven years that have passed the leaders of all the Arab states have openly and repeatedly charged that the American government has become merely the instrument of Zionist ambitions and have pointed to their own experience as the proof.
Far on the other side of the world the effect of the "rigged" electoral machine in New York was felt in its other manifestation: support of the revolution. Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese leader, was driven by similar shifts in American state policy from the Chinese mainland (where Communism with American support established itself) to the island of Formosa, where for the time being he again received some measure of American support. A well-known American broadcaster, Mr. Tex McCrary, visited him there and reported back to the listening millions of New York State: "I squirmed with embarrassment when I was told, 'We have learned never to trust America for more than eighteen months at a time, between elections' ".
This control of American state policy, through control of the election machine, led in 1952 to a culminating act of the Talmudic vengeance, wreaked this time on the half of Germany which had been left "free" by the bisection. This half of Germany was forced to pay tribute to the Zionist state, set up three years after Germany's defeat in the Second War!
After the First War the Western victor powers tried to exact tribute ("reparations") but failed; what was received was merely by book-entry, for it was cancelled out by American and British loans. After the Second War the revolution exacted tribute from captive East Germany by simply helping itself. The Western victor powers made no demand for "reparations" on their own account, but extorted it for Zion.
As the years passed the alarm of responsible men in the Middle East again made itself felt in the State Department. It was constantly reminded by its advisers on the spot that the seven Arab States had never accepted the deed of 1948, that they held themselves still to be in a state of war with the interloping state, and held the United States to be paying for arms to be used against themselves.
Thus the idea was born, several years after the war's end, of making the "free" half of Germany pay "reparations" to a state which had not even existed during the Second War; the continued propping-up of the new state was to be ensured and the true source of its support obscured. The idea was long bruited behind the scenes and (like the judgment of Nuremberg) then was suddenly given symbolic realization on the eve of the Jewish High Holy days in 1952 (or, as Time magazine of New York put it, "In the last week of the Jewish year 5711"). It formed the dominant theme of the ensuing Judaic celebrations, one Jewish newspaper remarking that it was "The finest New Year present for Jewry we could think of".
The Chancellor of occupied West Germany, Dr. Adenauer ("waxy pale") informed the Bundestag at Bonn of "the obligation to make moral and material amends". His Minister for Justice, Dr. Dehler, spoke differently to an audience at Coburg: "The agreement with Israel was concluded at the wish of the Americans, because the United States, in view of the feeling in the Arab countries, cannot continue to support the state of Israel in the same way as heretofore".
The American presidential election of 1952 was then immediately at hand. The West German government was constrained to pay, over a period of twelve to fourteen years, 822 million dollars to Israel, mostly in goods. The picture resulting from this transaction somewhat strikingly recalls Stehlin's summary of passages from the Cabala depicting the Messianic consummation: "But let us see a little after what manner the Jews are to live in their ancient country under the Administration of the Messiah. In the first place, the strange nations, which they shall suffer to live, shall build them houses and cities, till them ground and plant them vineyards; and all this, without so much as looking for any reward of their labour". This picture is not far different from that offered by the British, American and German taxpayers under the different forms of constraint (hidden in the first two cases, open in the third case) to which they have been subjected in the matter of tribute for Zionism.
The Western masses were not informed about the manner in which this payment of tribute was extorted; it was presented to them as an independent act of the West German government, prompted by high moral feeling. Jewish readers, on the other hand, were as well informed as Dr. Dehler's audience at Coburg. To quote two examples: the Jewish Telegraph Agency "revealed that the United States Government has played a very important role in pushing Western Germany to make a decent reparations offer to the Jews; the British government has also done its share, although to a smaller extent"; and the Johannesburg Zionist Herald said, 'The agreement with Germany could not have been possible without the active and very effective support of the United States government in Washington and of the United States High Commissioner's office in Germany". The entire Arab press reported similarly, and an American newspaperman who sought to make his way in to one of the Arab refugee camps was rebuffed with the words, "What is the use of talking with you? We Arabs know very well that in America no newspaper dares to tell the whole truth about the Palestine question" .
In England the official version was given to parliament by Lord Reading, Foreign Under Secretary and son of the Viceroy mentioned in the Maharajah of Kashmir's question to Sir Arthur Lothian thirty years earlier. Lord Reading's statement was prompted by the usual expedient of a "question", on this occasion from a Socialist peer, Lord Henderson, who began by saying that "over six million Jews were done to death". Lord Reading's answer is of permanent interest; he said that the West German payments to the new state would be: "in the nature of some measure of reparation of moral, even more than material value", and that they would be "based upon the calculated cost of resettlement in Israel of Jews driven out of Europe by the Nazis".
This statement implicitly reasserts the principle that the only Nazi crime morally reparable was the treatment of Jews; none ever suggested that West Germany should pay the cost of resettling Poles, Czechs and all other victims. Its peculiar interest lies in the allusion to "reparation of moral value"; when it was made nearly a million Arabs had been "driven out" of Palestine by the Zionists and their claim to return to their homes had been repeatedly, even contemptuously rejected.
Probably the most characteristic passage in this typical statement is that which refers to "resettling Jews driven out of Europe by the Nazis". Israel is the one place in the world where the numbers of the Jewish population may with accuracy be learned. According to Israeli government statistics, it was about 1,400,000 in 1953, and among these were only 63,000 Jews (less than five percent) from Germany and Austria. These 63,000 were the only inhabitants of Israel who by any stretch of imagination might have been said to have been driven out of Europe and to resettle in Israel. The great mass came from Poland, Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria some time after the war's end (and certainly were not "driven out" as they were protected in those countries by special laws and preference in state employment) or from North Africa.
No moral basis existed for the extortion of tribute from the West Germans for the Zionist state, and if any had ever existed, in respect of the 63,000, it had long been cancelled by the Zionists' "driving out" of nearly a million Arabs. The affair is unique in Western history and proves only the extent of the American and British government's submission to Zionism.
West Germany was compelled to bear a large part of the cost of the new state's armaments and development; therewith the likelihood of another great war was brought nearer and the out look for the Arabs was made much worse. The Zionist state was at length propped up and the consequences at once began to flow. The exertion of "pressure" on the West German government in this matter was about the last major act of American state policy under President Truman, whose term was about to expire. *
* As a footnote to the West German affair, the Western Powers in Vienna, (on this occasion acting in perfect accord with the Soviet state) at the same bidding humbled little Austria (Hitler's first victim) by vetoing a law of amnesty and restitution which might have benefited some non-Jews. The Austrian government (at that time supposed to be "sovereign" again) protested in writing to the American High Commissioner, specifically accusing him of submitting to the orders of "emigrants from Austria" who were on his staff as "Jewish advisers". No intelligible account of this episode reached the British or American newspaper reader.
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