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The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? Hardcover
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3.0 out of 5 stars Well intentioned but too verboseReviewed in the United States on 19 October 2014
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THE ZIONIST CONNECTION
Alfred M. Lilienthal
THE ZIONIST CONNECTION II
What Price Peace?
ALFRED M. LILIENTHAL
“To the Jew as a man—everything:
to Jews as a nation—nothing.”
—Count Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre
to the French Assembly, October 12, 1789
“Peace in Palestine cannot be achieved by
force, but only through understanding.”
—Albert Einstein
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
—William Shakespeare
NORTH AMERICAN
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Copyright © 1978, 1979, 1982 by Alfred M. Lilienthal
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
6 7 8 9 10
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lilienthal, Alfred M.
The Zionist connection II: what price peace?
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Jewish-Arab relations. 2. United States—
Foreign relations—Near East. 3. Near East—
Foreign relations—U nited States. I. Title.
DS119.7L52 327 .5694'017°4927 82-061135
This is a revised and updated edition of
The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace?
published four times by Dodd Mead and once by
Middle East Perspective, Inc.
This is the first paperback edition.
Published by: North American, Inc.
P.O. Box 65
New Brunswick, NJ 08903, U.S.A.
To Christians, Jews, Muslims and Non-Believers,
living and dead, who have had not only the courage to
place their concern for mankind above their allegiance
to any group or sect but also the willingness to do
battle in behalf of this conviction
Introduction
PART ONEe*-THE ORIGINAL SIN
I Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s
Nightmare
Il America Picks Up the Torch
Il The Creation of Israel Revisited
PART TWOeTHE COVER-UP
IV Inside Israel
V_ What Palestinians? ©
VI The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count
VII Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest
VII Slanting the Myth-Information
IX Namero Uno: The New York Times
X Terror: The Double Standard
PART THREE-~-THE COVER-OVER
XI Exploiting Anti-Semitism
XII The Blitz
XI] The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires
XIV Christians in Bondage
XV_ Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter
29
103
146
206
239
271
314
vill CONTENTS
PART FOUR-POLITICS OR POLICY
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years
The Attack on Liberty
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years
War Again
The Ford Interlude
Exit Henry Kissinger?
Enter Carter—and Then Begin
Reagan and Still Begin
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles?
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 776
Last Word
Notes
Index
Introduction
If some compelling justification was required for bringing a most con-
troversial book, with a most unorthodox approach, before a world in
which the human psyche has become far more attuned to the pleasant
process of being softly lulled by Big Brother than to the painstaking
task of absorbing upsetting, nonconsensus material, then the astound-
ing November 19-20, 1977, pilgrimage of Egyptian Pre-ident Anwar
el-Sadat to Jerusalem supplied the reason. The Middle East imbroglio,
always complex, had now become ‘“‘curiouser and curiouser,” to bor-
row words from Alice in Wonderland.
Euphoric Americans clung to their video sets over that weekend.
Sadat was addressing the Knesset—Egyptians and Israelis were not
only talking to one another, but smiling. The “A-rabs” were at last
willing to give up war. Peace, surely, must be on the way.
This wishful thinking of course overlooked the fact that since 1948
there had been two wars going on simultaneously in the Middle East.
The one between Israel and the Arab states was only a secondary
consequence of what Syrian President Hafez al-Assad has called the
“mother question” —the conflict between the Israeli Zionists and the
Arab Palestinians. While there was some possibility of a separate
agreement ending the Egyptian-Israeli war, a solution for the core of
the dangerous Holy Land conflict seemed as distant as ever.
The November 10, 1975, U.N. resolution equated Zionism with
racism and racial discrimination, and for the first time placed the
genesis of the continuing Middle East struggle squarely before a star-
tled American public. But fervent supporters of Israel, Christians as
well as Jews, reacted with unprecedented furor to the overwhelming
U.N. censure and stirred the media to direct an equally unprecedented
2 INTRODUCTION
onslaught against the U.N., the Arab states, and the Third World bloc.
The supporters of the resolution were denigrated with the charge
“emulators of Hitler.”” The pro-Israel American public was led to
believe that this was indeed but another attack on Jews and Judaism,
a Nazi renaissance. The pertinency of this U.N. action to the continu-
ing Arab rejection of the State of Israel was totally covered over by
whipped-up emotionalism.
What is Zionism, and what is its connection with the Middle East
conflict? How, if at all, is it differentiated from Judaism? Why has
Organized Jewry, invariably an unequivocal exponent of the separa-
tion of church and state, condoned their union in an Israeli state
demanding the allegiance of everyone everywhere who considers him-
self a Jew, whether he be an observant practitioner or not? What
validity is there to the insistence of a persistent minority that anti-
Zionism is the equivalent of anti-Semitism? Such questions may mys-
ufy 90 percent of Americans, yet the answers go to the very heart of
the Middle East conflict.
It was the serious confusion between religion and nationalism that
led directly to the 1948 establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in
the heart of the Arab world, causing disastrous consequences for all
concerned, including Americans whose government had played a
major role in that nation-making. The resultant uprooting of Pales-
tinian Arabs, whose numbers today have swollen to more than 1.6
million, many exiled for thirty years to refugee camps living on a U.N.
dole of seven cents per day, brought down on the U.S. the enmity of
an Arab-Muslim world, eroding a measureless reservoir of goodwill
stemming from the educational and eleemosynary institutions America
helped found. The creation of Israel, likewise, led to the penetration
of the area for the first time by the Soviet Union, endangered the
security interests of the U.S., and thrust the burden of a premature
energy crisis into every American home.
However much the essence of Judaism may have remained as
distinct as ever from Zionism, the nationalist shadow has so overtaken
the religious substance that virtually all Jews have, in practice, become
Israelists, if not Zionists. Many who mistrust the Zionist connotation
can still have their cake and eat it, through Israelism.
While the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora (the aggregate of
Jews living outside of Palestine) do not believe in Zionist ideology, out
of what is mistaken for religious duty they have given fullest support,
bordering on worship, to Israel. Such worship of collective human
power is just about as old as Pharaonic Egypt, and was practiced by the
INTRODUCTION 3
Sumerians, pre-Christian Greeks, and Romans as well. As Dr. Arnold
Toynbee pointed out in 4 Study of History:
The prevalence of this worship of collective human power is a calamity. It is
a bad religion because it is the worship of a false god. It is a form of idolatry
which has led its adherents to commit innumerable crimes and follies. Unhap-
pily, the prevalence of this idolatrous religion is one of the tragic facts of
contemporary human life.
And these Jewish Zionists-Israelists have been joined by a large seg-
ment of articulate Christian opinion in the new worship of the State
of Israel, which has been accorded the same privileges and immunities
that have been vouchsafed to religionists who follow a genuine faith.
On every other issue of concern to Americans, both sides have
invariably been publicly presented, no matter how controversial: the
cigarette lobby vs. cancer research, the drug alarmists vs. the uphold-
ers of pot, traditionalists-oldsters vs. Beatles-hippies, civil rights
gradualists vs. extremists, hawks and doves over Vietnam, pro-Water-
gate outcome vs. Nixon apologists—to mention but a few. It has only
been on the subject of Jews, Zionism, and Israel that the U.S. and most
of the Western world have had a near-total blackout. The mere pres-
ence of the powerful Anti-Defamation League, even before the fear-
some “anti-Semitic” label might be brandished, has imparted a sensi-
tivity so powerful as to smother any idea of private discussion, let alone
public debate, on the grave issues involved.
The record of pressures, suppression, and terrorization practiced
against many—including Presidents of the U.S., who in undisclosed
memoranda, letters, and documents have entertained serious doubts
about the course upon which Zionism has embarked—is massive and
yet incomplete. The more submissive of the victims of Jewish national-
ist pressure have usually been either too ashamed or too afraid to
publicize their experiences.
Rarely has the deceit of so few been so widely practiced to the
disastrous detriment of so many, as in the formulation and implemen-
tation of U.S. Middle East policy. Guilt, fear, and the preoccupation
with domestic politics rather than consideration of policy, justice, and
security interests have molded the direction of the deep U.S. involve-
ment. And if John Q. Citizen was unmindful of what was really taking
place, it was largely due to the inordinate power of the media to
penetrate the inner sanctum of every home with its slantings, distor-
tions, and myth-information. ‘“T’ain’t people’s ignorance,” as Artemus
Ward once quipped, “that does the harm, ’tis their knowin’ so much
4 INTRODUCTION
that ain’t so.” Barnum notwithstanding, the media has been able to
fool the people most, if not all, of the ume.
The Watergate cover-up has to play second fiddle to the conceal-
ments in the Middle East fiasco for more than thirty years, involving,
as it has, the continuous serious threat to world peace manifested by
four regional wars and three serious Big Power confrontations, which
only narrowly missed becoming World War III. The stationing of
American technicians in the Sinai to help supervise the second Egyp-
tian-Israeli disengagement accord may have been a step in the making
of a new Vietnam. “ ‘One day,’ predicted a senior U.S. diplomat,”
according to Newsweek magazine, “ ‘there will be a congressional inves-
tigation into how we lost the Middle East that will make the great China
debate seem trivial.’ ”
This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a great Middle East
debate that should take place before, rather than after, catastrophe
strikes again in that already harassed portion of the globe. Certain
basic questions require answers: ““Whose legal and moral claim to
Palestine is stronger, the Israeli Zionists or the Arab Palestinians?
How, if at all, may these claims be reconciled? How may the U.S.
protect its vast political and economic stake in the area and simultane-
ously continue to foster its special, unique relationship with Israel?
Will the undeniable, overwhelming public statement of ‘‘never again,”
as to another Vietnam, be meticulously regarded in our pursuit of
Middle East peace? And above all, this clincher: Will President Reagan
and his policy advisers cease avoiding and openly face the central issue
in the entire problem—not the existence of an Israeli state, nor even
the nonexistence of a Palestinian state, but the kind of a state Israel
has to become so as to bring lasting peace to the area?
For some time it has been apparent that someone would have to
assume the burden of carefully examining the historical record of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, starting with the “original sin” in uprooting the
indigenous Arab Palestinians, and daring to articulate conclusions
seldom aired. As Norman Thomas once observed, one of the Jewish
faith is perhaps able to speak with ‘“‘the necessary moral authority that
no Gentile can express.”’
However strong the temptaticn may be for any author to succumb
to the prevailing mood of his surroundings and to indulge in indis-
criminate stereotyping, heightened by clichés and slogans, I have tried
to maintain a fair perspective and not to allow personal experiences
to dull the observer’s vision, nor instill too deep-seated a passion. It
is out of sadness, not anger, that I am forced to conclude that in
INTRODUCTION 5
embarking upon the new path that Organized Jewry has hewn for it,
prophetic Judaism has incurred an incalculable loss in moral values,
which author Moshe Menuhin has described as “‘the Decadence of
Judaism in Our Times.” What else can account for the anomaly by
which the once-persecuted have adopted the philosophy of their chief
persecutor?
In doling out incarceration and death while sweeping through
conquered Europe, did not the Fiihrer undo the laws of emancipation
for which so many Jews had so long struggled, as he decreed: “You are
not a German, you are a Jew—you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew
—you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew’’? Yet these are the identical
words that Zionist leaders have been intoning as they have meticu-
lously promoted the in-gathering to Israel (Palestine) of Jews from
around the globe, even plotting their exodus from lands in which they
have lived happily for centuries.
If at times this book seems unduly critical of Israel, and neglects
to place in balance the oft-repeated arguments in its favor, it is simply
because the gigantic propaganda apparatus of Israel-World Zionism
has spun such extensive and deeply ingrained mythology that there is
hardly enough space to refute widely accepted theses and expose the
picture as it really is. The reader, however, is particularly cautioned to
keep in mind at all times the very vital distinction between the State
of Israel and the people of Israel. Nor can he overlook the fact that one
of Western man’s most precious possessions is the inalienable right to
dissent. As Thomas Jefferson expressed it, ‘“For God’s sake, let us
freely hear both sides.”
This new, updated paperback edition has been published as an
answer to the widespread demand to learn more about the untold side of
a subject, the understanding of which may be vital to man’s very
existence.
In giving fair consideration to what to many will come as an
astounding recital, my readers are asked to display what William Ellery
Channing once defined as the free mind:
I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers,
which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or
hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, and
which receives new truth as an angel from heaven.
PART ONE
THE ORIGINAL SIN
“. .. If we had invested in the Arab problem a tenth of the energy,
the passion, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness which we devel-
oped in order to gain the support of Britain, France, the US and
Weimar Germany, our destiny in the development of Israel may
have been quite different. ... We were not ready for compromises;
we did not regard it as a major problem. . . . We did not make
sufficient efforts to get, if not the full agreement of the Arabs, at
least their acquiescence to a Jewish state, which I think would have
been possible. That was the original sin.”
Dr. NaHUM GOLDMANN,
President of the World Jewish Congress
writing in New Outlook,
November-December 1974
ISRAEL
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The Arab Countries
and Israel
THE ARAB WORLD
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UNITED ARAB
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(EGYPT)
I Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream,
Another’s Nightmare
We study the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not
paralyze today and today may not paralyze tomorrow.
—F. W. Maitland
How far back into history must we go to start untangling the basic and
relevant roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict? So much has been written
and said on this subject that the pursuit ultimately vanishes into the
distance like perspective lines. As each side pushes its competing and
parallel claim farther and farther back, the words tend to merge into
an indistinguishable blur.
Thus, if post-1967 claims matter, why not pre-1947? If post-Bal-
four claims, why not pre-Ottoman? If pre-Masada, why not pre-Moses?
If post-Abraham, why not pre-Semite? Continuing in this vein, we
would eventually end up in some Stone Age, and then who would
inherit the earth? The Basques? The Kenyans?
Absurd? Perhaps. Yet few protested when Moshe Dayan, speaking
to the World Assembly of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem on February
7, 1973, said in all seriousness that “any peace agreement Israel con-
cluded with Jordan should include the right of Israelis to settle any-
where on the West Bank of the Jordan River.” Dayan, then Defense
Minister of Israel, noted, ‘““The West Bank—I prefer to call it Judea and
Samaria—is part of our homeland. As it is our homeland, we should
have the right to settle everywhere without visas or passports from
anyone else. The Israeli government should make sure that any peace
agreement it signs includes that right.”
It was only natural for Menachem Begin, after the stunning May
1977 victory of his Likud alignment over the Labor party, to designate
Moshe Dayan as Foreign Minister. The two men shared an identical
attitude toward the land wrested by Israel from Jordan in the six-day
9
10 THE ORIGINAL SIN
October 1967 War and occupied since. But the history of this region
is a far cry from the Zionist mythology to which the Western world has
been continuously exposed.
Palestine, with its 10,000 square miles of mostly desert and rocky
hills, derives its name from the Philistines, who were pushed out of the
Aegean islands by the Greeks and settled on the Canaanite coast.
Palestine became an Arab country in the seventh century a.p., having
long since ceased to be Jewish in religion or rule, for the Jewish state
had fallen in the first century 4.p. From the 16th century the Arabs in
Palestine were part of the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule they
enjoyed a certain degree of self-government. Palestine was at that time
part of Greater Syria.
Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, and the Jewish people (and Judaism)
have been used by the mythmakers to suggest an historic continuity.
In fact, they were different people at different times in history with
varying ways of life. And the earliest of these reputed pre-Christian-era
forebears of present-day Jews intermarried with the Amorites, Canaa-
nites, Midianites, Phoenicians, and other Semitic ancestors of the pres-
ent-day Arabs whom they found there and with whom they shared their
lands.
Neither the Jews nor these forebears ever constituted a race or
even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping. The very word Hebrew does
not indicate a derivation from a land or a region, but comes from the
word /bhn, ‘‘one who crosses over.” It was first used in reference to
Abraham when he crossed over the Jordan from his home in Ur of the
Chaldees into the Holy Land.
Jews not only have a mixed ancestry, but Judaism was a tremen-
dous proselytizing force before and even after the coming of Jesus. It
was in the face of growing competition from the new Christian faith
that the rabbinate and other Jewish leaders ceased proselytization,
turned inward, and began to make “‘a racial hoard of God,” to use the
words of H. G. Wells.' But in so doing they did not succeed either in
wiping out their past history or in making an ethnic nation of them-
selves.
Even the Jewish concept of being the chosen people of God has
been distorted. God chose the Hebrews to be the special messengers
of monotheism, the belief in one deity. They were “the chosen” not
in the sense of being superior but to carry out the task of spreading
the word of one God. Soon the Jews had to share this mission with
others, as the followers of Christianity and Islam also made monothe-
ism the central theme of their religions.
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s Nightmare 11
As to the rightful ownership of Palestine, nothing can be proven
in any absolute sense. Both sides can quote Scripture from any one of
a number of holy books. Palestinian Arabs of today certainly have, at
the very least, as valid a claim to what is Israel now as do the Israeli
Jews. But sharing the land is not in accord with the nationalist dream
of the modern political movement known as Zionism, whose ambitions
and ideology have triggered the chain of events leading to the present
crisis.
The early 19th-century Jewish settlements in Palestine were com-
pletely nonnationalist in motivation. Political Zionism, spurred by the
writings of Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862) and Leo Pinsker
(Auto-Emanapation, 1882) and the inspired, dedicated leadership of
Theodor Herzl, did not succeed in winning wide support among the
Jews of Europe or America. The 9,000 Jews whom Sir Moses Mon-
tefiore found in Palestine on his first visit in 1837 had barely reached
50,000 at the turn of the century. The settlements that he founded, and
Baron Rothschild generously supported after him, benefited only the
new colonists and posed no threat to the indigenous Arab population.
On the other hand, Jewish students in Russia formed clubs.? Or-
ganizations for political nationalism such as the society BILU with its
motto ‘‘House of Jacob, come let us go” and the Hovovei Zion (Lovers
of Zion) were among the forerunners of the World Zionist movement
organized by Herzl in 1897. But verbal support of Jewish nationalism
was not translated into immigration to Palestine.
When Herzl sought the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
and turned to Sultan Abdul Hamid,3 the Turkish overlord told him: “‘I
cannot agree to vivisection . . . my people fought for this land and
fertilized it with their blood . . . !et the Jews keep their millions.”’*
The Kaiser, approached by avid Zionist leaders with the bait that
Palestine would become ‘“‘an outpost of German culture if it were a
Jewish Palestine,” was then cultivating the Sultan, and he gave an
emphatic ‘‘no,” as did the Czar of Russia. They resisted this despite
the fact that Herzl dangled before the potential overlords of a Jewish
Palestine all kinds of monetary advantages, from a university to long-
term credits.
When Herzl turned to Britain, Colonial Secretary Joseph Cham-
berlain made the offer of what 1s today Kenya. Most political Zionists
could not envision a Jewish state anywhere but in biblical Zion. The
Kenya proposal,® and Baron Hirsch’s plan for an autonomous commu-
nity in Argentina, revealed the conflict between those Jews who would
look to the establishment of a haven-home for Jews anywhere they
12 THE ORIGINAL SIN
could prosper, and those who would insist upon a state designed to be
the revival of old Zion in Palestine. The impetus for this latter national-
ist fervor came from the masses and middle-class Jews, not from the
wealthy and more successful who appreciated the importance of taking
no step through a nationalist movement that would interfere with the
unmistakable trend toward integration.
Although Herzl’s story of personal dedication to his dream of a
Jewish homeland has been told often and fulsomely, and the mere
mention of his name serves as a reminder to many contemporary Jews,
there are some little corners to his life that many of those who followed
his precepts have been only too happy to forget. Herzl had been
willing to accept the Chamberlain offer of Kenya as the site for the
Jewish homeland, but he was overruled by the leadership in the move-
ment he had brought into being, which forty-four years after his death
proclaimed, under his portrait, the Zionist state in Palestine. Herzl, as
Desmond Stewart pointed out in his revealing biography,® had been
only too willing to serve as an instrument of Britain’s vast colonization
effort at the end of the century. Ironically, one of the alternate situs
for the Jewish Eastern Company, which he proposed to found, as he
suggested in his meeting with Chamberlain, was El Arish in the Sinai.
It was at this very place in the 1973 October war that U.S. planes
landed their airlift to the then harassed Israeli army. Uncle Sam was
following a policy in support of Jewish colonialism, which London
seventy-two years earlier had refused to do in rejecting Herzl’s
scheme.
Herzl had only the most meager knowledge of what Palestine was
actually like—its geography and more especially, its demographic
composition. He had to be told by one of his close associates during
one of his few visits to the country that there were Arabs living there.
This attests to Herzl’s visionary, but unrealistic, state of mind.
Adding to the Herzl paradox was the fact that he had begun his
career as a political assimilationist who was not afraid to say that “the
Jew must get rid of certain nasty social habits and remake himself in
the image of the Gentile—then the curse of anti-Semitism would
wither and die.” Yet he gave birth to the most segregational of move-
ments.”
Herz]’s traumatic reaction while reporting the treason trial in Paris
of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the victim of clerical anti-Semitism (made
famous by Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”), coupled with his failures as a
playwright, caused him to turn to Zionist exclusivism. His utopian
novel Altneuland was followed by his classic, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another's Nightmare 13
State), and led to his convening the Basel Zionist Congress with its
ensuing call for ‘‘a publicly recognized and legally secured Jewish
home in Palestine.”
As a tactical move to win broader support and to throw off suspi-
cions of their ultimate aims—a tactic also employed later in drafting
the Balfour Declaration—the Zionists carefully limited their claim:
“Not a Jewish state, but a home in the ancient land of our forefathers
where we can live a Jewish life without oppression or persecution.” To
critics they responded: “‘Only those suffering from gross ignorance or
actuated by malice could accuse us of a desire of establishing an inde-
pendent Jewish Kingdom.”
The word “home” quieted the fears of non-Zionist Jews. Mean-
while, through the realization of their demands for unlimited immigra-
tion into Palestine, the Zionists hoped eventually to become a majority
in Palestine.
For the next twenty-five years the Zionist movement dedicated
itself to the practical aspects of buying land, establishing schools, and
building up its position in Palestine rather than achieving the creation
of a political entity.
With the outbreak of World War I, the Zionists moved their cen-
tral headquarters from Berlin to Copenhagen, from where they could
woo both the Central and the Allied powers. In the face of the hostility
of Jamal Pasha, the Turkish Commander for Palestine, they continued
to remind the Germans and Turks of the advantages of a pro-Zionist
Palestinian regime and of the need for a “counterweight” to the Arab
demand for autonomy. The Zionist argument, as expressed by one of
their spokesmen, ran as follows: “We wish to establish on the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean a modern cultural and commercial center
which will be both directly and indirectly a prop of Germanism.’®
Certain Zionist leaders contended that their ‘legally secured
home” could be more readily obtained from Britain than from Turkey
or Germany. With the objective of building a claim against Britain, the
revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky offered to form a Jewish Corps, and
eventually three Jewish battalions of Royal Fusileers rendered service
to Palestine in 1918.
Dr. Chaim Weizmann was the key figure in what turned out to be
the Zionists’ successful operation in Britain. Weizmann managed to
meet with Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and with the influential
editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, to gain the cooperation
of these and other important Christian figures in organizing a strong
British Palestine Committee. These men, convinced that a Zionist
14 THE ORIGINAL SIN
settlement in Palestine would be a political asset to the British Empire,
urged support of Weizmann on political, military, and humanitarian
grounds.
The two most powerful Jewish organizations in Britain—the
Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association—
as well as many American Jews sympathized with the cultural aspects
of Zionism and supported a Jewish community in the Holy Land that
would be secure in the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty and
would “receive equal political rights with the rest of the population
and reasonable facilities for immigration.’’® However, they were unal-
terably opposed to any recognition of Zionism on a political basis.
They objected to “recognition of Jews as a homeless nationality” and
to the investment of “Jewish settlers with certain special rights in
excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population.”
Led by Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, who insisted
that Jews be regarded as a religious community and himself as a Jewish
Englishman, these anti-Zionist Jews fought the establishment of any
Jewish nation. They maintained it would have the effect of ‘‘stamping
Jews as strangers in their native land and undermining their hard won
position as citizens and nationals of those lands.”’!® With prophetic
vision, opponents of Zionism held the proposal for a Jewish state all
the more inadmissible “‘because the Jews are and will probably long
remain a minority of the population of Palestine and because it might
involve them in the bitterest feuds with their neighbors of other races
and religions which would seriously retard their progress.”
The efforts of the British-Jewish Conjoint Committee and their
spokesman in the British War Cabinet bore fruit in the final wording
of the Balfour Declaration:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of
a national home for the Jewish people?! and will use their best endeavours to
facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that noth-
ing shall be done which may prejudice civil and religious rights of existing
non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed
by Jews in any other country.
The safeguarding clauses protecting the status of Jews outside
Palestine and of the Arabs in Palestine were important limitations
upon the grant to Zionism, making the Declaration a conditional credit
rather than a blank check. What the Declaration actually would make
possible, as expressed by the Hebrew philosopher and leading cultural
Zionist Ahad Ha-am, was the establishment of an “international
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s Nightmare 15
spiritual center of Judaism, to which all Jews will turn with affection
...acenter of study and learning, of language and literature, of bodily
work and spiritual purification.” !?
A national home without political sovereignty in Palestine would
be achieved by the very fact that the mandated territory would attract
hundreds of thousands of Jews, which would give it a higher percent-
age of Jews than anywhere else in the world. The limited character of
this home was conveyed not only by the verbiage employed and the
restrictive safeguarding clauses, but also by the necessity of reconcil-
ing the Declaration with other pledges and guarantees given by the
British government to the Arabs.
The Balfour Declaration was set forth in the monumental letter of
November 2, 1917, from Britain’s Foreign Minister to Baron Lionel
Rothschild. Arthur James Balfour had no way of realizing that decades
later the world would keenly feel the impact of what he had written.
Subsequent events, which have moved the Middle East to the center
of the world stage, are intimately related to the ambiguous sixty-seven-
word Balfour Declaration set forth in that letter. The meaning of the
Declaration must be interpreted against the background of relations
between the British government and the Arab peoples of the Middle
East.
The outbreak of World War I found Arab nationalism vigorously
stirring. Several secret nationalist societies increased their activity, and
leaders from Arab provinces took advantage of their position as dele-
gates in the Turkish Parliament to further exchanges regarding libera-
tion tactics. The key figure at this time in the Arab picture was Hussein,
the great-grandfather of King Hussein of Jordan, Sharif of Mecca,
descendant of the Prophet and custodian of the Holy Places. His influ-
ence was widespread. In his varied activities to bring Arab nationalism
to a head, he was assisted by his two able sons, Abdullah and Faisal.
Lord Kitchener, first as British Agent in Egypt and then as Secre-
tary of State for War, was alert enough to appreciate the considerable
help that the Arabs could give Britain in the Allied effort against
Turkey. On October 31, 1914, he sent a message to Hussein, pledging
support of the Arab struggle for freedom should they enter the war on
the side of the Alhies.
The British call to the Sharif found Hussein willing but cautious.
While Arab nationalists wished to be free of Turkish rule, they retained
a certain amount of self-government and had no desire to exchange
one type of rule for Western European domination. Before acting, they
wished to make certain that they could win outright independence.
16 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Hussein pretended to join the Turks in their jihad (holy war), which
had been proclaimed by the Sultan against the Allies, meanwhile seek-
ing out Arab support among nationalist leaders in Syria and Iraq.
On May 23, 1915, Arab nationalist leaders agreed upon what is
now known as the Damascus Protocol. This called for the indepen-
dence of all Arab land in Asia (with the exception of Aden) and the
abolition of the Capitulations giving foreigners special rights, but pro-
vided economic preference for Great Britain in the liberated areas as
well as a defense alliance with her. These were the terms upon which
the Arab leaders were prepared to support a revolt under the leader-
ship of Hussein and to enter the war against Turkey.
The British were worried about the effect of the Sultan’s jihad and
were hard-pressed elsewhere in Europe when the correspondence
began between General Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Com-
missioner for Egypt, and Hussein. The entire correspondence, eight
letters in all, was characterized by the British desire to avoid any direct
commitment and the Arab insistence on a clear promise of indepen-
dence before throwing their people into the war. McMahon’s first
position!® was that “it is inopportune to discuss the area of Arab
independence.” But the next note expressed Britain’s readiness to
recognize and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all regions
lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif “‘save certain stipu-
lated districts,’’ and without detriment to the interests of France. Pales-
tine fell clearly within this British pledge of independence, dated Octo-
ber 24, 1915. As State Department consultant Professor Williatn Yale
expressed it, to exclude Palestine from being one or part of an Arab
state was “contrary to the wishes, hopes, and expectations of the
Arabs.”’!4
For some years, because of the nuances in Sir Henry’s drafting,
it was contended by certain Zionist academicians, supported by the
British government, that the independence pledge was purposely
vague and never intended to pertain to Palestine. But the publication
in 1964 by scholar Dr. Fayez Sayegh! of two British documents, the
twenty-page ‘““Memorandum on British Commitments to King Hus-
sein” and the twelve-page “Appendix of Previous Commitments of His
Majesty’s Government in the Middle East,’’!® clearly revealed that
Palestine unmistakably was contained within the McMahon indepen-
dence promise.
The third note from Sir Henry expressed pleasure in Hussein's
efforts ‘‘to gain all Arab tribes to our joint cause and prevent them
from giving assistance to our enemies. We leave it to your discretion
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another's Nightmare 17
to choose the most suitable opportunity for the initiation of more
decisive measures.” The last word from the British High Commis-
sioner came on February 12, and the Arab revolt broke out in the
Hejaz on June 5, 1916.
Aided by the entrance of Arab forces on their side, the British
were able to withstand the German effort to take Aden and blockade
the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. “Had the result done nothing else
than frustrate that combined march of Turks and Germans to South-
ern Arabia in 1916, we should owe it more than we have paid to this
day,” wrote British archaeologist D. G. Hogarth, of the staff of the
Arab Bureau.!”
The Arabs drew off considerable Turkish forces that had been
aimed against British General Murray in his advance on Palestine. The
General noted that ‘there were more Turkish troops fighting against
the Arabs” than there were fighting against him. The Arab contribu-
tion to the British victory in the area was termed by General Allenby
an “invaluable aid.” By repudiating their allegiance with Turkey and
throwing in their lot with the Allies in exchange for pledges of inde-
pendence, the Arabs had redressed the balance in the Middle East.
In the light of the terror inflicted upon the Arabs by their Turkish
overlords in a frenzied effort to suppress the revolution, the contribu-
tion must have been considerable. As the countryside rose to aid the
Arab forces under Faisal, Arab nationalist leaders were taken from
their homes in Damascus, brought to public squares, and hanged.
Food was withheld from the people in Palestine and Lebanon, and tens
of thousands died of starvation. Everywhere Arab patriots paid with
their lives. When Hussein called upon all Muslims to join in the revolt,
and Ibn Saud took the lead in the Arabian Peninsula, Jamal Pasha,
leader of the Turkish forces, was compelled, to use his own words, “to
send forces against Hussein which should have been defeating the
British on the Canal and capturing Cairo.”’!8
Had the Arabs been aware of secret diplomatic agreements then
being negotiated, it is highly unlikely any revolt would have taken
place. Secret exchanges between Russia, Britain, and France resulted,
on May 16, 1916, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for the ne-
gotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Charles Francois Georges
Picot of France. The spoils of the Ottoman Empire were divided
among the three countries (Russia’s share being of no concern here
as it fell outside the scope of the Arab world). Under the agreement,
France was to receive western Syria with the city of Mosul, while the
rest of Mesopotamia (Iraq) from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf went to
18 THE ORIGINAL SIN
England. In the desert between there was to be a future Arab state, the
northern part under French control and the southern under British
domination. Although the French had insisted on all of Greater Syria
including Palestine, the British, concerned over Suez and the need for
a base near this strategic artery, forced agreement on internationaliza-
tion of most of the Palestine area while reserving Haifa and Acre in the
north for themselves. The ultimate future of areas in which spheres of
influence had been demarcated was left undecided.
The French were as much in the dark as to the Hussein-McMahon
correspondence as the Zionists were to this Sykes-Picot provision for
the internationalization of Palestine. And the Arabs, of course, knew
nothing of any of this secret diplomacy, which constituted a complete
repudiation of all the promises to Hussein, until Russian revolutionists
published the secret Czarist arrangement found in the Imperial Ar-
chives. It was the Turks who brought the information to the Arabs in
February 1918 in an effort to win their withdrawal from the war. The
Turks were now willing to recognize the independence of the Arab
countries if the Arabs signed a separate peace agreement. In alarm,
Hussein notified the British government. Balfour replied: “His Maj-
esty’s Government confirms previous pledges respecting the recogni-
tion of the independence of the Arab countries.”
Continued Arab distrust of Allied intentions led to the request by
seven exiled Arab leaders living in Cairo that Britain state frankly her
policy toward the Arab future. On June 16, 1918, came the British
“Declaration to the Seven,”’ which confirmed the previous pledges of
freedom and independence contained in the Hussein-McMahon corre-
spondence and gave additional assurances of a regime acceptable to
the wishes of the population. This policy statement, coming after the
Balfour Declaration, added to other governmental statements deli-
neating the meaning of a “national home.”
While the safeguarding clauses in the Balfour Declaration pro-
tected the “civil and religious” rights of the Arab communities in
Palestine, it was the promise delivered by Commander D. G. Hogarth
that protected the “political and economic” rights. The British archae-
ologist had been sent to Jedda a few weeks after the promulgation of
the Balfour Declaration to reassure Sharif Hussein that “as far as
Palestine is concerned we are determined that no people shall be
subjected to another” and that the return of the Jews to Palestine was
to be permitted but only ‘insofar as compatible with the freedom of
the existing population, both economic and political.” !9
According to Hogarth’s own account, Hussein was willing to wel-
Sixty-seven Words: One Man's Dream, Another’s Nightmare 19
come Jews to all Arab lands but would not accept an independent
Jewish state. ‘Nor was I instructed to warn him,” continued Hogarth,
“that such a state was contemplated by Great Britain.’ Hussein as-
sented both to Jewish settlement in Palestine as a refugee-haven from
persecution and to free access to the Holy places.?° Writing later in an
introduction to Graves’ Palestine: The Land of the Three Faiths,?! Hogarth
noted that the spirit in which nationalism was preached to the Arabs
could not be reconciled with any political implications read into the
Balfour Declaration. “It was not realized,” he stated, “by our govern-
ment of 1917 how far it [Palestine] was a settled land in occupation of
a people Arab in tradition and hope, which had not been oppressed
so greatly by the Turks as to welcome liberation at the price of a new
subjection.”
The Zionists, whose own hopes now rested on Allied victory, also
attempted to allay Arab fears regarding their ultimate designs. As
Nahum Sckolow had calmed the doubts of the anti-Balfour Declara-
tion Jews in 1917 by denying that Zionism had any intent to establish
a state, so now Weizmann attempted to dispel the doubts of the Arabs.
On April 27, 1918, he stated that Arab fears of being ousted from their
present position indicated either a ‘fundamental misconception of
Zionist aims or the malicious activities of our common enemies.”
Weizmann visited Faisal in his camp near Aqaba and gave the Arab
leader assurances that Zionism was not working for the establishment
of a Jewish government in Palestine. This meeting was a forerunner
to the London agreement between Faisal and Weizmann, signed early
in January 1919, in which full cooperation was pledged toward joint
efforts in the upbuilding of Palestine. But Faisal consented with a
stipulation inscribed by him on the text of the agreement he signed,
conditional upon the fulfillment by Great Britain of her pledges re-
specting Arab independence.?? (In his Knesset speech on November
20, 1977, following President Sadat’s address, Prime Minister Mena-
chem Begin referred to the agreement but totally ignored the Faisal
condition, the non-fulfillment of which as to Palestine vitiated the
agreement.)
With the successful culmination of the war, Arab nationalist lead-
ers met and organized the election of the General National Syrian
Congress. This first Arab Parliament with representatives from all
parts of Syria, including Palestine, convened in Damascus on July 2,
1919. The delegates favored a constitutional monarchy under Sharif
Hussein’s son, Faisal, as King of a united Syria. The U.S. was the choice
as the power to give economic and technical assistance to the new
20 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Syria. Britain was also viewed in the role of friend, but no help was
wanted from France. In citing Woodrow Wilson's condemnation of
secret treaties, the delegates pointed out: ‘We may look to Wilson and
the liberal American nation, who are known for their sincere and
generous sympathy with the aspirations of weak nations.”
This Syrian Congress, after opposing Jewish immigration into
Palestine and Zionist claims for the establishment of a Jewish common-
wealth, stated that “our Jewish fellow citizens shall continue to enjoy
the rights and bear the responsibilities which are ours in common.” It
was the belief of this Arab parliamentary body that the Paris Peace
Conference would recognize that ‘“‘we would not have risen against
Turkish rule, under which we enjoyed civil and political privileges as
well as the right of representation, had it not been that the Turks
denied us our rights to a national existence.’’23
While the Arab nationalists were proclaiming the independence of
Syria as a sovereign state with Faisal as King, the Allied Council of Four
was proceeding to divide the Ottoman spoils at the San Remo Peace
Conference. In the Allied formula, announced May 5, 1920, Britain
forgot her promise to Faisal and recognized the partition of Syria, in
exchange for which she won from France and Italy the right to rule
over Palestine. Greater Syria was divided into three spheres: Syria,
over which France was to have the mandate; Lebanon, over which
France was likewise to have the mandate; and Palestine, which was to
go to the British. A rider was attached to the effect that the mandate
for Palestine carried with it an obligation to apply the Balfour Declara-
tion, but there was no recognition of the ultimate independence of this
territory. The territory east of the Jordan River had been added to the
Mandate of Palestine, and the British were willing to apply the promise
of independence contained in the Hussein-McMahon Agreement to
what was to become the kingdom of Transjordan.
In ignoring the wishes of the people of Palestine, Britain had
committed an open breach of faith. In Arab eyes it was another “Et tu
Brute.” T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom did not hesitate to
refer to the Arab betrayal and ‘‘the revolt that had begun on false
pretenses.” He bitterly noted, “Had I been an honorable adviser, I
would have sent my men home and not let them risk their lives for such
stuff.’’24
Hussein, whose sons Faisal and Abdullah were destined to sit
upon thrones created by the British in Iraq and in Transjordan, re-
jected to his last days friendship with Britain, on the grounds that the
promise of Arab independence in Palestine had been broken.
Sixty-seven Words: One Man's Dream, Another’s Nightmare 21
In subsequent years Zionist leaders were wont to minimize the
binding force of these British pledges to the Arabs. They argued that
these promises had been superseded by the Balfour Declaration, pro-
mulgated to serve the Zionist interest of creating a political state.
History does not bear out this contention.
British self-interest was the primary motivation. At the time of the
Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Allied military position was seriously
threatened, and this was intended as a cold war move. The Germans
were reported to be considering a similar gesture to win Zionism to
their side. While undoubtedly the British government, and Lloyd
George in particular, felt a sense of gratitude to Weizmann for his
ingenious process of developing trinitrotoluene (TNT), more impor-
tant was that, to quote the words of a former President of the Zionist
Organization of America:
Britain, hard pressed in the struggle with Germany, was anxious to gain the
whole-hearted support of the Jewish people: in Russia on the one hand, and
in America on the other. The non-Jewish world regarded the Jews as a power
to reckon with and even exaggerated Jewish influence in unity. Britain’s need
of Jewish support furnished Zionist diplomacy the element of strength and
bargaining power which it required to back its moral appeal.?5
The Declaration was issued at the time of lowest Allied fortunes:
“Revolutionaries had been crushed, Russian army demoralized,
French unable to take offensive on a large scale, and the Italians had
sustained the great defeat at Caporetto.”’26 It was felt that the support
of American Jewry at this stage could make a substantial difference to
the Allied cause. It was also hoped that the British move would lessen
world Jewish hostility toward Russia, and give those Jews who had
been active in overthrowing the Czar’s regime a real incentive to keep
Russia in the war on the Allied side.27
Another most practical consideration motivated the British gov-
ernment. The Suez Canal needed a protective base in a nearby terri-
tory where “important elements would not only be bound to Britain
by every interest but would command the support of world Jewry.’’28
The strength that a Jewish Palestine could add to the position of Great
Britain in the area was an argument the Zionists themselves had
stressed with the British, as they had previously with the Turks and the
Germans. Winston Churchill, speaking of the Balfour Declaration in
the House of Commons in July 1937, said:
It is a delusion to suppose this was a mere act of crusading enthusiasm or
quixotic philanthropy. On the contrary, it was a measure taken . . . in due need
22 THE ORIGINAL SIN
of the war with the object of promoting the general victory of the Allies, for
which we expected and received valued and important assistance.?®
Even as the British acquiesced to Zionist wishes by issuing the
Balfour Declaration, they negated the illusion that the motivation for
their action had been Zionist interests and they admitted the limita-
tions imposed on the scope of the ambiguously worded document by
their pledges to the Arabs. In a War Cabinet debate over the Balfour
Declaration in 1917, Balfour declared that he understood the words
“national home” to mean:
. some form of British-American or other protectorate under which full
facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to
build up by means of education, agriculture and industry a real center of
national culture and focus of national life. It does not necessarily involve the
early establishment of an independent Jewish state, which was a matter for
gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolu-
tion.39
And one week before the Declaration, in a memorandum of Octo-
ber 26, 1917, Lord Curzon, who was to succeed Balfour as Foreign
Secretary, stated to the Cabinet that the administration ‘“‘cannot be
Jewish, but should secure to the Jews, but not to the Jews alone, equal
civil and religious rights with other elements in the population.”’3!
The June 1922 policy statement by the Secretary of State for the
Colonies, known as the Churchill White Paper, sheds additional light:
“It is contemplated that the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes
of the law shall be Palestinian, and it has never been intended that they
or any section of them should possess any other juridical status.’3?
The future Prime Minister stated that the Jewish community in Pales-
tine should be able to increase its number by immigration, but such
an increase was not “‘to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity
of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.” The White Paper
talked of the “further development of the existing Jewish community
‘of Palestine’ to become a centre.’’33
As to the Arab demand for an independent government, the
White Paper had this to say:
It is not as has been represented by the Arab delegation that during this war
His Majesty’s Government gave an undertaking that an independent national
government should be at once established in Palestine. [Italics added.¢
In this manner the adroit Churchill did not negate the possibility of
future independence for the Arabs. He also took the occasion to refute
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s Nightmare 23
specifically the repeated assertion, first advanced by Weizmann at the
Peace Conference and often thereafter reiterated, that ‘‘Palestine
would become just as Jewish as America is American and England is
English.” On June 27, 1923, the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of
Devonshire, told the House of Lords that while the intention had been
from the beginning to make a national home for the Jews, “‘every
provision has been made to prevent it from becoming in any sense of
the word a Jewish state or a state under Jewish domination.’’34
Churchill, who was later to become an ardent Zionist supporter,
also tried to assure a deputation of Arabs that a Jewish national home
did not mean ‘“‘a Jewish government to dominate Arabs. We cannot
tolerate tiie expropriation of one set of people by another.”35 The
Arabs, however, were not reassured by these words or by those of Earl
Balfour, now sitting in the House of Lords, that he disagreed with
those ‘‘who hope and those who fear that . . . the Balfour Declaration
is going to suffer substantial modifications . . . the fears are not jus-
tified, the hopes are not justified . . . the general lines of policy stand
out and must stand.’36 In the absence of any new guarantees, they
feared the “disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population,
language and culture in Palestine.”
The mandatory instrument adopted in 1923 by the League of
Nations did not enlarge the scope of the grant contained in the Balfour
Declaration in incorporating the British policy statement, including
the clauses safeguarding the rights of Arabs and non-Zionist Jews. If
anything, Arab rights were broadened by the reference in Article VI
against prejudicing “the rights and position of other sections of the
population.” The word “‘position” envisions the protection of eco-
nomic and political rights, as well as the civil and religious rights
covered under the Declaration.
Few British statesmen were willing to face up to the fact thet the
Balfour Declaration was a definitely limited and conditional grant. It
was one thing for British officials to hold out the hope that, in the
course of normal political developments, a Jewish majority might de-
velop in Palestine. It was quite another matter to accept the Zionist
claim that the Balfour Declaration was a grant to ensure a Jewish
majority and Jewish rule. The Jewish population never could have
overtaken the Arab population advantage without the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of Arabs that subsequently occurred.
Lord Grey, who had been Foreign Secretary at the me of the
Hussein-McMahon correspondence, singularly pointed to Britain’s di-
lemma in the House of Lords on March 27, 1923:
24 THE ORIGINAL SIN
The Balfour Declaration promised a Zionist home without prejudice to the
civil and religious rights of the population of Palestine. A Zionist home, My
Lords, undoubtedly means or implies a Zionist government over the district
in which the home is placed, and as 93 percent of the population are Arabs,
I do not see how you can establish other than an Arab government without
prejudice to their civil rights.
Lord Grey asked his fellow Lords to study all pledges and come to a
decision regarding ‘‘what is the fair thing to be done.”
Zionist interpretations of the Balfour Declaration were as varied
as types of Zionists themselves. Ahad Ha-am felt that the final wording
of the Balfour Declaration was a rejection of Jewish historic rights to
Palestine:
If you build your house not on untenanted ground, but in a place where there
are other houses, you are sole master only as far as your front gate. National
homes of different people in the same country can demand only national
freedom for each one in the internal affairs, and affairs of the country which
are common to all are administered by all householders jointly.°”
“Our leaders and writers ought to have told the people this,”
significantly added this spiritual Zionist.
In contrast, Ahad Ha-am’s close friend and pupil, Weizmann,
while admitting that the final wording of the Balfour Declaration
represented a “painful recession’ to the limited character of ‘‘a na-
tional home in Palestine,” was convinced:
... that the political work was far from finished. The Balfour Declaration and
the San Remo decision were the beginning of a new era in the political strug-
gle, and the Zionist organization was our instrument of political action.38
Some Zionist zealots did not see that the establishment of a na-
tional home for one people in a country already the national home of
another could only mean the limited nature of a second home or the
expropriation of the first people. Others saw the obvious, and planned
the expropriation. It was at their private meetings, rarely publicized,
that the political Zionists spelled out their plans of expanding from a
national home to a state and ultimately to a larger state.39 The out-
spoken revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, the mentor of Menachem
Begin, referred to the Balfour Declaration as providing ‘‘a corner of
Palestine, a canton, how can we promise to be satisfied with it? We
cannot, we never can . . . should we swear to you that we should be
satisfied, it would be a lie.”
The Zionists had been astute enough to bring about an increase
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s Nightmare 25
in the size of the mandate over Palestine to include the territory east
of the Jordan. Their careful plans of moving into this territory were
revealed by Weizmann at the 1921 Zionist Congress: ‘*. .. The future
would be decided when Cisjordania is so full of Jews that a way is
forced into Transjordania.’’4° Only the establishment of the Kingdom
of Transjordan under Abdullah frustrated the Zionist design.
Through the Zionist Commission appointed to implement the
Balfour Declaration and serve as a link between the British authorities
and the Jewish population, and through the Jewish Agency, the succes-
sor body under the mandate, the Zionists pushed their drive for con-
trol of Palestine. Having got one foot in the door, the Commission
opened new schools and took other steps to develop the Jewish com-
munity, then some 70,000 strong. The appointment under the Man-
date of ardent Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel as first High Commissioner
for Palestine greatly facilitated their aim of becoming in fact a sub-
national government and in this way ensuring the acceptance of their
meaning of the Balfour Declaration. The Jewish Agency became a
Jewish government within the mandatory government, exerting politi-
cal influence and drawing both propaganda and financial support from
all over the world.
The mandatory power increasingly was squeezed between Jewish
nationalism, on the one hand, and resisting Arab nationalism on the
other. In this battle the peculiar status enjoyed by the Jewish Agency
under the mandate gave it the upper hand. Several attempts by the
Briush government to devise a settlement reconciling the conflicting
obligations resulted in total failure.
There were many Jewish nationalists who did not insist on Zion
as the only acceptable site for the Jewish state. But for Chaim Weiz-
mann and the Eastern European Zionists, it was Palestine or nothing.
Their concept of nation was one of fated racialism. To them, what
made a person a Jew was not practice of the Judaistic faith (many of
them being, in point of fact, unabashed agnostics and atheists); suffice
he was born ‘‘a Jew’ —and once a Jew, always a Jew. Underlying that
concept was a deep despair, a cult of exclusivity combined with a sense
of doom. Its central tenets were the axiomatic conviction that anti-
Semitism cannot be erased from this earth, and the equally axiomatic
assumption that Jews cannot live a normal life outside their own state,
Israel.
Such despair has remained the philosophy of Zionism. The Israeli
state was created by a movement that believed Jews could live in
dignity only when settled in a land of their own, a land totally Jewish
26 THE ORIGINAL SIN
in language, custom, culture, and government. Religion has not been
perchance omitted from this listing: Zionism is more than ever pro-
foundly indifferent to the Judaist faith. But in order to sell itself in a
Western world that had long ago liberated the Jews from ghetto
confinement, that political cult of doom assumed the vernacular of
compassionate humanitarianism and faith. Power politics were made
up to look like philanthropy.
Weizmann was a most adept and practical manipulator, not to say
ruthless, willing to employ even devious tactics. One does not know
whether to be amazed or appalled to hear Weizmann himself say:
We Jews go the Balfour Declaration quite unexpectedly. In other words, we
are the greatest war profiteers. .. . The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built
on air and a foundation had to be laid for it through years of exacting work;
every day and every hour these last ten years when opening the newspapers
I thought: ‘“‘Whence will the next blow come?” I trembled lest the British
government would call me and ask: “Tell us, what is this Zionist organization?
Where are they, your Zionists?’’ For these people think in terms different from
ours. The Jews, they knew, were against us. We stood alone on a little island,
a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.*!
The majority of American Jews, the non-Zionists, were trapped
into support on the basis of not knowing the facts, exactly as other
Americans neither know nor have been given the facts regarding the
Middle East. Weizmann himself explained the precise manner in which
the Jewish minority pulled off its coup:
Those wealthy Jews who could not wholly divorce themselves from the
feeling of responsibility toward their people, but at the same time could
not identify themselves with the hopes of the masses, were prepared with a
sort of left-handed generosity, on condition that their right hand did not
know what their left hand was doing. To them the university-to-be in
Jerusalem was philanthropy, which did not compromise them; to us it was
nationalist renaissance. They would give—with disclaimers; we would ac-
cept—with reservations.‘?
A closer look at the realities of that period reveals that the Zionist
movement obviously owes its success at least as much to the political
turmoil, conflict, and disintegration known as World War | as it does
to any ‘‘vision’’ of Herzl or even the machinations of Weizmann. In-
deed, the genesis of the Israeli state can be traced to the conflicts
between various warring states and a by-product of the breakup of
empires going back several centuries. As Bert deVries, Professor of
history at Calvin College in Michigan, put it:
Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another's Nightmare 27
The source of the conflict between Israel and the Arab nations is the ambigu-
ous formation of these nations after World War I. Prior to the war the whole
area was a part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. National boundaries were
largely absent. All the modern nations of the Middle East had their origins in
the dismantling of the Turkish Empire. The haphazard and contradictory way
in which this empire was dismembered is responsible for many of the ingredi-
ents of the Middle East crisis of the 1970’s.43
But there is something more involved in this type of Big Power
politicking. This was still a ime when the Big Powers took very little
notice of the individuals affected by their grand designs. Territories
and populations were traded around like so many bolts of cloth. Only
this can account for the subsequent adoption of the Balfour Declara-
tion despite a deep, obvious flaw in what Israelists claim constitutes the
legal underpinning for their state in Palestine, and which the British
government hid from the British people: the population breakdown in
Palestine at the time they granted a national home to the Zionists. In
expressing what appeared to be a liberal concern for the minority, they
hoped to conceal the fact that 93 percent of the population was then
Christian or Muslim Arab and but 7 percent Jewish. The reference to
the overwhelming Arab majority as “the existing non-Jewish com-
munities,” whose rights allegedly were being safeguarded, was akin to
going into a room where there are 100 people and referring to 93 of
them as the “‘non-7.”
In Palestine: The Reality, author J. N. Jeffries described the aim of
the framers of the Balfour Declaration:
By an altogether abject subterfuge, under colour of protecting Arab interests,
they set out to conceal the fact that the Arabs to all intents constituted the
population of the country. It called them the “non-Jewish communities in
Palestine!”’ It called the multitude the non-few; it called the 670,000 the
non-60,000. . . .
But, of course, there [this] is more than mere preposterous nomenclature.
... It is fraudulent. It was done in order to conceal the true ratio between
Arabs and Jews, and thereby to make easier the suppression of the former. It
was as though in some declaration Highlanders and Lowlanders had been
defined as ‘“‘the existing non-Irish communities in Scotland” in order that
dispossessive action [from Scotland] against the Scots could be attempted
more easily.44
It is hard to find a document that has wrought more tragedy to the
world than the Balfour Declaration. The British failed to view in the
armed disorders of 1920 and 1936 signs of deep and unalterable Arab
resentment. The British error—and that of the U.S., which blindly
28 THE ORIGINAL SIN
followed her lead—led to deteriorating relations climaxed in the fatal
Suez invasion of October 1956, hastening the reduction of a once
proud empire to a third-rate power and helping bring on four hot wars
and a global oil embargo. How the U.S. became swiftly saddled with
grave area responsibilities and, as a result, faced the very real danger
of World War III erupting in the Middle East, requires a new chapter.
II America Picks Up the Torch
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for
words are slippery and thought is viscous.
—Henry Brooks Adams
Arab hopes for national independence rested heavily on the declara-
tions of President Wilson. His promulgation to the American Congress
on January 8, 1918, of the Fourteen Points by which he postulated how
the postwar world ought to be governed included the following twelfth
point: ‘“The other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule
should be assured an undoubted security of life and absolutely unmo-
lested opportunity of antonomous development.” At Mount Vernon
on July 4, 1918, President Wilson declared (that) one of the primary
aims for which the United States had entered the war was:
the settlement of every question whether of territory, sovereignty, of economic
arrangement or of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance
of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis
of a material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may
desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or
mastery.
This Wilsonian principle of self-determination sharply conflicted
with the position later attributed to the President by a March 1919
news story that the President had ‘expressed his personal approval of
a declaration respecting the historic claims of the Jews regarding Pales-
tine and that he was persuaded that the Allied nations with the fullest
concurrence of the American Government were agreed that the foun-
dation of a Jewish Commonwealth should be laid in Palestine.”
The Peace Commissioners’ meeting in Paris doubted that the
President had made such a statement. Through Secretary of State
Robert Lansing they requested that Wilson, who had returned to the
29
30 THE ORIGINAL SIN
U.S., be questioned as to the authenticity of the statement. On April
16 came the President’s reply:
Of course I did not use any of the words quoted in the enclosed, and they do
not indeed purport to be my words. But I did in substance say what 1s quoted,
though the expression ‘foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth”’ goes a little
further than my idea at that time. All that I meant was to corroborate our
expressed acquiesence in the position of the British Government in regard to
the future of Palestine.!
What Middle East policy the U.S. had at the time was merely
to follow and support the British. How far Wilson would have ac-
quiesced in the position of the British when this conflicted with his
deep-seated political philosophy is a matter of considerable conjec-
ture. In order to achieve his dream of a League of Nations, the
American President had been forced to accept the Versailles
Treaty, entailing the sacrifice of some principles. But other evi-
dence indicates a determination that so far as the future of the
Arabs was concerned, he was still determined to stick to his basic
formula of the ‘‘consent of the governed.”
At a meeting of the Council of Ten held in Paris on May 22, 1919,
Wilson declared he “had never been able to see by what right France
and Great Britain gave this country [Syria] away to anyone.” The
President favored sending a Commission of inquiry to ascertain the
wishes of the people of Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. This suggestion
stemmed from his Mount Vernon address and a proposal by Faisal. But
the British, following the lead of the French, backed away from this
idea, and the Four Power Inquiry never took place. In 1919 President
Wilson dispatched Oberlin College President Dr. Henry C. King and
industrialist Charles R. Crane as the American section of the Interna-
tional Commission on the Mandates in Turkey.
The findings of the King-Crane Commission,? based on a six-week
inquiry in the areas concerned, were withheld from the public until late
December 1922, after the provisions of the Peace Treaty had been
established. It was only then that the ailing Wilson gave permission for
full publication of the Commission report. The findings made it obvi-
ous why Balfour, the Zionists, and Clemenceau had all opposed any
inquiry into the Middle East. The American Commissioners reported:
No British officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist
program could be carried out except by force of arms . . . only a greatly
reduced Zionist program should be attempted by the Peace Conference and
then only very gradually initiated.
Amenca Picks Up the Torch 31
The Commission proposed that one mandate be established for
all of Syria, including Palestine, within which Lebanon should be given
autonomy, and recommended that Faisal be made King of Syria with
another Arab ruler to be found for Iraq. Noting that while they had
been frankly predisposed to Zionism at the start, the Commissioners
called for a serious modification of the extreme Zionist program of
unlimited immigration, looking to Jewish statehood. ‘“‘The actual facts
in Palestine coupled with the force of the general principles pro-
claimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians”’ had driven them to
new recommendations.
Regarding the Balfour Declaration, King and Crane wrote:
A national home is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor
can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest
trespass upon civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
During the course of the Commission’s investigation, Jewish rep-
resentatives had never attempted to conceal the ultimate goal of com-
pletely dispossessing the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine
by various forms of purchases. Nine-tenths of the inhabitants, the
Commission reported, were against the entire Zionist program. ‘“To
subject the people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration and to
steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land would be a
gross violation” of Wilsonian principle, they wrote, ‘‘and of the peo-
ple’s rights, though it be kept within the forms of law.’’3
The American Commissioners endorsed the program that had
been announced by the General Syrian Congress as a basis on which
the Syrians could unite and the mandatory power could propitiously
inaugurate a new state. The rationale advanced for a unitary Greater
Syria (i.e., the territory was too limited; the population too small; the
economic, geographical, racial, and language unity too manifest for
the establishment of a separate independent state) takes on dramatic
meaning today in the light of the region’s continuous conflict and the
disastrous Lebanese civil war, which are direct consequences of carv-
ing up the territory into the independent states of Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, and Israel.
The Commissioners warned that anti-Zionist feeling among the
Arab people of the liberated Turkish provinces ‘‘is intense and not
lightly to be flouted.”” The colonial powers, Britain and France, were
in great disfavor. More than 60 percent of these people had indicated
their choice of the U.S. as the mandatory power, no other nation
receiving more than a 15 percent choice in the petitions submitted to
32 THE ORIGINAL SIN
the Commissioners. America had earned this popularity among the
Arabs through her unselfish record, untainted by territorial or imperi-
alist ambitions, the philanthropic and educational instituuons she had
set up, and her past record of good treatment of backward areas in
permitting Cuba and the Philippines to move toward full freedom.
Although Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations
stated that the wishes of the communities formerly belonging to the
Turkish Empire must be a principal consideration in the selection of
the mandatory power, the British and French had other definite plans
for this territory even had the U.S. not debarred herself in donning the
mantle of isolationism. American postwar isolationism became an ideal
instrument in the hands of the new, powerful alliance between the
Washington politicos and the Zionist lobby. The vacuum created by
the absence of American foreign policy was eagerly filled with a spate
of resolutions supporting the ever-increasing Zionist appetite.
Considerations of domestic politics rather than area foreign policy
governed. In routine manner national and state legislative declarations
continued to advocate the establishment first of a Jewish national
home and then later a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Whereas the
British were pursuing their pro-Zionist tactics for reasons of empire,
the principal motivating force behind American actions in the Middle
East remained political. The essential differences between home and
state, between haven and sovereignty, were glossed over in the U.S.
as politician and lobbyist worked hand in hand to mold inexorable
support for Zionist nationalist aspirations.
Starting with the joint resolution of June 30, 1922, support of
Zionism was voiced in one form or another by successive Congresses.
But basically the United States had retreated into isolationism and was
far more preoccupied with its own domestic affairs—firrst the inflation-
ary years of the 1920s and then the depression years of the 1930s.
There still was no specific Palestine policy save aping the British. The
Middle East issue had not yet become a point of competition between
the two major parties or the nation’s politicians to see who could
promise more to obtain ‘the Jewish vote.”
Then, in 1933, two men stepped onto the stage of modern history
who were to dominate events for the next twelve years. When it came
to the Jews and modern Israel, both played roles, but it was Adolf
Hitler, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, unfortunately, assumed
the major role.
The increasing flow of Jewish emigrants from Europe with the
advent of Hitler caused a stiffening of opposition and increased fear
America Picks Up the Torch 33
on the part of the Arabs that Britain would never honor her pledges.
The 1936 six-month strike by the Arabs in Palestine led to the Peel
Royal Commission to Palestine and their June 22, 1937, report recom-
mending partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.4 The con-
tinued Arab insurrection against this recommendation forced the Brit-
ish government to send the Woodhead Commission to further
investigate the partition plan, which was found impracticable.
A virtual state of war continued for three years; even exiling Arab
leaders to the Seychelles did not halt it. At the London Conference of
1939 the British government sought to end the strife and consulted
separately with representatives of the Arabs, both of Palestine and
other Arab countries, and then with Jewish leaders. During his partici-
pation in this Conference, the Lord Chancellor, Vincent Caldecot,
upon examining the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, admitted
that the Arab point of view proved to have greater force than had
appeared heretofore. The Committee on which the Lord Chancellor
served with Arab delegates unanimously reported that “‘His Majesty’s
Government had not been free to dispose of Palestine without regard
for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine.” The occa-
sion of the London Conference served to make public for the first time
the Hogarth message to King Hussein of twenty-one years previous,
which contained the official interpretation of the Balfour Declaration
shortly after its final drafting.
The MacDonald White Paper of 1939 pointed to the ambiguity
in the expression “a national home for the Jewish people” as the
fundamental cause of unrest and hostility between Arabs and Jews.
Affirming the 1922 interpretation given by Colonial Secretary Church-
ill that the government “at no time contemplated the subordination of
the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine,” this White
Paper declared “it was not part of their policy that Palestine should
become a Jewish State. . .. This would be contrary to their obligations
under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given
to the Arab people in the pact that the Arab population of Palestine
should not be made the subjects of a Jewish state against their will.”
The goal was described as an independent Palestine state within ten
years, in which “Arabs and Jews could share in such a way as to ensure
that the essential interests of each are safeguarded.” In such a Pales-
tinian state, it was envisioned that “Jews and Arabs would be as Pales-
tinian as English and Scottish in Britain are British.”
As a concession to the Zionists, the White Paper did call for the
admission of 75,000 more Jews over the next five years, with no further
34 THE ORIGINAL SIN
immigration thereafter “unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to
acquiesce in it.”” At the same time the British pledged they would check
the ever-increasing illegal immigration into the Holy Land.
The reaction to the new British decree in Jewish Palestine circles
was violent. Demonstrations took place, a British constable was killed,
and the Grand Rabbi tore up the White Paper before the congregation
in Jerusalem. As Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency,
David Ben-Gurion said on August 25, 1939, “For us the White Paper
neither exists nor can exist. We must believe as if we were the State
in Palestine until we actually become that State in Palestine.”
Sir John Hope Simpson, a British expert sent to the mandated
territory in May 1930 to report on the riots that had heightened ten-
sion between Arabs and Jews living in the Holy Land, wrote the follow-
ing ina 1944 article regarding the Zionist determination to expand the
national home established for them by the British government under
the Balfour Declaration into a Jewish state:
Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settle-
ment in Palestine—‘‘a Jewish life without oppression and persecution” in
accordance with Jewish customs—the national home would have presented
no difficulty. The Jews could have entered and settled as so many did in
the P. I. C. A. [Palestine Jewish Colonization Association] setthements—
founded in many cases long before the Balfour Declaration—in friendly re-
lationship with their Arab fellow-citizens, and themselves loyal citizens of
Palestine. The unfortunate fact is that the Jewish immigration today is not
composed of Jews who, on religious grounds, wish to return to the land of
Zion, in order to lead a Jewish life, without oppression and persecution, in
accordance with Jewish customs. Rather is it composed of Jews, largely de-
void of religious conviction, animated by a spirit of political nationalism,
and determined to secure domination in Palestine, the home land of the
Arab for at least 1,300 years.
No effort has been made to coalesce with the existing population. On the
contrary, there is extreme divergence between the virile occidentalism of the
immigrant and the conservative orientalism of the mass of the resident popula-
tion. After its description of the organization of Jewish policy in Palestine the
Royal Commission writes: “Jt would be difficult to find in history a precedent
for the establishment of so distinct an imperium in impeno.”
With the outbreak of open hostility between Nazi Germany and
the Allied free nations, British efforts to find a solution to the Palestine
dilemma were temporarily shelved. But the Zionists in the U.S. did not
halt for one second their intensive campaigning for statehood. The
American Palestine Committee, numbering hundreds of U-S. senators,
Amenca Picks Up the Torch 35
representatives, Cabinet members, governors, and other influential
personalities from all walks of life, were exerting pressure everywhere
it counted; in a joint statement of December 1942 signed by 63 sena-
tors and 181 congressmen they called on Roosevelt “‘to restore the
Jewish homeland.”
President Roosevelt had dispatched Brigadier General Patrick
J. Hurley (later to become Ambassador to China) to the Arab Mid-
dle East as his personal representative to report directly to the
White House. General Hurley informed the President of the Zionist
insistence on increased immigration into Palestine and concrete
plans for expansionism, although opposed by Arabs and some
Palestinian Jews:
For its part, the Zionist Organization in Palestine has indicated its commitment
to an enlarged program for:
(a) A sovereign Jewish state which would embrace Palestine and probably
Transjordan;
(b) An eventual transfer of the Arab population from Palestine to Iraq;
(c) Jewish leadership for the whole Middle East in the fields of economic
development and control.8
With the Jews of Europe facing the onslaught of Hitler genocide
and Nazi crematoriums, President Roosevelt hoped that the rescue of
500,000 could be achieved by affording a generous worldwide political
asylum. In line with this humanitarian idea, Morris Ernst, a New York
attorney and a close friend of the President, went to London in the
middle of the war to see if the British would take in 100,000 or 200,000
uprooted people. The President had reason to assume that Canada,
Australia, and the South American countries would gladly open their
doors. And if such good examples were set by other nations, Mr.
Roosevelt felt that the American Congress could be “educated to go
back to our traditional position of asylum.”
The key was in London. Would Morris Ernst succeed there? He
came home to report, and this is what took place in the White House
as related by him to a Cincinnati audience in 1950:
ERNST: We are at home plate. That little island [it was during the second blitz
that he visited England] on a properly representative program of a World
Immigration Budget will match the United States up to 150,000.
ROOSEVELT: 150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States
—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere, and we can start with half a million
of these oppressed people.
A week or so later, Ernst and his wife again visited the President.
36 THE ORIGINAL SIN
ROOSEVELT: Nothing doing on the program. We can’t put it over because the
dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.
ERNST: It’s impossible! Why?
ROOSEVELT: They are right from ther point of view. The Zionist movement
knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They
know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘“There
is no other place this poor Jew can go.” But if there is a world political asylum
for all people irrespective of race, creed, or color, they cannot raise their
money. Then the people who do not want to give the money will have an
excuse to say ‘‘What do you mean, there is no place they can go but Palestine?
They are the preferred wards of the world.”
Ernst, shocked, first refused to believe his leader and friend. He
began to lobby among influential Jewish friends for this world pro-
gram of rescue, without mentioning the reaction of the President or
the British. As he himself put it: “I was thrown out of parlors of friends
of mine who very frankly said, ‘Morris, this is treason. You are under-
mining the Zionist movement.’? He ran into the same reaction among
all Jewish groups and their leaders. Everywhere he found “a deep,
genuine, often fanatically emotional vested interest in putting over the
Palestinian movement” in men “who are little concerned about human
blood if it is not their own.’’!°
This response of Zionism ended the remarkable Roosevelt effort
to rescue Europe’s displaced persons.
By mid-1942 London and Washington had reached an agreement
on the tactic of restraining local political foment over the Palestine
question by delaying a settlement of the issue until the conclusion of
the war, meanwhile assuring both Arabs and Jews that no decision
would be reached without prior consultation with both.!! As tensions
in the Holy Land increased, a joint Anglo-American statement to this
effect, and emphasizing that ‘‘no changes brought about by force in the
status of Palestine or the administration of the country would be per-
mitted or acquiesced in,” was prepared for release to the public. The
White House, under constant Zionist bombardment, hoped to ward off
further public agitation and domestic political activities relative to
Palestine while the war was in progress.
A leak occurred, however, before the Anglo-American joint state-
ment could be issued, and Zionists immediately flooded high govern-
ment officials with protests.!? At this point Secretary of State Cordell
Hull believed that the matter should be decided not on a diplomatic
basis but on a military one. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson con-
cluded that the military situation was not serious enough to warrant
Amenica Picks Up the Torch 37
any statement on Palestine. The plan was canceled. The joint declara-
tion, earlier agreed upon as being in the national interest by the high-
est political authorities of both countries, thus had been killed by
American Zionist pressure groups.!3
The need for an alleviative joint declaration was given greater
urgency by the State Department following the lengthy meeting in
Riyadh between Saudi Arabian King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud and Colonel
Harold B. Hoskins, who had headed a special mission to the Middle
East and North Africa in early 1943, then was dispatched to see
whether the Saudi monarch might suggest any basis for a settlement
of the torrid Palestine question. It was felt that Colonel Hoskins, a
close student of the problem who spoke Arabic fluently, could best
approach Ibn Saud with the suggestion of meeting with Dr. Chaim
Weizmann, then President of the World Zionist Organization.
In line with the previous advice of U.S. Resident Minister James
Moose, Ibn Saud was vehemently opposed to further Jewish immigra-
tion into Palestine, let alone the creation of a Jewish state there. This
was confirmed in the week-long daily meetings held with Hoskins in
August 1943. The King rejected the American proposal that he meet
with Weizmann on the ground that his position of leadership in the
Arab world did not permit him ‘‘to speak for Palestine, much less
deliver Palestine to the Jews even if he were willing for even an instant
to consider such a proposal.’’!4 Hoskins said the Saudi King, whose
anti-Zionist stand had brought him ‘‘a flood of telegrams and con-
gratulations” from Arabs and Muslims all over the world, ‘‘could never
afford to support Jewish claims to Palestine.”
The Arab world rocked in protest when the Wright-Compton and
other resolutions calling for unrestricted Jewish immigration and the
establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine were introduced
in Congress in 1944. The year before all Jewish groups, save one, had
enunciated the Biltmore program in an all-out appeal for a Zionist
state. Lengthy hearings were held before the Foreign Affairs Commit-
tee, but a letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to Committee
Chairman Sol Bloom asked that the resolution be shelved “since such
action would be prejudicial to the successful prosecution of the war”
by vastly complicating the Middle East picture.
Presidential approval was received once more in March for the
Anglo-American joint statement on Palestine. But within a few days of
approving the issuance of the statement—Zionist intelligence within
the White House was again doing its job well—the President was
forced on March 9 to receive Rabbis Wise and Silver, who then an-
38 THE ORIGINAL SIN
nounced to the press an affirmation of the President’s support of the
Zionist position. Even as he was a master in the art of statesmanship,
FDR was equally the politician par excellence. He knew just when he
had to subordinate the idealism behind a concern for the national
interest to the realities of getting elected, and this was the outset of the
1944 national campaign.
The Wise-Silver announcement provoked an immediate protest
throughout the Arab Middle East and street riots in Damascus, Homs,
and Jerusalem. It became necessary for the State Department to issue
a confidential interpretation of the rabbis’ statement for the use of U.S.
Chiefs of Mission in Arab countries, explaining that U.S. policy on
Palestine was based on consultation with both Arabs and Jews.!5 This
was in line with Roosevelt letters to Ibn Saud and other heads of Arab
governments late in 1943. But such assurances to the Arabs had never
been made public, whereas the Zionists continued to spread through-
out the media any and all encouragement received from the President
or any other administration official.
In the 1944 campaign pro-Zionist planks were included in both
major party platforms. Under the impact of the Zionist Biltmore Decla-
ration, the Democratic plank spoke of “‘a free and democratic Jewish
commonwealth” in Palestine. The Republicans used the phraseology
“a free and democratic commonwealth,” but Governor Thomas E.
Dewey in the campaign had unmistakably indicated that such a com-
monwealth was to be a Jewish one. At first there had been a general
disposition in Arab capitals, including Riyadh, to write these off as
merely party politics. But on October 15 the President addressed a
letter to New York Senator Robert F. Wagner in which he endorsed
the Democratic Palestine plank, therefore making the matter appear
more serious and raising grave doubts in the minds of the Arabs
regarding the pledges previously given them by the President.
After the election the President sent Secretary of State Edward R.
Stettinius, Jr., to tell Rabbi Wise and congressional leaders that the
reintroduction of the Palestine resolution in Congress at that time
would be undesirable. Nevertheless, resolutions were introduced in
both houses, and it took the personal appearance of Secretary Stet-
tinius before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defeat the
legislation. The FDR position was never put in writing but was made
known orally to Rabbi Wise, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Con-
gressman Sol Bloom, and others. Moreover, the President sent a mes-
sage to Senator Wagner in which he pointed out that the passage of
the resolutions could lead to bloodshed between Jews and Arabs and
Amenca Picks Up the Torch 39
should, therefore, be averted at this time, although he significantly
added: ‘‘Everybody knows what American hopes are.”
Killing the resolution did not halt an intensive Arab anti-American
press campaign and the subsequent boycott by Palestine Arabs of the
Culbertson Economic Mission, the purpose of which had been to im-
prove economic relations between the United States and certain Arab
countries.
The Arab attitude was otherwise stiffening, and the State Depart-
ment was very aware of this. In signing the October 7, 1944 Pan-Arab
Protocol, better known as the Alexandria Protocol, which led to the
subsequent formation of the Arab League, King Ibn Saud urged a joint
military committee to defend Arab Palestine by force if necessary. And
in a January 9, 1945, memorandum to the President, Secretary Stet-
tinius noted how significant it was that Ibn Saud should “regard him-
self as a champion of the Arabs of Palestine and would himself feel it
an honor to die for their cause.’’!6
James Landis, American Director of Economic Operations in the
Middle East, one-time Dean of Harvard Law School and an outstand-
ing liberal, warned the President early in 1945 that any presidential
action regarding Palestine that did not go to the root of the matter
“was not likely to advance very far and that, for this reason, it might
be well for the President to avoid the issue entirely unless he was
prepared to make some far-reaching proposals.”!7 Landis insisted:
..a vacillating policy with reference to Zionism as in the past twenty years
has proved to be equivalent of no policy . . . the approach to the problem must
start from an insistence that the objective of the Jewish commonwealth or the
Jewish state as distinguished from the Jewish national home must be given up.
The political objective implicit in the Jewish state idea will never be accepted
by the Arab nations and is not consistent with the principles of the Adantic
Charter [the joint statement of FDR and Churchill of August 14, 1941], nor
is the Jewish state idea demanded by the mandate. But given an adequate
conception of the Jewish national home, together with the political limitations
that must be placed on that conception, it should be possible to sell that to
the Jews and Arabs as well.
Of course, the one great stumbling block is the question of immigration.
That question at the present possesses a significance that it should not possess
because of its relationship to the political as distinguished from the economic
future of Palestine. In other words if the extent of immigration can be related to the
economic absorptive capacity of Palestine rather than to the political issue of the Jewish
minonty or majority, there is hope of striking an acceptable compromise even on the
immigration question with the Arabs. This is particularly true now, for I believe the
economic absorptive capacity of Palestine has been grossly exaggerated. [Italics added.]
40 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Seeking to increase the certificates of immigration into Palestine,
which according to the limitations set by the British White Paper would
be exhausted in four months, the Zionists in the U.S. opened up their
heaviest barrage on the State Department!® and the White House on
the eve of the February Yalta Conference where the Big Three—
Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—were scheduled to discuss all out-
standing problems including Palestine. Following this conclave, both
the British and American leaders were due to have meetings with King
Ibn Saud. The Zionists were fearful that the ambivalent Chief Execu-
tive, under pressure from the pro-Arab State Department, might aban-
don the Democratic party’s commitment to Zionism and renege on
what they considered binding promises of the previous March made
to Rabbis Wise and Silver.
At Yalta nothing was said about Palestine, but at the colorful
meeting of February 14 with Ibn Saud aboard the U.S.S. Quincy in
Great Bitter Lake in the Eastern Mediterranean, Roosevelt made a
significant promise in answer to the Saudi monarch’s full exposition of
the Arab side in the Palestine dispute and the claim that continued
Jewish immigration and purchase of lands constituted a grave threat
to the Arabs. The President replied that he wished ‘‘to assure His
Majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs
and would make no move hostile to the Arab people. He reminded His
Majesty that it is impossible to prevent speeches and resolutions in
Congress or in the press which may be made on any subject. His
reassurance concerned his own future policy as Chief Executive of the
United States Government.”!9
According to the memorandum of conversation, the two Chief
Executives were in agreement that Jewish homeless survivors of Hitler
might well be resettled in the lands from which they were driven. The
President, according to a conversation upon his return from the meet-
ing, had been deeply impressed by the “intensity of the Arab feeling
with regard to Palestine.”?° The President is reported to have re-
marked that he had learned more about the Arab Jewish situation from
Ibn Saud in five minutes than he had understood all his life.?!
Churchill had indicated at Yalta that he was as strongly pro-Zionist
as ever, and in his talk with Ibn Saud a week after Roosevelt’s, the
British Prime Minister suggested that the Jews be placed in Libya, a
country with a lot of room and few people.?? (Roosevelt’s menuon of
this suggestion to Ibn Saud had brought forth the strong objection that
such a step would be unfair to the Muslims in North Africa.) Churchill,
according to the words used by the Saudi ruler in later confiding
America Picks Up the Torch 41
details of the meeting to U.S. Minister to Saudi Arabia William Eddy,
had opened the discussion on Zionism “confidently wielding a big
stick.”’25 He referred to the subsidization Saudi Arabia had received
from Britain for more than twenty years, which the Arabian monarch
admitted had enabled ‘my reign to be stable and fend off potential
enemies on my frontiers.” The King now wanted assurances that Jew-
ish immigration to Palestine would be stopped. But Churchill refused
to give any such promises, although he assured His Majesty that “‘he
would not drive the Arabs out of Palestine or deprive them of their
means of livelihood there.”’
To the Churchill request for Arab moderation and a realistic
compromise with Zionism, the King stated (as paraphrased by Minister
Eddy) that what the Briton proposed was not gratitude or help itself,
“but to wipe out my honor and destroy my soul. I could not acquiesce
and in the preposterous event that I was willing to do so, it would not
be as a favor to Britain, since the promotion of Zionism from any
quarter must indubitably bring bloodshed and widespread disorder in
the Arab lands with certainly no benefit to Britain or anyone else.”
The Saudi narrator told his American listener that ‘“‘by this time
Mr. Churchill had laid the big stick down.” The British Prime Minister
was firmly reminded that “the British and their allies would be making
the wrong choice between a friendly and peaceful Arab world and a
struggle to the death between Arabs and Jews if unreasonable immi-
gration of Jews to Palestine is renewed. Jn any case the formula must be
arrived at by and with Arab consent.’’?4 (Italics added.)
After his Great Bitter Lake meeting with Ibn Saud, the President
on March 16 authorized Rabbi Wise (to whom the doors of the White
House were invariably wide open) to state that the President was still
in favor of unrestricted Jewish immigration and a Jewish state. Or as
Richard H. S. Crossman, British Parliamentarian, sarcastically noted,
“The President then hurried back from the Crimea to Washington to
assure the Zionists that his attitude toward them remained un-
changed.”
As the Arab Middle East once more angrily reacted, FDR soared
to the heights of double-talk. He approved of the Department of
State’s telegraphed explanation to its Middle East posts of the presi-
dential authorization to the Zionist rabbi: the statement referred only
to possible action at some future date and the President had very much
in mind his pledges to Ibn Saud and other Arab heads of state that they
would be consulted as well as the Jews on any U.S. move relative to
Palestine.
42 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Foreign Service officers in the State Department continued to call
for an enunciation of a definitive Palestine policy that would give full
consideration to U.S. long-term interests. The public, meanwhile, was
being kept entirely in the dark as to the continuing presidential assur-
ances of consultation on Palestine that were being given to Arab lead-
ers.
On March 10 the President received letters simultaneously from
the King of Saudi Arabia, the Regent of Iraq, the President of the
Syrian Republic, the King of Yemen, and the Lebanese Prime Minister.
These communications all followed the same lines in presenting Arab
claims to Palestine, marshaling moral, historical, and political argu-
ments. The State Department recognized that the Arabs, and particu-
larly King Ibn Saud, were determined to fight if necessary in defense
of their position on Palestine. ““The President’s continued support of
Zionism may thus lead to actual bloodshed in the Near East and even
endanger the security of our immensely valuable oil concession in Saudi Arabia. ”?5
(Italics added.)
This warning from Wallace Murray, Director of the Office of Near
Eastern Affairs in the State Department, foreshadowing the oil boycott
of 1973, twenty-eight years later, also included a reminder to the
President that it would not be wise to reach a settlement on Palestine
without the full agreement of the Soviet government, which at that
writing (March 20, 1945) was opposed to establishment of a Jewish
state. ‘“The continued endorsement by the President of Zionist objec-
tives could throw the entire Arab world into the arms of the Soviet
Union,” added the career diplomat who had just been designated
Ambassador to Iran.
In replying a week before his death? to the letter from Ibn Saud,
Roosevelt indicated clearly, as he had communicated to the King in
person, that no decision would be taken with respect to the basic
Palestine situation ‘without full consultation with both Arabs and
Jews,” and reassured the Saudi monarch that he ‘‘would take no action
as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government which might
prove hostile to the Arab people.”
This was more presidential double-talk—saying one thing for ex-
ternal diplomatic affairs and quite another for internal public con-
sumption—which persisted through his death on April 12 at Warm
Springs, Georgia. The U.S. had developed no clear-cut policy toward
Palestine, which of course only contributed materially to the instability
of the political situation and the growing friction between Arabs and
Jews.
America Picks Up the Torch 43
Within the confines of the White House, the President was willing
to be quite open in his criticism of Zionism, and the biography Eleanor
and Franklin?’ is most revealing as to the First Family’s differences on
Zionism. Mrs. Roosevelt referred to “the wonderful work that had
been done by the Zionists in certain parts of Palestine.”’ The President
noted that except along the coastal plain, Palestine had looked ex-
tremely rocky and barren to him as he flew over it on his way to the
Cairo Conference. Mrs. Roosevelt commented on the fact that the
Zionists felt much stronger and were willing to run the risk of a fight
with the Arabs over Palestine. The President agreed that this was a
possibility, but reminded her that ‘‘there were fifteen or twenty million
Arabs in and around Palestine and, in the long run, he thought these
numbers would win out.”
It is surprising to learn that intrepid Zionist Eleanor Roosevelt
herself had earlier been an advocate of trusteeship, not statehood, and
that only later did she become a rabid, avid supporter of Israel. It is
even more interesting to note in this excellent biography that Eleanor
Roosevelt was not exempt from Richard Crossman’s famed observa-
tion that “everyone harbors a soupcon of anti-Semitic prejudice.’’?8
We astonishingly read of Eleanor Roosevelt saying that she had to
attend a party given by Admiral William Harris for Bernard M. Baruch
“which I'd rather be hung than seen at,” as she complained in a letter
to her mother-in-law, “mostly Jews.’”’ Two days later she wrote, “The
Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels . . . and
sables mentioned again.”?9 Henry Morgenthau, with whom she and
the President later became warm personal friends when he served as
Secretary of the Treasury in the first Roosevelt Cabinet, and Louis
Brandeis were exempted from this dislike, sort of “some of my best
friends are. .. .’ Her mother-in-law, Sara, wrote from Hyde Park after
meeting the Morgenthaus, ‘Young Morgenthau was easy, and yet
modest and serious and intelligent. The wife is very Jewish but ap-
peared very well.”” The persistent strivings of Mrs. Roosevelt, particu-
larly as former First Lady, to advance the Israeli cause could have
stemmed from an unconscious atonement for her secret feelings of
earlier years. So many other persons of her social class and era likewise
jumped from a near-anti-Semitic stance to a virulent pro-Israel posi-
tion.
While FDR publicly was most sympathetic to Jews and intent on
rescuing those who were trapped by the Nazi movement in Europe,
privately the wartime President had no interest in Jewish-Zionist state-
hood. A refined student of history who was both concerned with
44 THE ORIGINAL SIN
American national interests and worried about possible Communist
gains, he personally found the idea of Jewish statehood repugnant.
The full extent of the Roosevelt coolness toward Zionist aspira-
tions for statehood was never completely realized until the State De-
partment in May 1964 disclosed heretofore classified documents bear-
ing on 1943 U.S. policy in the Middle East. President Roosevelt had
at that time been urging a “‘trusteeship for the Holy Land with a Jew,
a Christian, and a Moslem as the three responsible trustees.”’ This
proposal had come forward after negotiations between King Saud and
Zionist chieftain Weizmann had come to naught. The categoric rejec-
tion by the Saudi monarch of the Roosevelt suggestion that he meet
with the Zionist leader, according to presidential emissary Harold
Hoskins, stemmed from the fact that ‘“‘during the first year of the war,
Dr. Weizmann had impugned his (the King’s) character and motives
by an attempted bribe of 20 million Pounds Sterling.”°° Apparently
the King had been told that the Weizmann promise of payment had
been guaranteed by the President himself. And FDR was highly ir-
ritated at the use of “his own name as guarantor of payment as there
was no basis in fact for doing so.”
In 1972 when the letters and cablegrams between the two leaders
of the wartime British-American alliance, Churchill and Roosevelt,
were made public to researchers at the Hyde Park Memorial Library,
the two sides of FDR on the Middle East were confirmed again. The
many published versions had suggested that Roosevelt in his meetings
and correspondence with the Saudi monarch had urged him to admit
more Jews to Palestine, whereas in fact the President had indicated an
agreement with Churchill that survivors might well be resettled in the
lands from which they were driven, particularly Poland.3!
Nor did Roosevelt really fool the leading Zionists of his tme.?? In
Ben Hecht’s autobiography, Child of the Century, he even called Roose-
velt ‘‘an anti-Semite.” In 1953 Zionist chieftain Rabbi Emanuel Neu-
mann admitted that the late President’s friendship toward Jews had
been indisputable, but noted that “for the Zionist cause he had little
time and thought.’’33 The movement, therefore, directed its principal
pressures on the leaders of both parties in Congress, fully realizing
that to attack FDR would have been disastrous:
To the Jewish masses in America and throughout the world, Roosevelt loomed
as the great friend and champion of their people. How could such a friend
oppose or ignore Jewish national aspirations? Not only was it difficult to accept
such a painful thought—there was a strong psychological need to reject it. In
America Picks Up the Torch 45
a tragic hour and a hostile world there simply had to be a champion and
protector. If it was not Stalin or Churchill, it had to be Roosevelt. This emo-
tional dependence on Roosevelt was reinforced by eminently practical consid-
erations. He might be re-elected, and he was re-elected for a fourth term. His
would be the power to shape the postwar settlement. To cross him, to offend
him, to alienate his affection was to court disaster for the Zionist cause.34
Roosevelt’s sudden death found the Zionists quite prepared to
challenge his successor, upon whom they now concentrated their pres-
sure while not abandoning in any way their rewarding efforts on Capi-
tol Hill. Their task with President Truman proved to be immeasurably
simpler than with his predecessor, even though the new incumbent in
the White House was immediately put on notice by the Department of
State of the dangers and complexities of the Palestine question.
In a personal and confidential letter of April 18, 1945, to President
Truman, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius attempted to put the
Palestine problem in true perspective:
It is very likely that efforts will be made by some of the Zionist leaders to obtain
from you at an early date some commitments in favor of the Zionist program,
which is pressing for unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine and the
establishment there of a Jewish state. As you are aware, the government and
people of the United States have every sympathy for the persecuted Jews of
Europe and are doing all in their power to relieve their suffering. The question
of Palestine is, however, a highly complex one and involves questions which go far beyond
the plight of the Jews in Europe... . There is continual tenseness in the situation
in the Near East, largely as a result of the Palestine question, and as we have
interests in the area which are vital to the United States, we feel that this whole
subject is one that should be handled with the greatest care and with a view to
the long-range interests of the country.35 [Italics added. |
The Stettinius letter was followed by a lengthy memorandum of
May | from Acting Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, fully briefing the
incoming President with the history of the relations between President
Roosevelt and the Arab Chiefs of State, including the pledge given to
King Ibn Saud of prior consultation on Palestine and assurances “‘that
he would make no move hostile to the Arab people and would not
assist the Jews against Arabs.’’36
In the face of the unmistakable views of his predecessor and of
clear warnings from the State Department, Truman nevertheless pro-
ceeded to lend his support to the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine. He inched the Zionists closer to their goal by his admixture
of the humanitarian problem of refugeeism with the political question
of statehood.
Ill The Creation of Israel Revisited
A bad beginning makes a bad ending.
—Euripides
With the death of FDR in April 1945, the entire international picture
changed overnight, and nowhere more so than in America’s dealings
with the Jews and the Middle East situation. For all the gutsy qualities
that Harry S. Truman possessed, which have now become enshrined
in contemporary legend, he had neither the strength nor the vision of
FDR.
Much was made of the cocky, confident “man from Indepen-
dence,” but in those early months Truman was extremely insecure,
susceptible to whoever got to him. And no one knew this better than
the Zionists. In the words of The American Zionist, the “going became
easier”’ after Harry Truman took office. The successor to FDR, we are
told:
. . was a far less complex personality than his illustrious predecessor—less
adroit and sophisticated, simpler and more straightforward. He accepted the
Zionist line reluctantly and under pressure, at first, but having accepted it, he
followed through honestly and firmly. In the end he found himself in direct
conflict with Britain’s Bevin. He did not shrink from the encounter, but,
supported by popular opinion, he stuck to his guns and forced the State
Department to acquiesce in his pro-Zionist policy.!
Indeed, Truman became the pivotal figure in the establishment of
Israel. For obvious reasons he has been honored by the Zionists, the
Israelists, and the Jews of a whole generation. It was during his ad-
ministration that the State of Israel came into being. It was under
Truman that the U.S. committed itself to the maintenance of that state,
and it was Truman’s policies that initiated the special and unique
U.S.-Israel relationship, which still governs American Middle East pol-
Icy.
46
The Creation of Israel Revisited 47
The story of Truman and the creation of the State of Israel is a
matter of public record now. Yet most Americans have paid little
attention to the evident facts. Essential to the maintenance of the
status quo in Israel, and to U.S. relations with Israel, is a selective
version of the Truman story. Interestingly enough, many individuals,
organizations, and elements in the media usually so active in bringing
revelations and reappraisals of ‘‘inside stories” to the attention of the
American public have shown, in this particular instance, no interest in
publicizing this episode. Truman committing errors at Potsdam—that
is acceptable book material. But Truman making mistakes over Israel
is taboo.
Truman’s first action on the Palesune question was to reply to
messages of March 10 sent by Emir Abdullah, the ruler of Transjor-
dan, to President Roosevelt, which had never been answered. In his
letter to the grandfather of King Hussein, the President reiterated the
assurances FDR had given just prior to his death to Ibn Saud: “I am
glad to renew to you the assurances which you have previously re-
ceived to the effect that it is the view of this government that no
decision shall be taken respecting the basic situation in Palestine with-
out full consultation with both Arabs and Jews.’? This promise of
consultation prior co any decision was repeated by Truman in a sepa-
rate message to Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmy Nokrashy of Egypt,
who had joined other Arab heads of government in communicating
with Roosevelt in March.3
On June 16 Undersecretary Joseph C. Grew again cautioned Tru-
man that the Zionists would be exerting pressure anew and would no
doubt desire to confer with the President regarding Palestine prior to
his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, scheduled for July
16 to August 2, 1945. Grew advised the President to receive any
materials with thanks, give assurances that Zionist views would be
given careful consideration, and reiterate that the matter of settlement
would eventually come before the United Nations Organization.4
Meanwhile, the Zionists had stepped up their lobbying campaign
directed to the new occupant in the White House, and were warning
the State Department that unless a forthright U.S. position was taken,
more extreme elements in the Zionist movement would be replacing
the moderate leadership of Rabbi Stephen Wise and Dr. Nahum Gold-
mann. The militant elements were then allegedly led by Rabbi Abba
Hillel Silver.
In another meeting, on June 27, Evan Wilson, the Desk Officer for
Palestine, reported on a lengthy conversation held at the State Depart-
ment between his chief, Loy W. Henderson, new head of the Office of
48 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Near Eastern and African Affairs,> with several Zionists, including
Goldmann and David Ben-Gurion. The future Prime Minister of Israel
stated at the meeting:
The Jews were to be allowed to set their own house in order without interfer-
ence from outside elements. . . . They objected to a situation in which their
demands in Palestine, which they regarded as legitimate, would not be met
because Lord Killearn [the British Ambassador in Cairo] had to appease some
Egyptian pasha. The Jews could not recognize that an Egyptian pasha or a
Bedouin sheikh or an Iraqi bey had any right or interest in the Palestine
question. The Arabs of Palestine, of course, were legitimately interested in
that country and there was no intention of disturbing them or calling their
rights into question. Jews and Arabs had lived there in amity for many years
and there was no reason why they should not continue to do so, provided the
Arabs elsewhere left them alone.®
Even as he picked up the British tactic of ‘divide and rule,” Ben-
Gurion warned that the pledges made by Allied leaders to the Jews had
to be carried out and that his people would fight if necessary to defend
those rights. He and his companions expressed complete confidence
in their ability to deal with the Arabs, whom he said he knew well, and
whom he predicted “would not really put up any kind of a fight.”’ The
bedouins of the desert were of course good fighters, but it was well
known that they had no interest in the Palestine question. So the
leaders of the Arab states would not be successful in rallying their
people to support the Arab position in Palestine.
Ben-Gurion and his colleagues made clear from the beginning
that reducing the bars on immigration would not answer the prob-
lem. The immediate establishment of a Jewish state was the only
answer. On July 24, Truman handed Churchill a memorandum in
which he stated that the U.S. was interested in the British “finding
it possible without delay to take steps to lift the restrictions of the
White Paper on Jewish immigration into Palestine.”’? The President
asked the Prime Minister to send him his views on the settlement
of the Palestine question.
The emphasis was now on immigration to Palestine and, of
course, the rescue of the Jews, which came after the fact—the war had
ended and there was far less need for this rescue. The matter had
obviously become a political ploy.
At Potsdam, Churchill and Clement Attlee, present as Britain’s
newly designated Prime Minister, discussed with Truman the question
of a Jewish national state. But just as Roosevelt had avoided bringing
The Creation of Israel Revisited 49
up the matter at Yalta, similarly the new President did not take up the
issue with Stalin because, according to Truman, ‘“‘there was nothing
Stalin could do about it.” At this time the Soviet position on Palestine
was not fixed. While Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk
had assured Washington that the Soviet Union favored creation of a
Jewish state in Palestine, a public address by Middle East expert Pro-
fessor Evgueny A. Korovin in Moscow had declared that the Soviet
Union was supporting the Arabs in Palestine. The President later
explained at an August 16 press conference: ‘It was the American view
put forward at Potsdam that we want to let as many Jews into Palestine
as it is possible, and that the matter will have to be worked out diplo-
matically with the British and the Arabs, and it would have to be on
a peaceful basis, as we had no desire to send half a million American soldiers
to keep the peace in Palestine.’’® (Italics added.)
Truman’s avoidance of a discussion with Stalin came under great
criticism from Dr. Fadhil Jamali, the Director-General of the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, who protested the President’s endorse-
ment of immigration into Palestine of as many Jews as possible, and
was irked by the statement that “the Soviet Union could do nothing
about it.”” The Iraqi diplomat pointed out that the U.S.S.R. had an
interest in the immigration problem if it was to be considered of an
international nature; if it was a problem of a domestic nature, then
neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. had any interest.
The President’s approach to the subject of immigration at the
Potsdam Conference won him warm congratulations in a telegram
from Rabbi Wise, who reiterated the view that no large military
forces would be “especially required in Palestine to keep the Arabs
in check in case it should be decided to permit unlimited Jewish
immigration.” But a telegram of August 22 from Chargé d’Affaires
Moose in Baghdad to the Secretary of State pointed out that every
time the question of Palestine—i.e., Zionism—was brought up,
there were local disturbances, and that the Arabs all stood together
on this important subject.9
The position of the State Department at this time was outlined in
a lengthy, detailed, and meticulously written memorandum by Hen-
derson to the Secretary on August 24 in which he discussed four
possible plans for Palestine: (1) an independent Jewish common-
wealth, (2) an independent Arab state, (3) partition under the trustee-
ship system, and (4) proposed trusteeship agreement for Palestine.
This paper ruled out the first possibility, creation of a Jewish common-
wealth, as dangerous to the interests of the U.S., a violation of the
50 THE ORIGINAL SIN
wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants, and “jeopardizing
American economic interests including our oil interests in Saudi
Arabia and other Arab countries.’’!°
The position preferred by this Foreign Service officer was a trus-
teeship agreement to be reached by Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet
Union—and, if possible, France—under which Palestine would be
given special status as an international territory with Great Britain as
the administering authority.!! Such a plan, it was recognized, would be
opposed by both the Arabs and the Jews, but with less intensity than
any of the other alternatives.
In the meantime, the end of World War II in Europe had created
a new problem: the epitome of distress of the displaced person. These
refugees from Hitler’s gas chambers were actually, not theoretically,
homeless. They came from many lands: Austria, Germany, Poland,
Hungary, Rumania, the Baltic countries. They were of all faiths: about
500,000 Catholics, 100,000 Protestants, and 226,000 Jews.'2 Of these
Jews, some 100,000 were in the assembly camps of Germany, Austria,
and Italy; 50,000 were undetained in the United Kingdom; 12,000
were in Sweden and 10,500 in Switzerland; the rest were scattered over
the Continent.
On August 31 Truman wrote Prime Minister Attlee that issuance
of 100,000 certificates of immigration to Palestine would help alleviate
the refugee situation. He enclosed a copy of the very moving report
by the President’s special representative, Earl G. Harrison, on the
conditions in the refugee internment camps in Central Europe. This
was one of the most persuasive documents used by the Zionists in
gaining the support of the President and other Americans for the
immediate evacuation of the Jews in the camps to Palestine.
The Truman top-secret communication, handed by Secretary of
State James Byrnes to Attlee in London, fell into the hands of Iowa’s
former Senator Guy Gillette, an officer of the American League for a
Free Palestine, and was made public three days later. Immediately U.S.
radio and newspaper reports picked up the Truman request for the
admission of further Jews into Palestine. In the Middle East a great
howl was raised. The Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, alleged
that this major step, affecting Palestine so importantly, had been taken
without the promised consultation assured by President Roosevelt in
person in letters to King Ibn Saud and repeated by him to other Arab
chiefs of state, and later reiterated by President Truman to Emir Ab-
dullah and to Prime Minister Nokrashy.
In the ensuing uproar against the U.S. for prodding Britain into
The Creation of Israel Revisited 51
admitting 100,000 immigrants into Palestine, Truman was attacked for
his “generosity at the expense of the Arabs.’’ He was further assailed
for allegedly stating at a press conference that a search of the FDR
papers had failed to discover any record of the pledge made by the late
President to King Ibn Saud regarding prior consultation over Pales-
tine. For this reason the Saudi Arabian monarch cabled Truman and
proposed to publish conversations and a memorandum of the conver-
sation held with FDR aboard the U.S.S. Quincy on February 9, 1945,
as well as the later controversial letter of April 8, together with the
King’s original letter to FDR that had prompted the presidential re-
sponse.
The Ministers (they were not as yet accorded the rank of Ambassa-
dor) of the four Arab governments then accredited to Washington—
Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—registered an angry complaint to
Undersecretary Dean Acheson on the failure of the United States
government to live up to its promises. The Zionists joined in protest-
ing the latest Truman suggestion on Jewish immigration, claiming
they, too, had not been consulted. They feared that the administration
was trying to kill the possibilities of a Jewish state by granting 100,000
Jewish visas.
The uproar in Arab countries over the U.S. immigration proposal
and the alleged failure to consult with the Arabs, followed by the
release of the FDR-Ibn Saud and the parallel FDR-Regent of Iraq
letters, led the American Ministers in Arab countries to cable warnings
to the Department of State of ‘‘severe blows to American prestige and
threats to vital U.S. interests from a hostile Arab world.’’!3 Added to
the seriousness of the Truman proposal was the estimate of the War
Department that it would take as many as 400,000 soldiers, half of
whom would probably have to come from the U.S., to maintain order
if Palestine was opened to Jewish immigration.
In reply to the Truman letter of August 31, British Ambassador
in Washington Lord Halifax, in a memorandum of October 29, per-
sonally handed to Secretary Byrnes and in the ensuing conversation,
set forth Attlee’s suggestion for the urgent establishment of a joint
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry!* to examine the question of
Jewish immigration to Palestine and elsewhere.'5 Lord Halifax took
extreme exception to the conclusions reached in the Harrison report
that ‘“‘Jews [in Europe] are at present living under worse conditions
than any other victims of the persecution,” and insisted that the com-
mittee should explore the possibilities of Jewish emigration to coun-
tries other than Palestine.!® The British felt it was most important that
52 THE ORIGINAL SIN
“Jews should be enabled to play an active part in building up the life
of the countries from which they came in common with other nationals
of these countries.”"!7
Faced with the deteriorating position in the Holy Land as the
fighting between Arabs and Jews increased, Foreign Minister Ernest
Bevin instructed his Washington emissary to push for urgent action,
suggesting October 25, six days later, for the joint U.S.-U.K. an-
nouncement of the establishment of the Anglo-American Committee.
This was the immediate U.S. reaction to the British suggestion:
LORD HALIFAX: The last day Parliament meets in that week you see. They don’t
want to miss another weekend. That would be their thought.
BYRNES: Quite frankly, I am thinking of the New York City elections the follow-
ing Tuesday, and when this is submitted to the President he has to think about
that.
LORD HALIFAX: Would this not be rather good?
BYRNES: I am wondering whether it would or not. I have not followed it, but
I know that other people do. I know it has a lot to do with that election and
I am going to read about it with much interest.
LORD HALIFAX: Is it the following Tuesday—the New York election?
BYRNES: Yes. We will have to think that one over. I am thinking of the alterna-
tive. The alternative is that for the present nothing would be done. I had
thought that when Mr. Attlee came over here, there would be a discussion by
the President and Mr. Attlee. That, however, will be some weeks. That date
is uncertain.'8
The British Ambassador also pointed out “that the Zionists are
using every possible form of intimidation to stop Jews from leaving
Palestine to go back to Europe and play their part in its reconstruc-
tion.”’!9 In a further conversation with Byrnes three days later, he again
addressed himself to the urgency of convening the Anglo-American
Committee.
On his part, Byrnes did not hide the fact from Lord Halifax that
he had been subjected to intensive and continuing Zionist pressures.
Both Eugene Meyer, the editor and publisher of the Washington Post, ?°
and Administrative Assistant to the President David K. Niles?! had
thrust themselves on him that morning.??
While the Washington-London impasse continued, the situation
in the Middle East worsened. A concentration of bomb outrages, in
which many were killed and wounded and all communications in Pales-
tine came to a halt, was carried out throughout the mandate territory
by 3,000 Jews under the combined operations of the Irgun, the Stern
Gang, and the Haganah. November 5 found the British and Americans
The Creation of Israel Revisited 53
still fighting over the terms of reference. Pressures accounted for the
Truman adamancy, for he could not alter his stand lest he be interpre-
ted as seeking homes for Jewish refugees other than in Palestine. Two
days later Secretary Byrnes indicated to Lord Halifax that the pro-
posed British changes would be “construed as turning the focus of
attention away from Palestine.’’?4
At this time there were additional complications. A strong memo-
randum from the Arab League, submitted to the Department of State
through its representatives in the Arab countries, noted that the pro-
portion of Jews over the preceding twenty years had decreased from
ten-to-one to two-to-one, and called upon the British Mandatory
Power to carry out its previous pledge to stop all immigration to
Palestine ‘‘after five years of the issue of the White Paper of 1939.” The
statement declared that the Truman suggestion to permit 100,000
Jews to enter was a violation of both the 1939 White Paper pledge and
British and U.S. government promises ‘‘that they shall not take deci-
sions on resolutions regarding immigration or settling of the Palestine
problem without full consultation and agreement with Arab states.’’?4
In Saudi Arabia Emir Faisal asked U.S. Minister William Eddy
whether U.S. promises to seek no change in the basic situation in
Palestine without prior consultation with Arabs meant without prior
“agreement” of Arabs.25 The wily Foreign Minister in his talk with
Eddy gave his first indications of his deep understanding of the inter-
national political scene and expressed deep concern for U.S.-Saudi
Arabian relations:
I assure you that the British were telling us officially that they favor the Arab
case against Zionism, but that they are being pushed by you into pro-Zionist
moves. The very real admiration and respect which all Arabs held for America
is evaporating rapidly and may soon disappear altogether, along with our
many mutual interests and cooperation.
We Arabs would rather starve or die in battle than see our lands and
people devoured by the Zionists, as you would do if we were giving them one
of your states for a nation. [Italics added.] Do not think we would yield to
Zionism in the hope of survival or property elsewhere. If it develops that the
USA and the British will aid the Zionists against our will and to our destruc-
tion, we shall fight Zionism to the last man. In the meantime, don’t forget that
the British are blaming the initiative on the Americans.?6
A compromise was finally reached by the American and British
governments as to terminology and the terms of reference for the
Anglo-American Committee. Announcements of the forthcoming
inquiry were made by Foreign Minister Bevin in the Commons and
54 THE ORIGINAL SIN
by Truman in Washington on November 13. The British and
American members of the committee were announced simultane-
ously in London and Washington on December 10. Zionists in Lon-
don and New York attacked the news simultaneously, calling it a
fresh betrayal to which they would never submit.?7 Riots followed
in Tel Aviv. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Pales-
tine, with six American and six British members, was empowered
“to examine political, economic and social conditions in Palestine
as they bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration and settle-
ment therein’?8 and “‘to examine the position of European Jews”
in terms of estimating the possible migration to Palestine or else-
where outside of Europe.
Among the committee members were U.S. Federal Judge Joseph
C. Hutcheson, Chairman; Dr. Frank Aydelotte, Director of the Insti-
tute of Advanced Studies at Princeton; former American Ambassador
to Italy William Phillips; attorney Bartley C. Crum; James G. McDon-
ald (later to be the first American Ambassador to Israel); and R. H. S.
Crossman, prominent Laborite member of Parliament.29 The first
meeting was held in Washington early in January 1946. Representa-
tives of Jewish organizations as well as those who expressed the Chris-
tian and the Arab viewpoints were heard. Sessions were resumed in
London later that month, and several subcommittees carried on inves-
tigations in various countries of Europe. The full committee held
further sessions in Egypt, and subcommittees also visited the capitals
of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. These exhaustive
deliberations were completed in Switzerland. A report, unanimously
signed at Lausanne, was made public in London and in Washington
on April 30, 1946.3°
The principal recommendation (No. 2 in the committee report)
called for immediate issuance of entrance certificates into Palestine for
100,000 Jews ‘‘who had been the victims of Nazi and Fascist persecu-
tion.” Had these 100,000 admissions actually been granted, the over-
whelming majority of Jewish displaced persons whose situation re-
quired immediate action would have been saved and the revolting D.P.
centers could soon have been closed. The report went on to state: “‘Jew
shall not dominate Arab, and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine.
... Palestine is a Holy Land, sacred to Christian, to Jew and to Moslem
alike, and because it 1s a Holy Land, Palestine is not, and can never
become a land which any race or religion can justly claim as its very
own,’’3!
Two of the six American members, James G. McDonald and Bart-
The Creation of Israel Revisited 55
ley Crum, who later became ardent advocates of Jewish statehood,
joined another political Zionist-to-be, British member R. H. S. Cross-
man, in unequivocably expressing the view that while
... the Jews have a historic connection with the country, they embodied but
a minority of the population. . . . Palestine is not and can never be a purely
Jewish land. It lies at the crossroads of the Arab world, its Arab population,
descended from the long-time inhabitants of the area, rightly looks upon
Palestine as their homeland. It is therefore neither just nor practicable that
Palestine should become either an Arab state in which an Arab majority would
control the destiny of a Jewish minority, or a Jewish state in which a Jewish
majority would control that of an Arab minority.
This section of the committee’s report was Recommendation No.
3, entitled ‘Principles of Government: No Arab, No Jewish State.”’32
Palestine’s government, as envisioned by the members of this commit-
tee, was ultimately to be placed under international guarantees in
order to protect and preserve the interests of Christiandom and of the
Muslim and Jewish faiths alike, and to ‘‘accord to the inhabitants, as
a whole, the fullest measure of self-government.”
The committee found that Palestine alone could never meet Jew-
ish emigration needs and that the U.S. and Britain, in association with
other countries, must endeavor to find new homes for displaced per-
sons.
While willing to endorse the committee’s plea for the admission
of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, Organized Jewry opened fire on the
report’s other nine recommendations, of which the acceptable one was
an integral part. The American Zionists in New York, the British Zion-
ists in London, and the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem insisted, as they
had at the committee’s hearings, on nothing less than Jewish statehood
in accordance with the Biltmore Program adopted in New York four
years earlier at the conclave of Jewish organizations in New York’s
famed hotel.
The Morrison-Grady Plan,33 drawn up by representatives of the
Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War from the U.S. and their British
counterparts, recommended a federal state for Palestine with separate
Jewish and Arab cantons, a district of Jerusalem and a district of the
Negev. The question of immediate Jewish immigration was made con-
ditional upon Arab acceptance. The Zionists screamed, “‘Sellout.”’ Paul
Fitzpatrick, New York State Democratic Committee Chairman, wired
Truman this warning: “If this plan goes into effect, it would be useless
for the Democrats to nominate a state ticket for the election this Fall.
56 THE ORIGINAL SIN
I say this without reservation and am certain that my statement can be
substantiated.’’34
In early 1947 a last British attempt to conciliate the Arab and
Zionist positions called for admission into Palestine of 4,000 Jews per
month for two years, and subsequent admissions depending on the
future absorptive capacity of the country. This second offer for the
rescue of almost 100,000 Jews was also spurned. The Jewish Agency
denounced it as incompatible with Jewish rights to immigration, settle-
ment, and ultimate statehood.
Meantime, on December 22, 1945, Truman had directed the
Secretaries of State and War, and certain other federal authorities, to
speed in every possible way the granting of visas and to “‘facilitate full
immigration to the United States under existing quota laws.”’ Con-
gress, which had often shown its vulnerability to Jewish pressure
groups, did not implement the President’s request regarding the appli-
cation of unused quotas to uprooted Europeans. Finally a bill was
introduced by Congressman William G. Stratton in the so-called ‘‘Do-
Nothing” 80th Republican Congress, in 1947, to admit displaced per-
sons “in a number equivalent to a part of the total quota numbers
unused during the war years.’’35 Under the Stratton bill up to 400,000
displaced persons of all faiths would have been permitted into the U.S.
The hearings on this legislation (HR 2910) lasted eleven days and
covered 693 pages of testimony. There were exactly eleven pages of
testimony given by Jewish organizations, who seemed profoundly
uninterested. In 1944 when the House Foreign Affairs Committee was
considering the Wright-Compton resolution calling for establishment
of a Jewish commonwealth, scarcely a Zionist organization did not
testify, send telegraphed messages, or have some congressman appear
in their behalf. In support of the Wright-Compton resolution, 500
pages of testimony were produced in four days, the vast bulk by Zion-
ists and their allies.
Yet on the Stratton bill, which would have opened America’s
doors to 400,000 displaced persons, the powerful Zionist Washington
lobby, otherwise most articulate, was virtually silent. Only one witness
appeared for all the major Jewish organizations—Senator Herbert
Lehman, then ex-Governor of New York. In addition to Lehman’s
statement, there was a resolution from the Jewish Community Coun-
cils of Washington Heights and Inwood, and the testimony of the
National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans. Not a single word
was volunteered in behalf of displaced persons by any of the Zionist
organizations that at that moment were recruiting members and solic-
iting funds ‘‘to alleviate human suffering.”’
The Creation of Israel Revisited 57
During a meeting at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, Con-
gressman Stratton expressed his surprise at the lack of support from
certain organizations that normally ought to have been most active in
liberalizing the immigration law. Obviously the Illinois Representative
had never heard the President of the Zionist Organization of America
exhort his membership:
I am happy that our movement has finally veered around to the point where
we are all, or nearly all, talking about a Jewish state. That was always classical
Zionism. .. . But I ask . . . are we again, in moments of desperation, going to
confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism? . . . Zion-
ism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the second World War,
nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe, and were there free
opportunities for Jewish immigration in other parts of the world at this time,
Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.3®
The generous admission of Jewish displaced persons to the U.S.
and to other countries would have eradicated the necessity for a ‘‘Jew-
ish state.”” Yet the human flotsam in former concentration camps im-
pressed the Zionists only in two respects: as manpower and as justifica-
tion for Jewish statehood.
This is what a Yiddish paper had to say on the distressing subject:
By pressing for an exodus of Jews from Europe; by insisting that Jewish D.P.’s
do not wish to go to any country outside of Israel; by not participating in the
negotiations on behalf of the D.P.’s; and by refraining from a campaign of their
own—by all this they (the Zionists] certainly did not help to open the gates of
America for Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living people—their
brothers and sisters who went through a world of pain—to the politics of their
own movement.”'37
In Europe a well-organized movement, supported by large finan-
cial contributions from Zionist sources, had set up ‘the underground
railway to Palestine.” Jews from all over Europe were moved down to
ports on the Mediterranean. There they were placed on ships, often
overcrowded and unseaworthy, under conditions of utmost privation
and squalor. A very large proportion of this human freight was
brought from countries of Communist-dominated Eastern Europe.
For indeed, the Kremlin had begun to play its Middle East game of
sowing unrest in the Arab world and pushing Britain out.
To most Americans, however, the struggle in Palestine was merely
a drama of refugees fighting for homes, this time against their new
English oppressors. When the British terminated all entry into Pales-
tine, anti-British feelings mounted in the U.S. There was no movie
house in America that did not carry a newsreel shot of the distraught
58 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Jewish faces aboard the SS Exodus ’47, which was intercepted by the
British and its passengers prevented from illegally entering the Holy
Land.
Organized American Jewry exerted utmost pressure on public
opinion and politicians. This, they reminded everyone, was the same
kind of war the American Revolutionists had waged against the very
same imperialist power. The tactics of the British in Palestine were
compared with those used for a long time against Ireland’s fighters for
freedom. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the
Irgun Zvai Leumi and the mob hanging of two British sergeants at
Nathanya elicited from Hollywood’s Ben Hecht: “Every time you let
go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews
of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”
It was perhaps unfortunate that throughout this trying period
Britain’s Foreign Minister was Ernest Bevin. This onetime Welsh
miner's temperament was hardly suited to the task of reconciling two
such intransigent forces as the Arabs and the Zionists. Nor was he able
to demonstrate, particularly in the U.S., just how Britain was being
squeezed between two flaring nationalisms. At Bournemouth before a
Labor party gathering in 1946, Bevin charged that the U.S. was press-
ing Britain to allow more Jews into Palestine—because we did not want
to allow them into America. While he meant to attack the political
exploitation of human suffering, he unwittingly brought down upon
himself the totally unjustified charge of being anti-Semitic. His quick
temper constantly handicapped his efforts to separate the problem of
displaced European Jewry from the political question of Palesiine.
By early 1947 events in Palestine clearly demanded international
intervention. Zionists were more than ever insisting on a Jewish major-
ity in Palestine in order to secure a Jewish commonwealth. The British
were resisting all efforts to force them into a new policy. The Arabs,
fighting both the British and the Jews, were demanding an indepen-
dent Palestinian state.
Audible public opinion in the U.S. supported illegal immigration.
Such organizations as the American League for a Free Palestine, the
Hebrew Committee for National Liberation, and the Political Action
Committee for Palestine were each raising funds for their own Pales-
tinian terrorist group. Their competitive advertisements defended ter-
rorism and stressed the tax exemptability of contributions for terrorist
organizations. Congressman Joseph C. Baldwin, scion of one of New
York’s oldest families and public relations adviser to the Irgun Zvai
Leumi, condoned the flogging of four British soldiers and assured
The Creation of Israel Revisited 59
Menachem Begin, Irgun leader (now Israel’s Prime Minister), that he,
Baldwin, would do everything to make Begin’s position clear in this
country.
And then the British decided to give up the Palestine ghost. The
Anglo-Arab Conferences, which had started in September 1946 and
had adjourned to January 1947, proved a total failure, as did the
so-called Bevin Plan which, revising the earlier Morrison-Grady Plan,
suggested semiautonomous Arab and Jewish cantons for a five-year
period and the admission into Palestine of 100,000 displaced persons.
Both parties vehemently objected, whereupon Britain announced it
was not her intention to enforce any plan. At the same time the Zionist
Jewish Agency proclaimed its refusal to cooperate with Mandatory
authorities in any action against terrorists.
Britain felt there was nothing left to do but to place the contro-
versy before the U.N. A special session of the General Assembly was
called by Secretary-General Trygve Lie.
Submitting the dispute to international adjudication, Bevin let
loose with a characteristic barrage of words. He accused American
politicians of wrecking any chance for an amicable solution of the
Palestine problem and, quite undiplomatically, pointed the finger at
the White House when he explained to the House of Commons:
I did reach a stage, however, in meeting the Jews separately . . . when things
looked more hopeful. There was a feeling . . . when they left me in the Foreign
Office that day, that I had the right approach at last. I went back to the Paris
Peace Conference, and the next day . . —I believe it was a special day of the
Jewish religion—my right honourable friend, the Prime Minister, telephoned
me at midnight and told me that the President of the United States was going
to issue another statement on the hundred thousand. I think the country and
the world ought to know about this. . . 38
Bevin was referring to the 1946 Day of Atonement plea of President
Truman to admit 100,000 refugees. The Paris Peace Conference was
then in session, and Bevin implored Secretary Byrnes to intercede with
Truman not to issue a statement that might upset current delicate
negotiations. Whereupon the Secretary of State told him that “‘if the
President did not issue a statement, a competitive statement would be
issued by Dewey.”’ The New York Governor, who was the Republican
standard-bearer in 1944 and 1948, was leading the fight for a G.O.P.
Congress.
In the New York Times of October 7, 1946, political columnist
James Reston disclosed that several administration advisers had op-
60 THE ORIGINAL SIN
posed the Truman statement because Britain was alleged to be on the
verge of reaching a truce with the Zionists. Attlee himself had asked
the President to withhold the statement, but Truman refused to heed
the British request. It was believed that Mead and Lehman, the Demo-
cratic candidates for Governor and Senator in New York, would be
helped by the Truman declaration. On October 6 New York Governor
Thomas E. Dewey outbid Truman by declaring the British would admit
“not 100,000 but several hundred thousand Jews.”’ Ohio’s Senator
Robert A. Taft, Dewey’s conservative rival in the Republican party,
also joined in the fun by raising the ante.
Whether the British talks with the Zionists would have been suc-
cessful if domestic American politics had not interfered is question-
able. But the whole episode was extremely characteristic of the poliu-
cal pattern the U.S. government has inevitably followed whenever
Israel and the Middle East are involved.
The Arabs were as clearly inept in propaganda techniques as the
Jewish Nationalists were masters. No publicity was given to King Ibn
Saud’s protest to the President that the Yom Kippur declaration on
Jewish immigration was a violation of the promised consultation
“whenever the basic situation in Palestine” was involved.39 But Ameri-
can national politics being what they are, the chances of impressing
this country with the Arab world’s point of view were at best slim:
There is a rather negligible Arab vote in the U.S. Whatever the rights
of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants may have been, these were com-
pletely dismissed, as were the ineffectual murmurings of anti-Zionist
Jews, in the worldwide propaganda battle between the Mandatory
administration and the Jewish Agency.
The British were determined to maintain law and order pending
the U.N. decision over the ultimate fate of the Holy Land. The Zionists
continued to present their power play to the confused world in terms
of humanitarianism. Continuous clashes between wretched would-be
immigrants and the armed British authorities were the only issue really
discussed in the American press. The S.S. 4dri/, Ben Hecht’s boat,
crowded with refugees, was seized by the British; three British were
killed and several were injured in an effort “to rescue or capture”’ (as
the U.S. press reported) refugees who plunged into the sea. Terrorists
blew up the Iraq Petroleum Pipeline. The Irgun declared open war-
fare. Dov Gruner and three other terrorists who had attacked a Pales-
tine police station were hanged. The Stern Gang promised retaliation.
During all that time the only contribution of the U.S. government
was words. There was much talk about displaced persons and human
The Creation of Israel Revisited 61
suffering, but no real effort to bring them into the U.S. Everybody
knew, and said, what Britain should or should not do. Every politician
hurried to get in on the act, to exploit “humanitarianism” for votes.
Everybody favored unlimited immigration to the Holy Land. Eleanor
Roosevelt urged a luncheon meeting of the Women’s Division of the
United Jewish Appeal to speak out. “‘The time has come,” she said,
“when we have to stand up and be counted. You have not told Con-
gress so they would hear one unmistakable voice.”’
Organized Jewry hardly needed such a reminder. Day in and day
out the press carried headlines such as ‘“The American Jewish Con-
gress demands ,” “Senator Lehman Again Renews His Plea to
Open Up Palestine,” “Congressman Javits of Manhattan Suggests a
Congressional Junket to Palestine to Foster Establishment of a Jewish
Commonwealth.” The British Empire building in Rockefeller Center
in New York was picketed; the city’s Mayor William O’Dwyer, not yet
a refugee in Mexico, excoriated the British before the National Council
of Young Israel. Zionists flooded the capital with letters trying to link
Palestine with aid to Greece and Turkey. ‘‘Tell the British,” some
letters said, ‘“‘there will be no aid for the British policy in Greece and
Turkey unless they follow the United States lead on Palestine.”
The State and War Departments, it is true, were constantly cau-
tioning the White House and Congress that an irresponsible vote-
chasing policy for Palestine might irreparably damage the American
position in one of the world’s most strategic areas. But politicians
following the scent of “blocs” are beyond the reach of reason, and
both parties were convinced that their eloquent support of statehood
for Israel was a prerequisite for conquest of pivotal states. There was,
in fact, no need for the Zionists to refute the solemn warnings that
were coming from War and State. All the Zionists had to do was make
sure the politicians remained hypnotized by “the Jewish vote.’’ Per-
haps for the first time in history, a decisive battle could indeed be won
with the tools of propaganda.
It is to the credit of the Zionists’ acumen that they grasped their
chance. But it is perhaps less to the credit of America’s non-Zionist
Jewry that it permitted its self-appointed Zionist leaders to bet the
future of American Judaism on the roulette of power politics.
And so it was tha: on April 28, 1947, the Special Session of the
General Assembly of the United Nations convened in New York to
consider Palestine. The Zionists had succeeded in forcing the issue
into a forum where they could control events independent of the
Palestinians and the Arabs in general. What happened in the next
62 THE ORIGINAL SIN
months led to the fateful U.N. vote on November 29, 1947, partition-
ing Palestine.
Both the Truman Memoirs and the Margaret Truman biography of
her father*® are very clear and unambiguous in detailing the pressures
that forced the U.S. to whip other U.N. members into line to assure
passage of the partition resolution.*! In his own Memoirs, the man from
Independence is the number-one witness to the tremendous Zionist
coercion:
The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the
United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but 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 and annoyed
me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favor-
able votes in the General Assembly. I have never approved of the practice of
the strong imposing their will on the weak whether among men or among
nations. 4?
Truman’s daughter in her book fell victim to the same general
misconception to which nearly every writer and even every historian
on the subject has been prey: namely, that the term “national home,”
not used previously in diplomatic parlance, nor since, was equivalent
to “national state.” She thus construed the Anglo-American Commit-
tee report as supporting Jewish sovereignty. She also added impor-
tantly to her father’s story of Zionist pressures. Truman’s mother, for
example, had sent the White House a letter she received from “a
Jewish friend of a friend” requesting her to influence the President to
have the Palestine problem put on the agenda of a conference then
going on in London. The President, daughter Margaret related, ‘‘came
very close to blowing up at this attempt to involve his mother in
international politics.”
There was also a very significant letter of December 2, 1947, to
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who had served as Secretary of the Treasury
under Roosevelt, in which Truman wrote:
I wish you would caution all your friends who are interested in the welfare of
the Jews in Palestine that now is the time for restraint and caution in an
approach to the situation in the future that will allow a peaceful settlement.
The vote in the U.N. is only the beginning, and the Jews must now display tolerance and
consideration for the other people in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be
neighbors. 43 [Emphasis added.]
The Creation of Israel Revisited 63
These later two references to the President’s growing impatience with
Zionists, which did not appear in the New York Daily News summary*4
of the biography, were published, for example, by the upstate Bing-
hamton (N.Y.) Press#5 and elsewhere where Zionists did not wield so
strong an axe and the Jewish readership did not mean so much.
Also mindful of potential readers, the Truman biography tried
to convey the impression that the pressure on the White House
came equally from both Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. President
Truman’s meetings with Rabbis Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel
Silver of the Zionist Emergency Committee were alleged to have
been balanced by those with certain “anti-Zionists,” including Jo-
seph Proskauer and Jacob Blaustein of the American Jewish Com-
mittee (AJC), who “called to tell Dad that not all Jews supported
the Zionist program.”” The most that could ever be said about the
AJC was that its membership originally included non-Zionists and a
very few anti-Zionists. The latter soon became convinced by their
colleagues that to oppose the creation of the State of Israel was
heretic, and the potent AJC became, as it has been since, an all-out
supporter of Israel while proclaiming not to be Zionist. The only
militant anti-Zionist group at the time, the American Council for
Judaism, was denied permission to see the President.
As a matter of fact, if Judge Proskauer ever did so caution the
President as to the views of certain non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews,
he himself soon was singing another song. For the judge was not only
one of those who helped put the squeeze on smaller U.N. members
when the critical 1947 vote at the General Assembly was nearing, but
it was he who insisted shortly thereafter that the U.S. sell arms to the
Haganah, the military arm of the Jewish Agency, for “those who are
defending the decision of the United Nations.”
In its reaction to the Margaret Truman book, the Zionist organ
Near East Report indicated just how supersensitive Zionists were,
twenty-five years later, to the charge of political pressures. Editor I. L.
Kenen claimed that such accounts, including Truman's expression of
resentment, were grossly exaggerated: “It is true that Zionists worked
hard to win American support, but in this campaign they were joined
by a great majority of the American people.’”’46 Kenen claimed that
there had been ‘‘a multitude of diverse pressures”’ at work and that the
President had been in a much more significant conflict at the time with
his own Department of State over Palestine. According to him, after
opting in 1946 for partition, these counterpressures forced Truman
into silence in 1947, leading to an agreement that the U.S. delegation
64 THE ORIGINAL SIN
at the U.N. “would reserve its position from campaigning with other
delegations.”
There were wide differences between the President and the De-
partment of State as to what course of action would best protect the
national interests of the country, and the Truman Cabinet itself was
divided on this. Defense Secretary James Forrestal bitterly opposed
partitioning Palestine because of the Arab antagonism that would be
aroused. The Secretary’s military advisers were convinced that with-
drawal of the British from Palestine would result in serious trouble in
the area, which could only help the Soviet Union. His chief, President
Truman, who survived Forrestal by some twenty-two years, lived to see
the emergence of the Soviet Union for the first time as a Mediterranean
power and the area turned into a caldron of regional war and hatred,
ever-threatening global conflict, and the diminishing American posi-
tion in a part of the world that is deciding the energy consumption to
be enjoyed by his daughter and his grandchildren.
Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marshall, was less than en-
thusiastic regarding the U.S. position on partition. Hence, when recog-
nition of Israel was under consideration in May 1948, Marshall was not
trusted by the President with the decision-making. In fact, Truman had
problems with all his Secretaries of State on this single issue. James
Byrnes, who had held the post prior to Marshall, had, in his own words
to Forrestal, ‘‘disassociated himself from President Truman’s decision
in 1946 to turn down the Grady report which had recommended either
a federated state for Palestine, or a single Arabian state,”4” but not an
exclusively Zionist Jewish state.
In 1969, twenty years after succeeding Marshall as Secretary of
State, Dean Acheson in his book Present at the Creation: My Years at the
State Department bared for the first time his own opposition to establish-
ment of the Israeli state in what he called ‘‘Arab Palestine.” The
differences over the Palestine question marked his only major dis-
agreement with his chief, President Truman. Here is how Acheson
described it:
I did not share the President’s views on the Palestine solution to the pressing
and desperate plight of great numbers of displaced Jews in Eastern Europe.
The numbers that could be absorbed by Arab Palestine without creating a
grave problem would be inadequate, and to transform the country into a
Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly
exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all West-
ern interests in the Near East. From Justice Brandeis, whom I revered, and
Felix Frankfurter, my intimate friend, I had learned to understand, but not to
The Creation of Israel Revisited 65
share, the mystical emotion of the Jews to return to Palestine and end the
Diaspora. In urging Zionism as an American Government policy, they had
allowed, so I thought, their emotion to obscure the totality of American inter-
ests.48
While many of those closest to the President were either opposed
to or unenthusiastically going along with his design for Palestine, those
outside the government were exercising the pressures, the existence
of which apologists today deny. The Zionists were reaching boldly into
the chancelleries of foreign countries. “Operation Partition” was ex-
ecuted by a strategy board of immense international influence; the
three American masterminds were New York’s Judge Joseph Pros-
kauer, Washington economist Robert Nathan, and White House As-
sistant “for minority affairs” David Niles.
These three, speaking to foreign governments and diplomats al-
ways as “‘mere private citizens,” were men of impressively good con-
nections in public affairs. Robert Nathan, for instance, knew precisely
how to weaken Liberia’s objections to partition. The Liberian delegate
was simply told that Nathan would go after his good friend, Edward
R. Stettinius, Truman’s first Secretary of State, who at that time was
attending to his enormous business interests in Liberia. The Liberian
diplomat considered this attempted intimidation and so reported to
the Department of State. In the final moment, however, by some
strange coincidence, Liberia’s vote was cast in favor of partition. And
informed hints to various South American delegates that their vote for
partition would greatly increase the chances of a Pan-American Road
project, then under consideration, greatly improved Zionist traffic in
the General Assembly.
Eleanor Roosevelt, too, inexhaustibly worked on the many friends
she had among the foreign delegates at the U.N., and she was inces-
santly prodding her husband’s heir to put pressure on the State De-
partment, whose officers were properly limiting their efforts to peace-
ful debates with foreign delegates.
When partition prospects looked particularly grim, Bernard Ba-
ruch was prevailed upon to talk with the French, who could not afford
to lose interim Marshall Plan aid. Through former Ambassador Wil-
liam Bullitt, the adviser to Presidents passed a message in a similar vein
to the Chinese Ambassador in Washington.*9 Other important Ameri-
cans “talked” to countries such as Haiti, Ethiopia, the Philippines,
Paraguay, and Luxembourg, all dependent on the U.S. Drew Pearson,
an old friend of the Zionists, told in his ‘‘Merry-Go-Round” column
66 THE ORIGINAL SIN
how Adolph Berle, legal adviser to the Haitian government, “‘talked”’
on the phone to Haiti’s President, and how Harvey Firestone, owner
of vast rubber plantations in Liberia, ‘‘talked’’ with that government.
In discussing the partition vote at the Cabinet luncheon on De-
cember |, 1947, Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett said that
“never in his life had he been subjected to as much pressure as he had
in three days beginning Thursday morning and ending Saturday night.
Herbert Bayard Swope and Robert Nathan were among those who had
importuned him.’’5° The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, ac-
cording to Lovett, made use of its concession in Liberia and had
transmitted “‘a message to their representative there, directing him to
bring pressure on the Liberian Government to vote in favor of parti-
tion.’’5! Lovett remarked that Jewish zeal was so intense that it “almost
resulted in defeating the objectives” sought.5?
Bribes as well as threats had been used. One Latin American
delegate had changed his vote to support partition in return for $75,-
000 in cash and another, a Costa Rican, declined a $45,000 bribe but
eventually voted for partition in accordance with orders from his Gov-
ernment.5?
And no pressure was sadder, or more cynical, than that put on the
Philippines. War hero and head of the delegation, General Carlos
Romulo, left the U.S. for Manila shortly after delivering a fiery speech
against partition on the floor of the General Assembly. Ambassador
Elizalde had spoken by telephone to President Manuel Roxas and told
him of the many pressures to which Romulo and the delegation had
been subjected. The Ambassador’s own view was that although parti-
tion was not a wise move, the U.S. was determined to see it happen
and it would be foolish to vote against a policy so ardently desired by
the U.S. Administration at a time when seven bills were pending in the
U.S. Congress in which the islands had a tremendous stake. The Am-
bassador and President Roxas agreed that the Philippines must not
risk antagonizing the U.S. when support could be so easily gained by
a proper vote on Palestine. This was all subsequently reported in a
lengthy cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Manila to the State Depart-
ment.
A joint telegram from twenty-six pro-Zionist U.S. Senators,
drafted by New York’s Robert F. Wagner, was particularly important
in changing the Philippine vote. The senatorial telegram, sent a few
days before the decisive ballot to twelve other U.N. delegations,
changed four votes to yes and seven votes from nay to abstention. Only
Greece, despite pressures from prominent Greek-American business-
The Creation of Israel Revisited 67
men, including film mogul Spyros Skouras, largely because of her
traditional friendship with Egypt, risked antagonizing the U.S. Senate
and stuck to no.
Sir Muhammed Zafrullah Khan, at the time Pakistani Foreign Min-
ister, expressed the feelings of so many of his fellow U.N. delegates
when he declared in a post-vote statement:
We entertain no sense of grievance against those of our friends and fellow
representatives who have been compelled under heavy pressure to change
sides and to cast their votes in support of a proposal the justice and fairness
of which do not commend themselves to them. Our feeling for them is one of
sympathy that they should have been placed in a position of such embarrass-
ment between their judgment and conscience, on the one side, and the pres-
sure to which they and their Governments were being subjected, on the
other.54
It is true Truman had expressed the wish that the U.S. delegation
at the U.N. not use threats or improper pressure of any kind on other
delegations. As Undersecretary Lovett expressed it, ““We were willing
to vote for that partition report only because it was a majority report.”
But unofficial representatives in the name of the U.S. government had
nevertheless exerted tremendous pressures.
Dean Rusk, then Director of the State Department’s Office of
United Nations Affairs, admitted to a meeting of representatives of
national organizations a few months after the partition vote that, while
the U.S. “‘never exerted pressure on countries of the U.N. in behalf of
one side or another, certain unauthorized officials and private persons
violated propriety and went beyond the law’ to exert the needed
squeeze. As a result, Rusk pointed out, partition was “‘construed as an
American plan” in the eyes of certain countries, and the decision was
tobbed of whatever moral force it might otherwise have had.
In explaining the U.S. position to King Farouk of Egypt and to
King Ibn Saud, the U.S. Ambassadors in Cairo and Jeddah were in-
structed in messages of December 26, 1947, and February 3, 1948, to
state that the U.S. had taken the stand it had because of ‘“‘expressions
of policy by responsible American officials, resolutions of Congress,
and Party platforms of the last thirty years. They came to a conclusion
that unless there was some unanticipated factor in the situation, the
trend of public opinion and policy based thereon practically forced it
to support partition.” The message also took pains to answer the Arab
charge that the U.S. delegation had been under pressure to take its
stand and had pressured other governments.
68 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Furthermore, Acting Secretary of State Lovett informed the
Kings:
It is understood that one of the reasons for Arab resentment at the General
Assembly decision is concern lest the Zionists intend eventually to use their
state as a base for territorial expansion in the Middle East at the expense of
the Arabs. It is the conviction of the US Government, based on conversations
with responsible Zionist leaders, that they have no expansionist designs and
are most anxious to live with the Arabs in the future on cordial terms and to
establish with them relations of a mutually advantageous character. . . . [f, at
a later time, persons or groups should obtain control of the Jewish state who have aggresive
designs against their neighbors, the US would be prepared firmly to oppose such aggressive-
ness in the United Nations and before world opinion.** [Italics added. ]
(Someone somehow seems to have forgotten these pledges, which
were initialed by the President.)
Official records disprove the attempt to refute charges of coer-
cion. The actual extent to which pressures played the dominating
role in the drama at Lake Success was revealed not only by Tru-
man in his diaries, but more clearly in the 1947 State Department
papers released late in 1971, one quarter of which dealt with Pales-
tine.56 At the same time the President was calling publicly for
adoption of the U.N. Partition Plan and the creation of Israel, he
was vigorously opposing other behind-the-scenes pressures. In a
memorandum from Truman to Undersecretary of State Lovett
dated December 11, 1947—some two weeks after the deciding vote
at the U.N.—the President repeated previous orders that no one in
the administration should state any preference on the Palestine
question during further U.N. discussions:
It seems to me that if our delegation to the U.N. is to be interfered with by
members of the United States Senate and by pressure groups in this country,
we will be helping the United Nations down the road to failure. I have a report
from Haiti in which it is stated that our Consul in Haiti approached the
President of that country and suggested to him, that for his own good, he should
order the vote of his country changed, claiming that he had instructions from
me to make such a statement to the President of Haiti. It is perfectly clear that
pressure groups will succeed in putting the United Nations out of business if
this sort of thing is continued.5”7 [Emphasis added.]
This threat had worked. The affirmative vote of Haiti, whose rep-
resentative only twenty-four hours previously had been fiercely attack-
ing the proposal during the Lake Success debate, was one of the three
last-minute shifts (the Philippines and Liberia were the other two) to
The Creation of Israel Revisited 69
bring about the 33-to-13 two-thirds majority the partition plan re-
quired.
The publication of State Department papers dealing with Pales-
tine developments of 1948 was delayed for more than two years and
then came out in one 1,730-page volume. The documentary evidence
of the subordination of the national interest to domestic political pres-
sures proved to be almost too hot to handle.
In a paper delivered December 28, 1976, in Washington before
the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (at a ses-
sion held jointly with the Jewish Historical Society), Truman’s Special
Counsel Clark Clifford assailed what he called the argumentation ad-
vanced by “a school of revisionist historiography” that the Truman
Palestine policy had been motivated ‘‘entirely by the purely political
consideration of wooing the Jewish electoral vote”’ and the “portrayal
of the birth of Israel, one of the most seminal events of modern times,
as somehow illicit and ignoble.”’
That the prestigious American Historical Association should have
set the stage for the Clifford performance—in which avid Israelists
Barbara Tuchman, Eugene Restow, and Howard Sachar (historian and
son of the President of Brandeis College) also participated as part of
a panel whose one-sidedness even moderator Professor Jacob Hure-
witz, invariably a supporter of Israel, was forced to note—further at-
tests to the unbelievable influence wielded by Zionism in the U.S.
Obviously, the damaging effect of the long-awaited publication of Vol-
ume V of Foreign Relations of the United States for 1948 and the subse-
quent publicity given the Marshall memorandum therein had to be
quickly counteracted.
Clifford charged that ‘‘the State Department repeatedly attempted
to undermine President Truman’s policy on the Middle East,’’5§ and
that the ‘“‘evidence which includes documents that are not found in the
recently published volume of Foreign Relations, confirms that the Presi-
dent was not being well served on the implementation of American
policy regarding Palestine. The trusteeship proposal was a case in
point.”
On March 19, 1948, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Warren Austin
had dropped what Clifford called a “bombshell’’ when he read a state-
ment calling for temporary shelving of the partition resolution and
establishment of a U.N. trusteeship over Palestine (the solution pri-
vately favored by FDR).
In her 1973 biography of her father, Margaret Truman claimed
that he never formally committed himself to the trusteeship plan and
70 THE ORIGINAL SIN
that the State Department had engaged in what she described as a
“conspiracy” behind her father’s back.59 With the Secretary and the
Undersecretary out of the country, the Austin statement, in the eyes
of the President’s daughter, constituted a gross betrayal. The State
Department had reversed his Palestine policy, she added, and “‘the
third and fourth levels of the Department had succeeded in cutting his
throat.” In support of the viewpoint of the President’s daughter, Clif-
ford adduced his own evidence of State Department “machinations”
undermining the partition plan and the President’s “humanitarian”
design.
Truman’s calendar diary entry for March 19, 1948, read:
The State Department pulled the rug from under me today. I did not expect
that would happen. In Key West, or en route there from St. Croix, | approved
the speech and statement of policy by Senator Austin to the U.N. meeting. This
morning I find that the State Department has reversed my Palestine policy.
The first I know about it is what I see in the paper. Isn't that hell? IT am now
in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I never felt so in all my life. There
are people on the third and fourth levels of the State Department who always
wanted to cut my throat.6°
The President apparently had overlooked, or forgotten, the vital
details. While on board the Wilhamsburg in the Caribbean on February
21 he had received a detailed top-secret telegram®! from Secretary
Marshall setting forth the U.S. position on the Palestine question and
the procedure to be followed by Ambassador Austin at the Security
Council.®? It was clearly stated that if the Security Council was unable
“to give effect to the General Assembly resolution on Palestine [i.e.,
partition] . . . and if the Security Council is unable to develop an
alternative solution acceptable to the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, the
matter should be referred back to a special session of the General
Assembly.” The Secretary considered it would “then be clear that
Palestine is not yet ready for self-government and that some form of
U.N. trusteeship for an additional period of time will be necessary.”’®
Truman sent a telegram February 22 to the Secretary of State
from St. Thomas stating: ‘““Your working draft of recommended basic
position for Security Council discussion received. I approve in princi-
ple this basic position.”’6* The ‘working draft’’ to which he referred
was contained in the Secretary’s telegram to the President of February
21. The contents of Senator Austin’s speech of March 19 was in accord
with the policies proposed in that telegram.
In pursuance of these policies, the Department had taken a series
The Creation of Israel Revisited 71
of other steps, all leading up to the speech of March 19, which one by
one were approved by Truman. For instance, the President approved
telegrams 107 and 108 sent by the Department on March 5 authorizing
the kind of speech Senator Austin might make when there was clear
evidence before the Security Council that the Jews and Arabs and the
Mandatory Powers were not prepared to implement the General As-
sembly plan of partition through peaceful means.65 On March 8 the
Secretary informed Senator Austin that the President had approved
the draft statement on the situation in Palestine “‘as set forth in DEP-
TEL 107 for use if and when necessary.’’66
‘his is why Secretary Marshall could unhesitatingly tell a March
20 press conference in Los Angeles: ‘“The course of action with respect
to the Palestine question which was proposed on March 19 by Ambas-
sador Austin appeared to me, after the most careful consideration, to
be the wisest course to follow. I recommended it to the President, and
he approved my recommendation.”’67
Four weeks earlier the President had given his approval to the
Marshall proposals.68 Yet when Ambassador Austin delivered his re-
marks to the U.N. temporarily reversing U.S. policy, Truman was
outraged at the action of the “striped-pants boys,” as he referred to
the foreign service officers in his memoirs, and regarded the timing of
the release of the proposal as an attempt to force his hand.
Documentary evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.
It so happened that on the two days preceding the speech of
March 19, both the Secretary and Undersecretary Lovett were not in
Washington. They were the two members of the Department who had
been keeping the President informed of developments and who were
most closely acquainted with the President’s feelings and views. The
Acting Secretary was Willard L. Thorp, Assistant Secretary for Eco-
nomic Affairs, who had had nothing to do with the Palestine problem
and unfortunately little contact with the White House. Thus the re-
sponsibility for making decisions with regard to Palestine rested pri-
marily with those senior officers of the Department who had been
working on the problem, including Norman Armour, the Assistant
Secretary for Political Affairs; Charles Bohlen, the Counselor of the
Department; Dean Rusk, Director of the Office of United Nations
Affairs, and his Special Assistant Robert McClintock; John Hickerson,
Director of European Affairs; and Loy Henderson, Director for Near
Eastern and African Affairs. Senator Austin in New York, who had
been working closely with the Secretary and the Undersecretary and
had maintained contacts with the White House, had the knowledge
72 THE ORIGINAL SIN
and experience that caused these officers of the Department to respect
his judgment and listen to his suggestions.
During this particular period Dean Rusk and Robert McClintock,
his Special Assistant, in view of the fact that their office was the entity
in the Department through which U.N. problems were usually han-
dled, “carried the ball” along with Senator Austin. They worked
closely, however, with the other concerned officers of the Department,
and all of them shared responsibility for such actions as were taken.
All evidence based on available documents and on interviews with
surviving participants®? sustains the view that each believed he was
doing his share in carrying out the policies agreed to by the Secretary,
the Undersecretary, and Senator Austin, and approved by the Presi-
dent. Carlisle Hummelsine, Director of the Executive Secretariat,
Office of the Secretary of State, kept in daily touch by telephone with
Lovett in Florida, informing him of the events of the day and passing
his suggestions and comments along to the other responsible officers.
The Clifford accusation that State Department officers “‘disobeyed
White House instructions”’° to avert partition has also been vigor-
ously denied by foreign service officers involved. That there had been
little enthusiasm from the outset for the Palestine partition plan by
these foreign service experts has never been denied. Writing with a
pen of prophecy, Loy Henderson expressed these views in a Septem-
ber 1947 memorandum to Secretary Marshall:
An advocacy on our part of any plan providing for the partitioning of Palestine
or the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state would be certain to under-
mine our relations with the Arab, and to a lesser extent with the Moslem World
at a time when the Western World needs the friendship and cooperation of
the Arabs and other Moslems. . . . The resources and geographical position
of the Arab countries are of such a character that those countries are necessar-
ily factors of importance in the international economic field. Arab friendship
is essential if we are to have their cooperation in the carrying out of some of
our vital economic programs. During the next few years we are planning to
draw heavily on the resources of the area, not only for our use, but for the
reconstruction of Europe. Furthermore, we are intending to make important
use of the communications facilities in the area.7!
Henderson, who over the years has been the chief target of much
Zionist criticism, answered the Clifford allegation of State Department
obstruction:
We might be criticized for failure to keep in close touch with the White House,
but it is ridiculous to charge that these officers would deliberately conspire
The Creation of Israel Revisited 73
among themselves to take action which might embarrass the President whom
we were conscientiously endeavoring to serve. We felt that it was our duty to
apprise him if, in our opinion, he might be about to take action which would
not be in the best interest of the United States. Since we were convinced that
he wanted to do what was in the country’s interest, we considered that such
advice as we might give was in his interest as well as in that of the country.7?
In ‘‘President Truman’s Recognition of Israel,”’ an article in the
December 1968 Amencan Jewish Historical Quarterly, Tan J. Bickerton
declared flatly that Truman had agreed to the suggestion of his Secre-
tary of State that Palestine be placed under a temporary U.N. trustee-
ship but had given no specific directive for the implementation of this
U.S. policy reversal.78
John Snetsinger states bluntly in his revealing book, Truman, The
Jewish Vote and the Creation of Israel, that Truman “‘directly and know-
ingly approved the change in American policy on Palestine.’’’4 Secre-
tary Marshall likewise pointed out that the President had agreed to the
statement but was exercised over the fact that he “had not been ad-
vised that Ambassador Austin was going to make his Security Council
statement at that particular time.’’75 This is supported by several pages
of penciled notes dated May 4, 1948, in the handwriting of Clifford,
which can be found among the papers in the Harry S. Truman Library
at Independence, Missouri. These notes, by Clifford’s own admission,
were prepared by him for the May 12 conference at the White House
at which recognition of the Jewish state was discussed. Clifford in-
dicated that the President had approved the Austin draft statement on
March 8, asking the U.N. to set aside partition and establish a tempo-
rary U.N. trusteeship in Palestine, and that Secretary Marshall had
directed Austin to make the speech “as soon as possible as Austin
believed appropriate.” The Clifford notes also admitted that while the
final text of the speech Austin delivered had not been shown to the
President, ‘it was the same substance as the draft previously submitted
to the President” and that ‘“‘Marshall and Lovett [who were out of
Washington] left no word that the President was to be informed when
Austin was to speak.’’76
Truman stated in his Memoirs that ‘“‘the suggestion that the man-
date be continued as a trusteeship was not a bad idea.’’”7 Presidential
Aide Matthew J. Connelly confided to some of his colleagues that “the
President had approved some agreement, during the Caribbean trip,
setting forth the new policy.”’78
What had infuriated Truman was the timing of Austin’s pro-
nouncement of the American policy reversal at the U.N., for it had
74 THE ORIGINAL SIN
come the day after a secret White House meeting with Dr. Chaim
Weizmann, the President-to-be of Israel. Truman and Weizmann, who
had entered unnoticed through the East Gate, met together for forty-
five minutes. The President assured the Zionist leader that the U.S. was
staunchly supporting partition and would stick to this position. (Tru-
man, incidentally, was not the only political figure to have been
strongly influenced by Weizmann. Arthur Balfour, to whom the Zionist
leader was introduced in 1917 by Prime Minister David Lloyd George,
was said to have been ‘‘won over completely by his charm, his persua-
siveness, and his intellectual power.”?9 The Balfour Declaration fol-
lowed later that year.)
Neither Secretary Marshall nor anyone else at the State Depart-
ment had any knowledge of Truman’s secret meeting. And the very
next day the new U.S. policy shift to trusteeship was announced with-
out the President having been advised in advance of the speech that
he had approved in principle in the Virgin Islands.
The reversal, which Weizmann undoubtedly viewed as a deliber-
ate breach of faith on Truman’s part, followed exactly the procedure
laid down in the memorandum approved eleven days earlier by the
White House. Further consultation with the President, who was in the
Caribbean, had not been envisioned, nor was this necessary. Truman
had passed along to the Secretary and his assistants, and to Senator
Austin, the responsibility for the detailed wording of the speech in the
framework of approved policy, leaving to them the timing of the deliv-
ery once the agreed preconditions for reversal to trusteeship had been
met.
The initial U.S. attempt to gain support in the Security Council
for the necessary implementation of the General Assembly partition
resolution failed on March 5, receiving support of only five of the
seven needed members on a preliminary vital vote. The U.S. draft
resolution calling on the Security Council “to do everything it can
under the Charter to give effect to the recommendation of the
General Assembly,”8° was doomed to defeat, although not put to a
final vote.®!
U.S. foreign policy makers as well as other U.N. members were
divided over the question of whether the Security Council, empowered
to act to prevent threats to the peace, could move with military force
to impose a General Assembly plan, namely, partition. Maintenance of
peace was generally held not to be the same as enforcement of the
partition recommendation. These uncertainties accounted for the fail-
ure of Ambassador Austin to recruit countries other than the Soviet
The Creation of Israel Revisited 75
Union, Belgium, France, and the Ukraine to support the U.S. resolu-
tion, thus in effect vitiating partition.
The Security Council did provide for establishment of a commit-
tee composed of its permanent members (U.S., U.S.S.R., France, and
China—Britain would not serve) to find ways of implementing the
General Assembly resolution. It was only after ten days of failure of the
consultations by this committee that Secretary Marshall authorized
Ambassador Austin in a top-secret message on March 16 to present his
speech and draft resolution of March 19 to the U.N. “since no party
to the Palestine problem believes partition can be carried out except
by the use of force.”’82
Dean Rusk in New York indicated his agreement with the Secre-
tary’s decision:
The plan proposed by the General Assembly is an integral plan which cannot
succeed unless each of its parts can be carried out. There seems to be general
agreement that the plan cannot be implemented by peaceful means. This
being so, the Security Council is not in a position to go ahead with efforts to
implement this plan in the existing situation.83
Britain as the Mandatory Power absolutely refused to participate
in any implementary measures to effectuate partition. The general
consensus of the Security Council indicated opposition to carrying out
the General Assembly Resolution of November 29, thus in effect vitiat-
ing partition. Unless the U.S. took some action for establishment of an
administration to govern Palestine, chaos threatened.
As the bitter battling between the Jewish Agency and the
Palestine Arab Higher Committee accelerated—the Arab states in-
dicated they planned military intervention on May 15, the date of
the Mandate’s end—the U.S. proposed a temporary trusteeship,
setting aside partition “without prejudice to the character of the
eventual political settlement,” and called for a special session of
the General Assembly.
Impelled by reports from many quarters, Truman for some time
had been entertaining serious private doubts, never publicly ex-
pressed, as to the sagacity and practicability of the partition decision.
In a blunt report to the Security Council on February 16, 1948, the
United Nations Palestine Commission pointed out that it would re-
quire ‘‘military forces in adequate strength” in order to be able to
implement the partition resolution. The hopes of a peaceful transfer
of responsibility from the British Mandatory Power to the Arab and
Jewish states had vanished when the Arab Higher Committee, the most
76 THE ORIGINAL SIN
authoritative spokesman for Palestine’s Arab community, indicated
they were deliberately planning “‘to alter the plan by force.”’ The
commission feared that May 15, the date set for the transfer, would
usher in “‘a period of uncontrolled widespread strife and bloodshed.”
In a February 24 report preparatory to the policy reversal to
trusteeship, the State Department Policy Planning Staff under George
Kennan (later Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.) emphasized the necessity
of “‘preventing the area from falling under Soviet influence”:
. . we are deeply involved in a situation which has no direct relation to our
national security and where the motives of our involvement are solely in part
commitments of dubious wisdom and in our attachment to the UN itself. If we
do not effect a fairly radical reversal of the trend of our policy to date, we will
end up either in the position of being ourselves militarily responsible for the
protection of the Jewish population in Palestine against the declared hostility
of the Arab world, or of sharing that responsibility with the Russians and thus
assisting in their installation as one of the military powers of the area. In either
case, the clarity and efficiency of a sound national policy for that area will be
shattered .84
Secretary Marshall had informed the President that the U.S. had
three options: abandonment of the partition plan; vigorous support
for implementation, including the use of force; and referral back to the
General Assembly for a review of the enue question.®
It was the unanimous opinion of the military, including Secretary
of Defense Forrestal and General Alfred Gruenther, that the U.S. was
in no position militarily to commit armed forces to an international
peace force to enforce partition. Gruenther declared partial mobiliza-
tion would be required if more than 15,000 troops (a division) were
needed for the international policing.86 And the President had given
public assurances that he would not send American troops to Pales-
tine. Truman steadfastly refused to consider establishment of an inter-
national constabulary to police the area, which would bring the Soviet
Union, long knocking at the door, directly into the area for the first
time. He was opposed to any commitment that would tie down Ameri-
can troops in Palestine, for such a move would leave him less leverage
to handle Europe’s pressing unresolved postwar problems.8” The se-
curity risks posed by the possible necessity of use of force in the Middle
East deeply concerned him.
The National Security Council had submitted a report to Secre-
tary of Defense Forrestal indicating the extent to which the Palestine
turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the U.S.88 This report,
The Creation of Israel Revisited 77
prepared by the CIA, emphasized both the strategic importance of the
Middle East and its vast untapped oil resources.89
Increasing international tensions were another factor prompting
the President to support temporary abandonment of partition. On
February 24, 1948 the Czechoslovakian coup d’état took place. One
week after this pro-Soviet move, a top-secret telegram was received in
Washington from General Lucius Clay in Berlin, warning that within
the last weeks he had felt ‘‘a subtle change in the Soviet attitudes,”
which meant that war, previously felt by him to be “unlikely for at least
ten years, may come with dramatic suddenness.’’9°
These developments only tended to confirm the fears, expressed
in the many memoranda submitted by almost all concerned officers of
the State Department ever since the Palestine problem had come to the
fore at the U.N. the previous September, that implementation of parti-
tion would undermine U.S. relations with the Arab-Muslim world and
might even create the risk of involvement in a war against the Arabs,
one the U.S.S.R. would be sure to take advantage of.9!
If, as Margaret Truman insisted, the President did not wish an
open break with Secretary Marshall and did not feel free to tell the
whole story of the alleged State Department ‘‘perfidy,”” even in his
Memonrs, this was because of the President’s deep ambivalence on the
subject. Publicly he talked about Jewish immigration to Palestine and
eventual partition. At the same time, behind the scenes, he shared the
State Department’s view that partition was unworkable, and he gave
complete cooperation to the efforts at the U.N. to win additional sup-
port for a U.N. trusteeship directed to the maintenance of peace pend-
ing a political settlement.
In his Memoirs Truman described the March 19 trusteeship state-
ment by Ambassador Austin not as a rejection of partition but as an
effort to postpone its effective date until conditions were more propi-
tious.9? (From the very outset the new U.S. approach had invariably
been referred to as a “temporary trusteeship.”) The President
conceded that his policy on Palestine did not mean commitment to any
set of dates or circumstances, but was dedication to internal obliga-
tions and relief of human misery. Hence Truman could reconcile the
trusteeship proposal with his own policy, despite his angry calendar
entry, so long as it was not interpreted as abandonment of the partition
plan, which Clifford claimed certain members of the State Department
were doing.
Failing in the immediate prerequisite task of bringing about a
truce between Jews and Arabs in their escalating warfare, the U.S.
78 THE ORIGINAL SIN
could win little support for the trusteeship proposal. While the Secu-
rity Council was struggling to arrange a truce, a special session of the
General Assembly convened “‘to consider further the question of the
future government of Palestine.”’ Impeding any solution was U.S. re-
luctance to commit troops either to act on its own or as part of an
international police force.93 (Anomalously, the Soviet press at this time
was critical of the U.S. shift to trusteeship, calling the “repudiation of
the partition resolution an open violation of U.S.A. international obli-
gations” and quoting the New York Post’s criticism that Forrestal was
obstructing partition in behalf of American oil companies.%)
The President, Secretary Marshall, and other officers in the State
Department were in total agreement that the U.S. was “not prepared
to join in enforcement measures in Palestine for the maintenance of
international peace and security until U.N. trusteeship had been estab-
lished and then only to maintain the integrity of trusteeship as a bul-
wark of international peace and security,’’® not to implement parti-
tion. It was Washington’s general fear that the tactic of the Soviets,
who were wooing the Jewish Agency, was to seek enforcement of peace
to the exclusion of the establishment of a framework within which a
peaceful solution of the Palestine problem might be found.
The President would make no specific commitment to contribute
armed forces to the U.N. for maintenance of law and order in Palestine
even as part of a truce and trusteeship.% At his press conference March
25, Truman stated that “‘our policy is to back up the U.N. in the
trusteeship by every means necessary,” but that did not necessarily
mean that American troops would be used. Following Clifford’s ad-
vice,97 the President made clear that the trusteeship proposed was not
a ‘substitute for the partition plan, but an effort to fill a vacuum soon
to be created by the termination of mandate on May 15” and “‘does
not preyudge the character of the final political settlement.”
It was in this March public statement that the President clearly
rebutted the Clifford charges that the State Department had under-
mined his resolve to support partition:
This country vigorously supported the plan for Partition with Economic Union
recommended by UNSCUP and by the General Assembly. We have explored every
possibility consistent with basic principles of the Charter for giving effect to that solution.
Unfortunately, ut has become clear that the partition plan cannot be carned out at this time
by peaceful means. We could not undertake to impose this solution on people of Palestine
by use of Amencan troops, both on Charter grounds and as a matter of national policy. %*
[Italics added.]
The Creation of Israel Revisited 79
The President concluded: “If the U.N. agrees to trusteeship,
peaceful settlement is yet possible; without it, open warfare is just over
the horizon.’’99
The kind of gross distortion in which Clifford and his research-
ers! indulged to prove malevolence on the part of the State Depart-
ment can be seen through one comparison of his version of what took
place in 1948 with official U.S. documents. The former Special Coun-
sel to President Truman and the Secretary of Defense under President
Johnson told his American Historical Society audience:
But the basic attitude of the department remained the same. On May 11, one
of its senior officers, in a telephone call to Henderson and Wadsworth in New
York, made the comment that Jews in Palestine were running their own affairs,
which ‘‘was not according to plan.’’!°! [Italics added.]
Volume V of the Foreign Relations of the United States, published in
1976, reveals that this senior officer was Dean Rusk, that his telephone
conversation had in fact not been with Ambassadors Henderson and
Wadsworth but with Ambassador Philip C. Jessup and Jack Ross.!02
Here is what actually was said:
Phil, I think what is likely to come out from down here, particularly across the
way [the White House], is the idea that something has happened in fact over
there. It is not according to plan, but nevertheless there is a community in
existence over there [the Jewish community in Palestine] running its own
affairs. 103
By reporting the phone conversation out of context, Clifford im-
puted State Department subversion of policy and placed at the door
of a former Secretary of State an implication of an anti-Semitic remark,
the credibility of which was increased by making Loy Henderson, the
favorite béte noire of the Zionists, a party to the conversation.
Final insight on the controversy over the U.S. reversal to trustee-
ship can be gleaned from the memorandum to Charles E. Bohlen of
March 22 from Secretary Marshall affirming that the timing of the
Austin U.N. speech was “the reason he [the President] was so much
exercised. He had agreed to the statement but said that if he had
known when it was going to be made, he could have taken certain
measures to have avoided the political blast of the press.’’! Like
President Carter twenty-eight years later, after the issuance of the
October 1, 1977, joint communiqué with the U.S.S.R. regarding
“Palestine rights,” Truman seemed to have failed to anticipate the fury
with which Organized Jewry would react to the shift in policy.
80 THE ORIGINAL SIN
As the impossibility of the pacification of the Holy Land became
increasingly evident and the end of the mandate approached, Zionists
everywhere mounted new offensives. In a letter of April 9, 1948, to
Truman, Weizmann warned of the consequences of not implementing
partition, declaring that ‘“‘the choice of our people is between state-
hood and extermination.”!95 With the cooperation of White House
aide David Niles and Clark Clifford, domestic politics again raised its
ugly head.
The stunning victory in a special Bronx congressional election of
American Labor party candidate Leo Isacson over Boss Ed Flynn’s
Democratic organizational candidate in a district in which there was a
55 percent Jewish constituency provided the excuse. This was at-
tributed to the militant pro-Zionist stand taken by the victorious candi-
date in whose behalf Henry Wallace had spoken frequently in the
district. Wallace had declaimed, ‘“Truman still talks Jewish, but acts
Arab.!96 The voters had soundly repudiated the Truman administra-
tion’s lack of enthusiasm in implementing partition and giving all-out
support to the creation of a Jewish state.
The outcry against the sell-out of partition and Jewish statehood
increased. The administration’s embargo on the shipment of all arms
to the Middle East was attacked as hurting the Jews far more than the
Arabs. The Truman administration was assailed for its “vacillation and
inadequacy” by the Republican party to which the press, then pre-
ponderantly Republican, added the charge, “‘betrayal of humanitarian-
ism.” In the large cities organized Jewry once again mobilized public
opinion. The story of the courageous fight of the Palestinian Jews
crowded newspapers and radio. In New York City, Communist and
left-wing labor leaders ran a “Palestine Protest Rally” in Madison
Square Park, attended by 10,000, at which “‘oil politics” was attacked.
Special services were held in more than 8,000 Jewish houses of wor-
ship throughout the nation to protest the U.S. stand on Zion. The
President was personally bombarded with appeals to support partition
from political leaders all over the country, notably Chairman of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee Sol Bloom and powerful Chicago
Democratic chieftain Jacob Arvey.
Clifford was now convinced that his plans for Truman’s 1948
national presidential campaign were being jeopardized by U.S. rever-
sal of its Palestine policy. Previously Clifford had vacillated between
idealistic statements that in the long run “there is likely to be a greater
gain if the Palestine problem is approached on the basis of far-reaching
decisions founded upon intrinsic merit” and his full awareness of the
The Creation of Israel Revisited 81
political importance of the Jewish bloc vote, particularly in New York
State. Although no President since 1876, except Woodrow Wilson in
1916, had lost New York with its forty-seven electoral votes and still
won the election, the presidential adviser had not been convinced that
the best way to win this Jewish vote was through the adoption of
pro-Zionist policies. But as November 1948 grew nearer, Clifford
bowed to political forces and gave unstinting recognition to the inter-
relationship between the administration’s stand on the Palestine issue
and presidential success at the polls. By May 4 he was convinced,
according to his papers,!°7 that a Jewish state ‘will be set up shortly,”
and he avowed forthright recognition of the state.
On May 7 Max Lowenthal, closely associated with the Jewish
Agency, a consultant to the White House, and a confidant of both
Clifford and Niles, sent a confidential memorandum ‘‘FOR MR. CLIF-
FORD ONLY. This is for the protection of the Administration, not to be
shown in written form, to anyone else, under any circumstances.”"1°8 Low-
enthal called for recognition of the Jewish state even before May 15
as that ‘‘would free the Administration of a serious and unfair disad-
vantage”’ in the November elections.!99
Other Zionists were satisfied with asking for prompt recognition
once the state came into being. Within the State Department itself,
long-time Zionist supporter General John Hiildring, who had been
appointed by the President as Special Assistant to the Secretary on
Palestine Affairs,!!° was doing everything to undermine the influence
of those foreign service officers who continued to caution against
premature recognition of the Zionist state.
With the help of Democratic National Chairman Howard
McGrath, Undersecretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman, Federal Se-
curity Agency Administrator Oscar Ewing, and other politicos, over-
whelming additional pressures were brought on the President. Secre-
tary Marshall’s influence was waning as Clifford’s advice became
Truman’s important guidestone. The hope was that a dramatic gesture
of support to Israel would be amply repaid by Jewish votes and contri-
butions.!!!
A decisive White House meeting was held on May 12 at 4 P.M.,
attended by seven others in addition to the President: Marshall, Lovett,
Clifford, Niles, White House Aide Connelly, and State Department
veteran Foreign Service Officers Robert McClintock and Fraser Wil-
kins. Clifford pressed for approval of a presidential statement, stating
it was his intention to recognize the Jewish state once it came into
being. Clifford openly admitted that his support of such a policy was
82 THE ORIGINAL SIN
based upon consideration of the political implications involved in such
a course, and also claimed that it would ‘steal a march on the
US. S.Re2"
Niles, Clifford, and Lowenthal, as the key contact with the many
Zionist groups, had prepared well for the meeting. Following confer-
ences starting May 6, Niles had prepared the initial draft of this state-
ment and had sought guidance and approval from Benjamin V. Cohen,
who had served as Counselor in the State Department under Secretary
Byrnes. The final draft read by Clifford at the White House meeting
had been revised by Clifford’s assistant, George Elsey, to include
suggestions set forth in a Lowenthal memo of that day,!'5 the seventh
memo in five days.
Secretary Marshall had done nothing to hide his deep resentment
over the fact that Clifford was even present. “Mr. President,” he pro-
tested, ‘‘this is not a matter to be determined on the basis of politics.
Unless politics were involved, Mr. Clifford would not even be at this
conference. This is a very serious matter of foreign policy determina-
tion.”!14
According to Elsey’s notes, the Clifford statement received ‘a
violent reaction from Marshall: “This is just straight politics. You
wouldn't get my O.K.’ Clifford was enraged, and Marshall glared at
Clifford.””!15 The White House Counsel later angrily recalled: “He said
it all in a righteous God-damned Baptist tone.’’!!6
In opposing the course suggested by Clifford, Undersecretary
Lovett maintained that it would be
... highly injurious to the U.N. to announce recognition of the Jewish State
even before it came into existence and while the General Assembly, which had
been called into special session at the request of the U.S., was still considering
the question of the future government of Palestine . . . Furthermore, such a
move would be injurious to the prestige of the President. It was a very trans-
parent attempt to win the Jewish vote but it would lose more votes than it
would gain. Finally, to recognize the Jewish State prematurely would be buying
a pig in a poke. How did we know what kind of a Jewish State would be set
up?!7
In his own memorandum of conversation, which received wide
publicity in 1976 when Volume V of the 1948 Foreign Relations of the
United States was finally printed, Marshall expressed sharp disagree-
ment with Clifford:
I remarked to the President that speaking objectively, I could not help but
think that the suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to
The Creation of Israel Revisited 83
allow their suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that
intended by Mr. Clifford. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not
in fact achieve this purpose.
The great dignity of the office would be seriously diminished. The counsel
offered by Mr. Clifford was based on domestic political considerations, while
the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the
President were to follow Mr. Clifford's advice and if in the elections I were to vote, | would
vote against the President.‘'8 [Italics added. ]
Following the spirited exchange of views, the President, who had
remained neutral, according to all reports, concluded the meeting by
suggesting that he ‘was inclined to side with Secretary Marshall and
we would sleep on it.”!!9 According to Clifford, the President also
stated, after the others had left, that “following a short cooling period,
we would get into it again,’’!20
Indicating that he had not as yet made up his mind to recognize
the incipient state, the President refrained from using the Clifford
draft statement at his scheduled press conference on May 13. Mean-
while, following the White House conference, Lovett arranged to have
Legal Adviser Ernest A. Gross immediately send a memorandum to
Clifford noting that any premature recognition of a new state’s exis-
tence “‘is wrongful in international law because it constitutes an unwar-
ranted interference in the affairs of the previous existing State.”!?!
Even recognition immediately after the state came into being could not
meet the State Department's standard requirements for recogni-
tion,!22
As Weizmann noted in his diary, the mandate had but a few more
days to run when “TI strengthened our contacts with our fnends in
Washington, and affirmed my intention of going ahead with a bid for
recognition of the Jewish State as soon as it was proclaimed.”!23 (Ital-
ics added.) Then, on May 13, 1948, he wrote a personal letter to
Truman asking that the U.S. “promptly recognize the Provisional Gov-
ernment of the new Jewish State.” Up to that day, the General Assem-
bly had neither revoked nor reaffirmed the November partition resolu-
tion and was still wrestling with the problem of how to bring about a
truce that would save lives in Palestine. A U.S. resolution, approved
by the President, had been introduced in the General Assembly calling
for the appointment of a U.N. Commissioner for Palestine to mediate
between the parties and to ‘‘promote agreement on the future govern-
ment of Palestine.”’
The documentary evidence would seem to show that at some
point after the fateful White House meeting of May 12 the President
a
84 THE ORIGINAL SIN
decided to go ahead, regardless of the views of his Secretary of State,
and recognize Israel as soon as the latter declared itself a state. No
doubt he was affected by the eloquence of Weizmann and the persua-
siveness of Clifford that something had to be done to get the Demo-
cratic party off the election hook. Immediate recognition of Israel was
needed to recoup the political losses stemming from the violent reac-
tion to the shift to trusteeship. While the President was closeted on
May 14 with intimate advisers—one of the few callers he received that
day was B'nai B'rith President Frank Goldman—and the White House
maintained a rigid silence, Clifford took the necessary action.
Around eleven-thirty the representative of the Jewish Agency for
Palestine, Eliahu Epstein, (later, as Eliahu Elath, the first Israeli Am-
bassador to the U.S.) was telephoned by Clifford from the White
House!?4 and told that the U.S. was prepared to accord the new state
recognition (de facto, if it was to be a provisional government that was
being formed) upon the declaration of Israel’s independence, but that
a formal request for such recognition would have to be received from
the new government that afternoon. Epstein pointed out quite reason-
ably that the new state could not send such a request prior to its birth
(which was not expected before midnight May 14, 6 p.m. Washington
time).!25
According to the Snetsinger account, Clifford demanded and re-
ceived ‘‘a pledge of secrecy” from Epstein, which precluded his con-
tacting Jewish Agency officials in Palestine. Furthermore, there was the
important time factor. Epstein assumed full personal responsibility for
drafting and delivering the required recognition request as soon as
possible. He called Benjamin V. Cohen, who was expert in such mat-
ters because of his drafting experience in the State Department, to
come over to the office of the Jewish Agency and assist him in compos-
ing the draft. When it came to the name of the state, which had as yet
not been announced by the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv, it was Cohen
who suggested, ‘‘We'll have to use the designation referred to in the
U.N. Resolution—simply ‘the Jewish State.’ ”!26 Accordingly, the draft
was typed, signed, and rushed by Agency press attaché Harry Zinder
in his car to the White House.
A few minutes later Elath’s secretary reported that she heard on
the radio that ‘‘they’ve named it the ‘State of Israel.’ ”” According to
this version of events, she sped in a cab, ‘“‘caught up with Zinder at the
White House entrance, removed the letter from the envelope, and with
a ballpoint pen crossed out references to ‘the Jewish State,’ substitut-
ing the words ‘State of Israel.’ ’!27
The Creation of Israel Revisited 85
The letter stated that ‘‘the State of Israel has been proclaimed as
an independent republic” and that “I have been authorized by the
provisional government of the new State . . . to express the hope that
your government will recognize and will welcome Israel into the com-
munity of nations.” Not only had the request for recognition, when
delivered that afternoon at the White House, not been authorized by
those who were to become the provisional government, but there was
no provisional government until eight hours after the request, al-
legedly from that provisional government in Tel Aviv, had been re-
ceived.
Apparently both the President and Clifford, as he told Lovett two
days later, had been impressed by the Undersecretary’s arguments at
the May 12 meeting with regard to the disadvantages and dangers of
premature announcement of the U.S. intent to recognize Israel. To
minimize the risks, Clifford had been careful to ask Epstein to state the
boundaries the new state would accept when he presented the request
for recognition. Epstein took upon himself the responsibility of declar-
ing that Israel would accept the boundaries as defined in the Novem-
ber 1947 resolution.
Meanwhile, Clifford had decided to keep the President’s decision
of recognition from Secretary Marshall and everyone else!28 in the
Department of State until the afternoon to avoid a leak and any objec-
tions Marshall or Lovett might raise to the move. He wished to pre-
clude any attempt to persuade the President to delay the recognition.
The Secretary was only told sometime between three and four that
afternoon.!29
According to Undersecretary Lovett’s memorandum of conversa-
tion with Clifford, which took place following lunch at the F Street
Club on May 14, he was informed that ‘‘the President was under
unbearable pressure to recognize the Jewish state promptly.”’ He also
was told by Clifford to draft ‘‘appropriate language to put into effect
recognition in the event the President decided upon it.’!3° Clifford
brushed aside Lovett’s caution against “indecent haste” until “‘we
could confirm the details of the [State’s] proclamation.” The Under-
secretary was concerned about proper notification of the British,
French, and Belgium governments and of Ambassador Austin in New
York. Clifford declared that the President could not afford ‘to have
any such action leak.”
The documents show that once the President ordered the process
of recognition to go ahead, both Lovett and Marshall accommodated
themselves to the decision, never questioning the presidential power
86 THE ORIGINAL SIN
to do so. According to Dr. Forrest Pogue, Director of the Dwight D.
Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research and former Executive
Director of the Marshall Foundation, ‘“There is much evidence to show
that Marshall, apart from being unswervingly loyal to President Tru-
man, always had a healthy respect for the Presidential prerogative,
according to the Constitution, to make foreign policy decisions, and
regardless of his own views on any given issue which he did not hesitate
to express to the President beforehand, always deferred to the Presi-
dent’s position once the decision was made.”'!3!
What Marshall and Lovett chiefly opposed to was not recognition
per se but the Clifford proposal to have the President announce on
May 13 that the U.S. would recognize the new state as soon as it
declared itself on the 14th.
At twenty minutes to six the Undersecretary was notified that the
President was to make the recognition announcement shortly after six
and that he could now notify Ambassador Austin in New York. The
Lovett memorandum of this memorable day ends thus:
My protests against the precipitate action and warnings as to consequences
with the Arab world appear to have been outweighed by considerations un-
known to me. But I can only conclude that the President’s political advisers,
having failed last Wednesday afternoon to make the President a father of the
new State, have determined at least to make him the midwife.!32
At six o'clock Eastern Daylight Time the British mandate expired.
At 6:01 p.m. the new State of Israel came into existence, promulgated
“in the name of the Jewish people.”’ And at 6:11 p.m. the U.S. accorded
recognition. Charles Ross, presidential press secretary, read to report-
ers summoned to his office Truman's two-paragraph announcement
that accorded de facto recognition.!33
As the administration in Washington was recognizing the sove-
reignty of Israel, U.S. representatives at the U.N. were still discussing
the internationalization of Jerusalem and were trying to reach “‘an
agreement on the future government of Palestine.” Vera Weizmann,
widow of the first Israeli President, in her book The Impossible Takes
Longer, 134 describes how U.S. Mission member Professor Philip C.
Jessup had to ring up the White House from a public phone booth at
Lake Success to obtain confirmation of the rumored presidential an-
nouncement of recognition of the Israeli state while the question of the
internationalization of Jerusalem was being debated on the floor of the
General Assembly.
Notified by Dean Rusk of the President’s move, Ambassador Aus-
The Creation of Israel Revisited 87
tin shut himself up in his Waldorf Astoria Towers apartment in disgust.
It was not until half an hour later that a member of his mission read
the statement of recognition to the General Assembly, reportedly ob-
tained from an Associated Press ticker tape.
The delegates at the U.N. were stunned by this latest abrupt U.S.
policy reversal, which now sanctioned partition after beating the
drums so long for trusteeship. Cuban Ambassador Guillermo Belt had
to be restrained from going to the podium and announcing his coun-
try’s withdrawal from the U.N.135
George Barrett of the New York Times reported that one delegate,
when asked exactly what the U.S. position was on Palestine, replied
that he did not know because he had not seen an announcement for
twenty minutes. This humiliating undercutting of such distinguished
Americans as Ambassador Austin, Deputy U.S. Representative Francis
B. Sayre, Sr., and Professor Jessup further emphasized the magic hold
exercised by Israel in political quarters. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, al-
though strongly favoring the recognition of Israel, wrote Secretary
Marshall on May 16 complaining about the way this had been done
because it “created consternation in the United Nations.’’!36 Dean
Rusk was dispatched to New York by Secretary Marshall to ‘prevent
the U.S. delegation from resigning en masse.’’!37
Internecine disputes between former allies strangely brought to
light additional pertinent, heretofore missing details regarding this
saga. Margaret Truman, supported by I. L. Kenen, tried to make light
of any influence that Eddie Jacobson, the President’s former haber-
dashery partner in Kansas City, might have had in supporting the idea
of a Jewish state. She called “an absurd myth” the allegation that
“Eddie saw Dad secretly innumerable times during his White House
years, using his friendship to bring Dad over to a pro-Jewish point of
view. I don’t believe they ever discussed politics except in the most
off-hand fashion,” she wrote.!38 But Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of
State after Marshall, in a television interview and in his autobiography
indicated that the President was moved by “the repeated entreaties of
Eddie Jacobson,” who “talked to the President a great deal about it”
and whose “ideas appealed to the President very much.’’!39
Frank J. Adler, administrative director of Kansas City’s (Missouri)
Temple Congregation Ben Jehuda, issued through the Jewish Tele-
graphic Agency a strong statement concerning Margaret Truman’s
denigration of ‘one of our boys,”’ contending that she ‘‘was completely
in error when she dismissed as inconsequential the influence of Eddie
Jacobson on the President’s decision with regard to the Palestine situa-
88 THE ORIGINAL SIN
tion.” According to Adler, official White House records of the Truman
administration at the Truman Library include references to twenty-
four appointments in the President’s office for Eddie Jacobson, thir-
teen of which are marked “off-the-record.’’!4° Adler’s research for his
book, Roots in a Moving Stream, a centennial history of his congregation,
had sent him to the library in Independence. In addition, Jacobson was
with Truman on the 1948 election whistle-stop train for three days.
And, quoting Truman Library sources, Adler stated that “they en-
gaged in private discussions, largely U.S. policy on Israel.”!4! ‘““His way
of making an appointment with the President was unique,” according
to another source. ‘‘He often asked for the meeting to be made that
day or the next, and usually the answer was ‘Come right over,’ ’’!42
In his Memoirs published in 1965, the former President referred
to Jacobson as his late “great and irreplaceable friend.” Jacobson’s
widow was one of the very select few at the final burial service for
Truman on December 28, 1972, in Independence, Missouri.
In the same book, Truman notes that Jacobson never asked for a
single favor for himself but recalls that Jacobson did intervene when
Chaim Weizmann found the doors to the White House closed to him
at a critical moment. Edward E. Grusd in his book B'nai B'rith: The Story
of a Covenant fills in the details on this incident:
The word got out that the White House door was bolted against all Zionist
leaders, and it is a fact that although many knocked, none was admitted.
Meanwhile the United Nations halted all partition implementation measures.
During this period, however, the President and Secretary of B'nai B'rith had
an audience with Mr. Truman. It had no visible effect, however, and President
Goldman called on the lodges and chapters to express themselves by letters
to Mr. Truman and the United Nations.
At this critical juncture, B'nai B’rith was able to make an important contri-
bution which broke the logjam. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, internationally famous
scientist and head of the World Zionist Organization, although he was over
seventy and ill, came to the United States to make a personal appeal to Presi-
dent Truman. While he lay bedridden in a New York hotel, American Zionist
leaders again tried to make an appointment for him at the White House. But
President Truman refused.
It came to Frank Goldman’s knowledge that one of the President's oldest
and dearest friends was an Eddie Jacobson of Kansas City, Missouri. He got
in touch with A. J. Granoff of Kansas City, a prominent attorney and a past
President of District No. 2. It turned out that Mr. Granoff was Mr. Jacobson’s
attorney, and he gladly introduced his client to the President of B’nai B'rith.
Mr. Jacobson told him he was not a Zionist, and that B'nai B'rith was the only
Jewish organization to which he belonged. He had been Harry Truman’s close
The Creation of Israel Revisited 89
buddy in the Army during World War I, had served in the same artillery unit
with him in France, and after the war he and Mr. Truman had been partners
in a Kansas City haberdashery. He was so close to the President that all he had
to do to see him in the White House was to come to Washington, call up, and
immediately be invited to “come on over, Eddie.”!43
It was not exactly that cut-and-dried, according to the President's
own account of the meetings. A telegram from Jacobson to the White
House pleading that the Chief Executive see Weizmann brought no
results. But when his former haberdashery partner called him on the
morning of March 13 and expressed a desire to come to the White
House, the President said to him, “Eddie, I’m always glad to see old
friends, but there’s one thing you’ve got to promise me. I don’t want
you to say a word about what’s going on over there in the Middle East.
Do you promise?” And he did.!44
Here is how Truman described the meeting with Jacobson, who
was shown into the Oval Room after being “begged by Matthew Con-
nelly”!45 not to discuss the Palestine question with the President:
Great tears were running down his cheeks and I took one look at him and said,
“Eddie, you son of a bitch, you promised me you wouldn’t say a word about
what’s going on over there.” And he said, ‘“‘Mr. President, I haven’t said a
word, but every time I think of the homeless Jews, homeless for thousands of
years, and I think about Dr. Weizmann, | start crying. I can’t help it. He’s an
old man and he’s spent his whole life working for a homeland for the Jews.
Now he’s sick and he’s in New York and he wants to see you, and every time
I think about it, I can’t help crying.”
I said, ‘‘Eddie, that’s enough. That’s the last word.”’ And we talked about
this and that, but every once in a while a big tear would roll down his cheek.
At one point he said something about how I felt about old Andy Jackson, and
he was crying again. He said he knew he wasn’t supposed to, but that’s how
he felt about Weizmann.
I said, ‘‘Eddie, you son of a bitch, I ought to have thrown you out of here
for breaking your promise; you knew damn good and well I couldn’t stand
seeing you cry.”
And he kind of smiled at me, still crying, though, and he said, ““Thank you,
Mr. President.” And he left.'46
Truman, says Grusd, was ‘“‘sick of the way the Zionists had badg-
ered and unjustly condemned him” for his actions in regard to Pales-
tine and he was so angry that Jacobson later wrote, ‘‘I suddenly found
myself thinking that my dear friend the President of the United States
was at the moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man possibly
could be,’’!47 It took all of Eddie Jacobson’s friendship and persuasive
90 THE ORIGINAL SIN
powers; Truman was finally induced to arrange a secret meeting with
the Zionist leader.
According to Merle Miller’s autobiographical version, after Jacob-
son left, Truman called the State Department (Loy Henderson and
others working on the problem in the Department deny this) and told
them he was going to see Weizmann:
Well, you should have heard the carrying on. The first thing they said—they
said Israel wasn’t even a country yet and didn’t have a flag or anything. They
said if Weizmann comes to the White House, what are we going to use for a
flag?
And I said, ‘‘Look here; he’s staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York
and every time some foreign dignitary is staying there they put something out.
You find out what it is and we'll use it. And I want you to call me right back.’”’!48
That meeting on March 18 not only led to the warm Truman-
Weizmann friendship that played a vital part in the later Truman act
of recognizing Israel, but also brought about inclusion of the Negev
within that portion of Palestine assigned by the U.N. to the new Zionist
state. Jacobson did not go with the scientist to the White House, as he
was told by Weizmann he should be “saved” in case he was needed for
another emergency. ‘‘You have a job to do, so keep the White House
doors open.”!49
A year later the Chief Rabbi of Israel came to see the President
and told him, ‘‘God put you in your mother’s womb so that you could
be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel after two thou-
sand years.’ At these words, we are told that “great tears started
rolling down Harry Truman’s clreeks.’’15°
During former Israeli Premier Ben-Gurion’s last visit to the States,
Truman visited him at his New York hotel. Ben-Gurion is said to have
remarked, “I do not know how you will stand in American history, but
you have a secure place in the history of Israel.’”’ As an embattled Israel
struggles to hold onto that initial inheritance with which the late Presi-
dent endowed it, who can quarrel with this assessment on both counts?
As he revealed many years later in one of his hundreds of hours
of taped interviews with author Miller for the book Plain Speaking,
Truman shared some of his vilification of the State Department in a
White House meeting with Zionist state builder Rabbi Stephen Wise,
whom “‘he referred to as the most courteous man I have ever seen.””!5!
I told him I knew all about experts. I said that an expert was a fella who was
afraid to learn anything new because then he wouldn’t be an expert anymore.
And I said that some of the experts, the career fellas in the State Depart-
The Creation of Israel Revisited 91
ment, thought that they ought to make a policy, but that as long as I was
President, I’d see to it that / made policy. Their job was to carry it out, and
if there were some who didn’t like it, they could resign any time they felt like
it. 132
Truman’s nice words about the Rabbi did not jibe with what has
appeared elsewhere in his writings, particularly in his Memoirs, where
we learn that he later closed the door completely to this intense Zionist
leader and would not see him because of his “‘emotional tantrums” in
their meetings. These Zionist pressures on the White House were
described in this interesting passage:
Well, there had never been anything like it before and there wasn’t after. Not
even when I fired MacArthur, there wasn’t, and I said I issued orders that I
wasn’t going to see anyone who was an extremist for the Zionist cause, and
I didn’t care who it was. . . . I had to keep in mind that much as I favored a
homeland for the Jews, there were simply other matters awaiting . . . that I had
to worry about.!53
During the year following the narrow Zionist victory at Lake Suc-
cess, a temporary U.N. trusteeship for Palestine emerged as a possible
alternative to partition. The political pressures exerted on the Presi-
dent (and the Congress) more than balanced his concern for the na-
tional interest. As Truman noted:
The Jewish pressure on the White House did not diminish in the days follow-
ing the partition vote in the U.N. 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. I think I can say that I kept my faith in the rightness of my policy
in spite of some of the Jews.!54
One of the problems that Truman increasingly “had to worry
about’’—and undoubtedly wished to worry about—was the Palestinian
Arabs. As the President concerned himself over the nlight of the new
refugees, his relations with the Zionists and the Israeli state cooled
considerably. The President was deeply disturbed.
According to previously classified State Department diplomatic
letters and cables for 1949, Truman sent a strong, angry note to Israel
on May 28 demanding that Israel withdraw from territories captured
during the 1948-49 war with the Arabs and urging the government to
take back a certain number of refugees. He expressed “deep disap-
pointment at the Israeli refusal to make any of the desired concessions
on refugees or boundaries at the Lausanne Conferences” (April 27 to
92 THE ORIGINAL SIN
September 15, 1949). The President interpreted Israel’s attitude ‘‘as
dangerous to peace in opposition to U.N. General Assembly resolu-
tions.” 155 The May 28 note ended with the toughest stance taken by
the American government thus far, warning that if Israel continued in
her attitude, “the U.S. government will regretfully be forced to the
conclusion that a revision of its attitude toward Israel has become
unavoidable.’’!56
Ten days later, in a formal note of June 8, Israel rejected the
American demand. The Israelis insisted that ‘‘the war has proved the
indispensability to the survival of Israel of certain vital areas not com-
prised originally in the share of the Jewish state.” As far as the plight
of the Palestinian refugees was concerned, the note termed them
“*members of an aggressor group defeated in a war of its own making.
History does not record a case of large-scale repatriation after such
experience.”!57 (What was the creation of the State of Israel but a
“large-scale repatriation’’?)
In his summation of the Israeli note, Deputy Undersecretary of
State Rusk wrote, “With regard to the refugees, the note repeats the
familiar arguments blaming the Arab states for the plight of these
people. . . . The note maintains that Israel has gone as far as it is
possible for it to go under the present circumstances in regard to
repatriation and reiterates the position that nothing more can be done
until a final peace settlement is reached.” Rusk also underlined Israel’s
continued rejection of any territorial settlement and pointed out that
“the basic positions of the United States and Israel thus remain un-
changed, and there is no reason for the United States to abandon the
firm position it has taken as regards Israel.’’!58
A top-secret State Department memorandum to Truman two days
later called upon the U.S. to adopt a hard-line attitude toward Israel
in an attempt to pressure her to return to the partition lines. Among
other things the memorandum suggested:
(1) Immediate adoption of a generally negative attitude towards Israel by
refusing Israeli requests for U.S. assistance, such as for the training of Israeli
officials in this country and the sending of experts to Israel; by maintenance
of no more than a correct attitude toward Israeli officials in this country and
towards American organizations interested in promoting the cause of Israel;
and by failing to support the position of Israel in international organizations.
(2) Holding up allocation of $49 million of a $100 million export-import
bank loan earmarked for Israel.
(3) Lifting the tax-exempt status of the UJA and other American Jewish
fund-raising organizations.!59
The Creation of Israel Revisited 93
The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, cabled Clark
Clifford to inform him that Truman’s note had “‘embittered Israeli
opinion” and that Premier David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister
Moshe Sharett might be forced ‘‘despite their will and better judge-
ment to resist demands.” The envoy suggested that “Israeli conces-
sions with refugees are possible if request for these are not again put
in form of demand, but under no circumstances except use of over-
whelming force will Israel yield any part of Negev.”
It was this exceedingly pro-Israel American Ambassador to Israel
who later reported the subsequent U.S. retreat: “The [next] American
note abandoned completely the stern tone of its predecessor. . . . More
and more Washington ceased to lay down the law to Tel Aviv.’”!6° And
as a corollary, it may be added, it became axiomatic that more and
more it was Tel Aviv that seemed to be laying down the law to Wash-
ington. To the Arab world, this all too ready presidential acceptance
of the Israeli leaders’ prompt rejection of American requests demon-
strated a lack of sincerity in the original rebuke administered by Wash-
ington to Tel Aviv.
To the very end Truman insisted consistently that his own actions
in helping Israel arose not from outside influences, which he never
denied were all too present, but from his own deep concern for the
persecuted Jews of Europe. The ambivalence inherent in all of the
President’s actions was brought out in the statement he made to a
group of diplomats called home in 1946 to report to the State Depart-
ment on the deteriorating U.S. position in the Middle East: ‘I am
sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who
are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of
thousands of Arabs among my constituents.’’!6!
Clifford in no way ever substantiated his serious charges against
officers of the State Department, including former Secretary of State
Dean Rusk and, by implication, George Marshall, who presided over
the Department during the period in question. The Clifford role in the
creation of Israel and in nurturing the relationship during the subse-
quent Truman administration, which has developed into our overrid-
ing, special commitment to the Zionist state, could never be squared
with the moral code set down by Marshall in 1948. He declined to
answer any questions on Palestine at a February 28 press conference,
declaring that such statements should come from Ambassador Austin
at the U.N. lest “there be any confusion as to what is being stated.’’!6?
Then, in a secret and completely off-the-record confidential message
to Ambassador Austin in New York, Marshall stated:
94 THE ORIGINAL SIN
As far as I am concerned and the State Department is concerned, but particu-
larly as far as I am concerned, in this highly emotional period of extreme
bitterness and violent attacks, my intention is to see that nothing is done by
the State Department in guidance for the action of its delegates to the U.N.,
in response to either military threats or political threats, one or the other,
nothing whatever. My intention Is to see that the action of the U.S. government
is to be on a plane of integrity that will bear inspection and a common review
and that there will be no bending to any military threat or to any political threat
so long as I am Secretary of State.!63
The unbelievable pressures exerted and the affluence brought
into play by the ubiquitous Zionist machinery prevented Truman from
attaining the ‘high plane of integrity” set by his Secretary of State.
While the President insisted consistently to the end that his actions in
helping Israel stemmed from his own deep concern for the persecuted
Jews of Europe, his memoirs and papers attested to an untold story of
the many influences at work not only from the outside but more impor-
tantly even from within the White House: Samuel Rosenman, special
counsel to FDR and for a year Truman’s contact man with Weizmann;
Benjamin V. Cohen; Max Lowenthal; Eddie Jacobson; and a host of
additional Jews as well as such Christians as Eleanor Roosevelt and
General John Hilldring. But David K. Niles was the big Zionist connec-
tion. A protégé of Harry Hopkins, Niles (born Neyhaus) had become
an executive assistant to President Roosevelt after the 1940 election
and was a member of a select group of confidential advisers with an
often-quoted “passion for anonymity.” FDR, weighed down by war
responsibilities, turned over to Niles the handling of problems relating
to minorities. Thus Niles soon became what amounted to the first
Jewish Ambassador to the White House, and when Truman succeeded
Roosevelt, the Palestine issue was placed in his lap.
Niles, unknown to the public although occasionally publicized as
“Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,”!64 was in a unique position to further
Zionist interests.!65 He made possible the continual unique access to
the White House enjoyed by Eliahu Epstein and helped channel to the
President the opposition against the Morrison-Grady Plan, which the
President had considered to be fair.166 Niles often conveyed Eddie
Jacobson’s views directly to the President.
The man from Independence was constantly being torn between
his desire ‘‘to work for the best interests of the whole country” and the
overriding necessities of domestic politics, of which he was constantly
being reminded by the many Zionists around him.
In response to James G. McDonald and New York Senators Rob-
The Creation of Israel Revisited 95
ert F. Wagner, Sr., and James Mead, who had brought a memorandum
attacking the Morrison-Grady Plan, the President, according to Vice
President Henry Wallace, snapped: “I am not a New Yorker. All these
people are pleading for a special interest. I am an American.”’!67
Subsequently that year at a Cabinet meeting, when Wallace warned
Truman that the plan was “loaded with political dynamite,” the Presi-
dent blurted out, ‘Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here
on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.’’!68
Just as Zionist pressures were being mounted prior to the decisive
meeting of the General Assembly on partition, Truman wrote to Mrs.
Roosevelt, ‘I feel very much that the Jews are like all underdogs when
they are on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people
were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very
much because my sympathy has always been on their side.’’!69
Truman’s final explanation for his own ambivalency on the Pales-
tine question was expressed in a 1947 memorandum to Niles: ““‘We
could have settled this Palestine thing if U.S. politics had been kept out
of it. Terror and [Rabbi] Silver are the contributing causes of some,
if not all, of our troubles.”!7°
In retrospect, the truth seems to be that the late President was
governed in his Palestine thinking by two considerations not inher-
ently in conflict: his concern for votes as the head of his party, and his
humanitarian feeling as a great liberal, which was described by former
Secretary Dean Rusk:
I doubt that there are fewer people who hold Harry Truman in higher esteem
than do I. On this particular issue, however, I think that it would be fair to say
there were two Harry Trumans.
The one was the man who considered George Marshall the greatest living
American and who was strongly inclined to back Marshall’s judgment. Mar-
shall himself was very anxious to find a settlement in Palestine with which both
sides could live and which would not be the basis for prolonged fighting in that
critical part of the world. Some of the criticism aimed at Loy Henderson should
really be aimed at Marshall himself; on this issue he was in no sense merely
a puppet of his various advisers. You may recall, for example, that with Presi-
dent Truman’s full knowledge, I, myself, tried to negotiate with Arabs and
Zionists a military and political “standstill” to take effect with the expiration
of the British mandate in order to give a little more time to try to find a more
permanent solution. My negotiations failed over the issue of the rate of Jewish
immigrants into Palestine during the “standstill.”
The other Harry Truman was the man accurately described as having
strong personal feelings about a homeland for the Jewish people and strong
96 THE ORIGINAL SIN
sympathies for the Zionist cause. He, as all Americans, had been deeply
shocked by the full exposure of the frightful atrocities of the Hitler regime. Mr.
Truman was strongly impelled toward a homeland for the Jews where such
things could not be repeated, and this view was politically reinforced by a
large, active and dedicated group in this country who were working very hard
on behalf of a Jewish State in Palestine. It would be naive to think that these
domestic political considerations played no part in Mr. Truman's own thinking
and decisions.
These two Harry Trumans caused the man himself considerable anguish
and produced on occasion some actions and instructions which appeared to
have inner-contradictions. I do not fault him unduly for this because high
political office is filled with similar problems.!7!
British historian Dr. Arnold Toynbee similarly referred to the
Truman dichotomy:
The Missourian politician-philanthropist’s eagerness to combine expediency
with charity by assisting the wronged and suffering Jews would appear to
have been untempered by any sensitive awareness that he was thereby abet-
ting the infliction of wrongs and sufferings on the Arabs; and his excursions
into the stricken field in Palestine reminded a reader of the Fioretti di San
Francesco [The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi] of the tragic-comic
exploit there attributed to the impetuously tender-hearted brother Juniper,
who, according to the revealing tale, was so effectively moved by a report of
the alimentary needs of an invalid that he rushed, knife in hand, into a wood
full of unoffending pigs and straightway cut off a live pig’s trotter to provide
his ailing human being with a dish that his soul desired, without noticing that
he was leaving the mutilated animal writhing in agony and without pausing
to reflect that his innocent victim was not either the invalid’s property or his
own. !72
Others in Britain have not been as charitable to the President’s
motivations as the famed British historian. In 4 Prime Minister Remem-
bers, published in the spring of 1961, Earl Clement Attlee, former
British Prime Minister, charged that ‘‘U.S. policy in Palestine was
molded by the Jewish vote and by party contributions of several big
Jewish firms.”!73 The one-time leader of the British Labour party
insisted that Truman had been swayed by political considerations in
calling for the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine in
the midst of the 1946 congressional campaign. In defending his for-
eign minister against charges of anti-Semitism (Zionist pundits called
Ernest Bevin the “Haman of the Forties,” a reference to the Old
Testament villain of Queen Esther’s days), Attlee alleged that Truman
had gone against the advice of his own State Department and military
The Creation of Israel Revisited 97
people: “The State Department would tell us one thing, then the
President would come out with the exact opposite.’"!74
In Britain only to a slightly lesser degree than in the U.S., Israel
enjoyed for a long time!7> a strange, abnormal political position little
affected by the political party in power. Perhaps Christian expiation for
Jewish persecution and biblical fundamentalism, buttressed by a pow-
erful, assimilated Jewish community whose social ties reached even
into Buckingham Palace,!76 were the important factors in winning
British support for Zionism at the outset of the Palestine problem. But
British foreign policy likewise reflected the absence of an Arab vote
and a deliberate consideration for the ‘Jewish vote.’’!77
As a member of the House of Commons pointed out in a parlia-
mentary debate:
There are no Arab members in Parliament. There are no Arab constituents to
bring influence upon their members in Parliament. There is no Arab control
of newspapers in this country. It is difficult to get a pro-Arab letter in the Times.
There are in the City no Arab financial houses which can control amounts of
finance. There is no Arab control of newspaper advertising in the country.
There are no Arab ex-colonial secretaries.”"!78
Time never settled Anglo-American differences over the major
responsibility for the Palestine debacle. From his home in Indepen-
dence, the peppery former President had acidly commented on the
criticism directed against his administration by Attlee: ‘““The British
were highly successful in muddling the situation as completely as it
could possibly be muddled.” To which Lord Attlee promptly retorted:
“There is no Arab vote in America!”
Anglo-American concern for the Jewish vote forged the final di-
sastrous and unjust decision. The appropriateness of comparing the
U.S. intervention in Palestine to St. Francis’s Juniper action leaving the
“mutilated animal writhing in agony” is clearly manifest from these
undisputed figures. At the time of the partition vote there were only
650,000 Jews in Palestine while there were 1.3 million indigenous
Palesunian Arabs, either Christian or Muslim. Under the partition
plan, 56.4 percent of Palestine was given for a Zionist state to people
who constituted 33 percent of the population and owned about 5.67
percent of the land. Nothing so totally illustrates the devastating abne-
gation of the Western professed ideal of self-determination than these
U.N. maps on Palestine’s land ownership (1945) and population distri-
bution (1946). This is the “original sin,” which underlies the entire
Palestine conflict.
ALESTINE (945)
Prepared on the Instructions of
Sub Commitee 2 of the Ad Hoc Commitee
on the Palestinian Question
PERCENTAGES
ARAB jewish
PUBLIC & OTHERL
Less than ‘| 4%
90
Map No. 94(b) United Nations U.N. Presentation 574(b)
August 1950
DALESTINE (1949) nérasurion oF OF
+ POPULATION BY SUB DISTRICTS
WITH PERCENTAGES OF JEWS & ARABS
ARABS JEWS
(Including the Smaller Minorities
shma
yi
BEERSHEBA ©
Map No. 93(b) United Nations U.N. Presentation 573(b)
August 1950
100 THE ORIGINAL SIN
Whatever motivation history may finally ascribe to the “Man from
Independence” for his role in the affair, what is already shatteringly
clear is the crying injustice inflicted upon the Arabs, the deep harm
wrought to Jews and Judaism, and the inordinate price the American
people have paid for the handsome dowry Truman bestowed on fledg-
ling Israel. History has already recorded how far short the President
fell of his stated goal of reconciling “regard for the long-range inter-
ests of our country with helping those unfortunate victims of persecu-
tion find a home.”
No doubt what reluctance the ‘‘Missourian politician-philanthro-
pist’”’ might initially have had in equating “home” with “‘state’’ was
driven from him by the facts of life. Certainly his training under the
Pendergast machine had, above all, taught him to be a political realist.
But in ignoring the advice of three of his Secretaries of State—James
Byrnes, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson—and of Secretary of
Defense James Forrestal, Truman may have written U.S. foreign pol-
icy’s ‘American Tragedy.”
Why and how such basic facts regarding the creation of Israel, so
vital to the survival of their country and to civilization, have been so
successfully secreted from the American people requires a careful
examination of a cover-up and a cover-over that have few parallels in
the annals of man.
PART TWO
THE COVER-UP
It is a catastrophe when evil triumphs, but it is an even greater
catastrophe if it compels the just to resort to injustice in order to
combat it. Unless the world returns to moral conscience, to the
value of the spirit and its primacy over force, power is only a
source of destruction.
Pau TOURNIER
IV Inside Israel
Things are seldom what they seem
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
—Gilbert and Sullivan, H. M. S. Pinafore
On November 10, 1976, the General Assembly of the U.N., meeting
in plenary session, fired a new shot heard ’round the world. By the
overwhelming vote of 72 to 35, representing 73 percent of the world’s
population, the international body reaffirmed the earlier overwhelm-
ing committee vote of a resolution terming Zionism ‘a form of racism
and racial discrimination.”
In the debate preceding the count, Zionists hysterically ranted
against the U.N. and, supported by the New York Times, charged that
adoption of the resolution “would encourage anti-Semitism in other
countries.” U.S. Permanent Representative to the U.N. (and Senator-
to-be) Daniel Patrick Moynihan angrily assailed the resolution and its
sponsors, particularly venting his Irish spleen in a flow of venom
directed against Idi Amin,! Uganda’s controversial Chief of State and
President of the Organization of African Unity. Member countries of
that organization, together with the Arab and Eastern blocs, con-
stituted the principal sponsors of the most serious indictment of the
Israel state since its founding in 1948. For the first time the legitimacy
of the state was being challenged.
After the result of the vote was announced by the President of the
Assembly, Ambassador Moynihan rose from his seat, strode over to
Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog and, as if in total defiance of the
onlooking members of the international body, warmly embraced him.?
In banner headlines the press screamed: “Shame of the U.N.”
“Repugnant.” “Anti-Semitic.” The Western world recoiled in varying
degrees of shock, anger, and amazement. To the man in the street, the
103
104 THE COVER-UP
action conveyed little meaning save that ‘‘the Arabs are ganging up on
the Jews again.”” To only a handful of Americans did the word ‘‘Zion-
ism” ring the slightest bell.3 Even to most of those who followed the
course of the U.N. debate, the censure of Israel with the charge of
racism, normally leveled against the Nazi and Fascist enemies of the
Jews, was totally unintelligible. The Zionist movement, still hiding
behind the facade of refugeeism and humanitarianism, had not sur-
faced on its own; ‘‘Palestinians”’ was still but another word for Arabs,
connotating a cross between wild-eyed terrorists and Cadillac-owning
bedouins, whose avarice was increasingly responsible for the inaccessi-
bility of reasonably priced gasoline and oil.
Jews and Israelis were easily identifiable, but not so Zionists. The
claim that the State of Israel had come into existence primarily to
provide a home for the victims of Hitler’s persecution had gone un-
challenged. That the 1947 demographic makeup of Palestine, two-
thirds Arab (Muslim or Christian) and but one-third Jewish, neces-
sitated an abnormal sovereignty and an abnormal nationalism for the
new nation occurred to only a few observers. Nor was there awareness
that behind the splendid facade of refugeeism, the need to end the
perennial homelessness of “the Jewish people’”—the nationalist ex-
cuse for establishing a state—was being advanced by a scarcely recog-
nized, powerful worldwide movement, Zionism.
It mattered little or not at all that Judaism, the faith, was in fact
far from identical to Zionism, the political movement, and that all Jews
were not Zionists. Some Jews, including members of the Neturei Karta,
who observed all the tenets of religious observance most meticulously,
vehemently opposed the nationalist concept. The Zionist movement,
ushered in by Theodor Herzl, had called only for a “legally secured
home in Palestine”’ at its Basel Congress of 1897, but then used all-out
world sympathy for the oppressed Jews as a sub rosa cover for achiev-
ing its real goal, Zionist statehood. And the World War II holocaust
removed the last obstacles to the creation of the Jewish state in what
was once Palestine.
The new white flag with a single blue six-pointed star, hoisted on
May 15, 1948, on a mast on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
meant one thing to the Zionist leadership inside the new state and
quite another to the world outside. Even as Christian and Jewish sup-
porters were viewing Israel as a state for refugees, the President of the
World Zionist Organization, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, was openly de-
claring what he had been saying behind closed doors for years to his
followers: “Zionism is not refugeeism. Refugees or no refugees, we
Inside Israel 105
still have to realize our ancient goal of recreating a Jewish state in
Palestine.”
Zionists had always talked of the necessity of ‘the redemption of
the Jewish people through the in-gathering of the exiles,”’ insisting that
the tag “exiles” be applied to all Jews outside Israel. U.S. Zionists
refused to accept personal residence in Israel as the sole criterion for
being a good Zionist and exercising some control over Israeli policy.
This issue came to a head at the 23rd World Zionist Congress of 1951,
where a compromise was reached whereby the call for “‘in-gathering”
was toned down to make it only one task of Zionism rather than the
sole instrument of Jewish redemption. In this way those who did not
wish to be ‘‘in-gathered”’ themselves, at least not for the moment, were
able to continue their proselytizing among others of American Jewry
and remain in good standing in the party.
From the outset of the drive to win a state for themselves, the
Zionists had to hide their true nationalist, political ambitions beneath
the outer garment of philanthropy in order to win the support of the
wealthy and influential Jewish families who were non-Zionist, if not
anti-Zionist, at that time. A forthright exposition of true Zionist goals
would have endangered the success of the movement.
However successful Zionist leadership may have been in hood-
winking other Jews in the West into support of statehood on false
grounds, deception was of little avail in trying to solve the far more
complicated questions confronting Zionism in the Middle East itself.
The 1948 demographic makeup of the new Israeli state, with its 42
percent Arab minority, exposed the Jewish majority to the much
higher Arab birth rate and to the very real possibility that the Arabs
of Israel might one day become the majority and the Jews a minority
within their own state. The Zionist leaders who took over the helm of
Israeli government on May 15, 1948, made crystal clear that they
would never permit this to happen. “Israel is the country of the Jews
and only of the Jews,” David Ben-Gurion told Ibrahim Shabath, editor-
in-chief of Al-Mersad.+ Golda Meir declared to the Knesset: “I want a
Jewish state with a decisive Jewish majority which cannot change over-
night. .. ."” These remarks of two Israeli Prime Ministers reflected the
identical outlook of Israel’s founder, Theodor Herzl, who had written
in his Dianes: ‘We must expropriate gently the private property on the
estates assigned to us. We should try to spirit the penniless Arab
population across the borders by procuring employment for it in the
transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country.’’5
Such remarks, if uttered by other than Jews and Israelis, would
106 THE COVER-UP
have been forthrightly condemned as racist. But by commanding
world sympathy—invoking the specter of Hitler whenever necessary—
and talking in terms of security to defend actions taken within the state,
Israel continued to hide from the outside world the truth on what was
going on within the country. Ignorant, misled Americans insisted on
judging the Middle East conflict in terms of the survival of refugees
from Hitler, never as the Zionist building of a nation that required
expulsion of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people from
their country, along with expropriation of their lands, homes, and
property. (A controversial television documentary showing Israeli sol-
diers expelling Arabs from a border village in the 1948 war was first
banned by the Minister of Education but then shown in Israel on
February 13, 1978.)
The new Israeli state moved swiftly to ensure a permanent Jewish
majority in the country and to become the exclusivist state for which
their dogma called. The Zionist leadership set in motion a simulta-
neous dual flow: immigrationof Jews into the country and emigration
of Arabs from the country. The Diaspora Jews were incessantly re-
minded of the dangers of anti-Semitism. To push out Arabs, to “‘fear-
in” Jews, and to wipe out in the Western world any meaningful dif-
ferentiation between Jews and Zionists became the imperatives of the
supranationalist movement working in cooperation with the govern-
ment of Israel. “Greater Israel,” the slogan of the expansionist opposi-
tion Herut party of Menachem Begin, quietly and gradually was taken
over by the Labor Establishment as part of its own program during its
May 1948 to May 1977 rule.
Israel’s quest for “Lebensraum” (living room)—and without
Arabs—has remained immutable from the outset, first in Israel proper
and then after 1967 in the occupied territories. The fear in Israeli
circles has been that between the 1.4 million Arabs who live on the
West Bank and in Gaza, and the 574,000 within Israel proper—and
with the comparative fertility rate of 3.2 per 100 for Jews, 7.1 for
“non-Jews,” and 8.3 for Moslem Arabs, according to the Jerusalem Post
of October 3, 1977—the Israeli Jews by the end of the century would
be outnumbered by the Palestinian Arabs. The grave dilemma was how
to keep the land without the people so as not to become a minority
within their own state.
Forcing out the Arabs was one way of accomplishing this. The
June war of 1967 helped. For example, the 43,000 refugees subsisting
in the Akabet Jabeer refugee camp had been reduced to 3,000 after the
Palestinians were driven across to camps on the east side of the Jordan
Inside Israel 107
River. An additional 55,000 other refugees from the West Bank regis-
tered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
also fled in wild panic.
While plotting the further emigration of Palestinians out of the
country, the Israelis had to rely on the cheap labor force provided by
the Palestinian farmers. The Israelis made it more difficult for these
farmers remaining on the land by barring them from cultivating certain
lands as a security risk. By thus forcing the Palestinians off the land,
they naturally decreased Palestinian agricultural products on the mar-
ket, which was a consequent boost for those Israeli products managing
to reach Arab markets.
Further, in order to lure from their fields the bulk of the Arabs
working on the land to serve as a cheap labor force for building the
industrial side of Israel, particularly in construction projects, the Israe-
lis offered the farmers an incentive of a higher living wage than they
had ever received. This brought them off the farms and into the human
trafic crossing over the Jordan River. Robbed of this cheap labor, and
already drained by calls to military service, Israel would have been
even more hard-pressed for manpower.
By taking manpower from Palestinian agriculture and diverting it
to Israeli industrial development, the Palestinian agricultural base has
been endangered. Plantations lie fallow, and large-scale Palestinian
migration has ensued—precisely the Zionist aim of holding Arab land
without its people.
The Zionists enjoy their cake and are able to eat it, too—to the
applause of the unknowing world. The widely publicized “‘open
bridge”’ policy, permitting the flow of Palestinians to and from the
West Bank into Jordan, was believed by world public opinion to indi-
cate Israeli goodwill toward its conquered people. But this policy has
not been carried out in any way for the sake of the Palestinians. With-
out the daily flow into Israel of 55,000 Palestinian Arab refugees,
earning a daily wage of less than $350,000 but buying roughly some
$30 million in Israeli products, the Israeli economy would have come
to a halt.
The share of Arab labor in Israel’s productive industries, accord-
ing to the Jerusalem Post’s economic editor Moshe Ater, by mid-1976
approximated one-quarter, divided equally between Arabs from within
Israel proper and commuters from the administered territories.® In
agriculture and building it is one-half. Even in manufacturing, the
share of Arab labor exceeds 10 percent. Arabs constitute about half of
the unskilled workers employed in manufacturing, and virtually all the
108 THE COVER-UP
farmhands. Arabs also dominate in a number of service industries,
such as hotels and garages, which involve inconvenient hours or
“dirty” work. As Israeli Jews continue to retreat from productive activ-
ity to services and middle-class professions, the Arabs’ economic role
continues to far exceed their numerical share of the population. And
this economic imbalance has accentuated tensions between Arab and
Jewish Israelis.
The “open bridge” policy also made possible a flow of Israeli
goods, particularly agricultural products, across the Allenby Bridge
from the West Bank into Jordan. Produce was usually carried in Israeli-
registered trucks with the license plates covered over on arrival in
Jordan. This permitted Israel to export its own products into the Arab
world through the use of Palestinian middlemen, to whom they offered
a good fee for their services plus a bonus, depending on the profit
earned. This explains the huge uproar when a consignment of oranges
stamped “‘Jaffa” found its way to the Amman market and the Arabs
discovered visible proof that they had been subsidizing their Israeli
enemy for years.
It should not be forgotten that the ‘‘open bridge’’ policy also
permitted a counterflow of tourist traffic into Israel with the invaluable
dollars of American Christians who were visiting Jordan and the Holy
Land simultaneously.
The “open fences” established by Israel with South Lebanon
represented a move toward achieving the Zionist goal of a ‘“‘Greater
Israel” to include what is now southern Lebanon up to the Litani
River, with its invaluable waters. This aspiration had been expressed
in maps presented to Versailles Treaty conferees in 1919 by Zionist
representatives.
The Book of Leviticus gives this biblical command: “The stranger
who sojourns with you shall be unto you as the native among you, and
you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of
Egypt.” This, like so much else in the Holy Scriptures, was ignored
from the outset by the government of the fledgling Israeli state. If the
Arabs, who were themselves amost pure Semites, could be accused of
anti-Semitism, as they have been because of their intense and unrelent-
ing vpposition to Zionism and to Israel, the show of bigotry fits far
more appropriately on the Israeli foot. The 180,000 Arabs who re-
mained and did not flee the new state upon its establishment in 1948
(now grown to 570,000 plus), and the 700,000 Jewish Arabs who
emigrated to Israel from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and the North African
countries, have been the victims of anti-Semitism, to use the popular
Inside Israel 109
parlance. As the editor of the Jewish Newsletter reported, they “have
been subject to a series of discriminations and persecutions which
would shock the civilized world, if they were fully known.’’8
While Israel is almost universally regarded as the shining example
of “democracy” in the Middle East, Israel’s 1952 Nationality Act
codified discrimination into law and made the Arabs second-class citi-
zens. Under this legislation all Jews in Israel automatically became
citizens of the state, but not one of the more than 240,000 Arabs by
that time in the country could gain citizenship without first proving
that he had been a Palestinian citizen before May 14, 1948, and that
he had lived in Israel continuously since the establishment of the state,
or that he had entered Israel legally after its establishment.
To become a naturalized Israeli citizen, the Arab had to meet six
requirements, including providing documentary proof of residence in
Israel ‘‘for three of the five years preceding the application” and
knowledge of the Hebrew language. A Jew, from no matter where in
the world, is exempt from these requirements as part of ‘the Jewish
people.” This grouping (in official Israeli government and Zionist
organization declarations the term is invariably followed by a verb in
singular form) has won increasing acceptance and a certain legal sta-
tus: ‘A national home for the Jewish people” in the 1917 Balfour Declara-
tion and “the historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine”
(italics added) in the 1922 preamble of the League of Nations covenant
were derived from the Basel program of the First Zionist Congress in
1897, forerunners to the careful and purposeful wording used in the
declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948:
We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the
Jews of Eretz Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand
by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream—the
redemption of Israel.9
To preserve the “Jewish people,” imperiled by emancipation and
assimilation, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared in the /srael
Government Year Book 1952:
The State of Israel is a part of the Middle East only in geography, which is,
in the main, a static element. From the more decisive standpoint of dynamism,
creation and growth, Israel is a part of world Jewry.!°
The Law of Return codified this Jewish people concept: “The
State of Israel considers itself as the creation of the Jewish people”!
and endowed any Jew (only in recent years have criminals, such as
110 THE COVER-UP
Meyer Lansky, and drug addicts been denied the right to immigrate to
Israel for permanent settlement). Without exception, Israeli spokes-
men continued to proclaim, as did the Israeli High Court in January
1972, “There is no Israeli nation apart from the Jewish people residing
in Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora.” And if Jews outside were to
be considered part of the state and were to be “‘ingathered,”’ the other
side of the coin was that more Palestinians had to be removed, let alone
not permitted to return home, to make room for incoming Jews. Under
this law a Jew may become a citizen of Israel after one minute in the
land, a status that can be denied to an Arab although he may have been
born in the land and his forebears been there for a thousand years.
When Israel annexed the eastern Arab portion of captured Jerusalem
in 1967, thousands of Palestinian Arabs fell within the borders of the
enlarged State of Israel—but ten years later many were still being
denied Israeli citizenship.
The Israeli Nationality Law makes it possible for a non-Jew to be
born within Israel’s pre-1967 territory and yet be doomed to inherited
statelessness. The Israeli Ministry of Interior has yet to publish official
statistics on the number of stateless Palestinian Arab residents living
under Israeli law. The State of Israel created two classes of citizens,
Jews and non-Jews, with differing legal rights. This implemented the
Zionist thesis that theirs was a Jewish state belonging to the “Jewish
people” everywhere and only to Jews—in accord with Ben-Gurion’s
dicta.
Arabs who were granted citizenship in Israel were treated quite
differently from the Jewish settlers. Many were removed from villages
along the border in the interests of security and paid but nominal
compensation for their property. Those permitted to remain in their
villages were subject to strict regulations and military rule. Unul 1966
they were confined under curfew restrictions to certain areas. With no
access to civilian justice, they were subject to court-martial. They faced
restrictions on their comings and goings. They had to obtain a permit
to travel away from the border or to visit Jewish settlements, and Jews
were not permitted to enter Arab villages without written permits from
the government. Arabs in Israel held distinctive identity cards, differ-
ent from those held by Jews. The official Israeli explanation for this
strict rule over Arab Israelis was the necessity of security: ‘‘Arab states
sull threaten Israel with war, and Arab villages are situated near Is-
rael’s borders.”
A motion by opposition parties in the Knesset calling for abolition
of discriminatory military rule was defeated by the ruling Mapai party
Inside Israel 111
and its Religious party allies by a narrow margin in February 1962. The
relaxations of military rule then permitted were characterized by the
London Times as “‘not amounting to much... . It is the principle of
military rule that has been challenged rather than details of its applica-
tion.”!2 Zionist organizations in the U.S., then and since, have been
very sensitive to the charge raised incessantly in U.N. debates of dis-
crimination against the Arabs of Israel, even bringing certain Arabs to
the U.S. to make appearances on radio and TV and to hold press
conferences as a refutation to these allegations.
The underlying assumption of the system of military government
imposed upon Israel’s Arab citizens for eighteen years after the crea-
tion of the state was that every Arab was a security risk whose move-
ments and activities had to be constantly monitored and controlled.
Arabs could not travel within the country without special passes from
the military government. They could be summarily exiled from their
home villages and restricted to special zones, all at the discretion of
loca] military governors and without recourse to the courts. In some
cases entire villages were forcibly emptied and the land then turned
over to nearby Jewish settlements for cultivation. All this was done in
the name of military security.
Under this military arrangement, an unresponsive bureaucratic
apparatus was bred, totally unrelated to any military concerns and
interfering in every aspect of the communal life of the Arabs. Military
governors were known to cultivate and promote their own favored
Arab leaders, of course preferring those who would foster the interests
of the ruling Labor party.
Israel’s growing security problem, buttressed by the Israeli
Masada complex, underlay the decision to refuse to permit the Maro-
nite Christian inhabitants of tiny Kafr Baram and Ikrit to return to their
deserted villages. These Christian Arabs, who had always sympathized
with the Israeli government, had left during the 1948 war when the
Israeli army asked them to evacuate their villages for two weeks; an
Arab counteroffensive was feared and the towns were situated in a very
strategic position a few miles from the Lebanese border. They locked
their homes, collected their herds and stables and sheds, left eighteen
men to guard their property, and set out for temporary shelter in a
village two or three kilometers away. Thereafter, the Knesset passed
the Land Acquisition Act giving retroactive legality to the transfer of
the land of Kafr Baram to the Development Authority, ending any
hopes on the part of the evacuees for their return. The army then blew
up the houses in the village, and the next day trucks came to remove
112 THE COVER-UP
the ruins. Baram was wiped off the face of the earth. As the explosive
charges were placed around the walls of the houses, the evacuees
gathered on a hill above their village for one last look; it is called by
them the “hill of tears.”
In a 1974 letter to Prime Minister Golda Meir, the head of the
Greek Catholic community , Archbishop Joseph Raya, protested the
treatment of Christian Arabs in Israel:
There is not enough justice in this country. There is neither democracy nor
liberty. No end justifies injustice whether the end is to be the good of the state
or the nation. If you base security on the denial of justice, there is no accumula-
tion of money which will guarantee that security; not even an army as strong
as the Romans will ensure it.!9
Promises had been given to the inhabitants of the two villages at
the time of the 1948 war that they would be allowed to return. Israel’s
Supreme Court in a 1951 decision ruled that the citizens of Ikrit were
not refugees but Israelis, and as their property had not been aban-
doned, there was no legal right to include it with enemy absentee
property. But the military declared they could not return for “security
reasons,” the area having been declared ‘‘closed territory.”
A letter to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz made the telling
point:
If the Israeli government is not capable of reaching a just and free agreement
with Arab inhabitants who are under its rule and with local refugees within the
boundaries of the state, and on the basis of respecting their basic rights, how
will it be able—on the basis of its present policy—to reach a just and lasting
agreement with neighboring Arab countries, in a solution of the Israeli-Arab
conflict by peaceful means in joint agreement?
One of the writers for another of the Israeli newspapers, Yediot
Aharonot, viewed this problem from a very opposite and sentimental
viewpoint:
There is another point which Kafr arouses a spiritual attachment in the people
of Kafr Baram and Ikrit despite the lack of historical proof and only by intui-
tion. It seems to me that most of the Maronites in the Galilee and Lebanon
are the survivors of Jewish villages whose inhabitants converted to Christianity
in the oppressive period of the Byzantine authority. The inhabitants of Baram
and Ikrit have very Jewish eyes, and the Aramic language in which their prayers
are written also strengthens this supposition. Finally, all my sensitive spiritual
motivation whispers to me, “They must be treated well and returned to their
inherited land.” But here I find myself in a difficult conflict with my Zionist
conscience.
Inside Israel 113
This same writer went on to admit that there was a basic unresolved
conflict inasmuch as the Arabs, as well as the Israelis, have a deep
sentimental attachment to the land of their fathers, “which lights the
fires of hatred against us.’ He then decided that he must put aside his
sentimental feelings and permit his Zionist inclinations to win out
because if these people were permitted to return to their land it would
mean the “uprooting of the Zionist theory.”
What really decided the fate of the citizens of these two little
villages was that their moral right to return was subordinated to gov-
ernment fear of permitting more Arabs to live near the troublesome
Lebanese border. Even seven hours of intense conversation between
Meir and Israel’s intelligentsia could not alter the mind of the Prime
Minister, who was worried lest a precedent be established for the
return of other Arabs to lands taken from them, both in sensitive
regions and elsewhere. Even the public admission by Tel Aviv Univer-
sity Law School Dean Amnon Rubinstein that the return of the villages
would not demand “‘the addition of a single soldier in the region’”’ was
of no avail.
The tragedy of the village of Baram is not unique. It is an example
of how much of Palestine was expropriated by force. General Chaim
Bar-Lev stated in Yediot Aharonot on August 8, 1972:
It’s first and foremost a security matter. The minority (non-Jewish villages on
the Lebanese borders) are extremely important, and we have no wish to add
to their number. . . . If we now allow the return of Kafr Baram, we would be
creating a precedent, and there are several other villages whose inhabitants
have also been evicted.
More direct and blunt was Yoram Bar Porath, writer for the same
newspaper:
It is the duty of the Israeli leaders to explain to the public with clarity and
courage a number of facts that have been submerged with the passage of time.
The first of these is the fact that there 1s no Zionism, settlement, or Jewish State without
eviction of the Arabs and expropration of their lands.'4 (Italics added.)
Baram’s 200 families, who now live in nearby Gush-Halav, want
only to have the uncultivated land returned to them, thus ending their
thirty-year exile. ““Baram is where I grew up and laughed,” said Maro-
nite Argoub Mtanes. ‘That is where we want to live.”!5 Although the
Prime Minister’s Adviser on Arab Affairs, Shmuel Toledano, long ago
conceded the loyalty of the inhabitants of the villages and agreed that
they posed no security threat, the government has remained firm in its
114 THE COVER-UP
decision. The massive demonstration, supported by most of the liberal
forces within Israel and clerical groups, was reported in the Western
press, but to no good effect.
When Begin came to power he stated, as part of his new alliance
with Maronite forces in Lebanon, that he wished the return of the
people of Kafr Baram and Ikrit to their homes!® but as yet this wish
remains but a devout hope to the dispossessed people of the two
villages.
The London Times noted that military rule was not the sole handi-
cap under which Arabs in Israel lived:
A greater source of complaint for the younger generation is the lack of ade-
quate higher education and, still more, the shortage of jobs when education
is complete. Except in teaching, there is still not the scope for Arabs in public
service that their numbers or abilities warrent . . . they are worse off in
commerce and industry.!7
Nationally, economic and social disabilities also remain unaltered.
As far back as 1961, Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Israel
Moshe Brilliant reported that Arabs were barred from jobs even in
positions not remotely connected with national security, for private
enterprise regarded them as security risks.!§ Arab students often at-
tended university only after being granted travel permits limiting them
to one route and forbidding them to stop off on their way or to stir
from Jerusalem, except with the express written permission of the
military governor in their place of residence. Jewish doctors were
barred from residing in Arab communities where they were employed
at government health centers. This left such villages without medical
care after sundown. Every Arab or Druze working in Tel Aviv or Haifa,
even if he were a veteran, would have to commute daily from his village
to the city, where he might spend the night only if he had obtained a
special permit from the military governor, who was free to act com-
pletely at his own discretion.
Military governors controlled labor relations, awarded building
and business permits and marriage certificates, approved appointment
of teachers and municipal council members and religious officials.
These military rulers were known to force Arabs to sell to Jewish
purchasers from a nearby settlement by refusing permission to go to
town to sell their property. Permission was required to look for work
or to obtain medical help, and Arab children were known to die in the
arms of their mothers while waiting in the corridor of the governor for
a permit to see the doctor.
Inside Israel 115
Many Israelis were shocked by a letter in the Jerusalem Post Febru-
ary 3, 1964, written by an eminent Israeli, Dr. Peter Ben. He attributed
the death of twenty-four Arab children in a measles epidemic to the
fact that most Arab villages had no regular doctors at all. He accused
the Israeli Ministry of Health of negligence in treating the Arab
minorities, whom he referred to as “the country’s 20 percent of unin-
sured citizens.”
In calling for an end to military rule, former Minister of Justice
Pinhas Rosen said, ‘‘We must turn the Arabs in Israel into citizens with
equal rights in compliance with the principles of a really democratic
state.””!9 But when military rule formally came to an end, the life of
Arab Israelis was sull marred by other serious discriminatory actions
in force since the creation of the state.
Most of the Arab farmer-peasants lost their land during the first
(1948) Arab-Israeli war. In the wake of the armed forces, nearby kib-
butzim seized additional farmland from Arab villages. Under the 1950
Absentee Property Law, absolute power to declare any property or
person absentee was vested in the Custodian of Absentee Property
Land, and other property of absentees could be confiscated. Held to
be ‘‘absentee” was any Arab who “‘left his place of residence and went
[for any duration of time, even days or hours] to another place which
was, at that time, held by forces that tried to hinder the establishment
of the State of Israel.”’ Thirty thousand Palestinians who had fled from
one part of Israel to another during the fighting were thus declared
absentees and lost their property. For example, half of the Arab inhabi-
tants of Kafr Elut remained in their village, but the other half took
refuge in Nazareth. All were declared absentees, and those who re-
mained in their homes were required to make payment to the Custo-
dian for use of their own lands.
The Land Acquisition Law of 1953 legalized seizures of Arab
lands that had taken place to date. Arabs who owned land in Israel and
remained behind, but had moved or beer’ moved elsewhere, were
compensated in cash based on the 1950 value, which ranged between
15 and 25 Israeli pounds per quarter acre (dunum) rather than the
1953 value, which was somewhere between 250 and 350 Israeli pounds
per quarter acre. The pound had depreciated from $2.80 in 1950 to
$1 at the time of the new legislation. Jewish writer Derrick Tozer
described these laws as “extraordinary, even in modern times.” The
Tel Aviv newspaper Ha ‘aretz protested: “There is no reason to legalize
the fact that certain farms exploited the victory of the state and seized
for their own benefit the lands of their neighbors.’’2°
116 THE COVER-UP
While serving as Minister of Agriculture, Moshe Dayan intro-
duced in 1961 in the Knesset the Agricultural Lands Condolidation
Law, allegedly designed to consolidate scattered land parcels in Gali-
lee and permit the establishment of twenty new Jewish settlements
there (even then the Israeli Establishment was worried about a possi-
ble Arab majority in this heavily Arab region). Commenting in Ner, Dr.
Shimeon Shereshevsky declared that the purpose of this law was to
bring about the same result as the 1953 legislation, under which “‘innu-
merable acts of injustice were perpetrated against those whose lands
were thus ‘acquired,’ including the land values fixed for them, com-
pensations which have not been paid in many cases to this day.” This
Israeli further noted, ‘““The bad and insulting attitude toward the Arab
land owners, whose lands and those of their ancestors were confis-
cated, quite simply because Jewish kibbutzim and moshavim?! wanted
to increase their holdings.” In the words of Haaretz, ‘‘Under the right
of expropriation, more and more land was being added to one section
of the population at the expense of another which happens to be
weaker.’’22
An ingenious use of other laws helped in the grab of Arab lands.
Under the right given to the Minister of Defense, an area could be
declared a ‘‘security zone,” which Arab cultivators were not permitted
to enter. Under the Cultivation of Wastelands ordinance, the govern-
ment was authorized to take over land not cultivated. Since the decla-
ration of a security zone results in the area not being cultivated, it
could then be taken over by the government and given to Jewish
settlers, who were permitted to enter and cultivate it. By these and
similar means, as early as 1965 some 3,125,000 acres (12,500,000
dunums), more than 60 percent of the land of Arab Israelis who had
never left Israel, had been confiscated. Critic Shereshevsky stated that
the Israeli government was concerned with only one thing: “to remove
the Arab rural settlers from their homes and uproot them from their
lands, so as to force them to leave Galilee and the Triangle and go
elsewhere, to the large cities such as Haifa, where they would live in
the slums as proletarians deprived of hope.”
Not only did the Palestinians lose their land, they also lost the
right to work on the land. During the mandate, the Jewish Agency, the
Keren Kayemet, the Keren Hayesod, the Histadrut (whose official
name is General Federation of Jewish Labor in Palestine), and almost
all Jewish public and private institutions made it a rule that no Arab
was to be employed. Under the Mandate, according to a British High
Commissioner report, “the principle of persistent and deliberate boy-
|
Inside Israel 117
cott of Arab labor had been set in force, although it was contrary to
the Mandate . . . and an increasing source of danger to the country.’’23
Article 3 of the constitution of the Jewish National Fund, which
holds most of the agricultural land in Israel, declares that land “‘is to
be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people,” and “‘in all
works and undertakings carried out or furthered by the Jewish Agency,
it shall be deemed to be a matter of principle that Jewish labor shall
be employed.” This proviso appears as Article 23 in standard land
leases, along with the proviso that the ‘“‘employment of non-Jewish
labor shall constitute adequate proof as to damages.” Near civil war
and bloodshed ensued when certain Jewish owners of orange groves
tried to hire the cheaper and sometimes better trained Arab laborers
for their groves. When this racist clause was incorporated into Israeli
law on August 1, 1967, as part of the Agricultural Settlement Law,
Knesset opposition member Uri Avnery stated, ‘‘This law is going to
expel Arab cultivators from the land that was formerly theirs and was
handed over to the Jews. We shall be acting in accordance with the
verse which says, ‘Hast thou killed and also inherited?’ ” It was only
in 1959 that the monolithic Histadrut began to accept Arab labor
members into its ranks.
Even after the controls imposed by military rule had been
removed, the Israeli Arabs were still treated as a conquered and sus-
pect population. In 1948 and 1949 Israel adopted the Emergency
Defense Regulations from the British World War II decrees, absolutely
restricting the movement of all Palestinians, both Arab and Jewish.
This became the most feasible instrument of oppression and eviction
that the Zionist regime could muster. Supplemented by travel limita-
tions and expulsions, it served as a cloak for the plunder of lands.
Here is a sampling from these far-reaching presently existing laws:
Articles 109 and 110 give power to enter anyone’s home at any hour, day
or night.
Article 119 empowers the Military Commander to destroy a house if
under his suspicion.
Article 120 gives the power to confiscate private property.
Article 121 gives the power to expel from the country.
As mentioned above, the Minister of Agriculture under Regula-
tion 125 has been permitted to expropriate ‘‘fallow’’ lands. First, the
owner is told he cannot work the land; after a certain period of time
the area becomes fallow and the Agricultural Minister can then expro-
priate it. A former Minister of Defense said regarding this regulation:
118 THE COVER-UP
“The 125th paragraph on which the military government bases itself
in great measure is a direct continuation of the struggle for Jewish
settlement and immigration.”
Although the Jewish community in Palestine fiercely resisted the
same British mandatory laws before statehood, Israel now continues
their use against the Arabs. Israel’s one-time Minister of Justice Yaacov
Shapiro described these regulations in 1946 as “unparalleled in any
civilized country; there were no such laws even in Nazi Germany.” And
then the Zionist government applied them both to the Arab inhabi-
tants of the 1967 occupied territories and to Arab citizens of Israel.
Other Zionist leaders, including former Premier Ben-Gurion, just
prior to his death, defended the Emergency Regulations as the prop
on which the military government rested: ‘“The military government
comes to defend the rights of Jewish settlement in all parts of the
country.” Through such regulations, thousands of Arabs have been
dispossessed of their rightfully owned lands and tens of settlements
have been built on these closed areas, with the new immigrants arriv-
ing from the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
While the American media continued to draw a picture of a con-
tented Arab population enjoying the greatest benefits of ‘democratic
Israel,” far better off and far happier than their own brethren under
Arab rule, Arab youth in Israel were being brought up in an atmos-
phere of total oppression in which threats of house arrest, demolition
of their homes, eviction, or expulsion often forced them to deal closely
with police security officers. Young Arab students who refused to serve
as informers were told they could not receive the jobs they sought, as
was the case of one Nebil Saath, who could not obtain a job at the
Broadcasting Service in the early 1960s because he would not play the
role of a quisling. Thereafter, while living in his village of Um-El-
Fahum, southeast of Haifa, he was forced to renew his permit monthly
in order to leave the village for studies and for work.
It was under the cover of war that the mass displacement of indige-
nous Arabs could be most effectively carried out. In order to create a
larger Jewish majority, thousands of Palestinians had been forced to
flee from their homes during the initial fighting in 1948, and they were
then joined in exile by others who were expelled after the war had
ended. This policy enacted during what Israel called its ‘“‘War of Inde-
pendence” was equally so in the June 1967 six-day war. Reduction of
the Arab population in Israeli-occupied areas in 1967, as in 1948,
became a dire necessity and official Israeli policy. U.N. Chief of Staff
Odd Bull reported: “The Israelis encouraged their departure by vari-
Inside Israel 119
ous means just as they had in 1948.”?4 In 1967 the 1.5 million Arabs
in Israel proper and in the conquered territories, with the almost
three-to-one edge in birthrate, obviously posed the threat of an even-
tual Arab majority within a few decades. Direct annexation of people
as well as territory could only challenge Israel’s racially exclusivist
state. US News and World Report indicated that Israel was considering
‘‘a variety of schemes that would in one way or another prevent the
Arabs in the occupied territories from becoming Israeli citizens to save
Israel from ‘conquest’ by the Arabs from within.”’?5 Leaders of Israel
debated alternate “democratic” procedures for liquidating the prob-
lem.
In a report released in December 1970, the U.N. Special Commit-
tee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the
Population of the Occupied Territories found that there was much
“evidence of mass deportation and of the creation of conditions which
leave no option to the individuals except to leave the territory.”” The
committee further found that the inhabitants of the occupied areas
were being ‘deprived of leadership by the deportation or detention of
a considerable number of those persons looked upon by the inhabi-
tants as leaders.”
Declaring that any law is invalid if such law violates the provisions
of the Geneva Convention, the Special Committee rejected the de-
fense by Israel of its actions under the authority of the Defense Emer-
gency Regulations of 1945. On the basis of ‘‘considerable evidence,
eyewitness accounts, and newspaper reports,” the committee held:
There is a policy of collective and area punishment being imposed indiscrimi-
nately on the civilian inhabitants in the occupied areas . . . that such punish-
ment Is, in most cases, inflicted by way of reprisal for acts of sabotage of which
the resistance movement is suspected . . . the collective and area punishment
takes the form of destruction of houses, curfews and mass arrests. A common
feature of these forms of collective punishment appears to be the lack of
proportion between the act committed and the punishment imposed. It is an
established fact that Halhul was the scene of extensive destruction, that the
destruction was inflicted as a collective punishment by way of reprisal, and that
the Israeli authorities were responsible for the destruction that took place.?6
The committee was composed of representatives of Sri Lanka (Cey-
lon), Somalia, and Yugoslavia, whose findings were in line with those
of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Later on in the same year, the committee warned that Israel was
continuing to violate the rights of Arab inhabitants in the occupied
120 THE COVER-UP
territories and expressed concern that the ‘measures taken by Israel
all tend to show they will make the occupied territories socially,
economically, politically and judicially part of Israel unless some form
of supervision of the occupation is put into effect.”
Long after the stunning military victory of 1967, Israel continued
to pursue a policy of outright expulsion of the Arab civilian population
through deliberate intimidation, oppression, economic strangulation,
and psychological warfare. The goal was to keep most of the seized
territory but somehow be rid of the Arabs living there. In June and July
1968 alone, thirteen months after the 1967 war, 4,116 refugees were
driven across the River Jordan onto the East Bank, clearly indicating
the extent to which Israeli policy was being implemented by local
military governors. By August 1968 the refugee flow into the Kingdom
of Jordan had risen to 408,000, of whom 351,000 had come from the
occupied West Bank and the remainder from the Gaza Strip. Official
UNRWA figures indicated 80,000 refugees were squeezed into six
camps where conditions were appalling. The rest subsisted in Jor-
danian cities, suffering acute social and economic problems.
The flight from Israel of the original Arab Palestinian refugees,
who by 1976 numbered 1.5 million, has long been a matter of dispute.
Propaganda accepted by most Americans insists that the Arabs left
voluntarily, on their own accord at the behest of their leaders with the
intent of returning home with the ‘‘victorious Arab armies.” Aside
from the fact that no such “behest” has ever been recorded, the 1967
war exposed this as pure myth-information. History does sometimes
repeat itself, and 1967 pointed up what Christopher Sykes had written
in Crossroads to Israel, a book not unfriendly to the Zionist case, in
describing the 1948 flight: ‘““But if the exodus was by and large an
accident of war in the first stage, in the later stage it was consciously
and mercilessly helped on by Jewish threats and aggression towards
Arab populations.”27
In an article in the L@ndon 7imes,?8 two members of the British
House of Commons spelled out details of the psychological warfare
used in 1967 to “persuade” Arab Palestinians to leave their homes and
flee across the Jordan. Many left their camp in Jericho because of sheer
panic, but “rifle butts do seem to have been used in some cases (we
saw their imprint on some refugees), according to the parliamentari-
ans.
These two House of Commons members, Ian Gilmour and James
Walters, had upset the Israeli officials by arriving unexpectedly and
were thus able to view the true conditions of the crossings over the
Inside Israel 121
Allenby Bridge. Their comment is pertinent: ““The contrast between
the indulgence granted to Israeli trippers and the attitude of guards
towards the Arabs was shocking. Tourists can go to the Israeli end of
the bridge and photograph the departing refugees. Arabs who have
been separated from their families are not allowed to go to the same
spot to see if their children are alive.” The two British parliamentari-
ans were convinced that “the bulk of the refugees have been and still
are being forced out.”’
Expert psychological warfare served in other instances. Residents
of Bethlehem were informed that ‘‘unless they left within hours, they
and their homes would be blown up. They left.” In another village a
rumor was spread that anyone remaining in the village one hour later
would be killed. The entire populace evacuated their homes and, just
by chance, found buses outside their village to transport them across
the river. Such a desertion of a village has often just preceded demoli-
tion and the rebuilding of an Israeli paramilitary settlement in its place.
As reported in There Goes the Middle East,?9 the little town of Qal-
qilya, lying in the hills of Samaria, boasted luxuriant orange groves in
the coastal plain nearby. In 1949 an armistice line divided the town
from its groves. At the time of the first orange-picking season, many
people from Qalqilya went over the line to pick oranges from their own
trees. The Israelis concealed patrols in the groves and killed the pick-
ers. The resulting incidents were described to Western readers as
“armed incursions of bandits.’ These trying times, endured by the
Arabs for eighteen years, ended in 1967 when Qalqilya, as well as
neighboring Zeita, Habaleh, Deir Ghosun, Latrun, and Beit Yalu, all
captured in the six-day war, were bulldozed and the latter two villages
all but eradicated from the map.
The refusal of Israel to permit the indigenous Palestinian popula-
tion to return to their homes and the flagrant violation of civil and
human rights visited on its Arab minority, who at best could be consid-
ered second-class citizens (in fact, third-class because the Oriental
Jews from the Arab world were accorded second-class treatment), was
kept far from the attention of Israel’s many admirers in the West.
American Jews and Christians had been sold the notion that the Israeli
state was a modern “‘bastion of democracy” (some bastion—without
U.S. money and arms, Israel would totally collapse). Indeed, Israel was
democratic in the sense that its representative form of government was
far advanced over that of its neighbors. But out of abysmal ignorance
and a gnawing sense of guilt for the holocaust, the Western community
willingly accepted in toto the idealized Zionist fairytale, including the
122 THE COVER-UP
myth that the Arabs of Palestine were being well treated.
On paper, the Israeli Arabs, whose numbers have increased from
125,000 in 1949 to 574,000 in 1977, appear to be full-fledged citizens
with the same rights and duties as the 2.6 million Jewish residents.
They may vote, pay taxes, own land, run businesses, go to their own
public schools, hold union cards, carry Israeli passports, sit in the
Knesset, and, as New York Times correspondent Terrence Smith noted,
“occasionally even die in the same indiscriminate terrorist attacks on
the streets of Jerusalem.”
On the other hand, these Israeli Arabs are not called to serve in
the armed services, nor are their kin entitled to automatic citizenship
as Jews are under the Law of Return. And even in highly vaunted
“democratic” Israel, there are political discriminations. The Arabs are
grossly under-represented. For their 14 percent of the population,
they should have sixteen or seventeen seats, in the parliament; they
have five. Arab political parties, as such, are prohibited; only the Com-
munist Rakah party is free of Zionist control, so the Arabs give their
support to it.
But it is in practical economic, human, and social terms that Israeli
Arabs are demonstrably second-class citizens. Their per capita income
is significantly less than the average of Jewish Israelis; their educational
level is far inferior. While representing 14 percent of the total popula-
tion, they constitute only 3 percent of the university population, and
the proportion of Arabs in civil service is far lower than what they
would be entitled to on the basis of their share of the population. Of
a total of 48,792 civil servants in 1961, only 500—approximately |
percent—were Arabs. This situation has not substantially improved
since then.
Politically, it was only in 1972 that Israeli Arabs won the right to
join the ruling Labor party, after years of being barred. By 1977 only
about 4,000 of the 300,000 party members were Israeli Arabs, and in
the 120-seat Knesset, there were but five Arabs. With the exception of
these few elected officials, there are no Israeli Arabs in the high ranks
of the Israeli Establishment, no Cabinet members. There are, of
course, none in the army, and while Arabic is the official language with
Hebrew, few government officials speak it. There is no universal level
of instruction in Arabic. Public telephone directories are issued in
Hebrew and English, not in Arabic. There are many other benefits and
advantages provided by the government to Jews only.
Arab schools in Israel have suffered from a serious shortage of
books, forcing teachers and pupils to use old ones. And the situation
Inside Israel 123
regarding school buildings is also sad. Most are not fit to be used as
schools: old, with small, dark rooms and few sanitary amenities. Play-
ing fields, furniture, and other equipment are inadequate. But the
Ministry of Education has turned a blind eye to these conditions,
adding the pretext that he was unable to provide such aid to villages
that had no local authority (a municipality or a local council); of course,
the Minister of Interior has not yet established any form of local gov-
ernment in 40 percent of Arab villages, inhabited by 60 percent of the
Arab population of Israel.
In the course of ten fiscal years, 1960-1970, the state allocated the
paltry sum of ten million Israeli pounds (less than $2 million, three
quarters of which were repayable loans) for the improvement of Arab
schools in the country. This constituted only a minuscule proportion
of the Ministry of Education’s budget which totals tens of millions of
Israeli pounds.3°
It may be claimed that the Israeli Arabs are better off than their
brethren had been on the West Bank under Jordanian rule and in most
other Arab countries, that their standard of living is higher, their infant
mortality lower, and other social services improved. But they certainly
are far less free under Israeli rule than they used to be.
Israel’s treatment of her Arab citizens led the great Socialist leader
Norman Thomas to declare in early September 1961: ‘An Arab, with-
out too much exaggeration, can complain that the Jews are practising
Hitlerism in reverse. The Arabs have been made second-class citi-
zens.’’3! But few Americans read this sincere observation, and none
would have dreamt of linking it with the troubles in Israel that broke
out on September 22, 1961.
The alleged well-being of the Arab community in Israel was shat-
tered on that date when antigovernment demonstrations broke out in
Nazareth, Haifa, Acre, and other Arab population parts of Israel. The
uprising continued for five days following the killing of five Arab
youths who had attempted to cross into then Egypt-held Gaza and
were apprehended by the Israeli border patrol. The New York Times was
obliged to carry an account of the incidents on the front page, with
correspondent Laurence Fellows closing his report on this note:
The bitterest pill for the Arabs in Israel by far is a military government.
Perhaps 180,000 of the 220,000 Arabs in Israel live under army rule. They are
under curfew restrictions and are confined to certain areas. . . . In addition,
they are not given access to civilian courts under ordinary circumstances, but
are subject instead to courts-martial.’3?
124 THE COVER-UP
However contemptuous of the Palestinians most Israelis may be,
they are also deeply disturbed and worried about a vital demographic
factor they cannot control, either within Israel proper or in the occu-
pied territories. The Arab population, already being 67 percent in
Galilee’s western portion and only 39,000 less than a majority by
mid-1975 in the northern district (in 1974 but 759 Jews were added
to the population while the Arab population increased by 9,035),
threatened to constitute a majority of the total population of the dis-
trict. This led to the plan set forth in a secret memorandum submitted
to Prime Minister Rabin by the Northern District Commissioner of the
Ministry of Interior, Israel Koenig. “According to this rate of increase,
by 1978 Arabs will constitute over 51 percent of the total population
of this district,”” Koenig pointed out, which will “endanger control of
that area and create possibilities of military forces from the north
infiltrating in proportion to the acceleration of the nationalistic pro-
cess among Israeli Arabs and their willingness to have help [from their
co—Arabs].’’33
Reminiscent of another secret, racist report—the Klausner Memo-
randum of 1946, submitted to the Jewish advisers in the occupied
German zone so as to prevent Jews in the World War II concentration
camps from going to countries of their own choice rather than to Israel
—the 1976 Koenig plan for Galilee proposed to thin out the Arab
population through varied measures. To meet the challenge of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the rise of Arab national-
ism in the country, Koenig proposed ‘“‘to redress the drastic situation
by giving Arabs no more than 20 percent of the available jobs; by
changing the selection system to reduce the number of Arab students
in the universities and encouraging the channeling of these students
into technical professions, physical and natural sciences and thus to
leave them with less time for dabbling in nationalism—also to make
trips for students easier while making the return and employment
more difficult, which is to encourage their emigration.’’34
Further, this plan would have the Israeli government “neutralize
and encumber Arab agents in the northern areas in order to avoid the
dependence of the Jewish population on those agents and otherwise
disassociate the population from its present leadership.”85 To bring
the “rebels” under national control, payment of ‘“‘big family grants to
Arabs should be transferred from the national insurance system to the
Jewish Agency or the Zionist Organization.”’ Never has Israel’s Zionist
system of classifying its citizens into Jews and non-Jews been more
nakedly exposed.
Inside Israel 125
A blind eye continued to be turned for years to Israel’s intercom-
munal and interreligious relationships, particularly since the military
rule in Israel had been relaxed. On the surface, the Arabs of Israel and
the Israeli government seemed to have worked things out so that
visitors on conducted tours gained the impression that “everything
was coming up roses.” Then in the spring of 1976 savage rioting
erupted in several towns of the Galilee region of Israel.
In the face of the Israeli decision to expropriate 375,000 acres (1.5
million dunums) of Arab-owned Galilee land, and governmental en-
couragement of Jews to settle there, the threatened Arab villages and
defense committees declared March 30, 1976, as ‘“‘Day of the Land”
and launched a general strike in which the whole Arab population of
Israel participated. Normally passive in the face of denial of full civil
and democratic rights, the Israeli Arabs suddenly came to life. The
establishment of settlements in the occupied territories had long been
a thorn in the side of the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, but this
time the aggrieved protestants were the Israeli Arabs. The progressive
confiscation of Arab lands for Jewish development inside Israel was
keeping pace with Jewish civilian settlements in the occupied lands.
The Israeli Arabs were joined by a mass strike in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza, where protest demonstrations had been held the
three previous months. All sectors of the Palestinian people—stu-
dents, workers, peasants, and women—united to express their con-
demnation of twenty-eight years of Israeli takeover and misrule. Thou-
sands of Arab teenagers blockaded roads and stoned military vehicles.
Israeli soldiers responded with firearms. When it was all over, seven
Israeli Arabs were dead, with scores on both sides injured. Among
those killed was the teenage daughter of the prominent Nabulsi Pales-
tinian family, who had been shot in the back of the neck.
It was the worst outbreak of communal violence in Israel’s history
and created shock waves throughout the already beleaguered country.
Having previously convinced themselves that ‘their Arabs” had been
reconciled to the Jewish state, many Israelis had to wonder for the first
time about a new Palestinian nationalist time bomb within their own
borders.
The lid had been blown off Pandora’s box, exposing to the outside
world for the first time the true state of the Palestinian Arabs and the
actual facts of the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. What had previ-
ously been considered pure Arab propaganda regarding the oppres-
sive rule in the occupied territories and the third-class citizenship in
Israel proper was now exposed to world public opinion in a manner
126 THE COVER-UP
even the U.S. media could not ignore. Previously, Israel had been able
to appear as a benign occupier of Palestinian lands, but when news
services circulated pictures of Israeli soldiers and police grabbing
teenage Israeli-Arab schoolgirls by the hair, clubbing others to the
ground, and even shooting one in the back, it was difficult for the
Zionists to live up to their image as an open society and the only
“democracy” in the Middle East.
Many events had been helping to coalesce the rising tide of na-
tionalism among Arab Israelis with the continuing resistance of Pales-
timans Arabs in the occupied territories. In Gaza an agricultural pack-
aging plant had been destroyed by four masked commandos, involving
losses estimated from two to five million Israeli pounds ($400,000 to
$1 million). More importantly, in Nablus, even as the Israeli military
occupying forces continued to blow up homes of Palestinians sus-
pected of aiding the fedayeen, Palestinian flags began to flutter over
public buildings and minarets, and leaflets appeared calling on the
population ‘to continue the combat of chasing the enemy from all the
occupied territories.”’ In Jerusalem 500 prominent Arabs, including
the muftis of Amman, Jerusalem, and Hebron, attended a rally protest-
ing the occupation and Israeli reprisal raids on Palestinian refugee
camps. “Israeli murderers’’ was one of the slogans shouted to the
gathering. The December 1975 election of an Israeli Arab Communist
as mayor of Nazareth had been followed by the overwhelming PLO
victories in the local elections throughout the occupied West Bank and
Gaza. In this voting, temporizers and the old-line politicians were
thrown out, forced to give way to intense PLO nationalists.
Inside Israel, demonstrators marked the Prime Minister’s visit to
Nazareth, and slogans of solidarity with the PLO were shouted during
student demonstrations. Arab students in the universities, not permit-
ted arms or to serve in the military forces, refused to take guard duty
at the universities. As a show of independence, the inhabitants of
Nazareth were called by its Arab mayor and council to help the munici-
pality pay off its pressing debts.
The ‘Day of the Land” outbreak was the consequence of long-
simmering grievances of Israel’s Arab minority. Even as attempts to
bring about a dialogue on the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with
racism and racial discrimination were being totally suppressed, Pi Ha-
Aton, ® the weekly student paper on the campus of Jerusalem’s Hebrew
University, was publishing an article on the subject in Hebrew from the
pen of the country’s leading civil rights defender, Dr. Israel Shahak.
Professor of Organic Chemistry at Hebrew University and survi-
Inside Israel 127
vor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Shahak chaired the
Israel League for Human and Civil Rights. Citing laws and regulations
in force in Israel and known to everyone due to their rigorous enforce-
ment, he contended that “the State of Israel is a racist state in the full
meaning of this term because people are discriminated against, in the
most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life,
only because of their origin . . . one who is not a Jew is discriminated
against, only because he is not a Jew.”’ Starting with the right to live,
to dwell, or to open a business in the place of his choice, Shahak
dissected racism in Israel as it is today:
Most of the land in Israel belongs to or is administered by the Jewish National
Fund (JNF), which forbids non-Jews to dwell or to open a business, and
sometimes even to work on its lands only because they are not Jews! Such
policy not only enjoys here perfect legality (in contrast to a similar discrimina-
tion against the Jews which is illegal in most countries of the world), but is
supported by all the instruments of the Israeli rule. In such a manner many
whole towns were created in Israel, which are as the phrase goes ‘“‘clean of
Arabs” and this legally, or rather as we should say ‘‘clean of Gentiles (goyim).”’
In other towns, like Upper Nazareth, only one special quarter is “devoted” to
the dwelling of Arabs. Any attempt of an Arab to buy or to rent a flat from
a Jew is opposed openly and legally by all the branches of the government (the
Ministry of Housing, Municipality, etc.) and also by the illegal opposition of
the Jewish inhabitants, which is nevertheless supported by the Israeli police.
I can only remind you that nobody opposes an operation of the sale or the
rental of a flat in Nazareth, if the buyer or the lessee is a Jew, which means,
according to the racist definition of this word employed legally in Israel, a
human being who can prove that his mother, his grandmother, his great-
grandmother and the grandmother of his grandmother were Jewish. If he can
prove this, such an operation becomes all right all of a sudden and nobody
opposes it, neither the government nor the inhabitants. There is opposition
only if the mother of the buyer is not Jewish.
Shahak pointed out that Muhammad Ma’aruf, an Israeli ciuzen
from the village of Dir-el-Assad, tried to open a factory in Carmiel but
was prohibited from doing so because that town was “‘out of bounds”
to non-Jews and he had to build outside the “‘pure’’ boundries. How-
ever, a Jew may dwell or open a business in any place of his choice,
but only because his mother was a Jew; right is denied to those whose
mother was not Jewish.
This discrimination did not stem from any “‘security” reasons. It
is imposed on all non-Jews, including those who have served in the
Israeli army and may have been wounded. Ma’aruf, a Druze, and all his
128 THE COVER-UP
family ‘‘were obliged to serve a compulsory service in the Israeli De-
fense Force, just as Jews are. But he has not the night given to every Jew to
dwell in Carmel.” (Italics added.) And as Shahak notes, ‘‘a Jewish thief
or robber or murderer, who has completed his sentence, has the right
to dwell in Carmiel. But a ‘goy,’ a Druze, a Circassian, a Bedouin, or
a Christian cannot dwell in Carmiel because he happened to be born
to the ‘incorrect’ mother.”
In the eyes of this civil rights defender, the worst racists in Is-
rael are the kibbutzim members who will not accept into member-
ship ar Israeli citizen who is not a Jew ‘even in cases where a
daughter of a kibbutzim has fallen in love with one of its hired
non-Jewish workers. Any discrimination of that kind, if it is inflicted
on Jews in other countries, encounters—and rightly so—the shout
of ‘anti-Semitism’ . . . the Zionist State of Israel does exactly the
same thing as anti-Semites attempt—usually without success—to do
in other countries.”
According to the teachings of the Israeli Ministry of Education,
Jewish pupils from kindergarten on are taught the concept of the
“Salvation of the Land”: Land is “saved’”’ when it is transferred to
Jewish ownership. Personnel of the Jewish Nation Fund, with ‘the
most forceful support of the Israeli government and especially of its
‘security arms,’ are employed continually in ‘saving’ land both in Israel
and in the occupied territories.”
Israeli Arabs have no right to settle in the new town of Yamit,
established in occupied Egyptian Sinai, while non-Jews are being ex-
pelled from ‘‘saved” land. To Shahak, Zionism in this respect is worse
than the apartheid South African regime where whites are forbidden
to buy land in a “black” area and blacks are forbidden to buy in a
“white” area. But Zionism strives to ‘‘save’’ as much land as it can
without any limit in all areas of the ‘Land of Israel,” turning the land
“saved” into “one big apartheid in which human beings who were
born of non-Jewish mothers have no right to live.”
Regarding the right to work, the Shahak article called attention to
the story of July 3, 1975, in Ma‘ariv under the heading: “The Israeli
settlement authorities are taking action against the leasing of lands to
Arabs”’:
The Ministry of Agriculture and the Setthement Department of the Jewish
Agency have recently launched a vehement campaign to eradicate the plague of
land-leasing and orchard leasing to Bedouins and Arab farmers in the Western
Galilee. The Director of the Galilee area for the Jewish Agency, Mr. Aharon
Inside Israel 129
Nahmani, said that his office sent a circular notice to all settlements, in which
they are warned that the leasing of national lands for cultivation by Arab
share-croppers, as well as renting of the orchards for picking and marketing
by Arabs contradicts the law and the regulations of the settlement authorities and the
settlement movements. The management of the Galilee area enjoins the settle-
ments to abstain from this practice, and stresses that last year already, the
department pressed legal charges against settlements which did not abstain.
[Italics added.]
Shahak, remembering his concentration camp experience, angrily
writes:
Pay attention, please: Because I am a Jew, I am allowed to lease orchards for
picking or marketing, but an Arab, only because he is an Arab, is forbidden
this! The Ministry of Agriculture of the State of Israel together with the
settlement authorities will persecute and prosecute the Jewish settlements, for
doing things which are completely legal when done between Jews and Jews and
become a grave offence when done between Jews and Arabs! And truly enough
the settlements were punished. But since in this country “the settlements” are
a holy cow, because they are racist, a special privilege was granted to those
offenders who ‘‘broke the law.’’ They were not brought to court, on the
accusation of this most horrible ‘‘crime” of not being racists, but made ‘‘a
deal” and bought themselves off by giving “donations” to a mysterious fund!
The Israel paper Al-Hamishmar of July 21 the same year related the
end of this story:
The Ministry of Agriculture mentions a number of agricultural settlements
which were “caught” for breaking the law and leasing their lands for cultiva-
tion, or for the picking of their crop. Since they committed that offence for the
first time, they were not fined but were obliged to give donations in money to
a special fund which stands to be established in the near future, and the aims
of which have not yet been defined. The sum of the “donations” was £750,000
($75,000). If a settlement is caught once again leasing lands, all form of state
support will be interrupted. That settlement will not receive water-allouments,
will not obtain credit, and will not enjoy development loans.
The struggle of the government against the right of its own Arab
citizens to work and gain their means of livelihood had been opened
by the declaration of Minister of Agriculture Aharon Uzan that ‘the
domination of Jewish agriculture by Arab workers is a cancer in our
body.”
Apparently the Israeli Ministry of Housing has a special unit called
“Department for the Housing of Minorities.”” While the Housing Min-
istry is engaged in building flats for Jews only inside Jerusalem, its
130 THE COVER-UP
minorities department is doing the reverse: it “thins out’’ Muslims and
transfers them ouf of Jerusalem and further, according to Shahak:
The racist state of Israel has no human housing policy, as it exists in varying
manners in the U.S.S.R., in the U.S.A., and in Britain. The State of Israel does
not pretend to care about housing for a human being because he is a human
being, for a poor family, or one that has many children, because decent hous-
ing is a human need. No! The State of Israel because of its Zionist aims, such
as the “Judaization of the Galilee,” is carrying out two contradictory sets of
policies at the same tme: One of maximum care for Jews and the other of
discrimination against and oppression of the ‘‘non-Jews.”
Health has been dealt with in a similar manner through the ap-
pointment of a “Deputy Minister of Health for the Minorities.” Simi-
larly, in almost every area of life there exists a racist separation be-
tween “Jews” and “non-Jews,”’ leading to gross discrimination. Israeli
society can be defined as a society in which there are no Israelis, only
Jews and non-Jews.57 Calling the Israeli Mission to the U.N. in New
York for a population quote, one is asked, ‘“‘Do you want the popula-
tion with Arabs or without Arabs?” There are even separate statistics
for infant death rate, the 1972 tables showing the figures to be 18.8
for Jews and 40.2 for non-Jews. Almost all Israeli statistical data are set
forth in terms of “Jews” and “non-Jews.” In every way it is legally
crucial for a citizen of Israel to be officially defined as a Jew in order
to qualify for major privileges accorded only to Jews.
As Shahak pointed out, the State of Israel was not the only racist
state nor the Zionist organization the only racist organization. He, as
have others, deplored a paragraph in the 1968 Palestinian Covenant
(since amended) that could be considered a racist declaration, but this
Israeli progressive insisted that ‘‘justice first begins at home,” linking
the struggle against racism with that for peace:
Only a state which will abolish inside itself all forms of racism, beginning with
those it enforces itself, is capable of effectuating a policy which can bring all
of us to a stable peace. Such peace can only be one in which people will not
be discriminated against because of their origin, nor in their right to live or
work where they wish, nor in any other area of their lives, and in which the
government will treat everyone in the manner in which all human beings deserve to be
treated. (Italics added. ]
Government-decreed racism was reflected in the attitude of Israeli
citizens toward their Arab neighbors. A 1971 Harris Poll revealed that
two-thirds of the Israeli Jews assumed their Arab “fellow citizens” to
be lazier, crueler, crookeder than themselves, and fully 84 percent of
the Jews opposed marriage to Israeli Arabs.
Inside Israel 131
* * *
Although in the face of surrounding Arab enemies Israel gave the
impression of being a united monolithic whole, there was far less
internal cohesion even among its Jews than an outsider would ever
imagine. With people drawn from over 100 nations around the world,
the Israeli community is not homogeneous and is divided into many
conflicting groups. Aside from their third-class Arab citizens, the Jews
themselves are divided into the Sephardic or Oriental Jews from the
Arab and North African countries, and the Ashkenazi, whose back-
ground is European. The former already outnumber the latter and are
increasing at a faster rate, but it is the Western and Eastern European
Jews, rather than the Oriental Jews, who control the reins of the coun-
try and have made the Sephardim second-class citizens.
The leaders of Israel have been of European or non-Middle East
origin. Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Golda Meir were
born in Russia, Abba Eban in South Africa. Menachem Begin and
Shimon Peres were born in Poland, while Yigal Allon and Moshe
Dayan are the sons of settlers from Eastern Europe. Yitzhak Rabin was
the first sabra-Israeli-born Prime Minister.
Israel, despite the imposition of Hebrew as a common language,
is coming apart at the seams, even before the seams have been securely
joined. The history of more than 2,000 years of living separately under
varying cultures and rules in the Diaspora cannot be wiped out. The
community of persecution hardly makes a common bridge to trans-
form people who are, in essence, Iraqi, German, Turkish, French, etc.,
into the common denominator, namely, Israelis. The now simmering
struggle of the Sephardim against the Ashkenazi Establishment is evi-
dence of this. This split runs deep because it is not only a cultural
fragmentation but goes to the very essence of the individual being.
Imagine an Eastern Arab Jew, originally from Morocco or else-
where in North Africa, living in the slums of Jerusalem for more than
twenty years, looking out and seeing recent immigrants from Moscow,
Kiev, or Leningrad and noting the advantages showered on these new
arrivals. While those immigrants from the Soviet Union, settling by
1972 at the rate of 3,000 per month, were assigned apartments as soon
as they stepped off the plane, and were provided extremely favorable
mortgage rates, thousands of poor Oriental Jews who had arrived
years earlier were not eligible for subsidized rents and were still
confined to slum housing. Nor were they given cash grants, tax-free
incentives in terms of cars, refrigerators, television sets, stereos—all
luxury items.
Israel's Black Panthers are those Oriental Jews who have banded
132 THE COVER-UP
together under that name to dramatize their protest against the sec-
ond-class citizenship imposed on the darker-skinned Jews from Arab
countries, It took this Madison Avenue approach to overcome the
obvious reluctance of foreign correspondents to report on this long-
existing, simmering discrimination. Although some of their leaders,
including Kochavi Shemesh, have been jailed because of their partici-
pation in protests and public demonstrations—some featured by vio-
lence and Molotov cocktails—violence has not been their aim. These
protestants are not revolutionaries
Virtually nothing of the story of bigotry against the “‘black Jews”
of Israel had ever been carried previously by the American media, even
though the New York Times, as well as other major newspapers and
press associations, have long had permanent representatives based in
Jerusalem and/or in Tel Aviv. The 60 percent Sephardim (from North
Africa or Asia) have had to content themselves with 3 percent of all top
executive government posts and just 20 percent of the seats in the
Knesset. Under the premiership of Golda Meir, the eight-man Cabinet
included only Iraqi-born Police Minister Shlomo Hillel to represent
the Arab-speaking Jews (Iraqis, after the Poles and Rumanians, consti-
tute the largest Israeli ethnic group).
Many of these Oriental Jews are the very ones who were trans-
ported from Yemen in operation “Magic Carpet’? and viewed the
planes as flying birds sent by God to bear them to the Promised Land.
These Arab Jews are educationally and socially backward, and many
have been unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Some
cannot afford to send their children to high school, which costs about
$300 a year (1973 figures). It is estimated that at least 60,000 Israeli
families live in poverty, almost all of whom are Arab. About 67 percent
of Israel’s enrollees in elementary school are Orientals, but because of
the huge high school drop-out rate, they make up only about 18 per-
cent of high school graduates and a mere 5 percent of university
graduates. Somehow, the grants given out for college scholarships
have not gone to these Jews from Arab countries.
As far back as July 1951, Iraqi Jews had been holding mass demon-
strations in Tel Aviv against racial discrimination. These were re-
ported in the Alliance Review, the organ of the American Friends of the
Alliance Israelite and Université, but nowhere else. Other unpleasant
outbursts followed, to the point where Prime Minister Ben-Gurion felt
compelled to assail ‘Israeli anu-Semitism”’ publicly. Many of the B’nei
Israel sect—the brown Jews from Bombay, Rangoon, and Calcutta—
found themselves the object of discrimination. At one point Israel’s
Inside Israel 133
rabbinate even banned marriages between Indian-born Jews of this
sect and Jews of other communities. When this stigma was finally
removed, these particular Jews were still required to prove the purity
of their forebears before marrying out of their community.
A large group of these Jews sought repatriation to India because,
they claimed, they were being forced to do the lowest kind of labor and
were called “black” by the rest of the populace. Whenever assaults of
an unknown origin took place on dark streets, Tel Aviv papers almost
automatically reported “the assault is thought to have been committed
by a North African,” referring to the latest dark-skinned Jewish immi-
grants from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algiers.
A most serious race riot broke out in the summer of 1959 in the
slum district of the port city of Haifa. The battle between “‘black Jews”
from Arab countries and ‘“‘white Jews” from Europe lasted four days,
resulting in eleven Israeli policemen wounded, thirty-two rioters ar-
rested, and considerable property damage.38 While Arabs in Tel Aviv
in 1961 were demonstrating against the government, 400 Yemeni Jews
paraded through the streets wearing black armbands to protest dis-
crimination “they contend is practiced against them by the lighter-
skinned Jews of the country,” according to a far-back-page, small New
York Times item. Thousands of Christian and Jewish Americans visiting
Israel rarely bother to go beyond the conducted tour, or they turn a
blind eye to what has been going on in Israel’s intercommunal and
interracial relationships. How could they dare ever question anything
about the ‘land of milk and honey’’?
The reaction at that time of the Israeli government to the Jewish
Panthers was most enlightening. After meeting with their leaders,
Prime Minister Meir was reported by Time magazine as taking an in-
stant dislike to them. ‘Perhaps they were good boys once,”’ was her
comment, ‘‘and I hope they will be good in the future, but they are
certainly not good boys now.’’39 The Minister of Housing placed the
blame for the clash on the poverty of the Sephardim, mainly because
they “spent money they could not afford on bar mitzvahs, weddings,
and TV sets” instead of saving for housing.
The vast differences among the component ethnic groups making
up Israel are, of course, invariably obscured by the common front that
the Arab threat has created. But the mark of history has left an indeli-
ble imprint that cannot be patched together through a brotherhood
based on outside hostility, although this is an almost irresistible unify-
ing force within the new state. Israel comprises citizens from 102 lands
speaking eighty-one languages. Even Meir was forced to admit that
134 THE COVER-UP
hundreds of thousands of Israelis live poorly and “dangerous strains
have appeared in the inner fabric of Israeli society.’” While she denied
deliberate discrimination against Orientals, she charged that they have
brought a feeling of discrimination ‘with them in their suitcases [not
unlike the answer that Christians have given to Jewish complaints of
discrimination in the U.S.]. .. . But disadvantages exist, and they make
the problem very difficult.”’4° In 1973 Georgian Jews from the Soviet
Union, the newest immigrants at that time to Israel (many of whom
settled in Ashdod after Soviet authorities had eased emigration restric-
tions), organized protest demonstrations, hunger strikes and riots
against alleged discrimination. Their fellow Israelis called them “back-
ward, arrogant, clannish, and stiff-necked,”’ or worse.
Israel is faced continuously with an increasing number of strikes
and demonstrations. There are sharp and real differences between the
white Jews and the darker, or black, Jews from Africa and Asia, be-
tween Ashkenazim and Sephardim, atheist and theocrat, rich and poor,
new immigrants and new settlers, rising new cities and old villages,
those living on the kibbutzim and those living in the capitalist cities.
Conflicts are contained and a superficial impression of unity appears
because of the outside danger, the struggle for survival and the man-
ner in which this has been reported, or rather not reported, by the
Western media.
In late 1977 charges of racism were leveled against Israel by a
group of Black Jewish Americans, who filed a complaint with the U.N.
The group was jailed and deported from Israel for demanding access
to the community of Dimona in the Negev Desert, where more than
1,000 other American Black Hebrews live. According to Asie] Ben
Israel, minister of the Hebrew Nation of Israelites—Black Americans
of the Jewish faith, “The state of Israel is racist to the core.’’*! As
examples of this discrimination, Ben Israel contended that the Israeli
government “since 1971 has refused to give work permits to Black
Hebrew Americans, and although 350 children have been born to the
group, refused to issue birth certificates.” In addition, he insisted,
“They are kept in total, complete isolation. They cannot leave and any
person who tries to visit them is refused entry. If they persist, they are
jailed and deported as we were.”’
Cultural and economic differences are not the only ones that
divide the Israelis. The pervasive nature of religious law in Israel has
been kept out of sight under the cover of progressive achievement. But
with the election of Begin and a share of power in his cabinet resting
both with the ultrachauvinist National Religious party (NRP), which
Inside Israel 135
has served in every preceding government since the inception of the
state (the dismissal of the party from the coalition in December 1976
by Prime Minister Rabin helped weaken the Labor government), and
with the ultraorthodox Agudat Israel, the concealment has ended.
Too, the new Prime Minister is religious himself and unhesitatingly
makes liberal use of biblical quotations in his political posturings.
Through their control of the Ministry of Religion, the orthodoxy
of the NRP has emerged in the past with many controversial victories
over secular forces, whereby laws and customs of the Middle Ages have
been made part of Israeli marriage law. Jews cannot marry non-Jews;
male Jews thought to be descended from the ancient priests (Cohanim)
are not allowed to marry divorcees; and marriages performed by civil
authorities outside Israel are declared invalid, making the children
illegitimate. In addition to Sabbath blue laws and the strict dietary
regulations of orthodoxy, reform and conservative rabbis have not
been permitted to perform the most sacred rites of religion, marriage,
circumcision, etc.
Because these rabbis do not carry out the orthodox Halachah they
have, with the exception of a handful of conservative rabbis, been
barred from practicing their vocation in Israel, despite the vigorous
public demands of their rabbinical organizations in the U.S. for “equal
rights and recognition.’’*2 Meanwhile Reform Jews of American or
Conservative Jews of Anglo-Saxon backgrounds find themselves
chafing at the strict orthodox laws of the country, which make it so
dificult for them to worship.
The new Likud government immediately antagonized their fer-
vent Conservative and Reformed Judaism supporters by endorsing
legislation introduced by its two religious components that revised the
Law of Return to exclude Jews and their families who have been con-
verted to Judaism by nonorthodox rabbis. This strict construction of
defining who is a Jew complicated further the status of immigrants
from the Soviet Union, where civil marriages are the norm and many
have intermarried with no conversion at all.
Another part of Israeli religious law bars a woman from obtaining
a divorce without written consent from her husband. A widow must
obtain consent to remarry from her husband’s brother. She may have
to pay part of her inheritance to get her brother-in-law to give up his
right of “‘livirate’’ and, if he is a minor, the widow may have to wait until
he comes of age before he releases her. Children born of a married
woman’s affair or a common-law marriage are bastards and as adults
are not allowed to marry under Israeli law.
136 THE COVER-UP
The noted feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, in a markedly pro-
Israeli article appearing in Ms. magazine, was forced to admit that the
role of women in “the promised land” is not enviable. She writes of
a woman who had moved from the West side of Manhattan and who
“describes a life that sounds like the worst of both worlds. She has
communal self-denial, hard work and lost individuality, but she hasn’t
been relieved of time-consuming exhausting family chores.”’ Accord-
ing to Pogrebin, “even though women comprise one third of the Israeli
work force, they’re concentrated in the familiar female ghettos of
clerical work, nursing, and teaching . . . they earn 25 to 40 percent less
than men .. . and the kibbutz prototype of communal child care is
enjoyed by less than 4 percent of the population; most parents can’t
find or afford baby-sitters.’’43
The few Israelists who do know what has been going on in the
Israeli state are most unhappy about the situation and usually keep
silent. But in 1975 I. F. Stone, editor of the famed newsletter that bore
his name, spoke out:
Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside
world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, nonracial,
pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which
mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status
than Jews, and in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight
everywhere for their very security and existence against principles and prac-
tices they find themselves defending in Israel.
Ironically, one of the groups that has been most at odds with the
state is its most Orthodox element. Within the Mea Shearim sector of
Jerusalem there is bitterness toward Zionism that surpasses in intensity
all Arab oppostion. The ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta regard the crea-
tion of the State of Israel as usurpation by man of an act that God was
to bring about with the coming of the Messiah. This small, militant
group literally observe all the oral and written laws of the Torah.
When Meir addressed an Israel Bond meeting in New York in
December 1971, Neturei Karta members were joined in picketing the
Americana Hotel by a larger contingent of men and women from the
National Committee of Orthodox Jewish Communities, who were op-
posed to Israel’s conscription of girls under the Military Draft Act.
American Zionists were shaken up when TV news programs depicted
Jews with beards and peyes (long sideburns), who by no stretch of the
imagination could be written off as anti-Semites, in militant opposition
to Israel’s policies. This small group of religious zealots, who have on
Inside Israel 137
occasion reacted violently by overturning cars entering their area in
Jerusalem on the Sabbath, vigorously expressed its view through its
late leader, Rabbi Amram Blau:
We in the Holy Land find ourselves in an unfortunate position, both materially
and spiritually. Materially, we are against our will included in an independent,
nationalistic state, labeled Jewish, whose entire foundation and ways are op-
posed to our faith. Our sages warned us against such a phenomenon two
thousand years ago. The state has, since its establishment, been in a constant
state of war and bloodshed. Jewry has always lived in peace with its Arab
neighbors, and we are certain that we could have continued living in the Holy
Land in peace with our Arab neighbors. We decry bitterly the bloodshed of
these wars, diametrically opposed to our will and our faith. We look forward
with trepidation and horror to the future predicted by our Sages for this
independent state.
Spiritually, we find ourselves under the rule of Jews, devoid of faith, who
aspire to live in permissiveness and abandon. The education and culture in like
manner are leading our youth astray in our Holy Land. The situation is to us
more bitter than death itself, may G-d spare us.
Our Jewish brethren in exile among the nations of the world live under
no comparable awful threat, neither material nor spiritual. We find no formula
to turn back the wheels of confusion that have run down Jewry in the Holy
Land.
. .. Let the state’s power be unable to drag children of these Jews away
from their heritage. Do all that is possible to rescue these Jews from the lot
of this state; for they are not part of it—they opposed its establishment and
oppose its existence. Let these Jews be enabled to lead their lives as Jews and
bring up their future generations in the ways of their heritage, protected from
the general education and culture of the state.*4
Outside of small, inconspicuous ads that American members of
this group have placed in The Times, little of this philosophy reached
the American public. A rare Washington Star May 13, 1978 religious
page article on the Neturei Karta was headed “This is a Story I Wish
Someone Else Would Tell,” and ended:
With great trepidation I have told their side of the story given the volatile
nature of writing in such a vein about Israel, the next time I hope I don’t have
to write about Neturei Karta. . . . It’s safer that way.
The already overburdened American taxpayer, facing the exorbi-
tant inflationary cost of living (hardly offset by pro forma tax cuts), is
certainly entitled to see ‘Inside Israel’’ so as to learn why the U.S.
government is spending so many billions for a special, unique relation-
ship with a small Middle East enclave, which has been more than a little
138 THE COVER-UP
complicating the peace process. Behind the propaganda facade, aside
from the Arab question, what is Israel like for Jews themselves? Is it
the utopia Zionists would have the world believe?
The Israeli public must put up not only with rampant inflation and
the perpetual war economy, but with the highest taxes in the world.
As far back as 1971, before the October war that only made matters
worse, Time magazine reported that a man earning $15,000 a year
would wind up with a mere $4,500 after paying income, municipal,
property, and service taxes, and handing back money for compulsory
government loans. This same man had to pay 75 cents a gallon for gas.
His English Ford sold for $7,000 in Israel as against $2,880 in Britain,
and his black-and-white television set cost him a minimum of $600. In
addition to the high taxes, Israelis were obliged after the 1973 war to
purchase a compulsory war loan in the amount of 10 to 20 percent of
their income.
By June 1977 the inflation rate had increased to the second high-
est in the world, surpassed only by Uruguay and six times the rate in
the U.S. During 1976 it had varied only a few points below this. On
November 3, 1976, Israelis awoke to discover that basic food prices
had increased 20 percent and the already high cost of fuel had risen
11 percent. Within the following two weeks public transportation in-
creased 20 percent and electricity and water rose 11 percent.
The already high consumer price index was up 5 percent, and the
sharp price increases all but wiped out the 12 percent cost-of-living
increment for salaried workers that went into effect at the beginning
of October. To partially meet a budgetary gap, it had been necessary
for the government to slash state subsidies for such staples as milk,
bread, butter, eggs, frozen chickens, and cooking oil.
The new economic policies of Finance Minister Simha Ehrlich
under the Menachem Begin administration led to street marches by
thousands of Israeli workers protesting the latest price increases. In
October 1977 restrictions on trading in foreign currency were
removed (a violation had resulted in the unseating of Yitzhak Rabin);
this made the Israeli pound freely convertible and sent it plummeting
down to 7% cents from a once-high of $4. Commodities subsidized by
the government cost the consumer 15 percent more, the value-added
tax (akin to sales tax) rose 50 percent, and inflation hit the 40 percent
mark before the end of the year. The cost of most imported goods
jumped 45 percent.
Israel’s estimated defense budget for 1976 was $3.3 billion, about
40 percent of the total budget. In 1976 Israel spent 35 percent of its
Inside Israel 139
gross national product on defense-related items, an inordinately high
amount when compared, for example, with the U.S., which spends
about 7 percent of its G.N.P. on defense. And this was at a ume when
the country was enjoying a relative calm on its borders as the Arabs
were preoccupied in slaughtering one another in Lebanon.
Israel’s economic plight was becoming so desperate that one of its
famed reporters quipped: ‘“They tell us we are going to have to tighten
our belts until we get by with a Size 0.” It is a matter of proven
experience that Diaspora Jews give more money when the danger of
war is greater. The Israeli government, therefore, also has a great
vested interest in not making peace. In early 1967, for instance, eco-
nomic controls had produced a major unemployment problem. Invest-
ment was at a low ebb, and there was little demand for imports. Out
of that economic crisis and recession, war was the only way out. And
“Oh, What a Lovely War!” it was. World Jewry came across as never
before. Five hundred million dollars were brought into the coffers of
the Israeli treasury through the Special Emergency UJA Fund and
Israel Bonds. It remained to be seen whether, once again, with emo-
tionally minded American Jews both footing the bill and fighting
Washington pressures on Israel to become more flexible, war might
not be the ultimate method chosen by this U.S. ward both to break out
of her dire economic conditions and to resolve the peace negotiations.
The Israeli economy is perpetually confronted by two unusual internal
factors working against it: heavy dependence on outside gifts (largely
from the U.S.) and total dependence on a slave-worker population
composed of Arabs and Oriental Jews.
On the political front, Israel has proved no different than any
other nation. Zionist politicians differ not one whit from politicians all
over the rest of the world in their pursuit of a single goal: The quest
for power is the name of the game. Israeli politicians, as elsewhere,
indulge in their share of infighting, splinter parties, and power ploys,
and have been caught with more than their portion of corruption. The
scandals that have rocked the Tel Aviv establishment since 1974 in-
cluded a prison sentence for an ex-national health service chief (who
was about to be placed in charge of the Bank of Israel), convicted of
siphoning off public funds to his own Labor party; the suicide of
Housing Minister Avraham Ofer under a cloud of suspicion of land
fraud; and the arrest of a Rabbinical Court judge for unlawful currency
manipulations.
Israel’s Watergate was the investment fraud involving the busi-
ness conglomerate of Tibor Rosenbaum. Israeli and foreign Jewish
140 THE COVER-UP
capital, estimated as high as $8.5 million, had been deposited without
authorization in the International Credit Bank of Geneva, which failed
along with Rosenbaum’s Inter-Credit Trust of Liechtenstein. (The
Geneva bank was being used to finance arms purchases for Israel in
Europe.) Involved was France’s Baron Edmund de Rothschild, who,
with associates, had injected some $100 million in capital and long-
term loans into the Israel Corporation, the country’s largest invest-
ment organization, in order to strengthen the sagging economy. Tied
into these investments were 300 wealthy non-Jews (Holland’s Prince
Bernhard was also involved) as well as Kuhn Loeb & Company and
Samuel Rothberg, a top Zionist leader in the Israel Bond drive in the
U.S. for years. Underworld figure Meyer Lansky reportedly had funds
in the collapsed bank. The corporation had been formed at the cele-
brated Tel Aviv ‘Millionaires’ Conference” of 1968 when Israel was
basking in the security won by the six-day war and was pushing her
economic recovery in the wake of the recession, which had impelled
the launching of the conflict. The new company had been established
to promote the development of basic industry and manufacturing and
was formed by the conferees who, in addition to Baron de Rothschild
from Paris, included London’s Sir Isaac Wolfson, another equally well-
known Zionist, and Sir Sigmund Warburg. The usual incentives for
foreign investment had been granted the new company. At the outset
each million-dollar participation brought with it a directorship; at one
point there were 175 directors, illustrating the breadth of the project.
The new refinery at Ashdod in the south to process the 1967 war-
captured oil, petrochemical shipping, and hotels were some of the
investments into which the Israel Corporation had placed its funds.
Israeli shipping line Zim Navigation and the Haifa Refineries, both
owned in part by the Israel Corporation, had deposits in the bankrupt
Rosenbaum enterprises.
This sad state of affairs had been at least noted by a leading Israeli
weekly news magazine, which had earlier sarcastically commented:
“The contributors and donors to the UJA and the Israeli Bond inves-
tors would be quite interested in knowing that a great part of their
contribution and investments are now safe and well-protected in num-
bered bank accounts of Israeli employees and officials in the ‘Promised
Land’—Switzerland.’’45
Millionaire property speculator Shmuel Flatto-Sharon, arrested
by the Israeli government in December 1976 at the request of the
French government but released on bail the following day, proceeded
to run for and win a seat in the Israeli Knesset. An Israeli resident since
~~
Inside Israel 141
1971, Flatto-Sharon had been sentenced by a French court to five years
in prison. His parliamentary immunity to criminal legal proceedings
effectively blocked the French government’s request for his extradition
on fraud charges. Although he claimed to be willing to return to
France ‘‘at any time,” Flatto-Sharon was widely photographed by the
Israeli press, while sick in bed, studying Hebrew in order to assume
his parliamentary duties, and conferring with his lawyers. According
to the Newsletter Israel and Palestine (published in Paris by Maxim
Ghilan) Flatto-Sharon was praised in Tel Aviv as a “true prophet. Most
of our politicians smuggle abroad the money they steal from here. He,
at least, took to Israel money taken abroad.”
To climax Israel's fall from integrity, Prime Minister and Mrs.
Yitzhak Rabin, prior to the 1977 elections, were discovered to have
maintained illegal savings bank accounts in Washington, dating back
to his Ambassadorship. They were charged in court; she was fined
heavily ($20,000) and he resigned, turning over the government to
Shimon Peres.
This long wave of corruption was a factor—if not the major one
—in the downfall of the Labor government in the May 1977 elections.
As one foreign journal pointed out:
This preoccupation with scandal great and small, comes at a time when there
should be preoccupation with the possibilities of obtaining a peace agreement
in the Middle East. But the brutal Israeli taxes (which incite tax avoidance) and
the maze of rules and regulations on, for example, overseas bank accounts,
stem from the inordinate—and probably in the long term untenable—expend-
iture on defense that Israel requires.46
Israeli internal politicking, at the very least, adds to U.S. financial
liabilities and often threatens the whole world. In trying to consolidate
their own political positions, Israeli leaders continue to vie with one
another jn exploiting the troubles with the Arabs. One learns from the
book The Middle East: Quest for an Amencan Policy that “of the Middle
East actors, Israel has maintained the highest level of reported military
action during the 64-month period of January 1966 through April
1971. It has generated more hostile behavior to the Arab nations than
they have directed to Israel.’’47
As University of California political scientist Malcolm Kerr
pointed out in 1968, and it still holds true: “Any border incident
... could initiate a series of increasingly violent retaliatory actions on
both sides. Every threat uttered against Israel, whether or not it was
accompanied by serious intent, and every commando raid . . . gave
142 THE COVER-UP
credence to the views that the Israelis were merely retaliating.’"48
Because so few take the trouble to look “‘inside,” Israel is still not
infrequently depicted to the world as a small, confined country of
peace-loving kibbutzim, content to scratch out an existence on the
desert-come-to-bloom if only the Arabs would leave them alone. Her
aggressive posture, stemming from the Zionist number-one goal of
“ingathering the exiles,”’ bringing all Jews from the Diaspora “home,”
remains carefully concealed from her many supporters abroad, partic-
ularly innocent-minded coreligionists. If there were Jews from the
‘West taking advantage of the Law of Return or from the Soviet Union
“seeking asylum,” there had to be more land—preferably without
inhabitants, but land, above all. Expansionism and new frontiers were
the inevitable concomitants of Zionist dogma, which remained immu-
table and sacrosanct even as change otherwise appeared to be an
indispensable sine gua non.
Ben-Gurion always insisted that the “boundaries of the state
would have been larger had Moshe Dayan been the commander-in-
chief in 1948,” while Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, who commanded
the army in that first Arab-Israeli war, countered with the claim that
Ben-Gurion had ordered the cease-fire. These Israeli leaders were in
agreement that Israel ought to have “occupied the Litani River in the
north and the Sinai desert in the south and also liberated the whole
of our homeland,” to use Allon’s words.
Moshe Dayan gave expression to this same expansionist dogma
when he stated after the six-day war:
Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognized in the Partition
Plan. Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949. Now the six-day genera-
tion has managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights. That is not
the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will
extend beyond Jordan—perhaps to Lebanon and perhaps to central Syria as
well.49
Nobel Peace Prize winner S. Y. Agnon was among the fifty-four
signators to an advertisement in a 1968 edition of Ha aretz proclaiming
the birth of a new movement called EVERYTHING (i.e., Everything is
Ours) and demanding the retention of every inch of territory won in
the June 1967 war. The hawk faction, in Israel as in other countries,
invariably has a political appeal that doves and other elements lack.
They are able to unite the people behind simplistic slogans against the
outside “enemy.” Thus an aggressive stance and an aggressive behav-
ior have become necessary to many aspects of Israeli internal life and
Inside Israel 143
to relations abroad with Diaspora Jewry, particularly those in the U.S.
Yoel Marcus, writing in Haaretz in 1975, had this to say:
We shall have to mobilize American Jewry, still a powerful force. .. . We shall
have to explain again and again that a strong Israel is not only in the American
interests, but also still the only way to convince the Arabs to find some form
of coexistence with her.
We must make clear—and first of all to ourselves—that we do not neces-
sarily intend to play according to Arab rules. We shall determine which Arab
move is from our point of view a casus belli, and at what point we shall play the
game differently from the way others expect us to. If the Free World is fright-
ened and the West is in the process of decline, it may be that we have a number
of means available to terrorize it more than the Arabs could. A word to the wise is
enough.®°[Italics added.]}
Such veiled threats alluding to Israel’s possession of an estimated
minimum of twelve atom bombs, when combined with the Masada
complex which has so deeply permeated Israeli thought, makes for a
highly combustible compound, particularly under the command of a
Begin. Masada was the fort where the last of the Jewish Zealots of the
first century held out in their mountain fortress against the Roman
legions, and when faced with the choice of surrender or death, chose
suicide rather than submit to enemy subjugation. Junior Israeli officers
are administered their oath of loyalty into the army at the site of the
Masada Memorial. This kind of public ideal—although present as one
of a number of patriotic images in many cultures, as in the American
“Remember the Alamo’’—can be dangerous when permitted to invade
and dominate, particularly when combined with a determination to
take their enemies with them this time, as hinted in the Marcus piece
but spelled out more explicitly in Commentary editor Norman Podhor-
etz’s article, ‘“The Abandonment of Israel.’’5!
Modern Jewish zealots, inside and outside the Israeli state, were
often being reminded of Masada as the high point of Jewish history.
This was reflected in the 1969 speech of then Defense Minister—now
Foreign Minister—Moshe Dayan to the graduates of the Cadet School:
“The Arabs do not agree to our venture. If we want to continue our
work in Eretz Israel against their desires, there is no alternative but
that lives should be lost. It is our destiny to be in a state of continual
warfare with the Arabs. This situation may well be undesirable but
such is the reality.”’5?
It was inevitable that arch expansionist Menachem Begin, who had
been rejected six times, should seize upon the propitious moment for
144 THE COVER-UP
capturing the imagination of the Israeli people and come to power on
a program that his predecessors had been quietly espousing as well as
gradually implementing. It was equally inescapable that his ‘‘peace”
cabinet increasingly should assume the appearance of a Jewish military
junta with its five5’ Israeli generals (as of the end of 1977): Deputy
Prime Minister Yigal Yadin, Foreign Minister General Moshe Dayan,
Defense Minister General Ezer Weizman, Minister of Agriculture Gen-
eral Ariel Sharon, and Transport and Communications Minister Meir
Amit.
Yadin, as leader of the Democratic Movement for Change, had
refused for five months to join the new government because of its
policy of insisting on continued settlements in the occupied territories.
But he succumbed to the mood of the new Establishment, overwhelm-
ingly backed by popular acclaim, whose philosophy had been elo-
quently set forth by Dayan earlier in eulogizing a kibbutz leader killed
by the Arabs in a border dispute:
In front of their (the Palestinians) eyes, we are taking possession of the land
and villages in which they and their forebears have dwelled. ... Let us not draw
back at the sight of the burning hatred which fills the lives of the hundreds of
thousands of Arabs surrounding us... . This is the destiny of our generation.5*
But a new force had emerged to pose the first real challenge to
Zionist ambitions to hold onto land already seized and to grab more
of ‘Eretz Israel” (Old Israel). In losing the six-day 1967 war, the Arab
confrontation states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan showed that their
hearts were not really in the battle. They had been only standing in as
proxies for the Palestinian people whose plight always constituted the
very heart of the Middle East conflict. But the Palestinians could
scarcely field a fighting force of their own, let alone command interna-
tional attention, until March 1968, when the battle of Karameh drasti-
cally changed the picture.
Out of this unexpected strong showing by Palestinian commando
units defending their camp on the East Bank of the Jordan against an
Israeli invasion force emerged the Palestinians and their political-
military organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which
had been in the making since 1964. It was the very existence of these
Palestinians, not the hostile Arab armies, that constituted the growing
Israeli nightmare and challenged the very being of the state. Nasser’s
blockade of the Straits of Tiran played right into Zionist hands, provid-
ing them with the excuse to launch the 1967 conflict. The seizure by
Israel of the West Bank and of Gaza during that war anticipated the
Inside Israel 145
eventual Palestinian transmutation from refugee to political status,
demanding nationhood in at least a part of Israel and its occupied
territories.
Then, even as Tel Aviv insisted they did not exist, the frustrated
Palestinians seized on violence to bring their untold tragedy to the
center of the world stage.
Vv What Palestinians?
Against the agony,
The world is adamant,
The sun's eye is gouged,
The world is lost and torn!
The world, my Lord,
Has not raised a single candle,
Has not shed a single tear,
To wash away
Jerusalem's grief.
—Fadwa Tuqan
Former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol stated in a 1969 interview
in Davar:
What are the Palestinians? When I came here there were only 250,000 non-
Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was desert—more than underdeveloped.
Nothing. It was only after we made the desert bloom and populated it that they
became interested in taking it from us.!
Until very recently, much of the world accepted without questioning
such statements as that of Prime Minister Eshkol, or declarations such
as these by another Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir:
How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them
to.?
There was no such thing as Palestinians. . . . It was not as though there was
a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestine people, and
we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They
did not exist.3
Although the fate of the Palestinians today, as always, constitutes
the heart of the Middle East conflict, for many reasons the very exis-
146
=
What Palestinians? 147
tence of these people has been ignored, let alone brought into true
focus. The objective observer was sidetracked because he could not
help but be moved to great compassion by even the most casual exami-
nation of the circumstances under which so many of the Jewish re-
fugees escaped the hell of Hitler to find a home in Palestine. Their vast
accomplishments in fashioning their new land were bound to elicit
great admiration. But the plight of the Jews in Europe ought not to
have been considered by itself, as if the state for the surviving victims
had been set up in a vacuum. Unfortunately, this fallacy underlies the
perspective held by most American Jews who have so copiously sup-
ported Israel in a myriad of ways and, at the same time, bear a per-
sonal, intense hatred, scorn, and disdain—a racism exceeded by no
Nazi Gauleiter—for their vicarious foes, the Arabs, and in particular
the Palestinians.
Likewise, American Christian liberals have managed until recently
to overlook almost completely the Arab presence in the Holy Land.
Their reaction, when confronted with the dire consequences wrought
upon the Palestinians by Israel’s creation, is most reminiscent of the
early Zionists when they realized “the land without a people for a
people without a land” to which they aspired actually had people—and
people, incidentally, whose own national aspirations were definitely
already forming.
This discovery of the other occupants of Palestine, the 93 percent
indigenous populace, came as a rude shock to the early settlers. Max
Nordau, one of Theodor Herzl’s closest associates, came crying to him
one day in 1897, “But there are Arabs in Palestine. I did not know
that!’"4
This was fifty years before the founding of Israel. In this same
early Zionist period, the father of modern Hebrew, Ben Yehuda, was
similarly dismayed upon his arrival in 1882 and “faced a crisis of
conscience,” in the words of Israeli author Amos Elon in his valuable
book Israelis: Founders and Sons.5 Ben Yehuda saw himself coming to
Palestine
oe
. as a proselyte, a stranger, the son of a foreign country and a foreign
people; in this, the land of my forefathers, I have no political and no civil right.
I am a foreigner . . . I suddenly broke. Something like remorse rose in the
depths of my soul. . . . My feet stood on the holy ground, the land of the
forefathers, and in my heart there was no joy . . . I did not embrace the rocks
. .. | stood shocked. Dread! Dread!’’é
The unrealism of these Zionist settlers has been brilliantly cap-
tured by Elon:
148 THE COVER-UP
There are few things as egocentric as a revivalist movement. For decades the
Zionist leaders moved in a strange twilight zone seeing the Arabs and the same
time not seeing them. Their attitude was a combination of blind spots and
naiveté, of wishful thinking, paternalistic benevolence, and that ignorance
which was often a factor in international events and sometimes their cause. It
may very well be that without this ignorance most Zionist leaders would not
have ventured on their task in the first place.’
Former head of the Jewish Agency Dr. Nahum Goldmann, in a
1974 article in The New Outlook,® wrote of the total unawareness of the
Arabs on the part of most early Zionist settlers and of their importance
in establishing any Zionist state. Goldmann referred to an article he
had published for a German Jewish newspaper several months after
the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which he had stated that
while the Declaration was an important historical document, “‘if the
day comes when the Arabs issue a Balfour Declaration, it will be ten
times more important.” It had been his belief at the time that ‘‘without
an agreement with the Arab world there was no future for the realiza-
tion of the Zionist idea.” His colleagues laughed at him and asked how
could he ever compare the poor Arab bedouins with the British Em-
pire. Very few of them were aware of the Arabs, and those who were
did not attach the necessary significance to them.
Great statemaker David Ben-Gurion was another Zionist pioneer
who was taken aback by the Arab presence in Palestine. At the outset
he and some of his more liberal colleagues were willing at least to talk
in terms of granting the Arab minority some voice in the projected
Jewish state, while firmly rejecting any Palestinian claim to nation-
hood. For their part, some Palestinians feared the intense nationalism
of Ben-Gurion. After being arrested by Turkish authorities in 1915 for
Zionist agitation, the future Premier of Israel, upon his release, ran
into a fellow law-school alumnus who, when told that the Turks wished
to expel the budding Zionist from the country, remarked to Ben-
Gurion, ‘‘As your friend, I am deeply sorry. But as an Arab, I am
pleased.” It was then that the future Prime Minister of Israel first
became slightly aware of anti-Zionist feeling among Palestinian Arabs,
but he did not believe the Arab nationalist political movement had any
real roots in Palestine. He felt it was concerned only with the desire
of the people of Lebanon and Syria to break free from the foreign yoke.
The Arab Palestinians as a whole failed to recognize the European
Jewish émigrés as a threat until it was too late, largely because they had
looked upon the Jews in past historic terms as nothing more than a
small, docile minority thriving in the region under the special protec-
What Palestinians? 149
tion of Muslim Arab rulers, traditionally provided to nonbelievers by
the Koranic right of El] Dimha with the payment of a tax.
The history of the land known traditionally as Palestine bares the
almost totally Arab nature of the country, unul the Zionist arrival. The
name Palestine was derived from ‘‘Philistia,” for this was the land of
the biblical Philistines, or people of the sea, who occupied the south-
ern coastal area in the 12th century B.c. On the basis of an examination
of human remains, anthropologists have found that 50,000 years ago
the Palestinians were of mixed racial stock. From the 4th millenium
B.c. until 900 B.c., the predominant indigenous stock were the Canaan-
ites. Towns such as Jericho, Megiddo, and Beth-Shan were centers of
civilization in Palestine in the early Bronze Age: by the middle of that
age, links had developed between the people in Palestine and the
civilization of Phoenicia.
Throughout its long history Palestine has always been the target
of successive invaders and has continuously changed rule. This land
has rarely been free of great-power domination. After the Canaanites
came the Egyptians and Hittites; then a combination of Canaanites,
Philistines, and Hebrews; the Hebrew kingdom of the North and Judea
in the South; Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids,
Maccabees, Seleucids, Romans, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Cru-
saders, Egyptians, Mamelukes, Turks, Britons; and now Israelis and
Jordanians.
The Hebrew-Israelite-Judean-Jewish (as it has been successively
referred to) community never totally predominated even in the more
than nine centuries of the two kingdoms and the united nation. As Dr.
Julian Morgenstern has pointed out, there were ‘‘only two brief simul-
taneous periods in the life of each kingdom, neither lasting more than
fifty years, when there was any indication of national strength and
glory.’’9
The mythmakers have insisted that Palestine was once an uncul-
tivated land without people, and that the miracle of Zionism developed
a state with modern technology and “turned the desert into green
hills.” While some Jews continued to live in Palestine since their origi-
nal entrance circa 1000 B.c., in contemporary times the Jewish popula-
tion of Palestine at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was a
mere 7 percent of the 700,000 inhabitants. The rest were Muslim
(570,000) and Christian (70,000) Arabs.
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Yosef Tekoah insisted before the
Security Council on May 4, 1968, that Jerusalem is “‘no more Arab
because of the Arab occupation than it was Turkish because of the
150 THE COVER-UP
Turkish occupation,” and that “‘the very name is Hebrew, meaning city
of peace.” Actually Jerusalem had been overwhelmingly Arab from the
7th century until the modern influx of Westerners began toward the
end of the 19th century. As for the name of the city, it first appears as
“Urushalimma” (Jerusalem) in Egyptian texts of the 19th century B.c.,
more than 800 years before King David occupied the city. The name
meant “foundation of Shalem,” that same Semitic god whose name
appears in “‘Shalmaneser,” the Assyrian king.
But the Zionist, in his desire for exclusive possession of what he
referred to as his ‘‘ancestral home,” and in his mistaken belief that he
alone had a right to it, ignored the existence of the Palestinians and
romanticized his own. Within Israel only a few voices attempted to
kindle the Jewish conscience. One was that of Judah Magnes, first
president of the Hebrew University, who helped bring into being the
Ihud (Brotherhood), a movement dedicated to Arab-Jewish friendship.
During the bitter conflict prior to the creation of Israel, Magnes, bold
champion of binationalism, said: ““We seem to have thought of every-
thing—except the Arabs. . . . But the time has come for the Jews to take
into account the Arab factor as the most important factor facing us.
... If we wish to live in this living space, we must live with the Arabs.”’!°
Then there was Moshe Smilansky, one of the first settlers, who
expressed deep disappointment at the neglect of the indigenous popu-
lation. He wrote in the publication Ner: ““Where are you, Jews? Why
do we not at least pay compensation with a generous hand to these
miserable people? . . . Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the
Parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of the
land? How solitary does sit the Jewish conscience in the city of Jerusa-
lem!’”!! And Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha-am, in one of his last letters,
commented: “If this be the Messiah, then I do not wish to see his
coming.”
Such few protestants, speaking out humanistically in behalf of the
universal dogma of Judaism, were at the outset overwhelmed by the
pioneering zealot majority and later by the specter of Hitler. There
emerged a new Israeli trauma combining an overriding concern for
security, the psychological vestiges of the Masada complex, and a
feeling of guilt (mixed with tear) stemming from the growing aware-
ness of the Arab-Palestinian community. Exclusivity increasingly be-
came the mark of narrow Zionist dogma in which there was little room
for pluralism. Party members and sympathizers alike in the U.S. picked
up and embroidered this theme.
In the face of the Palestinian refugee flight precipitated by the
What Palestinians? 151
1948 war and planned terror, the Israeli government maintained a
consistent propaganda stand: The Palestinians had fled of their own
accord in the hope of returning home victorious, and the other Arab
states should take care of these people, who had never really owned
but were only squatters on the land that had been given 3,000 years
earlier to the Jews by God.
Typical of this attitude was a statement by Joseph Weitz, one-time
head of the Jewish Agency Colonization Department, who wrote:
Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room in this country for
both peoples. The only solution is Eretz Israel . . . without Arabs, and there
is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring coun-
tries—to transfer all of them—not one village, not one tribe should be left.!2
This intent, reiterated in Davar after the six-day war, updated the
philosophy behind Herzl’s original plan to uproot and displace the
Arab population by any and all means possible. As told in his Diaries,
the father of Zionism envisioned this role for the indigenous populace:
“If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the
Jews are not accustomed—big snakes, etc.,—I shall use the natives,
prior to giving them employment in the transit countries, for the
extermination of these animals.’’ Herzl would also have had the ‘‘na-
tives drain the swamps” inasmuch as they were “accustomed to the
fever.’”"18
There was total absence of any reference to Arabs in the first
Zionist Congress. The attitude of Jewish nationalist leaders re-
flected the views of Herzl and of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of
the expansionist-revisionist Greater Israel movement and the idol
of young Menachem Begin. At an early conclave, Jabotinsky re-
ferred to the Palestinians as ‘‘a yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy,
savage rags.’’!4
Some Israelis later even went so far as to justify Israeli exclusivism
on moral grounds. In 1970 a Hebrew University professor, Eliezer
Schweid, observed in an official Zionist publication, Dispersion and
Unity:
... The general policy of Zionism based itself upon the certainty and primacy
of the right of the Jewish people to its homeland. From this point of view, the
opposition of the Arabs was a stumbling block that must be overcome, and not a
moral problem that must be dealt with. We must emphasize again that one should not see
in this approach disregard for truth and righteousness. This approach had a factual and
moral basis. Arab nationalism in the land of Israel appeared from its beginning,
not as a movement whose purpose was to realize or defend the right of an
152 THE COVER-UP
existing national entity, but rather as a movement that realizes its very being
in defiance of Zionism.!5 [Italics added.}
For their part, American Jews have sincerely believed they were
safeguarding the very existence of their coreligionists in Israel, never
dreaming it was Zionist exclusivism for which they were giving their
dollars, political support, and moral aid, and betraying their single
loyalty to their own country.
And today, when the thesis of binationalism is raised by Arabs in
advancing their rights to a Palestinian state and in calling for a secular,
pluralistic Israel, the Jews in America see this only as a threat “to
destroy the State of Israel.’’ They see no reason why there should be,
nor do they believe there can be, a de-Zionization or restructuring of
the Israeli state, in line with the universal thesis of Judaism and the
thinking of universalists such as Magnes, Buber, Einstein, and others.
Jews have been adamant in refusing to recognize even the possi-
bility of any other claims to Palestine aside from their own. This con-
viction was infinitely strengthened by Hitler and the holocaust. Pales-
tine was theirs by right and theirs alone, to be shared with no one. Few
in America even recognized, let alone were willing to discuss, the need
to redress any past wrongs. But Nathan Chofshi of Herzlia, one of the
pioneer Jewish settlers in Palestine, wrote:
We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare
to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name instead of being deeply
ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil committed.
... We justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.!®
The great tragedy was that the few voices from the Jewish side
spurred by ethical universalism to call for binationalism in Palestine
found little echo among the Arabs, whose emotional initial response
to Zionist policy was to rule out any possibility of sharing. The Arabs
missed their great opportunity for a unitary Palestinian state when
their representatives at the 1947 U.N. debate at Lake Success showed
no official support for a minority report suggesting a single state with
a federal structure rather than the partition of the mandated terri-
tory.!7
And yet these Palestinians could point with dignity and pride to
a history in which they and other Arabs had perennially extended a
warm shelter to Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Europe, to Chris-
tian Armenians escaping oppression in Turkey, and to other harassed
peoples. Most Palestinians always honestly believed in a pluralistic
state in which Arabs and Jews could live together in a democratic
society of one man, one vote.
What Palestinians? 153
With the partition of 1947 under the auspices of the U.N. and the
unilateral declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, the fate of
these Palestinians was sealed. The Zionists of Palestine had seized the
initiative, and backed by the U.S. in particular and world opinion in
general, they moved inexorably to extend their control over the land
of Palestine. The total inequity of this action was self-evident from the
small Jewish percentage of the total population of Palestine at the time
(33 percent) as well as from the minuscule percentage of the total land
they owned (7 percent). This is a matter of record—the U.N. figures
have never been in dispute. Present-day Israelis simply rely on the fact
that no one will take the trouble to consult these figures, giving the
Zionists the opportunity to cultivate a number of myths that have come
to take precedence over any statistics, even when bared.
One such Israeli myth has been that the Palestinians all fled from
their homes and land of their own volition, intending to return under
the banner of victorious Arab armies recruited in neighboring Arab
lands. According to this mythology, those few Palestinians who might
have owned anything have only themselves to blame, for they had
gambled on force and lost.
However, the responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem
rested squarely with the Zionist military forces, particularly the
“freedom fighters,” as they were called at that time, the Begin-led
Irgun Zvai Leumi, which with the Stern Gang were the two princi-
pal terrorist groups. The Irgun perpetrated many acts of violence
and terror. Far worse than the more celebrated King David Hotel
incident, in which only ninety-five British and Arabs were killed,
and the garroting-hanging of two British sergeants at Nathanya,
was the attack on the small village of Deir Yassin in which 25418
women, children, and old men were killed and their bodies thrown
down a well on April 9, 1948. This particular village, hugging a
rocky promontory west of Jerusalem, had managed to keep out of
the turmoil of fighting and excesses of nearby Jerusalem until that
moment; Haganah commander David Shaltiel noted that Deir Yas-
sin had been ‘quiet since the beginnings of disturbances . . . not
mentioned in reports of attacks on Jews, and one of the few places
which has not given a foothold to foreign bands.”’!9 Harry Levin in
Jerusalem Embattled? wrote: ‘‘When an Arab band tried to make its
base there [Deir Yassin] last month the villagers themselves
repulsed them, at the cost of the Mukhtar’s (headman’s) son.”
Deir Yassin had done nothing to provoke this attack and had lived
peaceably in a sort of agreement with the Jewish suburbs surrounding
it.2] The village had on occasion actually collaborated with the Jewish
154 THE COVER-UP
Agency”? and was said by a Jewish newspaper to have actually driven
out some Arab militants.23 It was the Muslim sabbath when the attack
was launched on the little village by the combined forces of the Irgun
and the Stern Gang.
No warning had been given to the villagers, as was later claimed
(Begin has stated that all victims of Irgun attacks had been warned
beforehand), because the armored truck with its loudspeaker had tum-
bled into a ditch and been tossed on its side far short of the first houses
of the village. Advised by a night watchman of the approaching Jewish
raiders, some inhabitants, with only a robe thrown around them,
managed to flee to the west.
The initial resistance of the men of Deir Yassin to the attack was
soon overcome, and all of the town’s inhabitants were ordered out into
a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. Accord-
ing to the recital in O! Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique La-
pierre, the daughter of one of the principal families of Deir Yassin,
declared that she saw ‘‘a man shoot a bullet in the neck of my sister
Salhiyeh, who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach
open with a butcher’s knife.’’24 Another woman was killed when she
tried to extricate the unborn infant from the dead mother’s womb. A
sixteen-year-old survivor, Naaneh Khalil, claimed she saw a man take
‘‘a kind of sword and slash my neighbor Jamil Hish from head to toe
and then do the same thing on the steps to my house to my cousin
Fathi.”’25
According to the accounts of survivors, the female members of the
two terrorist groups matched the savagery of their male counterparts.
“Bit by bit, Deir Yassin was submerged in a hell of screams, exploding
grenades, the stench of blood, gunpowder and smoke. Its assailants
killed, they looted, and finally they raped.’’?5 Another survivor, Safiyeh
Attiyah, saw one man open his pants and leap on her. “I screamed,”
she said, “but around the other women were being raped, too. Some
of the men were so anxious to get our earrings they ripped our ears
to pull them off faster.”’2”
Fifteen houses in Deir Yassin were dynamited to drive out the
owners, and when the terrorized survivors fled to those homes still
standing, the Irgun commanders began to systematically work their
way through these remaining buildings with Sten guns and grenades.
Most of the men of the village were absent because they worked
in Jerusalem. When the terrorists entered, there were only women and
children and older people. For two days afterwards, while they tried
to dy up the mess they had made, the Irgun allowed no one else to
What Palestinians? 155
enter except a Jewish policeman, who reported that one Arab had been
killed.28
When the British authorities refused to investigate the incident,
the Arabs of Jerusalem prevailed upon the International Red Cross to
look into the facts. Swiss representative Jacques de Reynier led the first
party to reach the site and found 150 bodies thrown into a cistern and
another 40 or 50 at one side. In all, he counted 254 dead, including
145 women, of whom 35 were pregnant. He found a six-year-old girl
still living under the heap of corpses. Eyewitnesses said later that it was
not possible to go near the village without becoming nauseated.?9
In his diary, the International Red Cross representative indicated
that when he arrived the terrorists had not completed their work.
According to his entry that night:
The first thing I saw were people running everywhere, rushing in and out of
the houses, carrying Sten guns, rifles, pistols and long ornate knives. . . . They
seemed half mad. I saw a beautiful girl carrying a dagger still covered with
blood. I heard screams. The German member of the Irgun explained, “‘We’re
sull mopping up.” All I could think of was the SS troops I'd seen in Athens.°°
And then to his horror de Reynier noted he saw “the young woman
stab an elderly man and woman cowering on the doorstep of their
hut.” When he entered one of the first houses, he noted that ‘‘every-
thing had been ripped apart and torn upside-down. . . . There were
bodies strewn about. They had done their ‘cleaning up’ with guns and
grenades and finished their work with knives. Anyone could see that.”
The Swiss Red Cross representative rushed the wounded to the near-
est hospital. The other surviving women and children were stripped
and paraded in three open trucks, their hands over their heads, up and
down King George V Avenue, where they were spat on and even
stoned.3!
Shaltiel and his Haganah command had been occupied in fighting
on other nearby fronts. We are told by writer J. Bowyer Bet? that
when he arrived at the edge of Deir Yassin, “‘a smoking ruin filled with
corpses of men, women and children” greeted him. When Irgun Com-
mander Mordechai Ramaan announced the village was completely
under control and a Haganah unit should be sent in to take over,
Shaltiel replied, ‘‘We’re not going to take responsibility for your mur-
ders.’’33 The claim later made by the Irgun that those killed had been
fiercely resisting was totally disproved by another Haganah member
commander of the youth organization, Eliyahu Arieli, who stated: “All
of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or chil-
156 THE COVER-UP
dren. The dead we found were all unjust victims, and none of them had
died with a weapon in their hands.’’54 Shaltiel’s adjutant was said to
have told the commander of the Stern contingent of attackers, “You
are swine.”
While the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Haganah publicly
disassociated themselves from the outrage, the latter took military
advantage of the victory by eventually taking over the village, and the
former accepted other spoils. The Jewish Agency posted leaflets de-
scriptive of the massacre in many Arab villages. Loudspeaker vans
toured Arab Jerusalem broadcasting in Arabic, ‘‘Unless you leave your
homes, the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate.’’5
A group of American correspondents who attended a press con-
ference given by the Irgun and the Stern Gang were told that it was
“the beginning of the conquest of Palestine and Trans-Jordan.”36 The
Israelis took advantage of the massacre, which has compared with the
Nazi atrocities at Oradoursur-Klane and Lidice, or even ‘‘a horror
worse, for in Lidice only the men and boys were slaughtered.’’37
Most of the information of Collins and Lapierre in O! Jerusalem was
obtained from de Reynier’s report to the International Red Cross and
several reports on the incident forwarded to the Chief Secretary of the
Palestine government, Sir Henry Gurney, by Richard C. Catling, As-
sistant Inspector General of the Criminal Investigation Division, on
April 13, 15, and 16, 1948. Bearing the dossier number 179/
110/17/GS under the designation ‘“‘Secret”’ and signed by Catling,
they contained the interrogation reports of the massacre survivors by
a team of British police officers together with corroborating physical
evidence obtained through medical examinations of the survivors by
a doctor and a nurse at the government hospital in Jerusalem.
Israelis today, and Begin defenders in particular, deny that the
Israelis in any way instigated the flight of the Palestinians, whom they
insist left voluntarily as a result of Arab broadcasts urging them to
leave “so that the Arab armies could sweep through.” But other
sources indicate contrarywise. Jon Kimche, the Zionist writer, calling
the incident “the darkest stain on the Jewish record throughout the
fighting,” stated, ‘“The terrorist justified the massacre of Deir Yassin
because it led to the panic flight of the semaining Arabs in the Jewish
state area.”’38 Jewish writer Don Peretz described the result of Deir
Yassin as a ‘‘mass fear psychosis which grasped the whole Arab com-
munity.’’39 Arthur Koestler wrote, this “bloodbath . . . was the psycho-
logically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of Arab refugees.’’4°
Moshe Sharett, in a letter to U.N. Conciliator Count Folke Ber-
a ing,
'
What Palestinians? 157
nadotte, referred to ‘‘a mass exodus, mostly spontaneous, a cataclys-
mic phenomenon which, according to the experience of other coun-
tries, changes the course of history.” In his own report, Bernadotte
stated: “The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created
by fighting in their communities, by remorse concerning real or al-
leged acts of terrorism, or expulsion.” Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the first
President of Israel, referred to the Deir Yassin incident as ‘“‘a miracu-
lous simplification.”’*! A policy of deliberate terrorism, ‘‘adopted by
the Zionist forces in an attempt to cow the Arabs into submission and
break their will to further resistance,’’42 was how a Canadian writer
phrased it. This precipitated the mass Arab flight, not the orders of the
Arab Higher Committee, as Israelists contended.
According to Erskine Childers’ article ““The Other Exodus’’43 and
Professor Maxime Rodinson’s Israel and the Arabs, *4 there is very little
evidence to support the Israelist contention that the Arabs left their
homes at the orders of Arab leaders and the Arab Higher Committee.
Research clearly indicates that those not incited to leave by Zionist
propaganda fled at the bayonet point of the Israeli army, joining the
tide of those who “‘were made to leave by deceit, lying, and false
promises,” to use the words of one Jewish witness to the flight who
described the manner by which “we, Jews, forced the Arabs to leave
cities and villages.’’45
Begin denied responsibility for the tragedy (at the time Prime
Minister Ben-Gurion sent an apology to Jordan’s King Abdullah, the
Jewish Agency deplored the “commission of such brutalities by Jews
as utterly repugnant” and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem took the
unusual step of excommunicating participants in the attack) and
claimed that “‘this atrocity charge was a combined Jewish Agency-Arab
propaganda story” (quite a combination!). However, in The Revolt: The
Story of the Irgun,*® Begin boasted of the daring deeds he committed.
He referred to “the military victory at Deir Yassin,” greatly simplifying
the task of transforming Israel into an exclusively Jewish state and
admitted that the ‘“‘subsequent tales of ‘Irgun butchering’ ” had re-
sulted in
maddened, uncontrollable stampede. Of the about 800,000 Arabs who lived
on the present territory of the state of Israel, only 165,000 are still there
...In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror . . . All
the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through
butter. . . . The Arabs, who began fleeing in panic, shouting “Deir Yassin!’
... The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be
overestimated.
158 THE COVER-UP
And the President of the Zionist Organization of America, Rabbi Abba
Hillel Silver, was quoted as having said, ‘““The Irgun will go down in
history as a factor without which the State of Israel would not have
come into being.’’47
It is true, as the Zionists allege, that many Palestinians left thinking
they might return as soon as the war was over. They fled without any
idea of permanency. Many left all their clothes behind. As one told me
in a refugee camp, she “‘left her things to sew, pictures, the paintings
and photographs’’—things people would not leave behind if they did
not intend to return, or indeed if they even had time to plan their
departure. But once the war was over, the way home was closed to
them—perhaps forever if the Zionists of Israel continue to have their
way.
Some Arabs fled because of deliberate acts of terrorism, others
because the war was on their doorstep, explosions everywhere and
civilians were under fire. From the outset the incoming Israelis em-
ployed terror and fear to drive the Palestinians from their homes.
These Israelis were even then determined that the world reecho their
cry, ‘What Palestinians?”” As the London 7Jimes reported on one of
hundreds of such incidents: ‘“‘On April 22, 1948, Zionists attacked
Haifa after midnight, occupied buildings, streets and public buildings.
The Palestinians taken by surprise moved their women and children
to the Port area for evacuation to Acre. While in full flight the Arab
refugees were attacked by advanced Jewish posts. 100 Arabs were
killed and 200 wounded.’’48
This does not mean that the Arabs, in turn, did not commit atroci-
ties of their own. But it is vital to understand the manner in which the
land was emptied of Palestinians who had lived for centuries in their
homeland.
Moshe Dayan, now a self-proclaimed critic of terrorism, played
an important part in the early Zionist terror campaign against the
indigenous peoples. On July 11, 1948, forces led by Dayan attacked
the Arab town of Lydda, now the location of the Tel Aviv airport.
Pro-Zionist writers Jon and David Kimche in their book 4 Clash of
Destinies describe exactly what happened: “Dayan drove at full
speed into Lydda shooting up the town and creating confusion and
a degree of terror among the population. . . . Its Arab population
of 30,000 either fled or were herded on the road to Ramallah. The
next day Ramleh also surrendered and its Arab populous suffered
the same fate.’’49
|
|
What Palestinians? 159
Another Israeli myth: The Palestinians had owned the land and
over the years had never done anything with it. They had hardly any
settlements, only a few miserable farms. Whatever you see in Israel—
villages, towns, cities, farms, and the rest—have all been built up by
the Jews, and principally since 1948. So goes the myth.
This is an outright perversion of the truth, and those Israelis who
have the courage to speak out will verify that Palestine was being
developed in line with the times and its regional culture long before
the Jews took over. What the Israelis did, in fact, was to destroy most
of the Palestinian villages. Prior to the Zionist seizure of Palestine in
1948 and the establishment of the state, an industrious Palestinian
Arab community lived in developed cities and villages scattered
throughout the country.
Concentration camp survivor Dr. Israel Shahak, who organized
the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, tells us in his 1973
report “Arab Villages Destroyed in Israel]’’5°: ‘‘The truth about Arab
settlements in the area of the State of Israel before 1948 is one of the
most guarded secrets of Israeli life. No publication, book or pamphlet
gives either their number or location. This is done on purpose so that
the accepted official myth of an ‘empty country’ can be taught in
schools and told to visitors.”
In Palestine’s fifteen districts before 1948 there were 475 villages
(not including areas inhabited by a certain number of nonmigratory
Arab tribes, which were not considered villages). Since 1948 no less
than 385, three-fourths of the original number, have been completely
destroyed by the authorities, leaving only 90 of the original villages.
The chart on the following page from the Shahak report shows that in
many districts, such as Ramleh with its thirty-one villages, every Arab
settlement was demolished by the Israelis. In the district of Jaffa,
outside Jerusalem, only Jaffa City remained.
Annex | to the report lists by district the names of all the villages
that existed before 1948 and those existing in 1973. Almost all of the
385 destroyed villages, even with their cemeteries and tombstones,
were literally bulldozed away. Passing visitors are told: ‘That was all
a desert.”
Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, addressing students of the
Haifa Technion School in March 1969, stated: There is not a single
Jewish village in this country that has not been built on the site of an
Arab village. The village of Nahalal took the place of the Arab village
of Mahloul. Gifat took the place of Jifta. . . .’’5!
160 THE COVER-UP
Name of Number Number Number
District of Villages of Villages of Destroyed
Before 1948 Now Villages
Jerusalem 33 4 29
Bethlehem 7 0 7
Hebron 16 0 16
Jaffa 23 0 23
Ramleh 31 0 31
Lydda 28 0 31
Jenin 8 4 4
Tul-Karen 33 12 21
Haifa 43 8 35
Ako 52 32 20
Nazareth 26 20 6
Safad 75 vi 68
Tiberias 26 3 23
Beisan 28 0 28
Gaza 46 0 46
Tora 475 90 385
According to a 1968 report made by delegates of the National
Council of Churches, headed by Rev. Raymond E. Maxwell,
... the destruction of villages appears to be a particular expression of ar-
ticulated Israeli policy that the Arabs must be taught by prompt, destructive
reprisals that insubordination will not be tolerated . . . as evidence of the
existence of Yalu, Beit Nuba and Imwas, there remains only a scrap of wood,
a bent rod, scattered here and there . . . and a broken water pump which has
been installed with ecumenical relief funds. Eucalyptus trees have been
planted and are rapidly covering the ground where the villages had stood for
hundreds of years.
This policy of physically destroying Palestinian settlements within
territory controlled by Israel has never ceased. To solidify their gains
after the 1967 war, according to U.N. figures, the Israelis destroyed
during the period between June 11, 1967, and November 15, 1969,
some 7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories seized during
that war; this figure excluded thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan
Heights that were razed to the ground.®? In the two years between
September 1969 and 1971 the figure was estimated to have reached
16,312 homes.
Israeli journalist-soldier Amos Kenan was so shocked by his ex-
periences in occupied territories that he had to write:
——
What Palestinians? 161
The unit commander told us that it had been decided to blow up three villages
in our sector [in the Latrun area], Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu. . .. Unarmed
people were to be allowed to pack up their belongings and were told to go to
the nearby village of Beit Sura. We were ordered to block the entrances of the
village and prevent inhabitants from returning. The order was to shoot over
their heads. At noon the first bulldozer arrived and pulled down the first house
at the edge of the village.53
On the site of the Arab village of Imwas, a “national park” was
opened in September 1975. In describing the dedication of the park,
a writer for Maariv stated there had been Arab villages there “but in
June 1967 the villages were ‘abandoned.’ ’’54 Michael Adams, editor of
Middle East International and former Guardian correspondent in Beirut,
related the comment by a rival journalist in Haaretz “that the use of
the simple word ‘abandoned’ was a wonderful expression, very Zionist,
sounding like ‘to give oneself the sack.’” 55 This journalist went on to
warn that it might be better not to let the children playing in the park
dig in the ground in case they came across the remains of the houses
that had been destroyed, which would, however, be passed off as “the
remains of a 12th-century synagogue.” He then sarcastically con-
cluded:
Originally, there were Jews here and then came the bulldozers of the Jewish
National Fund. In between there was—nothing; and if there was anything,
well, it was abandoned and destroyed. Now there’s a national park, and that’s
all that’s important. Truthfully what is nicer: a nationalist Arab village or a
Jewish national park?5é
As for the Israeli claim that the “Jews came and made the desert
bloom,” a Palestinian Arab still living within the borders of pre-1967
Israel noted that the orange groves were there before the Jews:
Before I was born, my father had two orange groves and was exporting some
23 million boxes by 1948 from Jaffa. And yet, the tour directors taking Jews
from all over the world, including Americans, through our cities and country-
side, keep talking about these orange groves that the Israelis had planted since
1948. You know, it’s funny, there was a little American lady on the bus and
as the tour director went on to talk about the great achievements of the Israelis
in orange planting, she remarked, “Nonsense. That orange grove is certainly
older than twenty years.”
Israeli apologists invariably insist that the Palestinian Arabs never
had it so good. They call it ‘‘a benign, enlightened occupation.” It is
true that 40-50,000 from the West Bank work in Israel daily. They are
mostly unskilled workers who come from their towns and villages by
162 THE COVER-UP
bus or walk as much as three miles to work. They are paid more than
they ever received under Jordanian rule. The pay may be good for
them, but it is Israel that benefits most from this boon. Israel depends
totally today on this cheap labor to operate machines in the new
factories of the kibbutzim and to build houses, schools, and roads.
According to the Israeli daily Ma‘ariv (March 14, 1974), “hun-
dreds of Arab children, 14-16 years of age, work in West Jerusalem.
The work they do involves no learning and in many cases borders on
shameful exploitation.”’ Noting that the problem was not a new one,
the Israeli newspaper pointed out “that the phenomenon has now
become an inseparable part of the social and economic fabric of the
capital. In the past, a garage owner was ashamed to employ a boy for
4 Israeli pounds a day ($1.20); today there is no shame. The explana-
tion given is that no one compels him to stay, and some argue that they
are doing these boys a favor.”
‘“‘What relevance does economic prosperity have to people’s hap-
piness?” asked novelist Amos Oz in the same Ma ‘anv article. ““We were
much more prosperous under the British Mandate than the first years
of our independence.” This Israel could understand what Anwar Nus-
seibeh, former Jordanian Minister of Defense, meant when he talked
after the Israeli conquest of “‘the terrible frustration for the Palestini-
ans in this occupation—the frustration of being an outsider in one’s
land.”
Well-educated, suave, and moderate, Nuseibeh analyzed the
problem confronting his fellow Palestinians:
It’s not a matter of food or clothing. We have enough of that. It’s a question
of having to deal with an alien bureaucracy, of receiving orders in a language
1 do not understand, of getting notices under my door in writing I cannot read.
The other day a police officer arrived to tell me that the fine for a traffic ticket
I received has been doubled because I did not pay it on time. Of course I never
knew that I'd been charged with it in the first place because I could not read
the writing [in Hebrew].57
What actually took place during the June 1967 Israeli takeover of
Arab lands has never been recited in any of the plethora of books
published on the “wondrous” six-day Israeli victory.
The Bab el-Maghraba District of Arab Jerusalem, for instance, was
a pleasant and architecturally distinctive quarter of freshly white-
washed roof terraces, gardens, and neat unattached houses built in
North African style several hundred years ago to house Moroccan
soldiers garrisoned in Jerusalem for the Ottomans. Shortly after sunset
What Palestinians? 163
on June 8, 1967, the night following the takeover of the Old City by
Israeli paratroopers in the six-day war, demolition of the district
began. The occupants were evicted on one-hour’s notice. One woman,
deaf and alone, not hearing the order, was buried alive beneath the
ruins. Within a few days more than 130 buildings, including two
mosques, were eradicated—the equivalent of three city blocks.
Widespread sequestrations of Arabs also took place in the Sharf
Quarter leading to the mosque and in the Daraq Tabouni region. Not
less than 3,500 persons residing there were given scant notice to leave,
a procedure likewise used against large groups of Arabs who had dwelt
for centuries in the region of French Hill and Mt. Scopus near the
British Cemetery. There were other isolated instances of sequestration
by the Israelies in their continued effort to Zionize Jerusalem. Con-
demnations by the U.N. Security Council for these expropriations
going back to May 1968 had no effect in bringing about any change
of position by the Israelis.
Although the Arabic language is given to gross hyperboles, the
following account of a Christian Arab living in occupied Jerusalem still
must make the reader pause:
Early in June, 1967, the people of the West Bank of Jordan, including Jerusa-
lem, suddenly found themselves under Israeli occupation, and the same trag-
edy of 1948 has been repeated. Their nationality and personality as a nation
has again been the subject of doubt.
Terror reigned when the Israeli army entered Jerusalem. Looting on a
large scale commenced, and ninety percent of the shops were broken into.
Both military and civilian Israelis ransacked houses and emptied them of all
valuables. Residents of Jerusalem did not realize at the beginning what was
happening, many of them, who for the first time now seeing Israeli soldiers,
mistook them for Iraqis coming to the rescue. Due to this mistake many
civilians were killed in welcoming such soldiers.
For the next five days, the curfew was relaxed only two hours a day. When
it was lifted, the first impression one gained when leaving his house was the
vast destruction of houses and commercial centres and the number of bodies
of both military and civilian Arabs that were in the streets. People were run-
ning about inquiring as to their relatives. Everyone appears to have missed
somebody. In some houses the number of missing came up to ten. Hundreds
of young innocent men were carried by force in trucks and detained without
any offense. Their fate is still doubtful.
Arab Jerusalem was not prepared for war for the simple reason that it was
thought that as a holy city, the town would be spared the catastrophes of battle.
Not a single sandbag was prepared and no shelters built. The civilian popula-
tion was not trained for civil defense.
164 THE COVER-UP
During the five days of fighting in Jerusalem the population could under-
stand that it was war, but worse was coming after the fighting had stopped.
Every officer and soldier acted on his own initiative and took the law in his own
hand. The following are some examples of what took place.
Israeli soldiers entered the house of the Sandouka family whose head was
a sick man in bed for two years. Without warning they shot dead four of his
family, injured two grandchildren aged eight and twelve and a cousin who
happened to have been taking shelter with them. The tragedy was completed
when the head of family was shot and killed and dumped over the bodies of
his family.
The Hindiyeh family lost two sons aged twenty and twenty-four. When the
younger bruther was shot and killed at the doorstep of his house, his elder
brother tried to pull him in, but he was in no better luck, and another shot
penetrated his stomach. The second son could have been saved if medical
attention was available. The mother tried first aid but without success and he
died of hemorrhage. His mother had no water even to wash up the blood of
her sons.
Two girls of Khashram family, aged nineteen and twenty, were victims of
Israeli cruelty. The first was hit by a shrapnel. The other sister decided to take
her to the nearest first aid centre and carried a white flag to show that they
are innocent civilians. Immediately when they proceeded from the house, they
were met by an Israeli tank which shot both sisters dead on the spot.
Jerusalem has since become a special victim of Israeli expansionist
policy. Following the 1967 war, the Israeli government embarked on
a program of Zionizing East Jerusalem. For this purpose a company for
restoring and developing the Jewish quarter was established, and ex-
propriation orders were submitted. The company took over existing
buildings, reconstructed them, and then sold them to Jews, out from
under the Arab ownership. The purpose, of course, was to cause the
immediate evacuation of hundreds of Arab families. The inhabitants
were offered the ridiculous sum of £ 15,000 ($1,500) as compensation,
which was never sufficient to purchase any alternative housing.
Many refused to move, in which case pressure was put on them,
often by compensating one or two families much above the official
price. When they left, reconstruction began on their apartment, turn-
ing the lives of the other tenants into a nightmare as walls were broken
down, sewage pipes broken, and the building became unlivable.5*
The story of how “‘thousands of Arab residents since 1967 have
lost their family homes to Israeli-directed redevelopment” was de-
tailed by the Christian Science Monitor March 5, 1975:
Since 1967, thousands of Arab residents have lost their family homes to Israeli-
directed redevelopment. . . . Property developers in Israeli-annexed East
What Palestinians? 165
Jerusalem are continuing pressure to evict and “relocate” Arab inhabitants of
the old walled city and to “modernize” it. Evicted Arab families see box-like
contructions of new Israeli housing rising from the debris of their demolished
homes. ... When Mr. Saifi refused to sell his home in Jerusalem, bulldozers
demolishing nearby houses pushed high mounds of rubble around his house,
making access nearly impossible. The foundations were undermined by dig-
ging on two sides. Israeli police, at this writing, were pounding frequently on
the door and warning Mr. Saifi’s elderly mother, the only person still living
there, to leave because the house was unsafe . .. Mr. Muhammad al-Maghrebi
refused any compensation for his house . . . and is holding on. . . . Another
house . . . belongs to three families named Shaheen and houses twenty people.
Demolition on three sides has already undermined the foundations, but some
of the Shaheens are staying until they are forced out... .
In Jerusalem Zionist expansionism took the form of outright de-
struction and usurpation, then total annexation. ‘‘Now that the Jews
have got Jerusalem, they cannot give it up without losing their soul,”
said Mayor Teddy Kollek.5? The status of Jerusalem was not even
negotiable and, according to its Chief Executive, internationalization
was a bad solution, dividing the city to an even greater degree.
Defending his position, Kollek claimed, “The Arabs in Jerusalem
already have functional independence. They enjoy a greater degree of
physical security, prosperity, and freedom of expression than citizens
of Arab countries. They have their own schools. They can attend Arab
universities. .. . They have freedom of movement. . . .”. The Times
correspondent interviewing the Mayor added, ‘In fact, they have ev-
erything except the right to be their own masters.’ To the individual-
istic, independent-spirited Arabs, this right was first, last, and above
all.
The Jewish Mayor indicated that he understood ‘“‘how this must
rankle.” But he defended Israeli conduct in the Holy City: “The Arabs
had been occupied for hundreds of years by the Turks, the British, the
Bedu from Jordan, and now Israel.” Kollek admitted that there were
“many Arabs who hope for eventual independence, but not just now.”
It is in the Holy City more than anywhere else in the occupied
territories that the visitor is overwhelmed by visible evidence of the
Israeli “fortress” mentality, which has, unfortunately, supplanted any
sincere search for peace. One cannot help feel deeply saddened, then
angered, to see the ugly high-rise hotels, offices, and concrete-block
tenement apartments (often with wash flapping in the breeze) looking
ominously down upon the Old City and breaking the beautiful, peace-
ful contour of surrounding hills. The enthralling, uplifting feeling that
166 THE COVER-UP
once pervaded every believer here, whether sauntering on the Via
Dolorosa on which Jesus trod under the burden of the Cross, gazing
at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the spot from which Muhammad ascended to
heaven, or standing by the Wailing Wall so sacred to the Jews, has been
stilled by the ominous presence overshadowing the holy places.
It was this “‘Zionization” of Jerusalem that led to the highly publi-
cized censure and ban of Israel by UNESCO and the counterboycott.
Such musical luminaries as Artur Rubinstein and Leonard Bernstein
publicly called upon Yehudi Menuhin, Chairman of the executive com-
mittee of the International Music Council, an affiliated body of
UNESCO, to join in the counterboycott of UNESCO organized by
Zionist groups. But Menuhin declined to follow their advice. In a
response to a cable sent to him in Paris, the noted violinist declared
Jerusalem, because of its “universal meaning, must be treated as a trust
for humanity at large and not as the province of a single power.” He
added that ‘‘a broader attitude” was essential “if Jewish people every-
where and Israelis in particular are to command international support
and sympathy, which is now at a low ebb.’’6! ““The Rape of Jerusalem,”
as some called it, went forward despite the advice of the international
development consultants who bitterly opposed such modern construc-
tions as the proposed twenty-four-story Hyatt House in East Jerusa-
lem.
And everywhere the contrast prevailed between the two comba-
tants: the neon advertisements in Hebrew versus the Arabic scriptures
in stone. The houses of 100 Arab families were torn down to create
a plaza in front of the Wailing Wall. And lest any visitor become
momentarily unmindful as to who was the appropriate and rightful
possessor of this Holy City, a terrace has been erected facing the wall
where the tourist might pick up a telephone-phonograph apparatus
and with the payment of a nominal sum have poured into his ears all
the customary Zionist propaganda.
Elsewhere, the former Jewish quarter of the Old City was emptied
of its Arab inhabitants, most of whom were Palestinian refugees from
lands taken by Israeli forces in 1948. Eight hundred acres of the best
land in the Old City were expropriated, old homes bulldozed, and
trees cut down so the land could be used for Jewish settlements. An
Arab woman with tears in her eyes pointed to the places where once
she played as a child under the shadow of lovely old olive trees. Land
requisitioning continued to go forward, takeovers to satisfy so-called
security requirements, archaeological needs, or just plain Israeli de-
mands. The continued digging, to bring to light the original Wailing
What Palestinians? 167
Wall, endangered the mosque of Al-Aqsa as well as other Muslim and
Christian places of worship. Despite Mayor Kollek’s vaunted promise
of nonintention to create a monoculture, whenever Arab cultural
rights conflicted with alleged Israeli ‘needs,’ Arab rights inevitably
had to give way.
Israeli propaganda would have Americans believe that Arabs and
Jews were equals in the new “united Jerusalem.”” How could this flam-
boyant claim be squared with the facts? Car plates for Arabs were
distinguished by the first three digits; Arab taxis had to be painted in
a distinctive manner. American visitors to Jerusalem who rode in Arab
cars and taxis have found themselves harassed at checkpoints. Phone
numbers of Arabs were all given the initial digit “8” to distinguish
them from others. Arab identification cards carried this notation:
“This identification does not represent verification with relation to the
law of entry into Israel” (literal translation). This vague caveat could
only mean that an Arab leaving Israeli territory was not sure of read-
mittance.
Inside the occupied West Bank and Gaza, the atmosphere fairly
bristled with conflict. An announcement that the military government
for the West Bank was informing landowners in the northern regions
of the Jordan Valley between Nablus and Jenin that over 500 acres
(2,000 dunums) of their lands would be declared a closed area for
military purposes, would mean very little to Americans. But the history
of Israeli colonization to date indicates this has been the standard first
step for securing lands for new Jewish settlements. This was no ‘“‘paper
tiger.”” This move had a direct impact on human beings, as I learned
during my travels.6?
I saw rich, agricultural land pushed aside, acres of fertile farming
giving way to ghetto-like, blockade-type Eastern European multiple
dwellings. The claim that the Zionists made the desert bloom falls
apart when one can see the green productiveness of the old terraced
Arab farms reaching as far as the eye can see on both sides of the road.
Forty-five kilometers out of Jerusalem are flourishing vineyards. Then
come the new, fortresslike buildings at Hebron for Jewish resettle-
ment, in sharp contrast to the small Arab houses with their arches,
olive trees, little gardens, and distinctive architecture.
The Arab Palestinians, no matter how cozy a picture the media
continued to draw, still deeply resented the occupation. Just when the
Gaza Strip had become a bit less turbulent and the situation of the
Arabs there slightly more tolerable, largely thanks to the efforts of
Gaza City’s Arab Mayor Rashid al-Shawa, the Israeli Military Governor
168 THE COVER-UP
ordered him to incorporate the neighboring Shati refugee camp within
the city limits and provide it with municipal services. The Palestinians
feared that such a change in the legal status of the strip would result
in the permanent integration of the area with its 400,000 refugees
within Israel. Mayor al-Shawa pointedly refused to obey the order and
was dismissed. Nine members of the eleven-man city council resigned.
A Christian Science Monitor editorial quoted what Michael Adams had
written in the Guardian Weekly, stated: ‘‘I had my ups and downs during
four years of war in Germany, but the Germans never treated me as
harshly as the Israelis are treating the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, the
majority of whom are women and children.’’63
Traveling through the West Bank in 1974, I met with Adel Ahmed
Shakaar, Deputy Mayor of Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city. One
of his top assistants, Engineer Hamdi Qasas, having read my books,
proceeded to talk freely at great length about the latest series of out-
rages committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians. More than 100
houses had been blown up in the past months, often on the basis of
mere suspicion of collaboration with the Palestinian Fatah. We were
taken to see the most recent example of Israeli oppression, a home that
had housed seventeen persons but had been ruthlessly blown to pieces
when one of the young residents was accused of collaborating in the
kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. While the American press still re-
ported in rhapsodic terms the alleged good relations between the
occupiers and the occupied, the contrary was apparent to any inquiring
viewer. The ruthless control being exercised over the Palestinians was
all too evident.
This house had been blown up only two weeks previously. After
the Israeli military had done their job, the members of the family
refused to move, insisting on sitting near the main road so everyone
could see what had happened. The military government had requested
that the Mayor take care of these new refugees so that they did not
continue to make a public display of their situation. His response was
that they should have thought of this before they destroyed the home
of seventeen people. The family was divided into two or three groups
and taken in by other families. To add insult to injury, the Israelis
forbade a homeowner to rebuild in the same location, or anywhere else
—as a practical method of getting rid of the Palestinians. With the
motto “I won’t help you, and I won’t let anyone else help you,” the
Israeli Establishment continued its pushing-out process of the indige-
nous population.
Indiscriminate destruction of homes enforces collective punish-
What Palestinians? 169
ment against the Palestinian community. The chief victims often have
been children and babies, women and old men, whose only crime
consisted of having some kind of blood relationship with a man merely
suspected by the authorities of sympathizing with the fedayeen. Demo-
liuon of homes, carried out even in the middle of severest winters, such
as that of 1973-74, resulted in whole families, who were not even
permitted to remove their personal belongings, being thrown out into
the freezing cold lacking adequate dress as well as shelter.
Antagonism against the occupier reached new heights when the
many friends of Kamal Nasser, the poet-PLO leader assassinated in the
cunning Israeli commando raid on Beirut, overcame security obstacles
to gather together in April 1973 from all over the region to mourn with
his family in the little church at Bir Zeit on the West Bank. (The Israelis
would not permit the body to be sent across the Allenby Bridge. The
slain Palestinian was buried in Beirut, with tens of thousands marching
through the streets to the cemetery there.)
The subsequent arrest of two editors of the Jerusalem Arabic
weekly Al Fajr, charged with evading censorship and inciting to revolu-
uon, surred additional unrest. These editors had audaciously printed
a poem, written by the mother of the late Kamal, in an editorial in
which Jordanian and Israeli intelligence officers were charged with
planning the Beirut attack at a meeting in Eilat.
Earlier, five young dissident Jews had been sentenced by a military
court to a fine or six months in prison merely for protesting Israel’s
seizure of an area on the occupied West Bank near Akraba for Jewish
settlement. A paramilitary colony had been quickly established there,
and a civilian setthement called Gitit was being built. The 4,000 peas-
ants of Akraba, a small Palestinian village six miles southeast on Nab-
lus, had refused to sell their lands. Then, according to Le Nouvel Obser-
vateur and the Chnstian Science Monitor, the Israelis took this drastic
action:
On April 28, an Israeli Piper plane overflew Akraba spraying a chemical defoli-
ant over the villagers’ wheat fields. In one night all the wheat sown the previ-
ous December (200 hectares or 494 acres) had changed its color: the green
turned brown, burnt by chemical products. . . . The Israelis do not deny these
facts. They admit having sprayed the fields with chemicals, but only “to teach
a lesson to these villagers’” who were stubbornly continuing to work lands to
which the army had forbidden them access. . .. One can’t help wondering why,
in the midst of these arid hills, cultivated fields were chosen as training
grounds (for the Israeli military). The answer is no mystery: the idea is to
prepare for the arrival of the Israeli settlers. In any case, Akraba is not the only
170 THE COVER-UP
village of the occupied West Bank where pressure is exerted on the villagers
to sell their lands.
This shocking action aroused the ire not only of the Arabs but of
their Jewish sympathizers. At a New Left rally in front of the Knesset,
the five accused youths had distributed pamphlets that vividly pro-
claimed: “We are loyal to our people and our country, but we refuse
to accept the confiscation of land belonging to the Arabs, the destruc-
tion of their crops, and their replacement with a Jewish village.”’
Any objective examination of what was taking place could not help
reveal the unmistakable Israeli motivation to push Arabs off their
property and take over. Medical centers for blood and TB and labora-
tory facilities, which had been servicing the Arabs of Jerusalem and
twenty-nine Arab villages, were ordered closed on April 1, 1973, and
moved to Ramallah, greatly inconveniencing people who needed quick
help. One of the four centers was thereafter reopened, but nothing was
heard further of the other three. The claim was also made that the
Sharia, the Muslim courts, were very gradually being closed down. The
Kadi in charge, we were told, was just another stooge who was forced
to swear to the Israeli Establishment that appointed him. Thirteen new
quarters were being established by Israelis in and around Jerusalem,
planned to accommodate eventually 122,000 new Jewish immigrants.
This did not at all end the Arabs’ fear. It was rumored that 1,000
additional square miles (80,000 dunums) would also be used for Jew-
ish populating of the area so as to link up Bethlehem, Jericho, and the
Dead Sea.
Arrests, trials, and deportations of West Bank Arabs increased.
Even as Israel was vehemently protesting the treatment of prisoners
of the October 1973 war and the Syrian-Egyptian reluctance to ex-
change prisoners as violations of the Geneva Convention, oppressions
against the inhabitants of the conquered territories, clearly forbidden
by the Geneva Convention, continued and were being ignored.
The Amman Committee of Expelled Palestinians, claiming to rep-
resent sixty-eight exiled Palestinians—‘‘men and women of promi-
nence and influence, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, doctors,
lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, teachers, students, union workers,
farmers, and heads of municipalities” —submitted a memorandum to
the Jordanian Prime Minister in 1969 stating:
“It is clear that the . . . expulsion of people of influence or leadership is
intended to fragment the people’s unity, lower their morale, and undermine
their resistance to the occupation. . . .""6
What Palestinians? 17]
Most of the allegations against the deportees concerned activities
normally considered within the realm of human rights, such as: ‘“‘pub-
licly opposed the annexation of East Jerusalem,” “incited students to
demonstrate,” ‘planned merchant strikes, leaflets found in his
house,” ‘‘active in Communist party,” “‘collected funds for PLO,”
“caused unrest in school,”’ “urged people not to work in Israel,”
“demonstrated on Human Rights Day,” “‘is wife (or son or daughter)
of——(suspected or actual Palestinian activist),”’ etc.66
When the Israeli policy of deportation without trial was just begin-
ning, a critical article appeared in New Outlook (Tel Aviv):
9 66
To the best of our own personal knowledge, at least some of the personalities
deported had not occupied themselves with sabotage or terror, but had, within
the limits of the given situation, voiced their opposition to Israeli rule on the
West Bank. If that is a crime that warrants deportation, we may not be far from
the day when thousands of others will have to be treated the same way.®?
The magazine's prediction soon became a fact, and the deporta-
tions never ceased; if anything, it became more brazen. On December
10, 1973, which coincidentally is celebrated in Israel as the Day of
Human Rights, eight®8 Palestinian intellectuals and community leaders
of the West Bank were expelled to Jordan, the expulsions being carried
out in the most brutal manner. The men were arrested at night and
taken from their homes, without the victims or their families being told
what the charges were. In each home from which the father of the
family was taken for expulsion, a security man was left, whose task was
to prevent the family from having immediate contact with the outside
world, even with an attorney.
The arrested men were kept in the dark as to the exact reason for
their apprehension. As one of them, Dr. Walid Kamhawi, later de-
tailed:
An officer climbed into the vehicle in which we were being transported, read
a paper he held in his hands, and then we knew—the Israeli occupying authori-
ties had ordered our expulsion from our homeland, because we “constituted
a danger to Israeli security.” It was so funny, that in spite of the “secure
borders” and the ultra-modern war machinery of “invincible Israel’ we, a
doctor, a mayor, a trade-unionist, two lawyers and three teachers, were a threat
to Israeli security, though none of us had carried a pistol in his life. No court,
no trial, not even a charge was brought against any of us.9
They were taken into the desert area of the Araba Valley and
compelled by threat of force to cross over into Jordan. Abd al-Jawad
Saleh,7° the Mayor of the town of El-Bireh, refused to obey the order
172 THE COVER-UP
to cross over the border and was wounded with a bayonet by one of
the Israeli soldiers. To force them to advance further into Jordanian
territory, shots were fired in their direction. A few weeks later, when
the father of Mayor Saleh died, the son was not allowed to cross back
even for a brief visit to attend his father’s funeral.
Jewish Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer described another deporta-
tion as it was related to her by one of her many Palestianian clients:
There were twelve of us. On | July 1970 we were taken to the Beersheba
prison. The guards told us that this was the first stage of our release. When
we arrived in Beersheba we were told it was banishment. Next morning at six
o'clock we were handcuffed and blindfolded and our feet were chained. In
reply to our questions we were told that we were going home. They put us in
a truck and we travelled for about four hours. When the truck stopped we were
taken to another vehicle and travelled about three hours more. We didn’t know
where we had been taken to. When the vehicle stopped the cloth was taken
off our eyes. We saw then that we were in an armoured car. We were sur-
rounded by other armoured cars loaded with armed soldiers. We were on the
road, and around us extended the desert. An officer came and ordered us in
a threatening voice: ‘Now you walk towards the East,” and he pointed at the
dunes of the endless desert. ‘Anyone coming back will be shot. Anyone com-
ing back in a month, a year, or any other time must know that only death awaits
him here.”’ To the east the burning sands of the desert were waiting for us.
It was mid-day in July. Our heads had no cover; our shoes were plastic slippers.
We each had a water-bottle with lukewarm water and a bag with sand-covered
food. We started walking in the terrible heat of noon without knowing where
our steps would take us. We were afraid of getting lost in the desert. We
remembered the Egyptian soldiers who died in the Sinai sands after suffering
hunger, thirst and sun stroke. We walked for more than two hours until
suddenly we met a first-line post of the Jordanian army. They thought we were
spies and started shooting at us. By a real miracle none of us were wounded,
and finally we succeeded in convincing them, and we were taken to Amman.
As you know, the Jordanian authorities refused to accept people deported
across the bridges. So the Israeli authorities wanted to confront them with
facts. I think they expected the Jordanians to kill us. We were told later that
we had been banished near the Al-Dahl region, in Wadi Araba. Our feet were
inflamed when we arrived in Amman. The skin of my shaved head had peeled
off because of the sun. The desert was a nightmare.7!
The Israeli government has used deportation as a means of rid-
ding itself of outspoken Palestinian nationalists, including the mayors
of Jerusalem and Ramallah, the editor of Shaab newspaper, former
members of Parliament, and doctors and lawyers. Dr. Hanna Nasir,
president of Bir Zeit College, was expelled from his Ramallah home
What Palestinians? 173
on November 21, 1974. He was a member of a distinguished Pales-
tinian family, including his father, Musa, who had served as Jordan’s
foreign minister, and his cousin, Kamal, the assassinated PLO spokes-
man-poet. Nasir had been an outspoken nationalist. With no notice
whatsoever, he and four others were awakened and bodily removed
from the West Bank, accused of inciting recent demonstrations and of
being members of “hostile organizations.”’ Yet New York Times corre-
spondent Terence Smith, in a November 22 story, wrote that Nasir
“did everything he could to avoid a confrontation” between the
marching, protesting students of his college and the Israeli soldiers
sent in to keep the area quiet.
In an American Friends Service Committee Report of April 1977,
Ann Lesch indicated that between June 1967 and February 1976 nearly
1,500 Palestinians had been deported from the occupied territories,
most of them community leaders, and some 110 political activists. The
study”? lists by name 1,136 individuals with the exact date of deporta-
tion and the route by which they were dispelled—by the River Jordan
bridges into Jordan, across the Lebanese border or set loose in the
desert region between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba.
Some nationalists have not been deported. Ramallah-born Ray-
monda Taweel was placed under house arrest in August 1976. She can
see people, but their names are carefully noted by policemen guarding
her door. Her crime: She passed word along to foreign correspondents
on what was really happening. For this she was accused of poisoning
the foreign media. She defied Israeli officials in the military govern-
ment, saying: ‘“This is supposed to be an open society. There is a price
for democracy and I am going to continue.” She refused to write a
letter of apology and the authorities refused to bring charges, even
permitting her to leave the country to visit the U.S. during the meeting
of the U.N. General Assembly in 1976. But, contrary to Israeli hopes,
she returned to carry on her battle. On March 22, 1978 at 1:30 a.M.,
Israeli military police knocked at her door and took her off “for inter-
rogation.” She was not permitted to contact her lawyer nor were the
charges against her revealed.
The claim widely spread by the Zionist Establishment that the
occupation of Sinai, Golan, the West Bank, and Gaza has been “‘the
most liberal occupation in history” is not borne out by independent
correspondents. The London 7imes (June 17, 1974) declared: ‘It is a
curious form of ‘liberalism’ with hundreds of new prisoners in the past
few months crammed into Israeli jails in addition to the thousands
already there for several years.”’ And four years later, according to Time
174 THE COVER-UP
magazine of June 19, 1978, Arab students were being arrested for such
vaguely defined crimes as “‘indiscreet talk.” Brother Joseph Lowen-
stein, President of Bethlehem University, who kept a log of under-
graduates called in for interrogation, noted that 104 out of a student
body of 400 had been questioned.
Were this occurring anywhere else in the world, liberals in Amer-
ica would have been the first to voice strongest objections to the fact
that there is no legal way of opposing the occupation by Israel. Peace-
ful demonstrations, protests, strikes, distribution of leaflets are all
heavily punishable by law. Thousands are currently in prison for hav-
ing chosen these forms of resistance. Prison sentences are meted out
for any type of help given to a person suspected of antioccupation
activities. In late 1976 there were estimated by the Middle East Re-
sources Center to be 3,200 security prisoners in Israel and the occu-
pied territories, many being held without charges or a trial date.
According to one particularly harsh law, anyone who suspects that
another person intends or is about to commit an offense against the
military laws in force in the occupied territories, and does not prevent
him from doing so, or inform the authorities at once, is himself guilty
of an offense punishable by up to five years in prison or a fine of
£1,000.
In With My Own Eyes, Felicia Langer detailed the treatment of
prisoners, the violence, beatings, and torture to which suspects are
subjected during interrogation by members of the Shin Beth (Israeli
Security Service).73 There has hardly been a trial whose records do not
contain testimony in which the accused complains of beatings and
torture, and the evidence is all too visible to those such as Langer who
have access to these prisoners. Israel was indeed continuing practices
that cultural Zionist leader Ahad Ha-Am had observed back in 1891:
“They treat Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their
rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds, and
nobody among us opposes these despicable inclinations.”
The Israeli officials set up a category of West Bank Palestinians,
calling them “Temporary Residents” despite the fact that many of
these Arabs were born in the place where they now live and where their
families have lived for a number of years. There was the case of Mrs.
Ratibe El-Basha of the village of Beit Iba. She had come back from
Kuwait with the body of her husband for burial in her village. She was
forthwith declared a ‘““Temporary Resident” in the very village in
which she had been born and lived all her life prior to forced exodus
with her husband to the Arabian Gulf for employment after the 1967
What Palestinians? 175
war. She shared the house with her ten-year-old son, her aged father,
and the rest of the family. Each month she was compelled to ask for
a permit to live in the village, which meant that she had to go to the
Allenby Bridge, cross over to the East Bank, return, and apply for a
new permit on the spot. It is quite difficult to describe in words the
brutality, humiliation, and cruelty of this treatment, which had been
repeated for several months. Protests to the Israeli authorities in an
attempt to alleviate some of these hard conditions imposed on this
widow were of no avail. And this was only one of many similar cases.
In an attempt to acquaint the American people with these facts of
life within Israel and the occupied territories, Shahak came to the U.S.
in 1974 to lecture and to visit newspaper offices. He did shake up some
people, particularly when he detailed how the Jewish National Fund
had been engaged in the process of buying up all inhabitable land in
Israel (except in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem), following
which restrictive covenants were slapped on the purchases so that
Arabs might never rent or buy them. And amazingly enough the Israeli
courts have enforced with fines any attempted breach of these cove-
nants,
The survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps returned a year later
to testify before the House Subcommittee on International Organiza-
tions and Movements of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He told the
members: “I did not have any such experience in my life that shocked
me so much as witnessing the blowing up of Arab houses by Israeli
demolition squads in the occupied territory of the West Bank of the
Jordan River.” The professor stated that it has been “the standard
practice of Israeli authorities ever since the 1967 war to seize Arabs
whom they deem undesirable on the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip
and deport them, after which their homes are destroyed.’”’ Shahak
challenged the eight representatives, who were taking his tesumony,
to go out to the area and “‘see if you think these things are correct for
yourselves and express your own opinion.” Congressman Jonathan B.
Bingham of the Bronx and Lester L. Wolff of Long Island, both stal-
wart Zionists, countered with the suggestion that such time would be
better spent dealing with charges of Arab abuse of Israelis.
Even though the truth was easy to obtain, these legislators and
others of their equally uninformed and prejudiced colleagues in both
houses of Congress did not really wish, or were afraid, to understand
what lay at the core of the Middle East conflict. When the counsel of
the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees and two other
staff members were sent on a Middle East fact-finding mission to
176 THE COVER-UP
review the dire situation facing the Palestinians, the report containing
the findings was bottled up and efforts to obtain a copy were met with
refusal from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on
Refugees, Senator Edward Kennedy.’*
Some little light on the treatment of Palestinian political pris-
oners, held indefinitely under administrative detention, had previ-
ously been shed by international agencies and the European press.
A report to the U.N. by one of its special working groups declared
that the “vast majority of detainees are held in detention by virtue
of administrative orders and that persons under administrative de-
tention are deprived of any guarantees concerning the length of
detention and fair trial.’’75
The International Red Cross reported:
On a visit which was carried out without the presence of an observer, 81
prisoners were found huddled in one cell. The prisoners all declared that they
were not allowed to leave their cells, even to use the toilets or the washing
facilities. They had to use the cell tap which was situated only 15 centimeters
from the level of the floor.7&
Shortly thereafter Le Monde informed its readers:
Two thousand eight hundred Palestinian Arabs and around a hundred and ten
Israeli Arabs are presently detained in Israeli prisons, Israeli official sources
declared Tuesday. Among the Palestinian prisoners there are a few dozen
women... .77
Somehow more courageous than any of the larger English or U.S.
journals, the London Sunday Times exposed the Israeli practice of ad-
ministrative detention:
Ishak Ali el-Marari was arrested on March 7, 1969, in Jerusalem. After two
months of interrogation, during which he claimed he had no access either to
his wife or his lawyer, he was charged with having been a member of an illegal
organization. Interestingly, though he is still in prison, the charges against him
were dropped on June 6, 1969... . This does not mean under the system of
administrative imprisonment which is now widely used that there is anything
to prevent his remaining in prison for an indefinite period.78
The Economist reported that the official Israeli figure in 1970 of
“non-Israelis in prison was 3,700 (Arab estimates put the number at
up to four times the Israeli figure),” more than 1,000 of whom were
“under administrative detention, that is without charge, some of them
for periods of more than two years.” This writer was most perspica-
cious in pointing out the shape of things to come:
What Palestinians? 177
By subjecting to the same treatment confessed saboteurs, those condemned
for political activity and innocent members of the Arab public who happen to
fall under suspicion, the authorities are in fact achieving the one thing they
presumably would like to prevent: a consolidation of Arab opinions inside
Israel behind the commando movement.79
Another noxious practice, kept out of sight but carried on by the
Israelis against the Palestinians, was collective punishment. A memo-
randum received by the U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights in
the Occupied Territories discussed this:
Ever since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, collective punish-
ment has been a principle of wide application—blowing up houses, taking of
hostages, expulsion of Palestinian leaders and notables, curfew, etc. The man
personally responsible for the Israeli policies in the occupied territories is
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. When asked by Knesset member Uri Avneri,
“Is the Ministry of Defense acting in such cases according to principles of
collective responsibility of the whole family for one of its members?” Minister
Dayan answered, ‘‘Yes.”’8°
When oppresion against inhabitants was stepped up after the
October 1973 war, huge mass arrests were carried out. In the town of
Nablus alone 550 people (all males) were arrested in two days, includ-
ing high-school age youths and even elementary school youngsters.®!
Five of the prisoners taken on January 5, 1974, disappeared from sight.
In an interview reported in the Norwegian Arbuderbladet (April 4,
1970), Arne Haaland, a member of the Executive Committee of Am-
nesty International, the London-based organization that attempts to
monitor human rights worldwide, stated: ‘“We never claimed that the
allegations about torture had been proved . . . but we have in our
possession very extensive material to support the assumption that
torture does in fact occur. We have rarely—if ever—had such reliable
material on which to base the establishment of the fact in relation to
torture taking place—or not taking place—in a particular country.”
The Amnesty report, “Israeli Methods of Torture,” uncovered
these practices:
a. Police dogs let loose on the prisoner who is usually handcuffed with hands
behind back. The dogs are trained to throw the prisoner on the ground. The
prisoner is then ordered to get on his feet, and so on.
b. Finger placed on the end of an open door, and then the door is slammed
on them.
c. Finger nails are pulled out with ordinary pincers.
d. The prisoner is injected with pepper solutions.
178 THE COVER-UP
e. The prisoner is injected with solutions which he is told induce instant
insanity. He is shown what he is told is an antidote, which would be given to
him if only he confessed in time.
f A large metal container is fitted over the head and neck and held firm to the
body by extension. The container is then hit with sticks on the outside, at first
slowly and in routine fashion, and then with increasing tempo. The more
battered the container, the more difficult it is to remove.
g. Match sticks are inserted into the penis. Sometimes they are lit.
h. A certain chemical substance (possibly a nerve irritant) is put in the hand
of the prisoner who is ordered to clench it. The substance gives the effect of
an electric shock.8?
After inspecting an Israeli prison where 370 Arab hunger-strikers
were protesting jail conditions, Gaza’s Mayor Shawa declared: “The
conditions in the Ashkelon prison are terrible. They are kept 16 men
to a cell and are locked up 22 hours a day. They sleep on the floor and
have few winter clothes.” The inmates, imprisoned for security
offenses, demanded they be treated as prisoners of war. A representa-
tive of the International Red Cross agreed that living conditions in the
prison were terrible, but comparable with those at other prisons in the
occupied territories.
Where Shahak and Langer failed to win any meaningful media
coverage on the gross maltreatment and torture of Palestinians, The
London Sunday Times succeeded in its June 19, 1977, four-page spread
based on the exhaustive study of its prestigious “Insight” team of Paul
Eddy and Peter Gilman. Working inside the West Bank, they inter-
viewed forty-four Palestinian Arabs who had been arrested by Israeli
security forces and who stated they wére tortured during interrogation
to extract confessions of crimes. In twenty-two of these cases the Arabs
questioned agreed to be named even though they still live under Israeli
occupation. The others asked to remain anonymous.
Corroborating the Shahak and Langer charges, The Times found
that torture was so ‘“‘systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful
of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders” and “implicated all of Israel’s secu-
rity sources.”” The six principal conclusions reached were:
1) Israel’s securitv and intelligence services ill-treat Arabs in detention.
2) Some of the ill-treatment is merely primitive: prolonged beatings, for
example. But more refined techniques are also used, including electric-
shock torture and confinement in specially constructed cells. This sort of
apparatus, allied to the degree of organization evident in its application,
removes Israel’s practice from the lesser realms of brutality and places it
firmly in the category of torture.
What Palestinians? 179
3) Torture takes place in at least six centers at the prisons of the four main
occupied towns of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron on the West Bank, and
Gaza in the south; at the detention center in Jerusalem known as the Russian
compound; and at a special military intelligence center whose whereabouts
are uncertain, but which testimony suggests is somewhere inside the vast
military supply base at Sarafand,®3 near Lod Airport on the Jerusalem-Tel
Aviv road.
4) All of Israel’s security services are implicated: the Shin Beth, roughly
Israel’s MI-5 and Special Branch in one, which reports to the office of the
Prime Minister; Military Intelligence, which reports to the Minister of De-
fense; the border police; and Latam, Israel's “Department for Special Mis-
sions,” both of which report to the Police Minister.
5) Torture is organized methodically. It appears to be sanctioned at some
level as deliberate policy.
6) Torture seems to be used for three purposes. The first is, of course,
to extract information. The second motive, which seems at least as common,
is to induce people to confess to “security’”’ offenses of which they may, or
may not, be guilty. The extracted confession is then used as the principal
evidence in court: Israel makes something of the fact that it has few political
prisoners in its jails, only those duly convicted according to the law. The
third purpose is to persuade Arabs in the occupied territories that it is least
painful to behave passively.
During their exhausting task the two reporters compiled 110,000
words of recorded testimony, interviewing their subjects for hours,
making certain each interviewee could “withstand detailed cross-
examination” of incidents covering the ten years of Israeli occupation
in the West Bank and Gaza. They ended their field investigations in
December 1976, but this highly authoritative source poignantly stated
in its summation of the effort that ‘there is no reason to believe it [the
torture] has ceased; the allegations are continuing.”
The experiences of individual victims of Israeli interrogation,
repulsive as they are, provide a sharper insight into the seriousness
of the charges. The first case in the London Times was that of
Omar Abdel-Karim, a thirty-five-year-old carpenter from Beit
Sahur, just south of Bethlehem. He was arrested on October 3,
1976, as he was crossing eastward over the Allenby Bridge into Jor-
dan. Upon his apprehension, according to the Times, “‘he was fit,
happy, and holding down a job.”” When released, after five months
in the hands of Israeli security, “he looked like an old man” and
was carried over the bridge to Jordan on a stretcher because he
could not walk.
Upon admission to the King Hussein Hospital immediately fol-
180 THE COVER-UP
lowing his release, a medical examination showed this to be his condi-
tion, according to the Times:
He complained of pains in the chest and found it hard to breathe out. He had
an infection of the urinary tract. He talked of severe head pain and showed
signs of giddiness. And his difficulty tended to confirm his complaint that his
joints, especially his knees, were painful too. Chest x-rays then showed that
Abdel-Karim’s ribs had at some point been fractured. Abdel-Karim continued
to bear marks of having come through some traumatic experience. With the
aid of antibiotics, multi-vitamins and a high protein diet, Abdel-Karim has
slowly recovered, though two months later, he could still barely walk.
During eight hours of questioning by the “Insight” reporters in
mid-April, he said his ordeal began in the ‘Russian Compound’—the
detention and interrogation center in Jerusalem that houses Shin Beth
and Latam and occasionally the border police. He was beaten on the
soles of his feet, hung up by his wrists, and kicked around during his
first week of interrogation, but continued to insist he was innocent of
the charges against him, namely that he was a member of the fedayeen.
He was then transferred to another location, blindfolded, and there his
torture ordeal began. Among other things, he was suspended by his
wrists from a pulley and beaten until his ribs broke; a bottle was forced
up his rectum; his wife was beaten in his presence until he confessed
falsely to the crime. When his interrogators discovered he lied to save
his wife, and no explosives were found in his home as he had con-
fessed, he was kept under a cold shower, jammed into a barrel of
freezing water, and suspended from his wrists while his interrogator
squeezed his genitals.
Other details, which hardly make for edifying reading, relate to
five other prisoners, who were variously set on by dogs; had their
testicles squeezed; had a ball-point pen refill pushed into their penis;
were beaten on the head, the body, and the genitals; or were “‘raped”’
by a trustee prisoner, at the connivance of the Israelis.
Israel’s denials were not long in coming. In a rambling 3,500-
word reply published in the Times on July 3, 1977, Israel categorically
denied all charges and regretted that the Sunday Times “found it fit to
print such an article.’’84
In the case of Omar Abdel-Karim, the Israeli reply claimed that
he was ill before his arrest and that upon his release from prison “‘he
happily appeared at the press conference and on Jordanian televi-
sion.” On July 10, in a rejoinder, the Times flatly refuted both claims.
It said: ‘Not true. He was fit, happy and holding down a job. By
What Palestinians? 181
contrast, he left Israeh hands a stretcher case.”’ To the claim that he
appeared on television, the “‘Insight”’ team said: “The Director Gen-
eral of Jordanian TV, Mohamed Kamal, stated: ‘I have personally
searched through all our records; there was no such interview.’ Nor
was there a press conference. Summoned by the hospital doctor in
Jordan, two reporters went to Karim’s bedside, one from Reuters and
the other Daniel Southerland of the Christian Science Monitor. Souther-
land recalled that Karim was mostly in bed, propping himself on one
elbow to talk: ‘He was rather weak and frail and very thin, and obvi-
ously suffering physical pain.’ He had ‘difficulty walking’ even with a
cane. ‘Seen from the rear . . . he looked like an old man,’ Southerland
wrote at the time. And he concluded that Karim had been ‘badly
beaten.’ ”’
Commenting on the overall Israeli response, the Times said: “Is-
rael’s reply to our investigation dealt with the central points by flat
denial, rather than with detailed evidence; it raised side issues; it de-
voted great energy to attacking two of its own citizens (lawyers Felicia
Langer and Lea Tsemel, who defended some of the accused) who were
by no means our principal witnesses; it contained a number of un-
truths,”
Perhaps the most unsavory reading of all, however, was the ac-
count of a certain Josef Odeh and his daughter Rasmiah, which in the
words of the London Times “‘is terrible—though by no means unique.”
The story stated that it squares with the pattern of other testimony and
that some corroboration is available. According to the testimony of
Josef Odeh:
After his daughter Rasmiah was arrested, she was beaten. She was lying on the
floor and there were blood stains on her clothes. Her face was blue and she
had a black eye. Odeh was then taken into an interrogation room to find
Rasmiah naked and handcuffed. One of the interrogators, he said, ‘““Asked me
to sleep with her,” and I said: ‘Don’t even think of that. I would never do such
a thing.” They were beating me and beating her and we were both screaming.
... And they spread her legs and shoved the stick into her. She was bleeding
from her mouth and from her face and from her end.
In explaining how the Israeli authorities handle their security
problem in occupied Arab lands, the Times traced the development of
these oppressive measures since 1967 after Israel’s victory in the six-
day war. ‘Israel has never denied that its battle against the Palestinian
resistance has involved tough measures.” The Times said: ‘It has
demolished homes (16,212 between July 1967 and August 1971, ac-
182 THE COVER-UP
cording to an independently kept log) and deported ‘known agents of
subversion’ (1,120 to Jordan since 1967, according to Jordanian police
records).”
As the number of arrests swelled in 1967 and 1968 there was no
alternative to overcrowding the jails of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
with Palestinian prisoners. In the months after the 1967 war the num-
ber of detained Palestinians passed the 2,000 mark.
Ten years after the occupation began, only thirty-seven ‘‘de-
tainees”’ remain, thus allowing Israel to demonstrate to itself and to
the world that it has no political prisoners, only convicted terrorists.
The number in 1977 was 3,200 Palestinians guilty of security offenses
and 2,600 guilty of other offenses. Convictions in political cases were
always handed down by military courts, which have become the ful-
crum of Israel's claim to rule the occupied territories according to the
rule of law. But as the 7imes pointed out, convictions were always based
on confessions, which the “Insight” team charges were obtained by
torture—at least in the forty-four cases investigated.
To corroborate this point and the hopelessness of obtaining any
justice in a military court, the Times investigators said: “We have talked
with six lawyers—two Israelis and four Palestinians—who regularly
appear in the courts to defend those accused of security offenses. The
mechanism is, in its way, elegant, almost syllogistic. Most convictions
in those courts are based on confessions by the accused; most of those
confessions, the lawyers are convinced, are extracted by ill treatment
or torture; almost without exception the courts reject that contention. ”’ (Italics
added.)
In describing how rigged the entire process was against the Pales-
tinian defendants, the Times detailed the following: “The suspect can
be held for up to eighteen days before being taken before a military
judge. He can order further detention of up to six months, In this time,
the suspect is interrogated. When eventually he is brought to trial—
up to a year later—the prosecution is almost invariably equipped with
a statement, signed by the suspect, confessing to at least some of the
charges.”’ During the interrogation time, the 7imes said defendants
have no access to a lawyer and in most cases are detained at locations
unknown to their relatives.
When allegations of torture are brought up in court to refute the
confession of a defendant, a “‘little trial” takes place. According to the
Times’ account, this is what happens:
The defendant tells the court that he was ill-treated or tortured. The prosecu-
tion then produces the policeman or army officer who took the confession.
What Palestinians? 183
According to the young Israeli-born advocate Lea Tsemel, the officer tells the
court: “I sat with the suspect, we had coffee together, I gave him cigarettes,
he talked freely, and everything was normal.” And this officer is almost always
telling the truth. The catch is that the policeman may indeed have taken the
statement. But he did not conduct the interrogation. Many of the former
prisoners we questioned said that, after they had agreed to make a statement,
they were passed from interrogators to the police, together with a note of the
offenses they were admitting. The new officer then composed the statement
for the court.
In the editorial “A Case for Concern,” which appeared the same
day as the “Insight” report broke on the front page, the Sunday Times
declared:
... Torture must be condemned wherever it is practiced. But in the occu-
pied lands of Israel the people are dependent on international protection
and only respect for international convention can help them . . . the justifica-
tion of torture for the control of populations cannot be accepted by nations
with claims to Western values, whatever the provocations. It is self-defeating.
. .. It demoralizes those who practice it... . Mr. Begin suffered in a Russian
prison in his youth, had a price on his head under the British, and has writ-
ten with great emotion in condemnation of British methods of interrogation,
and trial of his comrades in the Irgun Zvai Leumi. Unless his convictions
have cha ged, he cannot be satisfied that since 1967 Israel has used against
Arab prisoners the British mandate laws and regulations he so bitterly de-
nounced. ...
The Israeli press, normally so “vigorous and outspoken,” ob-
served a strange silence as to just what was happening in the interroga-
tion centers. With the exception of Haaretz, the Israeli media have
rarely mentioned assertions of ill-treatment by Arabs in Israeli-
occupied territories, thus giving the military administration authorities
virtual carte blanche to do as they have pleased.
The Observer gave its approval to the findings of its rival London
journal. Twenty-seven Members of Parliament representing all parties
introduced a motion calling for a detailed investigation of the Sunday
Times’ allegations. David Watkins, one of the sponsors of the motion,
wrote: “The Zionist lobby has gone into action in its usual fashion,
unable to refute the Times’ evidence and therefore descending to at-
tempts to discredit this very reputable and internationally known
newspaper.”
Four months before the Sunday Times story had broken, the Chns-
tian Science Monitor®> had a lengthy piece, datelined Amman, on the
“brutality which persists in the current no-war, no-peace situation.”
The subject was Omar Abdul Ghani-Salameh, described as a “‘badly
184 THE COVER-UP
beaten, frail-looking Palestinian’” who had been permitted, despite
Arab policy of disapproving of the deportation of any Palestinians
from Israeli-occupied area, to make the 50-mile trip from the prison
in Nablus to the King Hussein Hospital in Salt.86
The Chief Surgeon:and Director of the hospital found Salameh,
whom Israeli military authorities described as a ‘‘convicted guerrilla,”
suffering from “‘ill health,” having difficulty walking, and suffering
from fractured ribs, multiple ‘‘contusions” or bruises, and a general
weakness due to loss of weight. Salameh, from a town near Bethlehem,
told two reporters that his “‘ill health” stemmed from torture after his
arrest as he was about to cross the river into Jordan with legal permis-
sion on family business. According to the account of correspondent
Daniel Southerland, the Palestinian claimed that “Israeli soldiers
handcuffed and blindfolded him, threw him into a car, and began
punching him with their fists even before he reached the ‘Russian
Compound’ (in Arabic Moscobiya, the place in West Jerusalem where
Arab dissidents from the occupied West Bank are beaten up). Here his
interrogators attempted to force him to admit his connection with
Palestinian resistance groups by forcing him to lie down on the floor
while three men beat him on the soles of his feet with sticks.”’
The torture during the next nearly five months included electric
shocks throwing him into convulsions and “‘suspensions from the ceil-
ing by a system of chains and pulleys which rendered him uncon-
scious.”’ One of his ‘“‘easy” tortures, according to Salameh, was to
“clean a floor full of dirt and glass with his tongue and then swallow
the filth afterwards.” When he protested to his torturers and begged
them “in the name of God” to desist, their reply was, ‘““Your God is
under my feet.”
Except for this article, there was a near-total blackout on this
subject by the U.S. media, save the most limited New York Times cover-
age of the London disclosures. When Shahak and three Palestinians
testified before a Senate subcommittee in October 1977 as to the
brutal deprivation of human rights on the West Bank and Gaza, it was
only a small Minnesota paper that noted in an editorial: ‘‘Deportation,
confiscation, racial discrimination, detention without trial—these are
ugly words for ugly practices.’’87
Minute coverage was paid (on a back page of the New York Times)
to the release of a report after a three-week fact-finding trip to the
Middle East by a ten-member delegation of American lawyers from the
National Lawyers Guild. These representatives of a national organiza-
tion of progressive attorneys, with seventy chapters and 5,000 mem-
What Palestinians? 185
bers, had studied the Arab-Israel conflict and conducted a particular
investigation of Israeli human rights practices in the occupied territo-
ries at their August 1, 1977 press conference. The returning Guild
members confirmed the charges that Israeli military interrogators fre-
quently torture to extract confessions and that no lawyer may be pre-
sent until the questioning has ended. Beyond a confession, the return-
ing lawyers reported, little evidence was required for conviction, and
these confessions were originally drafted in Hebrew, which most de-
tainees do not know.
The Guild delegation had been told by the Mayor of Ramallah that
in April and May 1977, for a period of forty-five days, Jewish settlers
went every night into a Palestinian village and fired shots, broke win-
dows and door handles, and shouted obscenities at sleeping villagers,
claiming the land was theirs and urging the villagers to leave. The
Mayor said the Jewish settlers had been accompanied by Israeli sol-
diers, who provided protection for them.
The findings of the delegation were summed up in the words of
Attorney Malea Kiblan, contained in the August | press statement:
Before I came, I had never fully understood the U.N. Resolution that equated
Zionism with racism, and I came here with an open mind to have personal
access to the facts of the situation. When I saw things firsthand, I was totally
overwhelmed by the way the Arabs are treated as inferior people. I didn’t really
understand institutional racism until I made this trip, although we have racism
in the United States. Israel is built on an exclusivist system, and the Arabs
racially cannot qualify as equal citizens in the West Bank or in Israel in any
area, including health, education, personal treatment, and every other area.
In September 1977 the Swiss League for Human Rights confirmed
the pattern of violation of Palestinian rights that had been observed,
investigated, and recognized by responsible organizations concerned
with the defense of human rights: Amnesty International (1977 Nobel
Peace Prize) in March 1972; the Israeli League for Human and Civil
Rights in February 1973; and a fact-finding mission of the American
National Lawyers Guild in August 1977. The Swiss League report
concluded:
... the Israeli occupation of the West Bank caused repeated violations of the
provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights including numerous
arbitrary arrests, prolonged cases of detention and deportations (a contraven-
tion of Article 3 of the Declaration); enforced residence, serious restrictions
on border crossing and prohibiting return (a contravention of Article 13
guaranteeing right of free movement and free choice of residence); arbitrary
186 THE COVER-UP
expropriation, prohibiting of construction and demolition of buildings (con-
travention of Article 17 stipulating that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived
of his property”); common and systematic practice of torture (in contravention
of Article 5); and the flagrant inequalities between Jews and Arabs in the West
Bank (in contravention of Article 2, Paragraph 2).
At the end of its report the Swiss League stated: “Finally, our
delegation cannot but feel concern with respect to the right to a na-
tionality cited in Article 15 of the Human Rights Declaration. In effect,
the very status of an occupied territory results in the denial of a nation-
ality to its inhabitants.”
In presenting the League’s report in October to the U.N. Special
Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights
of the Population of the Occupied Territories, President of the Swiss
League for Human Rights Denis Payot stated: “I felt it necessary to
come in person to New York. The cause of one man is a very worthy
one, but the cause of a whole people in distress is much more so.”
Human rights reports prepared by the Department of State in
February, 1978, in accordance with the provisions of the Foreign As-
sistance Act, clearly indicated that Israel has grossly violated the
Fourth Geneva Convention in its occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza. Noting the Insight Team report of the Sunday Times, the rappor-
teurs stated that while there was no evidence “‘of consistent practice
or policy of torture, there are documented reports of the use of ex-
treme and psychological pressures during interrogation and instances
of brutality by individual interrogators cannot be ruled out.’’88 The
State Department further noted the “selective expulsion of West Bank
and Gaza residents “suspected of engaging in terrorism or anti-Israel
political agitation” [Italics added.) ‘‘Collective punishment” has been
meted out to other individuals convicted of or suspected of terrorism
and to their families through the demolition or sealing up of homes.
Some 3,100 non-Israeli Arabs were said to be under arrest or in prison
in Israel proper. While freedom of religion is unqualified, freedom of
expression and of assembly are restricted by Israeli interpretation of
security requirements.”
On February 14, 1978, the U.N. Human Rights Commission con-
demned Israel for the eighth straignt year on for alleged atrocities in
occupied territories. Of the 32 member nations, only the U.S. and
Canada dissented; seven abstained. And Freedom House’s 1978 Com-
parative Survey of Freedom ranks Israel at the bottom of the scale for
political rights and civil hberties in foreign administered areas; only
Chile and South Africa rated lower.89
What Palestinians? 187
One comment can best sum up these shocking revelations of what
has been transpiring to Palestinian Arabs inside the occupied territo-
ries and in Israel proper. On the day after the U.N. had voted partition
of Palestine in November 1947, Israel’s first President-to-be, Dr. Weiz-
mann, stated: “I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state
by what it shall do with the Arabs.”
As part of their “push out the Arabs and bring in the Jews”
program, directly after the 1967 war, the Israeli government gave
impetus to new settlements throughout the conquered areas. Al-
though they were in defiance of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, of which Israel is a signatory, providing that “Occupying
powers shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population
into the territories it occupies,” the settlements were welcomed by
Israeli hawks9° who wished to create a situation that would inhibit any
move on the part of any Israeli government to withdraw from the Arab
territories occupied in the six-day war.
In his detailed paper “Signposts to Destruction: Israeli Settle-
ments in the Occupied Territories,” former long-time Middle East
Guardian correspondent Michael Adams noted that “‘settlements which
were initiated in 1967 as military or paramilitary outposts, like the first
settlements on the Golan plateau and the Jordan valley, have been
gradually turned over to civilian occupation, emphasizing their perma-
nency in the eyes both of the government and of the settlers them-
selves, while a growing proportion of the more recently established
settlements dating from the early 1970s, like those in Sinai and around
Jerusalem, have had from the outset an openly civilian character.’’9?
Pressure from the Golan Heights settlers, who had been disturbed by
the uncertainty of their status, led Golda Meir as Prime Minister to
state that the Golan Heights was “‘an integral part of Israel.’ Even the
New York Times was forced reluctantly to admit:
These settlements, which range in size from paramilitary agricultural hamlets
on the Golan Heights to incipient cities, represent the reality of Israeli policy.
They are the tangible evidence of Israel’s determination to carve out new
borders of the territory taken in 1967.92
The Zionist land-grabbing was the natural consequence of their
previous history of colonization in Palestine prior to the creation of the
Israeli state and the necessary concomitant of the Law of Return de-
signed to bring in hundreds of thousands of Diaspora Jews from their
“‘exile.”’ Jt was soon quite apparent that these new colonies were being
established in locations Israel already considered part of her territory
188 THE COVER-UP
and as a shield against counteraction that could be expected from
those they had displaced. In 1971 Prime Minister Meir told a group of
Soviet immigrants who had been settled in the Golan Heights that ‘‘the
border is found there where Jews live and not by a line on a map.’
Ten days earlier General Dayan had expressed it this way: “In every
place where we have established a settlement, we will never abandon
that settlement or the place itself.’ And even as the New York Times
carried a banner five-column headline: “Eban Tells UN Israel Is Flexi-
ble Regarding Mid-East Boundaries,” the Zionist state continued to
tighten its occupation of Arab lands and to add to the number of faits
accomplis.
The Israeli Foreign Minister had only to tell the General Assembly
in October 1972: “We have not sought to determine the final peace
boundary, and we have drawn no ultimate maps,” for its New York
organ to proclaim Zionist flexibility. But at that very moment in the fall
of 1972 Israel was bringing to forty (not including major developments
in Hebron and Jerusalem) the number of new communities of Israeli
settlers, which had begun in 1967 with five, in the occupied territories
on the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Sinai, and the Gaza Strip—
actions quite contrary to U.N. resolutions as well as to international
conventions. Strategically placed throughout the occupied territories,
these settlements included fourteen Nahal or paramilitary settlements.
Before the outbreak of the 1973 war, two more settlements were
added, and plans were underway for building in occupied Sinai the city
of Yamit, with an estimated quarter of a million persons, as the center-
piece of a complex of settlements between E] Arish and the Gaza Strip.
This ambitious program in the heart of Egyptian territory—aimed “‘as
a buffer between concentrated Arab populations in the Gaza Strip and
in Egypt’’®5—was no doubt an important factor in spurring President
Sadat to strike, after much hesitancy, in October 1973. Well-known
journalist, former editor of Al-Ahram, and author, Mohamed Has-
sanein Heikal, who served some time in the Sadat Cabinet as Minister
of Information, in his memoirs quoted the Egyptian leader as saying,
“Every word spoken about Yamit is a knife pointing at me personally
and at my self-respect.’’96 A few weeks before the war, Defense Minis-
ter Dayan had openly admitted on Israeli radio that his proposal for
the establishment of Yamit was “‘to serve as one of the factors enabling
us to establish the borders further to the west.”
This Sinai project and a complex of settlements in Israel, the
Rafah Approaches, caused the displacement of a large number of
heretofore very friendly bedouin Arabs. Thirty thousand residents
What Palestinians ? 189
were told (and this was stamped on their I.D.s) that “‘for security
reasons” they would have to leave their ancestral homeland by January
15, 1975. Their lands were expropriated, their groves bulldozed, their
homes, schools, and mosques leveled.9’? General Ariel Sharon under-
took to evict ten tribes, only one of which had been involved in actions
that could point to any of its members as security risks.98
As the modern Jewish city began to emerge on the sands of north-
eastern Sinai, Sharon, according to one observer, ordered his troops
to ‘eject the reluctant .. . and move them to resettlement sites. . . .
Under the shadow of the cranes and scaffoldings of the urban con-
struction site here, remnants of the former population have been try-
ing to stay put in a cluster of mud and stucco houses.”99
By the end of 1975 the number of settlements had risen to sixty
and the following year to sixty-eight, in which, according to an article
by William Drummond of the Los Angeles Times, 7,500 Jews were living.
The location of these settkements were: twenty-five in the Golan
Heights, seventeen in the Jordan Valley, five in Hebron vicinity, four
in the Jerusalem area, fourteen in Gaza-Rafah region, and three in the
Gulf of Aqaba. And twenty-two more were on the drawing board
despite the strong opposition from the newly-formed progressive
party, the Yaad, in which such iconoclasts as writer Amos Kenan,
former Histadrut Secretary-General Ben-Aharon Yitzhak, Knesset
member Uri Avnery, civil rights champion Mrs. Shulamit Aloni, Mayor
General Matityahu Peled, and ex-secretary of the Labor party Arie
Eliav had joined forces to oppose further expropriations and territorial
expansion.
The West Bank settlements formed a “cordon sanitaire” around
large Arab towns and villages, and served as a defense buffer against
any possible incursions across the Jordan River. (This defense system
underlay the peace plan that Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon had
long enunciated and which he set forth in detail, with a map, for the
readers of Foreign Affairs in the fall of 1976.)
While Israel’s leading independent newspaper, Haaretz, admitted
that additional settlements in the ‘“‘administered territories” (the term
used by Israel for the “occupied territories”) would most definitely
limit the area regarding which negotiations would be possible, U.S.
columnists Evans and Novak heard a much different point of view from
Israelis. In talking to members of a small settlement in the Jordan
Valley, the Americans were told by a youthful member: “Nobody gives
a damn about a just peace and secure borders. That is only a dream.
The reality is military strength along the present borders.’’!°°
190 THE COVER-UP
And the Greater Israel Movement, arguing that the creation of
further faits accomplis would prove to the Arabs that time was against
them and would force the intransigents to negotiate, continued to
push the government to move faster in its new settlements program.
Although earlier in an interview with Haaretz Prime Minister
Rabin had stated that ‘‘what happened in the past year in the adminis-
tered territories was one area of foreign policy I am not proud of,” in
speaking to a meeting of anxious delegates from Merom Ha-Golan and
other settlements on the Golan Heights at a time when rumors were
rife that the Israeli government might pull back, he said (and this was
reported only by the Jerusalem Post,!°! not by the U.S. press, so as not
to handicap Secretary Kissinger’s efforts at disengagement): ‘‘If there
are any who have doubts on the matter, they would do better to
disregard them and remove worry from their minds. No government
has established a settlement just in order to evacuate it, and therefore
members of the Golan Heights settlements can be completely confi-
dent.”
This was a clear indication that the permanent settlements in the
Golan Heights had not been established just to be dismantled again.
The Prime Minister concluded: “We stand here with a sense of confi-
dence and security which is due to the formidable increase in the
strength of our army. Your unwavering determination to put down
roots in this place against all the odds is encouraging.” Ten months
earlier General Rabin had declared that the Golan Heights would
remain an indivisible part of Israel.}92
Israeli expansionists were led by the Gush Emunim (literally ‘‘bloc
of the faithful’), a paramystical, ultrachauvinist movement insisting
that as the Chosen People and through biblical revelation, the Jews
have the right to all of Palestine, and that Israel must hold onto all the
occupied territories, with the possible exception of portions of the
Sinai. Drawn from the extreme right-wing Likud party, the successor
to the Jabotinsky Revisionist movement of the 1930s and Menachem
Begin’s Irgun Zvai Leumi of the 1940s, the Gush commanded the
support of some Cabinet members, but sometimes found themselves
clashing with the Israeli army. But they succeeded in establishing cer-
tain unauthorized new settlements on the West Bank and Golan
Heights. In some instances they were forced to return home, despite
the rabid oratory of their leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger. International
attention focused on the attempted settlement at Kadum Camp, where
politically hard-pressed Premier Rabin arranged a compromise under
which some forty to fifty settlers were permitted to remain unofficially.
What Palestinians? 191
The Gush leader in the Knesset was Mrs. Geula Cohen, who
proudly proclaimed she had been a member of the Stern Gang respon-
sible in Israel for the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte, U.N. concilia-
tor, and of many British officers. Mrs. Cohen in June 1976 told an
American visitor that Gush Emunim had not “‘occupied” but “liber-
ated areas on which they settled. It belongs to us because the Bible says
so. When we won the six-day war, that very day in 1967 we should have
truly annexed all these territories.”’!93 When asked how she would deal
with the problem of the Palestinian people, this fierce ultranationalist
responded: “Who are the Palestinian people? We are the Palestinian
people—not the Arabs!”’ A more sophisticated member of the group,
also holding a seat in the Knesset, is thirty-year-old Ehud Olmert. He
would grant each Arab Palestinian the right to choose whether he
wishes to vote for members of the Jordanian or Israeli Parliament and
to which of the two governments he would prefer to pay taxes. This
tough, brash expansionist refused to use the word “annexation.”
“Since the West Bank is part of the historic home of the Jews, it is my
right to have it.”
During campaigning in the May 1977 elections, Prime Minister
Begin left no doubt that he shared these views. He referred to settle-
ments on the West Bank in biblical terms of ‘‘Judea and Samaria,”
insisting they were “liberated” and not “occupied” nor even ‘‘adminis-
tered” territory. And he purposely chose to make his first post-election
appearance in a synagogue ceremony at the then not yet legalized
Kadum settlement. During his visit to Washington that July President
Carter had urged the new Israeli Prime Minister to refrain from start-
ing new settlements until after the Geneva peace talks, following his
return to Israel. But Begin granted official recognition to Kadum and
two other already-launched settlements although Washington called
this move “‘an obstacle to progress in the peacemaking process.” Some
three weeks later, on August 17, the Israeli government authorized
establishment of three new settlements in the occupied sector upon
the recommendation of a committee headed by new Agriculture Minis-
ter Ariel Sharon, whose two-man bloc in the Knesset helped give Begin
his initial majority of one. Sharon, well-known for his spectacular
counter-crossing of the Suez Canal during the 1973 war, had also been
responsible for the October 1953 massacre of sixty-six Palestinians in
the attack by Israel’s notorious Unit 101 on the border village of Kibya.
One of the new settlements was to be on a site south of Hebron
assigned to Gush Emunim, a second in the Judean foothills for the
ultraorthodox Agudat Israel, and the third near Petah Tikva, just
192 THE COVER-UP
across the West Bank border in Israel proper near the Zur Nathan
kibbutz of the left-wing Hashomer Hazair. The presence of the Gush
near Hebron could only exacerbate existing Israeli-Palestinian ten-
sions in the Arab city of 60,000, where a twelve-day military curfew had
been imposed during interreligious violence that had flared the previ-
ous October. The Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham allegedly
is buried and long a Muslim sanctuary (the Ibrahim Haram) because
Islam reveres the Hebrew prophets, was converted after the 1967
capture of the West Bank into half a synagogue and half a mosque. A
Zionist magistrate passed a ruling allowing Jews to pray in the holy
mosque, and the Arabs exploded. An argument that broke out be-
tween Muslim worshipers and Gush extremists from the nearby exist-
ing Qiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement, led allegedly to the desecration
of the Koran and to retaliatory acts against Torah scrolls. (The “‘fu-
neral service’’ for the desecrated Jewish holy books, a regular orthodox
ritual, including the recitation of the Kaddish, was attended by Defense
Minister Shimon Peres and received three-column headlines in the
New York Times on October 7. The story of the acts of Jewish vandalism
against the Koran was buried in the back pages.)
Settlement Qiryat Arba, abutting Hebron, had been the scene of
many demonstrations at which Rabbi Levinger had harangued militant
supporters with fiery chauvinism: ‘“‘We should look above us to the
heavens and see that these cities are ours. The government of Israel,
if it doesn’t take its orders from on high, is in trouble.” On such
occasions leaflets were circulated calling for the relocation from the
West Bank of Hebron’s Palestinians Arabs. While that goal had not yet
been achieved, Begin now had provided for a second wedge into the
heart of the city.
Anomalously enough, an Israeli public opinion poll taken in Sep-
tember 1977 by Louis Harris! showed that a large majority of Se-
phardim (of Arab background) expressed a willingness to leave in the
hands of Begin, whom many had supported at the polls, the question
of allowing more religious settlements in the occupied territories, even
though only 18 percent of these Sephardic respondents were them-
selves avowedly ‘‘religious.”’ By this time, Israel had established 113
new settlements, seventy-seven in the occupied Arab areas, the re-
mainder within the borders of Israel as created in 1948. On the draw-
ing boards were settlement plans for the next fifteen years calling for
186 new communities, of which forty-nine were to be in the occupied
territories, 15
As the Palestinians strove to rivet world attention to their political
What Palestinians? 193
rights and their identity as a people, even the slight attention that had
been paid to their plight as refugees faded from view. Their suffering
had become accepted. It seemed that the only time the humanitarian
aspects of the Palestinian problem made the news was when UNRWA
would announce a further reduction in the funds made available to this
agency charged with the responsibility of keeping the refugees alive.
Their villages destroyed, their property seized, and their lands
turned over to Jewish immigrants—no compensation had ever been
paid for the tens of millions of pounds in movable and immovable
property taken from the initial Palestinian refugees in 1948—the re-
fugees found themselves the victims of new world animosity stemming
from the reaction to acts of terrorism, often committed by guerrillas
in their name. The appropriate image of homeless, hungry victims of
injustice had never been created, as the Zionists had so successfully
done with their refugees from Hitler.
The Palestinians had earned contempt, if not hatred, and gained
litcle of the love called for by an understanding French-Catholic cleric,
Bishop Menager of Meaux:
There is a Palestinian problem one cannot ignore. Hundreds of thousands of
men and women, torn from their villages, have lived for more than twenty
years in refugee camps. Situations of injustice are breeding grounds of war and
violence. It is at this level that political action ought to be stronger than hate.
During the Lebanese civil war, which saw the Palestinians further
victimized, attention invariably focused on the political rather than the
humanitarian aspects of the struggle. The violence, marking this un-
precedented, suicidal fratricide in which 60,000 lost their lives, tended
to rekindle Western public opinion of Palestinian terrorism directed
at innocent people in supermarkets or airports—violence never to be
condoned however understandable. Strange that it should have been
Yael Dayan, Moshe’s authoress daughter, who declared that if she had
been born a Palestinian Arab she would most certainly have been a
commando. It took twenty-seven years from the time of the U.N.
partition decision at Lake Success in November 1947 before the Pales-
tinians could return to the U.N. and be granted a full hearing. And
without their terrorism, they would have remained the forgotten
people.
What a sad commentary on Western civilization, and on the U.S.
in particular, which has opened its heart to every other oppressed,
dispossessed, and disadvantaged people. When it came to the Pales-
tinians, whose plight stemmed directly from the American act of open-
194 THE COVER-UP
ing its heart, its purse strings, and its political power to redressing the
wrong done by Hitler, America immediately slammed the door and
cried “terrorism.”
While it is unfair to draw stereotypes and make overgeneraliza-
tions, the Palestinians, as a whole, are not a violent people. Given to
gross verbal exaggerations, they seldom follow through with deeds the
words they utter in the heat of anger. Terror does not come naturally
to them. But frustrated, oppressed, having no obvious alternative, they
have taken to arms, guerrilla warfare, and fedayeen activities, hitting
the enemy—the Israelis—whenever and wherever they find them.
The Palestinians launched themselves on this terrorist road by
following in the path of other successful liberation movements. It
worked in China, in Cuba, among the Portuguese colonies, for Algeria;
and it had worked for the Zionists in their creation of the Jewish state.
Thus the freedom fighters of Palestine had good examples on which
to model their own activities. They could see that the Western media
was not opening the slightest to them. Therefore they went to desper-
ate lengths to find a means of breaking down the barriers so as to
communicate with the outside world. For example, the principal aim
behind the kidnapping of three ambassadors—two Americans and one
Belgian—from the Saudi Arabian Embassy in the Sudan in 1974, an
incident in which the three lost their lives, was to get these ambassa-
dors out of the country, onto a plane, fly them to Washington, and
there at the Washington airport, with the three hostages at gunpoint,
hold a press conference the world could not ignore. Whose disgrace
is it that such violence was needed in order to tell the human story of
the clear-cut injustice the Palestinian people have so long endured?
With very few exceptions there has been no effort made in the U.S.
to present the “why” behind the Palestinian resort to violence. When
in America, for instance, are people exposed to the kind of sentiment
expressed by Professor Ya’cov Talmon, an Israeli educator, in an open
letter to Minister of Information Yisrael Galili, published in Ma ‘anv in
May 1969? Professor Talmon had this to say:
Don’t forget, Your Excellency, that the Jewish national home and the establish-
ment of the State of Israel were the result of an agreement between the great
Powers imposed upon the Arabs. When, therefore, you state that you do not
recognize the Arabs of Palestine as a moral or legal entity in Palestine with
specific national and popular characteristics, you are in fact saying that they
are ‘natives,’ with no identity of their own. In other words, Your Excellency,
they have no rights as a community. Why should you, therefore, wonder when
the Arabs or others describe you as colonizers and claim that they cannot reach
What Palestinians? 195
an agreement with you, because you simply do not recognize the principle of
mutual respect, but look only toward expansion? Words are more painful than
physical pain, and they are long remembered, even after the human body has
been cured of its pain... .
And I ask you, in your capacity as Minister of Information, what shall I
answer the thinkers and educated people of other nations, when they ask me:
why should not the Arabs join the ranks of the freedom fighters, when he hears
the words of Galili? You deprive him of his right to national existence and
self-determination. When the British attempted to do the same with you,
didn’t the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Group resort to terror and
violence? Yes, Mr. Minister, I ask you most sincerely: What do you expect my
answer to be? And I assure you most genuinely that I did not fabricate these
questions, nor did I invent them. The duty of the historian impels him to see
all aspects of the problem and not to be a liar or a propagandist.
When the CBS television network carried its program “The Pales-
tinians”’ to a large, prime-time viewing audience (10 P.m., June 15,
1974), Americans, perhaps for the first time, were given a somewhat
fair view of the problem as presented by a good cross-section of the
people concerned. CBS interviewer Bill McLaughlin, at the outset,
introduced a member of one of the fedayeen groups, the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, the group most responsible for
most of the acts of terrorism):
Palestinian Guerrilla Ramez: As we understand that innocent people from my
people is dying, I do understand that innocent people from other nations
might die. I don’t feel glad about it, but as well I can tell you that this does
take place all over the world and it did take place all over history.
About the “guerrillas,’"” McLaughlin had this to say:
When the Arab armies went down to humiliating defeat in 1967, the guerrillas
kept Arab pride alive. This teenager stumbling across a dried-up creek is
reaching for manhood; at the same time, he is learning to kill. When guerrillas
do kill, the cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism will begin all over again.
And guerrilla guns threaten more than Israel. As long as the guerrillas are
supported by the people, no Arab government could attack them and survive
politically.
And, most significantly, McLaughlin added:
Guerrillas consider all Israelis part of the military establishment. But, in fact,
killing civilians makes headlines; killing soldiers does not. Sooner or later,
guerrillas like Ramez justify terrorism. And these guerrillas are mostly the sons
of farmers whose homes were in Palestine until their defeat in 1948. They live
frustrated and homesick lives in refugee camps or guerrilla bases. They have
196 THE COVER-UP
almost no control over their own future, they can be sold out by the great
powers, and they expect to be.
Maher Yamani, a twenty-four-year-old fedayeen who took part in
the machine-gunning of an airliner in Athens and spent a year and a
half in a Greek jail, stated:
What could we do? We tried all ways possible, until we found the way of the
gun. As long as it is in our hands, we will continue fighting until we perish,
all of us. We will continue fighting, me, myself and my son and my grandsons
as well, my daughters and their children and all the Palestinians. We Palestini-
ans cannot accept a piece of our own land as charity from another country.
This same determination to return home exists among those
Palestinians who have done far better in life than young Yamani. The
commercial elite of the Palestinians have made good in their exile.
Today they actually dominate the Jordanian middle class and the
Kuwaiti civil service; they play important roles in helping to modernize
Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. They have specialized in man-
agement and finance, controlling the huge Arab Bank and the money
exchanges and owning much valuable downtown real estate in cities
like Amman and Beirut (before the 1975-76 civil war).
Hasib Sabbagh is a civil engineer who, until the disastrous civil
war, lived in the Lebanese capital. In his lovely home his favorite
possession was said to be a small glass bottle containing soil from
Jerusalem brought to him by a friend after the 1967 war. Sabbagh fled
to Lebanon in 1948 nearly empty-handed, but in 1950 he and two
partners obtained a $50,000 loan, as he told the CBS viewing audi-
ence. Now their company, the Construction Company (CCC), boasts
assets of $50 million and serves as economic consultants without fee
to the resistance movement, helping to plan for a future state. When
asked whether he would give this all up to go back to Palestine, Sab-
bagh replied: “If I can go back as I was before, I would give it all up
and go back to where I was brought up, where I had my childhood,
where my father is buried and my family was. There is more than
materialistic things to life. This is something sentimental.” If a new
West Bank state were to be established, this industrialist would like to
go there and help his people develop the country.
When queried about the guerrilla organizations, Sabbagh pointed
out heatedly:
They are not guerrillas. They are people asking for their rights. We have been
waiting for the world to help us regain our rights for twenty-five years, and
What Palestinians? 197
nobody listens to us. Even our Arab countries did not listen to us. Only after
the 1967 war did they start listening to us.
Palestinian women revealed to their American audience that their
feelings were equally intense. Violet Costandi, the wife of a forty-eight-
year-old refugee who had successfully rebuilt his life in Beirut in the
television production field, had this explanation for her attachment to
Palestine:
I was born there, it is my homeland. How would you ask me such a question?
I don’t belong here, I belong to the land there . . . as a child running through
the grape yards and the orange groves. I had grape yards and the orange
groves and everything. And that was mine, I want to go—I want to live—I want
to be there, it belongs to me. If you—if something belongs to you, like a
suitcase, and somebody steals it from you, you feel so bad about it. How come
“your home town, your house’? I have two houses in Bir Zeit. They are
beautiful to me. If I live in a place, if they make me a queen, I will not have
the same feeling like when I go back to them. And it is still—and I still have
the memory of them and to me it is only yesterday that I left, only yesterday.
I will never forget.
How many Americans have ever been given the chance to under-
stand that the Palestine Liberation Organization is a legitimate organi-
zation, part of a general effort by the Palestinians to organize their
people? The disrupted Palestinian nationalism has concealed the sim-
ple truth of the similarity of the Palestinians’ likeness to all other
peoples as well as the uniqueness of their circumstances.
When cornered occasionally by a knowledgeable liberal to explain
their harsh treatment of the Palestinians, Israelis resort to the familiar
mythology that these Palestinians hardly existed as a people or as a
culture, that they were at best an inchoate and amorphous mass of
peasants. Thus when the Israelis destroy houses and villages and seize
lands, etc., it scarcely matters. As the myth goes, the Palestinians are
barely human beings, let alone cultured human beings, and one need
not waste any time thinking of them as a modern society or as a
civilized people.
The facts are as follows: The total estimated Palestinian popula-
tion is 3.3 million, of which half are officially classified by the U.N. as
refugees dependent on U.N. services for aid and shelter in refugee
camps. There are 950,000 in Jordan, 693,000 in the West Bank,
390,000 in Gaza, 574,000 in Israel; the rest are scattered throughout
the Arab world, including Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Egypt, Iraq, the
Gulf, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. There are an estimated 7,000 in the
198 THE COVER-UP
U.S., 5,000 in Latin America, and about 150,000 in Europe. The
UNRWA records show 1,706,486 receiving aid and shelter from that
agency as of June 30, 1977.
While many of the Palestinians remain as wards of the U.N., the
majority have fanned out into the Arab world and overseas and are
leading useful, if in some cases difficult lives. In their Diaspora they
have become the teachers of the Arab world, the engineers, the build-
ers, the commercial leaders. A high percentage have entered the
professions. Universities are well equipped with Palestinian doctors
and technicians; Palestinian engineers and architects are laying down
roads and constructing bridges. Above all, their dispersion has driven
them in search of higher education, and they are the best educated of
all Middle East peoples, the Israelis not excluded.
The 1967 war, the subsequent Israeli occupation of the rest of
Palestine, and then the spectacular stand of the commandos at Kara-
meh transformed the Palestinians’ individual struggle for survival into
a collective struggle for the preservation of a national identity. It is the
new Palestinians, with feelings of self-awareness and self-reliance and
a great pride in themselves, that emerged from the twenty-nine years
of suppression and banishment.
Far from vanishing, as the Zionists hoped, with their rebirth the
Palestinians have emerged as the principal physical as well as psycho-
logical force in the area. In oil-rich Libya, distant from the fighting
zone, Palestinian children were being taught in Red Crescent schools
the history of their native land and its meaning to them. They sang
their national anthem, the haunting Balad: (‘‘Homeland’’) as their
mothers worked on knitting uniforms for the commandos. The Pales-
tinians had come alive and were no longer going to permit the Egyp-
tians, Syrians, or any other Arabs to wage war—a losing war—in their
behalf, as they had for twenty years. They were determined to carry the
burden themselves. The spirit was contagious and helped electrify the
Arabs in the countries in which these Palestinians had taken shelter—
and, of course, also vastly complicated the problem of finding peace.
No Arab leader, even one as strong as Nasser, had been able to accept
a settlement for the 1967 war and take back his own occupied territo-
ries without providing for a political—not merely a humanitarian—
settlement of the older 1948 war. This was the grave problem that
confronted President Anwar el-Sadat in the peace initiative he started
in November 1977.
It was only in 1965 that a small group of Palestinian commandos
for the first me crossed the cease-fire lines separating Israel from
What Palestinians? 199
Lebanon and conducted the first military raid into Israel. They were
under the command of an engineer turned soldier-commando by the
plight of his people. Nine years later Yasir Arafat, as head of the
Palestine Liberation Organization and the only person apart from
Pope Paul VI who did not represent a government to address a plenary
meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, informed the members of that
international body of the goals, ambitions, and aspirations of his peo-
ple for an independent Palestinian nation. That November 1974 day,
in distant Cairo and Beirut, people gathered on streets listening to
transistor radios. A holiday was declared in the refugee camps.
Arafat had studied civil engineering at Cairo University (then
Fuad University) and then, after being commissioned a lieutenant at
the Egyptian Military Academy, he served as a demolitions expert in
fighting the invading Israelis, British, and French forces in 1956.16
Moving to Kuwait to work as an engineer, Arafat helped train comman-
dos for raids against Israel and soon joined the commando group Al
Fatah, which under his leadership in 1969 took over the dormant
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The PLO had begun to represent the interests of the Palestinian
people in 1963, but its military wing, the Palestine Liberation Army,
had played only a most minor role in the crushing Arab defeat of 1967.
Under Arafat’s leadership the dormant PLO sprang to life. The
Palestine National Council (PNC) was enlarged to 293 members, to
include various sectors of the Palestinian community—not only the
different commando groups with their varying political ideologies, but
also independent political leaders, representatives from camps and
communities throughout the Middle East, the occupied West Bank and
Gaza and beyond, as well as representatives of various specialist
groups such as students, lawyers, doctors, women, trade unions, and
independent Palestinians attached to no group. This Council meets at
least once a year, but a Central Council of fifty-five members serves as
the legislative body for the larger group. Day-to-day PLO policies are
formulated by its fourteen-member Executive Committee.
Through vibrant leadership, the Palestine identity emerged and
the people in exile became more closely associated with the resistance
movement. Such important functions as scholarship aid for young
Palestinians, feeding of families whose bread winners had been killed,
providing medical treatment and research soon followed. The Pales-
tine Red Crescent opened clinics and modern hospitals and paid for
specialist medical treatment at European clinics; pensions and scholar-
ships were provided and schools opened in the refugee camps to
200 THE COVER-UP
supplement U.N.-financed institutions. The PLO Research Center was
formed and books relating to the conflict were published. A planning
center was set up to work on long-term strategy, including political and
diplomatic campaigns, and to prepare a detailed study on the viability
of a Palestinian state and on manpower resources of the Palestinian
people, as well as to review the military strategy of the resistance
movement. It was at the 1974 Arab summit meeting at Rabat that the
PLO earned the recognition of being designated the sole representa-
tive of the Palestinian people.
The history of the PLO has been marked by constant internecine
struggles, often armed conflict among its divergent seven major or-
ganizations: A] Fatah; the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palesune
(PFLP); the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PDFLP); the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General
Command, which under the leadership of Ahmed Jabril broke off from
the PFLP; the Al Saiga, led by Zuhair Mohsen, formed in 1967 of
Palestinians sympathetic to the Syrian Ba’ath party; the small Arab
Liberation Front, which is allied to the Iraqi Ba’ath party; and the
Palestine National Front, formed in 1974 by Palestinians living under
Israeli occupation, many of whose leaders were quickly deported by
the Israeli government. In addition, there emerged a faction in Iraq
under the leadership of Abu Nidal.
Within the Palestine Liberation Organization!® are the Palestine
Labor Organization, the Palestine Women’s Organization, Students’
Organization, Artists’ Organization, Writers’ Organization, Palestine
Red Crescent, Palestine Orphans Trust, Palestine Youth Organization,
Palestine Research Center, Palestine Medical Organization, Palestine
Lawyers’ Organization, Architects’ Organization, Teachers’ Organiza-
tion, and Artisans’ Organization. In the movement are many promi-
nent Christians, including the Reverend Ilya Khoury; George Habash,
leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and Nayef
Hawatmeh, leader of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation
of Palestine.
Arafat, known to his people as Abu Ammar, has said: ““What we
have done is to make the world and the Palestinian himself realize that
he is no longer U.N. refugee number so-and-so, but a member of a
people who hold the reins of their own destiny and are in a position
to decide their future.” As Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion
brought about the vivid emergence of the “Jewish people” into the
field of Palestine, so Arafat was forging an entry of his people into that
same field, now presently exclusively occupied by the State of Israel.
What Palestinians? 201
But the PLO leader has had a far rougher road to hoe than any of his
Zionist opposite numbers, even Herzl, who also faced the monumental
task of launching a movement. Arafat, too, may not survive to see his
dreams realized. During the Lebanese civil war and even at the Ryadh
and Cairo conferences that brought an end to the fighting, it was more
than rumored that Syrian President Hafez al-Assad sought his ‘‘scalp.”
The 1975-1978 happenings in Lebanon proved, as Arafat once noted,
that ‘Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or
it is the explosive that blows it apart.”
The tremendous task undertaken by the PLO leader of building
his people into a nation and obtaining a situs for their identity has
faced no end of complexities. Driven from Jordan in 1970, the Pales-
tinians had to face in Lebanon opposition against the presence of
heavily armed guests bordering upon a “‘state within a state."” Without
the overpowering personal charisma of a Nasser or Qaddafi, invariably
wearing dark glasses and white checkered kaffiyeh headdress and often
unshaven Arafat has had to contend with the Arab normal congenital
incapacity for collaboration and continuous attempts to fragment the
Palestinian movement into smaller groupings with particular social
and political philosophies.
The internecine Palestinian disputes—sometimes erupting into
armed conflict, particularly between the Fateh supporters of Arafat in
the PLO and George Habash’s Marxist PFLP (Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine)—led Brigadier-General Misbah Budeiri, Chief
of Staff of the virtually inactive Palestinian Liberation Army, to remark:
“T don’t approve of these left-wing groups. I am just here to liberate
my land—as a soldier. What’s the use of being a Socialist or a Commu-
nist when you've got no land where you can put your ideals into
practice?”
When he heeded pleas of Lebanese and of Arab moderates to halt
fedayeen attacks on Israel so as not to draw further Israeli retaliatory
aerial raids on southern Lebanon, Arafat was beset by cries of “‘subser-
vience to the Arab regimes,” as the more violence-minded Palestinian
guerrilla groups stepped up their attacks on Israel. It was such taunts
that forced him to enter the Lebanese civil war and risk the very
existence of the PLO by throwing his entire military strength in with
Lebanon’s leftist coalition and finding his armed forces looking right
into the muzzles of the well-equipped, eager Syrian army.
Yet even after the disastrous confrontation in Lebanon with the
intervening Syrian armies and with the Maronite Christian forces,
which nearly crushed him militarily and politically, Arafat managed to
202 THE COVER-UP
survive. The scenario outlined by Senator James Abourezek on the
Op-Ed page of the New York Times in January 1975 still applied, per-
haps only to a slightly lesser degree:
Very little imagination is needed to write the script for the chain of events if
Yasir Arafat is eased out of his leadership of the PLO. It is not difficult to
outline the step-by-step escalation of violence until finally the United States
and Russia discover that the ‘‘vital interests” of each require their active
participation in a Middle East shooting war.
An oil embargo would result from even a minimum military confronta-
tion. Our present economic condition makes the U.S. vulnerable to an out-
break of anti-Semitism against both Jews and Arabs, manifesting itself in a total
cutoff of aid to Israel, an attempted take-over of Arab oil fields, or a combina-
tion of both.!68
How many Americans have been allowed to listen to Yasir Arafat?
How many really read what he said when he finally had a chance to
address the U.N. General Assembly on November 13, 1974? Many
remembered the holster he wore—what media follower was allowed to
forget this?—but never heard or read one vital word he uttered.
Referring to the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, the PLO
chieftain told a capacity audience in the General Assembly hall:
Why should our Arab Palestinian people pay the price of such discrimination
in the world, Mr. President? Why should our people be responsible for the
problems of Jewish immigration if such problems exist in the minds of some
people? Why don’t the supporters of these problems open their own coun-
tries, which can absorb and help these emigrants?
Arafat continued:
Mr. President, if the emigration of Jews to Palestine had had, as its objective,
the goal of enabling them to live side by side with us, enjoying the same rights
and assuming the same duties, we would have opened our doors to them as
far as our homeland’s capacity for absorption permitted. Such was the case
with thousands of Armenians and Circassians, who still live among us in
equality as brethren and citizens. But that the goal of this emigration should
be to usurp our homeland, disperse our people, and turn us into second-class
citizens—this is what nu one can conceivably demand that we acquiesce to.
“Since its inception,” Arafat explained, ‘‘our revolution was not
motivated by racial or religious factors. Its target was never the Jew as
a person, but racist Zionism and undisguised aggression. In this sense,
ours is also a revolution for the Jew as a human being as well. We are
struggling so that Jews, Christians, and Muslims may live in equality
What Palestinians? 203
and enjoy the same rights and assume the same duties, free from racial
or religious discrimination.”
The PLO leader then made this crucial point relative to religious
tolerance:
Mr. President, we do distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. While we
maintain our opposition to the colonial Zionist movement, we respect the
Jewish faith. Today almost one century after the rise of the Zionist movement,
we wish to warn of its increasing danger to the Jews of the world, to our Arab
people, and to world peace and security. For Zionism encourages the Jew to
emigrate out of his homeland and grants him an artificially created nationality.
The Palestinian traced the fate of his people:
Zionist terrorism which was waged against the Palestinian people to evict it
from its country and usurp its land is registered in our official documents.
Thousands of our people were assassinated in their villages and towns, tens
of thousands of others were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes and the
lands of their fathers .. .
No one who in 1948 witnessed the catastrophe that struck the inhabitants
in hundreds of villages and towns—in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh, and
Galilee—no one who has been a witness to that catastrophe will ever forget
the experience even though the mass blackout has succeeded in hiding these
horrors as it has hidden the traces of 385 Palestinian villages and towns
destroyed at the time and erased from the map. . . . That terrorism fed on
hatred, and this hatred was even directed against the olive tree in my country,
which has been a proud symbol and which has reminded them of the indige-
nous inhabitants of the land, a living reminder that the land is Palestinian.
Thus, they sought to destroy it. How else can one explain the statement by
Golda Meir, which expressed her disquiet, about the Palestinian children born
every day. They see in the Palestinian child, in the Palestinian tree, an enemy
that should be exterminated.
While countless acres of olive groves have been burned by the
Zionists in an effort to further eradicate his presence, the ceaseless love
of the Palestinian for his village is such that even if all the houses are
gone, the placement of every tree is still vividly remembered. The
Zionists must have learned by now that perhaps it is far easier to
uproot a tree than to quiet the spirit of a Palestinian Arab.
Exemplifying this unconquerable spirit, Arafat represents no per-
sonality cult, and he defies the Western norm of charisma. Should the
PLO chieftain be chopped down, there will be others to come forward
and take his place in the continuing bitter struggle for freedom and
identity. For the Palestinians do have a strong sense of nationhood.
Even children who have never been there talk vividly about life in the
204 THE COVER-UP
Old City of Jerusalem or the beauty of Mount Carmel and the orange
groves of Jaffa. The Palestinians’ collective memory of homeland and
the dream of return are kept alive, in part, by a large body of nostalgic
poetry, which as Time magazine once noted, was written by “angry
young lyricists who know both the harshness of Israeli prisons and the
despair of life in refugee camps.”’!°9
Tawfiq Zayad’s poem, “The Impossible,” epitomizes Palestinian
national determination:
It is much easier for you
To pass an elephant through a needle’s eye,
Or catch fried fish in a galaxy,
Plough the sea,
Force a crocodile to speak
Than to destroy by persecution
The shimmering glow of a belief,
Or check our march,
One single step.
As if we were a thousand prodigies
Spreading everywhere
In Lydda, in Ramallah,
in the Galilee. . .
Here we shall stay,
A wall upon your breast,
And in your throat we shall stay,
A piece of glass, a cactus thorn,
And in your eyes,
A blazing fire.
Just two days before his death in 1970 in his ninety-eighth year,
Bertrand Russell, still fighting for justice for all peoples and particu-
larly concerned about the fate of the Palestinians, wrote: ‘We are
frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the
sufferings of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. . . . What
Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horror of
the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.’’!!® And the
famed philosopher asked this question: “‘How much longer is the
world willing to allow this spectacle of wanton cruelty?”
But the world was powerless. Washington had seemed to be inch-
ing closer to some recognition of the PLO in the spring of 1976. The
thanks offered publicly by Secretary Kissinger and President Ford to
Arafat and his organization for assisting in the evacuation of endan-
gered civilians in Lebanon worried the Zionists greatly. Then along
What Palestinians? 205
came the escalation of the Lebanese civil war and the Entebbe affair,
the reaction to which was magnified by abysmal Arab public relations.
The revulsion that had followed from seeing Arab youth being beaten
by Israeli soldiers was driven from American minds, and Palestinian
raids into Israel, baldly presented out-of-context by the media, alien-
ated American public opinion. The U. S. under President Carter strug-
gled to shake off its tethers—a giant under the control of the strongest
organized minority in the world, which knew exactly how to get what
it wanted through the right connections.
VI The Jewish Connection:
Numbers Don’t Count
Numbers are not crucial to any struggle. Strength and purpose
are.
—Mahatma Gandhi
When so much is at stake, inevitably the question must arise: How has
the Zionist will been imposed on the American people? Far from all
Jews believe in the concept of a Jewish state, and the Jews themselves
constitute a very small minority of the American population, some 3
percent, a little over 6,000,000. Is it possible that Americans have
become so apathetic that 6,000,000 can manipulate the other 207
million?
There are many compelling reasons why population figures are of
little relevance to the Zionist success story, why neither numbers nor
wealth alone can account for the strength of pro-Israel sentiment in the
U.S. and in the Western world. This strength, qualitative and not
quantitative, can be summed up in one word: power. They are able
either to muster fantastic muscle at the right moment and at the right
place, or instill the fear that it might be used.
It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves
and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has molded this unprecedented
power. Although many Jews were initially opposed to the creation of
Israel, the Zionists were able to use the Hitler tragedy to obliterate
anti-Zionist opposition and non-Zionist indifference in capturing every
aspect of organized Jewish life.
There has swiftly emerged in the Jewish ethos of the post-World
War II era a universally and inflexibly supported movement, Israelism,
which embraces many variations of “Friends of Israel.” The Jewish
communities had been subdued, Jewish connections manipulated by
Washington’s most potent lobby to achieve nationalist goals.
206
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don't Count 207
When it comes to organization and depth, the Zionist apparatus
is unparalleled. The philanthropic, political, religious, educational,
and cultural branches all work in a total cooperative effort in extracting
money and full political support from all American Jews. None are
exempt from the call. Many who were queasy about being labeled
“Zionist,’’ sensing a connotation they did not quite like, found mul-
ufold ways of becoming Israelists and thus supporting the cause. Nor
have psychological ties been neglected.
Semites, as anti-Semites, have frequently resorted to the aged
cliché, ‘Once a Jew, always a Jew.” And this has served to bring the
many minimal Jews—those whose mother or father or both were Jew-
ish but who had few, if any, ties with the religion or Jewish communal
life—into Israelist ranks. The further removed from Judaism, the reli-
gion, a Jew may become, the more he is likely to compensate through
support of the state. The rabbinate and other Jewish religious leaders
have warned—and figures bear out these fears—of the serious flight
from Judaism, evidenced both by the decline in formal religious ob-
servance and by steadily increasing marriages outside the faith. But the
greater the escape into religious nothingness, the greater the converse
worship of the State of Israel as a substitute for the worship of Yahweh.
The synagogues may be virtually empty on a Friday evening or a
Saturday morning, but on the three big Holy Days! they are over-
crowded to hear the pulpit reverberating with appeals for increased
purchases of Israel Bonds as a renewal of faith in Israel. And those who
abstain completely from attendance satisfy their guilt feelings for hav-
ing run from the faith of their fathers by contributing to the UJA or
by purchasing an Israel Bond. Thus they are able to convince them-
selves that they are still “‘on the team.”
Wherever there is intermarriage, invariably the minimal or mar-
ginal Jew proves his loyalty to his religion by means of a rabid avowal
of the Israeli cause. That is one simple way of expiation for having
disobeyed Mother’s admonition: ‘“You must marry a nice Jewish girl.”’
His—or her—‘“‘goy”’ partner can, in the same way, similarly demon-
strate a total lack of bigotry by expression of a common love of Israel
so as to avoid domestic strife stemming from any past denominational
differences.
This letter from the Christian wife in a mixed marriage says a great
deal:
Since the war started, my husband and I have discussed the Middle East
problem quite a lot. He listens to what I say, but having grown up with
208 THE COVER-UP
Orthodox grandparents and extremely conservative (religion-wise) parents,
his responses to the questions are, quite naturally, pretty much automatic. So
my function in the matter becomes more or less merely to present food for
thought.
We have another friend who is Jewish, and I have had a few discussions
with him. He is more open to another point of view, but the automatic pro-
Israel reaction is still there basically. There is certainly no question of my not
being able to discuss the subject with my husband. He is certainly willing to
listen, if not particularly willing to agree.
Having married out of his religion to the great dismay of his family, I do
not think his response is the product of having thought the matter out in a
logical manner. It’s an emotional reaction. Besides, he’s stubborn.
With few exceptions, Jews who intermarry, who change their
names to a more Christian-sounding appellation (there has been an
increasing number of these), or who otherwise wish to escape from
being considered a Jew find an exit hatch in Israel. Their support of
Israel somehow helps calm their internal stirrings of guilt. The notice-
able change in editorial policy, foreign news emphasis and the strict
censorship exercised over anti-Zionist advertisements on the part of
the Wall Street Journal marked another conquest for the Jewish connec-
tion.2 Warren H. Phillips, successor to William F. Kerby as President
and Chief Executive Officer of Dow Jones & Company, which owns the
Journal, was born to Jewish parents but married out of the faith. His
employees, aware of his background, bowed to his purported support
of Israelism.
The story has often been told of Clare Boothe Luce’s first visit to
the Vatican following her conversion to Catholicism. She started de-
tailing to the Holy Father the many things she was doing as a devout
follower of her new faith until the Pope himself interrupted her to say,
“Madame Luce, you know I am a Catholic, too.” Apocryphally, con-
verts have always been more devout than those born into the faith.
Shortly after Elizabeth Taylor, who had become a Jewess following her
marriage to Mike Todd, had taken former Navy Secretary John Warner
as her sixth husband, the Hollywood trade papers announced in big
type a “Salute to John Warner.” The ad stated that the salute would
be “the greatest gala dinner in Hollywood’s history” and would aid the
Jewish National Fund (it would also do Warner no harm in his race in
Virginia for the U.S. Senate). More than 100 top stars attended this
very successful affair. And the last visitor received by Menachem Begin
at the Waldorf Astoria before returning home after his first meeting
with President Carter was the beautiful Liz Taylor.
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 209
The Jewish connection covers all areas and reaches every level.
Most Americans may not even sense this gigantic effort, but there is
scarcely a Jew who is not reached by its tentacles. The stranglehold of
the Zionist minority over the majority is exploited to the hilt in an
infinite number of ways and often most subtly. The advertisements of
the United Jewish Appeal (tax-deductible, of course) continue to be
replete with Zionist jargon cleverly tucked away in sad accounts about
Jewish refugees. It is almost impossible to discredit a charity drive
which, under the caption “The Big Meal,’’ runs a most appealing
full-page picture of pathetic, hungry-looking children sitting down to
“a solid meal—courtesy of you—the contributor to the United Jewish
Appeal.’’> And the humanitarian-religio appeal is often loaded with
political ploys stamped on the envelope: “Keep Israel Alive—Passover
Campaign.” An infinite number of innocent Jews are sucked into this
kind of giving through the clever admixture of politics and humanitari-
anism.
The very definitive ties set out in Israeli legal compacts between
the Jewish Agency, a public body operating in the U.S., and the gov-
ernment of Israel subject American citizens and taxpayers to direct
influences of a foreign government. This came out clearly in the legal
action brought in 1968 by Saul E. Joftes, the former Secretary-General
of B’nai B’rith’s International Council, against that organization,
whose employee he had been for more than twenty years. Joftes
charged that the B’nai B’rith, an organization accepting tax-free con-
tributions, was being developed ‘“‘more as an adjunct of a foreign
power than as a voluntary agency.”
In the course of the litigation, it was brought out that one of the
responsibilities of a B'nai B’rith ‘“‘volunteer worker” named Avis Shul-
man was to “arrange with Jewish Agency tourist officials to meet with
tourists who were going to Eastern Europe and to brief them on what
the state of Jews was in Eastern Europe.” In a confidential May 7, 1974,
memorandum intended “for the eyes of members of the Board of
Governors only,” the B'nai B’rith’s Washington representative, Her-
man Edelsberg, asked for increased funds “‘to enlarge our program of
instruction for American tourists visiting the Soviet Union to include
non-Jews as well as Jews.’’4
Of even greater significance was the role Israeli Consul Uri Ra-
naan and the Israeli Consul General apparently played in Mrs. Shul-
man’s employment by B’nai B’rith. They even picked up the tab for her
to work out the balance of the year. When Theodor Herzl urged the
Zionist organizations ‘‘to capture the Jewish communities,” he proba-
210 THE COVER-UP
bly never imagined so sophisticated a tactic as this kind of apparent
penetration of the oldest and one of the most powerful of Jewish
organizations.
Indicative of the far-reaching activities of the Zionist organizations
was a 1970 report by the Chairman of the Department of Information
of the American Zionist Council. Some of the salient points are given
below, in the Council’s own words:
I. MONITORING AND COUNTER-ACTION OF PRINTED MATERIALS
The office staff monitors the daily press, the Negro press, the Protestant
and the Catholic Church press, the academic press, magazines of all kinds and
books. When hostile attacks on Israel or the Zionist movement appear any-
where, material is prepared and sent, either directly to the editor or from the
office as draft material to our friends in groups throughout the country who
might have better access to the particular publication involved. The advantage
of having local Zionist Councils is that we are immediately informed by them
of any unfriendly attack on Israel from any part of the United States, either
directly from the communities or via our Field Offices. Because of our exten-
sive monitoring service, the routine job of preparing replies to hostile material
goes on constantly.5
II. THE SPEAKERS BUREAU
There is a very well organized Speakers Bureau which,® with an absurdly
small staff, does an amazing job.
The largest part of these [speaking] engagements is before non-Jewish
groups, although at times a request from a Jewish group is serviced at a
nominal fee. Where do we get the speakers? The representatives of the Israel
government, visitors from Israel, American men and women—Jews and Chris-
tians—who have been to Israel on organized tours, or through personal visits,
especially equipped Israelis who are invited here to attend some international
conference and whose presence in this country is utilized by our Bureau for
addresses before meetings arranged by us.
III. RESEARCH BuREAU
... We cannot expect every Zionist organization to have available the kind
of material which 's called for at every moment to answer attacks, to give
information, to send materials to friends and potential friends. For instance,
Dr. Sidney Marks, Executive Director of the Zionist Organization of America
had a letter from one of its leaders in Houston asking urgently for information
in four specific areas in order to help him prepare an answer to the attack made
upon Israel and the Zionist movement in his community. Dr. Marks turned to
us, and we were able to get the material to Houston in a matter of hours.
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 211
The Research Bureau also analyzes books and articles which deal with
Israel or the Middle East. When the book is favorable, it is recommended.
When it is unfavorable, it is analyzed and distortions are pointed up by
providing the factual data required, so that our local councils will be pre-
pared to react to the impact which these books make on the communities.
We also stimulate book presents to libraries, both community and univer-
sity libraries.
IV. Vistrors TO ISRAEL
Firmly convinced that an experience in Israel gives the visitor an under-
standing and appreciation of the problems and progress of that country for
which there is no substitute, a good part of staff time is devoted to stimulating
visits to Israel on the part of public opinion molders, either as individuals or
groups. In some cases, subsidy is involved.
V. SPECIAL IssuES PROJECTS
Our Department also has the responsibility for the preparation of memo-
randa and for informing the local Zionist Council leaders and Jewish commu-
nity leadership as to our recommended position and steps for action on issues
such as the Arab refugee problem . . . etc.
B. VOLUNTEER COMMITTEES
The Commission on Inter-Religious Affairs” is responsible for our effort
in gaining friends in the Protestant and Catholic religious communities. The
work concerns itself with monitoring the Christian church press, stimulating
articles presenting Israel and Zionist ideology, answering the hostile attacks
very often found in the publications of the Protestant and Catholic Church, as
well as cultivating key religious leaders and editors.
Seminars for Christian Clergy: This has been an extremely successful
project. There have been ten seminars during the past year, held in important
communities throughout the United States.
The Inter-University Study Tour to Israel: A very successful tour has just
been completed, made up of 49 participants who for the most part paid their
own way. Two Negro participants were sponsored by B'nai B’rith and the
Anti-Defamation League.
Writers planning a European visit are invited to sessions of the Committee
and encouraged or helped to go to Israel. There is a discussion of the kind
of story they should look for, one which may likely bring forth an article in a
magazine with which the writer has contact.
The TV-radio Committee® . . . arranges for talks and interviews on radio
and TV; submits ideas for possible programs to stations and networks so as
to give a better and more sympathetic understanding of Israel to the viewing
American public. . . .
212 THE COVER-UP
The Zionist-Jewish connection draws for its strength upon every
strata of life, every political point of view, and every religion. Contrary
to what most people believe, all Zionists are not Jews; many of the most
devout supporters of Israel are Christians. That is why Rudolf G.
Sonneborn, key man in the American wing of the Jewish underground
movement in Palestine before the establishment of the Zionist state,
was able to boast back in October 1947: ‘We have at least one person
in virtually every community in America.’’?
The extent and depth to which organized Jewry reached—and
reaches—in the U.S. is indeed awesome. When Secretary of State
William P. Rogers embarked in late 1969 on a new peace initiative to
meet the dangers of the escalating Israeli-Egyptian war of attrition and
called for the withdrawal of Israel from occupied areas, a grand na-
uonal offensive was waged by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist group,
allegedly concerned with welfare and humanitarian advances in Israel.
President Faye Schenk urged members to “write, wire, and call” not
only the President and Secretary of State, but Congressmen and Sena-
tors. The new U.S. peace proposal, she claimed, “‘endangers Israel’s
future and fails to offer her any valid guarantees.” At one time or
another, the myriad of Jewish groups are organizing locally and na-
tionally some citizen action, some public protest in behalf of Israel.
The Israelist cause draws its power not alone from its meticulous
organization but from the fact that many Jews hold positions that give
them greater visibility, prominence, and potential influence than their
numbers would suggest. The mere presence of American Jews in all
urban communities—and even in some of the most rural ones—lends
inestimable strength to the all-powerful connection. Six million, most
very well situated, stand ready and willing, and also are most able to
use their talents as well as their connections to advance the Israeli
cause. Every Christian living in an urban area has a banker, a butcher,
an accountant, a candlestick maker—a doctor, a lawyer, a supplier, a
neighbor, or just a plain fellow club member—who is Jewish, whom he
above all does not wish to offend, and certainly not for the sake of some
people 5,000 or 6,000 miles away with whom he has little in common.
It is on this basic fact of life that the Israelist movement has fattened
itself and that latent opposition to Zionism has died stillborn. Arab
lands are distant. Jews are very much in everyone’s back yard—or just
over the fence—which, in the long run, means infinitely more than
even an occasional energy shortage.
One of the loveliest ladies that I ever knew—I loved her dearly—
used to take an hour’s trip to the office annually to renew her own and
The Jewtsh Connection: Numbers Don't Count 213
her Christmas gift subscriptions to the newsletter Middle East Perspec-
tive, bringing her payment in cash. On one occasion when she brought
her annual donation in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, I could not
help but ask, “Isabel, you know how much I love to see you, but why
in the world didn’t you mail this check instead of driving into the city
in this horrible weather?”
“Alfred, I can’t have Henry Ackerman, my Jewish accountant,
draw a check to your newsletter. You are too well known, and I just
can't afford to lose him. So I take the money from my Christmas cash
check and bring it personally into you.”
But whereas New York City, with its almost one-third Jewish pop-
ulation, is firmly in the grip of the Zionists, this influence by no means
stops there, nor does it have any intention of so doing. From my own
experiences lecturing around the country, I can attest to the pervasive-
ness of this Jewish connection. I had hardly finished a lecture to the
Spokane (Washington) Central Lions Club when three members
pounced upon the president and demanded equal time. Of course
Zionists only get 99 percent of the time devoted to this issue, and no
sooner is | percent given to the opposing viewpoint than they try to
cut it down to half a percent by asking time for themselves. This was
in Spokane, a city of 200,000 with only 180 Jewish families. But again,
size has nothing to do with influence, particularly when the Christian
president happened to be in a business where Jews controlled his
supply.
A letter from the gentleman who made the introductory presenta-
tion noted, “Your talk certainly set the cat among the canaries as far
as Spokane is concerned. I have had telephone calls from the president
of B'nai B’rith and also the presidents of the Jewish Men’s Club, both
of whom were rather upset at my having introduced you at the Lions.”
On that same lecture tour, which had taken me to the West
Coast, I lectured in Kansas City at William Jewell College and was
afterward interviewed by the Kansas City Star. The story that ap-
peared the following day omitted any reference to charges of press
slanting, discussed at great length in the lecture and backed up by
substantial documentation. The article appeared only in the edition
distributed in North Kansas City. A look about the city the next
day explained a lot. Everything is surely “up-to-date in Kansas
City,’’ as Rodgers and Hammerstein once noted, and no small part
may be due to names like Hertzberg, Wolf, Lerner, and Altman,
who own important stores there. Here was Jewish affluence in still
another city. The same Star contained an ecstatic review, covering
214 THE COVER-UP
half a page, of a new book entitled Jsrael's Survival Is a Holy Thing,
and the following day ran a prominently placed picture-story
headed ‘Reunion in Israel,’”’ a detailed account of a Russian Jew
who had brought his family from Moscow to Tel Aviv.
On this same tour the chairman of the Republican County Com-
mittee, under whose auspices I spoke at a Reno, Nevada, luncheon,
was later warned by Zionist contributors that “the party must entice
a speaker to challenge Dr. Lilienthal’s remarks in the very near future.”
A stroll through the famed gambling city indicated the usual influence:
large stores owned by Ginsburg, Leeds, Lerner, etc.
Irvington-on-the-Hudson in wealthy Westchester County, like so
many other suburban New York City communities, is also subject to
the same influences: UJA fund-raising and other Jewish nationalist
activities, together with coverage of Middle East news items invariably
favoring the Israeli side, prominently appear in the local newspaper.
And the Irvington Library, too, reflected this bias. In the card index
for the Middle East there was one book by Dr. Sidney Fisher and a few
books under “Arab” and “Egyptian,” most of them, of course, dealing
with the ancient history of Egypt and having nothing at all to do with
the Arab-Israeli conflict. But under “‘Israel’’ there was a wide variety
of books on the political history, travel, and social conditions of that
country. These included all kinds of pro-Israel books, including Leon-
ard Slater’s The Pledge, Robert St. John’s latest book on Israel as well
as his earlier distorted biography of Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Boss!9;
Harry Golden’s The Israelis! replete with oversimplifications and
clichés; and Israeli Amos Elon’s The Israelis: Sons and Founders,!? the
eminently fair attempt at presenting his people. Yael Dayan, daughter
of Moshe Dayan, and Miss Ruth Gruber, an old-time Zionist propagan-
dist, were also represented.
Prominently displayed on the shelves also was a book by Gerold
Frank, The Deed, '3 a sympathetic treatment of the two young killers of
Lord Moyne, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt whose 1944 death
marked the opening of the incessant violence and terrorism that has
since overtaken the Middle East and has engulfed the entire world.
Zionist zeal can manifest itself in the least suspected place on the
most unsuspected occasion. New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu had
been one of the hundred young top national leaders listed by Time
magazine in the fall of 1975 to whom Middle East Perspective sent com-
plimentary subscriptions. On official New Orleans stationery, we re-
ceived the following letter:
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 215
Dear Dr. Lilienthal:
The nice thing about America is that one can say and write pretty much
what he thinks. Therefore, you have the right to express your comments in
your publication.
I also have the same right. With my right, I simply want to say that you
are a fool. If you think Israel is causing the problem in the Middle East, you
are a complete fool. If you are nothing more than anti-Semiuc, then I can
better understand why you would write such trash.
Sincerely,
JAY HANDELMAN
Assistant Director,
Public Relations Office
In a letter to the Mayor (sent in a plain white envelope to avoid
another interception), I wrote to ask whether he had seen the letter
advising him of the complimentary subscription and had authorized
the Handelman response. In reply, Mayor Landrieu expressed appre-
ciation “‘for calling the letter to my attention. Please understand that
Mr. Handelman was not authorized by me to send this letter, and the
thoughts he expressed should not have been under city letterhead.”
Just one of the innumerable examples of the harm the Jewish connec-
tion in high places can so easily wreak!
Leaders often cooperate unwittingly in Zionist suppressive tactics
in order to save themselves trouble or embarrassment. Without due
consideration for the erosion of free speech, they sometimes agree to
requests for the postponement or elimination of speakers, programs,
or articles relative to Zionism or Israel lest they be offensive to their
Jewish friends. A Zionist Unitarian in Rockford, Illinois, seriously op-
posed a study of the Palestinian question because “it might lead to
anti-Semitism.”” No sooner had a lecture by a critic of Zionism been
scheduled by the Rotary Club on the island of Nantucket, thirty miles
out at sea, than a stiff demand for cancellation or ‘“‘equal time” was
presented. The club’s president, the owner of the island’s largest hard-
ware store, felt instantaneously obliged to promise to schedule a Zion-
ist speaker. Program chairmen of service clubs are loathe to rise above
demands thrust upon them that non-Zionist speakers be canceled, or
not booked, because “‘if you insist on letting them talk, it will make
your Jewish friends very unhappy.” The implied threat is very obvious.
Aside from the superb organization and mobilization of the Zion-
ists, the impact of money provides another reason for the lopsided
attitude toward the Middle East in every corner of the U.S., and some-
times beyond its borders, too.
216 THE COVER-UP
On lovely St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, tourists on Main
Street, seeking bargains as they pour onto land from cruise ships in the
port of Charlotte Amalie, cannot miss the well-located Bolero Shop.
No matter which door they enter, they are met by large signs, “Visit
the Israeli Shops,” and in the rear again are posters leading to exhibits
of the most mediocre pottery and brass. The principal owner of the
store happens to be the largest contributor on the island to the UJA,
Henry Kimmelman, once chief fund-raiser for Hubert Humphrey’s
presidential campaign.
The St. Thomasite Zionists raised a vast sum of money during the
1973 war, largely through the donation of a free ad in the local paper.
The Arab merchants were denied an equal opportunity to appeal to
the populace. They were simply told by the newspaper that their fund
was “‘political, not humanitarian,” and therefore could not be run free.
Nearby at the Dutch end of St. Marteens on the main shopping
street is the Windmill, a quality jewelry shop. On one of its two big
windows is painted “Shalom—Welcome.” The store that sells paper-
backs has two travel books on Israel.
In Britain, too, the Jewish connection has been powerful and
all-encompassing. Marks & Spencer (hereafter referred to as M&S), the
largest chain store organization in the United Kingdom with some 251
stores and sales of just under $1.5 billion in 1973, also owns a chain
of stores in Canada and is opening up throughout Europe. M&S does
not manufacture any of their own goods, but they lay down certain
regulations and specifications that must be followed by manufacturers
regarding quality. Some of these manufacturers do not supply any firm
except M&S and are therefore wholly dependent upon the goodwill of
that company and its dictates. Whenever possible, M&S sells Israeli
and South African goods. Their counters are always stocked with pro-
duce, vegetables, and fruits from these two countries. The range of
goods sold in M&S stores includes clothing of all types, foodstuffs of
all kinds, toiletries, household goods, and so forth.
During the 1973 war, as in other previous crises involving Israel,
the company sent telegrams to all M&S Jewish suppliers “summoning”’
them to a meeting. They were then told how much they would have
to donate to Israel. Several manufacturers complained to their friends
about this, but said that the firm made it clear (although perhaps not
in so many words) that their contracts would be terminated if they did
not ‘‘cough up” sufficient money. Since many factories supply no other
firm but M&S, no manufacturer would risk losing his livelihood.
Also, Jewish members of the company’s staff are regularly pes-
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 217
tered to give money to various Zionist appeals. The sales promotion
department, which looks after publicity and advertising, frequently has
assigned staff members to design and prepare Zionist appeal bro-
chures and other such material during office hours, at the expense of
the shareholders. In addition, an executive of the company, paid by the
firm, is employed full time in promoting the interests of Israel. Hannah
House, a building in Manchester Street, London W1, which was built
to supply recreation and canteen facilities for staff members of the
firm, housed in part of its premises an Israeli government office that
promotes trade and commerce.
A firm called Triumph, one of the largest bra and girdle manufac-
turers in the world and one of the biggest suppliers of M&S, has, in
the past, produced their goods in factories in Austria. M&S bullied the
firm to open a factory in Israel. M&S is now bringing pressure to bear
on Triumph to close down all their Austrian interests and to manufac-
ture solely in Israel.
During the December 1973 demonstrations in London outside
the Syrian Embassy over the Israeli prisoners of war being held by
Damascus, Jewish staff members were told that they were free to go
during working hours, without deduction of pay, to demonstrate out-
side the Syrian Embassy. An observer who was inside the embassy
while the demonstrations were taking place wrote: “Several hundred
British Jews, all yelling hysterically, ‘Release our boys! Set our soldiers
free!’ (Italics added.)
Another firm that makes a point of promoting and selling Israeli
goods of all kinds—clothing, jewelry, food, etc.—is prestigious Sel-
fridges, the large department store that recently opened an adjoining
hotel. It is owned by Charles Clore, who like the heads of M&S, is
intensely Zionist and has donated a small fortune to Israel.
Zionist flexibility permits the solicition and acceptance of support
from any and all sources. It used to be said at the outset of the Middle
East conflict when Israel was first established that the anti-Semites,
along with the Arabists, constituted the bulk of what litthe American
opposition there was to Israel. And perhaps this may have been ini-
tially true of certain extreme right-wingers who rushed to Arab offices
—and to the anti-Zionist Jews, too—and pledged their verbal backing
(and very little more). But since then there has been a marked shift.
By way of a gross anomaly, one finds that the more a Christian—or a
Jew—possesses even a soupcon of prejudice, the more he is likely to
support the State of Israel. He feels that in this way he can compensate
for his bias. Consequently, the real anti-Semite can often be found in
218 THE COVER-UP
the ranks of those singing Israel’s praises.
When Israel came into being and campaigned for immigrants to
supply manpower, the idea of relegating ‘‘these nonintegratable Jews”
to the foreign State of Israel and to do so with popularity became a
bigot’s dream come true. Support of Israel now began to earn him a
gold star on his otherwise sullied escutcheon.
After the heightening of the area cold war in the 1960s with Big
Power polarization, which saw the Russians supporting Nasser and the
Arabs, and the U.S. backing Israel, conservatives joined other right-
wingers and liberals in support of Israel. Concerned with the contain-
ment of Communism, they fell for the gambit directed at them by
Israelist propagandists and fellow Jewish conservatives. They were
unable to recognize the difference between Communist controlled,
indoctrinated, or oriented countries, such as the Soviet satellites of
Eastern Europe, Cuba, or North Vietnam, and those who have been
forced to look to the Soviet Union for temporary diplomatic, military,
or economic assistance without buying Communist ideology. The
Arab socialist countries, including Egypt under Nasser, even as they
were forced by the U.S. “Israel First” policy to look to the Soviet bloc
for vital multifold assistance, remained virulently anti-Communist, as
evidenced by the Egyptian leader’s banning of the Communist party
and the large number of Communists jailed.
Bedeviled by their own inadequate grasp of the realities of the
area conflict and egged on by important Jewish connections, the right-
wing press, Human Events, National Review, and the publications of the
Birch Society, often competed with Zionist newspapers in anti-Arab
slogans and in applying the label “Communist.” Paradoxically, this
anti-Communist attitude, which was contributing to the molding of
American public opinion in favor of Israel, was at the same time driv-
ing basically anti-Communist peoples, the Arabs whose strong theism
constituted a natural bulwark against Communism, into greater reli-
ance on the Soviet Union.
Tel Aviv’s 1967 victory greatly assisted this movement of conser-
vatives, right-wingers, and bigots toward the Israeli camp. Americans
of all shades of political opinion like a winner, of course. Likewise, the
conservatives’ proclaimed advocacy of law and order intuitively
aroused strong opposition to the many acts of violence committed by
Palestinian commandos and their allies.
One-sided reportage on terrorism, in which cause was never
related to effect, was assured because the most effective component of
the Jewish connecticn is probably that of media control. It is well
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 219
known that American public opinion molders have long been largely
influenced by a handful of powerful newspapers, including the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—owned
respectively by the Sulzbergers, Eugene Meyer and now his daughter
Katharine Graham (half-Jewish, who also owns Newsweek), and the
Pulitzers, a Hungarian Jewish family. The New York Posé, until recently
when it was sold to Rupert Murdoch, was in the capable hands of
Dorothy Schiff, the granddaughter of banker Jacob Schiff.
Walter Annenberg, who served as Nixon’s Ambassador to Britain,
owned the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Morning Telegraph, Seventeen, and TV
Guide (estimated advertising revenues of $55 million), as well as sev-
eral television stations. Samuel Newhouse, of Jewish background,
owns some forty-nine newspapers, including the influential Newsday on
Long Island, four television stations, a number of radio stations, and
a cluster of vital magazines, including Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and
House and Garden. In smaller communities around the country, exercis-
ing large influence, are such Jewish-owned or operated organs as the
Las Vegas Sun and the Carolina Israelite.
Other newspapers, not Jewish-owned, have top editors, directors,
and advertising chiefs who are Jewish, such as the Los Angeles Times and
the /nternational Herald Tribune, an amalgam of the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the old New York Herald Tribune. In 1978 the
Washington Star’s owner was Time Magazine and the publisher until June
1 was Joe L. Allbritton, but the views of the executive editor Sidney
Epstein and associate editor Edwin Yoder, Jr. were clearly reflected in
its editorials and articles during the critical Middle East develop-
ments.!4
All of the leading magazines, ranging from Commentary, Esquire,
Ladies Home Journal, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and U.S. News
and World Report, have Jews in key positions as publishers, editors, or
managing editors. These people, at the very least, have the veto power
over whatever appears in their publications. No one 's about to criticize
Jews—or even take Israel to task—for fear of being out of line with the
boss, who is likely to fire him. The boss himself may not be a screaming
Zionist, but scarcely ever will walk out of step with the overwhelming
articulated opinion by expressing his own views on this subject, which
in turn makes his Christian friends and contacts keep whatever criti-
cism they may harbor under full wraps. There is also the constant
overriding concern of the media about losing advertising, so vital to
every publication, at times making a mockery of the vaunted ‘“‘freedom
of press.”” Power is thus very often exercised by default.
220 THE COVER-UP
Parade, the Sunday newspaper magazine with a circulation of close
to 20 million and a claimed readership of twice that number, has
Christian ownership, but editor Jesse Gorkin, two senior editors, and
many writers, until 1977 staff changes, were Jewish. Lloyd Shearer, its
editor-at-large in California, has worked actively with Zionist groups,
including the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense
League, and used his pen either to subtly attack the Arabs whenever
possible through his column, “Personality Parade,’”’ or to advance
Zionist propaganda. For example, a Shearer piece blamed brainwash-
ing and tne fear of war for the refusal of emigrating Soviet Jews to go
to Israel, while not mentioning Israeli taxes, bureaucracy, inflation,
corruption or fear of conscription—the reasons why so many other
Israelis were leaving the country.!5
It would be futile to list the number of top Jewish editors and
writers across the country. Many of the largest book publishers, includ-
ing Knopf, Random House, Holt, Liverwright, Viking Press, Simon
and Schuster, Van Nostrand Reinhold, and Lyle Stewart are Jewish-
owned, directly or by Jewish-controlled interests (including CBS,
RCA, Music Corporation of America, Litton’s, and Gulf and Western).
In other firms such as Macmillan and Grosset & Dunlap, one will find
editors-in-chief or presidents who are Jewish. Three years ago, one
large Christian publisher showed far greater regard for the possible
emotions of his Jewish editor-in-chief than he did for a sure-hit manu-
script that severely criticized Zionism. A call for a review copy to a
smaller house, the Dial Press, led to a connection with a Mimi Garfin-
kle. This all explains why such a pitifully small number of anti-Zionist
or pro-Arab books ever see the light of day.!§
An additional source of Zionist strength flows from the control of
the distribution field of paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers. A
near monopoly in the news distribution field in New York lies in the
hands of Henry Garfinkel Corporation National Services, which owns
the Union News Company. Few pocketbooks or paperbacks they op-
pose can be brought to the attention of the reading public. The Book
of the Month Club, which has distributed close to 250 million books
in the last forty years, was founded by the late Harry Sherman, who was
of Anglo-Welsh-Jewish parentage. Many of the wholesale book firms
are Jewish controlled.
In radio and television, again one finds almost an overwhelming
presence of key Jews. Chairman of the Board of CBS until very recently
was William Paley; RCA’s David and Robert Sarnoff for a long time ran
their subsidiary, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) whose
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 221
present chairman is Julian Goodman; and Leonard Goldenson headed
the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) until succeeded by Fred
Silverman. A few officials in three offices all located on the east side
of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan between 49th and 54th Streets select
most of the ideas, experiences, and news reaching most of the Ameri-
can people. Each of these three major networks has a separate news
subsidiary with offices responsible only for news programs. Reuven
Frank ran NBC’s, Richard Salant CBS’s, and Martin Rubinstein served
under Goldenson, with Avram Westin as executive producer. They
dictated pretty much what 200 million Americans learned of what had
happened in the nation and in the world each day. Virtually all national
and international news is filtered, edited, and broadcast by these three
corporations.
Not only is television chock-full of Jewish producers, but many of
the commentators, news reporters, editors, and directors of news pro-
grams are Jewish. Look at the influential national talk-interview pro-
grams where, among others, David Susskind, Mike Wallace, Lawrence
Spivak, and Irving Kupcinet have reigned supreme. For a long time
Stuart Schulberg of NBC sat on top of the popular “Today” show,
under Hugh Downs and then under Barbara Walters, to make certain
that while every Tom, Dick, and Harry might appear, nothing was to
be aired that might upset the continued brainwashing of their viewers
as to the Middle East. Try and get something that is anti-Zionist, no
less pro-Arab, through the blockade of the three networks and you will
quickly find out just how many producers and assistants are of the
chosen faith. Calling from Nantucket, at the outset of the October
1973 war, to protest one of the many viciously slanted CBS news
broadcasts of that time, I was three times connected with someone
bearing an obvious Hebraic name. It has been estimated that close to
70 percent of the important posts in the media are held by Jews, and
there are an infinite number of Judith Epsteins, as at Channel 13,
guarding the gateways to the top echelon.
Taxicab drivers, insomniacs, and other night hawks have for a
number of years been regaled by the competing radio talk shows of
Jewish loyalists Barry Gray and Barry Farber and Zionist converts Long
John Nebel and Bob Grant. Their lame excuse for letting their bias
show has been the fear of loss of all-necessary advertising. The same
holds true for the incessant appearances of Dr. Martin Abend on
Metromedia’s news outlet in New York and environs.
One need not point to the total control of the motion picture
industry to understand why the film Exodus, based on the famed Leon
222 THE COVER-UP
Uris book, with its subtle distortions of the Palestinian issue and glo-
rification of Zionist terrorism, is sull being shown as a repeat in some
theaters and on late-night television programs across the country. The
alliance between television and the motion picture industry has been
very close, one feeding into the other. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th-
Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Columbia, Warner Bros., Universal
and United Artists have all been headed, founded, and controlled by
well-known Jews such as Goldwyn, Fox, Laemmle, Schenck, Lasky,
Zukor, Thalberg, Cohen, Mayer, and Warner. Little wonder that Bob
Hope once equipped that “Hollywood is the only place where Catho-
lics give up matzoh balls for Lent.”
In addition, during the last several years Hollywood has closely
collaborated with and assisted the budding Israeli movie industry.
Richard Boone (Paladin), while not Jewish himself, promoted Israel’s
potential as a film-making center and in one of his earlier efforts
starred Hannah Meron, the Israeli actress who lost her left leg in the
1970 bombing of an El Al plane in Munich.
Likewise, the American theater headed by Broadway—and this
has been equally true of the entire entertainment world, including
music and other forms—has been dominated by Jewish names, too
numerous to list. No opportunity is lost by Israelists to push their
wares through the arts. These words, for instance, from a 1973 review
of the Poseidon Adventure, the film based on the novel of the same name
by Paul Gallico, deserve attention: “‘An amazingly fat Shelley Winters
and Jack Albertson as the couple en route to Israel and their grandchil-
dren contribute a touching vignette or two in a big cast largely seen
in bit roles.” A careful reading of the Paul Gallico book shows that this
couple, Belle and Manny Rosen, play an important role, but there was
no mention of their going to Israel. In the film this was brought in very
prominently by the screenplay writers, Stirling Silliphant and Wendell
Mays. An Israeli travel folder was held up by the couple as they sat on
deck and talked about going to see their grandchildren in the Holy
Land for the first time—a gratuitous boost by Hollywood screenwriters
for Israeli tourism, which had slumped badly in 1972. Could the film
writers’ change of names, a la my grade-school classmate Ming Toy
Epstein, not have contributed to their Zionist outlook?
Propaganda was further insidiously injected into the movie sce-
nario when the dying Belle handed a swimming medal to her husband,
pointing to the Hebrew letters on the rear, standing for “‘light’”—the
scene that was plugged on television ads for the film. The characteriza-
tion of the screenplay by New York Times’ reviewer Vincent Canby as
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 223
“burrowing into some new foolishness with all the intensity of a mad
mole digging through soap chips’ did not prevent the film from
becoming a big success and further advancing the Zionist saga.
As their contribution to public edification during the growing
crisis in U.S.-Israel relations, Hollywood and Broadway were always
doing more than their bit for Zionism. Otto Preminger, producer and
director of Exodus, announced production of a film on Israel’s history.
The tentative name of this feature was The First 25 Years: Dayan’s Israel,
to be based on the Israeli Foreign Minister’s autobiography, Story of My
Life.
Although the movie Exodus was an unqualified success, the musi-
cal version was a flop on Braodway; it closed after a disastrous three
weeks despite a Uris-paid Sunday Times appeal to keep the play going.
In a piece entitled ‘““The Last Straw,’ Women’s Wear Daily reviewer
Arthur Gottfried called An ‘‘a disgrace . . . a primitive production.”
Certain emotional themes do not lend themselves to stage dramatiza-
on, as was proven when the play based on the life of Theodor Herzl
also quickly closed. But the Zionists kept pushing their wares. Few
plays have been so widely heralded in advance as Golda, based on the
life of Israel’s former Prime Minister and written by William Gibson,
whose wife is Jewish. For seven months before its November, 1977
opening, major dailies and magazines were flooded with ads, feature
articles, and pictures of the lead, Anne Bancroft, with and without Mrs.
Meir, on the news as well as the theatrical pages, including notices
placed in the middle of the Times’ theatrical directory. Although the
play came to New York with a $250,000 advance sale and a super-
deluxe opening night, new advertising, and free publicity, it closed
after ninety-three performances and the entire investment of a half a
million dollars was lost, although rumored prospects of a film or televi-
sion special might retrieve part or all of this.
Maybe because she was English, actress Vanessa Redgrave was
totally naive about the meaning of the Jewish connection. In New York
in October, 1977 for promotion of the new screen hit Juda, in which
she starred with Jane Fonda, the self-admitted Trotskyite also tried to
create interest in a moving, two-hour documentary about the PLO
filmed with BBC cameramen that summer in Lebanon and containing
an interview with Yasir Arafat. Vanessa phoned Joey Adams (who,
despite his name, is a member of the tribe and had raised $200-million
for Israel) and asked help for getting her film on television. When she
told him what the movie was about, he exploded, “Lady, you’re very
sick,” and hung up.
224 THE COVER-UP
According to the New York Post, Redgrave said the film demon-
strated that Israel was a ‘“‘fascist, racist nation’’ (which was her lingo)
and should be eradicated” (which was definitely not hers).!7
The film star had roused the hornets. Picketing began outside
Cinema I in Manhattan, and at one performance the Jewish Defense
League unleashed dozens of mice. Show Business sounded the clarion
call for war by printing this fiery caption on a reprint from the earlier
New York Post story: ‘‘“Vanessa Redgrave Urges Extermination of Is-
rael.”!8 A full-scale “hate war’’ erupted which was joined by radio
station WINS, the Soho Weekly News, Our Town, for whom Cindy Adams
wrote a column, Mayor Edward Koch, and well-known producer and
former president of the Anti-Defamation League, Dore Schary. What
burned the Zionists and their friends in Hollywood and on Broadway
was that her documentary had the potential of arousing sympathy for
the Palestinians and exposing the manorial splendor in South Lebanon
of Christian Phalangist leaders, Israel’s allies.
The war accelerated when Vanessa was nominated as best sup-
porting actress for her role in Julia in which she, ironically enough,
played an anti-Nazi heroine in a story based on the memoirs of Lillian
Hellman. Enormous pressures were brought to bear by the Jewish
Defense League, the American Jewish Committee and everyone they
could commandeer to bar her from winning. New York Times critic
Vincent Canby pontificated that ‘‘great actresses are not those who go
around trying to find distribution outlets for films on behalf of the
PLO!
Outside the Los Angeles Music Center the night of the Fiftieth
Annual Academy Awards, vying demonstrations by the Jewish Defense
League and the Palestine Liberation Organization came close to open
conflict over Miss Redgrave. The neo-fascists carried signs reading
“PLO Murders Jewish Children,” “‘Redgrave and Arafat—A Perfect
Love Affair.’’ On the other side, the PLO supporters carried a placard
“‘Vanessa—A Woman of Conscience and Courage.”
In one of the most dramatic moments in filmdom history, the Tel
Aviv-Broadway-Hollywood axis was soundly defeated when Vanessa
Redgrave took home the Oscar. Beautifully gowned and coiffed, Miss
Redgrave’s acceptance speech was fiery and impassioned. Accepting
the Oscar, which she held aloft in triumph, she said: ““You should be
proud that in the last few weeks you stood firm and you refused to be
intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums, whose
behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to
their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppres-
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 225
sion. I salute that record and thank you, and I pledge to you that I will
continue to fight against anti-Semitism and fascism.”
This was one of the few, even temporary, setbacks for the Zionist
connectors, but Hollywood on this occasion had wished to prove how
non-political, pro-art they were. But the battle against the winner was
hardly over. Later at the Awards, writer Paddy Chayefsky, an active
Zionist and leader in the ‘Free the Soviet Jewry” movement, sharply
attacked Miss Redgrave; her own producer, Richard Roth, sounded off
at a lavish post-Academy party at which she was shunned by the leaders
of the entertainment industry, according to the New York Post. Come-
dian Alan King breathed fire: “I am that Zionist hoodlum she was
talking about. It’s just a pity I wasn’t on the platform tonight. I would
have gone for the jugular.” Few words could have more appropriately
expressed the murder pathology of the Begin-led world Zionist move-
ment than these. The vast abyss between Judaism and Zionism had
been openly exposed to a hundred million people around the world,
and the subsequent Adams-King effort to gather signatures for an
imposing Variety advertisement against the actress fell flat on its face.
There is little doubt that the Anti-Defamation League and the
other so-called ‘“‘defense organizations”’ will be calling for a book
burning campaign when this volume hits the book stores. At the time
of the outcry against Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General
George Brown for his Duke University charge of undue Jewish influ-
ence through “ownership” of the media, these organizations and other
critics of the General pointed out that of the total number of daily
papers in the U.S., only a small percentage are Jewish-owned (3.1
percent of the 1,748 U.S. dailies), and that even where the ownership
is Jewish, as in the case of the New York Times, the Washington Post,
Newsweek, and the Newhouse chain, many of the editors are not Jewish.
It has also been pointed out that there is no Jewish ownership of the
wire services, nor of Time magazine (the Chairman of the Board, An-
drew Heiskell, is married to Marion Sulzberger Dryfoos, sister of the
present New York Times publisher and widow of his predecessor). But
the decisive factor has always been control, not ownership.
It is fear and pressure that govern. Publishers and editors are
constantly concerned about their advertising—Jewish or otherwise—
are worried about calls from the Anti-Defamation League, and are
directed by their own inner compulsions, so often fed by the Holo-
caust. And when the AP, UPI, the Washington Post, the New York Times,
the news magazines, the networks, and the two major polls—Gallup
and Harris—agree on the same general viewpoint, as they have on the
226 THE COVER-UP
Middle East, forget it—it’s the ‘‘ball game.”
Even if, as has been alleged, the major networks, NBC, CBS, and
ABC, which grew out of the heavily Jewish-dominated entertainment
and advertising businesses, do happen to have a majority of anchor-
men, commentators, and analysts who are not Jewish, they are never-
theless most concerned about their future and will not do anything to
risk antagonizing their Jewish overseers. Hence the news has been
consistently, overwhelmingly pro-Israel and anti-Arab, any expression
of anti-Zionism being practically verboten.
The fact that the pro-Israel stance of Jewish-owned papers is
scarcely distinguishable (perhaps only to the extent of degree) from
the bias of the rest of the press is but a corollary of the famed advertise-
ment: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Rye Bread.” You
do not have to be a Jewish publisher to bow to the juggernaut of power
behind the State of Israel. Christians in all forms of media endeavor,
as in all walks of life, have often been more fervent supporters of Israel
than their Jewish prototypes.
The final proof is said to be in the eating. Any unbiased survey of
news reportage and commentary, whether on radio-television, in
magazines or newspapers, as well as of letters to the editor appearing
on the opinion-making editorial page, would unmistakably reveal the
extent of control exercised through the Jewish connection. While the
dramatic 1974 appearance of the PLO’s Yasir Arafat before the U.N.
could scarcely be ignored, and hence was accorded fuller coverage
than usually given the other side, whenever did Jewish columnists such
as C. L. Sulzberger, William Safire, Theodore White, Max Lerner,
Joseph Kraft, and Walter Lippmann ever do more than mildly slap the
Israelis on the wrist and chide them for some relatively inconsequen-
tial wrongdoing, while resolutely refusing in any way to even remotely
“repudiate the anachronism of Zionism in the modern world and the
madness of attempting to establish a theocratic state in the swarming
beehive of Islamic Palestine.’’?°
Outside of government, media experts such as David Garth and
Charles Guggenheim, pollsters Louis Harris and Daniel Yankelovich,
fund-raisers Max Fischer for the Republicans and Arthur Krim for the
Democrats, and presidential speech writers Democrats Richard Good-
win and Adam Walinsky, and William Safire for the Republicans, have
exercised a potent political ‘nfluence.
All it takes is one good connection, and the Zionists produce a
great “deal.” The connectors are never daunted, never ever stop—
either giving Treasury Secretary William E. Simon the annual civil
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 227
leadership award of the American Jewish Committee at a $175-a-plate
Waldorf Astoria dinner?! or the sports division honoring Yankee
player Phil Rizzuto for his contribution to baseball.
And the Zionist links are everywhere. Edgar M. Bronfman, scion
of the wealthiest Canadian Zionist family, presented the Synagogue
Council of America’s Covenant of Peace Award (including $18,000) to
Lillian Carter, mother of the president, at a dinner in September 1977.
Ambassador to the U.N. Andrew Young was the keynote speaker at the
dinner affair.
All types of Christians are wheedled into all types of support. At
a Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reception, Rose Kennedy bought some
$15,000 worth of Bonds, qualifying her for the Israeli Ambassador’s
“Society of Trustees.” The Jewish Connection is very effective in Brit-
ain, too. The Duke of Devonshire, as Chairman of the Conservative
Party’s “Friends of Israel’”’ Committee, toured the U.S. to raise funds
for “little Israel.”
A favorite gambit is to make love of Israel part of the popular
culture, to make us all feel a little bit “Jewish” without our knowing
what hit us. An annual event in New York City has been the ‘Salute
to Israel’’ parade with national, state, and city officials, along with
honored Israeli guests such as Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek or Chief
Rabbi Shlomo Goren on the reviewing stand, and marching school
bands—Protestant, Catholic, and nonsecular schools—swinging by.
The students participate because of the exposure and publicity offered
by the national band competition, which is adroitly scheduled as part
of the ‘‘Salute.”” When questioned, the director of a high school band
from Matawan, New Jersey, professed total ignorance of any political
implication to the parade or the presence of his youngsters. ‘“We could
be playing for the Greeks or the Poles, on their day. Why not for the
Jews?” Thus, unwittingly, the innocent help magnify in the press and
on TV the strength of support for Israel.
In California, too, there are many who zealously serve the connec-
tion. Milton M. Gordon, a key figure in the mortgage broker industry,
with more than a passing interest in pending state legislation, arranged
for free all-expense trips in 1975 to Israel of California’s State Trea-
surer Jesse Unruh, Democratic State Chairman Charles Manatt, As-
sembly Speaker Leo McCarthy, Senate President pro-tem, and twelve
other legislators, from both parties. Part of the funds came from Israel,
“the rest from business and labor leaders,’’ according to the Sac-
ramento Bee.??
The following year there was another all-expense junket for ten
228 THE COVER-UP
other California legislators, estimated to cost in excess of $13,000. On
their return, these legislators had nothing but paeans of praise for
Israel and its “militancy.” Ironically, the Judah L. Magnes Memorial
Museum of Berkeley, which had sponsored what Director Seymour
Fromer called a “cultural exchange fellowship,” had been established
to honor the first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Dr.
Judah L. Magnes, a devout anti-Zionist and a fervent believer in Holy
Land binationalism; he was forced to end his days in exile in the U.S.
out of fear of Begin-like terror, which struck down his driver and
narrowly missed taking his life.
Jews, toughened by centuries of persecution, have risen to places
of prime importance in the business and financial world. By 1955 18.9
percent of all Americans with an annual income of $10,000, and more
than 20 percent of all American millionaires, were Jews.?3 Their wealth
and resultant influence provided a weapon for advancing the interests
of the Israeli state and a shield from censure-criticism of the most-
favored-nation position that was accorded the new Mediterranean
state. While there were, at the outset of the Palestine question, pockets
of resistance to the concept of a Jewish state, and the founding mem-
bers of some of the great Jewish financial institutions considered Zion-
ism quite abhorrent, the doubters soon quickly learned to keep such
opinions to themselves. Their opposition was whittled down to an
occasional, scarcely whispered disparagement of Jewish nationalism,
even as they raised funds for or used their enormous influence on
behalf of Israel. It was no accident, then, that the greatest amount of
giving, not only for charitable but for political purposes, has come
from Jews, some of the more affluent of whom have even contributed
to the candidates of both major parties so as to ensure a favored
position for the interests of Israel.
Jewish wealth and acumen wields unprecedented power in the
area of finance and investment banking, playing an important role in
influencing U.S. policy toward the Middle East. While not true of the
commercial banks, the financial houses of Wall Street have been and
are dominated by Jews or are worried about Jews who may be their
biggest customers. The great investment banking houses—led by
Goldman, Sachs; Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Lazard Fréres; Lehman
Brothers; Salomon Brothers; and Loeb Rhoades & Company—have
played a large role in financing modern corporate America and have
exercised a great influence on the nation’s economy. A vertiable Who’s
Who in American industry and corporate life can be obtained by listing
the corporations on which these Jewish bankers have representation
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don't Count 229
on the Boards of Directors. Any listing of inherited wealth cannot
overlook the older families—the Warburgs, Kahns, Guggenheims,
Seligmans, Gimbels, and Strausses—or such well-established San
Francisco families as the Fleischakers, Haases, Lilienthals, Sutros, and
Schwabackers.
Loeb Rhoades has also a considerable brokerage business and
processes security transactions for some sixty correspondent firms
around the country.?4 That is why this investment house was in a
position to volunteer in 1974 to be of substantial assistance to the
Zionist cause. Congress had placed a $730 million ceiling on military
sales made on credit, which required Israel to borrow $300 million to
cover part of her military purchases. Several commercial banks, anx-
ious to curry favor with the Arabs, had balked at floating these securi-
ties. The U.S. government then did the unprecedented by guarantee-
ing for the first time an offering by a foreign country, a lengthy story
the New York Times unabashedly broke on its front page.?5 Undertaking
the chore at a much lower lending rate, Loeb Rhoades quickly sold the
twenty-year securities to many of its customers across the country.
Even as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was pledging U.S. even-
handedness in an effort to persuade Anwar el-Sadat and Hafez al-
Assad to proceed with disengagement, another branch of the govern-
ment was guaranteeing a loan to complete the purchase of Israeli
military procurements in the U.S.
No protest was registered, only praise was voiced, when Control-
ler Harrison J. Goldin of New York City, then a bankrupt municipality,
announced the $30 million, monthly installment purchase of these
securities from the pension funds of the New York Teachers Retire-
ment System. Los Angeles County, the City of Chicago, and the states
of Michigan, Oregon, Tennessee, and Wisconsin announced purchase
plans of the securities, as did the International Ladies Garment Work-
ers Union (Secretary-Treasurer Sol C. Chaikin stated: ““We’re inter-
ested in it because it’s for a good cause. But we wouldn’t have done
it if it had not been backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.
Government.”’). The Israeli Permanent Representative to the U.N.
hailed the armament investment as a “‘significant contribution in the
best American tradition of justice.’’26
In the larger metropolitan areas, the Jewish-Zionist connection
thoroughly pervades affluent financial, commercial, social, entertain-
ment, and art circles. In most cases there is not the slightest chance
of bringing any reasonable persuasion to bear on people in these
circles.
230 THE COVER-UP
Nathan Cummings, the man who built Consolidated Foods Cor-
poration and Sara Lee into a national institution, has more than 100
additional companies with which he is connected in some important
manner. In the spring of 1977 he invited 700 people to be his guests
on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in the grand ballroom of the
Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Attending were such outspoken international
Zionists and benefactors of Israel as British industrialist Sir Charles
Clore, Canadian Edgar M. Bronfman of Seagram’s, and Baron Ed-
mund de Rothschild of Paris. Others present at the party included
Charles G. Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, Leonard Goldenson of
American Broadcasting Company, Senator Jacob Javits, New York’s
Mayor Beame, Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dimitz, etc., etc.
At this $200,000 affair Bob Hope popped out of the 1,000-pound,
6-foot by 12-foot cake, to the applause of gathered notables from such
companies as U.S. Steel, Coastal States Gas, Heinz’s, Dillon Reed,
Norton Simon, Bianca Commerciale Italiana, etc. No officer of these
companies would ever dare think of uttering one word against Israel
or Zionism, because they would instinctively think of ‘“‘Nate Cum-
mings.”’ Although his precise views on Zionism might not be known
to them, the evidence was there for all to see that he was a generous
benefactor of Israel, and good business sense would compel any busi-
ness acquaintance of his to fall in line with the thinking of “Our
Crowd.”
And there are tens of thousands of counterparts to the Cummings’
connections. When one of his Jewish depositors withdrew his account
(with only a $250,000 line of credit) in protest after David Rockefeller
had allegedly joined other business leaders in warning President
Nixon of the need for a new Middle East policy, the Chase president
was forced to make a public statement that the U.S. “must do all it can
to safeguard security and sovereign existence of Israel.”
In the midst of the 1973-74 Middle East crisis, Charles Bluhdorn
called on the Motion Picture Association of America to assume the lead
in repricing ‘‘commodities unique to us that are exported to the oil-
rich nations of the Middle East.”” The Viennese émigré was highly
critical of American businessmen ‘“‘quaking, fearful, afraid of any-
body,” who were bowing to the Arabs. The control of the Motion
Picture Association, whose receipts hit a record high of $1.9 billion in
1974, rests heavily in Jewish hands. But Bluhdorn’s influence extends
far beyond the film industry. In addition to Paramount Pictures, Simon
and Schuster and Pocket Books, this huge $3.39 billion (as of 1976)
conglomerate has its fingers into manufacturing and production of
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 231
auto and consumer appliances and energy products; raw sugar and
cigars (Dutch Masters and E] Producto); zinc and other metals; apparel
products (Kayser-Roth); paper (‘“‘Paper Maid”’); building products and
automative replacement parts; as well as supplying a wide variety of
financial services (group health and other insurance).
For many years readers of the New York Times have been intrigued
by the full length, two-columned ads in behalf of Israel placed by A.
N. Spanel. After disappearing for some months, Spanel suddenly re-
emerged with his latest ‘“‘public service’ contributions signed by
Spanel International, Ltd. His many previous ads had been under the
auspices of International Latex, which became a part of the large,
financially-troubled Rapid American conglomerate owned by multi-
millionaire Meshulam Riklis. According to the Wall Street Journal, Riklis
sets aside 20% of his income for donations to Jewish-Israeli groups
and in 1972 loaned Hubert Humphrey $150,000 (of which he has been
repaid only $6,000) for the Minnesota Senator’s unsuccessful bid for
the presidential nomination. Riklis’ conglomerate also runs Schenley
Industries, Lerner Shops and McCrory Variety and controls Kenton
Corporation, among other companies.
A descendant of ten generations of rabbis and ordained himself
before entering the business world, Eli M. Black was chairman of
United Brands, one of the largest food processing companies, when he
made the front-page headlines on February 4, 1975, by his 44-story
plunge to death. A director of the PEC Israel Economic Comy-any and
very active in many Israelist organizations, the fifty-year-old suicide’s
varied business and art connections had included the American Securi-
tes Corporation, the American Seal Cap Corporation, John Morrell &
Company (the fourth largest meat packer in the U.S.), United Fruit,
Foster-Grant, and American Hoechst Corporation. Other interests of
the Black empire, which reached into several Central and Latin Ameri-
can countries, included petrochemicals, the A&W International chain
of drive-in restaurants, which are second only to McDonalds in the
fast-food business; the Inter Harvest lettuce growing; and the TRT
Telecommunications operating in Latin America and the U.S. Presi-
dent of the United Farm Workers Cesar Chaves was one of many from
all walks of hfe paying tribute to the dead executive. It was on the
ubiquitous contacts of the many Eli Blacks that the State of Israel
constantly drew.
While The French Connection won an Oscar, a far more interesting
him, but one that Hollywood dares not make, would be The Jewrsh
Connection. Jewish bank directors not enly have been serving as “‘push-
232 THE COVER-UP
ers’’ for Israel Bonds but have on occasion boldly placed Israel’s inter-
ests above those of their shareholders. In 1973 the Arabian Gulf Emi-
rate of Abu Dhabi sought a substantial five-year loan from a consor-
tium of European banks, which in turn invited the First National Bank
of Chicago to take $25 million of the loan. The Chicago bank, in turn,
asked a large Midwest regional bank to participate to the extent of $5
million. The regional bank, checking and finding that Abu Dhabi’s
credit was absolutely first-class, committed itself to the loan. When
word of this reached two Jewish directors of the regional bank, they
stormed in and demanded that the bank cancel the projected loan and
buy Israel Bonds instead. The bank’s officers acceded to the request
that the loan commitment be withdrawn, at the same time refusing to
put the money into Israel Bonds. It was disclosed that the bank would
have enjoyed a $375,000 profit on the loan in the five-year period. As
a result of the action of these two Jewish directors, the bank’s stock-
holders lost that profit. However, no stockholders’ action has been
brought against the directors for betrayal of their trust in placing
private political loyalties and the interests of a foreign state above
those of its fiduciaries.
The right man in the right place in the Pentagon can perform
wonders, particularly when he has some help from the Secretary of
State. An amazing kind of politicking in U.S.-Israel relations at the
highest level was revealed in an April 17, 1974, newspaper report
by Saul Friedman of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The article centered
on a swap between U.S. Jewish leadership and the Defense Depart-
ment: support of a big budget for the Pentagon, something liberal-
affliated Organized Jewry usually opposes, in return for pledges to
Israel from the U.S. government of a military, political, and eco-
nomic nature.
A number of dinners and social functions had been given at which
Secretary Kissinger and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., outgoing Chief
of Naval Operations, were alleged to have served as prime lobbyists
among Jews on behalf of the Defense Department. Attending these
meetings and buying the ‘‘deal’’ were such prominent leaders as David
M. Blumberg, President of B’nai B’rith, and Ira Silverman, Director of
the Institute for Jewish Policy Planning & Research, an arm of the
Synagogue Council of America. The frank swapping of Jewish support
for the Pentagon budget in return for U.S. support given Israel in the
October 1973 war was referred to by Silverman, according to the
Friedman story, ‘‘as the Pentagon lobbying of the Jewish lobby.”
There was nothing subtle about the approach of the military to the
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count 233
Jewish leaders, according to Silverman: ‘‘We helped you; now you help
us.
The Synagogue Council representative was also quoted as stating:
At the practical level, the case is made in more objective terms of self-interest,
that just as the C-5 transport planes and aircraft carriers, items previously
opposed by the would-be military budget slashes, were invaluable in support
of Israel during the war, so will American military capacity in the future
determine Israel's security.
The Friedman report continued as follows:
One Jewish leader, Herman Bookbinder, Washington representative for the
American Jewish Committee, is among those who are rethinking their tradi-
tional views against defense spending. On his own initiative, Bookbinder
called together colleagues in other Jewish groups “to take another look at the
military budget.”
Bookbinder was further quoted by Friedman as parroting the
Defense Department’s “propaganda” about its needs, caused by the
fact that “more than a third of our [the USA] total inventory was
chewed up in just a few weeks”’ (for Israel in the October war). Fried-
man had this striking observation to make about the previous similar
experience of Jews: “The Jewish community was in a similar fix when
the Johnson and Nixon administrations put pressure on Jewish leaders
to moderate their opposition to the Vietnam War in exchange for
support of Israel.’’27
The Friedman report as published merely touched on a tiny tip of
the iceberg of an abysmal corrupting process that has been pervading
the nation’s capital wherever Israel has been concerned. The use of aid
to Israel as bait in an international power play debased the corrupter
and the corrupted alike. The promises to Israel were not only danger-
ously injurious to a sound national defense and the national economy,
but illustrated the extent to which Israel had in fact become the fifty-
first state, not as William Buckley once humorously referred but in
dead seriousness.
Nor has the Pentagon been impervious to penetration, as the
strange history of Joseph Churba illustrates. A childhood friend of
Jewish Defense League’s Rabbi Meir Kahane, their professional associ-
ation began in 1965 when they set up Consultant Research Associ-
ates.?8 One of their first ventures was the Fourth of July Movement, an
attempt to mobilize campus support for the war in Vietnam, for which
they also co-authored the book The Jewish Stake in Vietnam. Churba was
234 THE COVER-UP
then an instructor at Adelphi College, studying for his doctorate at
Columbia.
As far back as 1967, it was reported that he was part of the intelli-
gence bureaucracy, a rumor Churba always denied. However, in 1971,
he was employed as a professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Air
Force University, Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
It was on a visit here that Major General George J. Keegan, Chief of
Air Force Intelligence, met Churba, and the super-hawkish views of the
general meshed perfectly with the vehement pro-Israel, anti-Soviet
sentiments of the professor to build instantaneous bonds of friend-
ship.
December 1972 found Churba in the most sensitive post of Spe-
cial Advisor (on the Middle East) in Keegan’s headquarters in Wash-
ington, where he speedily and avidly attempted to win proselytes for
the Zionist cause. While there are scores of pro-Israel moles in the
Pentagon, it has been the Air Force that has benefited most from the
Israeli connection and the many area armed conflicts. Air warfare is in
such a continual state of flux and its weapons so ephemeral that every
bit of intelligence helps. Like the Israelis, the U.S. Air Force has always
nursed a “‘first strike’’ mentality.
In a widely publicized New York Times interview of October 20,
1976, Churba accused the Pentagon of being unfair to Israel. He
assailed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George Brown’s view that
Israel was a “burden” as “dangerously irresponsible,” claiming that
this indicated a growing “‘tilt against Israel in the Defense Depart-
ment.” At this time, the Intelligence officer admitted to being an or-
dained rabbi, but vigorously denied this ‘“‘biased his view in support
of Israel.”’29
Churba resigned from his position after General Keegan was
forced to strip him of his special security clearance for having spoken
out publicly on security matters despite due warning. Shortly there-
after, the Times published a lengthy Churba letter arguing that Israel
was of great strategic importance to the United States. On March 24,
1977, together with avid Israelist Joseph Sisco,3° former Under Secre-
tary of State and then president of the American University in Wash-
ington, he appeared on the televised ‘““MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” on
which he criticized President Carter for presenting specific proposals
as to the nature of a Middle East settlement favoring the Arabs. He
declared that the Palestinians should not be included in the negotia-
tions: “They are not relevant to the table.”
The Times on August 25, 1977, carried a Churba letter, “West
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don't Count 235
Bank Settlements: Legality is not the Issue.’’ That same month his
former supervisor, General Keegan, shortly after he had retired from
his post, was a guest of the Israeli government and was quoted in a
lengthy Jerusalem Post front-page article praising the Zionist state as an
outpost of Western democracy and an asset to US strategic military
goals. Keegan called for more military aid for Israel, in particular
F-15s, in order to make certain that there are no “deficiencies that are
going to compromise the long-term position of Israel.’’3!
In the Fall, the General and the professor teamed up in a crusade
to reignite the cold war using Israel as ‘the single key to balancing
Soviet imperialism in the Mediterranean,” as Churba declared in The
Politics of Defeat: America’s Decline in the Middle East, a small ‘‘Vanity Fair”
published book? which was widely reviewed due to the efforts of the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington whose assis-
tance was gratefully acknowledged by the author. Churba’s book, de-
scribed by reviewer Mark Bruzonsky as ‘‘a historical interpretation,
colored by devotion to Israel and near-paranoid anti-Soviet im-
pulses,’’33 opposes de factor alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
assails the notion of ‘Palestinian rights” as a fallacy, and calls for
recognition of the thesis “that the pillars of stability in the region are
Turkey, Iran and a secure Israel . . . bolstered by the fostering of a
strongly independent Christian Lebanon.”
The Jewish connection on the political level has been of even far
greater consequence. Starting at least with the Franklin D. Roosevelt
administration, important decision-making echelons of the U.S. gov-
ernment have been filled with many Jews. The New Dealers contained
the broadest kind of list, ranging from Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Herbert
Lehman, David Niles, and Samuel Rosenberg to Morris Ernst and
Robert Nathan. Bernard Baruch played a unique role as adviser to five
Presidents. David E. Lilienthal34 and Lewis H. Strauss35 were Chair-
men of the Atomic Energy Commission. Under the brief rule of John
F. Kennedy, Arthur Goldberg served as Secretary of Labor and Sena-
tor Abraham Ribicoff as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
The presence of Abe Fortas on the Supreme Court, until his resigna-
uion, was in the tradition of Jusuces Frankfurter, Cardozo, and Bran-
deis, who had previously served on the highest court in the land.
President Nixon used Henry Kissinger, Herbert Stein, Leonard
Garment, Murray Chotiner, and other Jews in key positions. President
Ford retained Garment’s services and added to key White House posts
Milton Freedman, L. William Seidman#® and Alan Greenspan, among
many. When Ford gave his State of the World speech on April 10,
236 THE COVER-UP
1975, to a joint session of Congress, the TV eye that settled on the
Cabinet was revealing. There was Secretary of State Kissinger, Secre-
tary of Defense Schlesinger (born a Jew and now an Episcopalian),
Attorney General Edward Levi, and HEW Secretary Casper Wein-
berger (Jewish grandfather). And to this extraordinary lineup of Jewish
affluence could then be added for all practical purposes the President
himself and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whose deep commitment
to Zionism could be matched by no one, Jew or Gentile.
In critical 1977 as the new Carter administration turned major
attention to the Middle East, the Zionist lobby in Washington was
employing its wiles on the new 95th Congress, with its increased very
friendly Democratic majority, and on the new occupant at the White
House and on the Carter Cabinet, whose composition augured well
indeed. W. Michael Blumenthal, the Secretary of the Treasury, was a
Presbyterian whose parents were Jewish; Harold Brown, the Secretary
of Defense, claimed no religious afhliation but likewise had a Jewish
background. The same held for James Schlesinger, the former Secre-
tary of Defense under Nixon and Ford and the first Secretary of En-
ergy, who was a convert to Christianity. All three, because of their
backgrounds, were even more vulnerable to Zionist pressures than if
they had remained in their ancestral faith. Subject to blackmail from
without and guilt from within, the easiest way to defend their flight
from Judaism and show that they still ‘‘belong” in the family was to
give fullest support to Israel’s position. Two of the seven top aides of
President Carter were his counsel Robert J. Lipshutz, once head of the
B'nai B'rith in Atlanta, and Stuart E. Eizenstat, Assistant to the Presi-
dent for Domestic Affairs. Dr. Mark Siegel, top aide to Hamilton Jor-
dan, President Carter’s chief political adviser, served as liaison with
Jewish groups (the position held in previous administrations by David
Niles, Maxwell Rabb, Myer Feldman and Leonard Garment) until his
resignation over Middle East policy on March 9, 1978.
At sub-Cabinet levels were other key Zionists, such as Deputy
Secretary of the Treasury Kenneth Axelson, Undersecretary of the
Treasury Anthony M. Solomon, Assistant Secretary of State for Eco-
nomic and Business Affairs Julius M. Katz, and C. Arthur Borg, Execu-
tive Secretary of the State Department. The $1,000- to $5,000-a-plate
Waldorf dinner, which replenished the Democratic party coffers to the
tune of more than $1 million and was attended by President Carter,
was cochaired by Krim, Steve Ross, and Mary Lasker.
While some of them had only minimal links with Zionist-Israelist
organizations or their lobby, none wished to “rock any boats’; they
The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don't Count 237
were only too willing to quietly advance the interests of Israel, and
conversely were appalled or frightened by anything pro-Arab or anti-
Zionist that might pass over their desks.
Former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Rob-
ert S. Strauss was appointed the President’s special U.S. trade rep-
resentative, and Arthur J. Goldberg, who had served under three
Presidents, was designated Ambassador-at-large and Chairman of
the American delegation to the October 1977 East-West Belgrade
Conference on Human Rights. Goldberg, an avowed Zionist, be-
came Board Chairman of the United Nations Association. Formerly
known as the American Association for the United Nations, this
group had played a key role in swinging U.S. public opinion be-
hind the 1947 partition plan and since that time had followed the
same staunch, unwavering pro-Israeli line. In 1975 association Pres-
ident James Leonard was one of the four panelists on the televised
MacNeil-Lehrer Report who excoriated the U.N. for its resolution
equating Zionism with racism.37
In 1968 the association had been given a $400,000 grant by the
Ford Foundation to make an assessment, among other things, of the
crisis in the Middle East. This grant was reminiscent of an analogous
1959 situation when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee let out
a $25,000 contract for an impartial study of U.S. Middle East policy to
the Institute for Mediterranean Affairs. By the time the Zionist compo-
sition of the Institute (mostly American and Israeli followers of Mena-
chem Begin) was brought to the attention of Senator Fulbright and
other members of the committee, it was too late to upset the contract.
The committee subsequently discarded the obviously biased $25,000
report and reassigned the study to its own staff.
Other powerful groups and rich foundations have also been pene-
trated by the connectors. The Carnegie Foundation’s Commission on
the Middle East was allegedly a bipartisan group with both staunch
pro-Israelis and pro-Arabs on it, according to Dr. Joseph E. Johnson,
the former head of the foundation and “convenor” of the commission.
On one side were such unquestionably devout Zionists as Senators
Javits and Kennedy, and Brookings Institute President Kermit Gor-
don. The purported “‘balance”’ consisted of Chase Manhattan’s David
Rockefeller and former Time publisher James Linen, both of whom had
some business interests in the Arab world but many more with Israel
and American Israelists, and never dared lift a finger against Zionism.
The commission’s Executive Director was Larry L. Fabian, another
Zionist.
238 THE COVER-UP
Nowhere, however, has it been more apparent that the connec-
tion, not numbers, is what counts, than in the conduct of U.S. elected
representatives in Congress, who have so thoroughly exemplified the
maxim: Plus ca change, plus c’est la méme chose (the more things
change, the more they remain the same).
VII Whose Congress: Thwarting the
National Interest
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
—Mark Twain
The reason for the remarkable political success achieved by the Jewish
connection and the Zionist connectors lies deep in the American politi-
cal system. Our system of representative government has been pro-
foundly affected by the growing influence and affluence of minority
pressure groups, whose strength invariably increases as presidential
elections approach, making it virtually impossible to formulate foreign
policy in the American national interest. And the Electoral College
system has greatly fortified the position of the national lobbies estab-
lished by ethnic, religious, and other minority pressure groups, the
Jewish-Zionist Israel lobby in particular.
An added tower of strength to the Jewish connection has been the
Jewish location: 76 percent of American Jewry is concentrated in six-
teen cities of six states—New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois,
Ohio, and Florida—with 181 electoral votes. It takes only 270 electoral
votes to elect the next President of the U.S. Our Chief Executive is
chosen by a plurality of the Electoral College votes, not of the popular
vote. Under this system the votes of a state go as a unit to the candidate
winning a plurality of voters, which endows a well-organized lobby
with a powerful bargaining position. For example, in the presidential
election of 1884 in the State of New York, Democratic candidate
Grover Cleveland received 563,015 popular votes while his Republi-
can rival, James G. Blaine, received 562,011 votes. With a bare 1,004
plurality, Cleveland received all of New York’s electoral votes, result-
ing in his election. A change of 503 votes would have shifted the
election to Blaine. This explains why the politicians have been mes-
239
240 THE COVER-UP
merized by fear of the ‘‘Jewish vote” and by those who claim they can
deliver the ‘‘swing vote” in a hotly contested state.
The will of the majority has often been frustrated. Three Presi-
dents—John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and
Benjamin Harrison in 1888—were elected with fewer popular votes
than their leading opponents.! But it is the Cleveland 1884 election
that is the classic example, under the prevailing system, of how a
minority group such as the Zionists possesses a potent bargaining
strength by pandering the votes of a bloc.
The inordinate Israelist influence over the White House, the Con-
gress, and other elected officials stems principally from the ability to
pander the alleged ‘Jewish vote” as well as fill the campaign coffers
of both parties with timely contributions on a national as well as local
level, while taking full advantage of the anachronistic system by which
American Presidents are elected.
None of the many powerful political lobbies in Washington is
better entrenched than the meticulously organized brokers of the
“Jewish vote.” The individual Jew who might not go along with Zionist
ideology or Jewish nationalism is too cowardly to speak up and take
the usurpers of his voice to task, and so the peddling of his vote goes
forward. Hence the happy alliance dating back to World War I between
the supine American politicians and the Zionists, who have controlled
the Congress in its near 100 percent pro-Israel stance.
Occasionally a member of the House of Representatives has
earned a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery, as did Silvio O.
Conte of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1970 for exposing a most sordid
legislative deal involving the Middle East. Conte revealed that the
House had accepted a Senate $2.5 billion proviso covering grants for
various specified institutions in Israel in exchange for senatorial ac-
ceptance of the authority to extend easy credit to foreign countries
purchasing American arms (including Israel, of course). The Senate
had done the unprecedented in voting grants for specific institutions
of a foreign country: $500,000 for the Weizmann Institute; $1,250,000
for Igud Leiluf Hanoar; $500,000 for Hahaiyim Girls College; and
$250,000 for the Vocational School of the Underprivileged.
The House and Senate versions of the foreign aid appropriations
bill were as yet unreconciled when the Conference Committee came
up with a deal accepting the appropriation for Israeli institutions
against an allowance of money for military sales. At this juncture Conte
proposed that the conference recess for twenty-four hours so “I can
go out and get a school in Israel and get a piece of the action.”
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 241
“Are you insinuating . .. ?’” Wyoming Senator Gale McGee, Chair-
man of the subcommittee, started to ask indignantly. Conte inter-
jected: “I am not insinuating anything.” He continued, “I just don’t
understand how these projects, never requested by the State Depart-
ment, got into the bill, and [ think the whole procedure stinks.”
In late June 1973 the same kind of venal scene was repeated when
Republican Senate leader Hugh Scott tried to push through an amend-
ment that would have restored reductions to the military aid bill and
included a proviso for “supporting assistance” (a form of military aid)
to Israel. The Scott Amendment would have increased the new sup-
port of Israel from $50 million to $70 million. But three Democratic
Senators—Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and Stuart
Symington of Missouri—outbid the Republican leader by introducing
a substitute amendment that raised the grant to Israel to $85 million
and at the same time preserved the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee’s reductions in the overall military program.
Both sides unabashedly accused the other of engaging in a “‘bid-
ding contest.’’ Senator Scott, who owed his presence in the Upper
House in no small way to his ceaseless exploitation of the ‘“‘Jewish
vote,” complained bitterly when he was being outmaneuvered, his
favorite weapon being used against him. The Church substitute, the
Pennsylvania Senator charged, “‘tries to increase the amount for Israel,
hoping all Senators who are motivated by the Jewish vote will immedi-
ately rush in and support the substitute. . . . This is simply an attempt
to say to the Senators, as they walk through the door just before the
vote, ‘We raised the amount of money for Israel. You want to vote for
that, don’t you?’ ”’
Senator Bayh countered: “It appears almost as if this very impor-
tant authorization to help sustain democracy in Israel is being used as
a blackmail effort to get several times that amount to spend we know
not where and we know not for what.”
The attempt to table the Church substitute failed 37 to 35. The
substitute then was adopted by a margin of 54 to 21. On the final ballot
fourteen members of this ‘‘fearless’’ body, who had voted with Scott
and the administration on the tabling resolution, deserted because
they adamantly refused to appear on the record as against the larger
$35 million increase for Israel.
Obviously, one group of politicians who are most likely to be
under the control of the Zionist lobby are those who represent popula-
tions with a large percentage of Jews. And no place fits this description
more than New York City and New York State. Of the approximately
242 THE COVER-UP
6.3 million Jews in the U.S., 2 million live in Greater New York City
and some 2.2 million in New York State. As one New York City con-
gressman expressed it to a reporter for The New Yorker, “support of
military aid for Israel was about the same to his district as support of
dams and reclamation projects was to a congressman from the West.?
It is hardly surprising to find that most of New York’s politicians,
whether they be Christians or Jews, have virtually been speaking as
ambassadors of Israel.
This has taken many forms. In 1968 a bloc of congressmen, princi-
pally from New York State and led by Representative Seymour Hal-
pern, initiated action in the House to prevent any resumption by the
U.S. of normal diplomatic relations with the United Arab Republic.
The “sense of Congress” resolution for which the Representative from
Queens gained the support of twenty-four congressmen would have
required the Nasser government first to enter “into meaningful
negotiations with the government of Israel” before Washington and
Cairo restored relations.
A spate of critical speeches in the House in the wake of the U.N.
censure of Israel for its March 1968 attack on Jordan led the vote-
conscious Halpern to give vent once more to his Arab-phobia and
prove that he was the number-one Zionist protagonist in the House.
On several previous occasions Congressman Halpern had labored to
attract the attention of his Queens constitutents by excoriating the
Jordanians and introducing other ‘sense of Congress’’ resolutions,
either seeking to bar the U.A.R. from membership on the Security
Council or to halt American aid to Arab nations “which discriminate
against American citizens.” (A charge of juggling income tax returns
forced a premature retirement from the Congress of this stalwart Zion-
ist.)
When Catholic Robert Kennedy decided to move and represent
New York in the Senate, he had to assume an even more pro-Israeli
stance than he had in his home state of Massachusetts. It was in that
1968 campaign that the ‘Support Israel Above All” campaign moved
into high gear, and tragedy eventually ensued. In a frantic quest for
votes, Robert Kennedy became more Jewish than any rabbi. This Irish
Catholic, appearing in synagogues wearing a yarmulke and prayer
shawl, called for an end to any aid for Arab countries and, at the same
time, for the sale of fifty Phantom jets to Israel, to replace those lost
in the 1967 war. Since Israel had bombed and napalmed Palestinian
refugee camps and seized masses of Arab territory, including all that
remained of Palestine, young Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan, who
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 243
was watching the Senator on television, fled the room in angry tears,
his hands covering his ears, and scribbled in his notebook: “RFK must
die.”
Kennedy’s assassination did not, unfortunately, deter other politi-
cians from pandering to Zionist interests in varied and sundry ways.
No one could have been the least surprised when the Nelson Rockefel-
ler drive for reelection as Governor of New York was launched in the
late spring of 1970 by means of a full-page advertisement on Middle
East policy under the signature of a new “American Committee for a
Lasting Peace.” Rocky’s idea of creating stability in the area was to
“strengthen Israel’s capacity to cope with the Soviet-Arab strategy of
attrition being waged against her.” In the ad the word “Palestinian”
did not appear once. Rockefeller was competing with the ever-alert
Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, the Democratic nominee, for the Jewish
vote. With a choice lke this, between the proverbial Tweedledum and
Tweedledee, the people of New York State had little option in that year
of Middle East crisis.
When congressmen start indulging in their favorite sport of vying
for the “Jewish vote,” one can be sure it is another election year
without even consulting the calendar. Although leading economists,
including Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns, had called
for a cut in government spending as a means of halting inflation and
the growing recession, the House Foreign Affairs Committee? in the
summer of 1974 increased economic grants in aid to Israel from $50
million to $250 million. Where the administration had recommended
$300 million in military credit sales, the committee altered this by
approving $200 million in credit and $100 million in the form of a
grant. Florida Congressman Dante Fascell (from the Miami district)
justified the increase by referring to the ‘‘massive Soviet supply to
Egypt and Syria and Israel’s mounting external debt and declining
foreign exchange reserves.”
The interjection of the Arab-Israeli conflict into the local political
scene has often been tortuously and ludicrously accomplished.‘ In his
1974 campaign to oust New York Republican Jacob Javits, who has
often appeared to be Israel’s delegate to the U.S. Senate, former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark embarrassed would-be supporters
with his gross ignorance of both the causes of the energy crisis and
other facts of the Middle East conflict. In his half-page advertisement
in the New York Sunday Times, the Democratic candidate emulated
every other politician’s chauvinistic approach as he foolishly attempted
to outbid his opponent for the Jewish vote. Every cliché ever invoked
244 THE COVER-UP
by endless rhetoricians on this subject was used, including a categori-
cal downgrading of the Palestinian problem as “more the symptom
than the cause of the area’s unrest.”
In the gubernatorial campaign of that same year, the New York Post
ran the headline ‘‘Gov. Candidates Woo Ethnic Vote” and the subhead
“Wilson: I Am All Out For Israel.’ This story included a picture of the
staid New York Governor Malcolm Wilson, a Catholic, wearing a yar-
mulke on his head as he attended a fund-raising Waldorf Astoria
dinner given by the Orthodox Shaarez Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem.
Wilson was quoted as saying: “I, like other Americans, rejoice in Is-
rael’s victories over her enemies’”—this even as Secretary Kissinger
was winding his way through the Arab Middle East in an effort to prove
that the U.S. was hewing to its announced new evenhanded course, so
necessary for maintaining the peace momentum and, even more im-
portantly, for any hope of lowering oil prices and stemming the eco-
nomic collapse of the Western world. On the day before the elections,
Wilson had a full-page New York Times ad proclaiming: ‘Protest
Against Terror and Injustice Day.”
His rival, Hugh Carey, managed to outbid Wilson in his support
of Israel, and won the election handily. The following June Israeli
Premier Yitzhak Rabin, who was in the U-S. for talks with Secretary
Kissinger, made a point of coming through New York to confer with
two of his top delegates in America, the Governor of New York State
and the Mayor of New York City. It was something of an “T'll puff up
your political image and you'll fill up my coffers’’ deal. Carey, inter-
viewed on television news as he emerged from his conference with
Rabin, shamelessly informed the assembled reporters: ‘‘. . . and I told
[Rabin] not to pay any attention to what the polls might show .. . the
people of the state have not wavered in their support of Israel and will
continue to give that support.”
Here was an elected American official telling the head of a foreign
government that it is this foreign state’s interests that will prevail, even
over the expressed will of a majority of Americans. If any other country
but Israel had been given such a blank check, Carey would have been
up for treason the next morning.
A year earlier, in 1973, during the New York Democratic mayor-
alty primary contest, the four candidates had made the customary
foreign policy interjections into the campaign. The winner, Controller
Abraham Beame, called the proposed sale of American Phantom jets
to Saudi Arabia ‘‘a dangerous action” that could ‘‘escalate the belliger-
ent Arab rhetoric to actual war.’’ The other B’s—Blumenthal, Badillo,
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 245
and Biaggi—competed with the victorious Beame in various paeans of
praise for Israel, not one of which related cause to effect. And in the
ensuing election campaign, Republican John Marchi could not refrain
from attempting to outbid his rival on this critical issue.
Needless to say, Beame never let his side down. One of his first
acts upon assuming the office of Mayor was to hold a fund-raising gala
for Israel at Gracie Mansion, the Mayor’s official residence. Only when
reproached by an Arab group, and reminded that Arab-Americans also
pay taxes in the city, did he half apologize for using the official resi-
dence to raise money for a foreign government, and promise never to
do it again.
As his successor, Edward Koch, was to do, Beame’s predecessor,
John V. Lindsay, throughout his terms of office conducted himself
more like the Mayor of Tel Aviv than of the largest city in the U.S. In
1966, when King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was invited to Washington as
the personal guest of President Johnson for important talks, the Mayor
dishonored the White House in the same manner as had his predeces-
sor, Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., on the occasion of the earlier visit
of the then ruling King Saud, by making it understood that the Saudi
Arabian monarch was not welcome in the city. Plans for a large recep-
tion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were canceled by Mayor Lind-
say after the invitations had been sent out. King Faisal had told a
luncheon press gathering in Washington that Jews in America who
followed Zionist leadership in assisting Israel were the enemy of his
country. For some weeks previously, Zionist groups had been pressur-
ing Lindsay to turn his back on the Saudi king. The Mayor took advan-
tage of the monarch’s Washington remarks to cancel the reception and
to compete with Republican attacks on the visiting Saudi leader.
A page out of this venal political book was reenacted when Presi-
dent Georges Pompidou visited the U.S. in February 1970 after his
bitter dispute with the Israelis over the planes and submarines the
French government refused to release. John Lindsay’s behavior raised
a very real question. His boycott of President Pompidou’s first visit to
the U.S. as chief executive exposed the ambitions of New York’s mayor
for office far beyond the confines of the Hudson River. Only this could
have prompted him to act as he did in the face of a guest of the
President of the U.S. on a very important visit. After the assumption
of the Presidency by Richard Nixon, U.S. relations with France had
improved, and the New York Mayor did his very best to destroy the
new ties.
In between the insults to Faisal and Pompidou, Lindsay lavishly
246 THE COVER-UP
received and entertained Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister. More
taxpayers’ money was spent on her entertainment than had ever been
expended by the city for the many fabulous receptions held under
Grover Whelan or Robert Patterson, former V.I.P. official greeters.
The blatant Lindsay performance even led columnist William F.
Buckley, Jr., normally a strong Israeli proponent, to comment in his
column “On the Right”:
Jewish leaders in New York City should surely speak out against the vulgariza-
tion of diplomacy by Mr. Lindsay. “I do not think tt is fitting that our great
City pay homage to a foreign President Georges Pompidou who displayed
such contempt for world peace,” commented the Mayor, seconded by Con-
gressman Podell of Brooklyn. Can anyone imagine his saying the same thing
if the French had just finished sending 100 million dollars worth of jet planes
to Israel? It is humiliating for a proud people to be subject to the social and
diplomatic equivalent of currying favor by eating blintzes.®
After Lindsay threw his hat into the presidential arena in 1971, the
affairs of the City of New York went from bad to worse. At city expense,
accompanied by city employees still on the city payroll, Lindsay com-
muted between City Hall, Florida, and other primary states, vying in
blatant appeals for the “Israel-First” vote with the other Democratic
senatorial aspirants for the White House—Humphrey of Minnesota,
Jackson of Washington, Muskie of Maine, McGee of North Dakota, and
Hughes of Iowa. The result was the Florida ‘‘bagels and lox” primary,
a disgraceful exhibition on how low candidates for high office will bow
in the quest for votes.
In switching over to the Democratic party, Lindsay apparently had
failed to do his homework. Otherwise he could never have been so
totally unfamiliar with these strong words of Woodrow Wilson, his new
party’s standard-bearer in 1912 and 1916: ““A man who thinks of him-
self as belonging to a particular national group has not yet become an
American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your
nationality is not worthy to live under the Stars and Stripes.”
In choosing the Florida primaries as the initial test of strength in
his bid for the presidential nomination, New York's not-too-unbright
John V. Lindsay was well aware of the large bloc of former New York-
ers who had fled to the sunshine of the South and were not immune
to a blatant pro-Israel stand. But the Mayor ran a poor fifth in the
Florida sweepstakes won by George Wallace, with Hubert Humphrey,
the only candidate who had called on Washington to recognize Jerusa-
lem as Israel’s capital and insisted it was “‘wrong not to have done so
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 247
in the beginning,” coming in second.
Meanwhile the city, which had elected him and paid him a hand-
some salary, continued to suffer from sordid scandals in connection
with the Development Program, the Police Department, the Municipal
Loan and Housing Program, etc., as well as sundry deficiencies and
incompetencies—all of which were the precursors of the city’s near-
bankruptcy in 1976.
In pursuit of the Jewish vote, Lindsay never failed to advance
Israelist propaganda, even when it added to the existing dangers ad-
herent in the Middle East conflict. His verbal intervention in behalf of
Soviet Jewry at the time of the Leningrad trials was another manifesta-
tion of the venal politician grasping for votes, helping only to encour-
age the Soviet Union’s hard stand. This incessant interference in the
lives of Jewish nationals in other countries, marked by an educational
campaign to encourage emigration to Israel as well as to instill a
primary loyalty for Israel through the mischievous equation of political
Zionism with spiritual Judaism, was exceedingly dangerous. The ensu-
ing harsh Leningrad sentences could be partly attributed to the Soviet
reaction to the interference by worldwide Jewish leaders and the su-
pine politicians holding the mayoralties of large U.S. cities.
Pursuing the same politics on the Israeli question to the bitter
end, the Mayor early in 1973, in cooperation with the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, brought an exhibit of previously unshown archaeolog-
ical treasures from Jerusalem as the piéce de résistance, the center-
piece in the New York celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Israel's independence. It seemed to matter very little to the Museum,
and less, of course, to the Mayor, that most of the major elements in
the proposed exhibition were taken during the six-day war from Jor-
danian territory and legally belonged to non-Israeli owners. This
scheme had been cooked up while Lindsay was in Jerusalem on a
goodwill trip as guest of Mayor Teddy Kollek.
There were other Lindsay counterparts with their own fancy poli-
ticking making peace in the Middle East more impossible. Despite
attempts by fair-minded citizens and inept Arab-Americans on the
West Coast to stop him, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty allocated
$25,000 for the partial underwriting of the costs of extra internal
security at the Jerusalem fair held in his city to celebrate Israel's quar-
ter of a century. The date had been moved up to suit the convenience
of the city, just as has been done so often with our own holidays. In
his memorandum to the City Council, Yorty also indicated that an
additional $25,000 would be asked from the County of Los Angeles.
248 THE COVER-UP
Despite a vigorous protest against this wanton abuse of power in the
disbursement of public funds, both legislative bodies yielded to the
pressure applied and voted for the needed monies.
Recession or no recession, energy crisis or no energy crisis, Israel
managed to retain its fifty-first-state status, as far as Congress was
concerned. In 1974, at the same moment that the President was slash-
ing appropriations for the health and education of the American peo-
ple and vetoing legislation that would have increased veterans’
benefits, a rump meeting of the Israeli hawks on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee met and upped the appropriations to Israel for
the next fiscal year some $389 million over what the administration
had requested. Chairman Senator J. William Fulbright, other key
members, and staff were never apprised of the meeting that was held
under the leadership of Senator Humphrey, whose coconspirators
included such well-known Zionist Senators as Jacob Javits, Clifford
Case, and Gale W. McGee.
Politics, it has been said, makes strange bedfellows, but the Middle
East conflict makes even stranger ones. Senators who on almost every
other issue were a million miles apart have found themselves in agree-
ment when it came to Israel. in an April 1975 CBS television interview,
South Dakota’s Senator George McGovern and Idaho’s Frank Church,
doves on Vietnam, were at swords point with New York’s Senator
James Buckley as to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. But all was milk and
honey when the Senators discussed the virtues of Israel vis-a-vis the
Arab world, and all concurred that “our only ally must never be de-
serted.”’ At the time of the oil embargo, liberal Senators once violent
Vietnam doves, and “‘progressive”’ academicians, including four Nobel
economic laureates, joined with conservative Senators and right-wing-
ers in pronouncements bristling with antagonism toward the Arabs.
The extent of the inconsistency brought out on Capito! Hill by the
Middle East conflict is illustrated in an apocryphal story told by Gen-
eral Ira C. Eaker:
The Javits fighter, closely resembling the F-4 Phantom, is a multi-purpose
airplane named for its designer, the senior Senator from New York. When it
flies over Hanoi, it is clearly provocative and likely to initiate World War III.
But when it flies over Cairo, with Israeli markings, it is obviously in defense
of freedom®
One of the stars of the pro-Israel troupe is a man who, on the face
of it, might be excused from duty on the front lines. He comes from
a state as far from Israel or the Middle East as possible, and one with
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 249
a negligible Jewish population. He has taken on many other causes and
issues as his own, so he could hardly be said to “need” Israel as a
talking point. But Israel has had no greater friend in all of the U.S. than
Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Democrat from the State of Wash-
ington.
At the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where 1,100 people
gathered in rich regalia, Jackson launched his 1976 presidential cam-
paign on January 26, 1975. Many prominent California Jewish philan-
thropists and political angels were present; some paid the minimum
$250 into the war chest for the privilege of attending, others paid much
more. A five-minute documentary on Jackson was created by producer
David Wolper to boost the uninspiring image of the Senator, to whom
Zionist supporter James Wechsler of the New York Post had referred as
“the insistent bore.”
The Washington Senator’s greatest contribution to Israel had
come in 1970 when he drafted Section 501 to the Defense Procure-
ment Act’ giving the President blanket authority to grant unlimited
military purchase credits for Israel. House Speaker John McCormack,
himself always a dedicated Zionist supporter, was forced to admit: “I
have never seen in my forty-two years as a member of this body lan-
guage of this kind used in an authorization or an appropriation
bill. . . .”. The investment of such power in the President of the
United States obviously made him the number-one target of the
Israeli lobby.
In 1970 President Nixon had used this authorization to give Israel
$500 million. When the President only asked for $582 million military
aid for fifteen countries, including Israel, under the next year’s budget,
Jackson criticized the Nixon action as ‘“‘wholly inadequate both as to
amount and terms.” Israel was slated to receive only $300 million of
this, and her many friends, led by Jackson, were up in arms. Under the
impetus of stories carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Near
East Report, picked up by the New York Times and the media in general,
a vast Campaign was opened to bypass Senator Fulbright’s Foreign
Relations Committee, which had jurisdiction over routine military
sales, and to force the President to invoke the authority under Jack-
son’s Section 501 so as to give Israel much more. This tour de force
was successful.
In 1972 part of the bidding for presidential primary votes cen-
tered on competitive legislative efforts to increase resettlement aid for
would-be emigrant Soviet Jews. While the Jackson proposal, which
called for $250 million for a two-year period, was defeated in the
250 THE COVER-UP
Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a more modest $85 million
bill of Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, the spectacle of who could
offer most in support of Zionism’s Soviet Jewry gambit was all too
reminiscent of the voting auction in which Governor Dewey, Senator
Taft, and President Truman had vied in the 1946 congressional elec-
tions to see who would offer more visas to Palestine.®
Senator Fulbright protested even the smaller amount: ‘‘Here, we
are proposing to give $85 million to Israel when I am having trouble
getting $8 million for a road in Arkansas because funds are short.”
Similarly, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, usually a
strong proponent of Zionist legislation, noted that the Israeli lobby
might be ‘overreaching itself.”
The Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1972 US. trade agreement
with the U.S.S.R. linked the granting of trade privileges for the Soviet
Union to the removal of emigration barriers imposed on Soviet Jews.
With Senators Javits and Ribicoff, Jackson pressed for the barring of
credit to the Kremlin as additional leverage to force Moscow to release
Jews. While making votes for Jackson at home, these restrictions
spelled rejection by the U.S.S.R. of the long-negotiated agreement.
Although President Ford expressed sympathy for the “plight” of So-
viet Jewry, in his ‘‘State of the World” address in April 1975 he called
for the rejection of the amendment so that progress toward increased
détente between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. might continue. Jackson
stood firm as the foremost champion of the Israel lobby and continued
to clamor in behalf of Soviet Jewish emigration.
The question naturally arises: Why should Senator Jackson go to
such trouble for Israel and the Jews? Why is he such a determined, not
to say hysterical, activist on their behalf? Or, as Saudi Arabian Ambas-
sador to the U.N. Jamil Baroody once expressed it, ‘““Who is this Henry
Jackson 6,000 miles away who is more Jewish than the Jews, and more
Zionist than the Zionists?”
At least to an ex-Senate colleague it was quite obvious what made
“Scoop” tick. One of the Republican stalwarts in the upper House,
Vermont's George D. Aiken, who retired after thirty-four years, having
served long on the Foreign Relations Committee, spoke up very
frankly in his published Senate diaries:
Senator “Scoop” Jackson got about 70 of his colleagues to join in a resolution
which would sharply restrict trade with Russia just as a better understanding
between Russia and the U.S. is developing and more tolerance towards the
Jews by the U.S.S.R. is beginning to appear. Ostensibly, my Senatorial col-
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 251
leagues condemned Russia for charging an excessive exit fee to Jews who
wished to leave the Soviet Union, but Russia permitted over 30,000 to leave
last year, a figure many times the number that used to be permitted to leave
annually. . . .
Frankly, I believe that the leaders of this move to incite more trouble and
probable war in the Middle East, which would involve both Russia and the
U.S., are prompted by two principal motives. First, as leaders of what some
folks might call the ‘‘War Party”’ in the U.S., they were defeated in their efforts
to keep the conflict in Indochina continuing at high speed until a military
victory was won. Their position on Indochina, of course, would have meant
a lot more business for the manufacturers of war materials in the U.S. The
second reason lies in the fact that if Russia could be taunted or persuaded to
give more aid to the Arabs and more trouble to Israel, then these stalwart
champions, several of whom have high political ambitions, could rush to the
aid of Israel, competing with each other to see who could offer the most,
militarily and otherwise, in support of that small independent country.
Why are they so devoted to Israel? In my opinion, it is because the Jewish
people in America are among this country’s most spectacular campaign fund-
raisers and staunchest political workers, and certainly could be expected to be
most generous in their contributions of support to those who promised the
most American assistance to their brethren in the Middle East. I think my most
ambitious colleagues are making a mistake. Mrs. Meir and other top officials
know the differences between real friends and allies and those who are making
loud noises and promises for the purpose of getting support for the next
election campaign.9
And “Scoop” was running for the Presidency of the United States.
His many services for Israel won him the unflagging support of Zion-
ists and Israelists alike. The contribution lists in both his presidential
efforts were studded with names of Jewish contributors from New
York, Miami, and California. It was estimated that as much as 80
percent of the money he raised in 1975 for his 1976 bid came from
Jews.!°
Among Jackson’s principal Jewish contributors were oil man Leon
Hess of Amerada Hess, who allegedly channeled some $225,000 to
Jackson, directly or indirectly. Among the other important contribu-
tors, who gave nearly $1.5 million, were Leon Davis of the Colonial
Penn Group of New York and his wife; Max Karl of NGIG Investment
Corporation of Milwaukee; investment banker William R. Solomon;
and Charles Wolstetter, chairman of Continental Telephone Corpora-
ton of Virginia. People helping in the Jackson campaign at the top-
most level included Stanley Golub, a wealthy jeweler and a stalwart
supporter of Israel, but more on the liberal side than the Senator, and
252 THE COVER-UP
Jerry Hoeck, a wealthy retired Seattle advertising executive who had
met Jackson during the 1972 campaign.
Under new federal legislation, the U.S. government matches, up
to $5 million, funds raised by presidential nominees if they can raise
$5,000 in gifts of under $250 in twenty different states. It was very
simple for UJA legmen to get Jackson the needed twenty contributors
in any state in fifteen minutes.
While he had a falling out with George Meany, determined oppo-
nent of détente, over the Soviet trade bill, Jackson worked very closely
both with labor leaders who were on most intimate terms with the
Zionist Establishment and, more importantly, with the Israel lobby,
which has become intrinsic to the warp and woof of the U.S. political
system for the past thirty years.
This lobby has fully infiltrated and integrated itself within our
national elective process. Show me a man who is running for President,
and I will show you invariably a politician who will not dare offend this
potent lobby. Show me a legislator in either branch of the Congress,
and I will show you an officeholder who invariably bows to this power-
ful pressure group.
The ability of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), the Zionist lobby established in Washington under the dedi-
cated, able leadership of I. L. (Si) Kenen, to hard-sell Representatives
and Senators of both parties, is a matter of record. The entire Ameri-
can Jewish community is represented in AIPAC through the presence
of the potent umbrella grouping, the Conference of Presidents of
Major Jewish Organizations.!! Kenen’s weekly Near East Report, witha
claimed circulation in excess of 30,000 subscribers, goes to every con-
gressman (as well as every Arab embassy) on a paid or free basis, and
maintains links with every important member on the Hill. When an
issue important to Israel comes before Congress, Kenen alerts at least
1,000 Jewish leaders scattered across the country, who in turn activate
their own web of friends, letter writers, and important campaign con-
tributors. Such a system cannot be denied.
The Jewish connection is invaluable to the work of the lobby.
Where Kenen wished to obtain a conservative Southern WASP as
cosponsor of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment so as to facilitate passage,
the American Jewish Committee’s Washington representative, Hyman
Bookbinder, phoned this organization’s chapter chairman, who was a
law partner of Georgia’s Senator Herman Talmadge, and the deal was
swiftly consummated.
Whereas other pressure groups on other subjects may have to
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 253
comb congressional offices arguing the merits of certain proposals in
order to gain the necessary affirmative votes, the Israel lobby channels
information to its many allies in Congress, rounds up scores of assured
votes when they are needed, and has the pleasant task of urging well-
intentioned, overly eager members not to wander off with their own
competing legislation in support of Israel.
In 1969, on the occasion of Israel’s twenty-first birthday, a group
of 59 Senators!2 and 238 Representatives lent their names to an adver-
tisement that appeared in the Sunday New York Times (May 11, 1969),
reproduced ‘‘as a public service by the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee.” This congressional Israel birthday declaration, one of
the most vociferously pro-Israel and anti-Arab pronouncements then
to have been publicly promulgated, attacked U.N. resolutions censur-
ing Israel, called for face-to-face negotiations, and contained no refer-
ence whatsoever to the humanitarian needs, let alone the political
rights, of the Palestinian Arabs. This categorical and cynical outpour-
ing included no single word that even implied that the Middle East
struggle was a two-sided dispute and that the Arabs, as well as the
Israelis, had a case.
As shocking as it was to the most hardened cynic to see 297
legislators lend their names in support of a document drafted in the
interests of a foreign country and reproduced as an advertisement for
public consumption, some explanation can be found in the increased
activities and growing power of this lobby on the one hand, and the
abject fear of the legislators on the other. The Zionists were now
extending their influence beyond the larger electoral college states
into the heartland of the country.
But sometimes there is more to a political outpouring like this
than meets the eye. The truth was exposed when Paul W. Lapp of the
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary called the attention of his congress-
man, Robert J. Corbett, to a basic contradiction between the opinions
expressed in a letter written him by Corbett on May | and his signature
on the birthday declaration. Lapp pulled no punches in his docu-
mented letter. Congressman Corbett’s reply stated that he had been
invited, through a phone call to one of his staff, “to join in a birthday
greeting to the State of Israel,’ to which he readily agreed. But as the
congressman went on to say, he had not agreed “‘to be part of any
policy statement nor of any newspaper ad” and still stood by his earlier
statement to his constituent ‘‘that our best interests are not served by
taking a strong stance in favor of either side in the Middle East dis-
pute.”
254 THE COVER-UP
During the height of the 1973 war a thirty-six-hour “‘phone blitz,”
to quote Kenen himself, by AIPAC on October 18 resulted in the
immediate introduction of legislation in both Houses to transfer
“Phantom aircraft and other equipment in the quantities needed by
Israel to repel aggressors” in the amount of $2.2 billion. This resolu-
tion was cosponsored by 67 Senators, including Humphrey, Jackson,
Ribicoff, and Javits, while in the House there were 237 cosponsors. A
massive campaign led to passage of this military aid bill, as well as
defeat of an attempt to strip $500 million from the legislation. Firing
off ninety-five telegrams to members of the House Appropriations and
Foreign Affairs Committees, Kenen saw to it that the proposed cut was
immediately restored. All told, the Israeli aid package, including $400
million that had been voted earlier, came to a thumping $2.6 billion.
Of particular help to the Israelist lobbying were conservatives
who, Kenen liked to point out, regard Israel as a source of strength
against Communist-backed regimes and ‘‘a bulwark against the totali-
tarian threat.” Liberals, of course, pointed to the “democratic way of
life in Israel.”” Thus this alert lobby played both sides of the political
street, and successfully.
Even the influential Chairman of the House International Rela-
tions Committee (the new name fii the House Foreign Relations Com-
mittee) found himself forced to bow to Zionist power. The views of
Wisconsin’s Democratic Representative Clement J. Zablocki, favoring
across-the-board reductions in military exports to the Middle East,
including Israel, repeatedly clashed on the House floor with members
of the “Israel First” bloc. Direct confrontations between him and New
York’s Democratic Congressman Benjamin S. Rosenthal came to a
head when Zablocki countered a Rosenthal resolution calling for the
veto of a proposed $1.5 billion military sales package to Saudi Arabia
by introducing a resolution to veto a proposed sale of F-15 planes to
Israel, reportedly amounting to $600 million for twenty-five aircraft
and support (both sales were ultimately cleared by the House). Believ-
ing in ‘‘calling a spade a spade,”!3 the Wisconsin Democrat had also
invariably protested labeling military grants to Israel as “‘credit sales.”
Repayment of half of the $2.7 billion program for fiscal years 1976 and
1977 as military credit sales to Israel was to be forgiven. Zablocki also
voted on June 28, 1976, against the foreign aid bill of which Israel was
to be chief beneficiary.
Rosenthal, with the aid of other ‘‘Israel-Firsters’”’ and the AIPAC
boys, moved to block Zablocki from assuming chairmanship of the
Committee for International Relations in the 95th Congress. After a
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 255
bitter behind-the-scenes conference, an amicable arrangement was
worked out. Zablocki has not since opposed any of Israel’s ambitions
on Capitol Hill. In March 1977 he even addressed a meeting of the
Zionist Organization of America, explaining that his disdain for “ex-
cessive military amounts of foreign aid did not undermine his commit-
ment to the freedom, independence, and security of Israel.’’ He ex-
pressed the hope that “‘. . . the United States would enter into a formal
security commitment with Israel... .’"!4
During the important debate on the anti-Arab boycott legislation,
of which his “friend” Rosenthal was an important sponsor, the now
safely confirmed Chairman did not say a word that would have dis-
pleased his former adversaries. And when, in the course of the debate
on this measure, Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana
took the floor, and after first pointing to his ofttime support of Israel,
reminded the legislators that as members of the U.S. Congress, not of
the Israeli Knesset, ‘‘the interests of the U.S. should be our primary
concern,”’ Zablocki did not blanch.
What Zablocki had once been preaching and what Hamilton had
said in the House might have been particularly addressed to Hubert
Humphrey with real meaning. As a member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, the former Vice President voted against the sale
of 650 Maverick missiles to Saudi Arabia because, as he wrote a con-
stituent: ‘I do not believe that the U.S. should provide this technologi-
cally sophisticated offensive weapon to countries which could be in a
potential state of bellgerency uith an American ally in the Middle East.’”'5
(Italics added.) Never once had the Senator opposed sending to Israel
any of the billion dollars of offensive weapons voted by the Congress
over many years.
Another of the lobby’s fervent supporters in Washington, Con-
gressman Robert Drinan, the first Roman Catholic priest elected to
Congress, unwittingly revealed his Israeli ties to Nick Thimmesch of
the Los Angeles Times, who asked him the following question in Decem-
ber 1973: “If such [anti-personnel] weapons are intrinsically evil,
aren’t they evil everywhere, including the Middle East?”’ Thimmesch
described the Congressman’s response: ““The most confused com-
ment came from Congressman Drinan . .. who said such weapons were
‘horrible in Vietnam,’ but his moral decision was to vote them for
Israel as ‘the lesser of two evils.’ Very Jesuitical.”!6
Long defying the lobby, Senator Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Fulbright brought down upon his head the wrath of the
Israeli lobby when he stated on October 7, 1973, on the CBS show
256 THE COVER-UP
“Face the Nation” on national television: ‘“The Israelis control the
policy in the Congress and the Senate. . . . Somewhere around 80
percent of the Senate of the United States is completely in support of
Israel—of anything Israel wants... .”
The Senator had made the remark in answer to the question as to
what would be the best way to settle the Arab-Israeli war, which had
broken out two days before, and whether it would not be in everyone’s
interest for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to refrain from furnishing
either side with aid. Fulbright had responded: ‘Yes, but the U.S.
government alone is not capable of doing that, because the Israelis
control the policies of the Congress and the Senate, and unless we use
the U.N. and do it collectively, we know that the U.S. is not going to
do that. The emotional and political ties are too strong. I have wit-
nessed that, and I can speak from my own experience.” When pressed
on this matter by his interviewers, he said that on every test on any-
thing in which the Israelis were interested in the Senate, ‘‘the Israelis
have seventy-eight to eighty votes.”
The furious outcries following the Fulbright remark only pointed
up the truth of his statement, and the phenomenon was all but admit-
ted when Kenen boasted in the Congressional Quarterly that he had
almost instantaneously mustered sixty-seven senatorial signatories to
the resolution calling for the shipment of Phantoms to Israel. In serv-
ing as a substitute for Kenen in testifying on December 13, 1973, at
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the emergency
$2.2 billion aid bill for Israel, Rabbi Philip Bernstein of Rochester
conceded that the personal presence of Kenen was no longer needed,
as the Senate was “‘all wrapped up.” Kenen, who was in California
lecturing, explained his absence from this important hearing: “I rarely
go to the Hill. There is so much support for Israel that I don’t have
to.”"17
While acknowledging their consistent strength in the Congress,
Kenen and other AIPAC representatives insisted this was only because
senators and representatives realized that a strong Israel was in the
American interest. Accusing Fulbright of being ‘‘consistently unkind
to Israel and our supporters in this country,” Near East Report assailed
the Senator for questioning the motives of his colleagues. The Zionists
were determined to “get’’ Senator Fulbright, and they poured money
into Arkansas for his rival, Governor Dale Bumpers, in the May 1974
Democratic primary.
Philip Kaplan, a Little Rock attorney, blasted Fulbright on behalf
of Arkansas Jews: “‘We were shocked at his saying the Jews control
en sa
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 257
Congress,” and he added, ‘Fulbright is a Neanderthal.”
Philip Back, Arkansas chairman of Bonds for Israel, said that Ful-
bright’s statement that Congress was controlled by Israel was “‘uni-
formly disliked by Arkansas Jews.”
The Chicago Tribune reported on May 12, 1974: ‘‘Fulbright’s posi-
tions on the Middle East have not endeared him to American Zionists,
who have declined to contribute ‘a single dime’ to his campaign.”’ The
Tribune added that a Bumpers lieutenant boasted:
I could have bought central Arkansas with the offers of money from the Jewish
community. ... The Jews obviously are very unhappy with Fulbright, starting
with Golda Meir. The offers of assistance came from people in New York and
California, who have raised a lot of money in the Jewish community for politi-
cal purposes.
Senator Fulbright was defeated in the primaries and returned to pri-
vate life.
This has been one of the prime methods used by the American
supporters of “little Israel,”’ itself but a tiny splinter state, in exercising
its inordinate control over the legislative body and the Presidency of
one of the world’s two superpowers. The loss of the experience, wis-
dom, courage, and perspicacity of Senator Fulbright was nothing short
of another disaster to U.S. foreign policy interests, but a very great
victory for Israel and her supporters.
While Kenen vehemently denied in 1975 that he and the Washing-
ton Anti-Defamation League representative received daily briefings
from the Israeli Embassy, the close relationship between this Washing-
ton lobby and Tel Aviv has long been a matter of record. Kenen will
admit, when asked, that Jewish money plays a real part in this process
of winning friends in Congress. In the 1972 and 1976 presidential
elections Jews donated more than half the contributions of over $10,-
000 to Democratic candidates. AIPAC, supported by nondeductible
contributions, operated in 1974 on a $400,000 annual budget!® while
representing major Jewish organizations on Capitol Hill. The UJA and
other fund-raising organizations are not ostensibly a part of the AIPAC
umbrella because it might endanger their own tax-deductible status.
When an issue would come up in Congress, according to Kenen,
“We would send out a notice to the leadership of the American Jew-
ish community letting them know what developments are occurring
and they, in turn, would do what they could.”” The committee has a
staff of seventeen full-time employees and maintains extensive files
on matters concerning Israel, especially materials to rebut what
258 THE COVER-UP
Kenen called “the Arab propaganda apparatus.”
On the occasion of his twentieth year of service in Washington,
Kenen was honored in April 1972 with a testimonial dinner at which
Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban paid tribute to the “partnership”
AIPAC had welded between the US. and Israel.
When Morris Amitay succeeded veteran Kenen in 1975 as head of
this most successful of Washington lobbies, the young, dynamic leader
boasted confidently that his pressure group would continue to be as
effective as it had been in the past: “We have been systematically
visiting the freshman class of ninety-one congressmen and ten new
men in the Senate. Our relations are very friendly, stronger with the
freshman class than with the House as a whole.’’!9
The new director soon showed how completely in control he was
of the situation on the Hill. At a time when President Ford genuinely
seemed to be departing from his congressional practice of leading the
“Israel-First” bloc, the rest of his former colleagues still carried on in
their accustomed fashion. Under the direction of this small, highly
effective Israel lobby, steps were taken to thwart the efforts of the
White House to move toward evenhandedness. This was all revealed
in an amazing article, astonishingly spread over page 2 of the New York
Times, ?° frankly analyzing the activities of this most powerful of pres-
sure groups (all of the Times’ top brass must surely have been on
summer vacation at the time or this story never could have appeared
in print!).
President Ford had agreed, as a demonstration of the new U.S.
impartiality, to sell Jordan improved Hawk missiles with the NAS sys-
tems worth $256 million. But the lobby went immediately to work. A
secret confidential communication about the proposed sale, based on
a classified?! Defense Department document and sent by the White
House to members of the Senate Foreign Relations and the House
Foreign Affairs Committees, was leaked by Zionist aides of Senator
Clifford P. Case (Dem.-N.J.) and of Representative Jonathan B. Bing-
ham (Dem.-N.Y.) to Amitay. Immediately the lobby mobilized their
organizations in 197 major cities and 200 smaller cities across the
country, warning of the dangers to Israel in a two-page memorandum
and letter, which described the scope and nature of the proposed
Hawk sale to Jordan and concluded that it was capable of “providing
cover for offensive operations against Israel.” (Metromedia’s famed
and controversial commentator, Dr. Martin Abend, parroted the thrust
of this memorandum on Channel 5 in New York, as did other Israelist
pundits around the country.)
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 259
The communities were called upon to act at once and to apply
their forceful, capable pressures. The memorandum was also mailed
to all members of Congress. This Zionist committee claimed a nation-
wide membership of 12,000, not including, of course, the membership
of its many cooperating national organizations.
Within twenty-four hours of the distribution of the memorandum,
the congressmen were besieged with phone calls, telegrams, and mail-
grams from constituents urging them to oppose this Hawk sale to
Jordan. Congressman Edward J. Derwinski (Dem.-III.) revealed he had
received several pressuring calls and that he had argued, ““The military
security of Jordan could be an asset, not a liability.”” The congressman
added, “‘I was absolutely firm so they backed off,” and he complained
vigorously of an “‘overpresence”’ of the Israel lobby and of its ‘‘steady
pressures. It’s as if they were saying, ‘If you don’t agree with us now,
whatever you did before for us does not count,’”’ he noted.
To this alleged claim by the Illinois congressman of overkill, chief-
tain Amitay of the Israel lobby quickly replied: ‘‘Better to overkill than
to underkill if you’re trying to achieve something. If we have to make
a case solely on the basis of the interests of Israel, we’ve had it. Basi-
cally, I think we are effective because we have a good cause . . . we are
effective as a lobby because we’ve got a lot of people we can call on
immediately.” And this lobbyist brazenly concluded: ‘‘We’ve never
lost on a major issue.” (This was to hold true until May 15, 1978, when
President Carter’s package jet deal for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel
was not upset in the Senate despite the efforts of the Israel lobby.)
And so they did not lose on the Jordan issue of the Hawk missiles.
Congress offered the Amman government a little less than half of the
missile system sought, and imposed restrictions on their use. Despite
the threat that Hussein might turn elsewhere (even to the Soviet
Union), the legislators stuck by their guns, and the matter was put
off.22 One unidentified Democratic Senator was quoted in the Times’
explosive article as saying that he would only talk off the cuff about the
Israel lobby and the quotation could not be attributed to him “because
they can deliver votes and they control a lot of campaign contributions.
That’s why I cannot go on the record, or I’d be dead.
“It’s the strongest lobby,” the Senator added, then he went on to
say: ‘‘It doesn’t dilute its strength by lobbying on other issues—a lot
of members resent it, but they don’t feel they can do anything about
it. That lobby wants to do Congress’s thinking on Israel—they don’t
want any independent judgments.’’?3
“Last spring the Israel lobby rounded up the seventy-six Senators
260 THE COVER-UP
to sign the petition backing Israel,” another member of Congress
recalled. He further said: ‘‘A lot of guys stated they were afraid not to
sign it, even though they didn’t want to. Some of them told me it was
the last time they would sign such a petition. But if another comes, I'll
bet they’ll be just as scared of the lobby and sign up again—but don’t
quote me by name.” Iowa Senator John Culver, according to syn-
dicated columnist Tom Tiede, had first decided not to sign the petition
of support for Israel, but in the end changed his mind because, as he
told friends, “they put too much pressure on me.”24
Three American organization heads,?° two of them Jewish, asked
the Justice Department to probe the circumstances under which the
contents of a classified document sent by the White House to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs
Committee was transmitted to an agent of the State of Israel. A tele-
gram addressed to Attorney General Edward Levi, calling for an imme-
diate, thorough, and impartial investigation of the New York Times
disclosure that Senator Case, Representative Bingham, and their re-
spective aides had passed the information to a registered Israeli agent
was never even acknowledged, let alone any action taken on it.
Amitay’s connections with staff members of key congressional
committees and with aides to the legislators are close and intimate.
Michael Kraft in Senator Case’s office has consistently backed Israel’s
cause and is in almost daily contact with Amitay. Foreign Relations
Committee staffer Stephen Bryen?¢ is in close touch with the AIPAC,
as is Senator Charles Percy aide, Scott Cohen. Zionist Richard Perle
from Senator Jackson’s staff, probably the closest ally of the lobby,
launched the spring 1975 letter signed by seventy-six Senators warn-
ing the President against a foreign policy reassessment to the disad-
vantage of Israel. The Senator Bayh/Javits “Dear Colleague” letter
said, ‘“‘Recent events in Indochina underscore America’s need for de-
pendable and stable allies as well as greater participation by the Con-
gress in formulating our foreign policy.”
When Amitay served as Administrative Assistant to Senator Ribi-
coff, he and Perle coalesced key Senate staff people to work on behalf
of Israel and Soviet Jewry. Included in this group, according to Ste-
phen D. Isaacs in his book Jews and American Politics, were
.. . Richard D. Siegel (an aide to Pennsylvania’s Richard Schweiker); Mel
Grossman (an aide to Florida’s Edward J. Gurney); Albert A. (‘‘Pete’’) Lake-
land (an aide to Javits); Daniel L. Spiegel (an aide to Senator Humphrey); Mel
Levine (an aide to California's John V. Tunney); Jay Berman (an aide to
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 261
Indiana's Birch Bayh); and Kenneth Davis (an aide to Minority Leader Hugh
Scott of Pennsylvania). All but Lakeland are Jewish. This group has worked
quietly drafting legislation and other materials and mounting ‘‘backfires” to
insure support of the legislation, while Jackson, in particular, and Javits and
Ribicoff have worked “‘out front” to garner support among fellow senators.27
Also working very closely with the lobby was Dan Spiegel, Legisla-
tive Assistant to Hubert Humphrey, who to the end remained the
staunchest Zionist. And much of the credit for delaying the Carter-
Begin confrontation over the disposition of the West Bank during the
first 1977 visit of the Israeli Prime Minister to Washington must go to
Amitay’s boys on the Hill. As the lobbyist indicated to Washington Post
journalist Stephen Isaacs, ‘‘Jewish legislative staff members very defi-
nitely keep their Jewishness in mind.’’28
When President Carter planned to meet secretly with four key
Senators who automatically back Israel, the word was somehow passed
to Amitay, who then called on each one to shore up his support prior
to the meeting with the President. There is no question that this lobby
possesses the most unusual political savvy. ‘““They are plugged into the
Washington-based network,” a veteran congressional staffer noted.
“They are well armed with the usual vehicles that lobbyists need; they
are adept and intelligent—and they know how these cats meow.”’29
And they have other powerful Zionist oriented groups working side by
side, often plowing a path for them.
The Anti-Defamation League does its share cooperating in “con-
verting” congressmen at critical moments. Opposition to sending the
deadly C-3 concussion bombs to the Zionist state immediately brought
overt suggestions from this group that the opponents were secretly
anti-Semitic. ‘“That’s the pervasive force they strike in the hearts of
members up here,” one Capitol Hill aide was quoted as saying.3° “If
you're in opposition to anything Israel wants, you get a big white
paintbrush that says you’re anti-Semitic.” Congressman David Obey
(Dem.-Wis.) expressed it this way: “If you question their programs,
they say you are for their enemies and against them. . . . I defend Israel,
but not irrational policies that would lead to war for both of us.’’3!
While some legislators resented this kind of coercion, most bowed
to the powerful pressure. Congressman Thomas Downey from Long
Island in suburban New York City, who was one of the youngest men
ever to serve in the lower house of Congress, had serious doubts about
the 1976 foreign aid bill, which contained more than $1.7 billion for
the Zionist state. His constituents, judging from their mail, were
against foreign aid, and although Downey had been—and still was—
262 THE COVER-UP
a strong supporter of Israel, he was inclined to vote against the bill.
Soon some concerned rabbis came to call upon him, demanding a
positive vote on Israel. Downey defended his position but stated that
he would go along with their demands, despite his convictions, if there
was a “show of support” from his own district, where only 5 percent
of the voters were Jewish. Two days later he received 3,000 telegrams
from constituents in his district, and when the roll call came on foreign
aid, Congressman Downey registered an emphatic “‘yes.’’3?
In addition to pressures from and fear of the lobby, heavy dona-
tions to their campaign funds, and an occasional overseas junket,
members of Congress have other very practical reasons for their
deeply rooted pro-Israelism. Financial disclosures of income earned
by members of the Senate for speeches, public appearances, and writ-
ings, published from time to time in the Congressional Quarterly, clearly
indicate how potent a language dollars speak, even in the upper house
of Congress. In 1969 Jewish organizations paid out more money than
any other interest group for speaking engagements by U.S. Senators.
Twelve Senators received $29,250 in handsome fees, ranging from
$5,000 to $2,500, for saying—sometimes written for them—nice
things about Israel before audiences across the country.
There cannot help but be some small connection between the
largesse handed out as honoraria and the overwhelming support given
in the Senate at that time to the Israeli request for more Phantoms.
This pro-Israeli posture was not accidental or coincidental. The twelve
Senators (Bayh of Indiana, Muskie of Maine, Harris of Oklahoma,
Cranston of California, McGovern of South Dakota, Mondale of Min-
nesota, Packwood of Oregon, Tydings of Maryland, Williams of New
Jersey, Moss of Utah, Ribicoff of Connecticut, and McGee of Wyo-
ming) had enthusiastically supported the open letter that year ad-
dressed to Secretary Rogers urging additional jet aircraft for Israel,
and the latter two were among the Senators circulating the letter for
signatures.
Maine’s Senator Muskie led the Zionist list with $13,500 earned
for seven speeches, topped by his $2,500 speech before the Jewish
National Fund. In 1967 before the Senator became the Democratic
Vice Presidential candidate. Jewish groups showed no interest in him.
And after former Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey returned to the
Senate, he received $52,500 for twenty-four speeches to Jewish organi-
zations between January 1971 and February 1974. These financial
reports as filed with the Secretary of the Senate did not give full credit
to Israelist activity. The business of senatorial flesh-peddling has been
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 263
a highly lucrative one for certain lecture bureaus. Often a Senator was
booked through a bureau, which contracted with him at one price and
sold him to the sponsoring group at a considerably higher figure.
Hence it was the bureau that paid the Senator and that alone was listed
in the report to the Senate, not the Jewish organization. Likewise,
frequently Zionist-oriented individuals exerted quiet pressure to bring
a Senator to a campus, and only the name of the university or college
appeared in the report. Other conduits undoubtedly also were em-
ployed in providing the Washington lawmakers with important and
lucrative engagements.
Such a use by tax-deductible organizations of tax-free dollars to
woo the taxpayers’ representatives was more than a bit reminiscent of
the 1963 disclosure (in 300 printed pages of testimony taken that year
in May and August) by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of
what Newsweek magazine described as “one of the most effective net-
works of foreign influence.”’ More than $5 million masked tax-free UJA
dollars had been distributed through “conduits” of the Jewish Agency
in Jerusalem and the Jewish Agency’s American Section, a registered
foreign agency, in order to mold public opinion and exert pressures
in favor of Israel.33
Again in 1973, the publication of lecture earnings by pro-Israel
Senators revealed that it was not only votes that made such fervent
Zionists of legislators, but an even more practical consideration—the
payoff! For speaking to such groups as the United Jewish Appeal, the
Development Corporation of Israel, the B’nai B’rith, or a synagogue,
Senator Birch Bayh received $21,500 for fifteen appearances; Hubert
Humphrey $27,500 for only eleven turns; Henry Jackson $9,700 for
seven; Edmund Muskie $14,650 for seven; Gale McGee $13,500 for
twenty-two; Mike Gravel $7,200 for eleven; former Democratic Com-
mittee Chairman Fred Harris $8,000 for eight; etc. Between 1971 and
1974 “Scoop” Jackson had netted a cool $41,000 in Zionist speaker
fees on the chicken-soup circuit.
Honoraria from Zionist groups, Israeli philanthropic and develop-
ment organizations, synagogues and Jewish clubs paid fourteen sena-
tors $108,028 in 1976.34 At a time President Nixon was being increas-
ingly engulfed by the growing disaster of Watergate’s payoffs, no one
was interested in or dared make the slightest allusion to these facts and
figures, least of all columnist Jack Anderson, who was so constantly
engrossed in bringing to light so many other interesting exposures,
even the amount of money Jackie Onassis spent for her honeymoon.
This is why New Yorkers were surprised when the press reported
264 THE COVER-UP
that newly-elected Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had built his
political reputation as a defender of Israel during his stormy U.N.
career as U.S. Ambassador, had earned in 1976 $75,000 for twenty
speeches to such Jewish groups as the Zionist Organization of Amer-
ica, the UJA, the Jewish National Fund, and the Jewish Federaion of
Cleveland.*5 The disclosure was made in reports filed with the Secre-
tary of the Senate in Washington. The $3,750 per talk given to Moyni-
han was far more than Oregon’s Wayne Morse used to receive as a
speechmaker when he was, as one Florida editor put it, ‘‘virtually in the
employ of several major Jewish fund-raising organizations.”’56
In assuming his Senate seat, Moynihan was making a big financial
sacrifice. The growing dependence of members of Congress on out-
side income, admittedly a likely source of influencing legislation, led
Congress to enact legislation in 1975. A $25,000 annual ceiling was
placed on such outside honoraria in 1977; the ceiling drops to $8,625
under the new ethics code effective January 1, 1979.
Sometimes money is transferred more subtly and more indirectly
to the legislators by way of contributions to political campaigns. It was
none other than Joseph Alsop, long one of the most ardent, frenetic
supporters of Israel, who wrote: ‘‘With the possible exception of Sena-
tor Edward Kennedy, no liberal Democrat gets less than 50 percent of
his campaign financing from the Jewish community. In certain cases,
the percentage reaches a very much higher figure.”’ This had been true
for all campaign chests and candidates, save that of all the Kennedys,
who had their independent means.
The list of funds contributed by mid-1971 to the presidenual
primary races of Senators Edward M. Muskie,?? George S. McGov-
ern,°8 Birch Bayh,39 and Harold Hughes,*° four leading candidates,
showed they were overabundantly saturated with Jewish big givers,
further demonstration of the leverage employed by the Israeli cause
in the U.S. at the very seat of power. As the 7imes noted, ‘‘close to half
of the big political givers are in the New York City area.’"*!
Money and power do talk, and potently. It was a little hypocrit-
ical in 1974 and 1975 for Zionist supporters in Congress—and
even the President of the U.S.—to shout “Arab oil blackmail’? when
they are most aware of the kind of blackmail-bribery that has per-
meated the halls of Congress and the entire aura of Arab-Israeli-
U.S. relations.
It is not surprising, therefore, that one can count almost on one
hand the members of Congress who have dared defy the lobby and
speak out for a more balanced Middle East policy in the national
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 265
interest. In a speech to the Senate in 1970, Senator Mark Hatfield
(Rep.-Ore.) criticized the blind obeisance to the Israeli cause:
We must squarely confront the third rising force, the Palestinian movement.
The issue of Palestine must be understood, and its meaning in the eyes of all
the Arab world must be grasped. Our viewpoints must become sensitive to the
injustice that the Palestinians feel so deeply, and our policies must be con-
structed to deal with this sense of injustice.4?
In 1970, as seventy-four members of the Senate joined together
in calling upon Secretary of State Rogers to “provide Israel with the
aircraft so urgently needed for its defense,” Senator Henry Bellmon
(Rep.-Okla.) called for a more “balanced debate”’ on the Middle East,
which could prevent a second Vietnam. Bellmon queried his Senate
colleagues as to whether “‘a military answer in the Arab-Israeli conflict
is in the long-range interest of any of the countries concerned.” And
the Oklahoma Republican put these significant words into the record:
It is in keeping with the U.N. resolutions that the refugees of Palestine be
offered the choice of repatriation. . . .
Indeed, there are many friends of Israel who are fearful that the constant
need to demonstrate military prowess will render the nation into a modern
Sparta, a nation devoid of a soul.*3
On the floor of the House on October 18, 1973, Denver’s fresh-
man Representative James Johnson questioned the wisdom of step-
ping up U.S. arms shipment to Israel and suggested the action was an
“tact of war” against the Arabs. He warned that we will ‘‘make a grave
mistake if we continue to alienate the Arabs and drive them into the
Soviet bloc by continuing to provide aid to Israel under terms which
can inevitably lead to a commitment of our forces.”” The congressman
noted that American troops had been placed “on a military alert dur-
ing the latest crisis just two or three days after assurances that they
would not be sent to the Mideast.”
Leonard Larsen, chief of the Washington Bureau of the Denver
Post, which has always been a stalwart supporter of Israel, detailed the
story of Johnson’s courageous statement and the consequences
thereof. He told of Johnson receiving a batch of vituperative mail
“threatening any future he might be entertaining in politics and por-
traying him as anti-Semitic, pro-Communist, and a beast to rival Hit-
ler.”
Early in 1975 George McGovern—no longer a presidential aspi-
rant and now a bit more concerned about the interests of the people
266 THE COVER-UP
of South Dakota, whom he continued to represent in the Senate, than
in the Jewish vote—visited the Middle East as Chairman of a Senate
Foreign Relations subcommittee. After actually talking with some
Palestinians for the first time, the Senator began to realize that there
was, indeed, “another” side to the issue, one that apparently made
sense to him, and he brought down on himself the wrath of the Zionists
by advocating the creation of a Palestinian West Bank state. In his
meeting the following day with Golda Meir in Israel, he received the
frostiest of receptions, from which he had not quite recovered when
I later talked with him at a U.N. reception while the Senator was
serving with the U.S. delegation for that General Assembly session.
Apparently the former Prime Minister, emotionally wrought, had prac-
tically called him an anti-Semite for his espousal of justice for the
Palestinians.
At about the same time that McGovern made his statement favor-
ing a Palestinian state, Senator Charles Percy (Rep.-Ill.) also expressed
some change of heart. Percy’s stay at the U.N. as part of the U.S.
delegation during the General Assembly in the fall of 1974 had ex-
posed him to much of the international thinking regarding the Pales-
tinian question. This was followed by a twelve-country tour the follow-
ing mid-January. Upon his return, the senior Illinois Senator declared
that there were ‘‘limits to U.S. support for Israel” and that Israeli
leaders were unrealistic in believing they could avoid contact with the
PLO. Percy had found Yasir Arafat relatively moderate and, more
significantly, he struck a theme practically unheard of in the Senate:
“We cannot support Israel, right or wrong.” And, the Senator added,
if the Israelis were responsible for launching a new Middle East war,
“it is not clear that the U.S. support would be with them.”
Only a few weeks earlier, Senator Percy had been one of the
seventy-one Senators who, in an open letter to President Ford cir-
culated by AIPAC, called for support of Israel and attacked both grant-
ing U.N. observer status to the PLO and sending an invitation to Yasir
Arafat to address the General Assembly. The Percy turnabout sup-
ported the thesis long propounded by some friends of the Middle East:
Make it possible for anyone to visit the Arab world as well as Israel,
and there is a 90 percent chance that he will come home sensing the
justice of the Palestinian position.
But the Zionists refused to permit this conversion to stand. Lobby-
ist Amitay had declared at the time of the Illinois Senator’s controver-
sial remarks: ‘‘Percy is not irredeemable.”’ The continuous campaign,
spurred by blistering criticism in Near East Report and the Anglo-Jewish
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 267
press, resulted in a speedy receipt of 20,000 pieces of mail by the
Senator, and six months later he was still receiving fifty letters a week.
When Senator Javits attacked President Carter for his ‘‘the Palestinians
should have a homeland” approach in June 1977, Percy picked up the
attack on Carter in a speech before the Anti-Defamation League in
Chicago. Amitay had brought the Illinois Senator, now a real 1980
presidential aspirant, back into the fold.
The most consistent opponent of Washington’s “‘Israel-First” pol-
icy, aside from Senator Fulbright, has been South Dakota’s Senator
James Abourezk, the first person of Arabic descent ever to sit in the
upper house of Congress. In his maiden speech on foreign affairs to
the Senate on October 18, 1973, Abourezk said:
As a compassionate people, we can no more tolerate the inhumanity in the
continuation of the Palestinian refugee camps than we could the mistreatment
and genocide practised against the Jews by Hitler. Until the refugee matter is
dealt with, we must realistically face the fact that even the most brilliantly
drawn border agreements will fail in the face of continued terrorism.
We cannot stop by showing compassion only for homeless Jews. Our
compassion must extend to the Palestinians who have found themselves with-
out a homeland.
Mr. President, the job of this body and this nation is to do everything
within our power to bring peace to the Middle East. Let us forego the easy posturing
for our constituents. Let us put aside partisan divisions that have nothing to do
with the Middle East. Let us demonstrate in our actions the kind of even-
handed restraint to change the course leading to disaster. [Italics added.}
Abourezk has won wide respect in Washington as an outspoken
Senator willing to risk displeasure in behalf of issues he believes are
right. He was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam and an active
advocate of reforms based on the Watergate scandals. It was logical
that the Colorado Democratic State Committee should invite the Sena-
tor to address its traditional 1977 ‘‘Jefferson-Jackson Day” dinner in
Denver. But a high-pressure campaign to dump him immediately
swung into gear once the invitation had been issued. Colorado Zionist
Federation Director Arnold Zaler announced he was ‘‘disappointed”’
in the choice of speakers. Dinner Committee member Betty Christ
moved to withdraw the invitation. Denver labor leader John Mrozek
announced he was canceling his large ticket purchase and blustered:
“He is pro-Arab and anti-Israel. The labor movement is pro-Israel. As
a Democrat, I object to inviting someone who goes against the state
and national party platform, which is pro-Israel.”
Only by the narrowest margin was the motion to withdraw Abou-
268 THE COVER-UP
rezk’s invitation defeated. By the time he arrived in Denver on March
25, tensions had increased. At the airport the South Dakotan told a
press conference: “‘As a U.S. Senator, I have sworn to uphold the
Government of the U.S., but I never dreamed that I would be required
to swear allegiance to any other government.”
Before a dinner audience of more than 700, Abourezk reviewed
the attempts to suppress him. Once, he said, his appearance at Yeshiva
University (New York City) had been prevented, and in November
1976 prior to an appearance in Rochester, New York, people threat-
ened to bomb the auditorium where he was to speak. The Senator
minced no words:
The point of the controversy surrounding this dinner has been my refusal to
take an absolutist position for Israel. There is extreme danger to all of us in
this kind of absolutism. It implies that only one position—that of being
unquestionably pro-Israel—is the only position.
Senator Abourezk went on to describe the pressures of the Zionist
lobby:
For several years now, I have been extremely skeptical of the extraordinary
influence which the Zionist lobby has in this country. Its ability to accomplish
virtually any legislative feat involving military or economic assistance to Israel
is legend.
When one reads in headlines of the public outrage at attempted manipula-
tion of our government, directed by a foreign country, one can only wonder
that so little is written about the most powerful of all foreign government
lobbies, the Israeli lobby. The Israeli lobby is the most powerful and pervasive
foreign influence that exists in American politics. And one must never forget
that Israel, despite its status as an ally, is still a foreign power with its own
national interests to preserve. It is not an American protectorate or territory,
and for it to have the enormous legislative influence in the U.S. Congress that
it does is dangerous. It is dangerous because the United States, and its Middle
East foreign policy, is likely to become, if it has not already, a captive of its
client state.
I do not represent Israel in the United States Senate nor do I represent
any of the Arab states. I represent South Dakota, and the interests of the
people of the United States.
Winding up his address with a warning that suppression of dia-
logue was something which ‘‘we as Americans should all fear,’ the
Senator was greeted with a standing ovation, according to the Rocky
Mountain News, “although there were pockets of people who sat on
their hands.”’*4 In an editorial the same Denver newspaper stated:
Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest 269
‘James Abourezk is not a fanatic screaming for the blood of Israel.
Colorado Democratic leaders should be proud to have him as their
speaker. He is better than they deserve.’’45
While McGovern was losing his home state by a wide margin in
1972 in the presidential election, Abourezk carried South Dakota with
57 percent of the vote. That is why the announcement in January of
1977 that the popular Senator would not be a candidate for reelection
when his term expired in 1978 shocked his many constituents at home
and dismayed his many friends around the country. The Senator’s
retirement statement only cited “family responsibilities.” Some
months back when Abourezk asked one of his fellow Senators how he
generally voted on Middle East matters, his colleague responded that
“he found it to be less troublesome for him personally to vote the
Israeli side.” He explained that he had once voted against Israel, after
which he “‘‘spent most of his time explaining the vote to hostile Jewish
constituents and to lobbyists for the government of Israel.”
Because Abourezk had not taken the easy road, he could undoubt-
edly foresee many troubles ahead, with which he might not be able to
cope. As they had done with Senator Fulbright, the Israeli lobby was
prepared to pour tens of thousands of dollars into South Dakota in
1978 to defeat the Senator who had so adamantly refused to take on
a dual allegiance.
As early as 1974 the Israel lobby started gunning for him. As Jim
Abourezk expressed it, “the Israeli lobby is intimidating. If you get on
their hit list, you spend a lot of time defending yourself from ‘intellec-
tual terrorism.’ ’’46 Before retiring as AIPAC Chairman, Kenen wrote
letters to Abourezk’s Senate campaign contributors noting that the
Senator had gone “to great lengths to support the Arab cause and to
undermine American friendship in Israel. . . . | consider the question
important enough to write to you and others who supported Abou-
rezk.”
Only a few voices have reverberated through the halls of Congress
in an effort to keep alive the thesis so brilliantly advanced in 1969 on
the Senate floor by Senator Fulbright. In talking of the picketing by the
Seafarers’ International Union and the Longshoremen’s International
Association of the Egyptian (then U.A.R.) passenger-cargo ship Cleopa-
tra, in protest against the denial of free navigation for all ships through
the Suez canal, the Foreign Relations Committee Chariman had as-
sailed certain minority pressure groups for “‘whipsawing foreign pol-
icy” to the detriment of the national interest. With a profound histori-
cal vista, in words that will stand as a perpetual monument to the
270 THE COVER-UP
thinking of a true American, Fulbright addressed himself to the
broader aspects of this particular incident:
It is the problem of the development in this nation of organized groups which
bring into American political life the feuds and emotions that are part of the
political conflicts of foreign nations. This is one of the things that our founding
fathers came here to avoid when they created this nation. . . .
Mr. President, this nation has welcomed millions of immigrants from
abroad. In the 19th century we were called the melting pot, and we were proud
of that description. It meant that there came to this land people of diverse
creeds, colors and races. These immigrants became good Americans, and their
ethnic or religious origins were of secondary importance. But in recent years,
we have seen the rise of organizations dedicated apparently, not to American,
but to foreign states and groups. The conduct of a foreign policy for America
has been seriously compromised in this develoment. We can survive this
development, Mr. President, only if our political institutions—and the Senate
in particular—retain their objectivity and their independence so that they can
serve all Americans.*7
There has always been a wide difference of opinion as to whether
a congressman was to represent in Washington the interests of his
district or the totality of American interests. For the first ume a new
concept has been advanced and, sadly, almost unanimously accepted.
American federal legislators are to represent the interests of the for-
eign state of Israel and to comport themselves as if they were members
of the Knesset. In becoming, wittingly or unwittingly, lackeys of the
Israeli lobby, the members of Congress have abysmally betrayed the
trust of the American people whom they represent. The same and
more can be said of the other arch-villain in the Middle East tragedy,
the media, whose continuous myth-information has provided the total
cover-up for the improbity of Washington in its unique relationship
with Israel.
vit = Slanting the Myth-Information
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand
bayonets.
—Napoleon
Does the mass media in America personify freedom and democracy,
or does it deliberately restrict some voices and exclude exposure of
others? Does it expose and condemn all glaring acts of injustice, or
does it make particular exceptions? Does it act as a watchdog on abuses
in our domestic and foreign policy, or does it recoil from certain
politically sensitive issues? To what extent do biased reportage and
cartoon-drawing foster false stereotypes of the outside world and en-
courage U.S. public opinion to political hostility against or friendship
toward other countries?
Loaded questions, yes, but ones that ought not to be ignored. The
radio, television, newspapers, and magazines (and books, too) are in
many cases the only adult sources for information about foreign coun-
tries. They play a decisive role in shaping public attitudes toward the
formulation of foreign policy, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and
the Palestine question.
While most Americans probably would concede that the nation’s
radio and television networks, newspapers, and magazines fall short of
perfection, they would argue in the same breath that their media have
few equals in extensive coverage of events, balanced presentation of
controversial issues, and talent for exposing scandals of Watergate
proportions. Americans, who have come to trust the media after losing
faith in their leaders, would accept the suggestion of a media cover-up
in the Middle East with the greatest reluctance.
But evidence points unmistakably to the pro-Israeli and anti-Arab
bias of the mass media for many varied reasons: the religio-ethnic
pressures of the powerful Jewish community and its potent lobby,
exercised through advertising and otherwise; the general Western atti-
271
272 THE COVER-UP
tude finding empathy with people of European culture such as Israelis!
while at the same time looking suspiciously on non-Western peoples,
and the ever-present Christian guilt feeling for the Nazi genocide.
There are no set rules or guidelines as to what constitutes news.
What is held to be news by the press, television, and radio is decided
by reporters on the spot, by news personnel in charge at the time the
story breaks, and by the editor. And editors have been given carte
blanche even by the Supreme Court. In the words of Chief Justice
Burger: ‘For better or worse, editing is what editors are for, and
editing is the selection and choice of material.’’ While the Fourth
Estate never lets up on its reminders about freedom of the press, the
corresponding responsibility of the press is rarely ever mentioned.
Few question what editors do or do not pass as news.
There are admittedly a ‘‘disproportionate number of Jews in the
American media, relative to the population,” according to Ronald
Koven, Foreign Editor of the Washington Post. Many reporters are Jew-
ish; their version of an event is accepted by the foreign news desk
editor, who may also be Jewish or, if Christian, may not thoroughly
understand the development and will yield to the “knowledge” of his
reporter. In television, Jewish reporters ‘“‘often want their stories on
Israel done and go and ask that they be done,” observed NBC corre-
spondent Marilyn Robinson.?
The presence of so many Jews in the media was attributed by
Koven “not to a Zionist plot’”’ but to the fact Jews, like Irish immigrants
before them, ‘‘went onto places where they made more money and had
more prestige.”’ No matter for whatever reason they may have entered
the media, they are there in force and prestigiously located. Many
networks and news magazines assign Jews as correspondents in Israel
—such as Bill Seaman of ABC-TV, Jay Bushinsky who represents Me-
tromedia and Westinghouse TV, and Michael Elkins of BBC. Objectiv-
ity from such representation is not possible.
Aside from the news itself, commentary—or analysis—provides
further opportunity for slanting, as Harry Reasoner illustrated during
the Israeli 1975 demonstrations against the Kissinger disengagement
mission. The ABC commentator justified these actions by saying that
the Arabs started all the wars, and he placed the blame on them alone
for the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 conflicts.
The media bias may stem from a Christian reporter or corre-
spondent’s fear of being accused of being anti-Semitic or a Jew’s fear
of losing popularity. Stanley Siegal’s meteoric rise through ABC-
TV’s 9 a.m. talk show has brought him to the top of the television
Slanting the Myth-Information — 278
ratings; the New York Times hailed him as an “uninhibited terror that
stalks the local ABC studios, the man who had the nerve to ask Angie
Dickinson whether she had an affair with President Kennedy, the
man who asked Renée Richards, point-blank, whether she was enjoy-
ing her sex life. . . .”’ But Siegal has adamantly refused to air anti-
Zionist or pro-Arab opinion. New York Times correspondent Tom
Wicker, outspokenly fearless in advancing the civil and human rights
of the oppressed anywhere a few years back, admitted that he was
staying afield from reportage on the plight of the Palestinians be-
cause he did not wish to lose the support of so many followers who
were needed “for battles on other fronts.’’4
Fear of pressure and actual pressure also play a vital role. As
James McCartney, foreign and security affairs specialist of the Knight
newspaper chain in Washington, explained it: “I don’t think any chief
editorial writer for a paper in Philadelphia or Detroit goes for many
months without a visit from someone representing the Jewish commu-
nity and with a pro-Israel view, or a luncheon or something of that
sort.””5 Neither the Arabs nor their friends have begun to enter this
arena.
There is no question that the large Jewish population in major
cities where there is a built-in audience for what is happening in Israel
has produced in editors the automatic reaction to view the Middle East
situation in terms of what readers (or listeners) would want to know.
Peter Jennings, ABC news commentator, admitted, ‘““There is defi-
nitely an anti-Arab bias in America, and I regret it.’®
Some of the abundant pro-Israel and anti-Arab reportage has
stemmed from the media failure to place permanent correspondents
in Arab countries prior to the 1973 war and the oil embargo as they
did in Israel. The difficulty of access of American correspondents in
the Arab world to news and news sources, even as these were literally
foisted upon them in Israel, as well as the careful, remarkable Israeli
(plus American Zionist) public relations in contrast to an Arab neglect
and disdain of this modern communications technique, has also con-
tributed to one-sided reportage. Still, much of the bias has been delib-
erate.
The atmosphere against which John Doe judges the day-to-day
happenings in the Middle East has been poisoned or sweetened by the
use of stereotypes, ‘‘the fixed and oversimplified conceptions which
people hold about each other’’?—that Irish fight, Orientals are inscru-
table, Jews are grasping, Swedes are stolid, and Arabs are nomadic,
backward, sneaky, and villainous. In a typical stereotype slur, Marvin
274 THE COVER-UP
Kalb, reporting on the assasination of Faisal in a CBS Special from
Saudi Arabia, commented that while he was with Henry Kissinger in
Riyadh, he saw many people with “shifty eyes.’’®
The influence of stereotyping in molding American attitudes to-
ward the Middle East has taken on greater significance because so little
space is given to and there are so few readers of foreign news, as shown
by The American Institute of Public Opinion’s Readership Survey of fifty-one
newspapers, conducted for the International Press Institute.? Anti-
Arab stereotyping begins in elementary schools!° and its acceptability
has been made simpler by the historic Christian antagonism toward
Islam. The distorted image, built from many innocent and purposeful
misconceptions about the religion, history, and socioeconomics of the
Arabs, has gone side-by-side in media reportage with the pro-Israel
glorifications.
Innocent stereotyping, for example, simply uses the word “Arab”
to refer equally to Egyptians, Saudis, and Libyans as well as to Pales-
tinians. The Arab has been an easy victim for the cartoonist, who
invariably portrays Arabs as the Jews were portrayed by the Nazis:
somebody dirty, with a long nose, either a terrorist or an old sheikh,
gas pump in hand, and dripping with petrodollars. At best, it is a
person with Arab headdress and flowing robe, usually riding a camel
or a Cadillac.
Far less innocently motivated has been the plethora of stories
covering the armed conflict which inevitably never fails to refer to, if
not to show, Palestinians carrying Russian Kalshnikovs. While the
Communist label is tied to the Arabs, scarce mention is made that it
is U.S. Phantoms that have been the instrumentalities for Israeli bomb-
ing of Lebanese villages and Palestinian refugee camps.
To counter the bad Arab image, the Information Center of the
League of Arab States has four regional offices in the United States,
but, Zionist scare propaganda to the contrary, is underfinanced as well
as inexpert and understaffed. This puny, ineffectual Arab effort in no
way has begun to match the acumen and skill shown in the information
operations of the Israelis, let alone those of their Zionist and Israelist
supporters.
The Zionists, of course, have a press totally of their own. The
Anglo-Jewish press, comprising approximately 140 newspapers with a
combined circulation of 3.75 million, is headed by Hadassah magazine
(360,000), New York Jewish Press (210,000), and National Jewish Monthly
(200,000). As if the Israeli cause needed another publication in the
U.S., the American Jewish Committee started in 1976 a new quarterly,
Slanting the Myth-Information 275
Present Tense, ‘‘to broaden understanding of world Jewish affairs” —i.e.,
Israeli affairs. Zionists have also had their own Herzl Press working out
special arrangements for co-publication and/or distribution with
McGraw-Hill, Doubleday, and other major publishers.
Israeli positions are always quickly explained and accessible; the
Palestinians are made out to be nothing more than a collective group
of “terrorists,” rather than a liberation movement. Only very occasion-
ally has the plight of a million and a half refugees been presented,
because just the mere recital of that story is certain to arouse some
feeling for these people. At the same time, the human aspects of the
Israelis, ever intermixed with some reference to the holocaust, is daily
unfolded in most loving detail.
To compress the media’s misrepresentation of the Middle East
conflict into one chapter is no easy task, so vast and complex is the
subject. From stacks of material accumulated over the past ten years,
examples of distortion have been selected. Most of the slantings pre-
sented here were obtained from careful monitoring of the media over
these years; some few are based on personal experiences with editors,
publishers, and commentators.
As television focused on the clashes between Israel and the Arab
world, stereotyping intensified. The Arab was depicted on entertain-
ment programs and on documentaries as ‘“‘pimp, cheat, and backstab-
ber, whether lurking among the shadows in the bazaar of Cairo or
sitting in a tent in the middle of the desert surrounded by oil wells.””!!
All the worst possible images of the Arab from the blood-feuding
bedouin to the oil blackmailer are offered. As Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Professor Jack G. Shaheen pointed out in his study,!2 this image
of the Arab goes forward on television while Americans have matured
to a point where degrading caricatures of blacks, Chicanos, Jews, or
homosexuals are no longer socially acceptable. In 1976, on prime time
network television, the producers of ‘‘Cannon’’!3 were almost ob-
sessed with depicting the Arab as the scoundrel, who was similarly
depicted on “The Six Million Dollar Man,’”!4 ‘Medical Center,” !5 and
NBC’s monthly show ‘“‘Weekend.”!® During the quiz show “To Tell
the Truth,” Peggy Cass commented that Arabs now illegally occupy
space on American Indian reservations and sell Indian jewelry.!”
‘Mystery Theater” has been used to advance anti-Arab propaganda.!8
In the annual NBC Christmas special ‘“The Little Drummer Boy,” the
stereotyping was obvious when the young hero youth wore a yarmulka
and the only scoundrel was an oversized Arab who blatantly exploited
the young boy.!9
276 THE COVER-UP
On July 24, 1976, St. Louis public television station KETC-TV,
according to the station’s program guide, TV Guide, and local newspa-
per listing, was to air on ‘‘Documentary Theater” the show “‘Palestini-
ans and the PLO.” Viewers were instead subjected to “Dateline Is-
rael,” with the Anti-Defamation League’s Arnold Forster and the
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. discussing the sensitive Palestine issue.
And the station never indicated the name of the organization or organ-
izations providing the operating funds for the program aired, as they
invariably do.?°
Popular television host Merv Griffin was given a trip to Israel. On
his return, he had two shows about his visit, which started with a Mayor
Ted Kollek-conducted tour of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. An American
couple and three children from San Diego were shown at an absorp-
tion center; they had moved to Israel because they wanted ‘“‘to live a
full Jewish life—the quality of life, they knew, was superior.” At the end
of each night’s program, the announcer stated, “‘We wish to thank the
UJA for their assistance and help in producing this show.” And then
these words were flashed on the screen: “WE ARE ONE.”
A closer look at radio and television coverage of the Middle East
reveals how the media-controllers have made a mockery of responsible
journalism. The Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness
Doctrine, which has been in force since July |, 1966, is invariably cited
by television and radio broadcasters as a defense against charges of
bias. But it only provides that whenever “there is a discussion of
controversial issues of public importance, a licensee is under obliga-
tion to ensure that proponents of opposing viewpoints are afforded
reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting views.”
This doctrine, often confused with the equal-time requirement for
political candidates, unfortunately does not apply to news coverage,
only to talk and opinion shows. And the FCC has given a very narrow,
rigid interpretation to this obligation, being most reluctant to interfere
with the licensee and force him to present the views of petitioners.
In reply to a complaint about a grossly one-sided panel presenta-
tion on Menachem Begin directly after his election, the FCC declared
there had been no substantiation of the claim that the “Israeli elec-
tions, Mr. Begin’s book and his career and character, the desirability
of his heading the Israeli government and the Israeli treatment of
Arabs, etc.,” constituted a ‘“‘controversial issue of public impor-
tance.”?! The networks and individual stations have likewise been
given a free hand in deciding what is a “‘reasonable opportunity” of
reply. This has allowed for slanting of their coverage of an event or
Slanting the Myth-Information 277
selecting segments of the news in order to satisfy particular interest
groups. Where the Middle East is concerned, this boils down to prefer-
ential treatment of pro-Israel spokesmen and a blackout of news unfa-
vorable to Israel. On occasion an Arab spokesman, normally with little
grasp of the English language and with whom the viewer or listener can
scarcely relate, will be invited to join a panel to debate with an Ameri-
can Jew who has a distinct advantage.
The ABC program “Directions” on Sunday, March 5, 1978, pre-
sented the President and Executive Vice President of the Synagogue
Council of America, Rabbis Saul Teplitz and Henry Siegman. Four
weeks later the same half-hour show brought the views of Chairman
of the Conference of Presidents Alexander Schindler and former Presi-
dent of the American Jewish Committee Morris Abrams. The modera-
tor Herbert Kaplow did not even attempt to hide his total support of
Israel and Zionism as he asked the correct “tough” questions of the
four participants who were all 100 percent pro-Zionist and pro-Israel,
save that Abrams two minutes before the program ended stated that
the settlements on the West Bank “‘are not essential to Israeli security”
and therefore fall within the framework of U.N. Resolution 242 (hence
subject to negotiations). This one shading of difference among the
four officials of Organized Jewry, plus the Abrams declaration that
American Jews may not be ‘‘willing to bend with every vagary of Israel
foreign policy’ constituted to ABC attorney Thomas H. Wolf a sufh-
cient enough of a contrasting viewpoint to satisfy the requirements of
the Fairness Doctrine and to deny requests to present quite different
views.
There are other methods, too, of showing bias. Consider how the
media handled the televised appearances of Egypt’s President Nasser
in February, 1970 and PLO leader Yasir Arafat in November, 1974.
Nasser appeared on New York City’s Channel 5 in an hour interview
by William Touhy of the Los Angeles Times and columnist Rowland
Evans. Under the TV listings in the New York Times for that Sunday
there was a complete blackout for the hour—as if Channel 5 had gone
off the air; somehow all the other programs on the Arab-Israeli issue
that week won a listing. The CBS show “The Newsmakers,” whose
guest was ardent promoter of Israel Senator Jacob Javits, managed to
appear on page two of the first section of the Times in the late TV
listings. Programs featuring Senator Charles Goodell, then competing
with Javits as a number-one pro-Israel spokesman, Congressman Em-
manuel Celler, and even David Ben-Gurion were also listed for that
week.
278 THE COVER-UP
On the very evening after Nasser’s appearance, on the 10 P.M.
news program of this same Channel 5, Bill Jorgensen brought in none
other than Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. General Yitzhak Rabin,
allowing him to present a rebuttal to President Nasser.
On the morning of November 13, 1974, Arafat addressed the U.N.
—a momentous occasion marking the first time the Palestinian view-
point was put before the General Assembly and a world listening
audience. He found himself sandwiched between Zionist spokesmen.
Channel 5 had scheduled a telecast of the event, but deliverance of
Arafat’s speech was delayed. Under the closest security precautions
since the famed 1960 General Assembly session attended by so many
heads of state, the PLO leader and his colleagues literally had to be
smuggled into the U.N. compound by helicopter, and then more time
was needed in which to work out the translation of his speech from
Arabic to English.
In filling the time originally scheduled for Arafat, the program
directors of Channel 5 took full advantage of the situation. Israeli
former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, then teaching at Columbia Uni-
versity, was asked to take up the forty minutes. He proceeded to tear
apart the PLO point of view even before the viewers had heard a single
word of the Palestinian position that morning—or, for that matter, any
other morning. Arafat’s speech was then telecast. Following his ad-
dress, Channel 5 gave a one-sided panel enough time to finish the job
of demolishing the Palestinians’ ideology. One of the panelists who
was presented as a neutral academician was Professor J. C. Hurewitz
of Columbia University, who in fact has been a supporter of Israel from
the time of the 1950 publication of his first book, The Struggle for
Palestine. 2?
The coverage of Arafat’s speech by much of the media hit a low
point, even for journalistic distortions. In referring to the PLO leader’s
proposal for a secular, democratic, binational state, Time magazine
gratuitously commented: ‘“That proposal implicitly requires the disso-
lution of Israel, which goes against a long series of U.N. and other
international afirmations.’’23 The magazine continued: ‘Arafat tned to
distinguish his respect for the Jewish faith from his hatred of Zionism.”
(Italics added.) Several specific references in Arafat’s talk indicated
that he and his Palestinian followers differentiated sharply between
Zionism and Judaism. But Time, the Times, and other stalwart Israeli
supporters refused to report this.?4
As a climax in its coverage of the important Arafat appearance at
the U.N., Time magazine latched onto his words: “‘Many of you who are
Bi
Slanting the Myth-Information 279
in the assembly hall were [once] considered terrorists.”” Admitting that
his statement was more than rhetorical, the Time writer pointed to
other terrorists who now had become respectable statesmen despite
their initial use of violence. At this juncture it would have been appro-
priate, if not necessary, for Zime to mention Israel's terrorism along
with the examples given of Ireland, Mexico, and Algeria. But not a
word was said of Israeli violence in establishing the state that had
sparked the Palestinians’ counterterrorism. The magazine referred
only to the Israelis as “victims of violence who have suffered through
years of wanton attacks by Palestinian bombers and gunmen.”
This was written in November 1974, thirty months before the
election to the Israeli Premiership of Menachem Begin, the arch-ter-
rorist of the Middle East. Well documented in the excellent research
files of this news magazine was the record of Deir Yassin, the King
David Hotel, and other Irqun acts of terrorism without which, boasted
the former Israeli leader, there would have been no State of Israel.
The NBC “Today” show has been chock-full of “‘back from the
Promised Land” pro-Israel interviews.?> Scarcely, if ever, have anti-
Zionists or pro-Arab Americans been similarly privileged with an inter-
view or even been given the benefit of fair play, as the anatomy of a
1974 radio program illustrates. On March 11 on the “Barry Gray
Show”’ over radio station WMCA, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Ep-
stein, respectively Counsel and Vice President of the Anti-Defamation
League, were permitted for 244 hours to label every critic of Zionism
and the State of Israel as anti-Semitic. The pretext for this lengthy
interview was their recently published book, The New Anti-Semitism.
Substituting for the usual moderator of this show, who himself was
vehemently pro-Zionist, was William Scott, little more than a baseball
pitcher in batting practice, helping Forster and Epstein hit the ball out
of the park every time at bat. I promptly sent a telegram of protest to
Peter Straus, President of WMCA, demanding under the rules of the
FCC that an opportunity be given to present ‘‘a contrasting view by a
responsible element.” It so happened that Dr. John N. Booth, a former
journalist and a distinguished Unitarian minister from the West Coast,
was due East at this time, and the telegram asked that he appear with
me.
The show’s producer, Paul Zelden, called to say that some ar-
rangement would be made to balance the coverage. After considerably
more prodding, Zelden agreed that Booth and I would be given time
to air our views, but not by ourselves. To this we replied, again by
telegram: “‘We would be happy to debate with Forster and Epstein,
280 THE COVER-UP
although their reappearance is not required under the Fairness Doc-
trine. We would, of course, prefer to be given a reasonable opportu-
nity to present another point of view on this all-important issue by
ourselves, as the other two gentlemen were originally permitted to
do.” Zelden then agreed to get either Forster or Epstein to appear for
two hours with us.
The next word came from the station that both declined to appear,
and that we would have to appear with ‘two or three other people,”
whom the station would designate. This idea was entirely unaccept-
able, particularly when we were informed that the ‘‘two other people”
would be an assistant Peace Corps director who had served in Israel
and the head of some Zionist organization or other. Not only had we
been denied permission to present our position alone, but our views
were to be downgraded by the caliber of persons chosen to debate with
us. Booth and I declined to appear on such a program. Had we agreed
to participate, our audience would have been oblivious to WMCA’s
subtle fouting of the Fairness Doctrine and impressed, no doubt, by
the apparent fair numerical balance—two for, two against.
A blistering letter was sent to Straus indicating that all our com-
munications were being presented to the FCC in Washington. At this
time WMCA was encountering some other troubles in the Capital and
did not wish to make waves. Two weeks later WMCA reluctantly aired
a two-hour slam-bang Forster-Lilienthal debate.
The art of slanting is practiced by media people the public would
least suspect. Some of the best-known network commentators and
reporters, generally trusted by Americans of many persuasions as ob-
jective and fair, have taken advantage of their status by plying the
pure-Israeli line.
This was clearly the case in a ‘‘Face the Nation” interview with
Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba in the spring of 1965. The inter-
view was taped in the Carthage palace of Tunis and conducted by
Martin Agronsky, Winston Burdette, and George Herman. Also pres-
ent were the son of the President, Foreign Minister Habib Bourguiba,
Jr., and myself, a guest in the country. Judging from a few cracks made
by Agronsky, my presence as the only outsider was not appreciated.
Small wonder! During the lengthy period in which Bourguiba, Jr.,
translated from English into French for his father and back again into
English for the panelists, I took copious notes of both languages to
enable me to compare the actual taping session with the edited pro-
gram appearing on TV.
The telecast seen by American audiences showed Bourguiba
Slanting the Myth-Information 281
mouthing his answers in French with his son’s translation used as a
voiceover. Everything that the President had said against Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser appeared in the carefully edited program as pre-
sented over the network, while everything the Tunisian leader had said
against Zionism and Israel was deleted so as to give the impression that
he was more pro-Israel than even Jewish Defense Leaguer Meir Ka-
hane. The blissfully ignorant and somewhat naive American viewers
had no way of knowing the truth.
A “Sixty Minutes” program narrated by Mike Wallace on January
6, 1974 provides another typical example. The program covered the
oil embargo as well as pro-Zionist and pro-Arab groups in the U.S.
American Jewish groups were pictured around a table, calmly plotting
their activity on behalf of Israel. The sole opposition to Zionism and
U.S. Middle East policy was depicted as coming from the Arab League
and the Action Committee headed by Iraqi Dr. Mohamed Mehdi. Most
of the program centered on the latter, who presented the typical Arab
stereotype?6—loud, blustering, emotional—in vivid contrast to the
calm, sympathetic demeanor of the American Jewish leaders in their
exposition of how to meet the challenge of Arab propaganda. In the
filmed interview, Mehdi talked of demonstrations (the picture of Arab
violence again) and boasted of oil power, but made no mention of how
the average American was affected by the U.S. policy being followed.
CBS's presentation concealed any indication that indeed there were
many Americans (including some Jews), some organized in small
groups across the country, others unorganized and inarticulate, but
nevertheless opposed to Washington’s position.
Throughout the program Wallace tried to imply that oil compa-
nies were financing what little American opposition there was to Israel.
The CBS veteran went out of his way to point out that four or five oil
company representatives were present at a large Washington recep-
tion for Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani and, of all the
many personages that were greeted by the guest of honor, Wallace let
the cameras focus on Yamani warmly shaking the hand of the Soviet
Ambassador on his arrival at the Embassy gathering.
A Wallace interview with Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
Fulbright in his office at the time he was opposing the $2.2 billion bill
for special aid to Israel was cut to the bone, limited to the Senator’s
concern over threats that Zionists were going all-out to defeat his bid
for reelection. Fulbright’s presence at the Saudi Arabian reception was
of course given special attention, which helped complete the picture
of the gathering of all evil forces to defeat “little Israel.”’
282 THE COVER-UP
The piéce de résistance in slanting, came at the program's end in
a bald statement by Wallace that a CBS News poll reported that 60
percent of the 1,231 persons polled by phone wanted “‘little or no
pressure on Israel”’ to relinquish captured Arab lands so as to promote
resumption of Arab oil shipments, and only 35 percent wanted sub-
stantial pressure. The next day the New York Post carried this public
opinion rating in bold headlines.
The actual breakdown of responses revealed how CBS had subtly
distorted the results of this poll. On the question of applying pressure
on Israel, 12 percent had answered ‘‘a great deal”, 23 percent “a fair
amount,” 13 percent “very little,” and 47 percent “none at all.” In
announcing the results, CBS had lumped those who had responded
“very little” and “none at all” to get the 60 percent majority figure they
wished, whereas CBS should have indicated that 47 percent wanted no
pressure while 48 percent favored some kind of pressure—very little,
a fair amount, and a great deal—with 5 percent giving no answer.
A little sleuthing turned up further evidence of foul play: The
responses of those interviewed by telephone to a pretest question had
been overwhelmingly against the Zionist-Israeli position. The original,
more direct question was: ‘““The Arabs have said that they will resume
oil shipments when Israel gives up lands acquired in the 1967 war.
Should or should not the U.S. put pressure on Israel to return these
lands? ‘“Twenty-six percent had responded that the U.S. should put
pressure, and 15 percent had responded in the negative.?’ As a result
of this preliminary survey, the test question was changed to eliminate
any reference to the vital matter of the resumption of oil shipments.
And then the figures were manipulated by Wallace to give the desired
pro-Zionist result.?8
Lest any media fairness should manifest itself, the ‘‘what have you
done for us lately” attitude of Zionism has generally kept a firm con-
trol. Even Mike Wallace found himself on the spot for allowing CBS
cameras to tell the truth.
On February 16, 1975, the CBS “Sixty Minutes’’ special inter-
viewed Syrian Jews who attested to the gross exaggerations concerning
their lot and stated that their situation had greatly improved, even in
the face of the continuing war with Israel. The American Jewish Con-
gress brought charges of “excessive, inaccurate, and distorted repre-
sentations.”” Don Hewitt (Jewish himself) was threatened and received
a nasty letter, a copy of which was sent to the FCC. A protest was also
filed with the National News Council.
Quite accustomed to criticism, the CBS commentator noted that
Slanting the Myth-Information 283
this had been the first me he had ‘“‘come up against a conscientious
campaign by the so-called Jewish lobby—against a mimeograph ma-
chine rampant. We were swamped!”’29
Complaints from the Jewish Congress persisted throughout the
spring of 1975, while CBS maintained the charges were groundless. As
Wallace pointed out, ‘‘the world Jewish community tends somehow to
associate a fair report about Syria’s Jews with an attack on Israel be-
cause Syria happens to be Israel’s toughest enemy. But the fact is there
is not one Syrian Jew in jail today as a political prisoner.’’3°
On June 7 CBS relented and repeated the segment on Syrian Jews
from its previous program, adding a new introduction and a five-
minute epilogue responding to the Zionist criticism. The Jewish Con-
gress was stl not satisfied. In December 1975 the New York Post re-
ported Wallace as saying, “I’m going back to Syria to find out how the
Jews are faring there.’ Wallace continued, “‘I did not say back in
February of 1975 that Jews were living like kings. What I said was, ‘It
is apparent that the Syrian Jewish community is kept under close
surveillance.’ ”’
In 1976 Wallace returned and did a second program, which
confirmed the findings of the first. He is definitely no longer the
darling of the Israelis’ cult. He learned the hard way what others have
taken for granted: Investigation of sensitive matters concerning Israel,
directly or indirectly, is a risky business. The alternative to full disclo-
sure is silence or slanting, and the latter route is often the safest.
Lest CBS seem alone to be inordinately biased, let us turn to
Radio WRFM and Jim Branch’s treatment of the complex Middle East
problem on a program in December 1971:
You have a very suspicious Israel—suspicious that the U.N. is stacked against
itand with some good reason... . In 1967 Israel could have moved on to Caire.
They could have finished the Arab war capability once and for all, but they
didn’t despite the fact that the Arabs made it abundantly clear that they never
would consider Israel a legitimate nation and therefore were going to totally
destroy them.
Commentator Branch continued: ‘‘Why didn’t the Israelis finish the
job, especially when history indicated that the Arabs would just try it
again later?”
History indicates no such thing. When effect is not related to
cause, one obtains a picture entirely out of perspective. What Branch
was alluding to, of course, was the old, oft-quoted canard that Nasser
would ‘‘drive the Israelis into the sea.’”” (When Member of Parliament
284 THE COVER-UP
Christopher Mayhew in 1970 offered on television to pay £5,000 to
anyone who could produce any evidence of the statement attributed
to Nasser, no claimant came forward with legal proof—the quotation
was wrongly translated, or wrongly attributed, or invented, ‘‘usually
culled straight from some pro-Israeli publication.”’)3!
The WRFM gem continued:
The United Nations took off where the Arabs left off, taking the Egyptian
position on almost everything. That would not necessarily be so bad except
that the Arabs were clearly the precipitators of the Middle East War [a com-
ment in sharp contrast to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Charles Yost’s lengthy
article in Foreign Affairs, February 1968] . . . and the U.N. is not supposed to
be on the side of those who precipitate wars . . . and instead of maintaining
peace and guaranteeing Israel rights to sovereignty, the U.N. has allowed the
Arabs to rebuild their armies.
An ABC-TV special on the Arab-Israeli crisis presented on June
2, 1969, was a dead giveaway of the network’s sympathies. The net-
work chose syndicated columnist Drew Pearson—a long-time, hard-
line Zionist exponent—as producer and narrator of the program. Pear-
son approached the subject with customary disdain for the Arabs.
In his presentation of the Arab side of the question, Pearson’s
commentary and footage almost exclusively emphasized Palestinian
preparations for war, with repeated references to fedayeen identifica-
tion with revolutionaries of Communist countries, and Arab backward-
ness. Many less feet of film on guerrilla training and more on the
conditions that had existed for the refugees for over twenty years, with
appropriate commentary, would have been more informative. As for
the backwardness, his scenes followed the rampant Hollywood stereo-
typed image of the Arab as an uncivilized, unwashed, camel-riding,
illiterate bedouin in the desert. (The bedouins, incidentally, constitute
no more than 5 percent of the total Arab population.)
The Israelis, in contrast, were depicted as technologically well
advanced and strongly desiring peace. Unmentioned was the fact that
the only peace treaty the Tel Aviv government sought was one that
would have enabled her to keep her captured land intact at the expense
of Arab territorial rights and Palestinian self-determination. Nothing
was said of the essential role of private “‘charitable,”’ tax-deductible
dollars supplied by world Jewry in supplementing European techno-
logical skills.
Pearson’s narration about child life in the bomb shelters of Israeli
kibbutzim was touching, but his sympathetic approach did not extend
Slanting the Myth-Information 285
to the Arab refugee child living for years in flimsy tents under unimag-
inable conditions of poverty and privation.
The Pearson allegation that the Israelis were inferior in military
equipment to the Arabs was his ultimate distortion. Nothing could
have been further from the truth at the time. It was generally accepted
that the Israelis possessed the military capability to overrun the entire
Arab world with no difficulty whatever. They possessed the entire
range of defensive and offensive weapons of the most up-to-date de-
sign, while the Arabs, although rearmed after 1967, still only pos-
sessed weapons of a defensive nature whose quality was at best ques-
tionable.
Despite a reputation for presenting more balanced, fuller, and
generally less simplistic coverage of issues and events, even public
television and educational broadcasting falls by the way when the
Arab-Israeli situation appears on the horizon.
National Educational Television seemed ready to make an excep-
tion when it announced in May 1970 its network presentation of ‘“The
Advocates,” a two-part special featuring debate on U.S. support for
Israel. Participating in the program were Professor Roger Fisher, who
argued against further support, and his pro-Israel Harvard Law School
colleague, Allan Dershowitz, who presented the affirmative viewpoint
Hopes of an impartial show were scuttled from the outset by the
history of the conflict presented by film clips, playing upon the Nazi
persecution and shaded in this manner (italics added):
1939 . . . World War II brings Hitler's vicious campaign of genocide. Six
million Jews are murdered. For most Jews fleeing Europe there 1s no refuge except
Palestine... .
1947... The U.N., over Arab protests, decides to partition Palestine into
separate Jewish and Arab states.
May 14, 1948... . Israel proclaims its independence . . . ina matter of hours
it is attacked by Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The Israelis defeat
the Arab forces. More than half a million Arab Palestinians leave their homes.
1949... Contrary to agreement, Jordan occupies parts of Jerusalem, denying
Jews access to their Holy places.
1956... President Nasser of Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, blocking
Israel's shipping through the Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel, with British and
French support, launches a surprise attack across the Suez penninsula to the
Canal and the Gulf. After a truce, Israel is persuaded to withdraw from the Sinai
under assurances that she will have access to the Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba,
and that a U.N. peacekeeping force will be moved into the Sinai.
May 1967... As Arab terrorist activities from Syria become more vicious,
286 THE COVER-UP
Israel threatens drastic reprisal. Egypt mobilizes troops in the Sinai. Nasser
orders the U.N. peacekeeping group out and once again moves to block
Israel’s shipping.
June 6, 1967 .. . Diplomacy fails to open the Gulf of Aqaba. Israel again
strikes at Egypt in the Sinai. Jordan and Syria attack Israel. In a six-day war
Israel defeats all Arab forces. Israel occupies the Sinai, etc.
If this constituted an objective, impartial recital of the facts leading to
the 1970 crisis, then the words ‘‘objective” and “impartial” should be
taken out of Webster’s dictionary.
The four occasions on which Victor Palmieri, the moderator, in-
terrupted during the first Sunday evening’s program clearly indicated
how neutral he was. He broke in on Palestinian Abu Omar during the
heated Dershowitz cross-examination to help the Israeli protagonist by
stating, ‘‘Isn’t it true Palestine as such was never a national state?’ He
did not permit Abu Omar to reply to this, and interrupted him to
repeat: “‘Isn’t it true it was never a Palestinian state? Why isn’t it true,
then, that it [the conflict] is just as much a movement for the national
liberation for the Israelis as it is for Palestinians?”
After Professor Fisher finished his interview of Nasser, Palmieri
queried: ‘‘Mr. Fisher, if Egypt loses she survives. If Israel loses, she is
destroyed. Wouldn’t it be a reasonable first step for the Arabs to
pledge control over the Palestinian commando terrorist acts and then
seek the pledge that you want from Israel, a pledge of withdrawal?”
In June 1977 Public Television presented the first of four James
Michener “visual” essays, ‘Israel: A Search for Faith,” produced by
the Reader’s Digest Association. The famed author, a strong protago-
nist for Israel and equally anti-Palestinian, ludicrously presented Israel
as a land of faith, although more than 60 percent of its population was
either atheistic or agnostic.
In the film Michener continually misled his viewers not only by
invariably using Zionism, the nationalist movement, interchangeably
with Judaism, the faith, but by conveniently substituting the country
Israel for the people of Israel. He equated Hebrew, Israelite, Judean,
Jew, and Israeli as one, so as to draw a continuity for Jews from 2000
B.C. to date. Everyone watching Michener was led to believe there has
always been an Israel, and by implication that the Zionists have every
right to hold onto this land. But in fact, aside from the 250-odd years
the Kingdom of Israel existed in the 8th century B.c., there was no
entity called Israel in the Middle East until 1948.
To boot, the photography placed emphasis on what Israel had
done with its land, but showed in no way how the holy city of Jerusa-
Slanting the Myth-Information 287
lem, surrounded by Israeli high-rises, has lost much of its spirituality.
This hour-long presentation was effective Zionist political propa-
ganda, all the more so because it was provided the subtle tonings of
skilled causist Michener.
Educational TV could not ignore the controversial 1975 U.N.
resolution on Zionism and racism, which had much of the nation in an
uproar. New York’s Channel 13 began its coverage in a detached
enough manner: cameras followed the voting to the end, recording the
decision of every member state. The station then relayed the speeches
of Chaim Herzog, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N.; Dr. Fayez Sayegh,
speaking on behalf of Kuwait and the Arab bloc; and U.S. Ambassador
Daniel P. Moynihan—in that order. The Israeli and American
speeches, both of which denounced the resolution in near-hysterical
terms, ran a combined total of twenty-six minutes, as compared to the
nine minutes accorded to Sayegh.
These speeches were followed by the Robert MacNeil Report
(now the MacNeil-Lehrer Report), which presented a panel of “‘spe-
cialists” to “analyze” the outcome of the vote. The panelists were all
Zionist-oriented. Freelance journalist Anthony Astrachan called the
resolution an “obscenity.” The other panelists—Charles Maynes, Jr.,
from the Carnegie Endowment; Professor Anthony Gaglione, political
scientist from East Stroudsburg State College in Pennsylvania; and
James Leonard, President of the U.S. Association for the U.N.—joined
together in a continuous chorus of outrage against the U.N. resolution.
“Moderator” MacNeil was no less restrained.
In the fall of 1976 ABC’s ‘Accent On”’ program had a one-hour
presentation (aired on two successive Sundays) in which six panelists
discussed the Arab boycott of Israel. Out of the six, three were officers
of the United Jewish Appeal and the American Jewish Committee, one
was the son of the leading Zionist lobbyist in Washington, and the fifth
was a Jewish law professor. Time was demanded under the Fairness
Doctrine to present another viewpoint, and after several telegrams,
phone calls, and two meetings, it was reluctantly granted.
Six weeks later, the perpetually active Dr. Mehdi and I were
finally given a half hour. In 7V Guide, the New York Times, and New York
Post the program was listed as an ‘‘Arab Perspective of the Arab Boy-
cott.” It was obviously ABC’s hope that the potential audience would
react: “Well, who’s interested in an Araé perspective of the Arab boy-
cott.”
At the first opportunity I let the audience know that I was present-
ing an American perspective, explaining why it was vital to the economy
288 THE COVER-UP
of the U.S. that the antiboycott legislation be defeated.3?
My point was clearly made, much to the chagrin of moderator Bob
Lape and producer Carrie Van Zile. But the last word was theirs. As
our program ended, the station played an advertisement for Leon
Uris’s QB VII (starring Ben Gazzara and Leslie Caron), which was
shortly to appear on ABC. And the illustrations for this advertisement
were a minute of Nazi concentration camps! Anti-anti-Semitism was
intended to blanket out any effect the presentation of the third point
of view on the Middle East conflict, the American, might have had.
When network or local television feels pressed hard enough to
make some display of fair play, invariably an Arab League representa-
tive or an Arab Ambassador is dug up to balance a raft of pro-Israel
appearances, because even if his presentation should happen to be
good, it can be totally discounted as coming from someone with an axe
to grind. This was true when Arab League Ambassador Amin Hilmy
was pitted in 1976 on WNET’s MacNeil-Lehrer Report against Anti-
Defamation League Chairman Seymour Graubard in New York and
Congressman James Scheuer in Washington, plus moderator MacNeil,
in a discussion of the Arab boycott.33 The fact that many Muslim and
Arab firms were on the boycott list, whereas Jewish companies were
doing business in the Arab world, was totally obfuscated behind
charges of anti-Semitism.
When an American anti-Zionist does manage to fight his way onto
educational TV, the scales are tipped heavily in his opponent’s favor.
A classic example was the November 29, 1975, program of William
Buckley’s ‘Firing Line,’’ on which I debated the Zionism resoluuon
with Paul Riebenfeld, Co-Chairman of the Public Affairs Committee of
the Zionist Organization of America.34 From the very outset, Buckley
bent over backwards to assist Riebenfeld in strengthening his argu-
ments against mine. At one point Buckley cautioned a flustered Rie-
benfeld, “‘Don’t be so defensive. I’m on your side.” Our host’s bias was
further demonstrated by his quiet deference to the Zionist leader’s
lengthy harangues extolling Zionist policy, including the Israeli treat-
ment of the occupied Arab territories, in contrast to Buckley’s constant
interruptions, bordering on outright hostility, whenever I managed to
get a word in edgewise. In one memorable exchange, Buckley tried to
discredit my position by asking if it was not true that Israel had accom-
plished far more during its twenty-eight years of existence than the
Arabs had done in 2,000 years.
Buckley’s careful manipulation of time in favor of Riebenfeld, and
his shrewd interjections, served to reinforce the prevailing Zionist-
Slanting the Myth-Information 289
induced image that Israel is sacrosanct. On any other issue, this irre-
pressible iconoclast, who had been more than fair to me on a previous
occasion, would have deemed such onesidedness unforgivable. But
when Israel is on the stand its halo must be preserved at all costs.
Israel’s glowing image stems in part from the work of journalists
writing from Israel. The International Press Institute at Zurich, in its
very complete survey of 1970 ‘“‘News from the Middle East,”’ made the
following observation, quoting an American correspondent (and be-
cause of the sensitivity of the subject the name of this correspondent
was withheld, as were the names of all others quoted in this report):
“Most correspondents in Israel are won over by the Israelis because
of the little state’s valiant struggle for existence, and they give little
emphasis to the bleaker side. For example, one seldom reads about
sub-standard living conditions, exorbitant prices, black markets, inefh-
cient and insulting municipal workers, discrimination against Israeli
Arabs and the lack of religious devotion except among the small ortho-
dox minority. Instead we get a picture that is all ‘milk and honey.’ ”
This carefully nurtured blackout of Israeli defects, this “missing infor-
mation,” contrasts vividly to the widespread myth-information per-
sonified in the ‘‘desert recaptured” theme.
While it was Israel that launched the combined air, land, and sea
assault on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on the morning of June 5, 1967,
it was several days before the American public was told who had
attacked whom. Many Americans still believe that the Egyptians started
the war, because the media so grossly and repeatedly exaggerated
Nasser’s threats. Very few stories of Arab suffering appeared in the
American media. The horrible ordeal of Egyptian soldiers cut offin the
desert, forced to march for miles barefooted under the blazing sun and
dying in their tracks, if not already strafed by Israeli aircraft, was only
portrayed in one brief Life magazine account. Totally ignored was the
destruction of the cities of Suez and Ismailia, where virtually every
important building was leveled, forcing out a population of more than
100,000.
There were countless examples of ‘distortion through omission”
during the reportage of the October 1973 war. As in 1967, the airwaves
were incessantly filled with the Israeli version of what was taking place.
Foreign Minister Abba Eban was heard, Golda Meir was quoted verba-
tim, Moshe Dayan was paraphrased. CBS’s Providence outlet stated it
was in close touch with both Arab and Israeli Missions at the U.N., then
proceeded to present interviews with two Israelis. Monitoring of some-
thing like forty news programs far into the night on the Saturday of
290 THE COVER-UP
the attack and on Sunday morning revealed that there was not a single
radio station that failed to mention that the “attack had taken place on
Yom Kippur, when Israelis were in the crowded synagogues.” Simi-
larly, not one program mentioned that this was also Ramadan, the
month in which Muslim Arabs do not eat or drink, observing a strict
fast from sunup to sundown. And Muslims have a far higher degree of
religiosity than their Israeli counterparts. The media promptly called
it the “Yom Kippur war.”
Americans who are cognizant of this double standard and dis-
tressed by the pro-Israel bias in the media find it difficult to get their
views in print. Their principal outlet is, of course, the Letters to the
Editor column, long recognized as an important part of the American
media and certainly an essential part of our democratic forum. Even
in rural and small urban areas, there is evidence that this forum also
falls prey to the scarcely believable Zionist control.
After many unsuccessful attempts, Grace Kerrish finally saw one
of her letters, critical of Zionism, printed in the Chippewa Herald Tele-
gram of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin (population 12,000).35 Hers was a
Pyrrhic victory; an editor’s note appeared in the same issue, alleging
that her letter contained ‘“‘factual untruths.”’ The editor repeated the
hackneyed Zionist propaganda that the Israelis requested the Palestine
Arabs not to flee but to remain in their homes, and he further flatly
declared that “it was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the
Arabs are already in the Russian fold.”
This was by no means an isolated instance. Dr. John N. Booth,
who daily studied the Letters column in the /ndependent Press Telegram
of Long Beach, California, encountered similar hostility when he wrote
a letter of protest to Editor William W. Broom.*¢ In his letter Booth
complained of a “prejudiced selection of letters to the editor,” noting
“there appears to be a definite effort to keep out non-Zionist or criti-
cal-of-Zionist communications.”’ Booth made reference to subtle Zion-
ist pressures on “‘newspapers, clergymen, writers, and others,” and
suggested that ‘“‘a newspaper should be the first to expose and con-
demn this.”
In three curt sentences Editor Broom dismissed the matter: ‘‘Let-
ters expressing opinions on issues and events meet our criteria for the
editorial page. Letters complaining about beastly remarks from those
disagreeing do not. The space is simply not ample to handle the airing
of personal vendettas, and I doubt many readers would be interested
in the denouement.”
One would like to admire such decisiveness had it come from an
ed
Slanting the Myth-Information 291
objective editor. But Booth’s study of the paper’s letters to the editors
over an eighteen-month period revealed that letters ‘complaining
about beastly remarks’’ did appear regularly. One Samuel Whitman,
a frequent ‘‘correspondent” to the Long Beach paper, had been cer-
tainly successful in venting his spleen against sympathizers with the
Arabs. In one letter he singled out eminent historian Dr. Arnold Toyn-
bee for “‘uttering the most ridiculous nonsense.”’ In another, he ex-
pressed his chagrin that the U.S. did not tell Nasser to “go drink
seawater.”
Booth’s study showed that in one eight-week period alone, five
slanted Zionist letters from other writers were published. One lone
communication, correcting some falsehoods in one of the five polemi-
cal letters, was allowed to appear on the other side of the issue.
In the course of his study Booth paid close attention to the paper’s
standards of selection and decided that superior literary skill or in-
sights were hardly the criteria for determining the type of letters ap-
pearing in the newspaper. The majority of letters, he reported, “‘re-
wrote history, defamed the Arab peoples, or were sheer propaganda
efforts.” Booth noted that one letter (October 8, 1969) defending
Israel’s seizure of all Jerusalem, despite U.N. condemnation, was
signed by ‘‘Joel Moskowitz.”’ Investigation proved that the author of
the letter was a 15-year-old boy. His father, Dr. Irving Moskowitz, was
a known writer of letters to editors. Shortly thereafter (December 12,
1969), the parent himself was published again by the paper’s editors
in a letter charging that the Arabs ‘‘have terrorized the United States”
and, according to Booth, offered other curious views of Middle East
events.
Booth discovered that editorial approval even extended to letters
from apparently phony organizations. A Rev. M.F. Carlsgaard of Para-
mount, California, signed his anti-Arab letter, “President, Christian
Ministers to Prevent Communist Domination in the Middle East.”
Booth’s inquiry of the local representatives of the National Council of
Churches brought this reply: ‘“This group is unknown to our clergy
associates.”’ Further investigation failed to locate this group, but it had
been honored with space by the /ndependent Press Telegram.
The Unitarian minister’s study concluded:
There is an almost rhythmic publication of Zionist letters. On the other hand,
it is easier to drive a camel through the eye of a needle than to persuade the
Long Beach editors to publish a carefully researched letter that is less than
congratulatory of Israel’s position. The few exceptions deserve a nod for
292 THE COVER-UP
tokenism. Letter after letter, from knowledgeable writers, interpreting the
Middle Eastern situation from the non-Zionist side, moderately, thoughtfully
and concisely, disappear into the maw of the local editorial page office never
to see print. Two young students, Roger Malstead and Nancy Gallagher, who
have lived in the Middle East and are leaders of the American Students for
Justice in Palestine at UCLA, dramatize the newspaper’s prejudices. Their
thoroughly documented letter to the /ndependent Press Telegram detailing correc-
tions for errors in two published letters by Israeliphiles Eleanor Stein and Sol
Rankel never saw print. The anti-Arab mis-statements in the local paper by
Stein and Rankel sull stand.
Illustrative of the kind of treatment the Letters to the Editor
column too often receives, on June 7, 1977, the Washington Post”
printed under the heading “Israel Today: The Election, The Pres-
sures” four vehement pro-Begin, pro-Zionist letters from Jack S.
Cohen (Rehovot, Israel), Steven Mispsick (Washington, D.C.), Mark
Klein (Jerusalem), and Joseph B. Axelman (Alexandria, Virginia). And
the illustration appearing in the center for this three-columned spread
of Zionist letters was the flag of Israel—this in the leading paper in the
capital of the United States.
Editorials are of course opinionated by nature, leaving the reader
the option of agreeing or disagreeing. But the reader seldom exercises
this option when confronted with firsthand accounts written in vivid “I
was there, you better believe it’ terms. Charles S. Gregg, a private
American citizen reporting on his brief trip to the Middle East for the
Sunday News of Ridgewood, New Jersey, wrote what he saw through
Zionist-tinted glasses. For all his readers knew, he was demonstrating
a flair for accurate observation when he wrote:
It did not take long to discover that the entire populace [of Egypt]—cab
drivers, hotel clerks, policemen, shopkeepers, etc.—had found their escape
from Egypt’s abject social and economic misery through a fanatical hatred of
Israel as the cause of all its ills, including Uncle Ahmed’s toothache and
yesterday’s bad weather. The people have been so propagandized by wily Arab
dictators like Nasser intent on making them forget social injustice through
anti-Semtism.3®
This was his comment on Israel: ‘‘All the Greggs were deeply
moved by our five days in this miraculous nation. Israel’s miracle is that
it exists although for 20 years surrounded by hostile forces which
thrice have been thwarted in invasion attempts—and still fantastic
internal progress has been attained.” By printing this piece, the Sunday
News had bestowed upon Gregg the trappings of authoritativeness,
when in fact the writer was merely a tourist giving a highly subjective
a
Slanting the Myth-Information 293
and one-sided account of the areas he visited.
The press can use any number of pretexts for mounting some
form of fanfare for Israel or against the Arabs. The Boston Globe in 1973
on the back page of its first section under the heading RELIGION, ““The
Jewish People—40 Centuries Strong,” had an article six columns long
distributed by the United Press. No objective observer could ever
claim this was a news story, let alone one dealing with religion. It
belonged, if anywhere, on the editorial page. Under the byline of Lewis
Cassels, the propaganda started: “For more than 4,000 years a variety
of enemies with a variety of motives have tried to exterminate the
remarkable people who call themselves Jews.”
Support for Israel—both financial and moral—always peaks when
Israel is at war with the Arabs. In the aftermath of the October 1973
war, while I was on a speaking engagement in Salt Lake City, Utah, I
was not surprised to see a fervent ‘‘Aid-Israel’’ campaign developing
in the local press. Salt Lake City’s Jewish community of some fifty
families was small but powerful.39 In the Sunday Edition of the Salt
Lake Tribune, the United Jewish Council made the front page with its
boxed-off announcement of a community rally to ‘demonstrate the
Salt Lake Jewish community’s solidarity with Israel.’ On the back page
of this same section, a full-length column appeared under the heading
“Our Fight,” then ‘Fund Rally Slated to Aid Israel.’’ The entire article,
empathizing with the Israelist cause, carried this statement of the
Chairman of Salt Lake City’s Jewish Council:
The sympathy of non-Jews has been forthcoming. Salt Lake City is distin-
guished by a lack of anti-Semitism. I think the litde man is on the side of the
Israelis. It's just the governments who play politics... . There is little fear that
the Arab oil will determine American support. Only about 5% of American
energy is supplied by the Arabs.*°
The front page of this important Sunday edition ran a two-
column, six-inch picture of Israeli mothers “searching through photo-
graphs made available by foreign film crews for photos of sons who are
reported missing,” with a prominently placed two-column story,
“Missing Israelis? Film Provides Kin Clue.’’ There was nothing to
indicate that Arab mothers counted for anything or that the Arabs were
also human. Here in Salt Lake City, the capital of the Mormon world,
one not only encountered avid sympathy for Israel based on myth and
misinformation, but also the Mormon propensity to favor Israel be-
cause their theology, as set forth in the Book of Mormon, views the
Israeli return as part of prophecy. The followers of this religion con-
294 THE COVER-UP
sider themselves to be the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
However slanted the Salt Lake Tribune was, far more distorted were
the columns that appeared syndicated in that city’s Deseret News, which
is owned by the church. One was a General Features syndicated article
by Jim Fiebig, ‘Arabs Can Keep Oil,” including the following:
It’s blackmail—but things aren’t all that dark. The United States depends on
the Arabs for no more than 6% of its oil and Federal officials say we could
offset this by turning our thermostats down one degree and squeezing more
production from domestic wells. Let's start turning and squeezing. What the
Arabs have suggested with their dirty little game is that America’s commitment
to its friends goes no deeper than an oil well.*!
There has never been a shortage of excuses for trumpeting Israel.
In December 1968 the Denver Post brought out an eight-page supple-
ment on the country at a time when Executive City Editor Robert
Pattridge was on a trip to Israel sponsored by the United Jewish Ap-
peal. The supplement contained such objective headlines as ‘‘Israel
Progressiveness Draws Immigrant Flow’’ . . . ‘Israelis Have ‘Nowhere
to Run’”.. . “Bitter Battle Remembered—Golan Heights Quiet”
... ‘Arab Has Freedom in Israel” . . . “UJA Director Believes Jewish
Appeal Aid Vital” . . . ‘Denver Helps Build Dollar Bridge to Aid
Israel.”’
When all-expense trips were not arranged, the Zionists were pro-
viding inexpensive visits by the media. Broadcasting magazine carried
an advertisement by the American Zionist Federation announcing a
“Media Tour of Israel for Editors-Writers.’’42 At an inclusive cost of
$331, ““TV Radio and News and Program Directors and Commenta-
tors’ were given a ten-day in-depth study tour and were introduced to
their counterparts and to top Israeli personalities.*3
News slanting by the press, along with presenting a plethora of
“‘myth-information,” has been as true in smaller urban areas as in the
largest cities. On the basis of a lengthy study of Middle East coverage
during the year 1975 by the Sacramento Bee in California’s capital,
Ombudsman Thor Overson admitted the correctness of the judgment
of Mary Bisharat, herself the wife of a displaced Palestinian and an
acknowledged Palestinian advocate, that her hometown paper had
taken on an ‘“‘anui-Arab, pro-Israel image.’’4+ The detailed Bisharat
study did not suggest the entire Bee coverage was distorted, but rather
that it failed in its incompleteness and was faulted by insensitive
editing.
The Bisharat critique covered four categories: charges of Israeli-
EE ee
Slanting the Myth-Information 295
centered reporting; the unreported; the underreported; illustrations,
including pictures. Cutting across the categories was the coverage of
the wire service report of July 31, 1975, that Israel had built up a
stockpile of ten atomic weapons. The Bee played the story on page 3
and gave it five inches—many major dailies played it on page one—
with the headline “‘Israel’s A-Bomb Hoard?” Three months earlier the
Bee had quoted Egyptian President Anwar Sadat saying that if Israel
added nuclear weapons to its arsenal, so would Egypt. The head on
that story was quite different. It ranged over a three-column spread,
reading: “Sadat Rattles Atomic Sword at Israelis.”
Of the seven packets of newspaper clippings for 1975 in the Bee
library on the Mideast concerned strictly with the Israel-Arab conflict,
five are indexed “‘Israel.”’ This suggests that the conflict was seen, even
if subliminally, from the Israel point of view. (The Ombudsman placed
the blame on wire service coverage but admitted “it could involve
selection, editing of the wire report, and Bee processing.’’45) For that
year there were 173 articles on the war indexed “Israel,” against 41
found in the packet labeled “Palestinians.” One story carried the head-
line: “Israel May Have Big Oil Deposit.”” Bisharat noted: “The deposit
is in land occupied by Israel and therefore not Israel’s but under siege.
The deposits are in Ramallah in Palestinian land, sixteen miles north-
west of Jerusalem.”
The January 12 headline was ‘‘Palestinian Guerrillas Ambush Is-
raelis.” The story described how Israelis shelled three Lebanese vil-
lages with mortars and systematically destroyed crops there. Bisharat:
“For those readers who do not get beyond the headline, quite another
picture is created by ‘Palestinian Guerrillas Ambush Israelis.’ ”
In reporting the Sinai withdrawal, a headline reads: “Israel Loses
Territory,” not “Egypt Regains Territory.” Again, the story and head-
line are seen exclusively from the Israeli point of view.
On July 14 the story was: “Israeli Planes Go On Attack; Enemy’s
2-Hit Claim Denied.” ‘“‘Whose enemy?” asked Bisharat. “‘Is it so firmly
implanted in us who the ‘enemy’ is? Have we been so conditioned we
accept Israel’s ‘enemy’ as our ‘enemy’? It would be an appropriate
headline in the Jerusalem Post but not in the Bee.”’
In reporting the Mideast arms buildup, no reference is found to
Israeli weapons in headlines. For Israeli reports on the Arabs, the word
“arms”’ is employed October 19, November 6, and November 18.
In the headlines of twenty-three stories on the Israel-Lebanese
border crisis from January 5 through December |, fifteen begin with
“Israel,’’ two with the reference “Lebanon” or ‘‘Lebanese.’’ Of the
296 THE COVER-UP
same twenty-three, only four begin with “Arab’’—and two of these
employ the term ‘‘Arab Guerrillas.” There were no references in the
clips referring to Israeli ‘‘Guerrillas” or Israeli ““Terrorists.”’
Bearing out the Bisharat contention that references to Palestini-
ans were “‘all negative, pejorative,” Ombudsman Overson observed:
In 16 articles reporting conflict on the Israeli-Lebanese border, Israelis are
“Troops,” ‘“‘Commandos,” “Security Forces,’’ all neutral to positive terms.
References to Palestinians include ‘‘Guerrillas,” ‘“Infiltrators,” ‘‘Raiders,”’ all
negative to pejorative terms. Yasir Arafat is a ‘‘Guerrilla Chieftain.”
In Israel incursions-invasions into Southern Lebanon (12 were reported
from January to September) the reader rides along with Israeli “Commandos”
and ‘“Troops”’ as they “‘cross the frontier” or “‘slip across the border.”” There
are no “invasions,” no “incursions.”
Arab invasion-incursions are reported less delicately, and usually are told
from the Israeli point of view: July 18—‘‘Israel security forces today kill 3 Arab
Guerrillas who infiltrated.” September 18—Israeli soldiers killed a ‘‘raiding
party of 3 Palestinian guerrillas.”” And a story.on May 11: Israelis “‘crossed into
southern Lebanon in an anti-terrorist operation” during which Israelis ‘“‘cap-
tured five suspected guerrillas.”
Another image created by selective terminology was the November 22
wire service story reporting that Arab raiders were on a “‘head-hunting mis-
sion.”
On the unreported, Bisharat was quoted by the Bee as noting:
Journalists might be expected to be interested in censorship of the press. They
have been in India, yet the closing down of the chief daily newspaper in Arab
Jerusalem by Israeli authorities was not reported in the Bee.
In addition, there is a tendency to omit important development realities.
For one: The recognition by some in American Jewry that there is a “real
desire for peace in the Arab world.” The quote is from Israel Mowshowitz,
prominent New York rabbi, in commenting on a three-week tour of Egypt,
Syria and Lebanon, as well as Israel—a fact-finding tour encouraged by Repre-
sentative Lester Wolff. When a New York rabbi says that, by golly it is news,
and we should hear it. We did not.
Local U.S. newspapers are not alone in their devotion to Israel.
America’s best known weekly, Time magazine, gave a rousing salute to
Israel in an editorial March 16, 1970:
Israel is a democratic, modern, stabilizing force in a chaotic and brutally
backward corner of the world. The Israelis have created a nation and made the
desert bloom, thereby more than earning their right to national existence.
Israel needs U.S. support to survive, and if Israel were some day to fall, U.S.
interests would suffer.
Slanting the Myth-Information 297
The issue at that time, after the Israeli triumph in the six-day war, was
not whether Israel would be able to survive, but whether she would set
forth concessions she was willing to make in order to bring peace to
the area. With this glowing editorial Time only encouraged the Golda
Meir government to stand pat on its occupation of Arab lands and to
wait for its enemies to come and beg for peace.
Norman Cousins, founder of the original and new version of the
reputedly liberal*#® Saturday Review, was more explicit in stating the
editorial policy of his publication vis-a-vis the Middle East. In a letter
explaining his reasons for rejecting several article possibilities I had
submitted to him (‘‘Who Has Been Sending the Letter Bombs,” ““The
Creation of Israel Revisited’’), he replied bluntly, ““We will never pub-
lish anything that questions the right of Israel to exist.”
Meanwhile, Cousins’ publication had run three vigorously pro-
Israel pieces in the first seven months under its new format, to whit,
Rafael Rothstein’s ‘‘Undercover Terrorism—The Other Middle East”;
““Munich—Was it Worth It?” by the magazine’s editors; and in their
initial issue, a piece by Teddy Kollek, the Mayor of Jerusalem, ‘““Who
Owns Jerusalem?” Nor was there any subsequent change in direction
of its coverage (Cousins, at one point a quiet anti-Zionist who opposed
the creation of Israel, had somehow to square his escapism from Juda-
ism).
Katharine Graham’s Newsweek paid tribute to Israel in its issue of
November 24, 1975. Responding to the Zionism-equals-racism vote at
the U.N., the magazine attempted to explain Zionism in a dramatic
two-page spread entitled “The Birth of a Nation.”’ The authors of the
article—Angus Deming, Phyllis Malamud, and Lynn James—were
careful to include what they considered to be the Arab interpretation
of Zionism, thus achieving a balanced look to their explanation. Their
bias was discernible nonetheless. In describing the Arab point of view,
they noted that “because Israel is by definition a Jewish State, most of
its Arab residents regard themselves as second-class citizens.” (Italics
added.) Absent was any reference to Israel’s discriminatory policies
toward the indigenous Arab population on such matters as labor, land
ownership, and education or to the Law of Return giving Jews from
anywhere the right to become citizens, whereas Arabs who had lived
in the land for centuries had been forced out and are not permitted
to return. Included was this stock piece of Zionism:
Israel is their country—has, in fact, been so for 4,000 years—and sizable Jewish
communities have lived there throughout the centuries. The Zionist move-
298 THE COVER-UP
ment, in this view, aimed at restoring a moribund state, not at harming other
people. Zionists concede that Israel has an established religion, but note that
other countries do too. And they maintain that Arabs freely live, vote and take
office in Israel.
As the facts were presented, this Zionist explanation came across to the
readers as most reasonable.
The sympathy for Zionism was all too transparent. Whatever re-
straint the writers may have exercised in the name of objectivity was
overcompensated for by the layout of the article—complete with four
large pictures of Theodor Herzl, 19th-century Jewish settlers in Pales-
tine, Ben-Gurion, and Israeli troops at the Wailing Wall. Conspicu-
ously absent from the photo display were the victims of Zionism, the
Palestinian Arabs.
Benjamin D. Sherman in the Letters column of Newsweek July 4,
1977 disputed the magazine’s profile of Menachem Begin in its May
30 International issue, which blamed him for many atrocities including
the Deir Yassin killings and contended both that the village had “‘been
used by Arab forces as a base of operation” and that “prior warning
had been given to inhabitants to evacuate.” An editorial note (as
lengthy as the protesting letter) agreed with the letter writer, prepos-
terously stating that ‘“‘most contemporary scholars find no evidence
that the Irgun engaged in widespread or systematic atrocities and that
200 villagers had died in the ensuing battle between the Irgun and
Arab forces.” As for alleged ‘‘acts of rape and mutilation, both the
Arabs and the British had ample reasons for wanting to discredit the
Irgun.”
In answer to a protesting letter from Dr. J. Calvin Keene, former
head of the Religious Department at St. Lawrence University, that no
battle, but a massacre comparable to Lidice had taken place, Made-
leine Edmonson responded on August 19: ‘“There was no massacre.
And we’ll stand by the accuracy of that account.” To support her
position she cited “‘highly reputable reporters” A. J. Heckelman, au-
thor of American Volunteers and Israel’s War of Independence, Dan Kurz-
man, author of Genesis, both staunch Zionist apologists, and J. Bow-
yer Bell. The latter in his book specifically refers to the “massacre of
Deir Yassin” and the total abhorrence felt by the Haganah comman-
der,*” scarcely sustaining her contentions. The overwhelming weight
of evidence of the International Red Cross, the United Nations, Ben-
Gurion, the Chief Rabbi, Collins and Lapierre, Koestler, Kimche,
Levin, and others previously cited (see pages 153 to 158) was simply
Slanting the Myth-Information 299
dismissed by Newsweek as “anti-Jewish” propaganda.
The final word on this tragedy appeared on May 2, 1972 in the Tel
Aviv newspaper FYediot Aharonot, which carried a letter from an Israeli
who claimed to have been a Haganah officer:
I saw the atrocities committed. I saw corpses of women and children who were
cold-bloodedly murdered with bullets in their homes with no signs of fighting
or house explorations. From my experience I know there is no war without
killing and that not only soldiers get killed. I saw much in war, but I have not
seen such a thing as Deir Yassin. And that is why I cannot forget what hap-
pened there.
Far less subtle in its handling of articles dealing with Israel has
been New York magazine. From top to bottom this publication, prior
to the 1976 Murdoch takeover, was Jewish-Zionist owned, controlled,
and directed (Publisher Clay S. Felker; Editorial Directors Sheldon
Zalaznich, Byron Nobell, and Jack Nessel; Design Director Milton
Glaser, etc., etc.). This was reflected in the bias of the October 28,
1974, Tad Szulc New York magazine article ‘“The Inexorable Drift
Toward the Next Arab-Israeli War,” portraying Israel one year after
the “Yom Kippur” conflict as still “under siege” by Palestinian terror-
ists, while commemorating the anniversary of those killed in 1973. A
typical notice in the Jerusalem Post, announcing the unveiling of the
tombstone of one Raphi Unger, was reprinted in full in the article.
Senator Javits was attacked for not really being pro-Israel in fact be-
cause, according to this writer, he had labeled President Nixon’s al-
leged anti-Semitic remarks “irrelevant.”
It was no surprise to anyone for New York magazine to run a
four-page advertising supplement in the New York Times, the front page
of which was adorned by a large and evil caricature of Saudi Arabia’s
King Faisal with the bold, inflammatory caption, “Are you going to let
this man make you miserable?’’—this was at a time Secretary Kissinger
was trying to convince the Arabs of U.S. sincerity.
Well-known political author Richard Reeves*® poured forth in New
York magazine, ‘If Jews Will Not Be For Themselves, Who Will Be For
Them?” This hysterical plea for more Zionist information propaganda
noted that “if non-Jews have no idea how much the state of Israel
means to American Jews, that is a Jewish fault.”
When it concerns Israel or its leadership, magazines depart from
their typical format and television commentators forget their accus-
tomed deep and often embarrassing probing to indulge in ecstatic
elegies. Such was the introduction of The Saturday Evening Post (April
300 THE COVER-UP
1976) to an article on “The Palestinians” by former Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir: ‘‘A pioneer in the work that made a vigorous
productive nation out of barren desert asserts the rights of her people
to their native land” and the equally one-sided interview granted her
by Barbara Walters on the ABC $1 million, well-publicized news pro-
gram to which the former NBC commentator had just switched. The
otherwise tough, caustic interviewer presented easy, leading questions
to help the Zionist leader implant more propaganda.
Pictures have been exploited to arouse compassion for Israelis
and Jews. As an illustration, one need only refer to the tremendous
photographic publicity given to the nationwide Jewish demonstrations
protesting discrimination against Jews in the U.S.S.R. on the occasion
of the Moiseyev Ballet’s visit to this country in 1970. (In Seattle an
eight-column spread was given to a photo of the demonstrators.)
It so happened that about this same time a sizable demonstration
was launched against visiting Prime Minister Meir. As she was about
to address a large gathering of the United Jewish Appeal at the New
York Hilton, 200 militantly chanting protesters marched in front of the
ABC building across the street in a show of solidarity with the Pales-
tinian guerrillas. The picketers chanted, “‘No GIs to the Middle East”
and ‘Sixth Fleet—Keep Out.” This was quite an imposing turnout—
particularly so for the Israelists and Zionists attending the function.
They had seldom been the butt of such a well-organized protest in
their capital city. Yet not a single photo appeared in the New York
press of the demonstration.
While protests against Israel are ignored, the most minuscule
demonstrations against the Arabs get blown out of proportion in the
media, as happened on New Year’s Day 1975 when WPIX Channel 11
(New York) 10 o’clock news reported the following:
Fifteen members of the Jewish organization called ‘‘Save Our Israel” held a
noisy demonstration near the Lebanese Mission to the U.N. on East 76th
Street. The protesters say it is a myth that Jews came to Palestine in 1948 and
threw out the Arabs. They claim Lebanon and other Arab states helped create
the Palestinian refugee problem by encouraging them to leave Palestine. Now
they say the Arab states should take in the refugees. There was no comment
from the Lebanese.
This “news” commentary was based on a press release, sent out
by SOIL (Save Our Israel) and falsely captioned ‘‘Solidarity with the
Arab Refugees.’’49 The twelve-line mimeographed release gave no
indication of how many people would take part. As it happened, there
Slanting the Myth-Information 301
were exactly fifteen participants, engaged in “very dispirited, futile
picketing,” to use the words of the Lebanese Consul General.
It should not surprise anyone familiar with this media bias that
American book publishers are also one-sided in their presentation. As
I. F. Stone expressed it in “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident”, his
controversial article for The New York Review of Books, “finding an
American publishing house willing to publish a book which departs
from the standard Israeli line is about as easy as selling a thoughtful
exposition of atheism to the Osservatore Romano in Vatican City.’’5°
Although books are not burned as they were in Nazi Germany of 1933
to the tune of the “Horst Wessel Lied” or Chopin’s Funeral March, in
America the same end result—..e., forcing conformity to an imposed
pattern of thinking—has been achieved. The book burners of 1977
have discovered other means of destroying ideas, far more subtle and
more refined than using a common match. And the result has been
near-catastrophic.
The university and academically oriented firms and the smaller
publishers probably have the best record for fairness, but those ca-
tering to the mass American market have long abandoned impartial
representation. As with the media, the distortions take many forms.
The basic one is simply in the choice of books printed, promoted, and
sold. For example, while browsing through the bookstands in the
Tucson airport en route to Spokane during a 1971 lecture tour, I came
across several recently published paperbacks dealing with the Middle
East—all Zionist, of course—including Hammer and Sickle by Arie Eliev,
an Israeli writer, and Forged in Fury by Michael Elkins. The eye-catching
jacket of the latter book included a brilliant imprint of a Nazi flag into
the center of which had been plunged a knife topped by a Star of David
insignia. In bold type was printed: ‘“This is a book about Jews. When
you read it, you will understand the fiery heart that holds Israel to-
gether.”
Itis generally conceded that Americans purchase more books than
they actually read. Heavily illustrated books, in particular, usually get
only a quick glance. The illustrations are often selected and captioned
by the publishing house, which consequently has a chance to distort
the meaning of the text for readers who look only at the pictures. This
might explain the masterly use of illustrations in O Jerusalem!5! by Larry
Collins and Dominique Lapierre, authors of the bestseller, /s Paris
Burning?
One does not have to go beyond the dust jacket to learn the
opinions of the publisher, Simon and Schuster, if not of the authors.
302 THE COVER-UP
The comments, gauged to quickly woo potential Jewish purchasers,
begin with a slanted contrast:
The Jews: some of them descendents of the old rabbinical families that had
dwelt in Jerusalem for centuries—others the offspring of Zionism’s early pio-
neers who had come to Palestine to reclaim their lost homeland by sweat and
sacrifice; still others the remnant of the Six Million, trying to rebuild their
shattered existence in new surroundings.
The Arabs: resentful of what they felt to be an effort to seize a land they
believed theirs in the name of a crime they had not committed—the persecu-
tion of the Jews in the Christian West; driven to disaster by incompetent
politicians, deeding the world the seeds of a new tragedy in their refugee
camps.
Within this frame of reference the reader is introduced to the
struggle for the Holy City, and sympathies are naturally guided in the
direction in which the authors wish them to turn. One picture being
worth a thousand words, the authors very pointedly use their photo-
graphs, in conjunction with accompanying captions and explanatory
writing, to impart their kind of history. The selection of pictures, with
few exceptions, helps depict the Arabs as bloodthirsty renegades and
the Jews as a valiant people capable of enduring the most inhumane
suffering in order to fulfill their goals of a Jewish state. The photo-
graphs in O Jerusalem! from pages 388 to 404 serve as an excellent
example. “The Indomitable Architect of a Jewish State” is the Ben-
Gurion caption; “It was thanks largely to his foresight in preparing his
people for conflict with five Arab armies that the state of Israel was able
to survive the first critical weeks of its existence in May-June, 1948.”
As usual, it is always little Israel, always the senseless numbers game
instead of the quality, background, education, and support from the
outside that underlie the figures.
Golda Meir’s picture bears ‘‘Political Secretary of the Jewish
Agency in 1948—The Woman Whose Mission Saved the Nation. She
arrived in New York with ten dollars in her pocketbook and left a
month later with fifty million dollars.” Even pictures of lesser Zionist
personalities are invariably captioned with words of glowing praise.
The first Arab picture is headed “A Terrorist’s Harvest,” dealing
with ‘the cruel war in the streets of Jerusalem.” This is what is said
about the Arab leadership: ‘“The principal technician of the Arab at-
tacks was a thirty-year-old Palestinian Arab named Fawzi el Kutub, a
graduate of an SS commando course in Nazi Germany. On February
1, 1948, he succeeded in destroying the Palestine Post building with a
Slanting the Myth-Information 303
booby-trapped police truck.” And there are pictures of the buildings
he helped destroy in Jerusalem with bombs. Of another Arab leader,
whom they refer to “as the most effective one in 1948,”’ Abdul Khader
Husseini, these are his words: ‘We will strangle Jerusalem.”’ And this
is on the same page with a picture of Jews lining up for “Food for
Jerusalem’s Famished Jews—At a Terrible Price.” The story continues:
For weeks the city’s 100,000 Jews endured the ordeals of a siege, their meager
water ration distributed by tank truck, as illustrated above. Few convoys
managed to struggle past the Arab ambushes, while the Haganah strove to
claw a relief route, baptized the ‘Burma Road,” across the Judean Hills. Most
Jewish trucks, like the burning vehicle (below) fell victim to the Arab’s am-
bushes. Their rusted ruins (below) still stand along the highway to Jerusalem,
silent memorials to the sacrifices of the young men and women of the Haga-
nah, made to keep the Jews of the City of David alive.
Included in this particular group of pictures is the familiar one of
Ben-Gurion proclaiming the State of Israel on the afternoon of May
14, 1948, with a glowing caption so oft reiterated: ‘““The Accomplish-
ment of a 2,000-year-old Dream: The Rebirth of Israel.”” The Zionist
leader is shown at the head of a table surrounded by others in the
movement, proclaiming the beginnings of Israel. Above him is a pho-
tograph of Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism.
To heighten the contrast, the two photographs on the opposite
page (348) show a group of Arabs with guns in the act of seizing the
Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Etzion, the Haganah’s outpost south of the city.
And below them is a picture of Arab Legion Commander Major Abdul-
lah Tell with another officer, posed with ‘‘two of the four survivors of
the 150 Jewish men and women who had defended the kibbutz’s prin-
cipal settlement.”
On few subjects can anyone produce a group of photographs and
captions so carefully chosen to impart so slanted a view. Apparently
author Collins, who had represented the United Press in Beirut, had
been influenced by his coauthor Lapierre or his publisher had his way
with the photo section to make sure the Zionist story came through and
readers would not be offended by the book’s lurid, detailed description
of the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians.
Many successful books today do not simply “make it’’ on their
own. They become bestsellers when the publisher decides to make a
major commitment in advertising and promotion. Because few books
get this special promotion, a New York Times advertisement for If Israel
Lost the War, a so-called “documentary novel,’’5? is significant and
304 THE COVER-UP
worth comment. The simulated front-page story of June 9, 1967, de-
scribed the death and destruction wreaked by the Arabs as they rolled
over Israel, with King Hussein of Jordan giving instructions to “‘Kill all
the Jews!”’ This presentation from a respectable publishing firm (Cow-
ard-McCann) repeated aged Zionist propaganda that Arabs are fanat-
ical anti-Semites who wish to outdo Hitler by pushing all Israelis into
the sea. King Hussein’s actual words were altered and taken out of
context, as has been done time and time again to the statements of
other Arab leaders.55 This fictional documentary attempted to portray
Arabs as neo-Nazi fanatics. Published just after the public hangings in
Iraq, it was easier to pass off as credible.
But that was relatively mild. A much more high-pressure case
involved the publication by Simon and Schuster in 1971 of Red Star
Over Bethlehem, by self-styled Middle East ‘‘expert”’ Ira Hirschmann. To
begin with, the book was widely advertised. Both the New York Times
and Commentary referred to the author as an “international mediator
and State Department emissary.”” When Middle East Perspective ran an
open letter as a full-page Times advertisement on the day that President
Nixon took office, every ‘‘1” dotted in the ad and every “‘t’”’ crossed was
meticulously checked for accuracy by the 7imes prior to publication.
But Hirschmann’s claims, which also appeared on the book’s jacket,
were never investigated by the paper.
Thirteen years earlier the now defunct Look magazine had fea-
tured an article by Ira Hirschmann, “The Case of the Missing Arab
Refugees,” in its September 17, 1968 issue. The article accused the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of “supporting
nonexistent Arab refugees with U.S. tax dollars.”” Unsubstantiated
charges of the misuse of funds in the publication of “anti-Israel and
anti-Jewish hate propaganda” were intermixed with Hirschmann’s
other allegations. The publication was timed to coincide with the U.N.
consideration of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and the new budget for
UNRWA, which had just published an effective photo pamphlet,
“Twice in a Lifetime,” dealing with the latest exodus of Palestinians.
In the aftermath of Hirschmann’s outrageous article, Look maga-
zine was inundated with letters noting that indeed the Arab refugees
do exist and that their plight is a dire one, as well as challenges to
publish the other side of the problem. The response of Look was to run
six letters, four of which took issue with Hirschmann and two that
defended his viewpoint. But the last word was given to a letter from
Hirschmann himself, in which he noted that he had written the report
on the refugees in an office and with the help of a secretary loaned him
Slanting the Myth-Information 305
by the American Embassy in Beirut in accordance with instructions
from Washington ‘to provide me with cooperation and facilities.”
That was not the end of the Hirschmann article. It contained so
many errors and distortions that UNRWA, which had been looking
after the humanitarian aspects of the Palestine Arab refugees, issued
a statement through its New York office to the press, which said in part:
The 180,000 children who attend UNRWA/UNESCO schools every day cer-
tainly exist, and so do the 113,000 children who drink a glass of UNRWA milk
daily, and the 46,000 young children who daily eat a hot meal provided by
UNRWA. The inhabitants of UNRWA camps, for whom water and sanitation
services are provided, also exist.
All these services, by their very nature, cannot be provided for non-
existent persons. Together they account for two-thirds of UNRWA’s expendi-
tures.
Hirschmann had sought to give himself credentials as an expert,
alleging he had worked for UNRWA. Dr. John Davis, former UNRWA
Commissioner-General, in a letter to Look Editor William B. Arthur
had this to say:
As a matter of fact, Mr. Hirschmann’s only connection with UNRWA was that
of consultant (without remuneration) for fundraising during part of the World
Refugee Year, a position he held from October 1960 to April 1961. Mr.
Hirschmann was employed on this basis because he contended that he had
wide contacts in terms of potential sources of funds within the United States.
I regret to add that he never succeeded in raising any funds whatsoever. [Italics
added.]
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Zionist
tactics that Hirschmann never had been given any assignment by the
State Department, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs Robert J. McCloskey revealed:
Ira Hirschmann says he received a ‘‘commission” to do a survey of the refugee
problem. That statement is incorrect. Hirschmann was received at his request
at the State Department, prior to and following his trip to the Middle East, but
at no, repeat no, point was he given any assignment or “commission” from the
State Department. The views presented in his article, therefore, are his own
and do not represent the position of the State Department.54
Both the ads and the jacket asserted that Hirschmann was the only
American Jew to have been granted an exclusive interview with the late
President Nasser. C. L. Sulzberger of the Times, Eric Rouleau, and this
writer had interviewed the U.A.R. leader on several occasions. When
306 THE COVER-UP
this was pointed out to the publishers, they replied that they were
“objective and responsible” and apologized for “the oversight on the
part of the advertising agency for preparing that copy.”’ But no public
retraction was made and the harm had been done.
American publishers have almost invariably refused to publish
books not written from a pro-Israeli standpoint. General Sir John
Glubb, the internationally known and respected Englishman who com-
manded Jordan’s Arab Legion, has written numerous books about the
history of the Arabs and about the current crisis. He has unique knowl-
edge of and experience in the Middle East, but while Hodder and
Stoughton, his distinguished London publishers, have usually found
American outlets for his historical works, no American publisher will
touch those books that are critical of Israel. When Sir John wrote about
topical issues, American publishers would not accept it. But General
Glubb’s biography of Muhammad was brought out in America by Stein
and Day of Chicago, Muhammad being a “‘safe”’ Arab, a “‘good”’ Arab,
a dead Arab.
The general cowardice is not confined to ‘“‘conservative”’ elements
in our society. The liberal community—otherwise so outspoken and
fearless when it comes to unpopular issues—has almost totally abro-
gated its responsibilities in this area. When Dr. Booth tried to place
his article, “How Free and Courageous Is the Liberal Church?” with
the official organ of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association,
The Journal of the Liberal Ministry, one of the editors told him they could
not publish it because it would create “‘unbearable dissention [sic]’’ in
ministerial ranks.
The Beacon Press, once so courageous and forthright but now
viewed in some quarters as a “paper tiger press,” has assiduously
avoided the hot seat. Without much contemporary validity, it still rides
the reputation for boldness achieved by Paul Blanchard’s exceedingly
critical books on Catholicism, the handiwork of an earlier brand of
editors. The spring 1972 book catalog abounded in safely analytical
books on all subjects: twenty-one on world affairs, twenty-seven on
national affairs, ten on general history, twenty-two on European his-
tory, and twenty on the Third World. But not one volume had been
published since 1957 on the powerful Zionist movement or the Middle
East imbroglio.
I know of two volumes, including one published in Great Britain,
which Beacon was offered, but the director rationalized his negative
decision on this vital political/religious matter in these words: ‘‘We
know the subject is delicate, sensitive, dangerous, and so we have to
Slanting the Myth-Information —_ 307
respect arguments made against bringing it out.”’ Yet this was the same
publishing house that received numerous accolades when it defied
various orders by publishing Senator Mike Gravel’s copy of The Penta-
gon Papers. Indeed, the Middle East/Zionist issue is the one that has
separated the men from the boys.
This kind of Zionist cover-up is aided even by so well-known an
author as James Michener, who advances Zionist ideas in The Drifters.
One of the epigraphs that heads each chapter states:
Following World War I, the countries of Europe absorbed 1,500,000 refugees.
Following the Greek-Turkish war, Greece absorbed 1,400,000 refugees
thrown out of Turkey. Following World War II, the countries had to adjust to
13,000,000 refugees. Following the Indian-Pakistan war, the two sides ab-
sorbed upwards of 15,000,000 refugees. But in the wake of the Arab-Israeli
war, the Arab countries prove themselves totally incapable of absorbing a few
hundred thousand refugees for which they were themselves largely to blame.®5
Michener, as a student of the Middle East who has visited there many
times, knew full well that it has never been a question of the Arab
countries being willing to absorb refugees, but rather the insistence of
the Palestinian Arabs on not being absorbed into the Arab countries
and having a country of their own.
In The Drifters the reader meets Yigal, the American, who chooses
to settle down in Israel with his pioneering parents rather than with
his wealthy grandparents in the States and who, as a lad of sixteen,
goes into the six-day war and proceeds single-handedly to dispose of
six Egyptian tanks. When he steps into a bar at Torremolinos, the
fun-loving, depraved young people there, of course, recognize him on
sight as the ‘‘great Israeli war hero.” An earlier Michener Look cover
story,°® “Israel: A Nation Too Young to Die,” was made of similar
cloth, featuring an attractive photograph of stone houses, which had
been built by Arabs before the Zionist colonization of Palestine had
ever begun, and of olive trees, planted and cultivated by Arabs for
centuries—all passed off as Israel’s “making the desert bloom.”
Even libraries have been affected. A visit a few years back to the
USIS Library in Tel Aviv showed how Uncle Sam’s own information
service exhibited its partiality toward Israel. The USIS Library con-
tained many outspoken Zionist authors and Zionist-oriented books,
including works by Ludwig Lewisohn, Nadav Safran, David Ben-
Gurion, Waldo Frank, James G. McDonald, Leon Uris (Exodus), James
Michener (The Source), Walter Lacquer, and others. A look in the card
catalog of the USIS Library in Beirut the same year did not produce
308 THE COVER-UP
one single book that could remotely be described as anti-Zionist in the
way the many books in Tel Aviv were pro-Zionist.
The Reader’s Digest, which has followed a predictable course in its
choice of articles on the Middle East conflict, provides a logical bridge
for any discussion of slanting in books and mass-circulation periodi-
cals. Not long after the creation of the Jewish State in 1948, the Digest
carried my article, ‘‘Israel’s Flag Is Not Mine.” But as the years passed
and the Digest began to see which way the flag was waving, its editors
soon los: all interest in even giving the other side a small piece of their
valuable territory. My first book, What Pre Israel?, published in 1954,
was considered for condensation at that time, and three staff editors
even did the necessary and difficult cutting. Then, suddenly, the pro-
ject was vetoed,®” and no condensation of that book or anything close
to it has ever appeared; the Digest had joined the club.
In 1968 the Digest carried the condensation of Lester Velie’s
Countdown in the Holy Land, a book that rivals Leon Uris’s Exodus in
dispensing myth-information about Israel. Countdown deals extensively
with the June war of 1967 and the events that brought the State of
Israel into being in !948. In the Digest condensation, the words ‘‘Pales-
tinian Arab refugees” do not appear once, but much attention is given
to the homeless survivors of the holocaust, put at the grossly exag-
gerated figure of more than a million. (The official figure of the 1946
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry was 226,000.)
In April 1969 the Digest found space for an article entitled “Jerusa-
lem: The Sacred City.” Its author, noted journalist John Gunther, calls
Jerusalem a “City of Peace” but fails to mention the numerous blown-
up and bulldozed houses that belonged to Arabs suspected of col-
laborating with the Fateh guerrilla movement. Israel’s ‘Muslim neigh-
bors invaded the little republic, determined to kill it off at birth,”
Gunther writes, without a word of reference to four previous months
of incessant warfare and terrorism carried out by Zionist terrorist
organizations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and by the Jewish
Agency’s regulars, the Haganah and the Palmach. The plight of the
Palestinian Arab refugees is totally ignored in Gunther’s article.
Cleveland Amory, who as a columnist and TV commentator has
specialized on society life and authored The Proper Bostonians, visited
Israel under the aegis of the Reader's Digest. In a complete departure
from the field in which his expertise lies, Amory wrote a piece entitled,
“Israel in Siege,” which was Little Israel and the Big Bad Arabs all over
again. People of Amory’s background, and Wasps in general, prefer to
regard Jews as belonging to a foreign state, as quasi-foreigners. Hence
Slanting the Myth-Information 309
support of Israel is an ideal way out for some prejudice against Jews
qua Jews.
The Digest has made a contribution to slanting in still another
direction. An almanac is supposed to be a reference book, presenting
the reader with an objective survey of facts and statistics. But the 1977
edition of the Reader’s Digest Almanac (published by W. W. Norton Co.)
contains outright Zionist propoganda masquerading as information. It
demonstrates a glaring lack of objectivity by the amount of space
assigned to each of the Arab states as compared to Israel and by the
distortions in the data itself. “Information” about Israel occupies four
columns, while “data” on Egypt and Syria together does not exceed
five columns. In the opening paragraph of the so-called profile on each
country, the editors betray their pro-Israeli basis. The following ex-
cerpts are direct quotes from the introductions to each section:
Israel Today: ‘“‘About the size of New Jersey, Israel is a small Middle
Eastern nation on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It is the only
nation in the world in which Judaism is the official religion. Most of the
people are the families of Jewish immigrants who came to their biblical
homeland in the past 50 years from Europe, Africa, Asia and America.
Surrounded by Arab nations that wish to destroy the Jewish state,
Israel has fought four wars for its existence since declaring its indepen-
dence in 1948. Its troops occupy over 25,000 square miles claimed by
Palestinian Arabs. The nation remains continually on the alert against
attack from its neighbors and spends two thirds of its national budget for
military preparedness.
Egypt Today: Egypt is the largest and most powerful of the Arab countries
of the Middle East. But it has lost four wars in the past three decades with
neighboring Israel, a Jewish State with a population only one-ninth the
size of Egypt’s.
Syria Today: A militant Arab state, Syria has joined in four wars in three
decades against its neighbor Israel.
Like other information aids, where the subject of Israel is con-
cerned, this volume also makes no mention of the vast sums of money
the tiny state receives from the U.S. and elsewhere. The problem of
the Palestinian refugees is acknowledged, but the editors avoid even
a hint of the truth—that the creation of Israel caused the native Pales-
unian inhabitants to flee or be driven from their homes and lands. Also
included in this section is mention of “the daring rescue of passen-
gers” at Entebbe. The operation is ridiculously described as ‘the most
dramatic development in international affairs in 1976” and is given
310 THE COVER-UP
almost as much space as the U.S. presidential debates.
In addition to the U.S., the only other part of the world cited in
another section for an “historical survey” is the Middle East area. The
period covered spans the centuries from 3200 B.c. to the present. Even
though it is presented as a chronology of developments, the pro-Israeli
slant is flagrant and obvious, as can be seen from the following ex-
cerpts:
1929—Arabs attack and kill Jews in Jerusalem, Palestine, in dispute over
Wailing Wall.
1948—First Arab-Israeli war: all of Israel’s Arab neighbors attack and attempt
to destroy new nation but Israel with help of military armament from U.S.
is able to drive back Arab forces.
1964—Palestine Liberation Organization founded by Arab nations to conduct
terrorist raids on Israel.
In the manuscript given by my publisher to the copy editor for a
thorough going-over prior to publication, I had expressed astonish-
ment that ‘‘such a magazine as the Digest with its wide circulation and
highly experienced staff should stoop to such a slanted presentation.”
Attached to this page when the editor’s work had been done was a note
shedding light on what certainly was a 100 million to one shot. She
informed me that she had served for five years (1968-72) as chief copy
editor of this very Almanac, but beginning in 1973 it had been free-
lanced. She had even graciously researched the 1972 edition to find
the following Israel section, which must be compared with “Israel
Today” and the chronology set forth above regarding the 1977 alma-
nac:
The politically conscious Arab elite opposed the national-home policy as
an obstacle to their independence, which they felt should follow logically on
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. As Jewish migration increased under the
pressure of Nazi German persectuion, an Arab rebellion caused Britain to
heed Arab objections by limiting Zionist immigration and land purchases
during WW II. But after the war Britain was forced to give in to the twin
pressures of its own desire to find a haven for Jewish survivors of Nazism and
a savage campaign of terrorism by Palestinian Jews. . . . The two most impor-
tant issues still blocking genuine peace in the area are the resettlement of
hundreds of thousands of displaced Arab refugees from Palestine and adamant
Arab refusal to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.5®
In the aftermath of the 1967 war, one publication that bore prom-
ise of a more balanced interpretation of events was Atlas. Although
published in the U.S., Atlas’s outlook was purportedly international
Slanting the Myth-Information 311
since its pages were devoted exclusively to translated excerpts and
summaries of the world press. Yet its selection of articles on the war,
and particularly its introductory explanations preceding each transla-
tion, left no room for doubt that its sympathies lay heavily in the Israeli
camp.
The lead article of the July 1967 issue, ‘“The Embattled Middle
East,” carried the subheading: ““The War Game that Went Wrong: The
Case of Keeping Israel Alive.” The comment introducing pieces from
the London Sunday Times and Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris) read: ‘With
a flash of gunfire, war had pitted the Arab world (nearly 100 million
people) against Israel (about 2.5 million people joined to build a
homeland on the soil of their ancient beginning.)” The French piece,
written by Jean Daniel, was described as “‘a most remarkable article
written on the eve of war on the importance—to mankind—of Israel’s
survival.”’ Articles by London Times correspondent David Holden®?
were to be included in this Atlas issue, according to prepublication
blurbs, but they were not. Judging from the November 19 piece that
Holden wrote in the Times, ‘‘Military Occupations Are Apt to Be Nasty
for the Occupied,” one could understand this omission from Atlas.
The war was scarcely over when the September 1967 issue of Adlas
carried four articles from the Arab-Israeli press, introduced under the
title “The Middle East: The Irony, the Anger” in this manner: “Peace
in the Middle East was far away, if in truth a lasting peace was possible.
Belligerent Arab leaders met in saber-rattling conferences. The Israe-
lis kept wide-awake on the long cease-fire lines.”
In October Atlas endeavored to bring Black America into a racist
onslaught on Nasser and the Arab world by means of a cover-featured
article: “Slaughter in Africa—Arabs Against Blacks,” a piece translated
from Stern, Hamburg. In its ‘“‘editorial’’ introduction, blame is placed
at the door of the U.A.R. leader for “the extermination in the Sudan
of thousands of negroes at the hands of Nasser’s puppet Arab lead-
ers.”” Not one single word in the original piece, itself written by two
top reporters for this widely circulated German weekly, remotely
related the Egyptian leader to what was alleged to have taken place.
Today Atlas is under different ownership and presents a more
balanced selection of articles. One-sided accounts favoring the Israeli
position are still the norm, however, in national mass-circulation peri-
odicals. Any dramatic shifts would invoke the wrath of powerful pro-
Israel groups, and could easily induce large-scale cancellations of sub-
scriptions and removal of advertisements from the publication,
resulung in serious economic losses.
312 THE COVER-UP
Even the mildest form of criticism has been known to elicit hostile
reactions from Zionist quarters. For instance, when Life6° magazine
once ventured to make just a few cautionary remarks about Israel, it
received this reaction from the Minneapolis, Minnesota, Jewish peri-
odical The Amencan Jewish World.
But if one brainwashed negro spews out his ignorant torrent of illwill, what
are we to say of a supposedly informed, responsible, and nationally influen-
tial source such as Life magazine when it, too, flops over on to the side of
anti-Israelism? Especially on the damp and disgusting grounds of pragma-
lism... .
To justify its contemptible appeal to economic greed, Life throws in a
couple of indictments, 1) accusation of adventurism and 2) the charge that
Israel has violated Arab boundaries ever since the June war. Life must be
reading the U.N. Security Council’s mail from Cairo, Amman and Beirut. Or,
it has taken it upon itself to serve as the mouthpiece of the Arab-odored State
Department.
In either case we must say with a sense of grievous desertion that, with
friends like the black extremists and Life magazine, we don’t need Nasser.®!
When Harold R. Piety, Associate Editor of the Dayton Journal Her-
ald, wrote in December 1975 a remarkable article, ‘Who Speaks for
Judaism?” in the Journal Herald Forum, he was roundly criticized and
received many blasts from the local Zionists despite the objectivity of
the article and the deep sympathy expressed for the victims of Nazi
Germany. In this lengthy article the Ohio editor expressed the view
that the General Assembly should have dealt with the Zionist issue as
an essentially internal issue and admitted that many of the nations that
voted in support of the resolution at the U.N. did so cynically. But his
main emphasis was to express the view that
. . the anti-Zionism of the Arab nations is not anti-Semitism. The Arabs
themselves are Semites, and the Muslim world historically was hospitable to
Jews when Christians were murdering them. When the terrible pogroms in
Czarist Russia in the 1880’s and 1890's terrorized Jews in the Pale, Jewish
communities were living in harmony with Muslims throughout the Arab world,
including in the Old City of Jerusalem. Zionism, not anti-Semitism, changed that.
[Italics added.]
Piety was prohibited from writing further Middle East articles, and his
frankness may even have cost him a deserving editorial promotion.
Occasionally there are some slight indications that Israel’s stran-
glehold over the American media might be weakening ever so slightly.
Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres, appearing on “Face the Na-
Slanting the Myth-Information 313
tion” on December 15, 1975, encountered some tough questioning
with regard to the bombing attacks on Lebanon, new settlements in the
Golan Heights, and Israel’s refusal to debate with the PLO in the U.N.
Security Council. The same may be said regarding the February 12,
1978, “Meet the Press” appearance of Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan,
when Israeli policy on the settlements was given a blistering going-
over. Then there are inevitably sharp reversions to the norm, at mo-
ments of crisis when pressure on the media mounts from inside as well
as outside.
It will take eons of time before Americans realize the extent of the
media’s irresponsible coverage of the Middle East, whereby the most
complex issues have been presented only in terms of sweeping blacks
and whites, the good guys and the bad guys, cowboys and Indians—
in short, the impeccable Israelis and the abominable Arabs.
Within the mass media a few publications—a very rare few—re-
sisted Zionist pressures and succeeded in presenting both sides of the
Arab-Israeli dispute, notably the Christian Science Monitor. Many foreign
correspondents who covered the area over the years also reported on
and analyzed the news with honesty and objectivity. These included
not only John Cooley of the Monitor and John Law of U.S. News, who
covered the Middle East for twenty-two consecutive years, but such
other correspondents, whose organizations tended to have a pro-Isra-
eli bias, as Wilton Wynn of Time, Kennett Love of the New York Times,
and Barry Dunsmore and Peter Jennings of ABC.
The views of Rabbi Elmer Berger, leader of American Jewish
Alternatives to Zionism, expressed before Southeastern Massachusetts
Technological Institute in November 1967, are still valid:
It must be clear . . . that, in a democracy where enlightened public opinion is
essential for the formulation and implementation of a national foreign policy,
one of the first problems confronting American policy-makers for the Middle
East is this long history of formidable pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli propaganda.
The central proposition, the rock upon which this democracy is founded, can
be summed up in four words: “Let the people know.” These words apply as
precisely to our national interest in the Middle East as they do to any of our
domestic liberties and responsibilities. If we are to match policy with our
national interests in the Middle East, the American people will need to be more
critically alert. The American press has been almost criminally negligent in helping to
provide such vigilance. [Italics added.]
The New York Times is the ultimate case in point.
IX Numero Uno: The New York Times
There's villainous news abroad.
—Shakespeare, Henry II’
The founder of the New York Times, Adolph S. Ochs, wrote the follow-
ing for the editorial page of his first issue, on August 19, 1896:
It will be my earnest aim that the New York Times give the news, all the news,
and in concise and attractive form in language that is parliamentary in good
society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any
other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor,
regardless of party, sect or interest involved; to make of the columns of the
New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public impor-
tance and, to that end, to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of
opinion.
Those words are emblazoned in large letters behind the bust of Ochs
at the 7imes office, and are frequently carried in advertisements pro-
moting the Zimes.
Throughout this volume endless examples are cited illustrating
the enormous extent to which this powerful newspaper has deliber-
ately strayed from the goals of its founder and scarcely ever presents
the Middle East impartially, let alone fearlessly. But why should the
Times be singled out in a chapter to itself?
In these days where control of the media is concentrated in fewer
and fewer hands, there is even greater meaning to the title of the
George Seldes book written in the 1930s, Lords of the Press. Today the
New York Times is indeed the superlord by virtue of its 854,000 daily
circulation and its 1.4 million readership of its four-pound, 400-page
Sunday issue reaching every part of the country, as does its syndicated
news service, which competes with the Associated and United Press
and is carried by more than 100 papers in the U.S., Canada, and
overseas.
314
Numero Uno: The New York Times 315
The New York Times Company, now on Wall Street’s good-buy
lists, owns nine smaller dailies, four weeklies, six magazines, two
broadcasting companies, three book-publishing companies, and part
of three Canadian paper mills. Current publisher Arthur O. Sulz-
burger was planning to add two new magazines in 1978, one on fishing
and the other on outdoor pursuits, and hopes to purchase more broad-
casting stations, among other possible acquisitions. The Times employs
the nation’s largest full-time news staff: 550 journalists in New York,
32 outside the U.S., 40 in Washington, and 19 throughout the country.
One has to travel across the country and abroad, too, to appreciate
fully the influence and uniqueness of the Times.
To a certain extent all news in America, particularly foreign, is
what the Times calls news. This, as syndicated columnist Nicholas Von
Hoffman pointed out, is because the Times spends on foreign corre-
spondents the kind of money other papers, magazines, and networks
will not.! It is also because “‘so few print or broadcast editors are able
to make independent judgments of their own on the news, simply lack
the character and stature to have an opinion of their own, and prefer
the safety of letting the nation’s most prestigious paper do their deci-
sion-making for them.” This, adds Von Hoffman, is particularly so on
the Israeli issue, where any adverse publicity can bring down on the
editor vociferous abuse from the nation’s most meticulously organized
lobby.
There is no newspaper in the world that can compare with the New
York Times for sheer coverage of news, both domestic and foreign. One
feels completely lost when not seeing it, but equally aggravated while
reading it.2 But from the headlines on the front page to the letters
column and the Op-Ed page, and most subtly in the Sunday ‘Week in
Review,” there is no opportunity lost to advance the prejudices and
predilections of its ruling clique. Editorializing is scarcely confined to
the editorial page. To give an appearance of impartiality, it will even
run a highly emotional or badly written letter to represent the oppos-
ing point of view, which then entitles the 7imes to run three or four
more letters supporting its own viewpoint. To understand what is
really taking place requires the major task of reading the paper from
cover to cover day in and day out.
There is increasing world reliance on its news dispatches. Times
columnists such as James Reston, Anthony Lewis, C. L. Sulzberger,
and Russell Baker appear nationally. High schools as far west as
the State of Washington read summaries of the Sunday section
‘Week in Review” in their current events classes, and this section
is as much read as the Bible by midwestern wives who wish to
316 THE COVER-UP
catch up with the news in one place and at one sitting.
Another important influence of the Times derives from the often
reported fact that it has long been read by many of our elected officials,
from the President down. They may curse it, or toss it into the waste-
basket, but they cannot entirely ignore it. And even when they disagree
violently with its editorial positions—as overtly expressed—they prob-
ably depend on the Times for both “objective” and in-depth reporting
as do so many students of world affairs.
There are other reasons why the 7imes must be singled out and
analyzed, indeed exposed. For one, there is its reputation as an intelli-
gent, thinking person’s publication. This also carries the implication
that it is somehow objective, nonpartisan, unemotional. All of that
simply means that the Times ends up being more insidious, cunning,
and ultimately dangerous than, for instance, the blunt, unsubtle Daily
News, one of its rivals in New York City. With the News and its like, the
reader always knows where the paper stands, and thus knows where he
or she, in turn, should stand. With the Times, and its reputation for
objectivity, the reader is lulled into accepting each story as ‘‘the truth.”
Another aspect of the 7imes that has a direct bearing on our
concern is its reputation, gained and enhanced in recent years, as a
fearless exposer of scandals in high places and public life. One thinks
of its role in printing the Pentagon Papers and in exposing the Nixon
administration. It has been zealous in exposing the CIA over the years
and was influential in airing the New York nursing home scandals, as
well as many instances of corruption in local government.
This, coupled with its own motto—‘‘All the News That’s Fit to
Print”—has set up an image. The concomitant of this reputation and
motto is: If it’s not in the Times, it’s not happening.
By any standards, every aspect of Israel has been “‘overcovered”
in the New York Times. Any cursory examination of the daily, let alone
of the Sunday editions, will yield a plethora of articles of kibbutzim,
travel, Israeli folk dances, the Israeli ‘‘economic miracle,” etc. It is
interesting to compare this coverage with the paper’s reportage on
pre-Qaddafi Libya, which had an economic miracle of its own—a mira-
cle, incidentally, that was entirely homespun, not artificially stimulated
from abroad as has been the case of Israel.
The New York Times Index of January 1968 to March 1969 (well
after the June 1967 war, so that information directly relating to the
hositilities would not predominate), reflected the following coverage
for “Israel” and ‘“‘Libya.” These statistics of course do not take into
consideration the many items listed under the headings beginning
Ntimero Uno: The New York Times 317
“Jewish” and “Zionist,” nor under the names of the many component
groups in the Zionist-Israelist movement.
State of Israel Libya
30 Headings 14 Headings
161 Main Subheadings 0 Main Subheadings
9 Secondary Subheadings 0 Secondary Subheadings
878 Lines in Index 36 Lines in Index
The bias of the New York Times is carried out through a myriad of
devices. The greatest harm has been wrought not by fully reporting
one side of the coin and completely neglecting the other, nor by the
gross partiality in editorials and in the letters to the editor. What is
more dangerous is the subtle means of distortion, including slanting
by labeling (“Hitler of the Nile” and ‘“‘Communist puppet” are but two
of the infinite number); by headlining (“Israel Will Aid New Thant
Move” headlines a story on page one while the statement that U.A.R.,
Jordan, and Syria had earlier so agreed was lost somewhere in the
account); by strategic placement (a pro-Israeli story appears on page
1 while the rebuttal the next day is buried on the bottom of page 11);
by explanation (an editorial refutation inserted in brackets in the mid-
dle of an otherwise 100 percent news story, downplaying an attack by
the American Council for Judaism on Zionism by citing the small
number of Council members in contrast to the large figure of Zionist
membership‘); by contrast (in its coverage follow-up of the Israeli
attack on the Karameh refugee camp pictured Prime Minister Eshkol
at the bedside of a wounded Israeli soldier while King Hussein is
shown inspecting a captured Israeli tank.5).
The Times invariably prominently displays that news which fits its
viewpoint and conceals the developments toward which the paper is
not well disposed. A classic example of this occurred when philoso-
pher Jean-Paul Sartre, who in the past had rejected all honors includ-
ing the Nokel Prize, accepted an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. The Times carried the following words, re-
porting Sartre’s response to this reward: “My acceptance of this title,
which I regard as an honor, has a political significance. It expresses the
friendship I feel for Israel since its birth, and my desire to see that
nation prosper in peace and security.” This was the end of the 7imes
quotation. But the very next sentence, quoted in the Chnstian Science
Monitor and cut out by the Times, read: “I consider that such a peace can
only exist if the Israelis start talking with the Palestinians, for I am also concerned
over the fate of the Palestinian people. . . .”’ (Italics added)®
318 THE COVER-UP
Another striking example of the many distortions “by omission”’
was the Times’ reportage the day after President Sadat’s appearance on
the ‘Sixty Minutes” Mike Wallace-moderated show of March 27, 1977.
While extracts from the Egyptian President’s remarks were quoted,
there was not one word about what Yasir Arafat had said on the same
program, let alone that he had appeared. The PLO leader’s words
showing his people to be warm human beings, not desiring to kill Jews,
and his adroit handling of the customary tough Wallace questioning,
was intentionally kept from Times readers. On the most important
question of why the PLO was not prepared to recognize Israel at that
time, Arafat had noted on CBS that it was first up to Israel (and the
U.S.) to recognize the Palestinians, who have been the victims since
1948 of the original injustice that brought the Zionist state into being
and their simultaneous displacement.
There had been a similar near-total blackout in the coverage of
Senator Fulbright’s historic farewell address at Westminister College,
in November 1974, viewed by many as one of the most important
speeches of the century. The Hearst San Francisco Examiner, as well-
known anti-Zionist writer Moshe Menuhin in a rejected letter to the
Sulzberger paper noted, printed important passages, including the
Senator’s acute warning of the “danger of a fifth Middle East war,” but
the Times in its minimal coverage omitted any reference to “Israel's
strange influence in getting all the money she needs from America.”
In addition to its across-the-board slanting, this powerful newspa-
per helps create a general atmosphere in which brainwashing can more
easily take place, and the more obvious instances of distortion can be
kept from being recognized. A shining example was the Sunday issue
of February 8, 1970, when the Times ran a front-page, left-hand-
column story headed ‘‘5 Arab Countries Begin Cairo Talks on War
Strategy.’ Adjacent was a two-column lead of an interview with Golda
Meir, ‘“‘Air Raids Show Nasser Is a Failure.”
Between these two stories was an article headlined ‘‘Israeli Jet Sale
Not Set, U.S. Says.”’ This was a denial by the State Department of the
Times story of the previous day. These articles were intended to raise
speculation over the jet sale and to spur an increase in the tempo of
Zionist pressures that were already mounting on Washington to supply
Israel with twenty-five Phantoms and eighty Skyhawks for delivery in
1971. (Whether calculated to have that effect or not, this widespread
publicity on the alleged sale made Secretary of State William Rogers’
visit to Morocco and Tunisia, then in progress, most unpleasant.)
The Meir interview, running over to an inside page with a five-
Numero Uno: The New York Times 319
column head, presented the reasoning for Israel’s continued air at-
tacks into the very environs of Cairo. But even the most sympathetic
treatment at the hands of writer James Feron could not conceal the
obvious Israeli motivation behind the raids—to force Nasser to make
peace or to quit his office. No mention, however, was made of what was
well known to Meir and to the reporter: that no Arab government
could then have survived five minutes if it entered into direct negotia-
tions for peace while Arab territories still remained in Israeli hands.
Sadat could do this in 1977 only after the Arab show of strength in the
1973 war.
In ‘“‘The Week in Review” section of that same date, an editorial,
“Jets for Israel,” prematurely defended the U.S. supplying additional
jet planes to Israel as “‘a tragic but necessary decision.”” On the same
page was an article from Jerusalem by James Reston, ‘‘Jerusalem:
Surrounded, Outnumbered, and Defiant,” which helped advance the
theme of the editorial.
The same section carried a piece datelined ‘‘Jerusalem,” also from
the pen of James Feron, which gave expression to Israeli thinking
about her war of attrition, and its ‘risky premise that many moderate
rulers have followed fallen strong men,” speculating “whether this
might not be the case someday of Cairo.”” Next to this was a chart
illustrating the “Strategic Importance of Golan Heights,” bearing this
weighted, over-caption: “Israel seized Syria’s Golan Heights during
the six-day war in 1967 to insure the safety of Israeli towns and farm
settlements that have come under bombardment from Syrian guns on
the heights. ...”
Filling out the page was an article datelined “Cairo” and head-
lined “Arabs Pin Hopes on Moscow,” which described the alleged
jubilation in the Egyptian capital in the wake of Kosygin messages
warning the West that Israeli air strikes against Egypt had become
dangerously provocative. As on other occasions, Times reportage here
was furthering the polarization of U.S.S.R.-Arabs vs. U.S.-Israelis. A
news report from Hong Kong on page 4, noting a message of support
from Chou En-lai to President Nasser, further tied the Arabs to Com-
munism, as did the prominent mention that Red China was supplying
arms to the Al Fateh guerrillas.
In the travel section, crowded in by photographs, a four-column
headline read: ‘‘Tourists in the Land of the Twilight War . . . And Still
They Come to Israel.’”” Authored by the ubiquitous James Feron, the
article started from the subcaption to insist that “tourists from Kansas,
as above, and New York continue their invasion of Israel and the Holy
320 THE COVER-UP
Land, nonchalantly accepting the signs and symbols of a nation at
war.”’ Only deep in the article did one read that there had been a
tourist decline in 1969. The largest photograph, incidentally, was un-
mistakably that of Christians, for the tourist decline had been more
marked among non-Jews. The full page endeavored to show that Israel
was still a fine tourist spa to visit just then, and the theme was carried
over to a lengthy continuation inside the paper.
The first piece in the magazine section was “‘Israel’s Early Warn-
ing System in the Arab World,” an article by Paul Jacobs dealing with
the vital role played by Israeli intelligence, “‘a major factor in Israel’s
survival.”’ This interesting article, written with the greatest of sympa-
thy for Israel, was previewed by continued announcements on
WQXR, the Times-owned radio station. While the famed abortive
Lavon spy affair was briefly mentioned, nothing was said of the other
many instances in which Arab governments, notably Syria, had ap-
prehended Israeli spies, to which the world usually responded:
“Anti-Semitism.” The bold heading atop one of the last pages of the
Jacobs article, “World Anti-Semitism Has Given Israel Agents Who
Know Cairo As Well As They Know Tel Aviv,” sought to justify the
Israeli spying and spread the Times’ favorite cult. And in the Book
Review section reviewer Professor Rubin Rabinovitz dissected an Iris
Murdoch novel in which the evil acts of the villain, a survivor of
Belsen, were the results of “‘the evil he himself suffered during his
imprisonment.”
That day’s Times might seem, by now, rather remote in time, but
chances are you could take almost any Sunday Times of the past twenty
years and find the same pattern of distortion, bias, slanting, and color-
ing, if not to the same extent, as that particular Sunday.
Sunday, July 8, 1973, involved coloration in the Sports section.
On page 4 under a Tel Aviv byline (the writer was not identified nor
was it a ‘‘Special to the New York Times,” indicating it was probably
a reprint from a Zionist handout), was a four-column heading: ‘‘Mac-
cabiah Games: Somber Occasion.” The article noted that the quadren-
nial sports event, which “brings together leading Jewish sportsmen of
the free world,’ was to open the following Monday evening in Tel
Aviv. The article went on:
You will also recall the murder of members of the Israeli contingent to the
Munich Olympics last year. A memorial prayer composed by the Chief Rabbi
will be intoned, and eleven torches will be lit in succession as each victim is
named. Most of the victims had won medals at Maccabiah Games. . . . The
Numero Uno: The New York Times 321
organizers invited two non-Jewish Dutch athletes who, in sympathy with the
Israelis, withdrew from the Olympics after the murders.
The front page of that Times almost gleefully carried in large
capitals: ‘Iraq Executes 23 for Coup Attempt,” while in the center of
the first news section was a lengthy story about Libya’s Colonel Qad-
dafi ‘‘giving Egyptian leaders a foretaste of difficulties under the
merger,” in which the problems facing the scheduled Libyan-Egyptian
union were detailed. While these stories were accorded solid, notice-
able space, two days previously, buried in an inside Times page and set
in a single column on the far left, completely overshadowed by seven
columns of advertising, was a lengthy story “Jews Ask Kosygin to
Permit Return.” This concerned sixty Soviet Jews who, in a reversal
of their exodus, were pleading to return to the Soviet Union and had
petitioned Premier Alexei Kosygin, then visiting Vienna. The ‘‘News
Summary and Index” of that day listed this story in a most misleading
fashion so as not to attract attention: ‘Sixty Jews in Vienna Petition
Kosygin.” (What Jews? Petition for what?), The Libyan-Egyptian trou-
bles over their merger had been spelled out in the same Index over
no less than sixteen lines.
On June 10, well before the October 1973 war and the Arab oil
embargo, the 7imes contended in an editorial that there was no connec-
tion between U.S. policy in the Middle East and the enrgy crisis:
“American governmental and oil officials are hardly so naive as to
believe that a change of policy in the Arab-Israeli dispute could signif-
cantly affect the long-term trend toward nationalization among all of
the Arab oil states, although the Libyan example may accelerate that
trend.” Three years later the Times was taking the same tack in editori-
als and news stories when the Saudi Arabians broke the price front in
OPEC and limited themselves to a 5 percent rise. Israel’s media cham-
pion would recognize this action only as a gesture of restraint and a
sign of goodwill toward the incoming Carter administration, not as
leverage on Washington to exert pressure on Israel in future peace
negotiations so as to move toward peace terms the Arabs could accept.
Photographs in a newspaper such as the 7imes are a very potent
part of the journalistic imprint. Every aspect—the selection, size,
placement, caption—you may be sure is never left to chance. The use
of photojournalism may often be most subtle, a means of concealing
covert sympathy for Israel and antipathy for Palestinians and Arabs.
In May 1964 when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was being courted
by Nikita Khrushchev, the Times ran a picture on the front page of a
322 THE COVER-UP
Sunday issue of the the Egyptian and Soviet leaders riding together in
the same automobile in a welcoming parade in Cairo. Fair and good;
it was certainly a major event for that day. But then on the front page
of their ‘Week in Review” section of the same Times, the news editors
inserted (and this is normally put to bed in New York before the Soviet
leader had even set foot on Egyptian soil) virtually the same photo-
graph. The point was made—if you did not get the message on page
1 of the Times, here it is: Nasser, Israel’s greatest foe, is a Communist
—Egypt is going along with the Soviet Union. (Nasser’s incessant
battle against the Communists at home in Egypt where most of them
were jailed, while accepting enormous military aid from the Soviet
Union, was scarcely ever related to Times readers.) Such slanting by
repetition has often been employed.”
On May 14, 1969, on page 3 appeared a picture four columns 54%
inches deep, with caption, of a wounded Israeli soldier receiving a
blood transfusion after being shot by Egyptian snipers while on duty
on the East Bank of the Suez Canal. There were no pictures of any size
of Egyptians or Syrians wounded in this war of attrition.
Again, in May 1970 the photo of the bombing of the Egyptian
school in Bahr al Bakr was relegated to a back page under an ambigu-
ous headline and appeared only after the Times previously had all but
accepted the Israeli excuse that this was a military installation. On June
4 there was a three-column front-page spread of the Israeli school at
Beisan that had been hit. The Palestinian statement that this was an
accident was given no attention.
When Secretary William P. Rogers visited the Arab countries of
Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan in 1971, there was no pic-
ture with any of his hosts on the front page of the Times, even though
this was the first visit to this part of the world of a U.S. Secretary of
State since John Foster Dulles journeyed to that part of the world in
1953. But as soon as Rogers stepped into Israeli territory, the Times
carried a four-column front-page photo (the story appeared on page
10) of the Secretary with Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Premier
Golda Meir.®
Photojournalism exposed its uglier side even more recently.
When a Palestinian rocket killed two Israelis November 9, 1977, the
picture of grieving relatives appeared on page | of the Times? and was
repeated on page 2 of the “Week in Review.”’!° The photos following
the Israeli retaliatory air attack in which 110 Lebanese and Palestinian
were killed showed a broadly smiling worker carrying an indistinguish-
able body from the rubble on the same page 1, and in the “Week in
Numero Uno: The New York Times 323
Review” a seemingly relaxed Arab mother and children resting in a
hospital.
In the 1977 exchange between Israel and Egypt of forty-seven
Arab prisoners for the bodies of nine Israeli soldiers and two spies, the
New York Times") displayed a prominently-placed heartrending picture
of the coffins of the Israeli dead under a U.N. flag. But there was no
explanation as to how or why it was that the two spies had been
executed in Cairo in 1955. One had to read the Jerusalem Post’s interna-
tional edition six days later to learn the facts. As pointed out there,
both of the Israelis had been instrumental “‘in helping to organize a
group of young Jewish activists in Egypt into a sabotage ring aimed at
undermining the developing relationship between Egypt and the U.S.
and instilling terror in the Egyptian public.”” The Times had simply
referred to the ‘‘so-called Lavon affair,” and supplied no other details.
A third member of the group committed suicide in his cell, and three
others were freed in a prisoner exchange with the Egyptians after the
1968 war.
Instead of reciting these facts about this ugly sabotage attempt at
disrupting U.S.-Egyptian relations, the Times, quoted this emotional
outpouring of one of the spy survivors: “It is the end of a very sad story
and the realization of a dream. Their dream was to come and live in
Israel. They fought for it and gave their lives for it, and today they
come in the saddest way possible.’”’ Their deaths had in no way been
related to their coming to Israel. Both Dr. Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel
Azar were Egyptian-born, but then had gone to Israel and received
training at intelligence schools as intelligence agents for what the Times
had previously only referred to as a “disastrous adventure.”
In contrast to the use of incessant pictures of Jews behind barbed
wires or with Nazi guns at their backs to keep alive pro-Israel senti-
ment, a 7imes Marvine Howe story (July 3, 1977) covering the full
“family style” page bore the heading, ‘“‘Beirut’s Children: They Sur-
vived the War, but Cannot Forget it” and was dominated by two large
photos (covering precisely half of the space given the article). Pales-
tinian children during the Lebanese civil war were shown above these
capuons: “Left, playing with a human skull (held aloft) found in the
ruins of the city and Moslem youths, at right, patrolling a corner
checkpoint while showing a small girl how to hold an automatic rifle.”’
The boys bearing automatics and holsters were between thirteen and
sixteen years, and the girl, who could barely shoulder the weapon, no
more than seven.
Following the outbreak of the February 1978 fighting between
324 THE COVER-UP
Syrian members of the Arab peacekeeping force on one side and
Lebanese army regulars and Christian militiamen on the other, the
Times ran a six-inch, two-columns appealing picture on page 3 of an
anguished woman holding a baby and another youngster by her side
with this caption: “‘A Lebanese Christian seeking shelter with her chil-
dren Friday in Beirut where Syrian gunners shelled the Christian sec-
tor of the capital.’’!2 This appeared the following Wednesday—/ive days
after the alleged shelling and after fighting had ceased, but at a time
when public sentiment was building against Begin and the Israelis after
Sadat’s successful public relations visit to the U.S. and Zionists were
waging a counterpropaganda offensive. The Israeli-Lebanese Chris-
tian alliance was solidifying, and the tactic was to woo Christians in the
US.
The Times, an implacable foe of President Nasser, on every possi-
ble occasion totally misrepresented his goals, even as he was striving
to bring about the ceasefire of 1970. That year the Egyptian President
delivered a May Day speech at Shubra Al Kheima. Three papers re-
ported this talk differently. The Washington Post of May 2 carried this
headline: “‘Nasser Urges Nixon Peace Move in Mideast.” The first
paragraph noted that Nasser called upon Washington to salvage peace
by ordering Israel to withdraw, and the third paragraph contained his
observation that “President Nixon’s failure to achieve an Israeli with-
drawal would undermine American influence in the Arab world for
decades or centuries.” The Christian Science Monitor story from the pen
of John Cooley, under a Beirut dateline, headlined: “Nasser Asks
Nixon to Press Israeli Retreat.’”’ The story carried a picture of the
U.A.R. leader with the caption: “Puts onus for Mideast solution on the
United States.”
From the Times coverage it was impossible to believe that this was
the same speech. The headline was: ‘‘Nasser Warns US on Aid for
Israel—Declares Delivery of Planes Would Be ‘Dangerous’—Scorns
Foe’s Charges.” Rarely had a chief of state addressed a more humble
appeal to the Chief Executive of another country as had Nasser, and
rarely had headlines so completely warped the vital remarks of a head
of state.!3
Time and again, Israelis-Zionists use their favorite newspaper to
send up trial balloons or to beat the Israeli war drums. In May 1973
the Times prominently reported and bemoaned the alleged transfer to
Egypt of French-built Mirage jets from Libya and British-built Hunter
interceptors from Iraq. The story headline on page 1: “Egyptian Air
Bases Reported Equipped for Libyan Planes’’; the continuation on
Ntimero Uno: The New York Times 325
page 6 bore this misleading heading: ‘Air Preparations in Egypt Re-
ported.” The great protagonist for Israel was laying the propaganda
groundwork to excuse a possible Israeli preemptive strike against
Egypt before Anwar Sadat could become strong enough either to
renew the war of attrition across the Canal or to strike into occupied
territory, as he had implied he might be forced to do and actually did
do five months later. The mere possible presence of a few Libyan
planes was built up as a threat in the minds of readers, totally unaware
that the Israeli Air Force had 450 jet fighters, including 110 U.S.
Phantoms and 50 Mirages of its own and was, in the words of a weekly
news magazine, “patently superior to Egypt’s lackluster, low-profile air
force.” 14
At no moment in its recent history has the New York Times so
significantly earned its real slogan—‘‘All the News That’s Fit to Slant”
—as it did by its coverage of the passage of the 1974 U.N. resolution
permitting the Palestinians the right to appear before the General
Assembly in November that year. The twenty-nine-paragraph story of
October 15, 1974, starting on page 1 and concluding on page 3,
detailed the arguments of the opposition to the U.N. resolution, in-
cluding the claim of U.S. Ambassador John A. Scali that passage would
hamper rather than promote a settlement of the Middle East question,
and many allegations of Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah. The only
indication why 105 nations (only four had opposed and twenty ab-
stained) had given their support to the resolution was relegated to the
last two short paragraphs. In one, Syria’s Ambassador Hissam Kellani
defended the right of the Palestinians, “like any other revoluuonary
people” (the exact label the Times wished to stamp on the Palestinians)
“to choose their leaders.” And in the final paragraph, Cuban Ambassa-
dor Ricardo Quesada, whose very support of a resolution could drive
many of the Times readers to the other side, asserted that “all liberation
movements in the world at one time or another have been labeled
terrorist.” During the debate twenty-two other speakers rose to sup-
port the resolution, but not one single word of their remarks appeared
in The Times.
To minimize this overwhelming vote in favor of granting the
Palestinians the first step on the road to the recognition of their politi-
cal rights, the Times misleadingly stated that “members of the Euro-
pean economic community engaged in a European-Arab dialogue
were split in their vote.”’ In fact, none of these countries voted against
the resolution. France, Ireland, and Italy voted aye; Britain, Belgium,
Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany ab-
326 THE COVER-UP
stained. The article contained no listing of the votes, which would have
betrayed to the reader the tremendous diversity of the 105 nations
supporting the Palestinians and would have indicated the extent to
which U.S.-Israel isolation was growing. The four holdouts were the
U.S., Israel, the Dominican Republic,!®> and Bolivia.
The Times did its utmost in every possible way to downgrade the
significance of the invitation to the Palestinians, even as many new
elements throughout the world were granting recognition to them. As
if their front-page subtle distortion was not enough, there was in the
same issue a four-column picture, 64 inches deep: ‘Israelis Mourn
War Dead—At Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem, Women Pray
at Small Grave of One of 2,600 Soldiers Killed in Last Year’s War.
Services Mark the First Anniversary of War’s End.’’!6
Likewise, the Times conveniently moved the anniversary of the
October (Yom Kippur-Ramadan) war up twelve days by following the
Israeli rather than the Julian calendar, which would have placed the
commemoration on October 6, in order that the observance would
actually fall on Yom Kippur 1974, thus giving it a vital religious sym-
bolism. Starting with the evening papers of September 25 and then the
daily papers of September 26, the American media spilled over with
praise of Israel’s fortitude and recalled the Yom Kippur war, as they
simultaneously ran pictures of Jews observing the Holy Day. The Times’
front page carried a three-column spread of soldiers wearing the tallith
(religious shawl), even though the majority of Israeli soldiers, like a
comparable portion of their countrymen, were well known to be ag-
nostics or atheists.
Had the anniversary been noted on October 6, the Times and the
rest of the media would have been reduced to mere words of praise
of Israel's fortitude and might even have been forced anew to come up
with a justification for calling it the “Yom Kippur war” rather than the
Ramadan or October war.
This bastion of Zionist strength left no stone unturned in evoking
more pity, sympathy, and support for the Israeli cause. Mourning
Arabs on the anniversary of the war or on any other day somehow
never appealed to Times photographers.
While the U.N. was indicating to the world that there were indeed
Palestinians, this journal was adding its own version of the Golda Meir
cry, ‘What Palestinians?’ In an editorial of October 5, 1974, entitled
“Into the Mine Field” (a description of a trip by Secretary of State
Kissinger into the danger zone of the Arab world), the Times pontif-
cated: ‘‘Yesterday’s vote to recognize the PLO as the refugees’ [even
Nitimero Uno: The New York Times 327
the use of “refugees” rather than the more political “Palestinians”
carried an implication] official spokesman is another in a long series
of acts that has discredited the General Assembly as a peaceful instru-
ment of conciliation.” The chief publicist for the State of Israel seemed
as much upset as Tel Aviv over the turn of events.
As spelled out in its news reportage and editorials, the Times’ idea
of a settlement had been for Israel to make some minor concessions
by giving back some unspecified small amount of the occupied terri-
tory while retaining its role as the dominant and expansionist force in
the area. To advance this viewpoint, the Op-Ed page!7 had been
opened to Yale Professor and former Assistant Secretary of State Eu-
gene Rostow’s insistence that Security Council Resolution 338 (of
1967) required an Arab peace treaty before any Israeli withdrawal, a
viewpoint that could not be sustained by any possible interpretation.
And the Times was closed to the publication of any realistic analysis that
did not fit this yardstick. Accordingly, chief editorial writer John B.
Oakes, placed the entire burden for the future of peace ‘‘on how
successfully the moderate Arab leaders can restrain their colleagues
from closing the doors on the concessions that alone can lead to
peace,”’'® while mentioning nothing as to what Israel might be re-
quired to do or the pressures the U.S. ought bring on Israel.
The hatred against the PLO spewed in the news and editorial
pages alike must have embarrassed even the most rabid supporters of
Israel. Not only did the 7imes vent its spleen editorially again that fall
against the U.N. for voting to permit the PLO to present its case to the
General Assembly, but it did not neglect the specialized agencies of the
international organization. When UNESCO baldly censored and
barred Israel from membership in regional groups (and cut off $28,-
000 in assistance), Oakes in a blistering editorial assailed the action as
a “vindictive ploy” by the Arabs and the underdeveloped countries.
The editorial, ‘“‘“UNESCO vs. UNICEF,” made the distinction between
“the good organization, UNICEF,” (which has indeed a most worthy
program on behalf of undernourished and neglected children) and
UNESCO, which had “amassed votes of vengeance against Israel.’’!9
The facts behind the UNESCO action was Times missing informa-
tion. In the face of many U.N. and auxiliary body warnings and cen-
sures, Israel had not only unlawfully annexed Old Jerusalem, but con-
tinued to carry out its virtual “‘rape” of the holiest city in the world.
Everywhere the old, belonging to the Arabs—whether an ancient olive
tree, the little fountain, or the quaint houses in the Moroccan quarter
with their distinctive architecture and tiny gardens—had been torn
328 THE COVER-UP
down or plowed under, giving way to the new Israeli ugly cement-
block buildings.
Prior to the UNESCO condemnation of Israel, renowned designer
Buckminster Fuller, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and architect Louis I.
Kahn—members of the Advisory Council of the Jerusalem Committee
appointed by Mayor Teddy Kollek to help guide the development—
unqualifiedly condemned the trend of construction within view of the
Old City and called for a halt to many projects already approved. Kahn
declared:
These high buildings are as ominous as an invasion. They loom over the Old
City like a band of Indians on the hilltops ready to charge. . . . Jerusalem is
something special, a kind of trust from all mankind. These high-rise towers are
money buildings, and they are all the worse for being among buildings that
aspire to a spiritual awareness.
On his part, Fuller objected to blocking the whole mystery of
Jerusalem, “which is wrapped up in the vistas out to the Judean wilder-
ness,” and he assailed “the high-rise walls of greed, erected by avari-
cious landowners who will put anything up so long as it makes money.”
Even Times correspondent Terence Smith had earlier admitted that the
“graceful contour of the surrounding hills is being broken by a prolif-
eration of high-rise hotels, offices and apartment buildings.”’?°
Adjacent to the critical Times editorial, eight inches of space con-
tained a letter from the president of the U.S. committee for UNICEF
further distinguishing her “fine group” from the disreputable
UNESCO. Two years later the U.S. exerted sufficient pressure on
UNESCO by withholding funds (amounting to nearly $15 million, or
one quarter of its modest budget) to permit Israel to join the European
regional group. The Times in an editorial, ‘“‘Progress in UNESCO,’’?!
still took the occasion to criticize the policies of the organization be-
cause the delegates had on two successive days at its conference in
Nairobi, Kenya, overwhelmingly voted in favor of resolutions accusing
Israel of ‘‘systematic, cultural assimilation”’ of the Arabs in the occu-
pied areas and charging the Zionists with policies “contrary to human
rights and fundamental freedom” and the architectural Zionization of
Jerusalem.
Aspects of the Times’ reportage of the 1973 war maintained the
pattern of distortion. The Times scarcely deviated from what, in effect,
was warmongering for Israel. It persisted in presenting a picture of
good ‘“‘little Israel’? besieged by the many “‘bad oil-rich Arab states.”
Large headlines (in the New York Post as well) carried accounts at the
Ntimero Uno: The New York Times 329
height of the war of the rumored transfer from the Soviet Union to
Cairo of atomic warheads, which could be used on missiles and could
wipe out Israel’s cities. But nothing was said of the fact that Israel not
only had warheads—and she had not obtained these from the U.S.—
but had two atomic reactors, one provided by the U.S. plus the Dimona
reactor in the Negev Desert, clandestinely obtained from France in the
early 1950s, existence of which was kept from Washington until 1960.
Every intelligence service in the world acknowledges that Israel
has had nuclear capability for a number of years. A denial by Defense
Minister Shimon Peres that ‘‘to the best of my knowledge, Israel is just
in the scientific part of this program’’?2 meant only that certain key
components were not assembled but were, for the moment, being
stored separately—as was brought out in French and other non- Times
stories. With the first shipment of Phantoms sent by Lyndon Johnson,
Israel had been receiving nuclear equipment including bomb racks and
special computers. Israeli scientists had been long obtaining from the
U.S. many kinds of direct and indirect assistance in developing its own
nuclear research, and this increased proportionately as U.S. and Israeli
intelligence organizations worked in closer unison.
Long before 1973 Israel allegedly had from six to ten atomic
devices, not totally sophisticated bombs but still capable of wiping out
tens of thousands of people. The front page of the Buffalo Evening News
back on May 9, 1969, had carried a Reuters story based on West
Germany’s Der Spiegel account that Israel] had become the world’s sixth
nuclear power and had six Hiroshima-type bombs of 20-kiloton power
produced at Dimona. According to an April, 1976 Time magazine
story, Golda Meir gave Defense Minister Moshe Dayan permission to
activate the atomic bombs on October 9, 1973, after he reported that
Israeli forces were being routed by Syrians on the Golan Heights and
had been repulsed by Egypt along the Suez Canal.
On December 3, 1974 the Christian Science Monitor, carried a
lengthy front-page article quoting Israeli President Ephraim Katzir
that “‘if Israel needs nuclear weapons, it will have them.” This state-
ment (with photo of the President) took on greater significance be-
cause the Chief of State had been one of the founders of Israel’s major
defense center and because he had spoken at an informal meeting with
international science writers. President Katzir stated that Israel had the
research “know-how” to put together bombs within a reasonable time.
The Monitor article also noted that according to experts Israel had
sufficient plutonium to make a number of bombs.
Buried away at the bottom of page 11 of the Times on December
330 THE COVER-UP
3 were six lines, exactly twenty-seven words, noting that the Israeli
Chief Executive had stated Israel ‘‘would not be the first to introduce
nuclear weapons to the Middle East’’—that was all the New York paper
would publish on this sensitive subject.
Israel’s nuclear capacity gain came dramatically to world attention
in May 1977 when Paul L. Leventhal, a former staff nuclear weapons
expert for the Senate Government Operations Committee, told a Salz-
burg Conference on a Non-Nuclear Future that 200 tons of natural
uranium (enough to build forty-two nuclear weapons), placed on a
ship that vanished nine years ago, had ended up in Israel. The Ham-
burg-registered Scheersberg, which had been carrying the precious ore
under the control of Euratom, the European Economic Committee
Atomic Energy Agency, disappeared in the Mediterranean between
Antwerp and Genoa in November 1968. The ship had been com-
manded by a British captain and first officer; when it later turned up
it had a new name, a new crew, and no uranium.
In Oslo ten days after the Salzburg bombshell, Norway’s former
chief prosecutor revealed that Israeli agent Dan Aerbel had admitted
taking part in the operation to divert the uranium-laden ship. Aerbel
had been seized in 1974 by the Norwegians with four other members
of Israel’s Mossad secret service for the killing of a Palestinian guerrilla
leader in the small town of Lillehammer, given a five-year jail sentence,
and then pardoned one year later “for psychiatric reasons.”” Aerbel,
known to be a key member of the Israeli “hit team” responsible for the
murders of eleven Arab-Palestinians in Europe, denied any involve-
ment in the uranium affair. Israeli intelligence had previously dis-
played its mettle in stealing five gunboats in 1973 out of the Cherbourg
harbor in defiance of the French embargo and in the famed 1976
rescue of the Air France hostages at the Entebbe airport in Uganda.
Six months later Rolling Stone magazine®3 in a sensational story
revealed the Israeli government “had raised a secret nuclear arsenal.”
The story confirmed the hijacking of European uranium and told of
the smuggling of 200 to 400 pounds from the Nuclear Materials and
Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.?4
The article stated both Presidents Johnson and Ford had been aware
of the smuggling from an American nuclear plant. Unidentified gov-
ernment officials and a former CIA official were quoted as saying that
Johnson ordered Director Richard Helms not to investigate.
The authors of the article, magazine Associate Editor Howard
Kohn and Washington correspondent Barbara Newman, stated at an
October 24 news conference that a CIA estimate that Israel had fifteen
Niuimero Uno: The New York Times 331
nuclear bombs was conservative; they had unconfirmed reports of up
to 150 bombs. While the New York Post of October 24 on page 4
headlined ‘‘Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal—Says West Shut Eyes to Uranium
Hijacks,”’ the Times headlines and story on page eight the next day
passed it all off as left-wing magazine sensationalism: “Rolling Stone
Magazine Says Israelis Stole Uranium for Nuclear Arms.”
The most serious nuclear safeguards case the U.S. ever faced
broke into the open in late February 1978 when the Nuclear Regula-
tory Commission (NRC) released a 550-page report in response to a
House committee inquiry over previous testimony given by NRC Exec-
utive Director Lee V. Gossick. In revealing that Gossick had “testified
incorrectly,” the report confirmed that the CIA had evidence Israel
had the atomic bomb by 1968 and that bomb material in fact had been
diverted from the Apollo plant. Equally important to the report was
that CIA third-ranking official Carl Duckett had informed a closed
meeting of the NRC in 1976 that President Johnson had been told
eight years earlier that Israel had atomic weapons. The President had
told CIA Director Richard M. Helms, “Don’t tell anyone else, not even
Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara’’ (then the Secretaries of State and
Defense respectively).
The story was broken by the Washington Post in a March 2 page-
one story, ‘““Ex-CIA Aide Says Johnson Quashed Israel A-Bomb
Data,” but the page-five Times version read: “Ex-CIA Man Says John-
son Heard in ’68 Israel Had A-Bombs”’ (italics added). Duckett had
apparently also told members of the NRC in 1976 that CIA evidence
pointed to the fact that Israel had obtained atom bomb material in
the mid-1960s; circumstantial evidence pointed to the Apollo plant,
which had reported a “loss” of 202 pounds of highly enriched ura-
nium in 1965. Plant president Zalman M. Shapiro, an enterprising
scientist and ‘dedicated Zionist,” according to Newsweek,?5 had been
active in the Zionist Organization of America and the American
Technion Society, which raised funds for Israel’s “MIT” in Haifa.
The Atomic Energy Commission on February 14, 1966, privately
told Congress that it was not possible to reconstruct ‘the specific
events which resulted in this high loss.” An examination of the rec-
ords of NUMEC revealed that twenty-six of them were “incomplete,
inaccurate, or missing.’’26
The head of the nuclear processing plant had early felt “strongly
about the need for an independent Jewish state.’"” NUMEC had exten-
sive business ties with Israel and three foreigners, including an Israeli,
actually worked at the plant. The FBI uncovered some “‘pretty as-
332 THE COVER-UP
tounding things . . . as to how this fellow Shapiro dealt with the Israeli
Intelligence Service.”’??
No direct evidence of diversion or unlawful activity was produced
by the CIA or the FBI in its limited probe ordered by President Ford
in 1976. Shapiro, minus his former government clearance, went back
to his post at Westinghouse. Nothing of this would have surfaced had
not young analyst James Conran, in putting together a history of the
nation’s efforts to protect nuclear materials since the 1954 Atoms for
Peace prograin, run into a blank wall in his research when he discov-
ered one file involving NUMEC and its president missing. He pro-
tested the refusal of NRC safeguard officials to allow him to examine
the file. When Conran pressed the matter and even wrote to congress-
men and to President Carter, the director of the NRC’s Office of
Internal Inspection “‘produced a report that suggested Conran might
have psychiatric problems.”’28
Conran was removed from his safeguards post. Two House inves-
tigating committees, under Morris Udall and John Dingle, are still
looking into the matter. The title of the Newsweek article, “Mystery of
Israel’s Bomb,” became obsolete with the publication in late June 1978
of The Plumbat Affair, authored by three Sunday Times journalists, two
of whom were part of the paper’s “Insight” team, which has exposed
the existence of Israeli torture in the occupied territories. The book
details how Israel obtained its 200 tons of uranium sufficient to make
a dozen atom bombs, and how the plutonium extracted from the
uranium was used to manufacture nuclear warheads designed by Yuval
Ne’eman, who had been primarily responsible for the computerization
of the files of Israel’s secret police, the Mossad. Advised by the CIA
in the early stages of the October 1973 war that Israel, facing defeat,
was “‘on the point of resorting to nuclear weapons,” Secretary Henry
Kissinger and President Nixon speedily “authorized the airlift of U.S.
weapons and ammunition to Israel.”
No one should have been surprised, save the readers of the Times,
when the Israelis in 1975 requested Pershing missiles from Washing-
ton to be used for atomic warheads. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger
promised that as soon as the U.S. went back into production of these
weapons, the Israelis might receive theirs—in 1977 or 1978. Through
headlines and otherwise the Zimes poured out an entirely different
story of threats to Israel, rather than the threat Israel had long posed
to the Arab countries in the atomic field as a mini super power holding
them at bay, and used as additional leverage with Washington to ward
off pressure to yield the occupied territories. Israel has adamantly
Ntuimero Uno: The New York Times 333
refused Washington’s request to become a party to the atomic Non-
Proliferation Treaty, to which the U.S., U.S.S.R., and 103 countries
were party.
When Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, then editor of the influential
Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, urged that it was necessary for the Arab
world to “build, buy or borrow nuclear weapons as a deterrent to any
use of such weapons by Israel, who already had such weapons,” the
headline in the New York Times on November 24, 1973, was: ‘““Top
Cairo Editor Urges Nuclear Arms for Arabs.’’?9 To the headline reader
it was the Arabs who were using the nuclear arms threat, as the Times
presented a new version of the perennial ‘“‘Arabs want to drive the
Israelis into the sea.” Only five paragraphs from the end of the Heikal
story did the Times admit: “Policy makers in Washington were reported
a few years ago to have evidence that Israel had perfected the technol-
ogy for nuclear weapons.”
Even before any resolutions could be adopted by the first Arab
summit meeting at Rabat after the October war, the New York Times in
big front-page headlines on November 25, 1973, cried: ‘“‘Arab Talks
Open with Attack on Israel.” The Egyptian Foreign Minister was
quoted as saying: ‘‘We must preserve all our weapons for our com-
bined military strength. The battle has not yet ended. This requires an
integrated Arab front... .” Nothing unusual about such Arab polem-
ics. But the headlines breathed the story that its makers wished the
readers to get: insidious and continuous hostility toward Israel.
Another way in which the 7imes maintained the cover-up was
through slanting by position—simply relegating unfavorable news to
the back pages, if in the paper at all. As an example, on April 4, 1975,
at the bottom of page 35 in the lower left-hand corner, the Times
reported that Senator George McGovern had come out in favor of an
independent Palestinian state; television and radio news programs
mentioned it several times during the day. Buried away on the obituary
page was this important change of heart by the 1972 Democratic presi-
dential nominee, whose candidacy the Times had strongly supported.
A week previously the Jerusalem Post featured in large headlines:
“McGovern Meets Arafat/Urges PLO Recognition.” But it was only
after he had held a press conference in Jerusalem that the Times gave
even minimal notice to this important pronouncement.
On another occasion, in front-page stories on two successive days
(August 19 and 20, 1974), the Times detailed the growth of suppressive
power exercised by the military courts of South Vietnam, whereby
defendants’ rights and rules of evidence had been totally eliminated.
334 THE COVER-UP
In pursuit of the paper’s “liberal” line, the reporter had meticulously
investigated civil terror under President Nguyen Van Thieu, to the
point of citing specific incidents and presenting charts showing the
abuse of martial law in this alleged police state. But three days later,
on the Times’ front page, Israeli military suppression of Palestinian civil
rights on the West Bank was depicted by Terence Smith not in terms
of Israeli repression, but of Palestinian terrorism: “ISRAEL IS COMBAT-
ING A TERRORIST SURGE . . . Have jailed hundreds of Arabs.’’3° The
resistance movement “‘that had surfaced in the past six months” had
never previously been brought to the attention of its readers in the
plethora of Times stories emphasizing only improved Arab-Israeli rela-
tions, disrupted by occasional attacks on Israel allegedly launched
from outside the country, from Syria or Lebanon, but never by Pales-
tinians from within Israel.
Now, suddenly, a growing half year’s rising tide was admitted, but
speedily discounted: ‘“The core of the resistance, according to the
Israeli officials, was the Jordanian Communist party, which was out-
lawed by King Hussein,” whose membership “was estimated at no
more than 400, but is a ughtly organized, well-disciplined network of
small cells.”
Unlike reportage on Vietnam, there had been no effort to investi-
gate the facts, no charts made on Israel’s military and police force, and
particularly no mention of the application by the Israelis of British
World War II mandatory regulations aimed to suppress all civil rights
of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. Torture and mistreat-
ment of Palestinians were dismissed by the 7imes as ‘‘accusations un-
supported, save by attorney Felicia Langer,” who, it was pointed out,
“‘was a member of the Israeli Communist party” and was representing
more than fifty of the prisoners. Her charge of torture was summarily
written off by citing denials by Israeli officials, including “Defense
Minister Shimon Peres and other government ministers that the accu-
sations of mistreatment are unfounded.” The account noted that “‘pri-
vately Israeli officials acknowledge that some of the prisoners may have
been roughed up during arrest or interrogation ‘by the Shin Beth,’ the
notoriously efficient and ruthless Israel security service, which may
have applied ‘psychological pressure.’ ”’ But this was said to be “‘stan-
dard police techniques for getting information out of people who are
unwilling to talk. There is no torture.” The Times subhead, “Standard
Police Techniques,” further exculpated the Israelis of any guilt.
Unlike the South Vietnamese account, no prisoners were inter-
viewed, no statements obtained of alleged torture. The findings of the
Numero Uno: The New York Times 335
International Red Cross were summarily dismissed: The group was
said to have “‘refused to discuss the situation.”’ There were no compa-
rable four-column photographs of ‘South Vietnamese students ac-
cused of being Communists arriving for trial before a military court in
Saigon” depicting what seemed to be drugged or tortured prisoners.
This cover-up by the Times of West Bank resistance and Israeli repres-
sion was soon bared by the increasing violence which was difficult to
conceal.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission at a meeting in Geneva on
February 15, 1977, adopted by a vote of twenty-three to three (the
U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica), with six abstentions, a resolution accus-
ing Israel of practicing “‘torture’’ and the “‘pillaging of archaeological
and cultural property” in the Arab territories under occupation. The
Times buried the report in six sentences at the very bottom of a page
6 column (the rest of the page was all advertising) under the smallest
point heading used in the paper. Most of the brief account was taken
up by a listing of those countries that voted ‘‘nay,” including the U.S.,
and those abstaining. (In contrast, the visit by Lady Bird Johnson
during the summer of 1976 to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Forest near
Jerusalem to plant “two saplings in the forest of 1,000 six-foot pines”
received prominent coverage, including a two-column picture of the
ceremony.?!)
At this Geneva meeting chief U.S. delegate Allard Lowenstein
vigorously contended that the resolution adopted was based on un-
proven allegations, despite the well-researched inquiry of the London
Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team (see pages 178-183). But the New York
Times revealed its selective bias by reporting the London 7imes story
on June 20 in a short fifteen-line item, carefully tucked away on page
14 and coupled with an Israeli London Embassy denial of equal length.
Two weeks later the Times, now responding to the furor the London
story had raised, carried a lengthy 158-line story providing an outline
of the tortures charged; but the headline read: ‘Israelis Deny a Lon-
don Paper’s Charges of Torture.” Before the readers were acquainted
with the charges, they were flooded with the denial. Then, on July 8,
the Times carried a Reuters story titled “Arab Captives in Gaza Say
Israelis Beat Them but Don’t Torture Them,” based on interviews
with Palestinians security offenders detained in the Gaza Strip jail. The
article suggested Arabs were being badly roughed up but that no
torture occurred. The London Times rejoiner had pointed out that its
story concerned West Bank jails where the alleged torture took place,
and not in Gaza where things had relatively improved the previous few
336 THE COVER-UP
years. Israeli censors had deleted 110 lines from the Reuters story ‘on
the grounds that they disclosed army interrogation techniques.” The
reader was being neither unfair nor unreasonable in wondering what
these techniques might be and where to draw the demarcation line
between “beating and maltreatment” and “torture.”’
On June 2, 1978, the Times devoted an unprecedented one half of
its Op-Ed page to an article by two Zionist law professors,>2 “disprov-
ing” charges that torture had been used by Israel against an Arab-
American student who had been arrested while visiting his dying father
in Ramallah on the West Bank and accused of training in Libya with
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO group. The
three-column headline, “Israeli Torture, They Said,” and a box, ““Two
observers at the trial of Sami Esmail, an Arab, draw conclusions about
charges of human rights violations,” indicated that this was the New
York paper’s answer to the varied, substantiated charges of Israeli use
of torture in the occupied territories. (U.S. citizen Esmail was con-
victed and sentenced to a year and a half in prison for his alleged
associations which took place wholly outside of Israel.)
In vivid contrast to the Times treatment of the torture of Palestini-
ans was the page 2, August 24, 1977 two-column coverage in fifty lines
of ‘Militant Moslems on Trial in Cairo,” with attention drawn by a
photo of equal size showing the leader of the Egyptian extremists
shouting, mouth wide open, his hand raised in a frenzied gesture. This
trial of a small sect accused of the murder of a former little-known
Cabinet minister had drawn little attention elsewhere than in Egypt,
but provided an opportunity to further stereotype the Arabs as fanatics
at the time when the question of PLO participation at a Geneva Con-
ference was being hotly discussed (and who would make a distinction
between Egyptian and Palestinian extremists?). This was before Sadat
had won the status of a “good Arab.”
During the serious spring 1976 uprisings by the Arabs in Israel
and in the occupied territories, the editorials of the Times as well as of
the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times mildly chided the Israelis
for “‘military excesses’? and were concerned only lest this “sudden”’
Israeli behavior tarnish the Zionist image of an otherwise “benevo-
lent” occupation.33 It was hard to guess where these would-be guard-
ians of American morality—on other issues, of course—had been dur-
ing the arrests, blowing up of houses, deportations of Palestinian
leaders, and varied flagrant brutalities heaped upon the Palestinians in
the occupied areas since the 1967 occupation and later in Israel
proper. And these Goliaths had their own permanent correspondents
based in Israel and in Lebanon.
Ntimero Uno: The New York Times 337
The Times has also excelled in the more subtle ways of presenting
myth-information to its readership. In headling on August 15, 1977,
“Israel Is Extending Services For Arabs,” the Times implied great
benefits for the Palestinians, whereas the government had taken action
to further annex the occupied territories. To justify Tel Aviv’s latest
onslaught, the four-column heading of November 9, 1977 read: “Israel
Shells South Lebanon, Reportedly in Response to Rocket Attacks.”
Toning, placement, invention, raising trial balloons, and publica-
tion of out-of-date stories given an appearance of present-day rele-
vancy—all these techniques play an important role in stimulating what
is passed off as Middle East ‘“‘news.” The 7imes of August 23, 1974, on
page 6 had a two-column lead: ‘‘US Hears Report That Arabs Sought
to Bar It from Azores.”’ The State Department was the source for
reports that ‘“‘some unidentified Arab nation” had offered Portugal
$400 million to deny the U.S. use of the Lagens base in the Azores,
which served as a refueling point for the American airlift to Israel
during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
What was newsworthy for prominent publication—even if
verified, and it never was—about a ten-month-old attempt on the part
of the Arabs to block, if they could, the flow of military supplies to
Israel during a war in which Egypt and Syria had been fighting for their
very existence? Was this cricket? Congressman James Johnson of Den-
ver on the floor of the House had called the U.S. resupply effort
flowing to Israel “an act of war.” Had not several NATO allies of the
U.S. refused to have their territory or airspace violated by the shipment
of military supplies to Israel? What made this worthy of a two-column,
twelve-inch story, unless it was part of the cold war waged against the
Arabs by the media, the 7imes in particular?
The following week, the “Business and Finance”’ section of the
Sunday Times carried a five-column, half-a-front-page spread, replete
with illustration and concluded on half an inside page, “‘How Arabs
Turn Oil into Armaments.” A gross fear of what the Arabs might do
with their hundreds of millions of petrodollars underlies the article
written by Pranay Gupte. The multimillion-dollar defense purchases
by Iran, a non-Arab but oil-producing country, were cited as a possible
pattern for what the wealthy Arab oil-producing countries might do.
The entire tone of the article was calculated to inspire fear of the
Arabs and to supplement speculation being raised by Times columnists
as to the possibility of armed intervention to assure both access to oil
and the security of Israel. The Institute on Human Relations, an organ
of the American Jewish Committee and part of the Zionist apparatus,
was used as the source for figures on direct foreign investment in the
338 THE COVER-UP
U.S., which had increased from $3 billion in 1973 to over $6 billion.
The Arab share of this was not precisely given but was insinuated to
be very high and, of course, excessive. The article elsewhere bore
unmistakable signs of having been Israelist inspired. The Institute was
also quoted as ‘‘warning that Middle East oil revenues in 1974 could
reach $110 billion” and that a significant quantity of this Arab revenue
was going into military purchases.
Again trying to confuse the reader into believing Iran was an Arab
nation, it was noted that in 1973 foreign military sales amounted to
$8.26 billion, of which the Iranians purchased $4 billion and Saudi
Arabia $587.6 million. And only by reading elsewhere on the page a
box listing the arms sales to all countries did the reader learn that
Israel in 1974 had purchased $2.1 billion in military equipment, ex-
ceeded only by Iran’s buying and almost four times Saudi Arabia’s
purchases.
To heighten fear of the Arabs, the writer quoted from a Lebanese
representing Kidder, Peabody, the American brokerage firm, in Beirut:
“There is no reason why we Arabs should not control U.S. companies.
We can hire the best lawyers, the best public relations people and the
best accountants. I think we should make a major take-over in the
States as a matter of opinion.” This view of one Roger Tamraz was
held to be ‘‘a growing one, according to observers.”
The Tamraz quote appeared verbatim in the August 28 issue of
Near East Report, as part of an analysis paralleling the Times on the Arab
“investment threat.” This, once again, clearly indicated the close con-
nection between the New York Times and this Zionist Washington
organ.
The Times has always prided itself on its open-mindedness, pre-
senting divergent and even unpopular views, traditionally through its
“Letter to the Editor” column and then through the newer institution
of the Op-Ed page. Spokesmen for all kinds of opposing viewpoints,
causes, and positions on any and all subjects have almost universally
been able to obtain space, even a Clifford Irving to comment on Judge
Sirica’s honesty and morality. When it has come to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, however, there has been a slight departure from normal lib-
eral practice.
The Times has published a totally disproportionate number of
Zionist, pro-Israel letters. This finding was supported by a survey,
“Stands on the Arab-Israel Conflict: Letters to the Editor and Op-Ed
Articles Published by the New York Times.’’34 The periods covered for
the letters were the years 1975 (January through December), 1976
Numero Uno: The New York Times 339
(January through June), and 1977 (January through September). In the
first period there were 140 pro-Israeli letters published as against 41
pro-Arab or anti-Zionist ones and 25 neutral. The overall findings for
the twenty-seven months: pro-Israeli 286, pro-Arab 86, neutral 50.
However, the comparative quantified results do not convey all of
the real impact of the stands taken, as the figures alone do not reveal
the extent of the underlying bias—in favor of Israel—with all its subtle-
ties. The editors of the Times have used various manipulative mech-
anisms designed not only to highlight the presentation of pro-Israeli
stands but also to undermine pro-Arab and/or neutral stands. For
example, those whose letters defended the Arab-Palestinian position
were usually most carefully selected. Very often it was someone clearly
identifiable as of Arabic lineage, or an Arab Ambassador who obvi-
ously had an axe to grind and therefore whose credibility was instan-
taneously challenged, and with whose mode of expression the readers
often could not relate.
It was rare that a pro-Arab letter was allowed to appear without
an accompanying rebuttal, or one shortly thereafter. Usually, as in the
instance of the Abu Daoud affair in January 1977, the letters critical
of the French were twice as long as the letters deploring the hysteria
and expressions of outrage over the release of the suspected Pales-
uinian perpetrator of the attack at Munich.
The survey showed that “Letters to the Editor” were most of the
time much longer for pro-Israel stands*®, and significantly longer in
some instances.36 Additionally, pro-Arab or neutral stands were usu-
ally followed by their immediate pro-Israel counterparts, while the
reverse did not necessarily take place. Furthermore, in some instances
a pro-Arab letter was temporally and spatially separated®’ (1.e., placed
in a later issue) from its pro-Israel counterpart, despite the proximity
of the dates the letters were written. On the other hand, Arab stands
presented are immediately followed by their specific pro-Israel re-
sponse, regardless of the fact that the latter may have been written at
a much later date.*8
In addition to the variable of relative length of letters (advanta-
geous to the pro-Israel stand), other devices have been used by the
editors, such as sandwiching a pro-Arab and/or neutral stand between
three or more pro-Israel ones,39 as well as the cumulative presentation
of a number of pro-Israel stands—thus strengthening their impact—
and relegating the pro-Arab rejoinder to the end.*°
Incidences of title-slanting (i-e., not representing the essence of
the pro-Arab view) have occurred, but such has never been the case
340 THE COVER-UP
when the editors selected titles for pro-Israel letters.4! The editors’
layout has also frequently been used to favor pro-Israel letters; for
example, by boxing their titles and not that of a pro-Arab letter ap-
pearing simultaneously.42 The editors have resorted to other prejudi-
cial tactics by sometimes giving a single heading to both pro-Israel and
pro-Arab stands, when such is questionable and not necessarily appli-
cable to the latter.*3 (The findings of this survey hold true for the first
six months of 1978, when letters published were only slightly less
preponderantly pro-Zionist due to the sentiment for Sadat: 54 pro-
Israel, 19 pro-Arab, 23 neutral.)
The survey covered Op-Ed articles printed between January |
through the end of September 1977. There were thirty-one pro-Israel
articles, seven neutral, and four pro-Arab. In this way the Times en-
forced the view that the only people who could possibly take issue with
its pro-Israel stance were ‘‘those Arabs’’—a view strengthened by oc-
casional articles in the Times Magazine section such as the Joseph Kraft
hate piece, “Those Arabists in the State Department.”4* Letters ex-
pressing concern for the totality of American interests or opposition
to the subordination of Judaism to political Zionism never appeared.
Jewish iconoclasts, it was feared, might perhaps inspire a revolt of the
“enslaved”’ Jewish masses, many of whom have themselves harbored
distinct doubts about Israelism but, without leadership, have resorted
to the herd instinct.
I also personally endeavored to set the Times’ record straight on
one rather important matter—the exploitation of Dr. Albert Einstein
by the Zionist movement. When the greatest scientist of our age died
on April 18, 1956, at the age of seventy-six, the Times in the course of
its eulogy referred to “Israel, whose establishment as a state he had
championed.” This ‘‘kidnapping”’ of Einstein for Israel was one of the
most extraordinary coups ever perpetrated by any political group any-
where, but with the help of the omnipotent Times anything is possible.
The great mathematician had vigorously opposed the creation of the
State of Israel, but a myth to the contrary has been widely spawned by
the media, and was repeated sixteen years later.
In late March 1972 the New York Times published a series of articles
dealing with the life and thought of Albert Einstein as allegedly re-
vealed in the collection of his manuscripts, letters, and other papers,
which were to be published by his estate. The third of the series
included on the front page a three-column photograph of Einstein
with Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, and the caption read: “Ein-
stein papers tell of scientist’s efforts toward the creation of Israel.”
Numero Uno: The New York Times 34]
The article further referred “to his long efforts in behalf of the creation
of a Jewish national state and of his sad refusal” to accept the Presi-
dency upon the death of Chaim Weizmann.
Einstein, despite the Times’ incessant recitals to the contrary,
clearly opposed the creation of the State of Israel. A clear understand-
ing of the position taken on Palestine by the great mathematician,
himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, will not only set the record
straight and correct journalistic inaccuracies, but is most relevant to
the continuing quest for a just peace in the Middle East.
In his testimony in January 1946 before the Anglo-American
Committee of Inquiry, and in answer to the specific question whether
refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state, Einstein
stated: ““The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot under-
stand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-mindedness and
economic obstacles. I believe that it is bad. I have always been against
it.” He went further to deride the concept of a Jewish commonwealth
as an “imitation of Europe, the end of which was brought about by
nationalism.”
Then, in 1952, in a message to a ‘Children to Palestine” dinner,
Einstein spoke of the necessity of curbing “‘a kind of nationalism which
has arisen in Israel if only to permit a friendly and fruitful co-existence
with the Arabs.”’ When this portion of the Einstein message was cen-
sored in the organization’s press release so as to impart the impression
of all-out support of Israel, I went to Princeton to seek the Professor’s
views on the incident. Einstein then told me that he had never been
a Zionist and had never favored the creation of the State of Israel.
It was then that he also told me of a significant conversation with
Weizmann. Einstein had asked him: “‘What of the Arabs if Palestine
were given to the Jews?” And Weizmann replied: ‘‘What Arabs? They
are hardly of any consequence.”
Einstein referred me to his book Out of My Later Years, published
in 1950, in which he had expanded on his philosophy: “I should much
rather see a reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living
together than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical con-
siderations, 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.’’45
In subsequent years he vigorously supported many Israeli cultural
activities, in particular the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Insti-
tute, to which he was deeply dedicated. According to biographer Dr.
342 THE COVER-UP
Philip Frank, the professor had a “good hearted weakness” and was
hesitant to rebuke Zionists for their frequent manipulations of his
views and unauthorized use of his name in order to enhance their
prestige and fill their political purse. His hesitation to disassociate
himself from political Zionism helped confuse the American press.
In his modest manner, he publicly declined the Israeli Presidency,
as Weizmann’s successor, on the given grounds that he was not qua-
lified in the area of human relationships. But, in fact, that acceptance
of high office in nationalist Israel was hardly in keeping with the basic
philosophy of this great humanist and universalist.
Attempts to tie the renowned scientist to political Zionism con-
tinued. First there were the welter of public tributes from Israeli and
Zionist leaders, published at the time of his death. And two weeks later
in a story prominently published by the Times, the Israeli Consul in
New York claimed that Einstein had been preparing a laudatory speech
for nationwide television in commemoration of the seventh anniver-
sary of Israel. Not only was the evidence of Einstein’s Zionist intent
scarcely substantiated, but it was in direct conflict with the professor’s
last statement about the Israeli state, given in an interview with Doro-
thy Schiff, pro-Israel publisher of the New York Post. She quoted him
as saying: “We had great hopes for Israel at first. We thought that it
might be better than other nations, but it is no better.’’46
In the third of its articles on Einstein, the Jimes nevertheless
repeated the myth of his support of the creation of Israel without
indicating any new proof. Were the good professor alive today, there
is every reason to believe that he would be in the forefront of those
condemning the deprivation of the rights of the Palestinian Arabs. As
far back as January 28, 1930, Einstein had warned in the Palestinian
newspaper Falastin that “oppressive nationalism must be conquered”
and that he could ‘‘see a future for Palestine only on the basis of
peaceful cooperation between the two peoples who are at home in the
country . . . come together they must in spite of all.’” And from the
outset he had fully supported the idea of Dr. Judah Magnes, President
of the Hebrew University, of an Arab-Jewish binational state. In a letter
to the Times witii Rabbi Leo Baeck of Germany, he wrote: “Besides the
fact that they [Magnes and his followers] speak for a much wider circle
of inarticulate people, they speak in the name of principles which have
been the most significant contribution of the Jewish people to human-
ity.”” Such statements are hardly consonant with the Jimes’ allegation
of the scientist’s support of the creation of a Zionist state.
The Times’ revival of this Einstein mythology led me to call Op-Ed
Numero Uno: The New York Times 343
page editor Harrison E. Salisbury and suggest that it would be appro-
priate for him to run a piece presenting the true views of the learned
scientist on this subject. Although every type of opinion has been
presented on this important page, Salisbury refused to commission
such an article, as is customarily done. He stated he would be happy
to look at the finished product if it were written on speculation.
Even this I did, and here is his letter rejecting the article, the
substance of which has been set forth in the above pages:
I'm sorry to say that we decided against your article concerning Professor
Einstein. As I told you when we discussed this matter on the telephone, I was
dubious about the idea of elaborating on this particular aspect of Dr. Einstein’s
career, and I confess on reading the article my feeling was strengthened. You
may feel that I overstate the case, but it would seem to the casual reader like
myself that Dr. Einstein’s views, as one might expect, underwent a series of
changes over the years and the picture does not come out so strongly in your
article as to compel its publication.
How possibly could any subsequent Einstein “change over the
years’’—and his basic attitude toward political Zionism never altered
one iota—affect what he did or did not do about the creation of Israel,
an act which took place in 1948? The cultural Zionism in which Ein-
stein believed was a far cry from Jewish nationalism embodied in the
Zionist State of Israel, which he decried to his very death in 1956.
Likewise, the 7imes sees to it that Middle East books for its Sunday
Book Review Section fall in the proper hands. The revised edition of
Prime Minister Begin’s The Revolt and of Joseph Churba’s Amenca’s
Decline in the Middle East were reviewed by Wolf Blitzer, Washington
correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and editor of Near East Report, the
Zionist lobby’s official publication. For Jerusalem, 47 written by Mayor
Teddy Kollek and his son Amos, was placed in the safe care of ardent
Zionist, Saul Bellow. Still another biography on Begin,*8 along with
Anwar Sadat’s autobiography, was given to Nadav Safran, an Egyptian
Jew who emigrated to Palestine and fought in the Israeli army before
coming to the U.S. from Israel to study and teach at Harvard.
The most pitiful thing about the Times’ handling of the Middle
East is that it did not have to be so. The progressiveness and integrity
of its founder, Adolph S. Ochs, and his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulz-
berger, who succeeded him upon his death in 1935, established a
tradition in which fair reportage and legitimate dissent were unques-
tioned. The Times was obligated to raise and face questions about
Israel in the same courageous manner as Sulzberger had done when,
344 THE COVER-UP
as publisher, he publicly declared in 1946: “I dislike the coercive
methods of Zionists who, in this country, have not hesitated to use
economic means to silence persons who have different views. I object
to the attempts at character assassination of those who do not agree
with them.”
In the same spirit, the Times publisher declared at the commemo-
ration of the eightieth anniversary of the Miztah Congregation at Chat-
tanooga, Tennessee, “I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the unfor-
tunate Jews of Europe’s D.P. camps are helpless hostages for whom
statehood has been made the only ransom.’’49 But then the Jimes’
anti-Zionism came under attack as the Zionists launched their devastat-
ing 1946 boycott, which brought the paper to its knees. Ideology
abruptly went out the window. Overnight the editorial policy shifted
from anti-Zionism to non-Zionism, and later to Zionism. And the news
pages soon succumbed to the predilections of its editorial overseers.
The details of that boycott were hidden away in a file in Sulz-
berger’s safe and remained for many years one of the guarded secrets
of Times Square. It was in The Kingdom and the Power,5° Gay Talese’s
interesting book on the Times, that some light was shed on what had
only been referred to as the frightening experience. It had been known
that pressure from the large department store advertisers had brought
the paper to its knees, but what had not been revealed was that it had
been the cancellation of an advertisement submitted by the American
League for a Free Palestine, the American alter ego and fund-raiser for
the terrorist Begin-led Irgun Zvai Leumi, which had aroused Zionist
ire and helped usher in the boycott.
Sulzberger had explained, according to Talese’s account, that
while his paper in the past often had run the ads of organizations it
opposed editorially—it had, in fact, once lent the Daily Worker news-
print when the Communist daily was in short supply—and had previ-
ously published many Zionist ads without question, the decision to
cancel on this occasion was based on the 7imes’ conviction that the
League was directly connected with the Irgun terrorists in the Middle
East and, secondly, on the anti-British charges in the advertisement
not supportable by facts. For these reasons the Times publisher felt he
could not be responsible for the ill will the contemplated advertise-
ment would sur between Britain and the U.S. “ ‘We happen to believe
that the British are acting in good and not in bad faith,’ Sulzberger
wrote to one of the Zionist leaders. ‘From our standpoint, therefore,
your advertisement is not true. Since there is no yardstick by which
truth of this kind can be proved, it means that we are putting our
Niimero Uno: The New York Times 345
judgment ahead of yours—something of which you will not approve
and which we do only with the greatest hesitancy.’ ’’5!
Thirty-one years later, when the publishership rested in the hands
of his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (in the interim son-in-law Orville
Dryfoos had directed the paper until his death in 1963), the Times
joined in the greatest whitewash in journalistic history by welcoming
to this country Israel’s new Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, for
opposition to his terrorist activities had led to the 1946 ad cancellation,
the boycott, and the paper’s conversion to Zionism. The vicious circle
had been closed as the U.S. “‘began the Begin.”’ No one reading the
Times could ever imagine that the world, to recall Nevil Shute, was
really ‘‘On the Beach.”
Probably the person most responsible for the paper’s shift from
anti-Zionism to non-Zionism to an almost outright Zionism®? is Execu-
tive Editor Abe Rosenthal. Fanatically devoted to the Times, he was first
hired as a $12-a-week stringer at New York City College, spent nine
years as a foreign correspondent, and became Metropolitan Editor in
1963. Under the patronage of Sulzberger, he became Managing Editor
in 1969 and was elevated to Executive Editor in 1977.
According to most reports, Rosenthal can do no wrong in the eyes
of his boss. As a result he does exactly what he likes with the paper.
A 1977 Time report claimed that he has ‘“‘done more to re-shape the
paper than any editor since Carr Van Anda (first Managing Editor
under Adolph Ochs).” As one reporter claimed: “It’s not that Abe
doesn’t tolerate dissent, it’s that he rarely hears any.’’53
He has ruthlessly shifted and rearranged the staff, installing his
own men as editors, including Managing Editor Seymour Topping,
Deputy Managing Editor Arthur Gelb, Assistant Managing Editor
James Greenfield, News Editor Allan Siegal, and Foreign Editor Rob-
ert Semple. There has been a gradual disappearance of Christians on
the staff; those who remain, like Washington Bureau Chief Hedrick
Smith or Assistant Foreign Editor Terence Smith, show a distinct
Zionist leaning. (Smith recently returned from a four-year stint as the
Times correspondent in Israel.)
The whole trend under Rosenthal has been manifested in the final
shift to all-out support of Israel, a position with which no Zionist could
possibly find fault. Publisher Sulzberger wishes to avoid any personal
involvement in this subject and leaves it all to his Executive Editor,
who indulges in all kinds of ploys, ranging from trial balloons to
contrived articles, to advertise the Israeli cause. Writer Pranay Gupte,
who penned the August article on Arab oil and armament purchases,
346 THE COVER-UP
was brought back as a lad from Bombay by Rosenthal and pushed up
the ladder. Gupte maintains closest ties with Jewish groups and pubhi-
cations, even doing occasional writing for the American Jewish Com-
mittee, which manages to find its way into the pages of the Times.
The editorial policy of the paper on the Palestine issue, reflected
in its news reportage, was first to attack the Arafat proposal for a
secular, binational state to include Israel and occupied Palestine, and
then to oppose a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza when
the PLO had opted for this solution. The Palestinian organization
succeeded Nasser as the number-one béte noire of the Times writers,
who could see little wrong in efforts to bar the PLO from any participa-
tion in deciding the fate of its own people. And friends of the PLO such
as President Assad became the target of specially prepared critical
articles.54
Led by the Times, the U.S. media, with few notable exceptions,55
greeted Begin’s election in an expected manner, referring in large
print to his banalities in behalf of peace and to his intrepid defense of
Palestine as an “early liberator,” and only in small type in back pages
to his record as a terrorist leader. (When the Times in December felt
obliged to print on its Op-Ed page a photo of the Irgun blown-up King
David Hotel, the type used for the caption was half the normal size.5®)
Columnists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway of the Village
Voice5’? uniquely referred to “the Disastrous Victory of Menachem
Begin, because he is reactionary in every way. He has created his own
reality. He lives in a different century, on the other end of the political
totem pole.” But Human Events5® hailed Begin as “‘Israel’s Ronald
Reagan” and applauded his strong anti-Communist position exem-
plified by his opening “‘of the gates to a group of Vietnamese refugees
fleeing Communist rule” and sending for economist Milton Friedman
to solve the country’s economic difficulties. (The appointment of
Friedman, who had helped bolster the financial position of the Chilean
military junta that had ousted the Allende government, one of the
darlings of the 7imes, drew no critical comment from that paper.)
The Times was far from alone in handling Begin with kid gloves.
Once again, New York’s Channel 13 revealed its idea of an objective
panel discussion: permit the view of an American Jewish Congress
representative, an Israeli-born journalist,59 and of a former Begin aide
to go unchallenged. Peter Bergson, who had run the Irgun’s stateside
organization, the American League for a Free Palestine, described his
old chieftain as a “kind, gentle man.” In its May 18 edition on the May
victory of Begin’s Likud party, the New York Post referred to “Victory
Numero Uno: The New York Times 347
by Hawk,” but its only page-one reference to Begin’s terrorist back-
ground was a quotation from exaggerated Damascus commentary.
Relegated to the bottom of an inside page was a brief reference to his
“tough militancy,” including his “raid” on Arab villages and the King
David Hotel incident.
The Times of that day carried on page one: “‘Israel’s Labor Party,
Dominant Since 1948, Loses to Rightist Bloc.” In paragraph four it
stated: ‘“The Likud is headed by Menachem Begin, a hard-line 64-year-
old politician who has been a Labor Party critic for years.” Throughout
the story, continued in depth onto page 8, there was not a single word
about Begin’s past terrorist history. Nor did the following day’s stories
in the Times (three on page one, including a picture of the victorious
candidate with Mrs. Begin) in which the newly elected Prime Minister
was referred to as a ‘‘courtly, baldish figure’’ who kisses women on the
hand or cheek on introduction and is particular about his attire,’’6°
make any allusion to his past background save to depict Begin as a
“freedom fighter” in a “liberation movement.” The fearful Arab reac-
tion to the Begin triumph, shunted to page 14, was made to appear
paranoic, as another of the usual gross exaggerations from that part
of the world.
From the second day after the elections to his arrival in the U.S.
in July, Times reportage focused on the new Begin. His peaceful de-
meanor was portrayed in his post-election call on Presidents Sadat and
Assad and on King Hussein ‘“‘to meet him as soon as possible in
face-to-face peace talks’ and in his well-publicized efforts to achieve
Cabinet participation by both the Labor party and Yigal Yadin’s Demo-
cratic Movement for Change. Israeli pledges of ‘‘caution on its rule in
Gaza and the West Bank” made front-page headlines on May 23. In
contrast, Arab statements, which at this moment were at a minimum,
presented them as bellicose; the many Arab internecine quarrels,
whether between the PLO and the Syrians or between Sadat and Qad-
dafi, were built up into booming headlines, such as in a Sunday ‘Week
in Review” feature, “The Arabs Can’t Seem to Stop Fighting.’’6!
Reported at length was the shuttling back and forth to Israel of
Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, chairman of the Conference of Presi-
dents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who upon his return
was received ‘‘at the White House by Robert J. Lipshutz, Counsel to
the President, and Stuart Eizenstat, head of the Domestic Council, the
two most prominent Jews on Mr. Carter’s staff.”6? Schindler insisted
that the Israeli leader was no “raving extremist’? and might “soften
his policies.” On June 7 the Times reported, “Jews in US Seeking Unity
348 THE COVER-UP
Behind Begin.” Between Schindler’s efforts and those of Shmuel Katz,
Begin’s personal representative and Minister of External Information,
who had been dispatched to the U.S., the Times by June 26 could carry
the headline ‘‘Begin Gaining Support of the Jewish Community as His
Visit to US Nears.” Jews had discarded their doubts and were now,
according to the Times, solidly behind Israel’s new chieftain, as was the
Times editorial page, which called for a “real’’ peace to include Arab
normalization of relations with Israel, but was absolutely silent about
any counterpart normalization of Israeli nationalism.4
Photojournalism again played its important role here. The day
Begin actually took over the reins of government and appeared in the
Knesset as Prime Minister, his picture, nattily attired with tie, appeared
on the front page of the 7imes.65 The very next day another picture
from the takeover proceedings appeared, with no additional news
backup, showing the neat Begin with tie in sharp contrast to his prede-
cessor, Rabin, with open-necked shirt and tieless.®* A lengthy front-
page story, “66 Vietnam Refugees Reach Israeli Haven,” with an im-
posing headline and most sympathetic picture, helped the image of the
new leader.§7
In its half page devoted to the “questions and answers on the
background and main issues of the Middle East conflict” the day be-
fore the July 1977 Carter-Begin meeting, ®8 there was the briefest men-
tion of the Palestinians, an expression of doubt as to what they wanted,
but nothing about the beginnings of the problem (the original sin) to
indicate what they deserved. The image of spoilers and terrorists was
left intact.
In its editorial that same day, ‘“Mr. Begin Comes to Washington,”
the Times justified Israel’s refusal since 1967 to pull back so as to
“provide security against attack, which their neighbors have never
been willing to foreswear,”’ suggesting future withdrawals to be staged
“only gradually and behind a variety of residual defense arrange-
ments.” If Begin were willing to accept this, the Times argued that the
President “might shift some of the recent American pressure to the
Arab nations, which have yet to articulate even to their own peoples
their readiness to contemplate peace.”
The Sunday two days before Begin’s meeting with Carter in Wash-
ington, the New York Times Magazine®9 carried a cover photo of Mena-
chem Begin, identifying him (on page 4) as ‘‘the leader of the Irgun
underground in Palestine,” and two articles on ‘““The New Face of
Israel.” Four photos of a younger Begin, introducing the articles,
carried this large caption: ‘““The lives of a founding father of Israel—
Ntimero Uno: The New York Times 349
Menachem Begin as the leader of the Jewish underground military organi-
zation, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, in the late 1940’s.’’ (Italics added.)
The longer article contained the diaries of a June 8-22 visit to
Israel by CBS Diplomatic Correspondent Marvin Kalb, who had
gained renown as the admiring publicist for Henry Kissinger but had
now turned his magic pen—and his voice, too—to the new Israeli
leader. Prior to his Times piece, Kalb had complained, in a lengthy
interview in the Jerusalem Post,7° of the hysterical reaction of portions
of the American news media to the election victory of Begin, and he
had criticized fellow CBS news commentator Walter Cronkite for
opening an evening program with the words ‘“‘Begin, former terrorist.”
Kalb had also assailed Time magazine for alleging that ‘‘Jews raped
Arabs at Deir Yassin, a claim the PLO never made.” His contribution
to image building could scarcely have been outdone by the most rabid
Israeli journalist.
For his call for a Palestinian homeland and eventual return to the
1967 borders, President Carter was portrayed as the object of greatest
hostility in Israel from the new as well as the old Labor party leader-
ship, to the point that even Golda Meir “has hinted to friends that she
may have to abandon her retirement from public life and ‘open up on
the American President.’ ’’ Here and elsewhere in the article it was
“Aux armes, citoyens”’ (to arms, citizens) as American Israelists were
rallied to Begin’s side.
Kalb held nothing back: a recital of Masada and the wiping out of
its 900 Jewish defenders in a.p. 73; Israeli writers and Cabinet minis-
ters sounding their fears of Carter policy; new Defense Minister Weiz-
man insisting ‘‘Carter will understand why we talk about ‘Judea’ and
‘Samaria’ not the “West Bank’ ’’; Begin mouthing Zionist dogma that
“**The land of Israel’ belongs to the Jewish people,” and that “Israel’s
right to exist comes from God.’ Accompanying the Kalb piece was a
large cartoon reprinted from the Jerusalem Post magazine offering
Begin’s sarcastic plan for an American “‘withdrawal from occupied
territories,” showing what the U.S. would look like as it withdrew
successively from Mexican, Northwest, Texas, and Florida “‘annexa-
tions.”
The deft Kalb analysis ended on this note: “Hundreds of Israelis
crowded around the grave of young Natanyana, the young paratrooper
who was killed on July 4, 1976, during the Israeli rescue mission at
Entebbe.” After the chanting of the commemorative ‘‘kaddish,” Begin
delivered a brief eulogy and, as we are told by this admiring writer, as
his eyes “swept over the crowd, only one thought could be reverberat-
350 THE COVER-UP
ing in the mind of the leader of Israel—in a sense of the Jewish people
—the security of Eretz Israel would be the security of the Jewish peo-
ple. Surely the President would understand.”
The shorter article, “Hawk on a Mission of Peace,” by Times corre-
spondent in Jerusalem William E. Farrell, further fashioned the new
image of the Israeli Prime Minister. Tracing his Zionist career in Po-
land and presenting him as a near-victim of both Nazi and Soviet
totalitarianism, the author portrayed Begin as a man of peace (a pic-
ture showed him smiling broadly as he patted the hands of a bedouin
sheikh in an Arab encampment in the Negev Desert), who had battled
the British oppressor in Palestine and upon whose shoulders the blame
for blowing up the King David Hotel had been placed, although the
British had refused to heed warnings to abandon the building (Begin
in 1948 had confided to Walter Deuel of the Chicago Daily News that the
British had all of thirty minutes to evacuate their headquarters).7!
The Farrell piece rallied the readership with the confident conclu-
sion that Begin, while a stubborn “politician,” was ready to meet the
Carter challenge over the West Bank and the Palestinian issue, and
that he “may be the right man at the right time to persuade the Israelis
that major territorial concessions must be made.” Regarding the atroc-
ity of Deir Yassin, Farrell exculpated the former Irgun chieftain of
blame in this manner: “Begin was involved in a battle [italics added] in
which 200 Arabs, including women and children, were killed after a
‘warning’ to non-combatants.”
The warm and enthusiastic reception accorded Begin on his July
1977 visit to the US, in no small part due to the Times, was all too
reminiscent of his first celebrated visit in 1948 after the Israeli state
had come into existence on May 15. The Reception Committee for
Menachem Begin, formed by his American League for a Free Palestine,
exploited the American weakness of prominent citizens to promiscu-
ously join any organization smart enough to pick a sweet-sounding
name. A group of important Christian Zionists, including the Senators
of Kansas, Rhode Island, and Maryland, a score of Governors, men of
letters, and clergymen of all faiths, were founding members of the
Reception Commitiee. The invitations, calling upon the recipient to
add his name to the list of distinguished Americans welcoming Mena-
chem Begin to the U.S., read:
A Commander-in-Chief of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, he led one of the most
glorious and successful resistance movements in history. A little defenseless
community, a people who, in the course of almost two thousand years of
Numero Uno: The New York Times 351
dispersion, had lost the art of military defense, was transformed under the
miracle of his leadership into a fighting and heroic nation. It was through the
Hebrew Underground under his command that the hitherto pariah people of
the world, the Jews, won back their dignity and self-respect and the respect of
the civilized world. It was because of the valiant fight waged by the Irgun that
the whole structure of the British regime in Palestine collapsed, making possi-
ble the proclamation of Hebrew sovereignty and the establishment of the State
of Israel.
The two-page letter neglected to mention even one small word
about Begin’s bloody exploits save his determination to drive the
British out of Palestine (thus endowing his terror with an anticolonist
cast). According to the Reception Committee, Begin was the hero of
Israel and the Freedom Movement’s candidate for Prime Minister.
This, coincidentally, was the fall of 1948—the time of an important
national election in the U.S. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee remarked, “Put any petition with the name Jew on it before
a candidate in an election year, and you can get anyone to sign any-
thing!” At any rate, within a few weeks the Welcoming Committee had
grown to include eleven Senators, twelve Governors, seventy-odd con-
gressmen, seventeen justices and judges, and educators, public offi-
cials, and mayors by the scores.
These celebrated names emblazoned a huge advertisement in
the New York Times under the headline: ““The Man Who Defied an
Empire and Gained Glory for Israel—Menachem Begin, former
Irgun Commander-in-Chief, Arrives on Goodwill Mission Today.”
By now the 7imes was no longer questioning Zionist ads. The usual
Waldorf Astoria dinner and an official welcome at City Hall was to
follow. The main object of the visit was to obtain funds for electing
Begin Prime Minister of Israel. His political platform called for in-
corporation of most of Jordan and other adjacent territories into
Israel so that the new state would include the original boundaries
of biblical Canaan.
Begin’s record was well known in the State Department and his
visa application was rejected, until President Truman, vacationing in
Key West, issued a presidential order to grant entrance. But the arrival
in the U.S. ofa man who had carried out wanton criminal acts and even
was seeking to overthrow the U.N. partition proposal because not
enough land had been ceded to the Zionists was exuberantly heralded
by U.S. officialdom. The Welcoming Committee disintegrated only
after well-known Protestant clergyman Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, Cath-
olic Father John La Farge, and Rabbi Morris Lazaron, alerted by this
352 THE COVER-UP
author, publicly warned the duped U.S. politicians and called for the
repudiation of Begin.7?
Kansas Senator Arthur Capper claimed he did not know how his
name happened to appear in a newspaper advertisement concerning
Begin. Senator Herbert R. O’Connor, Democrat of Maryland, asserted
he had never approved acts of terrorism and that the only possible
connection he had with the Begin shindig was his concern with “the
general Palestinian problem in furthering the U.S. policy on the new
State of Israel.” Congressman John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts
wired the Chairman of the Committee, author Louis Bromfield:
“Belatedly and for the record I wish to withdraw my name from the
reception committee for Menachem Begin, former Irgun Commander.
When accepting your invitation, I was ignorant of the true nature of
his activities, and I wish to be disassociated from them completely.”
The office of Congressman Joe Hendricks of Florida revealed that the
congressman had been out of town and thus his name ‘“‘mistakenly”
had been given to the Begin Committee. Several other Congressmen
could not recall later whether they, or their office, had ever authorized
the use of their names. Dr. Harry C. Byrd, President of the University
of Maryland, said: ‘“‘Some people I know asked me if they could use my
name as a member of the reception committee and I said they could.
I didn't know who he was. I am not going to New York.” And so it went
—after the damage had been done.
Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, and Seymour Mil-
man were among the signatories to this letter, which appeared in the
Times on December 4, 1948.
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence
in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” . . . a political party
closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social ap-
peal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and
following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist right-wing chauvinist
organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United
States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for
his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with
conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of na-
tional repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that
those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if currently informed as to
Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and
support to the movement he represents. . . . A shocking example was their
behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin . . . this incident exemplified the
Numero Uno: The New York Times 353
character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they
have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and ra-
cial superiority. Like other Fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes,
and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions.
The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and
his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine, bear the imprint
of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakeable stamp of a Fascist
party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike) and misre-
presentation are means, and a ‘“‘Leader State” is the goal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth
about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all
the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to
campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the
dangers to Israel of support to Begin. The undersigned therefore take this
means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his
party, and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of
fascism.
The reference to unions made Philip Murray, then President of
the CIO and one of the original members of the Welcoming Commit-
tee, suddenly realize that he had never authorized the use of his name
—after it had appeared for weeks on thousands of letters, let alone
advertisements.
What made the 7imes’ complicity in building a different face for
Begin so patently dishonest twenty-nine years later was that the editors
and writers of a newspaper so steeped in foreign affairs could not help
know of the connection between the Irgun massacre at Deir Yassin and
the Palestinian problem, the continuing core of Middle East turmoil.
Journalistic history reveals few parallels to the cover-up of the past
record of the head of the Israeli government. Without the New York
Times, no new Begin would have ever been created for the American
people.
In the face of the overwhelming evidence of inescapable facts, the
Times with its enormous influence continued to provide otherwise the
most effective cover-up for the Israeli occupation. Its editorial and
news pages vigorously opposed the PLO at every turn, not only the
long term goal of a binational Palestine but also the immediate goal
of an independent entity on the West Bank. When Secretary Vance in
the summer of 1977 was in Jordan looking for “Palestinian dignitaries”
to supplant the PLO, it even gave credence to denials that the Arafat-
led group reflected the sentiments of the Palestinian people.
A Flora Lewis (European correspondent sent to the Middle East)
dispatch from Tel Aviv73 declared ‘“‘West Bank Arabs Favor UN Trus-
354 THE COVER-UP
teeship Over Area.”’ The impression was conveyed that the Secretary
had met at a garden party at the home of Foreign Minister Moshe
Dayan with a representative group of West Bank Arabs who had pre-
sented him a petition denying that the PLO was representative of West
Bank Palestinians. Although only a small group of dissidents, led by
the son of former Hebron Mayor Sheikh al-Jaabari, were identified in
the article, Lewis simulated a ‘‘balance’’ between them and the group
of West Bank Arab Mayors of major towns who had made clear their
total support of the PLO in a letter earlier delivered to Vance’s staff
in Jerusalem.
It was more than slightly ironic that Secretary Vance at this stage
should have advanced the trusteeship concept President Truman had
contemptuously attributed to the “striped-pants boys’? when State
Department career officers had suggested this as a solution in 1947
and again in 1948 after international support for partition had failed.
(See Chapter I.) Had not the President precipitately recognized Israel,
a Palestinian trusteeship might then have been effected and much of
the ensuing turmoil avoided.
In a September 9, 1977, article datelined ‘‘Ramallah, Israel-
Occupied Jordan,” New York Times Senior Editor and former Editorial
Page Editor John B. Oakes still was writing that “though no Arab will
admit it, this is surely one of the mildest military occupations in his-
tory.’’74 Downgrading the PLO, as he had when he wrote many of the
Times’ editorials, Oakes pointed to the alleged ‘‘lack of unanimity to
the PLO claim to be the ‘sole and legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people’ ”’ in contrast to the “solid determination of the 40
families at the new Kudum settlement ‘to establish our rights to this
land forever.’ ”
Oakes enthused about the “far higher wages” enjoyed by Arab
labor in Israel than outside and about the “building boom,” but re-
mained totally blind to Palestinian oppression. His observation that
“Israeli troops are hardly to be seen” was in direct conflict with the
article ‘‘Permanent State of Siege,” from the pen of a fellow journalist
of the Philadelphia Inquirer three months earlier: “Uniforms are every-
where. Jeeps with anti-tank guns roll down Ben Yehuda Street without
attracting attention. Young men and women carrying submachine
guns stroll down the street, or clamber aboard buses.75
During the 1977-78 peace talks ushered in by the Sadat initiative,
the Times’ opposition to the PLO, editorially and on the Op-Ed page,
intensified as Egyptian-Israeli differences centered on the issues of
settlements and Palestinian self-determination. A John Oakes article
Numero Uno: The New York Times 355
devoted an entire column, ‘Defying the PLO,” to a refutation of the
right of the Arafat group to speak for West Bank Arabs, using as his
authority a “prosperous Palestinian businessman (passing through
New York) who did his own share of bomb-throwing and terrorism
against the Israelis 30 years ago” and who now has “no use of the
PLO’s extreme position and terrorist tactics and fears its radicalism.’’76
In building up Abdel-Nour Khalil Janho as a “tough, energetic
entrepreneur who was typical of the West Bankers who have no love
for the PLO’s extreme position,” former top editorial writer and
nephew of the founder of the Times Oakes told his readers only part
of the story. Janho, as a letter to the editor subsequently pointed out,?7
was a close friend of Jerusalem’s Mayor Teddy Kollek and was notori-
ous for his intimate relations with both Jordanian intelligence and
Israeli military authorities. The years of collaboration led to special
privileges and favors, including the monopoly in the bottling and
distribution of gas, bringing him a purple Cadillac and wealth. Badly
defeated in the spring 1976 elections on the West Bank, this dissident
was involved in a shooting in broad daylight over a gambling debt in
which he killed one man and wounded another, but was absolved by
a military court although this was a civil matter. Although receiving
military protection from the Israeli army, Janho himself was assas-
sinated early in 1978, an act of which Oakes and the Times took no
notice at all.
When the peace talks broke off principally over the issues of Israeli
settlements and the ‘‘self-rule”’ offered Palestinians, Times editorials
refused to censure Israel or place the blame on Begin: ‘“The issue over
what has come to be called the ‘self-determination’ of Palestinians is
a tragic legacy of rival nationalisms and the failure of the Arabs to
accept the partition of Palestine when it was offered by the world 30
years ago.”’78 In March even after the full-scale invasion of southern
Lebanon, the Times insisted that the ball rested in the Arab’s court:
“Only by showing that they understand Israel’s need for elementary
security can they logically presume peace on the return of lost terri-
tory.”79 Again, total disregard for the Zionist nature of the Israeli
state!
To maximize Israeli compliance with the UN March 19 resolution
calling for forthright, complete withdrawal, a bold two-columned Times
headline on page one of April 12 and repeated three days later pro-
claimed the ‘‘2-Stage Pullback.”” Both stories were accompanied by
large maps of South Lebanon on which names of towns and hamlets
from which withdrawal had been made were set in boxed large print
356 THE COVER-UP
giving the false impression that this was a meaningful withdrawal.
Twenty-two square miles of the 500-square-mile area occupied in
March, or five percent, had been relinquished.
The role of the Times in molding public opinion by means of such
persistent deceit and bias cannot be exaggerated. This giant possesses
a tremendous, monolithic influence directly on the public, as well as
on opinion-molding leaders, although a 1978 Harris poll showed that
the people “running” the press stood sixteenth in public esteem in a
listing of twenty professions and occupations. How to curtail this
power without breaching the prohibition against interference with
freedom of the press constitutes one of the great challenges of our
times, a problem which Chief Justice Warren E. Burger touched upon
in a concurring opinion of April 26, 1978, when he declared that “large
media conglomerates had no special claim on First Amendment rights
of free expression or other constitutional liberties.” For the major
peril that now faces Americans has been spawned by widespread miss-
ing information and myth-information underlying their country’s Mid-
dle East policy, no small part of which has been caused by the double
standard applied to terrorism.
x Terror: The Double Standard
And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always
in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired
of blood and create a race that can understand.
—George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra
It is nearly impossible to pick out the one particular subject of Middle
East reportage the media has most slanted and distorted. But certainly
the manner in which the use of violence has been presented probably
has had the most influence in formulating American public opinion.
The media has succeeded in getting Western man to accept a
double standard: one, that Jews and Zionists have been freedom
fighters in pursuit of a moral, legal, historical imperative—namely, the
establishment of their own state, Israel. On the other hand, the media
has stressed that when Palestinians resorted to armed violence to
regain their homeland, they were terrorists. Whereas the Hitler experi-
ence was readily invoked to condone Zionist intemperate acts, the
desperate frustration of being deprived of their homes for thirty years,
and any hearing for their grievances, was deemed no excuse for Pales-
tinian excesses.! The choice of words and pejorative adjectives, the
shadings, the explanatory material spelling out the particular incident,
and the amount of sympathy employed in describing the victims were
all instrumentalities in applying this double standard.
As an example, few voices were allowed to be heard in dissent of
the totally accepted Zionist labeling given the October war. One of
these appeared on WEEI, the CBS outlet in Boston, three days after
the fighting erupted. Following four callers, who were to varying de-
grees pro-Israel, the moderator introduced a soft-spoken voice unmis-
takably Indian or Pakistani, who complained of the use of slanted
language by the reporters. He stated that the moderator had no right
357
358 THE COVER-UP
to call the war an act of aggression when all Egypt and Syria were trying
to do was get back their own territory. Moderator Howard Nelson tried
unsuccessfully to rebut the gentleman by reading the dictionary mean-
ing of the word “‘aggression,”’ totally refusing to take into considera-
tion the initial 1967 Israeli seizure of Arab lands. The persistent ques-
tioner countered by pointing to the persistent media slantings: “‘Why
is it, when Israelis hijack a Lebanese plane and force it to land in Israel,
newscasters Call it a ‘diversion,’ but when the Palestinians engage in
air thievery, it is called ‘hijacking.’ Why,” he asked again, “‘is there this
double standard?”
A study? made of U.S. press reportage showed that although all
acts of terrorism were generally bemoaned, Israeli actions were usually
justified as responses to “‘intolerable situations.’ The Washington Post,
for example, justified the 1973 Israeli assassinations in Beirut as “the
best kind of terrorism,” since they killed ‘‘the worst kind of terror-
ists.”’3 In editorials dealing with the commandos, 95.2 percent of the
coverage by the New York Times, 91 percent by the Washington Post, and
100 percent by the Detroit Free Press was against commando terrorist
activity. While condemning the commandos, the Times did manage to
publish three features indicating sympathy for the plight of the Pales-
tinian refugees as refugees. The Washington Post had three editorials
and one feature on the refugee problem.
Under rules of the media, the Israelis are ‘‘freedom fighters” and
the Arabs are “‘terrorists,” the Israelis ‘‘make reprisals’’ while the
Palestinians ‘‘commit atrocities,” the Arabs constantly stand vilified,
the Israelis glorified. As stated in an October 1968 ‘Letter to Chris-
tians” signed by sixty-six ministers from nine denominations:
Westerners in general are already aware of what the Israeli feels: pride that
he is once more, after so long, master in Palestine, where he no longer need
apologize for being Jewish. But Westerners are not so aware of what the Arab
feels: resentment at losing his land, humiliation at military losses, frustration
at being unable to make his claims understood to the rest of the world. . . .
Westerners should understand that the Arabic term for the underground
fighters, fedayeen, means ‘those who sacrifice themselves,” and that the Arabs
compare them to the underground fighters in Europe during the Nazi occupa-
tion.4
This double standard came into play long ago and slowly per-
meated reporting from the outset of the struggle in Palestine, helping
to mold the popular impression of events there. Most people became
conditioned to believe that 1t was the Arabs alone who resorted to
Terror: The Double Standard 359
violence. But the record of the Zionist use of violence in behalf of their
cause, carefully blacked out from public surveillance,} is a lengthy one
that could be traced back to the days of the British mandate.
Violence was often used against their own, as on November 25,
1940, when the S.S. Patra was blown up in the Haifa harbor, killing
276 illegal Jewish immigrant passengers. At the time of the incident
these deaths were attributed to the British, and it was not until ten
years later that the responsibility for this disaster was placed at the
door of the Zionists. David Flinker, Israeli correspondent of the Jewish
Morning Journal (the largest Yiddish daily) described what had hap-
pened:
. .. It was then that the Haganah General Staff took a decision at which their
leaders shuddered. The decision was not to permit the Patna to leave Jaffa.
The English must be given to understand that Jews could not be driven away
from their own country. The Patna must be blown up. The decision was
conveyed to Haganah members on the Patna and in the hush of night, prepara-
tions had begun for the execution of the tragic act. On Sunday, November 26,
1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they were being
returned to sea. The Jews remained silent, save for a whisper from man to man
to go “up the deck, all up the deck.” Apparently, the signal did not reach
everybody, for many hundreds remained below—never to see the light again.
Suddenly an explosion was heard and a panic ensued. . . . It was a hellish scene;
people jumped into the water, children were tossed into the waves; agonizing
cries tore the heavens. The number of victims was officially placed at 276. The
survivors were permitted by the High Commissioner to land.§
Fifteen months later the S.S. Struma exploded in the Black Sea,
killing 769 illegal Jewish immigrants. The Jewish Agency described it
as an act of “‘mass-protest and mass-suicide,”’ and the U.S. media once
more placed the responsibility for these deaths at the door of the
British and their Palestine immigration policy.
There followed the assassination in Cairo on November 6, 1944,
of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident; the Irgun’s blowing up
of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one and injuring
forty-five British and Arabs (subsequent evidence indicated the in-
volvement of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency), and the 1947
dispatch of letter bombs to British Cabinet Ministers and the bomb
attacks of December 11, in and near Haifa, killing eighteen Arabs and
wounding fifty-eight others. In subsequent years the Arab-owned
Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem was blown up, killing twenty persons,
among them the Viscount de Tapia, the Spanish Consul. The Haganah
admitted responsibility for the outrage.
360 THE COVER-UP
In 1948, following the adoption of the U.N. partition resolution
but pzior to the May 15 promulgation of the Israeli state, Irgun, Stern
Gang,’ or Haganah terrorists repeatedly struck with bombs, loads of
explosives, or even armed forces at Arab civilians in villages, towns,
and cities. The grossest outrage, of course, was the April 9 massacre
at Deir Yassin of 254 women, children, and old men.
On September 17, 1948, U.N. Palestine Mediator Count Folke
Bernadotte, nephew of Swedish King Gustav V, and his aide, Colonel
André Pierre Serot, were assassinated by members of the Stern Gang
while driving in the Israeli-controlled sector of Jerusalem. American
Ambassador Stanton Griffis, convinced that the identity of the assassin
was well known to the Israeli government, commented in his memoirs:
“The murder of Bernadotte will remain forever a black and disgraceful
mark on the early history of Israel.’’8
During a February 1977 press conference marking the publication
in Israel of a new book on David Ben-Gurion, The Secret List of Heinrich
Roehm, it was definitely admitted by author Dr. Michael Bar Zohar
(writing in the U.S. under the name of Michael Barak) that the late
Prime Minister had the names of the three who had carried out the
assassination; one of them, Yehoshva Zeitler, was one of Ben-Gurion’s
best friends.9 Zeitler explained that “we executed Bernadotte because
he was a one-man institution who endangered the status of Jerusalem
by his declared intention of turning her into an international city. He
was hostile to Israel from the moment the state was established and
actually laid the foundation for the present U.N. policy of supporting
the Arabs.”’ The decision to kill Count Bernadotte had been taken by
three Stern Gang leaders, Nathan Yelin-Mor, Dr. Israel Eldad-Scheib,
and Zeitler, commander of activities in Jerusalem and an intimate
friend of the first Prime Minister.
In 1950 Zionist agents in Baghdad threw bombs at a synagogue
and at other Jewish targets in order to pressure Jews into emigrating
to Israel. In 1953 the small Jordanian hamlets of Kibya and Nahalin,
and the UNRWA refugee camp at Bureij in the Gaza Strip, were at-
tacked; 102 villagers and refugees were killed. Between 1952 and
September 1956, prior to the first Suez war, the Arab villages of Beit
Jalu, Falame, Rantis, Bani Suhaila, Baheya, Gharandal, Wadi Fukin,
and Gaza were shelled on raids, killing 118 civilians.
A few hours after the Israeli army began its march into Sinai on
October 29, 1956, a curfew from 5 P.M. to 6 A.M. was imposed on Kafr
Kassem and other villages of the Little Triangle within Israel. This
curfew advance of one hour was transmitted at 4:45 p.m. to the Mayor
Terror: The Double Standard 361
of the village, who informed the Israeli officer in charge that a large
number of villagers were working in the fields and could not be
notified of the change; forty-nine villagers returning after 5 P.M., in-
cluding fourteen women and small children in the arms of their moth-
ers, were mowed down without any warning whatsoever by machine
guns as they came in from their work.
These facts, suppressed for a long time, seeped through when the
border policemen were finally brought to trial. The proceedings lasted
more than two years, and the Israeli High Court passed light sen-
tences: one officer received seventeen years, another fifteen years,
three were acquitted, and five constables received sentences of seven
years. All were set free one year later by government amnesty. And
from the ever intensely active libertarian-human rights movement in
the U.S., only silence. Identical reaction followed the 1966 Israeli
armed force attack, including tanks and armored cars, practically wip-
ing out the small Jordanian village of Es-Samu’a, killing eighteen and
wounding fifty-four others.
By 1972, with the emergence of the PLO movement, Israeli espio-
nage agencies concentrated their attention on individual Palestinians,
who were struck down by letter bombs, regular bombs, and machine
guns in Beirut,!° Los Angeles,'! Rome, !2 Tripoli,!3 Stockholm,!4
Copenhagen,!> Paris,!® Cyprus,!? and in Oslo.!8
The task of seeking out and destroying Palestinians known to be
connected with recurring fedayeen attacks on Israelis rested with the
Mossad, the Israeli version of the CIA, known familiarly as the “Insti-
tute.”’ A special branch within Mossad, set up in 1972, had been re-
sponsible for the April 10, 1973, raid on Lebanon and the assassina-
tion of the three PLO leaders, Kamal Nasser, Mohammed Yusuf
Najjar, and Kamal Adwan. The meticulously executed operation was
part of a plan, “Operation: God’s Wrath,” under the command of
Prime Minister Meir’s Special Adviser on Security Affairs, General
Aharon Yariv, whose goal had been the elimination of the 1,000 Pales-
unians capable of providing leadership to the movement. The elimina-
tion of this select number, it was thought, would liquidate the move-
ment itself. And the outbreak of fierce fighting in Lebanon’s civil war
in the spring of 1975 facilitated other raids by the Israeli secret service,
which soon added twenty-three victims to its roster.!9
Starting with the December 28, 1968, helicopter raid on the Beirut
Airport, Lebanon was the continuous site for Israeli attacks on civilians
and civilian targets, most of which occurred in the south of the country.
These commenced with a number of small raids in 1969 and 1970,
362 THE COVER-UP
reported to the U.N. but generally ignored. In 1972 the Israeli armed
forces began their serious raids with an attack on the Arkoub region,
in which two civilians were killed; on the Nabatiyeh refugee camp, in
which ten were killed; on Nahr al-Bared and Rafed and Rashaya-al
Wadi camps, causing the deaths of sixteen; on Baddawi and Nahr-al
Bared, killing twelve.
In April 1974 six South Lebanese villages were attacked by Israeli
armed forces, and in May the village of Kfeir was bombed with four
persons killed, including a woman and her seven-year-old daughter.
Eleven days later Israeli planes again raided the refugee camp of Naba-
tiyeh and that of Ein-el-Helweh as well, killing fifty and wounding 200,
and completely obliterating the former Palestinian site. On the 19th
of the same month, Israeli naval units bombarded the Rashidiyeh
refugee camp, killing eight civilians. The next month the Israeli planes
returned to bomb three U.N. camps, killing seventy-three and wound-
ing 159. In July Israeli naval units raided Tyre, Sarafund, and Saida,
sinking twenty-one fishing boats. The aerial bombing and ground
raids of Lebanese towns and U.N. refugee camps in the south of the
country continued into 1975.
The idealization of Zionist terror, far beyond mere condonation,
assumed its inexorable course when twenty-two-year-old Egyptian Jew
Eliahu Betzouri and his seventeen-year-old friend Eliahu Hakim slew
Lord Moyne in 1944. Years after the conviction, David Ben-Gurion
admitted “‘his reverence for the dedicated patriots who were hanged
in Cairo” for this assassination of Great Britain’s Resident Minister.
(Israel’s first Prime Minister also referred to terrorist Abraham Stern,
the poet who founded the group bearing his name, as “‘one of the finest
and most outstanding figures of the era.’’)
The reportage on the trial by such illustrious newsmen of the day
as the Jimes’ C.L. Sulzberger, AP’s Relman Morin, and UP’s Samir
Souki featured the defense counsel and the defendants’ condemnation
of the British administration for graft, anarchistic rule, and acts of
injustice. Popular sympathy was established in the U.S. with the young
“heroes,” even though in his House of Commons eulogy of the slain
British Minister of State, Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to
“the shameful crime” and boldly declared: “If our dreams for Zionism
are to end in the smoke of assassins’ guns and our labors for its future
to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then
many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have main-
tained so consistently and so long in the past.”’ No wonder that politi-
cal adviser to the Jewish Agency Leo Cohen, after listening to the
Churchill BBC broadcast, stated:
Terror: The Double Standard 363
When I think how proud we have been that Zionism could come before the
world with clean hands as a creative movement of the highest order, and when
I think of what those boys have been led to do . . . it is something so exasperat-
ing, so awful and dreadful.
But Churchill’s reassessment never reached fruition, and the
Western world’s honeymoon with Zionism continued. Chaim Weiz-
mann had written at the time to Churchill: ‘I can assure you that
Palestine Jewry will, as its representative bodies have declared, go to
the utmost limits of its power to cut out, root and branch, this evil from
its midst.’’?° Two years after that assurance, the Anglo-American Com-
mittee of Inquiry in its report was still requesting the Jewish Agency
“to resume active co-operation with the Mandatory Authority in the
suppression of terrorism and of illegal immigration and in the mainte-
nance of that law and order throughout Palestine which is essential for
the good of all, including the new immigrants.”?!
Author Gerold Frank, who ghosted Bartley Crum’s Behind the
Silken Curtain and Jorge Garcia-Granados’ The Birth of Israel, both ex-
tremely pro-Israel books, had the final word to say in his elegy to the
Moyne assassins in his book, The Deed. 2?
Here in the remote corner [the cemetery of Bassatin which contains the bodies
of such great Jews as Moses Maimonides], amid the debris and neglect of ages
one finds a single square stone, not large—two feet high, three feet wide—no
names on it, but in Hebrew “pray for their souls.” Beneath it, Eliahu Hakim
and Eliahu Betzouri sleep together, as they were buried in one cofhn, curled
in each other's arms as children. They hie curled together like sleeping children
under the eternal stone. No one guards their grave now. The sands of the
desert blow, nothing grows there, and no weeds, no foliage. Only the sifting,
creeping yellow dust over everything, and in the cloudless sky a molten sun.
In the ancient earth in the nameless grave they lie together under the imperish-
able stone. Few remember them now.
This is how the people have been prepared to accept Zionist acts
of violence and to judge the continuing conflict. Thus when the Irgun
led by Menachem Begin?? blew up the King David Hotel and some of
his followers were apprehended, the compassionate but often misled
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Lady Reading, a friend in England: “If
these young people are killed, there will be without any question a
sense of martyrdom and a desire for revenge which will only bring
more bloodshed. A generous gesture will, I think, change the atmo-
sphere.”
A special variation on the double standard is to be seen in the
handling of espionage activities by the Israelis and their Arab counter-
364 THE COVER-UP
parts. As to the Israeli cause, the end always justifies the means. The
Zionists and Israelis are admired no matter what dirty tricks they use,
often by the very people who are the first to condemn the use of ‘‘dirty
tricks” at home, by the CIA or other American intelligence-espionage
agencies. The Zionists and Israelis are allowed to break all the rules
of international law, and to make their own. The kidnapping of Adolph
Eichmann from Argentina was only the best publicized of many in-
stances of how the Israelis have been able to get away with defying
international edict. Imagine if the CIA were to kidnap some wanted
criminal for crimes against the American people! Imagine if the Arabs
were to abduct an Israeli for crimes against the Palestinians! Yet so
long as it is Jews, Israelis, Zionists—everything goes.
This has long been true in the attitudes toward Israeli spies. One
of the major instances of this, now forgotten by most of the few people
who ever knew about it, was the Lavon Affair that once rocked Israel
to the very core.
After the Egyptian revolution of 1952, relations between the U.S.
and the new Gamal Abdel Nasser government steadily improved. Cul-
tural and economic agreements between Egypt and other Arab states
and the U.S. were being discussed, and it was sincerely hoped that the
U.S. would aid the projected Aswan Dam development program. By
1954 American Ambassador Henry Byroade’s personal friendship with
Nasser seemed likely to produce results. A U.S. aid program of $50
million had been started.
The situation was viewed in high Israeli quarters as a grave
threat to the continued flow of American dollars into Israel from
public, if not private, sources. A direct severance of relations be-
tween Egypt and the U.S. was deemed desirable. An Israeli espio-
nage ring was sent to Egypt to bomb official U.S. offices and, if
necessary, attack American personnel working there so as to de-
stroy Egyptian-U.S. relations and eventually Arab-U.S. ties. The
creation of simulated anti-British incidents was calculated to induce
the British to maintain their Suez garrison. Several bomb incidents
involving U.S. installations in Egypt followed.
Small bombs shaped like books and secreted in book covers were
brought into the USIA libraries in both Alexandria and Cairo. Fishskin
bags filled with acid were placed on top of nitroglycerin bombs; it took
several hours for the acid to eat through the bag and ignite the bomb.
The book bombs were placed in the shelves of the library just before
closing hours. Several hours later a blast would occur, shattering glass
and shelves and setting fire to books and furniture. Similar bombs were
Terror: The Double Standard 365
placed in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Theater and in other American-
owned business buildings.?4
In December two young Jewish Egyptian boys carrying identical
bombs were caught as they were about to enter U.S. installations.
Upon their confession, a sabotage gang of six other Jews was rounded
up. Five more were implicated in the plot. The conspirators, who
received sentences ranging from fifteen years to life, were the objects
in the U.S. of multifold sympathetic editorials and articles. Nothing
appeared in print at the time to refute the image that this had been but
another Nasser conspiracy to unite his country against Israel. The cry
“anu-Semitism” widely reverberated.
In 1960 an investigation in Israel called attention to the forgery
of an important document in what had been announced as a “‘security
mishap” that had precipitated the resignation of Pinhas Lavon as Min-
ister of Defense in 1955. Shimon Peres, then Deputy Minister of De-
fense, and Moshe Dayan had, with the forgery, attempted to place the
legal responsibility for the unsuccessful 1954 sabotage attempt at
Lavon’s door. Ben-Gurion had fought the reopening of the case, but
a subsequent rehearing revealed that Lavon had been an innocent
victim of the machinations of Peres, Dayan, and Brigadier Abraham
Givli.
Even though the army, through censorship, attempted to cover up
its own blunders, the affair led to a Cabinet crisis and the resignation
of the Ben-Gurion government in 1961. As late as December 29, 1960,
the Times was still referring to the scandal only as ‘‘a disastrous adven-
ture in 1954.” As the already abnormal ties between Israel and the U.S.
grew stronger, scant attention was paid to the disclosure in Israel of
this blatant attempt to torpedo U.S.-Arab relations.
In 1971 one of the spies who figured in the Lavon Affair, Marcelle
Ninio, broke into the headlines of Israel and of the satellite Israeli
press in the U.S. Ninio, the only woman involved in the affair that so
rocked the political life of Israel, had been exchanged for Egyptian
prisoners of war after the June 1967 war, along with Victor Levy,
Robert Dassa, and Philip Nathanson, her cosaboteurs, and ‘“‘Cham-
pagne Spy” Wolfgang Lotz, who had been apprehended in 1965 after
four years of spying in Egypt. According to a five-paragraph story in
the New York Times of November 16, 1971, Premier Golda Meir was to
attend the wedding of a girl “who at the age of 16 was convicted of
espionage for Israel and spent 10 years in an Egyptian jail.”” The Lavon
Affair was referred to as a ‘mysterious sabotage mission inside Egypt”
in 1954, about which ‘“‘full details remain a secret.”
366 THE COVER-UP
The entire tone of the article suggested innocence on the part of
Israel and of the bride-to-be. It had been just another case of those
“hating Egyptians” trying to put a spy rap on a nice Jewish girl. The
New York Post carried a four-column story on page 4, “Israeli Heroine
to Marry,” and referred to the “dark-haired woman who spent fifteen
years in a Cairo prison for alleged sabotage activities.”
Both newspapers slanted the reportage, withholding undisputed
facts in this true spy story. Although the so-called “heroine” had been
deeply involved in proven espionage, seventeen years later the same
“editorial papers” were compounding the felony they had originally
committed. To avoid presenting the established facts of Israeli sabo-
tage against the U.S., which had involved Israeli Cabinet ministers
Dayan and Peres, the Times covered up the affair in this fashion: ““The
mission quickly was shown to be a far-fetched idea.”
When Israeli spy Elie Cohen, alias Kamal Amin Tabas, was uncov-
ered by Syrian intelligence and hanged in Damascus, an angry hue and
cry arose in the West, led by the media with photos (front page of the
New York Times) of the condemned’s body hanging in the public square.
Two popular books, Our Man in Damascus®> by Eli Ben-Hanan and The
Stlent Warnors?® by Joshua Tadmor translated from the Hebrew by
Israeli Ha aretz U.S. correspondent Raphael Rothstein, made a martyr
of the spy (the latter tome was dedicated ironically enough to Elie
Wiesel, the godfather of anti-anti-Semitism) and attacked the lack of
a fair trial to which the press was not admitted. In the course of their
glorification of the Israeli superspy, the authors unwittingly further
proved his guilt. Cohen had been arrested in Egypt as part of the
Lavon Affair spy ring but held only for two years, released, and then
had joined Israel’s Secret Service as a trained espionage agent with
Damascus to be the base of his operations. As an Oriental Jew he was
fluent in Arabic and was scarcely distinguishable from any Muslim or
Christian Arab. Most of the important Israeli spies were Arab Jews.
Cohen cleverly worked his way into affluent social and political
circles in Damascus, even becoming acquainted with General Amin
el-Hafez, who was to come into power in March 1963. Through his
contacts Cohen was able to ascertain the number, type, and placement
of MIG-21 planes, T-54 tanks, and other Soviet armament, which Syria
was receiving from the Soviet Union, as well as Damascus plans for the
construction of a canal as counterdiversion of the Daniyas, one of the
principal sources of the Jordan River.
The incalculably invaluable information smuggled out to Israel
unul his apprehension was an important factor in his country’s success
Terror: The Double Standard 367
in the six-day war. This was never alluded to in any way by the Ameri-
can press in their accounts of the ‘‘martyred” spy. But author Roth-
stein sharply pointed this up: ‘‘Now the peaceful Golan Heights, where
Russian tanks lie rusting and concrete fortifications are piles of rubble,
is a tourist attraction, and much of the credit for this turn of events
belongs to Israel’s silent hero, Elie Cohen.”
In the fall of 1972 the major capitals in Europe, the Middle East,
and the U.S. were rocked by a spate of letter and package bombs. This
phase of the lethal-letter war opened with the letter-bomb killing of an
Israeli diplomat in his London office. Coming on the heels of the
Munich tragedy, biased world public opinion was only too ready to
believe that these acts had been the responsibility of the Palestinian
Black September group, although the strict security watch at the Israeli
Embassy had intercepted seven other letters, only one of which con-
tained a leaflet boasting Black September sponsorship. Upon close
examination it remained very much of an open question who had been
sending what bombs to whom.
According to neutral observers in Britain, while the popular press
tended to lean sympathetically toward the Israelis, ‘the serious press
was more objective. After the thirteen letter bombs intercepted in
London in November, British Jewry was talking of retribution, but so
far as can be seen, there is no evidence to support the theory that Black
September is behind the current wave of incidents.” British writers,
including those of the London Times, viewed evidence of the Pales-
tinian complicity as “uneasy.” Yet in the U.S. there was no indecision.
The minds of the public were made up for them by the American press
and the politicians, although a New York City episode took on the aura
of a Hitchcock movie gone awry.
In October, letter bombs addressed to two retired officials of
Hadassah (Women’s Zionist Organization) were discovered when they
failed to detonate. Mrs. Rose Halprin, who had not been president
since 1952, allegedly received one at her East Side home. There were
fifteen Halprins in the 1972 Manhattan telephone directory, eighteen
in the edition a year earlier. There was no listing for Rose Halprin. It
was difficult to understand how a group of Palestinians 5,000 miles
away could ever have obtained her name let alone her address.
The second letter had been addressed to a one-time executive
director (one newspaper referred to her as Hannah Goldberg and
another as Mrs. Hannah Rosenberg) and was opened under police
supervision without it exploding.?? Following the apprehension of the
letter bombs addressed to the New York women, Mayor John Lindsay
368 THE COVER-UP
released this statement: ‘“Terror by mail is the latest, and in some ways,
the most vicious technique yet devised by conspirators against Israel.
To direct it at two outstanding ladies of Hadassah here reaches a low
in the politics of terror.”
At the same time a number of letter bombs sent to the Israeli
Mission to the U.N. were also intercepted. (One of these was sup-
posedly addressed to a diplomat not even as yet listed in the U.N.
directory.) A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy was quick to be
quoted: ‘ The letters sent to New York show that the terrorist organiza-
tion is not just anti-Israeli, as they claim, but anti-Jewish throughout
the world.” And to further this impression that the Palestinians posed
a threat to all Jews, two letter bombs, also mailed from Penang, ap-
peared in Rhodesia, sent to residents of Bulawayo. One had been
addressed to prominent young Zionist leader Colin Raizon, another to
the mother of Rhodesian Olympic weight lifter John Orkin. Both were
intercepted by the police.
Was it more than a coincidence that the letter bombs, sent to the
Hadassah and to the Israeli Mission, all of which were intercepted,
were received at a ime when Israel was doing its best to coordinate
its efforts with those of the U.S. in forcing the Legal Committee of the
U.N. to adopt an antiterrorist pact with muscle as a means of further
restraining the operations of the Palestinian guerrillas?
This alleged introduction of bombs into the U.S., following in the
wake of the Munich Olympics incident, played a major role in moving
federal authorities to initiate a ‘‘dragnet”’ investigation and interroga-
tion and surveillance of Arab residents and students in the country.
Cracking down on Arabs and restrictive measures against all travelers
passing through the U.S. was the inevitable result.
On October 26, on page 2 in a five-column headline, the readers
of the New York Times were told: “Israel Intercepts Letter Bombs
Mailed to Nixon, Rogers and Laird.”’ The story pointed out that the
latest letter bombs were ‘‘similar to those mailed to Jews in various
countries from Amsterdam last month by the Arab guerrilla organiza-
tion known as the ‘Black September.’ One letter bomb killed an official
in the Israeli Embassy in London.”
Two days later a UPI story, carried on certain radio stations,
revealed that an American tourist, twenty-two-year-old Dennis Fein-
stein from Stockton, California, had been arrested by the Israeli police
as he attempted to cross over into Lebanon. He was being held on
suspicion of mailing letter bombs to top American officials. The story
appeared in some papers, including the Washington Post.
Terror: The Double Standard 369
The Times News Summary and Index of the city edition on Octo-
ber 28 listed for page 3 under “International”: “Israel holds American
in mailing of letter bombs.’’ But not one line of the story appeared in
that edition. In the later edition the listing was deleted from the Index.
In page 3 of the earlier edition there had been an unclear, meaningless
photo of ‘‘men with opposing views scuffling on a Santiago, Chile,
street,” which appeared to have been dropped in as a last-minute filler
replacement in a spot where the Israeli story might have initially been
intended to go. New copy replaced this photograph on page 3 in the
later edition.
It took the Sunday Times of December 24, 1972 in a lengthy article,
‘How Israelis Started the Terror by Post,” to place the responsibility
for the spate of bombs. As noted by other European observers, it was
out of character for the Black September not to have claimed “credit”
for these incidents, as they had done instantaneously at the time of
Munich and invariably on other occasions.
With the exception of the first London bomb, which just missed
detection, the bomb in the Bronx post office, and the one mailed from
India, which injured jeweler Vivian Prins in London, all the other
numerous letter bombs sent in Europe and the U.S. to Jews and Jewish
organizations were somehow intercepted or proved to be duds. In
contrast, almost all of the bombs addressed to Arabs and Palestinians
worked successfully. The device for these bombs is very simple, and
they have been generally termed to be uniformly deadly. In the words
of the police in New York regarding the Hadassah letters: “They failed
to detonate even though the trigger was lying directly against the
blasting cap.”’ And the Palestinians proved on many occasions their
ability to handle infinitely more sophisticated weapons than these.
While the invention of the letter bomb went back to a brilliant but
unbalanced Swedish chemist, Martin Eckenberg, who killed himself at
the age of forty-one in a London prison in 1910, Zionist terrorists, the
Stern Gang and the Irgun, had brought the weapon to the Middle East.
In 1947 letter-bomb campaigns were directed against prominent Brit-
ish politicians believed to be unsympathetic to the Zionist goal of
establishing a state in Palestine, and figured in the internationally
publicized incident in which the brother of a British officer, Roy Far-
ran, who had been acquitted of murdering a Jewish youth in Palestine,
was killed by a parcel bomb admittedly sent by the Stern Gang.
The Zionist apparatus literally exploded when a 7imes front-page
story headlined an excerpt from Margaret Truman’s book alleging a
1947 letter-bomb attempt by the Stern Gang on the life of her father.
370 THE COVER-UP
The Anglo-Jewish press across the country reverberated with criticism,
one newspaper going so far as to make the familiar charge of “anti-
Semitism.” In a New York Times Letter to the Editor, Benjamin Gepner,
who identified himself as the U.S.-Western Hemisphere leader of the
“Stern Group,” insisted that it was absurd even to think that there
could have been such a plot against the President. The letter-bomb
attempt apparently had taken place at a time when the Chief Executive
was urging Zionists to be more restrained in their demands and to
become more sensitive to the Palestinian plight. Aside from the fact
that the authoress had little reason to pull this assassination attempt
out of the air, the Stern Gang’s own long record of terror supported
the plausibility of the story.
Explosive devices were widely used by the Israelis in a broad
campaign directed against German scientists working in Egypt in 1962
and 1963. A bomb placed in a gift parcel exploded, killing scientist
Michael Khouri and five others with him, and an attempt was made on
the life of Dr. Hans Kleinwachter, another scientist. Another package
addressed to a West German scientist working in Cairo blew up when
opened, blinding his German secretary. The daughter of German sci-
entist Dr. Paul Goerke was threatened with a similar fate.
The Israelis succeeded in their reign of terror. Almost to a man,
the West German scientists working on the development of rockets for
President Nasser’s army quit their Egyptian positions and returned
home. This is recounted in detail in The Champagne Spy,?® authored by
Israeli spy Wolfgang Lotz, who boasted of having sent messages out
of Cairo on the wireless hidden in his bathroom scales to his chief,
saying that he was ‘‘sure we can induce additional German scientists
to leave by dispatching more threatening letters and seeing that they
are published in the German press.” After a public reprimand by Prime
Minister Ben-Gurion, Israeli Security Chief ser Halprin resigned in an
admission of Israeli complicity in the campaign against the Germans.
There were still other bomb varieties in which the Israelis ex-
celled. Prior to the June 1967 war, the Chief Intelligence Officer in the
Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Military Attaché in Jordan were both killed
by book bombs. In the wake of the 1972 Lydda Airport massacre, the
Palestine Popular Front’s spokesman, Ghassan Kanafani, was blown
up when a plastic bomb attached to the exhaust of his car exploded.
And a series of booby-trapped letters, sent that fall, killed or badly
injured a dozen senior Arab guerrillas and prominent Palestinians in
Beirut.
Following the Kanafani death, Ma‘anv, the Israeli daily, wrote:
Terror: The Double Standard 371
“The terrorists’ statement linked the death of Kanafani to Israel and
accused her of mounting this operation. Israel does not deny this or
confirm it.”” Some eleven days following this incident, Anis Sayegh, a
Director of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut, received an
envelope ostensibly addressed to him from the Islamic Higher Coun-
cil. When he opened it, it exploded, causing him partial blindness and
the loss of three fingers. Within the same time period, another mail
parcel exploded in the hands of the Director of a Beirut bank and the
security officers of the Fateh in Beirut. (One had to closely scan the
small print and the back pages of the Times to find a line or two, if that,
about these incidents.)
In putting together all! the pertinent bits of this tragic history, this
observation is very much in order: The terrorists of yesterday have
since become Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, Generals, and other
VIPs of the Israeli state of today, and the armies that brought Israel
its “liberation” and widely employed terror—the Haganah, Irgun, and
the Stern Gang—have become the victorious armies of Israel today.
While letter bombs and other forms of terrorism have been used by
both sides, it was the Israelis who introduced them into the Middle
East and made, as usual, the perfect propaganda use of the deadly
explosives. For it was the exploitation of terror, above all, that con-
tinued to provide the public excuse for the adamant Israeli refusal to
recognize the PLO, which for so long was supported by the Nixon,
Ford, and Carter administrations and greatly complicated the task of
reaching a Middle East settlement.
No single act so totally equated the Palestinians with terror than
the killing of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic games in Munich. In
the early morning of September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian guerrillas
(newspapers more often referred to them as “Arabs” because that
word evoked stronger sparks of hatred) invaded Olympic Village in
Munich by climbing over a fence and forcing their way into the dor-
mitories of the Israeli team, where they killed two athletes and took
nine others as hostages. The guerrillas demanded the release of two
hundred of their compatriots held in Israeli jails and an airplane to take
them to an unspecified Arab capital. Israel, consistent with her long-
standing policy, refused to negotiate with the Palestinians, but high
German authorities attempted to do so, offering to pay unlimited
ransom and even to substitute four of themselves for the hostages.
After lengthy parleying and three extensions of the original noon
deadline, the Arab guerrillas and their Israeli hostages were flown
fifteen miles by helicopters from Olympic Village to the NATO Fuer-
372 THE COVER-UP
stenfeldbruck Airport, where they had been told they could board a
Lufthansa jet for an Arab airport. Five German sharpshooters backed
up by police waited to confront the eight Palestinians. Two guerrillas
left the helicopter to inspect the Boeing 727 on which they planned to
head for Tunisia. The Germans opened fire. One of the three helicop-
ters was set afire by an exploding grenade thrown by one of the Pales-
tinians as he jumped from the helicopter. But a German government
spokesman reported that the hostages were all safe. Three hours later
the Olympics Committee announced that all the hostages had been
killed.
In the course of the official government inquiry into the airport
shootout, Police Chief Manfred Schreiber admitted he had lost control
of the situation during the shooting.?® The original police announce-
ment claimed that the guerrillas had fired first, but most eyewitnesses
agreed that the sharpshooters had opened fire. Under dispute, untl
today, was how the Israeli hostages died: Was it when the Arabs blew
up the helicopter, or had they already been killed by Arab machine-gun
fire? It also was not beyond the realm of possibility that some had died
at the hands of German bullets intended for the guerrillas.
It has never been established that the airport battle was necessary.
All discussion of this very moot point was summarily dismissed by
Police Chief Schreiber—and by the U.S. media—with the unsubstan-
tiated allegation that the Arabs would have murdered the hostages en
route had they been allowed to leave the airport. This presumption
was in no way supported by the meticulous care and consideration
shown their hostages by the Palestinian hijackers of the U.S. and Euro-
pean planes in the September 1970 incident in Jordan (or by the
treatment accorded in other later hijackings up through Entebbe in the
summer of 1976).
Five and a half months later, on February 21, 1973, a Libyan
Boeing 727 with 113 civilians aboard was callously clawed out of the
sky by Israeli fighter planes over Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory of
the Sinai, about twelve miles from the Suez Canal. Some 102 passen-
gers and 8 crewmen were killed immediately or later died, including
27 women and children. The plane had overflown Cairo, losing its way
in a terrible sandstorm, when it was intercepted by Israeli fighters,
whom the French pilot mistook for a friendly escort of Egyptian MIGs.
The aircraft had already turned around and was headed toward Cairo,
nine minutes away, when it was shot down.
The Israeli version, supported by Moshe Dayan press confer-
ences, insisted that the plane had penetrated “probably the most sensi-
Terror: The Double Standard 373
tive area held by Israel,”’ that warnings had been given, that instruc-
tions to land had been ignored by the pilot, and that the 727 was not
shot down but crashed after landing. The Defense Minister contended
that the Israeli fighter pilots had signaled the Libyan plane pilot for
fifteen minutes (in that time the plane would have been past Israel and
well over the Mediterranean). And from the outset this Israeli fairy tale
was accepted—even embroidered upon—by the American press,
radio, and television.
If the media had indulged a bit more in research and study and
less in generating hysteria and hatred, they would have discovered a
perfect precedence in Israel’s 1955 stand when an El Al plane, which
had strayed into Bulgarian airspace, was shot down and fifty-eight lives
were lost. In a lawsuit brought in the International Court of Justice at
Geneva, Israel successfully argued:
It is the duty of any person who seeks to interfere with the normal flying of
civilian aircraft by ordering it to land at a designated airport not to deliberately
and unreasonably increase the inherent risks and certainly not to provoke
completely new and unwarranted hazards inevitable when modern armaments
were intentionally brought into play. The Bulgarian admission shows that
these safeguards were not discharged. The heart of the present case is that fire
was opened on the 4XAK which in the space of a few minutes was callously
clawed out of the sky and destroyed. The Israeli government contended that
no rule of law, not the liberal interpretations of any provision of the Chicago
convention governing international aircraft, nor the rules of general interna-
tional law, would permit such a degree of violence.
The generally accepted practice is to try to ‘‘box”’ the plane in and
lead it in the correct direction. And the Libyan Boeing was already
moving out of the danger zone when it was blown to smithereens.
The language used in page-one headlines of the New York Times
the day after the incident carefully concealed what had taken place:
“Israelis Down a Libyan Air Liner in the Sinai, Killing at Least 74—
Say it Ignored Warnings to Land . . . Jet Crash-Lands.’’ The Times, the
Post, and other big-city presses avoided the use of the words “shot
down,” trying to give an impression that the jet crashed on its own
after warnings to land.
The media’s obvious aim was to exculpate Israel of any possible
guilt and place the guilt on the French pilot, who had been on loan to
Libyan Airways, for his refusal to listen to the warnings. Varied types
of the art of slanting went into the reportage to the American people.
There was, for example, slanting by placement—whatever the Arabs
374 THE COVER-UP
said, including Cairo and Libya, was relegated to unimportant posi-
tions; whatever Israel said went into headlines. In other previous air
tragedies the papers invariably showed pictures of pretty stewardesses;
There were no pictures of the Libyan airline stewardesses in this in-
stance. In fact, there was no picture at all of survivors, which might
have evoked some sympathy for the Arab victims. All one saw or read
was condonation and excuse of the Israelis.
At the time of the Munich killing of Israeli athletes, banner head-
lines carried ‘the expression of horror by leaders around the world.”
Bold headlines ran: ‘“‘Head of UN Condemns Raid as Dastardly.”’ But
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s statement that he ‘‘deplored” the
fact that a civilian plane had been shot down, and his expression of
shock, concern, and condolences on the shooting down of the Libyan
airliner, were reported only in the early editions of the New York Post
and buried away, the seven-line account obscured under a tiny head:
“Waldheim [his name without his title is not familiar] Expresses
Shock.”’3° The quoted Israeli fear that “the Israelis could not guaran-
tee that it was not a kamikaze plane loaded with explosives headed for
an Israeli city” was featured prominently and made to sound plausible.
And the only mention of the terrible blinding sandstorm, which caused
the Libyan plane to lose its way, was as an incidental reference to the
more than two-hour delay to Israeli helicopters taking off with
wounded survivors.
The front page of the Daily News in New York?! carried this bold
headline: ‘‘Israelis Down Arab Jet.” The readers had to turn to page
2 to discover that it had been a civilian airliner. The New York Post
headlines were also of interest. The first was: “Israel Forces Down
Libya Jet—70 Die.” A little later in the day: “Israel Downs [never
“shoots”’] Libya Airliner; 70 Killed.’’ And then in the continuation off
this first page, they reverted to the original headline of the earlier
edition: ‘Israel Forces Down a Libyan Jet; 70 Die.”
Where the 7imes' story on the Israeli emergency Cabinet meeting
featured the Israeli claim that the pilot had acknowledged the warnings
and interception signals, the New York Post even went further into the
realm of the fanciful, quoting an Israeli newspaper account that the
pilot had radioed his pursuers: ‘‘We cannot obey your orders because
of the political situation. This area does not belong to you.”’ While this
yarn was being spread through the combined wire services across the
country, the correspondent of Israeli journal Ha'aretz was spreading
other propaganda on a two-hour talk show over New York radio sta-
tion WMCA. Under the usual “fair” media arrangements, the former
Terror: The Double Standard 375
President of the Zionist Organization of America, another articulate
Israelist, and this Israeli writer were pitted against the editor of Middle
East Perspective. The “‘moderator”’ of this program three days later was
among the six commentators of the same station who interviewed
prominent guests from Israel, representatives of Israeli-oriented na-
tional and international organizations, and their American counter-
parts in a continuous twenty-five-hour broadcast tribute to Israel's first
quarter century.
The Times, which scarcely waits minutes to execute moral judg-
ment editorially, remained silent the day after the plane shooting,
although the tragedy had been known in the U.S. before noon the day
before. On the third day the editorial page spoke out under the title:
“Tragic Blunder.” Its words, “horrifying blunder” and “‘act of callous-
ness,” like slapping a child on the wrist for eating too much candy,
could be contrasted to those used in its editorial six months earlier on
the Olympics tragedy, ‘‘Murder in Munich”: ‘‘Arab fanatics . . . homici-
dal hatred . . . indiscriminate murder . . . innocent lives snuffed out.’32
The editorial reluctantly conceded that the tape of the pilot’s exchange
with the Cairo control tower ‘lent credence, though not conclusive
evidence” that the pilot had no idea that he would be subject to an air
attack if he did not land. The publication’s principal concern appeared
to be the effect the incident would have on Israel’s image and its case
before the U.S. public.38
The murder in Khartoum on March 2, 1973, by the Black Septem-
ber movement of one Belgian and two American diplomats was as
sickening an act as the shooting down of the Libyan plane and in no
way condonable. As the author of The Game of Nations,54+ Miles Cope-
land, noted in Natonal Review, ‘‘The Palestinian movement is a breed-
ing ground, as is any homeless, idle and hungry population, for what
we might call ‘unstructured rebellion’—that is, rebellion against things
in general, toward no clear goal.’’35
Whereas the Times waited three days to publish its editorial on the
Libyan incident, less that six hours after the Khartoum deaths had
been announced, the editorial page was attacking the act as “lunacy at
large.’’°6 Bias was shown not only in the speed with which the paper
reacted but in the words of its editorial: ““The Palestinian extremists
made their move just as Arab propaganda machinery was spinning
forth outrage against Israel for the shooting down of an unarmed
Libyan airliner . . . Such talk now ts even less appropriate than ever... .”
(Italics added.)
Where the plane had been obviously shot down on what was still
376 THE COVER-UP
Egyptian territory but occupied by Israel, not a single news program
on the three major television networks mentioned this fact. CBS’ Wal-
ter Cronkite declared the plane had been shot down over Israeli terri-
tory.37
After the Israeli government reluctantly admitted that the crucial
black box, recording communications between the Libyan plane and
the ground control tower and conversations among those in the pilot’s
cockpit, had revealed that the French pilot had actually thought he was
surrounded by friendly Egyptian MIGs showing him the way home, the
New York Times continued to cover up Israeli guilt. The front page of
February 24 contained two six-column photos, one captioned ‘Five
Israeli military chaplains read psalms as the coffins [crude, unpainted
fruit crates with crooked nails protruding and shrouds showing] of
victims of the downed plane are placed on a boat.’’ The other, ‘‘A
military cortege on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal waiting for the
first boat.”’ The glowing headline, “100 Bodies of Jet Victims Taken
Over Suez to Egypt,” the reportage, and the publication of the Dayan
ofter of partial compensation endowed the Israelis with great acts of
magnanimity.
The sole headlined reference to the important revelations of the
flight recorder was ambiguously set forth in this manner: “Israel
Confirms Cairo Data.”” This admission only followed the substantia-
tion by U.S. intelligence sources, which had also monitored the con-
versation. One had to read well into the article to discover that the
important black box had confirmed the control tower tape, played at
the press conference two days earlier, the authenticity of which the
Times had then questioned.
In his endeavor to exculpate the Israelis from the guilt the Inter-
national Civil Aviation Organization had voted 105 to | to fasten upon
them, the Times’ Robert Lindsey, in a June 7 article headlined: “Sinai
Crash Study Notes Confusion,” unwittingly blew up another Israeli
myth widely circulated at the time of the tragedy by his paper: that the
curtains of the windows of the Boeing had been closed and therefore
the Israelis could not see that the plane carried passengers.
As on so many other occasions, the Times proved to be more
Israelist than the two leading Israeli papers, Maariv and Ha‘aretz. One
Israeli columnist noted that the downing of the plane had been kept
secret for three or four hours before publication of any announcement,
which in itself created at the outset a number of question marks. It was
the first time in the history of civil aviation that a plane had crashed
in an area easily reachable and yet, for twenty-four hours, it was impos-
Terror: The Double Standard 377
sible to get a picture of the wreckage. Requests to visit the site were
rejected without explanation. Emergency arrangements for the press
were refused. Nor was the spokesman for the Israeli defense forces
available for any queries or questions until twenty-four hours later,
when reporters had a right “to ask themselves what had taken place
and what had been erased in the interim.”
Further, according to Israeli accounts, it was only three days after
the incident that General David Elazar, the Chief of Staff, spoke to the
public. He had, according to the official version, received the report
on the Libyan plane “‘after some minutes of contacts between the
planes—apparently between 14:03 and 14:05, and the contact was
finished at 14:11 when the flaming Libyan plane touched the ground.”
Actually, as revealed by the all-important little black box, the contact
ended at 14:09 when the bullets were fired at the wings of the Boeing
to force it to land. Therefore the contact had not lasted more than
from four to six minutes. As one Israeli newspaper saw it, “the recep-
tion of the information from the air force commander and his ponder-
ing, as well as the decision, were all executed within a single three-
minute connection. Why, they ask, was not more time given for the
decision? Why did the Chief of Staff hear, think, and decide almost
simultaneously?”’
Perhaps the excuse made by the Israeli fighter pilot at a press
conference sheds some light. “When I hit him, he was at a minute’s
flight distance from the canal.” This fear that the plane might have
crossed back safely into Egypt was in line with the Chief of Staff's
remarks that he had “‘to decide immediately.” If the latter had waited
to contact Defense Minister Dayan, the Libyan plane could have
slipped away, which apparently would have been contrary to his in-
structions.
Air Force Commander Mordechai Hod, who had directed the June
1967 air strikes against Arab airfields, claimed that the Libyan pilot
could see the airport but had disregarded all signals. Hod ascribed
certain words to the pilot that were totally disproved, again by the
black box. There was no basis, according to the Israeli press accounts,
for the Chief of Staff's statement that the Boeing pilot saw and under-
stood the signals made by the Israeli Phantom pilots, disregarded and
stubbornly refused to follow them. The pilot’s words of confusion, as
recorded, directly contradicted such a version.
The first signal to land was given by the Israeli Phantom jets two
minutes after the Libyan plane was identified. The first warning shots
came a minute and a half later. In this briefest interim, Hod came to
378 THE COVER-UP
the conclusion that “there is no doubt that the Boeing crew under-
stood what we were asking from them and that the crew saw the airport
and refused to land there.” But again according to irrefutable evi-
dence, the Libyan crew did not see any airport. The first warning shots
were fired at a time when the plane was moving away from the airport
in a westerly direction toward the Suez Canal and Egypt. And Hod
talked to his Chief of Staff after the plane had turned away from the
Bir Gafgafa Airport, where the Israelis wished it to land, and perhaps
even before the first warning shots were fired.
It was established that the Chief of Staff had acted only after it was
clear that the Boeing had not—and could not—cause any harm in its
mistaken course into Sinai. Fears that the plane had aggressive inten-
tions were groundless. Aggressive intentions are carried out while
moving toward a target and certainly not while going away, back to
one’s home base. Yet the 7imes continued to allude to this repudiated
contention that the destructive design of the Libyan plane was a genu-
ine possibility. Because of the impossible weather conditions, Israeli
suspicion that the enemy might be taking air photos was likewise totally
unjustified.
While a Daily News editorial called the incident ‘‘a wantonly brutal
downing, which shocked and horrified Israel’s warmest friends,’’38 in
the four days following the wanton attack on the Libyan plane, not a
single columnist in any of the New York papers carried a single refer-
ence to the incident. Moralists such as Peter Hamill, who spouted every
time someone was killed in Vietnam or Israel, were glued to their
chairs in total silence. Where Tom Wicker had written about the seeds
of terrorism on the previous September 7, nothing now came from his
fertile pen on Israeli brigandage.
This U.S. reaction was in marked contrast to the hysteria that
raged for ten days after the Israeli athletes had been killed—the end-
less, overwhelming, nationwide media reportage detailing the mourn-
ing, tributes to the dead, and vituperative censure of the Arabs.39
The media’s gross romanticization of the Munich tragedy was
exposed in a column by Shirley Povich in the Washington Post: “It is
time to deflate that guff about the great brotherhood the Olympics
promote. They are torn by constant bickering among team officials of
all the nations, and political alignments influence the judging in events
like boxing, diving and gymnastics.” In contrast to the sensationalism
in U.S. newspapers that ran photos showing mourning athlete Jesse
Owens, handkerchief in hand, and grieving Israeli teammates of the
deceased,*9 the Washington writer noted:
Terror: The Double Standard 379
Olympic Village was a shame to behold on Tuesday afternoon, after the first
shock at the news that two Israelis were dead and nine held hostage by Arab
raiders. A few hours after the initial excitement subsided, you couldn’t find an
empty ping pong table in the village, rock music was blaring as usual, and it
was just another day in Olympic Village. There was other evidence of boredom
all around, even with their Israeli comrades having all that trouble in Building
33.41
The funeral services both in Israel and in the U.S. for the one
athlete who had been born American, but at the time of his death held
Israeli citizenship, received the widest coverage. An Associated Press
story out of Cleveland, Ohio, indicated that Governor John J. Gilligan,
at that time a presidential hopeful, had ordered state flags to be low-
ered to half-mast in memory of this weight lifter who was one of the
nine Israeli hostages “killed by Arab commandos” (two athletes died
in the original attack at Olympic Village). The bereavement of the
parents of David Berger overflowed onto every television set in the
US.42
The Times’ recital of the return of the bodies of the Arab victims
of the Libyan plane incident to Cairo noted that six bodies, which were
neither Egyptian nor Libyan, had been sent to the governments con-
cerned: five to France and one to the U.S. This, three days after the
incident, was the first reference whatsoever to the fact that an Ameri-
can had been among the victims. Only on the last six lines on page 8
of the New York Times*® did the name of the American appear—Wladys-
law Boysoglebski, sixty-two years old, of Chicago, an American who
had taken out citizenship after immigrating from Poland. No flags were
ordered to be set at half-mast by Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie
when the body of this American was returned, in contrast to the honor
accorded in Ohio to a half-American, half-Israeli serving on the Olym-
pic team of a foreign country. A call to the cable desk of UPI to find
out whether they knew anything about the disposition of the body that
was being shipped via Tel Aviv embassy to the States yielded a total
blank.
While the responsibility or necessity for the German attack killing
the Munich hostages was never established, at no point did the media
ever call attention to this doubt. However, in the reportage of the
Libyan plane incident, every sort of innuendo, excuse, or explanation
was indulged in, either by the media on its own or by publicizing the
views of the Israeli pilots, the Israeli army, and the Israeli government.
Where the Munich story had received banner headlines nght across
the front page and was continued with large five-column Times head-
380 THE COVER-UP
lines on the second day, the 110 innocent victims of trigger-happy
Israeli pilots received, on the first day, three columns, and the third
line of the heading gave the Israeli point of view, and that was that.
More than four years later, the Zionists were continuing to exploit
the 1972 Olympics affair. ABC national television provided unpaid
prime time (December 1976) at a cost of close to $2 million for a
specially produced Sunday evening television film, Twenty-One Hours at
Munich, under the meticulous direction of coproducers Edward Feld-
man and Robert Greenwald (illustrating once more the Zionist con-
nection). The greatest liberties were taken with the facts to portray the
Palestinians as the blackest villains, even attributing sorrowful last
words to one Israeli athlete, who had died all alone. The ABC press
releases, replete with pejorative adjectives, further spawned ant-Arab
hatred.
Everywhere this double standard prevailed** with but a few dis-
senting voices. Robert Pierpoint, CBS White House correspondent,
was one of a handful to point out that the U.S. had lost its sense of fair
play. He noted that in February 1973, when the Israelis carried out a
commando raid deep in the heart of Lebanon, striking at Palestinian
refugee camps 130 miles from their own territory with planes and
tanks and wiping out thirty-seven lives in the process, “there was next
to no outcry in this country.” It was on this occasion that an entire
Lebanese family of six was crushed to death as they sat in their car, by
an Israeli tank. Many other innocents were killed in this same raid,
along with a few Palestinian guerrillas, allegedly part of the Black
September movement.
Pierpoint on this CBS telecast declared that the shooting down of
the Libyan airliner had drawn some official regrets, but not expressed
publicly nor at the level of the White House. He continued:
Nor did any U.S. official ever indicate that the U.S. might think twice before
it dispatched more American-built Phantom jets to Israel of the type that had
shot down the Libyan airliner. Indeed, the very next week, President Nixon let
it be known after his talk in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Golda
Meir that more such Phantoms would soon be on their way. Contrast these
events with what happened after the Arab Black September’s massacre of
Israeli athletes at Munich. The U.S., from President Nixon on down, expressed
outrage, and the President ordered steps taken to see that no such terrorism
could strike at Israelis in this country . . .
Senator Hugh Scott, after meeting with President Nixon to discuss do-
mestic problems, standing at a White House podium, in response to a question
on what should be done to the Arabs who had participated in the murders in
Terror: The Double Standard 381
Khartoum, responded, “I hope they shoot them all, and the sooner the bet-
ter.” No mention was made of a trial, or the possibility that if a fair trial were
held, it might turn out that not all the terrorists were guilty of the murders.
For so long Americans have become used to thinking of the Israelis as the
good guys and the Arabs as the bad guys that many react emotionally along
the lines of previous prejudices. The fact is that both sides have committed
unforgivable acts of terror, both sides have killed innocents, both sides have
legitimate grievances and illegitimate methods of expressing them. Perhaps
the Arabs’ action was more irrational—sheer terror. At least it was not backed
by a relatively rational government which justifies its actions as necessary. The
Israelis have and utilize a formidable political propaganda force in this country
in the form of six million Jews. The Arabs have only slightly less than a million
descendants in America just beginning to organize a nationwide counterforce.
Perhaps this will help bring balance. In the meantime, the rest of us might apply more
steady balance and fair play to the difficult problems of the Middle East. [Italics added.]
The broadcast was no sooner on the airwaves and reprinted in
the Chnstian Science Monitor*® than the usual hue and cry was raised.
Pierpoint was, of course, charged with anti-Semitism, and his head
was demanded. Telegrams and letters poured into the network. The
CBS President and Vice President in charge of news were impor-
tuned to exercise some control over Pierpoint’s judgment. The CBS
correspondent had this to say about the smears and fears that were
raised: “‘As you can imagine, some of the criticism was highly emo-
tional if not downright hysterical. I was not surprised at this since the
subject is a highly emotional one. I was mildly surprised at the man-
ner in which the critics are so well organized that within hours peo-
ple who had not heard the broadcast were protesting by phone or
writing letters. In any case, the opposition to this kind of broadcast
was and is formidable.’’46
The treatment of the Ma’alot affair soon thereafter clearly in-
dicated that the Pierpoint call for press fair play had fallen on deaf ears.
On May 15, 1974, three fedayeen from the Popular Democratic Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) stole across the Lebanese-
Israel border (an Israeli nurse testified that one had been living nearby
in Safad for a long time) and at six in the morning seized a Ma’alot
school in which ninety teenage members of the semimilitary Nahal*?
had been spending the night after some training.
Fifteen youngsters escaped through an open door at the time of
the takeover, and two were allowed to leave because they were ill. The
guerrillas sent two more youths out with a list of twenty-six prisoners
held in Israeli jails whose release they demanded in exchange for the
382 THE COVER-UP
hostages. They asked that the French and Rumanian Ambassadors
serve as mediators.
The prisoners—twenty-three Palestinians, two Israelis, and one
Japanese—were to be flown to Damascus, according to the guerrilla
demand. As soon as the arrival of the released prisoners had been
confirmed in the Syrian capital, the mediating Ambassadors would
receive through Paris and Bucharest a code word with which to identify
themselves before starting negotiations for the release of the hostages.
But if no code word was received by 6:00 p.m., the guerrillas “would
not be responsible for the consequences,” they warned.
While negotiations were being carried on between the Palestini-
ans, Israelis, Cairo (from where the plane to carry out the Palestinian
prisoners was to come), and the Ambassadors, Israeli military forces
attacked the school half an hour before the guerrilla deadline. In the
ensuing battle the fedayeen were wiped out, but sixteen children were
killed, victims of either exploding Palestinian grenades or Israeli bul-
lets. And the Zionist-media alliance both in the U.S. and Britain (where
I happened to be at the moment) went absolutely wild, even as the facts
surrounding the tragedy’s final moments became increasingly be-
clouded. While nothing could ever condone the brutal killing of inno-
cent children, much evidence was adduced that the Israeli government
had far from done everything in its power to avoid the tragic loss of
life and that the military had overreacted. And it was the French Am-
bassador to Israel who cast the principal doubts on the oversimplified
story disseminated by the Western press.
Ambassador Jean Herly was waiting at the French Consulate in
Haifa throughout the afternoon for the Israeli authorities to call him
to Ma’alot. At 2:00 he had been informed by the Israelis that he was
not to receive the code word permitting him to negotiate with the
fedayeen until the prisoners held by Israel had been freed and had
reached Damascus. At 3:22, according to Israeli Foreign Ministry
documents, the Ambassador had requested permission to proceed to
Ma’alot. The answer was delayed. Realizing at 4:45 that it was now
impossible to organize the release of the Palestinian prisoners and get
them to Damascus in time for the 6:00 deadline, the Ambassador had
himself flown by helicopter to Ma’alot to plead with the Palestinians
to extend their ultimatum.
Upon his arrival, a high-ranking Israeli officer asked the French
Ambassador if he had the code word. He replied in the negative, and
then, as he told Agence France Presse, asked to meet the Minister of
Defense or the Chief of Staff, “thinking that I could perhaps, even
Terror: The Double Standard 383
without the code word and through my diplomatic pass, get into con-
tact with the fedayeen and try at least to postpone the expiration of the
ultimatum.” But he was informed it was ‘“‘too dangerous.” A few min-
utes later, at 5:30, in the words of the Ambassador to the press, he
heard shots and explosions. ‘I was told that it was all over and asked
to return to Tel Aviv.” Acting on the direct orders of the Chief of Staff,
forty minutes before the ultimatum's expiration at 5:20 p.., the Israeli
military forces stormed the building.
Herly, a diplomat to the end, stated that he was certain that the
authorities “had not willfully sought to prevent him from speaking to
the terrorists, but I still ask myself and wonder: What could have been
done that wasn’t done between five o’clock and six o’clock?”” He had
been denied permission to talk to the Palestinians on the grounds that
he had not received the code word from Palestinian headquarters in
Damascus. But as the Ambassador later told the Jerusalem Post, there
must have been a “‘grave misunderstanding”’ because he was, in fact,
not supposed to receive the code word until the released prisoners had
arrived safely in Damascus. Israeli Information Minister Shimon Peres
insisted that Herly never could have talked to the Palestinians without
having the code word in his possession.
According to Ha‘aretz of May 17, the government had decided
early in the morning to reject the clearly understood Palestinian condi-
tions. But to buy time, Moshe Dayan and General Mordechai Gur
informed the fedayeen that they agreed to their terms, meanwhile
formulating plans for the military rescue of the hostages. Fully aware
of the overwhelming sympathy of the Western press, both the Prime
Minister and the Minister of Defense saw an opportunity to take a
chance, even at the expense of children’s lives, of making important
favorable international propaganda at a time when Israel’s public rela-
tions standing in the world had gravely plummeted. The die was cast,
and French mediation efforts were not permitted to upset the carefully
calculated Israeli planning.
As at Munich, the Israelis justified the decision to storm the school
on the conviction that the Palestinians intended, in any event, to kill
their young hostages when their demands were rejected and the ulti-
matum ran out. Again, guerrilla action did not sustain this thesis. As
PDFLP spokesman Yasser Abed Rubbuh later declared, the three ter-
rorists had orders to prolong the original deadline by two hours in the
event no agreement was reached. The Palestinians maintained that at
no time did they plan to harm the hostages if their demands were met.
Their plan had been to bargain the first half of the hostages for the
384 THE COVER-UP
release of the prisoners on their list, and then the second half for the
safe passage of the three Palestinians out of Israel.
It was the Palestinian contention that the political decision to
storm the school “‘whatever the consequences” had been made long
before the 1600 GMT deadline was reached. According to the PDFLP
version, “the Rumanian and French Ambassadors were told by the
Israelis they do not have any aircraft available to take the prisoners to
Damascus.” But the Rumanian government had been notified at 1530
GMT, half an hour before the deadline and the exact time the Israelis
stormed the school, that the prisoners had actually taken off for Cy-
prus.
The Popular Front openly admitted responsibility for Ma’alot, but
at the same time, in a statement appearing in the London 7imes,*8
PDFLP leader Nayef Hawatmeh challenged Israel to submit to a public
postmortem to determine who, in fact, had been responsible for the
bloodshed. This the Israeli government ignored, and the media de-
clined to follow up the matter.
Had there been a careful investigation, it would have been re-
vealed that the border settlement of Ma’alot had been carefully chosen
by Hawatmeh for this raid on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the estab-
lishment of the Israeli state. This village, once the Arab village of
Tarchiha, as part of western Galilee, was to have been included under
the 1948 U.N. partition plan in the Arab state, but was attacked and
occupied before May 15, then annexed by the Israeli state. The Arab
villagers fled during the fighting, and after the 1949 armistice their
return was barred. The village was razed to the ground, and on its
ruins the Israeli village of Ma’alot had been built.
The U.S. media was totally uninterested in any exposition of
Palestinian thinking. By the sheerest of coincidences, in the late eve-
ning of May 14 as the attack on Ma’alot was taking place, I was in Beirut
taping a conversation with Palestinian Abu Nidal (a pseudonym),
leader of a group that had split off from the PDFLP and is Iraq-
oriented. This twenty-five-year-old Palestinian expressed himself
frankly and violently:
We believe that Palestine is ours, and the only way to get back what is ours
is to fight... . 1am not Mr. Sadat. I am a Palestinian, and I am not concerned
with world opinion, including American, which has done nothing for our very
fair cause through more than twenty-six years. The world can respect you only
when you are strong enough to stand in the face of the world and fight for your
cause. .. . We showed we were serious in our attack on Qiryat Shemona, and
we will strike again.
——— =O ee ee
Terror: The Double Standard 385
His reference was to the Palestinian attack six weeks earlier on an
Israeli border village in which eighteen Israelis had been killed and
sixteen injured, but three of his companions had lost their lives, the
oldest of whom was just twenty years old.
The following day when I reached London, this pertinent tape was
used on BBC television and radio. But on arrival in New York, forty-
eight hours after Ma’alot, there was the accustomed total blackout
from television-radio news and talk shows. No one dared put into
question the Israeli-Zionist propaganda that the sole Palestinian aim
was to murder the innocent and spread terror without cause.
At Ma’alot little children had been involved, and hysteria ruled the
American Jewish community. Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold
and companions chained themselves to a fence in front of the U.N. in
protest. New York’s Mayor Beame addressed a large emotional rally,
urging the U.N. to adopt immediate sanctions against Arab countries
to avert further acts of terrorism. New York Post columnists Max Lerner
and Peter Hamill far outstripped in narrow, vindictive one-sidedness
the efforts of other media pundits. Hamill screamed:
And now they were killing children, Israeli children. . . . People were dying in
the deserts of the Middle East. Israel, which initially had allied itself with the
U.S. on a moral basis, had discovered that it was just another colony, its fate
in the hands of Henry Kissinger whose wife kept Arab swag in a wall safe in
her bedroom.*9
In Jerusalem Premier Golda Meir claimed her government had
been prepared to submit to the commandos’ demands to free the
prisoners, but that they had not had enough time to act. In an angry
television address she vowed that Israel ‘“‘will do everything in its
power to chop off the hands that intend to harm a child or an adult
in any city or village.” The Meir caretaker government, which was soon
replaced by the Yitzhak Rabin Cabinet, came under increasingly angry
attack from many quarters for its handling of the affair, as more and
more of the facts began to leak out.
One of the freed Ma’alot students, sixteen-year-old Rachel Lag-
ziel, told reporters that the captives were allowed to listen to their
transistors and to hear all the news broadcast in Hebrew. “We were
allowed to drink our water and eat our provisions,” eighteen-year-old
Tamara Ben-Hamu later said. ‘Don’t be afraid” one commando said.
“If Israel gives us the prisoners, you will not be harmed.” (This, of
course, never appeared in the U.S. press—only in Israel.)
Angry Israelis assailed Dayan. ‘‘You have made us the stepchil-
386 THE COVER-UP
dren of Israel,’’ Ma’alot Council Chairman Eli Ben Yaacov screamed
at him. “It’s because most of us are from Morocco,” he added.
Before a day after the incident had passed, the Israelis had struck
back against South Lebanon in a retaliatory raid. Air attacks against
civilian targets brought death to fifty-two in an impoverished refugee
camp and in Lebanese villages. Ain El Helweh and Bowry El Barajneh,
refugee camps north and south of Beirut, were the targets of the Israeli
air attacks carried out by thirty-six U.S.-supplied Phantoms. On the
second successive day the “reprisal” for Ma’alot found the Nabitieh
refugee camp in South Lebanon literally razed to the ground.
The following is from a dispatch filed by Paul Martin, which ap-
peared in the London Times on May 18:
Rescue workers had just dug up the bodies of the young woman and her four
small children from the rooms of their tiny house when I arrived in this
Palestinian refugee camp today. The bodies were mutilated almost beyond
recognition. Nobody knew the woman’s name, but one refugee said he thought
her husband had been killed during last night's Israeli bombing raids as well.
The house was one of about 60, lining the camp's main street, which were
flattened by three separate air strikes in two and a half hours. Half the camp,
which holds 5,000 people, had been completely destroyed by direct hits on
houses in no way connected with the Palestinian guerrillas. I counted more
than 40 craters from 1,000-lb. bombs peppering an area of less than 400
square yards.
Eight children, between the ages of 8 and 12 were killed when bombs
showered down on the camp’s school. Their bodies were taken to Sidon
Hospital because their parents could not be found in the confusion. More
bodies are expected to be recovered from the debris of twisted and crumbled
buildings. The death toll so far in Nabatieh alone is 25 civilians killed and
nearly 60 wounded.
On the outskirts of the camp there was an endless string of pathetic
processions to the sedate little cemetery. There were no demonstrations of
overt grief or anger-—just looks of shock and fear. Men, women and children,
who died in Israel’s reprisal, were taken at short intervals to hastily prepared
graves. Their bodies were borne on open stretcher-like coffins, draped with
a flower arrangement resembling the Palestinian flag.
Nabatieh was the worst hit in Israel’s wave of air strikes launched yester-
day afternoon on Palestinian refugee camps and villages at 4 P.M. as the streets
were filled with people. The bombing and strafing lasted 10 minutes. Then,
as rescue workers began to drag the dead and wounded from the debris, they
struck again at 5 p.M.; the final and most devastating strike came at 6:45 P.M.
As I arrived in Nabatieh today, the last refugees were fleeing with mat-
tresses and the bare essentials of survival: “This is the third time in the past
three years that we have been driven out of here by Israeli air raids,” an old
Terror: The Double Standard 387
villager said, “‘Each time we have had to build up all over again, but we will
be back, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month; but, God willing, we will be
back.”
The presence of armed guerrillas in Palestinian refugee camps is no new
phenomenon. However, at Nabatieh there clearly was no evidence in the camp
itself of any guerrilla military bases. What is obvious from this latest Israeli
blow against Lebanon is that civilians suffered the most. Little or no damage
was done to the guerrillas and, if anything, they stand to gain much politically
from what has happened.
Such events tend to create militants. At one point a group of refugees who
had lost a relative gathered around me when I was introduced as a British
correspondent, a man of about 40 snapped angrily: “Curse you and your
Balfour. Curse America. Curse you all.”
A U.N. report on Nabatieh listed “60 percent destroyed, 20 per-
cent badly damaged, 20 percent partly destroyed. Not one house had
a roof left,” the international organization noted. Yet such acts of
terror against civilian populations were relegated to inconspicuous
coverage, and the pretext for the merciless retaliation, that fedayeen
were based in this area, was accepted as an extenuating circumstance
for the killings in the retaliatory onslaughts on refugee camps.
As planes brought death to 200 innocents in these latest May raids
in South Lebanon, which had begun in 1968 and accelerated to almost
daily attacks, the same politicians, ministers, rabbis, priests, and writ-
ers who had condemned the “cowardly methods” employed in the
killings at Munich and Ma’alot found themselves acquiescing in the
more sophisticated Israeli means of terror used in Lebanon. Exploding
dolls dropped from planes “‘to entice” children to their deaths brought
no outraged outcries. Lebanese villages such as Rashaya Fughar, once
a prosperous town of 2,000 Christian Arabs and a handful of Pales-
tinian refugee camps in the Arkoub region of Lebanon, were subjected
to attacks by airplane, artillery, tanks, and gunboats. Israeli comman-
dos invaded villages and camps alike, ‘“forceably checking identifica-
tions, blowing up houses, killing villagers, and taking prisoners.’’5°
Sull, certain American newspapers called this tragedy—the forerunner
to the Lebanese civil war—a lesson that should serve as “an ulumatum
to the Lebanese government to rid themselves of the Palestinians
within their midst.”
It was very obvious that the “lords of the press” were not inter-
ested in striking an equal balance by reporting these as “‘atrocities”’ as
they had so labeled Ma’alot. In the face of the Israeli aerial onslaught
on innocent Lebanese and Palestinian refugees, all that the New York
388 THE COVER-UP
Times would do was to administer another mild slap to the Israel wrist
and ask for ‘‘a determined show of restraint on both sides”’:
The fully justified anger and determination of Israel to resist terrorist assaults
that have caused 49 deaths, mostly among children in ten weeks, nevertheless
affords no sound basis for resort to counterterror from the air, especially when
such indiscriminate tactics, also involving the death of many innocents, have
repeatedly proved ineffective. In the present context, the Israeli response is
especially unfortunate since it directly serves the Palestinian extremists’ objec-
tives.5! [Italics added.]
The principal concern of the 7imes was that the Israeli savagery was
counterproductive.
Unmatched continued Israeli and U.S. Zionist-induced media hys-
teria over the thirty-eight victims of the March 11, 1978, Palestinian
raid served as a cover for Begin’s retaliatory blitzkreig into southern
Lebanon. First reports two days later in the New York Post mentioned
250 deaths and 100,000 refugees.52 In Saturday's New York Times,
Marvine Howe quoted “reports” of 100,000 refugees. In fact, there
were some 260,000 refugees and approximately 2000 deaths. For not-
ing that “apparently a dead woman in Lebanon is not worth as much
as a dead woman in Israel,” Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News
was bitterly assailed, and the next week an entire Sunday letters col-
umn was devoted to ten angry writers tearing him to pieces.
Two Times editorials flayed “the senseless terror against Israel’’
and averred that, ‘beyond messages of condolence,” the world ‘‘owes
Israelis sympathy and partnership in measures to punish terrorism on
every front,”®3 and as late as May 7 correspondent William Farrell was
writing about the “terrorist rampage in the March carnage.” James
Wechsler’s front and editorial pages in the Post alternately spared no
language in attacking the Palestinian raiders, bemoaned the “lost
peace,” and then gloried with across-the-page headlines: ‘‘Guerillas
Routed In All-Out Retaliation.’’54 As the air bombardment of fleeing
innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians continued, the Times re-
ferred to the ‘‘justified Lebanese retaliation.’’55
The Washington Post carried an AP picture of a machine-gunned
car and reported the ambushing at Aadloun by Israeli commandos of
two taxi-loads of Tibnine villagers. According to reporter Jonathan
Randal, ‘‘one taxi was riddled with machine-gun bullets, the other hit
by the fin of a rocket with Hebrew lettering on it. As many as 20
villagers—most of them women and children—were killed.”"5> Marvine
Howe of the 7imes simply reported that fifteen civilians had been killed
and two wounded in circumstances that were ‘“‘unclear,’’5”? while the
Terror: The Double Standard 389
Daily News briefly referred to an AP report of civilian deaths. The Time
correspondent described the “ghastly” sight of the taxis, noting that
fourteen in all had been slaughtered. Correspondent Dean Brelis re-
ferred to the “indiscriminate” bombing of the port city of Tyre, where,
with the exception of one Palestinian anti-aircraft gun, “‘no military
target had been hit . . . What had been hit, and hard, was the civilian
dwellings. Was this deliberate counter-terrorism on the part of the
Israelis? It certainly looked that way.”5® Nothing of this was even
hinted at in the Times or other U.S. dailies. And the State Department,
which had quickly condemned what it called ‘“‘a brutal act of terrorism
against Israeli civilians,”’ refused to issue any censure of Israel for its
invasion of Lebanon.
During an Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon the previous No-
vember in which more than 100 civilians were killed, a man in his
sixties, as told by an American newsman, “‘lost everyone he had in the
world at Hazziyeh—his wife, six children, his brother, his brother’s
wife, his brother’s four children. Numbed by grief, he walked like a
robot around a Palestinian Red Crescent hospital near Tyre. He knelt
among the bodies of his family, crouched over the dirty mutilated face
of his smallest son, kissed him and said, ‘Darling, go. It doesn’t matter,
God is great.’ 59
This man, if possible, was perhaps more fortunate than other
defenseless parents in unarmed Lebanese villages and Palestinian ref-
ugee camps upon whom, as Thomas Kiernan describes in the prologue
of The Arabs, American-made Phantoms showered phosphorous
bombs made of wax and acid—wax which stuck to the skin while the
acid ate it away:
A human figure materialized out of the gloom, an eerie, unintelligible chant
issuing from what was once its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its
knees and crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child—boy or girl I couldn’t
tell—and its charred skin was literally melting, leaving a trail of viscuous fluid
in its wake. Its face had no recognizable features. The top of its skull shone
through the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not more than ten
yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps exposing like the yolks of poached
eggs. It twitched once or twice in the dust, gave a final wheeze, then went still
in the puddle of molten flesh that formed around it in the dust. . . . Later it
was run over by a car. No one would ever know what had happened to that
child.6°
While the unparalleled destruction in Lebanon has since become
a recognized fact, only the primary cause remaining in contention, the
total devastation of Quneitra, the one-time capital of Syria’s Golan
390 THE COVER-UP
Heights, remains one of the world’s best-kept secrets.
Under the terms of the Syrian-Israeli disengagement accord, the
return of Quneitra to the Syrians was the principal guid pro quo for
President Hafez al-Assad’s reluctant acceptance of the fruits of Henry
Kissinger’s thirty-day shuttling. The southern quarter of the town, the
hills surrounding it on three sides, and the rich cultivated land—east,
west, and south—still remained in Israeli hands, allegedly to protect
Israeli settlements in the Hulah valley. Three Israeli settlements built
since 1967, in defiance of U.N. resolutions, lay within four miles of the
town. Without these Israeli settlers in the Golan, Kissinger might have
been able to make a more satisfactory arrangement. But as one settler
in Merom Golan boasted, ‘‘By our very presence we are proving once
again the importance of settlement to Israel. Where we settle, there we
shall remain.’’6!
The Syrian returnees in June 1967 were greeted by a Hebrew
inscription on a demolished wall: “You wanted Quneitra. You will have
it in ruins.” This threat was carried out.
Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General of the U.N., after visiting the
former capital of the Golan Heights, remarked: “I was very shocked by
what I saw at Quneitra.” For the Soviet Ambassador to Syria, Quneitra
revived memories of Stalingrad at the end of the last war. And to
Father George Muhassal, when he and his flock were finally permitted
to reenter the city, it was Hiroshima all over again.
In a statement released through the Near East Ecumenical Bureau
in Beirut, this pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church in Quneitra
charged the Israelis with bulldozing 80 percent of the city and with
desecrating-looting Christian churches and the cemetery just prior to
their withdrawal on June 26: ‘“The concrete tombs were opened by
machine-gun fire and, in some cases, hand grenades. The bodies were
brought outside and systematically looted. Hands were broken off to
get bracelets, teeth with gold were taken, and parts of the bodies were
not put back in the proper coffins.”
Such accusations coming from a priest of a church in the city
might be dismissed as exaggerations. But Irene Beeson, writing in the
Guardian, was most explicit in her description of the systematic Israeli
destruction before leaving. These are the words, as recounted by Bee-
son, of one of the ten inhabitants who alone had remained under the
Israeli occupation in 1967:
They had about eleven bulldozers stationed in the town, but they had to bring
in reinforcements to cope with the huge task. The smaller houses collapsed
Terror: The Double Standard 391
under a single thrust. For the larger two, three and four-story villas and
buildings, they had to build earth ramps so that the bulldozers could reach the
upper floors.
They worked from dawn to dusk for several days with grim determination
and great expertise. It took them practically a whole day to finish off the
three-story house down the street. Only the houses of the ten Arab inhabitants
who had not fled were intact. Left standing, also, was the gutted, bullet-ridden
300-bed hospital which the Israelis used for target practice. One of the town’s
churches was destroyed. Others left standing and only slightly damaged struc-
turally, but had been stripped of everything—marble facings on the walls,
furnishings, precious 4th-century icons, statues, lamps.
The shell of the Officers’ Club is another landmark. What remains of this
wall is riddled with bullet holes, decorated with sexy murals, insulting and
pornographic graffiti. .. . Generators were removed and carted away by the
Israelis, who made off with all the town’s pumps for drinking and irrigation
water. Into the water reserves and wells the Israelis had poured diesel oil,
petrol and garbage, making good the inscription they had left behind.®?
You can always read what others have to say, but that is not the
same as viewing for yourself, as I did a year later, the utter emptiness
and desolation of Quneitra, a city that had been bulldozed in its en-
trrety. The tracks of the machines were still evident everywhere.
Smailer houses had collapsed under a single thrust, while the larger
villas and buildings had obviously been bulldozed in the manner de-
scribed by Irene Beeson.
Such dark devastation visited by man upon man has had few
equals. The only signs of life were the stray, hungry-looking cat streak-
ing across the road and a few wild red poppies that had sprung up
beside the burnt-out framework of what once had been Quneitra’s
proud hospital. To me came a flashback to childhood:
In Flanders Field the poppies grow
Between the crosses row on row
That mark their place.
My visit to Quneitra was on a cold May afternoon, but the temper-
ature in no way could match the frigidity of the scene—dramatized by
nearby snow-capped Mount Herman, where so many fierce aerial bat-
tles between the Syrians and the Israelis had occurred. The approaches
to Quneitra were guarded by the Austrian U.N. peacekeeping force.
This tragedy can best be seen through neutral eyes. However,
despite continued widespread coverage of violence and terrorism in
the U.S. media, there were no reports on Quneitra. In July 1974 an
Australian delegation comprised of two members of Parliament, two
392 THE COVER-UP
Labor leaders, two journalists, and the Federal Secretary of the Young
Labor Association visited the Golan Heights. Leader of the delegation
George Petersen wrote an article, “The Town That Used To Be,” for
the Australian publication, Nation Review:
The most striking feature of the Quneitra buildings is that, in most cases, there
are no walls and the roofs are resting on the ground. How this was done is only
too apparent by the caterpillar tracks on the ground near the destroyed build-
ings.®3
After describing the conditions he found in the city, Petersen con-
cluded:
Quneitra was destroyed for the same reasons that most of the original inhabi-
tants were expelled from Palestine—because the Zionists intend to take over
the land, expel the original inhabitants and use it for their own purposes.
. .. Looking across the cease-fire lines to Ain Zivan kibbutz in Israel, I know
whom I would hate the most if I were a native of Quneitra. Not the soldiers,
not even the bulldozer operators, but the men, women and children living on
that kibbutz for the benefit of whom and of others like them the destruction
of Quneitra was instituted at an enormous cost to the native inhabitants. And
I know that I would want to cross the cease-fire line and kill those usurpers.
In the same publication, many letters from Zionists who knew
nothing whatsoever about Quneitra emotionally reacted to the Peter-
sen article. In a reply to one of the letters signed by five persons,
Petersen struck back:
When I was at Quneitra on July 5, the bulldozer tracks were clearly visible.
. .. [am puzzled why the apologists for the Israeli government deny that
Quneitra was destroyed by bulldozers and explosives! The Israeli practice of
bulldozing Arab villages to the ground is well substantiated in past reports by
such impartial parties as the International Committee of the Red Cross and
the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. . .. Why should the Zionists
have made an exception of Quneitra? I would particularly like your five corre-
spondents to explain how they justify the forcible eviction to Syria of over
100,000 native inhabitants of the Golan Heights area. Does Israel's right to
exist justify turning the civilian residents into homeless refugees? Or are your
correspondents’ concepts of humanity confined only to people who describe
themselves as “‘Jews’’?
Zionists contend that Quneitra had been destroyed during the
1967 and 1973 wars rather than methodically bulldozed at the ume of
the Israeli withdrawal. But a BBC documentary film showed Commen-
tator Peter Snow some three or four days before the Israeli evacuation
in a very alive city with many houses all intact—further proof that the
Terror: The Double Standard 393
city had been calculatingly destroyed, house by house, church by
church.
Another eyewitness from the Australian delegation was Stewart
West, President of the South Post Branch of the Waterside Workers
Federation of Australia. Under the tide ‘The Destruction of Qunei-
tra,” he wrote as follows:
In most war-damaged cities, you see heaps of rubble, bomb and shell craters,
burned-out buildings, with walls still standing and sometimes whole streets
left undamaged. But not in Quneitra. The city was completely destroyed in a
couple of days immediately prior to the Israeli withdrawal on June 25, 1974.
Most of the houses were demolished with explosives or pushed down with
bulldozers. . . . The destruction of Quneitra must be in the same category as
the destruction of ancient Carthage, as the destruction of European cities by the Huns, and
the Mongols, and with Hiroshima and the Nazi destructions during World War II.&*
[Italics added.]
Australian trade union newspaper Scope, in a special twenty-eight
page supplement of August 1, 1974, devoted two of its pages to the
Quneitra atrocities with a lead that read: “Syrian city of Quneitra used
to be half-way between the Israeli border and Damascus. In June of this
year, Israeli bulldozers destroyed the last of its houses, ripped down
the last of its trees and orchards and pulled back up the hills of the
Golan Heights.”’ The main piece, presumably written by Scope’s Editor,
George Coote, added in part:
June 26 was days after the disengagement between Israeli and Syrian troops,
and the last Arab house in Quneitra was destroyed minutes before UN peace-
keeping forces moved in. . . . Quneitra was smashed with dynamite and bull-
dozers which made sure nobody would live there again. . . . This was a puzzle
for the Australian delegation visiting the city. Did the Quneitra story hit the
Australian media?
The answer to this question and to the query posed by British journal-
ist Kathleen Evan’s contribution to the same special issue, “Had You
Really Heard About Israel’s Genocide?” was identical. Next to nothing
had appeared in Australia and Britain—and nothing in the U.S.—on
the story of a gutted city where nearly 45,000 people once had happily
lived.
Zionist terror also reached the sidewalks of New York. One Sun-
day afternoon in January 1972, the relative stillness of Seventh Avenue
was broken by the angry bellow of voices crying out in unison “Free
Soviet Jews,” alternating with “Six Million—Not One More.” Carnegie
Hall, where the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra was performing with stars
394 THE COVER-UP
of the Bolshoi Ballet and the Bolshoi Opera Company, was under
siege. Two busloads of Mayor John Lindsay’s police were keeping an
angry threatening mob from ticket holders who had to pass the picket
lines to enter the famed music hall.
The ugly, tastelessly clad pickets who were alternately cursing,
hissing, and spitting at other Americans, many of whom were them-
selves Jews, were members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense
League. Most of them were wearing buttons bearing their organiza-
tional emblem, ‘‘Never Again,” while some had buttons reading “Free
Syrian Jews.”’ One woman in a fur coat had a cloth emblem with the
flags of Israel and the U.S. joined together—symbolizing the duality
of these rabid ultramilitants. And on that Sunday miscreants of the
same ilk were picketing the Syrian Mission in another section of Man-
hattan. That evening the Egyptian Tourist Office at Rockefeller Center
was bombed. And two days later a fire bombing of ‘“‘unknown origin”
erupted in the offices of impresario Sol Hurok and Columbia Artists,
killing his secretary and injuring many. An anonymous caller to the
Associated Press said: “Cultural bridges of friendship will not be built
over the bodies of Soviet Jews. Never again.” On this occasion the
leaders of a few rival Israelist organizations in muffled voices related
their disapproval to the press. But no action was taken, and history was
being allowed to repeat itself.
The case of Meir Kahane would require a long examination. All
that may be noted here is the way he has benefited from the imposition
of the double standard. The five-year suspended sentence given him
in 1971 after his admitted manufacture of bombs, harassment of Soviet
diplomats, and acts of violence against American and Arab citizens was
scarcely believable. Only in a Brooklyn District Court presided over by
Judge Jack Weinstein and in an America under Zionist domination
could this have happened.
In a news conference following the sentencing, the brazen Rabbi
forthrightly disavowed the court’s injunction against further breaches
of the peace by stating that he would use violence if he determined it
to be “‘necessary.”” He announced that he would divide his time be-
tween New York and Jerusalem, where he was opening an interna-
tional center, and would “maintain dual citizenship as permitted under
Israeli law.”
The militant Rabbi vacated the leadership of the group he
founded after his defeat in the December 1973 Israeli parliamentary
elections. The Israeli government deported him after he and other
Israeli militants were arrested following a Gush Emunim demonstra-
Terror: The Double Standard 395
tion during the summer of 1976 in an off-limits Hebron hospital on the
West Bank. Kahane cried out to his followers living in the nearby
Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, which looks down on the Arab city
from a promontory: “This is a Jewish city. Abraham lived here, and so
will we. This is the building where Jews were murdered by Arabs.” The
six-columned New York Times report on page 2 showed a smiling,
charismatic Kahane sitting in an Israeli army truck after his arrest.®
Upon release from prison in his country of adoption, Kahane
returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges. Convicted, he kept newly
enthralled followers in line through his arrogant behavior from his
“country club prison,” as he used his demand for kosher food and
religious observance to move freely in and out of confinement.
His 1975 book, The Story of the Jewish Defense League, °° was reviewed
in the Sunday 7imes book section by Herbert Gold®7 (on the same page
as Elie Wiesel was reviewing The Blood of Israel: The Massacre of the Israeh
Athletes), and the reputedly sensitive novelist referred to Kahane as a
“lively rabbi with a baroque mind” whose “new book, ill-written, shrill
and without nuance, nevertheless gets at a truth about contemporary
Jewish experience which is generally missed by both the un-Jewish
popular mind and the established Jewish organizations.” The reviewer
found Kahane at times “‘almost loveable,”’ supporting the publisher’s
jacket blurb “that militance is and will be necessary to assure the future
physical and spiritual existence of the Jewish people.”
Little wonder that Kahane and his breed in the JDL, despite an
occasional rap on the knuckles, have been permitted to break the laws,
shoot at the innocent, deface property, and attack with impunity.
When Dr. Mohamed Mehdi of the Action Committee was attacked by
JDL members with a lead pipe in May 1974 and sent to the hospital
with a broken back,®8 it took nearly a year for the police to make an
arrest although a perpetrator appeared on television to boast of the
deed. This same arrogant defiance of the law was manifested in an ugly
attack on me when I lectured February 5, 1975 at William Patterson
College at Wayne, New Jersey, in a rebuttal to an address made there
by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban.®9 Neither of these inci-
dents received any media attention. Shortly thereafter, Mehdi’s offices
on East 44th Street in Manhattan were set afire and almost totally
gutted. The New York Times relegated this obviously vicious arson to
five short paragraphs on page 40, referring only to a “suspicious fire”
resulting in ‘“‘medium damage to office equipment.”’7° Yet this same
newspaper had often given prominent coverage to the many Mehdi
demonstrations and his often zany statements which did not put the
396 THE COVER-UP
Palestinian position in the best light.
Frustration and desperation breed desperation and frustration.
The grim reaction to the devastation suffered by the Palestinians in
Jordan in 1970 led to an increase in violence and in the arenas in which
force was applied. There emerged more desperate and intransigent
guerrillas, groups such as the Black September tied to the internation-
alist terrorist-revolutionary movement. The Japanese Red Army, the
Bader-Meinhof, and other groups cooperated with Palestinians on
whose strong moral position they drew to achieve their own ends in
Europe. 1 errorist acts served as a sad reminder that these Palestinians
just would not disappear. As Dr. Elmer Berger, expressed it:
Right or wrong, the exploits of the Palestinians stir an Arab world which knows
that if the president of the United States calls them “outlaws,” no power has
done more to put these people outside the “law” than the United States. For
no power is as responsible as the United States for Israel’s persistent defiance
of the ‘law’ as it has been inscribed in every international agreement ever
written on the Palestine problem.’’7!
The vilification of Palestinians goes forward without placing their
terrorism in the tragic context of the struggle for their right of self-
determination. This refusal of Western communications media to re-
late cause to effect has made the growth of violence inevitable and the
ensuing harrowing conflict in Lebanon unavoidable. The die was first
cast for that lovely country with Israel’s December 1968 reprisal attack
on the Beirut Airport.
For this double standard the New York Times must bear a heavy
responsibility, riveting so much attention, as it has, on the subject of
terrorism and refusing (even in a piece “Terrorism or Liberation
Struggle? Violence Begets Many New Nations”’72 in which the PLO was
discussed but not a word said about Begin’s Irgun) to place any blame
on Israel for the use of violence from the onset of her successful
struggle for “legitimacy,” but on every occasion detailing the rise of
the PLO through alleged stages of terrorism.73
Ina June 22, 1974, editorial following the Palestinian attack on the
Israeli border villages of Kiryat Shemona, Ma’alot, and Shamir” in
which fifty-one in all had been killed, the Times placed the responsibil-
ity for the ‘“‘stepped-up Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli counter-
attacks” at the door of “die-hard Palestinian extremists, infuriated by
the rapid erosion of the support for their intransigent stand among
their own people as well as in Arab capitals . . . these frustrated fanatics
have resorted to repeated acts of barbarism in a desperate effort to
Terror: The Double Standard 397
reverse the accelerating momentum toward accommodation.” (Wor-
ried indeed they were, as were all Palestinians, that there might be a
Middle East accommodation that did not take into consideration their
“inalienable rights.”’)
It is the saddest commentary on the decadence of the world in
which we live, that the only way these people could be heard was to
launch repeated terrorist attacks. Who knew about the Palestinians
before Munich? Who cared one whit about the rights of Palestinians
before Ma’alot? The answer is obvious—no one! There have been
myriad stories about the poor Jewish refugees from everywhere com-
ing into Israel and building up “the desert,” but what humanitarian
pieces broke into print about the Palestinians who had been thrown
out from their ancient homes, until they struck and struck hard? And
did not Winston Churchill in his History of the English Speaking Peoples
once write, “It is in the primary right of man to fight and to kill for
the land they live in.’’75
Parade compounded the Times’ felonies with its own piece: “Ter-
rorists: How They Operate a World-wide Network” in which it was
made to appear that most terrorism stems solely from the Arab Middle
East where ‘‘a gusher of Arab oil money is available” and “President
Qaddafi, an unpredictable Big Daddy, subsidizes terrorism to the tune
of $90 million a year.’’?® In an October 1976 interview, “Our Very
Existence Depends on the U:S.,”’ with Parade writer George Michael-
son, Prime Minister Rabin complained that the media had blown up
the West Bank demonstrations. The article contained the subhead,
“An Exaggerated Picture,” above reports of Israeli mistreatment of
Palestinians, together with a photograph captioned: “Israeli Soldiers
Grab West Bank Rioter.”’7 But four months later, an expansive, flat-
tering Michaelson outpouring on President Sadat (the cover showed
the Egyptian holding a rose) discussed every aspect of war and peace
in the Middle East without the word “Palestine” appearing once.78
And in two other articles dealing with the West Bank problem, this
writer further attached the terrorist label to the Palestinians and dis-
missed the PLO with an unsubstantiated blanket statement that
“among older, wealthier and more traditional West Bankers, the
PLO’s militancy is suspect.”’79
Few in the media cared to distinguish between terror as carried
out by private groups or individuals and terror as executed as part of
governmental policy. Neither the leaders of the Irgun nor of the Stern
Gang had ever been prosecuted by the Israeli government after the
establishment of the state. These terrorist groups were absorbed into
398 THE COVER-UP
the Israeli army intact as special units and their leaders elected to the
Knesset. And shortly after he took over as chief of state, Begin issued
a postage stamp honoring Abraham Stern, whose group had helped
him in the assault on Deir Yassin and had masterminded the assassina-
tion of U.N. mediator Folke Bernadotte.
As South Dakota Senator James Abourezk noted in a speech on
the Senate floor prior to the Ma’alot incident, the village of Kfeir in
South Lebanon where his parents had been born ‘“‘was bombed by
Israeli Phantoms, fueled by American bombs and American money.”
In that attack four civilians had been killed: a six-month-old baby, a
five-year-old and an eight-year-old child, and the mother of one of the
children. Coming two days prior to Ma’alot, the Israelis could not
claim “retaliation.” And if ever there were heartrending details that
lent themselves to dramatic rendition, here they were. But no NBC
spectaculars, no New York Times Sunday magazine or Parade renditions
ever sobbed out this tale.
Senator Fulbright added his comments to those of his South
Dakota colleague, noting that these persistent attacks cast doubt on
Israeli’s sincerity for peace, a capital reason for the U.S. media reti-
cence to publicize Israeli raids on civilian sites in South Lebanon and
on defenseless refugee camps. The standard Israeli justification for
these raids had invariably been to bomb “terrorists” who had commit-
ted previous acts of violence against them. Yet the “terrorists” who
committed the Ma’alot atrocity had died at Ma’alot.
Nor had other Israeli ‘‘retaliations” scarcely ever been visited
upon those Palestinians who had perpetrated the provocative raids.
Rather, the Israeli alleged “‘responses” were aimed at eradicating any
chance of a peace settlement according recognition to the Palestinians.
A spiraling sequence of violence and terrorism was hardly likely to
muster the respect from the world the displaced Palestinians so des-
perately needed in order to win acceptance of their rights—rights
which, if granted, might jeopardize the existing character of the Israeli
state.
What added insult to injury for the handful of protesting Senators
was that these Israeli raids had been all carried out with armaments
supplied by the U.S. through a vote of the very legislative body in
which they served. As Senator Abourezk pointedly reminded his col-
leagues in the Senate (scarcely reported outside of the Congressional
Record):
If we in the United States are to furnish Phantom jets, bombs, napalm, fire
bombs and money to fuel the planes when they do the bombing and the killing
Terror: The Double Standard 399
in southern Lebanon, then we must be held accountable for the deaths that
will result from what I consider to be official Israeli Government terrorist
activities—no less terrorist in nature than an act of three or four individual
Arabs who kill civilians in Israel.
Mr. President, this raises one important question: “Where are the doves
in the United States today who cried and who agonized over the killing in
Vietnam—the killing that was carried out in the very same manner as it is being
done now in southern Lebanon? Where are these people today who protested
that same kind of killing in Indo-China?”
The answer is obvious, Mr. President; they are deathly silent and in some
cases, those very same doves are cheering on the Israelis in their bombing
raids that result in the slaughter of so many innocent people.®°
The significance of the role played by the issue of terror in achiev-
ing the Middle East “‘cover-up” has been surpassed only by the contri-
bution of the syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism to the ‘‘cover-over,”
which shall now be examined.
PART THREE
THE COVER-OVER
Jews have suffered, and Christians have suffered. Mankind has
suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering, and no
human beings which have experienced hate and hostility more
than any other. I must say, however, that it is my impression that
Jewish history has been taught with a whine and whimper rather
than with a straight-forward acknowledgement that man practices
his inhumanity on his fellow human beings . . . Out of this peculiar
emphasis on suffering there has developed a new attitude of vicari-
ous suffering—a feeling among numbers of Jews today that be-
cause other Jews have suffered and died they, the living, are some-
how entitled to special consideration.
Rass RICHARD E. SINGER
Highland Park (Ilhnots }
Lakeside Congregation
XI Exploiting Anti-Semitism
In a democracy every group that affects public policy must be
accountable to the entire citizenry. A democracy cannot survive if
Iron Curtains are placed around groups, secular or religious, that
intervene in public affairs.
—Paul Blanchard
Throughout history, important civilizations have fallen due to reasons
ranging from external overexpansion to internal corruption. Should
the Western way of life, of which the U.S. is the chief progenitor, fall
victim to the ravages of time, future historians might well ascribe the
downfall to a scarcely known disease, “labelitis.”” The “label” has
contributed to the paralysis of individual thinking and has led to the
concomitant mass conformity which, together with fear, has helped
transform America into a nation of sheep years before ‘‘1984.”
The influence of the label and slogan is infinite. The unadorned
cliché parades forth shamelessly and unchallenged, sweeping politi-
cians everywhere in and out of office. Slap the word “‘liberal,” “‘Fas-
cist,” “‘reactionary,” or “Communist,” as the case may dictate, on any
point of view you do not like, and a sure, quick victory can be yours
immediately.
Nothing has accounted more for the success of Zionism and Isra-
elism in the Western world than the skillful attack on the soft under-
belly of world opinion—‘‘Mr. Decent Man’s”’ total repugnance toward
anti-Semitism. The charge of this bias, instantaneously bringing forth
the specter of Nazi Germany, so totally pulverizes the average Chris-
tian that by contrast calling him a Communist is a pleasant epithet. It
was the Christian revulsion toward anti-Semitism in the wake of Hit-
lerian genocide, not the superiority of Zionist over Arab rights, that
first created and then firmly entrenched the Israeli state, even permit-
403
404 THE COVER-OVER
ting the occupation of conquered territories in the face of the U.N.
charter and international morality. So strong has become the general
aversion to anti-Semitism that even the full-blooded Semite, the Arab,
absurd as it may be, has difficulty defending himself against this
charge. The Jerusalem peace talks in January 1978 were disrupted
when Prime Minister Begin hurled accusations of “anti-Semitism” at
both President Sadat and his Foreign Minister.
The emotional reaction, engendered by Nazi genocide, has given
rise to an eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not be anti-Semitic,”
and to a corollary twelfth commandment, ‘“Thou must be anti-anti-
Semitic.”” No Christian wishes to run afoul of these supplements to the
interdictions handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. In their zeal
to carry out the new commandments, the anti-anti-Semites, guided by
Organized Jewry, have rejected the basic distinction between those
who are against Zionism-Israelism because they deplore its political
precepts and abhor the consequences wrought by its measure, and
those who are against Jews because they simply dislike Jews. Christian
anti-Zionists and even Jewish anu-Zionists are alike denounced as anti-
Semites—discussion, muted doubts, and debate on Middle East policy
are crushed.
As Harvard’s Dr. David Riesman noted some years ago in the
Jewish Newsletter: “The Zionists can muster not merely the threat of the
Jewish vote and the no-less important Jewish financial and organiza-
tional skills, but also the blackmail of attacking anyone who opposes
their political aims for Israel, as anti-Semitic.”"! For writing that “‘it is
a sign of mediocrity in people when they herd together,” Boris Paster-
nak, the Russian author of Dr. Zhivago, was immediately stigmatized by
responsible Zionists, including the then Prime Minister of Israel, David
Ben-Gurion, as an anti-Semitic Jew.
That there are bigots and haters, that there was a Nazi Germany
whose unparalleled genocide still stings the conscience of Man, and
that there still is anti-Semitism, no one but the most irrational would
deny. It is one of an infinite number of prejudices that ought to be
eradicated. However, the presence of this sociological phenomenon
should not give inviolability to the ruthless suppression of even the
most constructive criticism of the State of Israel and of the multifold
Zionist organizations. Anti-Zionism can no more be equated with anti-
Semitism, the racist ideology directed against Jews as Jews, than Zion-
ism can be equated with Judaism.
Leading the high-pressure, efficiently organized, continuous cam-
paign to keep anti-Semitism in the limelight through the pursuit of
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 405
alleged anti-Semites, as well as to suppress all dissent with Washing-
ton’s “Israel First”’ policy, is the well-financed offspring of the 130-
year-old B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded
in 1913. Known as the ADL, this most powerful organ is supported on
most occasions by other Jewish organizations. The ADL’s earlier em-
phasis on stamping out genuine prejudice and bigotry gave way long
ago to acts of defamation, spying, and publishing spurious literary
productions, motivated by support of Israel and effected by eliminat-
ing critics of Zionist tactics.
The ward of the oldest and most powerful Jewish organization in
the world, the ADL backs up its New York City national headquarters
with an annual budget of $7.4 million (1975); twenty-eight regional
offices around the country and two in Canada; a professional staff of
300, including specialists in the fields of human relations, communica-
tions, education, urban affairs, social sciences, religion, and law. It has
representatives in hundreds of communities from coast to coast, and
has thousands of secret dossiers on citizens of Canada and of the U.S.
According to its own pamphlet: ‘‘Each regional office has its own board
drawn from leaders and prominent citizens in its areas. Thus, in hun-
dreds of communities throughout the nation, the ADL is able to coop-
erate as a neighbor to solve important local problems. . . .” Through
its mulufold private and public reports, allegedly directed against prej-
udice and bigotry, the ADL exerts enormous prejudice, often border-
ing on blackmail.
In a True magazine interview in February 1971, three top leaders
of the ADL, Benjamin Epstein, Seymour Graubard, and Dore Schary,
boasted of their use of undercover agents and entrapment through
impersonation. ‘‘ADL must have a pretty extensive spy network to do
all this,” the interviewer commented. Newsweek, trying to be as inoffen-
sive as possible, called the ADL’s methodology “highly selective” and
“never a total portrait.”? A review of ADL “Reports,” often issued in
book form by outside publishing houses, revealed the organization
“straining to fit the products of its own espionage into the procrustean
bed of its own personal predilections,” to use the words of Unitarian
minister and author Dr. John Nicholls Booth, a victim and a critic of
that same organization. While sounding plausible, many of the charges
leveled by this group were full of half-truths, inaccurate and question-
able. The secret and confidential reports of the ADL, widely dis-
tributed in liberal circles, often resorted to placing the stock apology
“but some of my best friends are Jews” in the mouths of critics to
impute an innuendo of anti-Semitism. Odious impressions were often
406 THE COVER-OVER
created by twisting a few words, distorting the original text.
Increasingly, the B’nai B’rith and the ADL have directed their
activities, allegedly against bigotry, toward assisting Israel. When Is-
rael’s Ministry of Tourism decided to offset adverse 1967 headlines in
the American press about the constant aerial bombing of Arab lands
by inviting 1,200 foreign newsmen to Israel for a visit, the B’nai B’rith
not only recruited journalists but organized their subsidized tours.3
The ADL continuously employed its “nonprofit organization” postal
permit to disseminate Israeli propaganda publications, as it did during
the June 1967 war* and on an infinite number of occasions since. As
former B'nai B'rith officer Saul E. Joftes brought out in his suit against
the brotherhood, which he carried successfully to the Supreme Court
despite efforts of attorneys to stall adjudication for almost four years,
charitable, tax-deductible funds were diverted into Israel-related
projects of a political or quasi-political nature.
Americans who have recently shown how sensitive they are to
threats to their privacy and liberties when CIA wiretapping and spying
were revealed have never been told about the building of what might
be called the Jewish Gestapo or the largest nongovernment spy system
functioning in the Western hemisphere. In his book The Pledge,> Leon-
ard Slater, a staunch Zionist sympathizer, detailed the many illegal
programs devised to assist in bringing Israel into being. Starting in
1945, Zionists enlisted key Jews and Gentiles in many countries around
the world; connived with judges, custom officials, and politicians; and
according to FBI reports, even smuggled weaponry and men out of the
U.S. and Europe, past the British into Palestine for the day of reckon-
ing with the Arabs. Washington economist Robert Nathan interceded
with J. Edgar Hoover to help free Zionist agents arrested at the Cana-
dian border for smuggling arms destined for Israel.6 Cases of rifle
barrels were stolen from the U.S. Naval Supply Depot in Hawaii.
Under the lead of the ‘‘SSonneborn Institute,’ named after U.S.
Haganah leader Rudolf Sonneborn, the quest for an armament indus-
try was realized. Material was gathered for Palestine into depots from
Zionist organizations across the U.S. From Wisconsin came 350,000
sandbags, from Ohio 92,000 flares, from New Jersey 25,000 helmets.
Chicago supplied 100 tons of barbed wire and ten tons of khaki paint,
while New Orleans sent salt tablets and penicillin. San Francisco of-
fered mosquito netting, Minneapolis 600 mine detectors, and from the
port city of Norfolk, Virginia, two corvettes, an ice cutter and, “‘to
guide the naval strategists of the future Jewish state, the complete
memoirs of Admiral von Tirpitz.’’7
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 407
Under the guise of Talmudic studies in New York City, attorney
Nahum Bernstein was teaching espionage and hand-to-hand fighting.
This intelligence school met in an Orthodox religious tax-exempt
institution which called itself the National Council of Young Israel.
Through the B’nai B’rith, the ADL, the American Jewish Commit-
tee, and varied Zionist and pro-Israel groups, Israeli intelligence con-
tinued to penetrate into every part of the U.S. Temples, synagogues,
and rabbis unabashedly cooperated. In fact, there was a cynical joke
that is said to have circulated in the Pentagon: Every confidential
military memo apparently was typed in triplicate, ‘‘one for the White
House, one for the State Department, and one for Tel Aviv.’’ At one
point the Israeli navy was a photocopy of the U.S. Navy even as far as
training from the Blue Jackets Manual.
Outside of the U.S., too, secretive surveillance and purchased
support for Israel went forward. The February 1970 hearings of the
U.N. Non-Governmental Organization Committee heard a report that
there was ‘‘a clandestine program of quasi-espionage in Eastern Euro-
pean countries, through American Jewish tourists, conducted by the
Israeli government and paid for by the Israeli government, but run
from inside B’nai B’rith, which was used as a cover-up.”
There are many ways of using anti-Semitism as an instrument to
compel agreement with the Zionist position and to still any criticism
of the Israelis. Foreign Minister Abba Eban, on the occasion of one of
the many Israeli reprisals against Lebanon, defended Israel’s actions:
“The attitude of foreign countries cannot be entirely divorced from
the traditional attitude of the non-Jewish world to the Jewish world.”
According to this theme on which the eloquent Israeli spokesman
elaborated in 1974 and 1975 after he had retired from his Cabinet post
and was lecturing on American university campuses while teaching at
Columbia University, any and all criticism of Israel could only be
considered anti-Semitic.
Dr. Willard Oxtoby, writing in Presbyterian Life,* had this to say on
the effect of the anti-Semitism labeling:
Hopefully, anti-Semitism may soon become a sin of the past, but for the
time being, it is still an emotionally potent word and nobody wants to be
caught being anti-Semitic. . . . Like the news media, and for the same rea-
sons, the Christian critic of Zionism is paralyzed. He cannot condemn Isra-
eli armed conquest because he must pussyfoot in the delicate area of reli-
gious prejudice. As a result, Zionism is a subject on which in the United
States there is more effective suppression of freedom of speech than any
other.
408 THE COVER-OVER
Since criticism of Jews by blacks automatically became labeled
anti-Semitism; since censure of Israel by Christians ranging from Pres-
ident Charles de Gaulle to the General Assembly and Security Council
of the U.N. was held by the world Jewish community to be but another
‘manifestation of perennial anti-Semitism,” according to Abba Eban;
since anti-Zionism was declared by the Rabbinical Council of America
to be but a new guise for anti-Semitism, it was inevitable that freedom
of expression in the U.S. became totally restricted. Veteran Zionist
leader Dr. Nahum Goldmann alleged there was a new kind of anti-
Semitism that had sprung up in Communist countries and elsewhere
among those whom he chose to term “members of the left wing.”’ This
variety of anti-Semitism, he asserted in February 1969, was being
propagated in the form of ant-Israeli and anti-Zionist positions.
Exploitation of prejudice reached unheard of heights in the 1974
study of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), The New Anti-Semitism,
written by its high priests of the cult of anti-anti-Semitism, General
Counsel Arnold Forster and National Director Benjamin R. Epstein.
According to the press release, headed ‘‘Searchhght on Hatred,”
widely distributed by publisher McGraw-Hill, the new anti-Semitism is
based on the old, only it emanates from different and surprisingly
respectable sources. ““The hostility of the Radical Left, the Radical
Right, pro-Arab groups, black extremists, and a malingering anti-Jew-
ish hate-mongering that has plagued the United States since the early
twenties” has allegedly now been augmented by “‘others within the
government, the media, the clergy and the arts, who are insensitive to
Jews and Jewish concerns, particularly to the needs and wants of the
State of Israel.”
And as authors Forster and Epstein indicated in their two-hour,
unopposed radio interview on New York’s popular WMCA Barry Gray
talk show, anyone who does not go along 100 percent with their views
of Israel is deemed ‘insensitive’ and therefore “‘anti-Semitic.” The
ADL leaders made it very clear that ‘any threat to the security of the
State of Israel’’ must be considered a threat to the Jews of the U.S. and
hence must be viewed as anti-Semitism. The reason given by them for
this new bigotry: “The hard-won status of American Jewry.”
The publication of this much ballyhooed study and book just
happened to coincide with the growing feeling in many parts of the
country that Zionist pressure, influence, and financial power had been
responsible for the energy crisis that brought gas shortages and grave
dangers. The cultists bitterly complained that Jews were no longer
protected by the “moral indignation that followed the holocaust.”
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 409
Apparently, they wished to extend a protective curtain over the Zion-
ist-imposed Middle East policy and other positions espoused by the
Jewish Establishment.
This was the seventh of the books on which these same authors
had collaborated.® As usual, the book was released to the press first as
a study one month before publication to lay the groundwork for a vast
publicity follow-up. The New York Times obliged, as customary, with
solid three-column coverage headed ‘‘Report by Anti-Defamation
League Sees Example of New Kind of Anti-Semitism.”!°
This latest ADL work contained no index, probably purposely
because it would have quickly revealed an imposing roster of respect-
able people listed as “‘anti-Semites.”’ The tightly woven volume, set in
smaller than usual type, contained infinite words and multifold un-
proven charges based on innuendo and insinuation. The names of
those who were vilified were interwoven with those of a few recognized
bigots and were adroitly dropped among members of the Radical Left,
the Radical Right, Arab, and black extremists—a perfect example of
the deceptive method of affixing guilt by juxtaposition.
While the Foreword of its latest ‘‘study” set forth the ADL’s long-
term goal to “fight against prejudice, bigotry and descrimination” with
“the weapons [of] law, education and public persuasion . . . to seek
justice and fair treatment for all citizens alike,” this widely accepted
image of the organization was destroyed by the repeated insistence of
the authors that “American Jews regard attacks on the existence of
Israel as the ultimate anti-Semitism.” As stated in the last paragraph
of the Epilogue, ‘the heart of the new anti-Semitism abroad in our
land” lies in the “widespread incapacity or unwillingness to compre-
hend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and sur-
vival throughout the world.” Therefore, the mildest criticism of Israel
or of Zionist activities was viewed as offensive “insensitivity” or ‘“‘cal-
lous indifference” and was equated to anti-Semitism, distinguishable
from the traditional kind, the authors averred, in that ‘‘the new anti-
Semitism is not necessarily deliberate in character and is more often
expressed by respected individuals and institutions here and abroad—
people who would be shocked to think of themselves or have others
think them as anti-Semites.”
In this Foreword ADL National Chairman Seymour Graubard laid
the groundwork for old, recognizable tactics:
While the memory of the Nazi Holocaust was fresh in mind, anti-Semitism was
silenced. As that memory fades, however, as Jews are more and more being
410 THE COVER-OVER
considered a part of the Establishment, there are new growths of anti-Semi-
tism. They are being nurtured in a climate of general insensitivity and deterio-
ration of morality and ethics, the kind of climate, history reminds us, in which
anti-Semitism grows best.
Having recalled the past to build fear and to invent present hostile
situations, the ADL was ready to apply the smear and vilification so as
to censor and silence, thus building an iron curtain over America that
would bar any criticism, however constructive, of Israel, Zionists, or
Jews (Judaism is rarely, if ever, involved). Even the New York Post's
James Wechsler, long an avid friend of Israel, was objective enough to
write that the latest Forster-Epstein ADL work is ‘‘grievously favored
by an intolerance of their own in equating criticism of Israel with
anti-Semitism.” Calling the presentation “‘illegitimate and uncivil,”
the columnist described a standard
which requires a kind of political psychiatry to isolate hidden intent, by pro-
ceeding from a well-documented dissection of the frenzies of Gerald L. K.
Smith to a loose indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and columnists
Evans and Novak. They do not explicitly apply the label anti-Semitic to the
latter three. But the context in which the attack appears—indeed their inclu-
sion in the volume—carries, to borrow their words, ‘‘an unmistakable mes-
sage” and inescapable “‘innuendo.””!!
The assumption of the simultaneous role of judge, prosecutor,
witness, and juror brought this sole protest from the “‘brave’’ band of
liberals who are otherwise frothing at the mouth at such stifling of
freedom. All of the ADL books, with the tremendous publicity given
to them before, during, and after publication (they were widely pro-
moted on radio and otherwise by among others, Walter Winchell,
during his days of fame) and the extensive advertising, ought long ago
to have earned for the organization its appropriate name, “The Defa-
mation League.”
The growth of anti-Semitism, which the ADL and other Israelist
groups allegedly feared, suited the needs of the Zionists who wished
to make Jews more conscious of their Jewishness. The worship of
ethical universal Judaism, in their eyes, was for the few skull-capped
old men and Talmudic scholars. But for the masses, who were turned
off by the tedium of synagogue worship, there was the new exciting
Israelism and the worship of anti-anti-Semitism.
From its outset the Zionist movement had clearly indicated the
extent of its vested interest in prejudice. Herzl expressed the hope
that any anti-Semitism would “act as a propelling force which, like
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 41}
the wave of the future, would bring the Jews into the promised
land.”"!? At the same time he also wrote: “Anti-Semitism has grown
and continues to grow—and so do I.”"!3 The father of Zionism pre-
dicted: ‘““The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semi-
tism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sov-
ereignty we want.”
The rabbinate had long employed anti-Semitism as a means of
keeping the flock within the fold, and since the creation of Israel,
support in the Diaspora has been continuously and easily enlisted by
depicting the new Jewish state as a kind of insurance policy in case of
a renaissance of anti-Semitism. Consequently, Zionist leadership has
cared little about how much anti-Semitism their own separatist activi-
ties might generate.
The late British Parliamentarian Richard H. S. Crossman, an ar-
dent Anglo-Saxon proponent of Zionism, cited Dr. Chaim Weizmann’s
contention that ‘anti-Semitism is a bacillus which every Gentile carries
with him wherever he goes and however often he denies it.’”!4 At this
first meeting Dr. Chaim Weizmann allegedly bluntly asked Crossman
whether he was anti-Semitic, to which the Labourite frankly answered,
“Of course.”’ Their friendship was sealed, and Crossman’s energetic
crusade, partly expiation for that original prejudice, followed.
Bigotry has only been so much grist for Zionist mills. Crossman
expressed it thus: ‘“‘Who achieved that majority vote for partition at
Lake Success? Not the terrorists of the Irgun nor the soldiers of the
Haganah, but the aged leader of international Jewry [Weizmann], who
could still sham and magic the Gentile world into recognizing its debt
to her people.’’!5 It is this continued process of shaming the Christian
world into accepting the guilt for the genocide of six million Jews that
first brought Israel into being, and since then has been the means of
rallying continued support for Israel’s cause in the U.S. and in the
Western world.
Parliamentarian Ian Gilmour, writing in the British magazine The
Spectator, noted the inevitable link between Zionism and anti-Semitism:
Since the basis of Zionism is that Jewish assimilation in other countries is in
the long run impossible and that anti-Semitism and persecution are bound to
break out sooner or later, Zionism has almost a vested interest in racial dis-
crimination. The Israelis mount “rescue operations” to save allegedly threat-
ened Jews in other countries. . . . In Arab countries, Jewish difficulties and
emigration to Israel were the result not of anti-Semitism, but of Zionist activi-
ties and the existence of the State of Israel. Zionism aggravated the disease that
it professed to cure.!6
412 THE COVER-OVER
This was a reecho of the words voiced earlier by Dr. Judah Magnes,
the first President of Hebrew University: ““We had always thought that
Zionism would diminish anti-Semitism in the world. We are witness to
the opposite.””!7
The separatist philosophy of Zionist dogma, staunchly supported
by Organized Jewry after the holocaust, has been picked up alike by
“‘retrogressive” conservatives and by liberal friends who would other-
wise look askance at the mere mention of apartheid. And this over-
whelming sentiment manifested itself, almost as if in answer to the
blunt warning of Goldmann that a “current decline of overt anu-
Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival. .. . The
disappearance of ‘anti-Semitism’ in its classic meaning, while beneficial
to the political and material situation of Jewish communiues, has had
a very negative effect on our internal life.”!8 Counsel Leo Pfeffer of the
American Jewish Congress voiced a similar statement: “Such discrimi-
nation may well be a blessing. It is possible that some anti-Semitism
is necessary in order to insure Jewish survival.”!9 In Britain, too, an
article in Blackfriars Magazine pointed to the danger of the extinction
of the Jewish community because of the absence of anti-Semiusm.?°
The large-city media came to the rescue and prevented such a
catastrophe from occurring by keeping the anti-anti-Semitic pot boil-
ing. Through its virtual control of the media, the Zionist machinery
had no problems orchestrating three important themes:
1) Arab anti-Semitism: the hostility of the Arab world, and particu-
larly of Gamal Abdel Nasser and later of Yasir Arafat and the PLO,
allegedly stemming from the same kind of bigotry and hatred that was
manifested in Hitlerian genocide.
2) Russian anti-Semitism: the Jews in the Soviet Union and else-
where behind the Iron Curtain were singular victims of Communist
terror and must be permitted to go to Israel.
3) Christian anti-Semitism: the bigotry that first persecuted Jews
as followers of Judaism and then permitted six million Jews in Europe
to be wiped out allegedly still manifested itself in continued acts of
hostility toward Jews and particularly toward the State of Israel.
An attempt was made to link alleged Fascist activities in Argentina
with increasing anti-Semitic overtones in Egypt. In the spring of 1975
Argentine Ambassador in Washington Alejandro Orfila asked his good
friend Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal to briefly see a visiting
writer for a supernationalist publication called Marchar. In response,
Ghorbal received the writer for just three minutes. Patricio Kelly, this
particular writer, spoke no English whatsoever and the Egyptian Am-
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 413
bassador speaks but a few words of Spanish and Italian. The only other
person present was a photographer whom Kelly brought along; most
unfortunately, no effort was made to obtain an interpreter. Several
weeks after the story of the interview appeared—and the paper went
out of business not long after—the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in
Buenos Aires fed a long section of the alleged interview, ‘“Extermina-
tion of Judaism in the Mideast Is Point of Departure for Arab Libera-
uion,” through its main trunk wire extending worldwide to the special-
ized Jewish press, which immediately picked up the story.
Jewish Week of Washington headlined its April 3 story: ‘““Egyptian
Ambassador Foresees Extermination of Judaism.”’ An additional com-
mentary on the alleged interview was carried by the national chauvinis-
tic Brooklyn Jewish Press (April 11) with the headline: “Extermination
of Jews.” Letters containing clips of this alleged interview poured into
the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. Even the respected and fair
Guardian in England published a large portion of the alleged interview,
but later carried a full retraction apologizing “for running a piece of
black propaganda,” which the newspaper admitted was obtained from
“an Israeli source that was impeccable.”
The opposition Herut party demanded in the Knesset that the
Israeli Foreign Ministry “reprint and distribute millions of copies of
the interview by one of President Sadat’s principal advisers,” which
they claimed proved what Israelis had always contended: ‘““The conflict
is not over territories, but over the very existence of Israel and the
Jewish people.”
Executive Vice President of the Synagogue Council of America
Rabbi Henry Siegman wrote Ghorbal: “Based on our association, I
simply find it impossible to believe that you could have said the things
attributed to you.’’2! Chairman of the Board of the World Jewish
Congress Philip M. Klutznick forwarded to Ghorbal a similar message.
Evans and Novak described the defamation of the Egyptian Ambassa-
dor as “cruel and tragic and without any effort to check the accuracy
of the inflammatory report in a worthless publication . . . the under-
standable emotions and fears of thousands of Jews have been manipu-
lated in the rising crescendo of the propaganda battle.’’?2
Every incident everywhere in the world in which a Jew or someone
reputed to be of “Jewish ethnic background” was victimized was being
incessantly presented by the Times as another example of Hitlerian
anti-Semitism. (Managing editor A. M. Rosenthal early in his career
wrote a sentimental piece as a correspondent in Europe following his
visit to Auschwitz and admitted “‘that there is no news to report,” but
414 THE COVER-OVER
“there is merely the compulsion to write something about it,” which
he did.?3) The campaign was led by Professor Seymour M. Lipset’s New
York Times Magazine article,?4 “‘The Socialism of Fools—the New Left
call it ‘Anti-Zionism,’ but it’s no different from the anti-Semitism of the
Old Right” and by Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz in an ad-
dress before the American Jewish Committee warning that the “taboo
on anti-Semitism is waning” and that a version of Nazism is the “‘in-
thing” today. When there were other victims in a mass tragedy, as in
the Iraq hangings, the fate of Jews was singled out as evidence of
persecution of Jews as Jews, rather than as a ruthless power play to
ughten control.
Every Times writer, correspondent, stringer, et al., with magnify-
ing glass in hand, has undoubtedly been sworn to a Sherlock Holmes-
like preoccupation with uncovering the most remote evidence of this
prejudice and sending in his “‘find’”’ to the news editor, who stands
ever-prepared to build the remotest implication of bias into booming
headlines of fact, to make atypical examples of prejudice appear typi-
cal. When Reverend George French Kempsell, Jr., of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in Scarsdale, New York, condemned in a sermon the
barring of Jewish escorts for debutantes going to a coming-out ball at
the Scarsdale Golf Club, three lengthy stories appeared in the 7imes,
two on the front page.25
When the winner of the Freshman First Honor prize in a letter to
the Daily Princetonian®6 dared question the appropriateness of bringing
the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit to the university, and pointed to “the
martyr image of 6 million dead” as the primary theme of the Jewish
drive toward Gentile acceptance, a raging controversy took over this
ivy college campus. Princeton President Dr. Robert F. Goheen stigma-
tized the letter as “blind prejudice.”’ The New York Times promptly
made national news by picking up the presidential letter from the
campus paper and featuring it prominently.27
The Times continued to be the willing efficient transmittal belt in
supplying the American public with constant alleged examples of
Arab, Russian, and Christian ‘‘anti-Semitism’”’ as a means of molding
favorable sentiment for the Israeli state. And occasionally the trials and
tribulations of a famed man of letters served the same purpose.
The death in Venice on November 1, 1972, of poet Ezra Pound,
who probably did as much for English literature in the 20th century
as any single individual, brought wide press reportage on the stormy
life of the famed expatriot. There was little reference, however, to the
final turbulent event in the hectic eighty-seven years of Pound's life in
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 415
which the cult of anti-anti-Semitism gained another resounding vic-
tory, and Pound was the victim.
While still living in Italy in 1972, the poet became the center of
a swirling controversy when he was awarded the annual Emerson-
Thoreau medal of Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences
by a panel of distinguished writers and critics. The Academy’s govern-
ing council vetoed the panel’s recommendation on what they called
‘moral grounds, because of other aspects of his life.” What this meant
was that the council, with a large number of Jewish members, was
penalizing Pound for his wartime Fascist leanings and alleged “‘anti-
Semitism.’’28
Like most incidents involving the cult, the affair was wrapped in
secrecy and would have remained hush-hush had there not been a leak
of the letter from Academy President Harvey Brooks (Harvard) to
certain members, in which he noted that “with memories of the Holo-
caust so prominent, there was the unavoidable implication that the
award carried special approval of life as well as work.” An award to
Pound, it was felt, would be ‘‘deeply offensive to many members of the
Academy.”
Three of this privately supported honorary society’s 2,700 mem-
bers resigned, protesting the relevance of social ideas in judging po-
etry. These were Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin of MIT; O. D. Hardison,
Director of the Folger-Shakespeare Library; and Professor W. Hugh
Kenner of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who perceived
an inconsistency in the membership honoring Pound for his book, The
Pound Era, while Pound the poet was not acceptable.
As Robert Reinhold’s front-page article in the Times of July 5,
1972, pointed out, many of the most distinguished creative writers,
composers, and scientists down through the ages have embraced
ideologies or led lives that most people would consider despicable:
“Shakespeare was a usurer, Christopher Marlowe a blasphemer and
probably a homosexual, Rimabud ventured into slave trading and
Baudelaire led a violent, depraved life, etc.” In his letter of resignation
Lettvin protested: “It is not art that concerns you but politics, not taste
but special interest, not excellence but propriety.” The MIT academi-
cian went on to note that to this day he himself was unable to bring
himself to visit Germany, but he nevertheless felt strongly about the
integrity of artistic intellectual expression.
“We are witnessing the institutionalization of a very dangerous
pathology in American intellectual life,’ stated Martin L. Kilson, a
black professor of government at Harvard, the theme which he reite-
416 THE COVER-OVER
rated in a letter to the Times.?9 He attributed the decision to a ‘‘per-
verse ethnic defensiveness” on the part of Jewish intellectuals, whom
he likened to ‘‘ethnically defensive blacks who want opposition to
white racism established as a precondition for the recognition of an
intellectual’s work by intellectual institutions.”
Kilson went on to say that he was as outraged about anti-Negro
intellectuals as a Jew is about anti-Semitic ones, but such outrage “‘is
not a matter of intellect but of politics,” and in evaluating an intellec-
tual’s work, he believed that ‘‘short of the intellectual himself commit-
ting criminal or atrocious acts against humanity under the influence of
his politics, his intellectual works should stand on their own.”
Who is to judge what anti-Semitism is? Those who opposed the
decision of the Boston Academy pointed to Pound’s generous efforts
not only to promote the careers of other writers, including James
Joyce, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot, but also to his personal warmth
toward many Jewish writers. Was he an anti-Semite? Eliot, a previous
Emerson winner, was also alleged to have shared Pound’s anti-Semitic
outlook in his earlier works.
What is this thing called anti-Semitism? Is any criticism of any Jew
because he happens to be a Jew per se “‘anti-Semitism”? Even when
Anna Pauker, a Rumanian Communist who had murdered thousands,
was herself purged, certain quarters raised their inevitable hue and cry
because she happened to be Jewish. If a Jewish politician is corrupt,
is he to be given the protective cover of the label “‘anti-Semitism’’?
In his Canto 52, Pound had written: ‘Poor yitts paying for the
Rothschilds/paying for a few big Jews’ vendetta on goyim.” From the
earliest moments of his career, Pound had criticized the vulgarity of life
and the international bankers, particularly those who were Jewish. His
venom expressed itself in: “Usury is the cancer of the world.” The
Rothschilds have been assailed from the Right and the Left for their
usurious practices in building their nearly inexplicable fortune. Is all
such censure automatically verboten because the persons concerned
are Jewish? Since the Nazi tragedy, Jews too often have managed to
take shelter under the exemption: ‘‘Don’t dare incriminate a Jew lest
you be taking Hitler’s side.”
But it took a 1973 column in the Boston Globe by Kevin Kelley to
really expose the cult of anti-anu-Semitism. Strangely enough, this
time the cultists were going after the movie industry, which has always
been more than 100 percent subservient to Zionist nationalism. Cer-
tain Christians might well level the charge against Jesus Christ Superstar
that it is irreverent (Catholics called it morally unobjectionable, but
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 417
libertarian)—but that it is anti-Semitic carries this too far.
The Boston columnist quite appropriately labeled as ‘“‘hysteria”
the outcry and the accompanying claim that producer Norman Jewi-
son’s name might fool people into thinking that he was Jewish, thereby
somehow giving the movie, magically, a Jewish blessing despite its
underlying bias. “That kind of suggestion, like the charge itself, is
paranoid,” wrote the columnist.3°
Particularly objectionable to the film’s Israelist critics was the
Jewish role in the crucifixion and the condemnation of Jesus by the
high priests, whom they alleged were “‘libelously depicted as contemp-
tuous, sadistic and blood-thirsty.”’ (Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and other
of the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament had, of course, similarly
described the priests of an earlier period.) These one-track-minded
Jews also protested a surrealistic scene following Judas’s betrayal of
Jesus and the use of Israeli tanks and Phantoms (without markings).
American Jews charged these damaged the Israeli image—again a case
of acting “‘more Catholic than the Pope,” as the Israelis had given their
initial approval to the film.
The prerelease publicity for Superstar was tremendous as contro-
versy was continuously fanned. A discussion on ‘“‘Midday Live,”’ the
Channel 5 program in New York City, featured Rabbi Marc Tanen-
baum’s view that the film was strengthening the misconception held by
many Christians, if not most, that the Jews had killed Christ. He would
have history entirely rewritten. Apparently the lyrics of the song sung
by Pontius Pilate made him appear all too human and shifted the
responsibility for the crucifixion to the pressures of a hysterical Jewish
mob. Further, the Rabbi insisted, the casting of a black actor in the role
of Judas was likely to encourage black anti-Semitism.
The cultists did not cease their ‘anti-Semitic’ branding cam-
paign. They tried to influence reviewers. The American Jewish Com-
mittee called a press conference denouncing the musical as compara-
ble to the “anti-Semitic” Passion Play of Oberammergau. Rabbi
Tanenbaum, however, was refused a meeting by Universal Pictures
President H. H. Martin to discuss the Committee’s concern that Super-
star might rouse new bigotry in West Germany and Austria, where “a
strong residuum of both religious and idealogical anti-Semitism con-
uinues.”
This latest effort at suppression appeared on the same page of the
New York Times! as a story about a new musical based on Molly, the
character created by Gertrude Berg on national radio and television.
When would John Q. Jew stand up and protest the blind stupidity of
418 THE COVER-OVER
attacking historical facts behind the crucifixion of Jesus while en-
couraging the dissemination of this kind of Jewish stereotype:
Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!
Was that “yoo-hoo” for me, Mrs. Bloom?
Who breeds the anti-Semitism these cultists allegedly are
fighting? Humorous as the Molly Goldberg series was, it contributed
to building the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jew as someone with an
accent, part of a group apart from the other people of the nation in
which he lives. Pressure from these same groups was responsible for
bringing to an end the very popular television series “Bridget Loves
Bernie,” because it showed that an Irish-Jewish intermarriage can work
despite obstacles. But the attempt to pressure NBC out of its sched-
uled showing of Lawrence Olivier in ‘““The Merchant of Venice”’ failed
after the cultists, joined by the magazine Jewish Currents, had expressed
a deep dread in permitting this production ‘‘to be beamed into the
homes of the mass TV audience.’’3?
The anti-anti-Semitism cult is vital not only in the silencing of the
opposition to Zionism and Israelism, but it also supplies a principal
raison détre for followers of the new modern kind of “Judaism.”’ Many
Jews insist they will remain in the faith so long as it is still unpopular
to be a Jew, i.e., so long as anti-Semitism exists. This alone could
account for the fact that the ADL and other ‘“‘defense”’ organizations,
with the powerful and wealthy Jewish-American community solidly
behind them, have never attempted to launch one single objective
scholarly study on the causes of anti-Semitism so as to make an honest
effort to kill this bias.
The reasoning is obvious. Neither the religious nor the lay
leaders of the many Jewish organizations wished to lose their most
potent weapon. If they removed prejudice they would lose adher-
ents to the faith. If they made strides toward eliminating bigotry,
funds for Jewish nationalist activities would dry up. Hence there
must be no real attempt to solve the problem of anti-Semitism.
Herein lies the conspiracy between the rabbinate, Jewish national-
ists, and other leaders of Organized Jewry to keep the problems of
prejudice alive, just as Goldmann and Herzl had advocated. The
Christian has not interfered, particularly if he carried any prejudice
in his heart—the endemic anti-Semitism to which Herzl and Cross-
man had alluded.
No one understood these machinations better than famed journal-
ist Dorothy Thompson. In 1938 she assumed the leadership of the
Exploiting Anti-Semitism 419
country’s moral mobilization against Nazism, after she risked life and
limb in taking on the Nazi Bund in the famed Madison Square Garden
incident. Her renowned wartime ‘“‘Listen, Hans’’ broadcasts and es-
pousal of the Zionist cause followed. She of course immediately be-
came the darling of the Zionist movement.
Upon her return from visiting newly created Israel, as her biogra-
pher noted, she began voicing “concern for the plight of the Arab
refugees and dismay at the tactics of Jewish refugees.’’33 William Zuck-
erman, editor of the Jewish Newsletter, later wrote in a tribute to the
great journalist, “Miss Thompson now saw that Zionism, which had
started out as a liberal and humanitarian relief movement, was turning
into a reactionary, aggressive, chauvinist movement of the same char-
acter as other European nationalisms, which she had been fighting
throughout her journalistic career.”
A bitter campaign of character assassination was waged against
her, even to the point of attributing her new viewpoint to the influence
of her “anti-Semitic” third husband, highly respected Czech sculptor
Maxim Kopf. As biographer Marion K. Sanders relates:
For Dorothy, the bitterest blow was the discovery that Zionists equated criti-
cism of their policies with anti-Semitism. “I refuse to become an anti-Semite
by designation,” she said, recalling not only her long record of benevolence
to Jewish refugees, her steadfast battle against Hitler, and, perhaps, the fact
that she had once been ridiculed for walking out of a dinner party where an
anti-Semitic joke was told, with the comment, “I will not remain in the same
house with traitors to the United States.’’34
The Zionist pressure directed against Thompson resulted in cer-
tain newspapers, including the New York Post from which she received
a full quarter of her income, dropping her syndicated “On the Record”
column. She was bitterly hurt: “I am crushed at the thought that this
campaign has been instituted by ‘liberals,’ against a writer in a ‘liberal
newspaper’ whose intolerance of an opposing or differing view leads
them to character-assassination and career-assassination. It has been
boundless, going into my personal life.”’35
Meyer Weisgal, the intimate associate of David Ben-Gurion and
her closest friend within the Zionist hierarchy, testified:
The attacks upon her became outrageous. She was accused, among other
things of having lined her pockets with the fees of Zionist organizations. This
stung her deeply. .. . She had taken nothing for herself. . . . All monies accruing
to her from public lectures to Zionist groups went into a trust fund, which I
controlled for the German-Jewish refugees who came into her orbit.3¢
420 THE COVER-OVER
As the final word on this terrifying episode, this writer who had
earlier been married to Sinclair Lewis wrote a memorable letter “On
Creating Anti-Semites’’ for the Jewish Newsletter:
Really, I think continual emphasis should be put upon the extreme damage to
the Jewish community of branding people like myself as anti-Semitic. It is a
little beneath the dignity of anyone with my record to deny such charges in
public, so they just tend to make anti-Semitism more respectable than it
otherwise might be, for, rightly or wrongly, a great many people in this country
respect me highly, and if it is publicized that I am an anti-Semite, anti-Semitism
becomes thereby a little bit more respectable.
... In the same way, the State of Israel has got to learn to live in the same
atmosphere of free criticism which every other state in the world must endure.
If the editors of this country’s press are forced to suppress critical views
because of organized pressure, both in the form of masses of letters to the
editor and pressures on the business side of the paper’s organization, the net
effect—and I know what I’m talking about—is to foment a very ugly resent-
ment, the worse because it finds no outlet. There are many subjects on which
writers in this country are, because of these pressures, becoming craven and
mealy-mouthed. But people don’t like to be craven and mealy-mouthed; every
time one yields to such pressure, one is filled with self-contempt and this self-contempt
works itself out in resentment of those who caused it. [Italics added.]
I often think that race relations were actually much better in this country
when we took good-natured flings at the characteristics of the various national
groups in our midst. People actually don’t like paragons, and any group that
tries to arrogate to itself all the virtues and admit none of the vices of the
common run of humanity does not thereby make itself more lovable. There-
fore, I am sure that anti-anti-Semitism, like anti-anti-Negroism, can reach a
point where it has exactly the opposite effect from the one which it has striven
for. . . 37
Dorothy Thompson was unable to halt the Zionist juggernaut.
Scornful of the long-term effects of its anti-anti-Semitic campaign, the
cult has continued its war of suppression and repression, waging an
unparalleled blitz on the great and near-great to win acquiesence to
its views on Israel.
XII The Blitz
No matter whose the lips that would speak, they must be free and
ungagged. The community which dares not protect its humblest
and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no
matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves.
—Wendell Phillips
Why is the subject of this book su: generis? A Dr. Timothy Leary could
talk openly in favor of pot. Others might argue pro and con on the
subject of abortion. One is quite able to attack his Holiness the Pope,
or Her Majesty the Queen of England. This country carried on a
lengthy, bitter, acrimonious debate on Vietnam, which finally led to
the U.S. withdrawal. But why can only one side of the Arab-Israeli
question be discussed in the U.S.?
In the case of every other issue of public interest, there is room
for both the pros and the cons. Arguments are aired and, as befits a
democratic society, disagreement is permitted to exist. Although this
is the one area of foreign policy that has deep domestic as well as
international implications, relating closely to the survival of the entire
civilized world, no one may freely talk about it. Only when it comes to
the Israeli problem is there so concentrated an attempt to crush all
opposition.
At critical moments in U.S. relations with the Arab world and
Israel there has invariably been some one person who has seen the
problem in full perspective, bestirred himself, and attempted to tell the
story to the American public. Equally invariably, like the wolc at the
head of the pack, he has been forthrightly shot down, his pen or voice
stilled, and the gaping vacuum once more becomes apparent. With the
help of the ever-willing media, the critic of Israel or of U.S. “‘Israel-
First’? policy has been made out to be a reincarnation of Hitler. The
421
422 THE COVER-OVER
history of these personal repressions will astound Americans quite as
much as did the revelations of Watergate in the spring and summer of
1973. Those who have dared break the silence barrier have paid griev-
ously for their courage in exercising what they considered to be their
democratic prerogative.
The roster of renegade libertarians, liberals and conservatives
alike, who over the past thirty years have tried to buck the tide of
Jewish-Zionist nationalism and then found themselves victims of a
smear campaign, reads like an international Who’s Who. Included in
this illustrious list drawn from top educational, clerical, literary, politi-
cal, and journalistic circles are: Yale’s Millar Burrows, Harvard’s Wil-
liam Ernest Hocking, Dean Virginia Guildersleeve, Dr. Henry Sloane
Coffin, Henry Van Dusen, Dean Francis Sayre, Rabbi Elmer Berger,
Dr. A.C. Forrest, Dr. John Nicholls Booth, Father Daniel Berrigan,
Morris Ernst, Arthur Garfield Hays, Vincent Sheean, Dr. Arnold Toyn-
bee, Norman Thomas, Howard K. Smith, J. William Fulbright, James
Abourezk, Ralph Flanders, General George Brown, James Forrestal,
Henry A. Byroade, Moshe Menuhin, Dr. Israel Shahak, Dorothy
Thompson, Willie Snow Ethridge, Margaret McKay, Hannah Arendt,
Sir George Brown, Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjold, Bruno
Kreisky, Georges Pompidou, and Charles de Gaulle.
The relentless and persistent attacks waged on those who have
dared raise even a note of caution, let alone a voice of protest, against
the prevailing one-sided pro-Israelism line can find few parallels in a
society that has not as yet extinguished free speech or opinion-expres-
sion and otherwise permits some talking out against the Establish-
ment. It is hard to believe that such things have been taking place in
this country, so persistently, for so long, and so quietly. To preserve
the massive cover-up and cover-over, there has been an onslaught that
can be compared only to the Nazi blitz, which sought to level London
to the ground at the outset of World War II. Surveillance, harassment,
character assassination, guilt by association, guilt by juxtaposition,
suppression of free speech, repression of even minimal dissent—these
are some of the basic techniques employed by the plethora of Zionist
“humanitarian,” “defense,” and lobbying organizations in silencing
any and all opposition to the Israeli state and its policies.
One of the earliest victims was James Forrestal, first U.S. Secretary
of Defense (prior to the Truman administration the Cabinet included
separate Secretaries of the Army and Navy). While other Americans
were being pressured into accepting the historical necessity and valid-
ity of the State of Israel, this perspicacious man was willing to fight for
The Blitz 423
what he believed to be the American national interest.
The publication of the Forrestal Diaries in 1950 revealed the
lengths to which Forrestal went in trying to obtain an agreement from
both major political parties to lift the question out of the 1948 political
contest. He argued in vain to persuade Democratic National Chairman
and Attorney General Howard McGrath that he would rather ‘‘lose two
or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support
of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question than
run the risks which, he felt, would ensue from that kind of handling
of the Palestine question.”” He added, ‘“‘No group in this country
should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could
endanger our national security.””!
Vilification was Forrestal’s only reward for his persistent efforts.
Bernard Baruch, the adviser to Presidents and a good friend, warned
him that his deep involvement in this attempt to forestall the inevitable
movement toward the creation of a Jewish state was already identifying
him to a dangerous degree with the opposition to U.S. policy on
Palestine. But Forrestal ignored such counsel. When Congressman
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., expressed fear that the party might lose
votes should a bipartisan agreement be reached, the Secretary almost
angrily retorted: “I think it is about time that somebody should give
some consideration as to whether we might not lose the United
States.’”?
The Defense Secretary argued in vain with Attorney General
Howard McGrath, his fellow cabinet member and Chairman of the
Democratic National Committee. McGrath, always the politician,
would not change his mind even after he was shown the report on
Palestine prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, which underlay
Forrestal’s tormenting worry that the Soviet Union might take advan-
tage of the breach of U.S. relations with the Arabs to move into the
vitally strategic Middle East with its vast oil resources. It was this
concern that motivated Forrestal’s lonely crusade to retain a modicum
of Arab friendship with the U.S. He acutely sensed the tremendous
strategic importance of the area, globally and oil-wise, and his military
advisers agreed that the withdrawal of the British from Palestine would
result in serious troubles that could only help the Soviet Union. (His-
tory has proven how right he was in visualizing the Kremlin’s “Open
Sesame” to the Arab world.)
Secretary Forrestal enjoyed a short-lived triumph during the U.S.
temporary shift to trusteeship, but then came President Truman’s May
14 recognition of Israel.
424 THE COVER-OVER
Cries of “tool of Wall Street” and “oil hireling’”’ greeted Forres-
tal’s trreless efforts to divorce Middle East policy from domestic poli-
tics. Zionist lawyer Bartley C. Crum, in a widely publicized Cleveland
speech, assailed Forrestal as the man “who has the power to decide
whether there is a Jewish state in Palestine. ‘Upon what meat does our
Caesar feed that he has grown so great?’ The answer is that Mr.
Forrestal has found a new diet that even Caesar might envy. It is oil
—Arabian oil.’’3 Attacks like this, widely distributed by the American
Jewish Committee, the ADL, and other Zionist groups, helped inspire
the ‘‘tormenting, persecuting columns’’* by Drew Pearson and broad-
casts by Walter Winchell, aggravating the Secretary of Defense’s ill-
ness.
Unfortunately Forrestal never lived to see the vindication of his
judgment concerning the dire long-term consequences to the U.S. of
the partition decision. This sensitive man, so deeply hurt, not so much
by his failure to achieve a bipartisan Palestinian policy as by the fact
that his motivations should have been impugned with the smears of
“anti-Semite,” threw himself from his room in the Bethesda Naval
Hospital where he was being treated following a nervous breakdown.
(Several articles and at least one book have hinted that he was pushed
out of the window from which he allegedly fell to his death.)
It was slightly ironic that the devout Zionist and the first U.S.
Ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald, in his book My Mission to
Israel,> should have been the one to come to Forrestal’s defense:
He was in no sense anti-Semitic or anti-Israel nor influenced by oil interests.
He was convinced that partition was not in the best interests of the U.S., and
he certainly did not deserve the persistent and venomous attacks on him which
helped break his mind and body. On the contrary, these attacks stand out as
the ugliest examples of the willingness of politician and publicist to use the
vilest means—in the name of patriotism—to destroy self-sacrificing and de-
voted public citizens.
When that irrepressible firebrand, Charles de Gaulle, whose pro-
nouncements were already offensive to so many on so many grounds,
added Israel in 1967 to his long list of antagonists, he really “put his
foot into it.”’ This time he took on a foe more powerful than any empire
on earth, the cult of anti-anti-Semitism, and there was no American
Ambassador to come to his aid.
At a press conference held at the Elysée Palace November 27,
1967, de Gaulle fired a new “shot heard ’round the world.”” When the
information media pulled a phrase out of context from his exposition
The Blitz 425
on the Middle East and gave it an inaccurate translation, they provoked
pressures such as have scarcely been visited on anyone, let alone a
Chief of State, since those directed at Harry Truman in 1947 to influ-
ence the final vote on the U.N. Partition Resolution. Banner headlines
proclaimed that the General, who up to the very morning of the June
5 attack continued to supply the very Mystéres with which the Israelis
knocked out all Arab air bases, had assailed the Jews as an “elite
people, sure of itself and domineering.’’ Americans were only too
ready (‘Give a dog a bad name and then hang him” is an old adage)
to add anti-Semitism to the long list of their grievances against the
French President.
The incident caused a furor in the French press. Le Monde called
the President “anti-Semitic,” while former presidential candidate
Francois Mitterand, interviewed in New York, labeled de Gaulle
“materialistic.’” Some editorials accused the General not of being an
anti-Semite but only of sounding like one. The New York Times even
added yeast to the brew by noting that “some men with frankly racist
views declared themselves elated.”
This is what de Gaulle actually stated, as reported in the official
French translation distributed by the French Information Service:
The establishment between the two world wars—for it is necessary to go back
that far—of a Zionist home in Palestine, and then, after World War II, the
establishment of a State of Israel, raised at the time a certain number of
apprehensions. One could indeed, and people did wonder, even among Jews,
if the implantation of this community on land that had been acquired in more
or less justifiable conditions and in the middle of Arab peoples who were
thoroughly hostile to it, was not going to produce constant and interminable
friction and conflicts. Some even feared that the Jews, up to then scattered but
who had remained what they had been down through the ages, that is an elite
people, sure of itself and dominating, once they gathered on the site of their former
grandeur, might come to change into a fervent and conquering ambition the
very touching hopes that they had for nineteen centuries. [Italics added.]
The press reportage conveniently changed “dominating” to
“domineering,” contradicting the official translation and thus making
it simpler for the Israelist propaganda campaign to affix the heinous
label. The remotest implication of bias was built into booming head-
lines of fact. The New York Times “‘Week in Review’’’ reported that
“Jews had been described as a people with a secular inclination to seek
domination.’’8 One Israeli newspaper charged de Gaulle, according to
the Times, with “surpassing the invective of Federenko”; another
claimed, ‘‘There arises the stench of the ‘Protocols of Zion.’ ’’? Where
426 THE COVER-OVER
the General was not accused of being an anti-Semite, he was con-
demned for ‘sounding like one.”’ The Chief Rabbi of France as well
as Michel Debré, the Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs (de-
scribed as a rabbi’s grandson), were brought into the pressuring act.
Additional reportage further embellished the case. Henry Tan-
ner’s front-page stories in the Times on January 6 and 10, 1968, respec-
tively headlined ‘“‘De Gaulle Assures Rabbi He Intended No Insult to
Jews” and “De Gaulle Says He Praised Jews,” were intended to lend
further support to the thesis of neo-anti-Semitic remarks. These sto-
ries, together with his Sunday piece of January 14 under the headline
“De Gaulle: He Has Some Second Thoughts on Jews,” besides point-
ing up the tremendous influence of Jewry (no reader of the bestseller
Our Crowd needed a reminder of this), implied that the General was
retracting his statement. Tanner, David Susskind, and the Anti-Defa-
mation League notwithstanding, there was not a single word of recan-
tation or retraction by de Gaulle. The French President had nothing
to recant.
‘Informed Jewish sources” were Tanner’s sole attribution for the
first alleged recantation at the New Year’s Day reception, where
“Rabbi Kaplan told the General of his concern over the fact that the
statement had been used by ‘real’ anti-Semites as an instrument
against the Jews.”’ (Moral to everyone: “‘Say nothing against Israel,
Zionism, or Jews, however true, because somewhere, sometime, some
real anti-Semite might pick it up and use it.”) The second de Gaulle
“recantation” was supposedly contained in an answer to a letter from
former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had written a fifteen-
page, single-spaced tome tracing Jewish suffering down through the
centuries.
As in all Israelist propaganda moves, there was real purpose be-
hind the expertly executed hue and cry. The “bad wolf” de Gaulle was
pitted against “little Israel” and the “persecuted” Jews to build favor-
able sentiment just prior to the U.S. visit of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol,
who was seeking more American planes for ‘‘defensive” purposes after
the June 5 Israeli sneak attack had virtually destroyed the air arms of
all Arab countries. Jewish nationalism once again sought to exploit
prejudice so as to achieve political goals.
Likewise, the anti-Semitic charge shifted attention from de
Gaulle’s clear, concise, and unambiguous condemnation of the course
taken by Israel, ‘“‘whose existence and survival,” according to the
French President, must ‘depend on policies she follows, as is the case
for all others.”’ In his reply to the lengthy Ben-Gurion letter, the
The Bhtz = 427
President of France made crystal clear what the controversy was all
about. After reviewing the “old and natural friendship France felt for
Israel,”’ de Gaulle referred to the “unfortunate blockade of the Gulf
of Aqaba” and the reasonableness of Israel feeling threatened. ‘‘But,”’
he went on:
... remain convinced that by ignoring the warning given in time to your
Government by the French Government, by taking possession of Jerusalem
and of many Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian territories by force of arms, by
exerting repression and expulsion there—which are the unavoidable conse-
quences of an occupation which has all the aspects of annexation [How clair-
voyant the General was!]—by affirming to the world that a settlement of the
conflict can only be achieved on the basis of the conquests made and not on
the condition that these be evacuated, Israel is overstepping the bounds of
necessary moderation.
Only in the third paragraph from the very end of his own lengthy
letter to Ben-Gurion did de Gaulle allude to the controversial ‘‘elite,
sure of itself’ clause for which he had been so vilified, holding that
“there cannot be anything disparaging in underlining the character,
thanks to which this people were able to survive and to remain itself
after nineteen centuries spent under incredible conditions.”
This response to Ben-Gurion, far from being an apology, was a
reiteration of de Gaulle’s original complaint, set forth in his press
conference, that Israel had ignored his May 24 warning imparted to
Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Paris just twelve days before the out-
break of the 1967 hostilities:
If Israel is attacked, we will not allow it to be destroyed. But if you attack, we
will condemn your initiative. To be sure, despite the numerical inferiority of
your population, considering that you are much better organized, much more
united and much better armed than the Arabs, I do not doubt that you would
win military success. But later you will yourselves be engaged locally and on
the international level in growing difficulties, all the more that war in the
Middle East cannot fail to increase a deplorable tension in the world and to
have very unfortunate consequences for many countries, so much that it is on
you, having become conquerors, that the disadvantages would be blamed.
The Generai had been elevated to the rank of number-one anti-
Semite because he had dared to remind Israel that ‘‘France’s voice was
not heard and that Israel remained in possession of the objectives it
wanted to acquire.” After Israel in February 1972, following the U.S.
agreement to supply forty-two Phantom jets, terminated its order for
fifty French Mirages, which had been fully paid for and were to have
428 THE COVER-OVER
been delivered in the middle of 1967, and French-Israeli relations had
further deteriorated, the Times’ Jerusalem correspondent summarily
analyzed the breach between the French and the Israelis in this man-
ner: “President de Gaulle apparently decided that France’s interests
would be better served by building ties with the Arab states than by
maintaining the relationship with Israel.” !®
De Gaulle had been in retirement when France joined Britain and
Israel in the secret treaty of Sévres leading to the 1956 tripartite
invasion of Egypt. Despite the strong words of friendship for Israel
after his return to power, he had never subscribed to the bitter anti-
Egyptian sentiments of Gaullist leader Jacques Soustelle, voiced in the
course of Algeria’s struggle for independence. It was not too difficult
for Charles de Gaulle to look beyond his nose and see where French
interests lay. A leader who, when France was completely under the
Nazi yoke, could envision a future for his country with grandeur, cer-
tainly could understand that the many Arab countries must eventually
become infinitely more important to her interests than the State of
Israel. The same vision that had carried France through its darkest
moments forged a new Middle East policy after France had served for
so many years as Israel’s staunchest ally, not excluding the U.S.
This, and this alone, was what the Israelist case against de Gaulle
was all about, and why the cult of anti-anti-Semitism pursued him
relentlessly until his body was laid to rest in the small cemetery of
Colombey les Deux Eglises.
From the outset of Georges Pompidou’s takeover of the French
Presidency, guilt through association was affixed to him by Organized
Jewry. After all, he was de Gaulle’s successor as well as de Gaulle’s
man. Few had seen fit to discredit him during the years he served with
the Rothschild banking house in France. But as soon as he became
Chief of State, his motives came under suspicion. Pompidou sensed
this and tried to defuse it by kowtowing to the ever-present bogey of
anti-anti-Semitism. The New York Times report on his first news confer-
ence pertinently included the following: ‘Mr. Pompidou described
French attitudes in the Middle East in an unemotional matter-of-fact
way. ‘France’s interest in the Mediterranean area requires good rela-
tions with the Arabs,’ he said pointedly. But he added: ‘France is not
forgetting anything, and in particular has not forgotten the martyrdom
inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews in all occupied countnies, including
France.’ ’"!!
This did Pompidou little good, however, for he found himself
constantly under attack by the pro-Israelists whenever he took any
The Blitz 429
position on the Middle East that did not hew 100 percent to the pure
Zionist line. Perhaps the climax, at least as far as Americans were
concerned, came with the French President’s February 1970 trip to the
US.
This visit, pursuant to the Nixon goal of seeking more cordial
Franco-American relations, happened to follow closely on the heels of
the French refusal to permit Mirages planes, contracted and paid for
by Israel, to be shipped, and of the suspension of the submarine
contract, which eventually was circumvented when the Israelis
dramatically smuggled the ships out of the Cherbourg harbor. As a
result, President Pompidou had become just about as popular with the
Israelis and American Zionists as de Gaulle had been following
France’s major policy shift in the face of Israel’s continued possession
of occupied territories.
The abnormality that Israel had become was visibly demonstrated
during this state visit. There were demonstrations against President
Pompidou in Chicago, booing in Westchester, and picket lines in New
York, which led the French Chief of State to call off the appointment
that had been scheduled with Jewish leaders there. In the Windy City
he had conferred with local Israelists, who used ‘‘very measured tones”
and conducted themselves in sharp contrast to the demonstrators out-
side the Chicago and New York hotels housing the visitor from France.
Mayor Daley’s police treated these Zionist demonstrators with a defer-
ence not accorded to the pickets at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
President Pompidou suffered from near-physical contact with pro-
testers who crowded in close enough to jostle him and members of his
party, ‘‘shouting insults into my face and the face of my wife,” to use
his words. This threat of violence led to plans of Madame Pompidou
to return home forthrightly, which were only reversed when President
Nixon phoned from Washington to express his regrets and say that he
himself was coming to New York to be present at the Waldorf Astoria
Hotel dinner of the U.S.-French Society honoring the French Presi-
dent. That the President of the U.S. was obliged to apologize to his
guest, the President of France, for the lack of manners and behavior
of a small minority of Americans, constituted both a testimonial to
Zionist power and also represented a damning example of the tragic
Jewish dichotomy.
The indignation with which the presidents of American Jewish
organizations received word of the cancellation of their New York
meeting with President Pompidou can appropriately be described as
“chutzpah,” the Yiddish word for colossal gall. Weeks before the visit,
430 THE COVER-OVER
organized Jewry had gone into action. On January 28 a Jewish delega-
tion visited New York’s Mayor Lindsay to make certain there would be
no reception there for President Pompidou. A few days later plans
were advanced for picketing demonstrations in New York, Westchester
County, Chicago, and other cities on the Pompidou route. It was then
that certain congressmen, led by Israelists Bertram Podell and Lester
Wolff, both of New York, called for a boycott of the French President’s
address to the Joint Session of Congress. A full-page advertisement
under the aegis of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee,
which called for Phantoms for Israel to counterbalance Mirages for
Libya and was signed by 64 Senators and 243 Representatives, added
to the rising temperature.
The President of the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations,
Dr. William Wexler, responded to the Pompidou refusal to meet, in
this not-surprising, ever familiar vein: “The cancellation comes when
we have every right to be concerned with the safety of the State of
Israel. There was the holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women, and
children died.”
The media headlines, if they were not so sad, further suggested
a comedy smash hit: “U.S. President Flies In; Wary Mayor Flies Out,”
and “Governor Goes Into Hiding.”” The Times photograph showed
screaming, youthful demonstrators, many recruited from Stern Col-
lege of the Yeshiva University, waving Israeli flags and placards in
compliance with the Wexler theme, ‘Israel Must Live.”!? The same
newspaper had a full-length bannerhead, “Israelis Fascinated by
Demonstrations Against Pompidou But Deny Responsibility.”
While Golda Meir was said to have been most pleased, it was the
Jewish leaders in Israel and in the U.S., rather than the Israeli govern-
ment, who were directly responsible for this unsavory incident. For
decades Zionist leaders had been quietly spreading their philosophy,
and now they had persuaded their stateside followers to respond in the
correct manner to a conflict in loyalty. The abnormality that is Israel
had found its counterpart in Jewish-American reaction to this and to
every crisis involving the new state.
During the Pompidou visit the Zionists took out several full-page
ads in the New York Times—outrageous, screaming mouthings that led
former French Ambassador to London Ranier Massigli, in a letter to
Le Monae in Paris, to question the loyalty of Jews to France, inasmuch
as they had been behaving more like French Jews than Jewish French.
Another Israelist ad of March 1, 1970, screamed: “J’accuse.”” It
indicted the French President in terms parallel to those with which
The Blitz 431
Emile Zola in his historic letter had indicted France in the Dreyfus case
for its “crime against humanity.” President Pompidou was accused of
selling out the French to Arab oil, of selling arms to Libya which he
knew were destined to Egypt, of pretending to seek peace in the
Middle East “while promoting war by upsetting the balance of power,”
and of “using Arab fanaticism against Israel to line your nation’s
pockets. ... We accuse you of promoting the likelihood of war in an
area that could spark a world holocaust.”
At a press conference before leaving New York, Pompidou in-
dicated that Israel could have the money back that had been advanced
for the payment of the Mirages, still undelivered under the French
boycott. Then, defensively, he added: “People can say what they like.
I am not an anti-Semite’”’—an assertion that no President of France
ought to have had to make, even if he had not in private life handled
Jewish banking interests.
Upon his return to Paris, Pompidou found himself plagued by a
remark attributed to him in his Chicago meeting with Jewish leaders
to the effect that he thought Israel ‘“‘must cease being a racial and
religious state and must become simply a state among others.” In
reporting on the Cabinet meeting after the Pompidou statement, gov-
ernment spokesman Leo Hamon tried to draw back somewhat from
what, in the words of the Chnstian Science Monitor, might possibly be-
come *‘a rising problem with French citizens of Jewish descent.” Public
relations advisers to the President no doubt recalled the previous
storm over de Gaulle’s widely publicized reference to the Jewish peo-
ple.
Even a Jewish head of government had not been safe from vituper-
ative labeling at Zionist hands. In late September 1973, two Palestini-
ans of a heretofore unknown guerrilla group calling themselves ‘‘Ea-
gles of the Palestinian Revolution” seized three Russian Jews en route
to Israel on the Moscow to Vienna train and at gunpoint held them,
together with an Austrian customs guard, as hostages for thirteen
hours at Vienna’s Schwechat Airport. They demanded that the govern-
ment close the Jewish Agency’s transit camp facilities at Schénau Cas-
tle, once a royal Hapsburg hunting lodge just south of Vienna, where
Jews arrived from the Soviet Union by plane and train en route to
Israel. The Palestinians also demanded a plane to carry them to safety.
Austria’s Chancellor Bruno Kreisky came to world attention when
he defied the U.S., the Israeli government, and global pressure
mounted by World Zionism and most reluctantly met the Palestinian
demands, the price exacted for the lives of the four hostages. The
432 THE COVER-OVER
Eastern seaboard press accounts of the Kreisky Affair, redundant with
the word “blackmail,” spread worldwide hysteria. Typical was the
statement of Jacob D. Stein, President of the Conference of Presidents
of Major Jewish Organizations, on the second day of this Austrian
crisis: “It is going to be very hard to accept the theory that Austria is
closed to a single Jew without every Jew replying that it is closed to
him.”!8
Although Vienna officials clearly indicated that the measures
taken would not affect individual Jews passing through, only the group
facilities in Vienna itself—and six months later it was revealed that
actually more Jews had transited through Vienna than in the previous
period—this did not stop Stein and Chairman of the National Confer-
ence on Soviet Jewry Richard Maas from sending a well-publized cable
protesting the Austrian government’s ‘‘refusal to grant entry to Israel-
bound Jews,” Added fuel to the fire was the reference by New York Times
correspondent Terrence Smith to the Austrian cruelty to “tens of
thousands of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia.’’!4
The Nixon administration, already under pressure from Capitol
Hill’s pro-Soviet Jewry block, made known its strong opposition to
Austria’s decision. Senator Jackson charged that Austria’s action
“represents the most serious and short-sighted submission to intimi-
dation and blackmail.’ But Kreisky was not easily intimidated and
resisted tremendous pressures and coercion, from abroad and home.
Leaders of the opposition parties in the Austrian Parliament, even the
small Freedom party with its many former Nazi members, denounced
the Chancellor in a play for votes. He declared: ‘What we cannot
accept is that Austria should become a secondary theater of the Middle
East conflict with violence and confrontations of armed men from both
sides. We shall maintain our humanitarian traditions.” The Austrian
leader issued this challenge to Washington:
Why doesn’t the U.S. share the burden of assisting the Jewish émigrés? Why
does not the U.S. operate an airlift? Instead of giving good advice, the U.S.
might send ships to Odessa or some other Black Sea port and evacuate Jews
from the Soviet Union. Ships could be sent to Leningrad. There are many
possibilities.
The Chancellor firmly stood his ground and vehemently denied
that Austrian borders had been closed to refugees: “This is simply
untrue. All we want is for the emigrants to leave Austria as fast as
possible—preferably the same day they arrive.”’!5
Premier Golda Meir, always quick to recognize an opportunity to
The Blitz 433
exploit an “‘affaire célébre” to her own propaganda advantage, at first
shrewdly only implored Vienna to keep the camp open and even
praised Austria for her role in enabling Jews in the past to reach Israel.
But later, in an address to 2,000 of Strasbourg’s Jewish community,
she charged that Austria had “betrayed her own greatness” by yielding
to Arab terrorist demands, and alleged that ‘‘whoever accepts the
conditions of terrorists only encourages them to pursue their criminal
acts.”
Meir flew to Vienna for a confrontation with the Chancellor, but
came away a most disappointed woman. (The Viennese Police Code
for the security during the Israeli leader’s visit was ““Schinkensemmel”
—ham sandwich.) She stormed out of Kreisky’s office, complaining,
“He didn’t even offer me a glass of water.”’ Meir had made a tactical
error in appealing to Kreisky, the humanist, on the grounds that he was
a fellow Jew.
Chancellor Kreisky happens to be an agnostic. The Chancellor’s
wife is a Protestant and his two chilaren were baptized into that faith;
he resents references to himself as a Jew, preferring to be called ‘of
Jewish origin.” And he, above all, knows the meaning of the Nazi peril.
Although from a wealthy family, he had joined the Socialist movement
as a teenager, and after the Nazis had annexed his country, he fled to
Sweden. It was thirteen years before he was permitted to return home
to start his career as a diplomat, which led him to the Foreign Ministry
and then to his country’s highest post.
Kreisky’s involvement with the Middle East hardly ended with the
closing of the Schénau transit facilities. During the controversy the
Israeli press had used statements of Kreisky’s brother, an émigré in
Israel, who had been mentally ill since his youth, to attack him. And
thereafter the Israelis continued to hound him, trying to add to his
embarrassment everywhere, notably at Socialist gatherings. Before
leaving with members of a Socialist International delegation on a tour
of the Middle East early in 1974, the Chancellor was forced to explain
in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ma ‘anv (January 20, 1974)
why they were going only to the Arab countries and not to Israel:
Because of close relations with the Israeli Labor party, we know how the
solution of the problem is seen in Israel. We’ve heard and heard again the
opinion of Golda Meir, but on the other hand, the International has no con-
nections with the states or parties in Arab countries. Therefore, a ume came
at last to see the problem through the Arab eyes so that the International could
arrive at a balanced position. Of course, before our eyes there will always be
an approach of solidarity with a member party, the Israeli Labor party.
434 THE COVER-OVER
Further in the interview, Kreisky went out of his way to declare he
did not recognize a Jewish nationality. He argued: ‘‘There is no Jewish
race; there are only Jewish religious groups. Israel was only the an-
cient, religious fatherland of Jews, but not their true fatherland.” Is-
rael’s Chief Rabbi Goren assailed the Austrian: ‘“‘Kreisky can do what
he wants, he was and will always remain a Jew.”’ The Austrian Chancel-
lor’s reaction: ‘In this, Rabbi Goren does in his own way what Hitler
did.”
But of far greater concern to the watchdogs of Israel in the U.S.
than the attitude of the French Presidents and Austrian Chancellor was
the outlook of opinion molders who commanded large followings.
Those iconoclasts among the clergy and media who dared direct atten-
tion to another side of the Middle East conflict soon found themselves
literally under siege.
One such victim was Francis B. Sayre, Jr., Dean of the Washington
Cathedral, who in his 1972 Palm Sunday sermon suggested that the
“once-oppressed Israelis have become the oppressors of Jerusalem.”
In emphasizing his conviction that contemporary events in the Holy
City were simply one of the many examples of the moral tragedy of
mankind, the Cathedral dean exclaimed: ‘“What a mirror, then, is
modern Israel of that total flaw in the human breast that forever leaps
to the acclaim of God only to turn the next instant to the suborning
of his will for us.”
Sayre asserted that Arab residents were deported, deprived un-
justly of their land, and forbidden to bring their relatives to settle in
Jerusalem. Arabs, he added, ‘“‘have neither voice nor happiness in the
city that is the capital of their religious devotion, too.” To support his
views, the Dean quoted from the writings in Christianity and Cnsis of
Israeli League for Human Rigitts Chairman, Dr. Israel Shahak.
Sayre’s brief fifteen-minute sermon caused an uproar in the na-
tion’s capital when the Washington Post surred up the opposition
through a bitter editorial and the publication of vindictive letters. This
journalistic citadel of Zionism (second only to the New York Times)
carved two sentences out of context to build an alleged picture of
bigotry: ‘Now the Jews have it [Jerusalem] all. But even as they praise
their God for the smile of fortune, they begin almost simultaneously
to put Him to death.” For this, ADL cultists Forster and Epstein
accused Sayre of repeating the central theme of anti-Semitism—that
the Jews collectively were guilty of having killed Jesus. In the three
previous sentences the Washington theologian had expressed “sympa-
thy with the loving hope of that little state [Israel] which aspires to be
The Blitz 435
the embodiment of a holy peoplehood . . . to achieve a government
there is to realize the restoration of a scattered remnant; it is the
fulfillment of cherished prayer, tempered in suffering. . . .”
Still seeking to bring about the removal of Sayre from his post at
the Cathedral, or to force him to recant, Forster and Epstein further
assailed the Washington clergyman in The New Anti-Semitism because he
dared later to say at a memorial service in the National Cathedral that
he was mourning not only the innocent Israeli athletes slain at Munich
“by murderous guerrillas and ruthless revolutionaries, but also those
additional victims of violence in Munich: those villagers in Lebanon
and Syria whose lives have been extinguished by the Israeli Air Force
even as the Twentieth Olympiad yet endures.”
Praise of the Sayre sermon by Gerald L. K. Smith, widely reputed
to be an anti-Semite, was adduced by the ADL as proof that the clergy-
man was himself a bigot.
It was slightly ironic, indeed, that Sayre should have given the
eulogy at the memorial service in Washington for President Harry S.
Truman three months earlier and that he should have been widely
quoted for noting, ‘“There were no wrinkles in his honesty.” Sayre was
the grandson of Woodrow Wilson, President at the time of the Balfour
Declaration, which gave the Zionists their first foothold in Palestine.
And it was President Truman without whose invaluable assistance the
State of Israel would never have come into being.
One of Sayre’s defenders at a Washington press conference called
to counteract the charges leveled against the churchman was the Rev-
erend A. C. Forrest, editor of the United Church Observer, which boasts
of being the most widely read Church paper (800,000 readers) in the
British Commonwealth. When the Odserver published a special report
on the Palestinian Arab refugees in the wake of the 1967 six-day war,
Forrest became a victim of a campaign of hate speeches and concerted
personal attacks launched by the ADL and carried out by the plethora
of Canadian Zionist-oriented organizations. As Forrest explained it,
“*My sin was and is that I am critical of Israel’s policies since the war
in June. My conviction is that the pathetic refugees should be permit-
ted to return to their homes as Israel promised last July 2 they would
do... I said, and still say, that Israel stands condemned before world
opinion.”
“Monstrous allegations” and “falsehood” thundered Canadian
Zionists. A Toronto rabbi repeated the falsehood that the Observer
editor had said that ‘“‘he hates Israel.’”” Out of a sense of fairness, the
Observer, printed a long blast by leading Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut,
436 THE COVER-OVER
widely reprinted in the Zionist press. But when it refused to publish
a 3,500-word diatribe by Israel Ambassador Gershon Avner, Canadian
air again reverberated with cries of “anti-Semitism” against Forrest. A
Zionist leader warned ‘‘we have a file on you, and it goes back twenty
years.”’ (Later, there was an apology. It seems they were talking about
a previous editor, who had written critically of Israel in 1948.)
Avid Zionist Professor Emil Fackenheim of the University of
Toronto demanded that Forrest be removed from the chairmanship of
a teaching panel. To this the besieged editor charitably noted: ‘‘Maybe
if I had gone through what Rabbi Fackenheim had in Germany, I would
be a bit more irrational, too.”
Hostile-looking individuals started showing up at churches and
meetings when the editor spoke. They took notes. They did not hang
around to shake hands. And they were not from the Globe and Mail. The
Globe quoted an officer of the Jewish Congress calling Forrest ‘‘a dupe
of Communist and Arab propaganda.” When the Observer editor was
not labeled anti-Semitic, he was accused of using anti-Semitic sources
and thereby creating anti-Semitism. Dates for his speaking engage-
ments were changed, if not canceled. And the Zionists left no stone
unturned in their efforts to have Forrest removed from his post or, at
the least, censored in his writings.
When the intrepid Canadian churchman carried the Palestinian
plight to the public in 1971] through a moving book, The Unholy Land,
readers in Canada flatly rejected a blatant attempt at censorship. Coles
Bookstores, one of the largest booksellers in Canada with more than
thirty outlets, suddenly cleared their shelves of the book, which was
not only critical of Israel’ policy vis-a-vis the Palestinian refugees but
also linked the Zionist state to South Africa and Rhodesia in the “‘prac-
tice of apartheid.” Alert public relations strategy by McClelland and
Stewart Ltd., the publishers of the Forrest book, brought this attempt
at book burning to the attention of the book and news editor of the
Canadian press. The reaction was instantaneous. People who never
heard of the book became curious. Columnists wrote that the book
removal “‘lent color to the Forrest claim that there is a pattern in
Canada of suppressing criticism of Israel.” In Toronto Buckley’s book-
store advertised the book by saying: “We do not suppress books how-
ever truthful they may be.”
The ban led to a stormy debate in newspapers, on radio, and on
television. Even as the Canadian Jewish News tried to quell rising interest
by calling the book “political pornography” and “trash,” sales
mounted; the controversy pushed the book onto the bestseller list.
The Blitz 437
While the General Council of the United Church of Canada voted
nearly 100 percent support of the editor of their church paper, and
accorded him a standing ovation at a Toronto Dominion-wide meeting
in late 1972, the persistent assault against Forrest continued. In the
latest Forster and Epstein book, Forrest was described as “Canada’s
most notorious and perhaps most denominationally protected Chris-
tian anti-Semite.” Harassment continued as a libel action was brought
against Forrest and the United Church for the publication in 1972 of
two controversial articles, based on sermons, by well-known Unitarian
anu-Zionist minister Dr. John Nicholls Booth.
In the name of reopening dialogue with the Jewish community,
Church Moderator Dr. Bruce McLeod and Secretary Rev. George Mor-
rison jointly declared with officers of the B’nai B’rith “that we regret
and disavow the insensitivity and inaccuracies contained in the arti-
cle.”
Forrest had repeatedly asked for proof of the alleged libelous
inaccuracies, which he offered to publish. Instead, a sea of pressures
—financial, political, economic, social, and otherwise, as noted in an
editorial!® by the Canadian Churchman (a rival journal whose circulation
is second only to that of the Observer in Canada)—were brought to bear
on his Church leaders who yielded.
The Churchman editorial noted how “relentless the Jewish commu-
nity, especially the B’nai B’rith, can be to anyone who has the temerity
to question the policies of the State of Israel.”
The editorial continued: “If the Church is to enter the field of
journalism, it should adopt the highest journalistic ideals rather than
the bastardized journalism (public relations) that may be appropriate
or inevitable in other institutions.”’ In noting the shift in heart of the
leadership, which had earlier supported Forrest but had yielded then
in the name of ecumenism, the Churchman declared:
But what price reconciliation? The Church needs a free press, a society needs
a free press, to hold before its readers a true picture of the institution. It can
serve only if it is unfettered, honest and responsible. When church leaders, no
matter how well motivated, diminish that freedom, we believe they diminish
the freedom of Christian people to know what is being done, said and
thought.!7
This Canadian affair was closely linked to unprecedented suppres-
sion of freedom of speech in the famed Community Church pulpit in
New York City, where John Haynes Holmes had once preached his
renowned Voltairian liberalism. In the spring of 1971 Rev. Donald S.
438 THE COVER-OVER
Harrington, Pastor of the church, invited Dr. Booth to come East and
deliver five Sunday sermons in his place during a leave of absence. The
Unitarian minister, who was retiring after lengthy service at his Long
Beach, California, parish, had long ago awakened the ire of the ADL
through his articles in the Observer and in Middle East Perspective, includ-
ing, ‘“The Dubious Ethics of B’nai B’rith.”
In his initial sermon on May 2, Wesak Sunday (honoring Buddha’s
birth), Booth spoke of the revulsion of Gandhi and Buddha toward
warfare, violence, and armament profiteering. He described at length
the U.S. as the “number-one merchant of death,’ naming the ten
American firms that are allegedly the foremost dollar earners from this
trade. No one protested this portion of the sermon, which as custom-
ary was carried on the New York Times’ radio station, WQXR. But the
eighty seconds that followed shook New York City. The station was
bombarded with calls, and the church received two threats of bombing
because the California Unitarian had stated that “according to a radio-
cast of the previous week on KFWB, the Los Angeles Westinghouse
outlet, Israel's number-one way of earning dollars was through the
manufacture and export of weapons, munitions, explosives, helmets,
and military uniforms.”
Business Week in April had reported that Israel Aviation industries
($100 million in sales 1970) was seeking aerospace experts for its
manufacturing products, including guided missiles and warplane
parts. And Newsweek had announced that Israel was going into produc-
tion with forty-ton tanks, having already manufactured 105-mm guns,
not to mention the heavily exported UZI 4 and napalm widely used in
the six-day war. (By 1977 U.S. officials were “expressing deep con-
cern” over the export of Israeli armaments.!®)
What burned the Christian and Jewish Zionists most was the
Booth lamentation that “it was the ultimate in desecration for present-
day stewards of the Holy Land, of the Prince of Peace, of the manger
and the cross, to be manufacturing and selling to other nations the
instruments for killing.’ A large number of Unitarians are Jewish, and
many of these that Sunday verbally abused Booth following the ser-
mon.
The crisis in the church forced Harrington to fly back to New York
from Chicago. Booth was asked to apologize “for his broadcast lies”
to the New York Times. The church officially invited the Consul General
of Israel in New York and the Zionist organization to send a repre-
sentative to share the May 16 sermon and to broadcast with Booth.
This offer was declined. The church then banned any further reference
The Blitz 439
to the Middle East conflict in any of the Unitarian minister’s scheduled
sermons. The trustees’ “Talk Back” session at the church had voted
to distribute to all parishioners an explanatory statement of Booth’s
position as well as his reply to personal slander. But the prepared
document was buried, despite the congregation’s vote, so as “‘to pre-
vent more trouble,” according to the explanation of the church’s
Board Chairman. It was never pointed out that Harrington was Chair-
man of the heavily Jewish-dominated Liberal party in New York State;
that Metropolitan Synagogue, which used the church facilities as
guests, paid an annual “honorarium” of $7,000; or that Harrington
had been honored with a B’nai B’rith plaque for a penultimate presab-
batical sermon titled “The Miracle of Israel.”
On June 21 ADL’s Arnold Forster was given twenty minutes on
WQXR’s ‘Point of View” to answer the eighty-second “attack” after
the Times had rejected the publication of a letter from Booth explain-
ing the incident in full. Forster used this opportunity to engage in a
diatribe directed against everything Booth had written or said regard-
ing Israel, taking particular exception to the “frightful picture’ con-
jured up by Booth in his words “Napalm from Nazareth” and ‘Bombs
from Bethlehem.” Harrington had justified censorship in his church
on the grounds that these malicious phrases were “‘equivalent to Chris-
tian anti-Semitism.”
Meanwhile, the Unitarian Church in Gainesville, Florida, which
had all but reached an agreement to make Booth their new minister,
was visited by an ADL representative who leveled charges of anti-
Semitism against him, provided the trustees with a copy of the B’nai
B'rith article, and declared that eleven Unitarian/Universalist clergy-
men had signed an anti-Booth protest. Booth forthrightly flew to
Florida and faced his critics, pointing out that free speech was being
curtailed in the guise of suppressing anti-Semitism. Despite the ADL
pressure, the Florida church by a 72 percent vote designated Booth as
interim minister starting September 1.
But this did not halt ADL efforts against Booth. A memo had been
sent from the national offices to its representatives across the country
“to alert you to possible forthcoming appearances by Dr. Booth in
your area. If, indeed, he does appear, I suggest you contact friendly
Christian clergy to inform them that Booth is vehemently anti-Israel
and anti-Zionist, whose diatribes border on anti-Semitism. ... We are
attempting to ascertain Booth’s traveling and speaking schedule. Any
information about him that comes to your attention should be sent to
me, quickly.” (Shades of the Gestapo and the SS!)
440 THE COVER-OVER
Only after a six-week campaign of letters and phone calls from the
West Coast and New York did station WQXR finally agree to permit
a four-minute taped reply to the Forster attack, which Booth ended
with these words:
We want peace, peace with justice for all. But it must be achieved not in terms
of being pro-Arab or pro-Israel, but pro-humanity. And it will not be secured
by name calling and fabrications, may I remind the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith.
Walter Neiman, Vice President and General Manager of the sta-
tion, wrote Booth to ask permission to delete from the tape the words
“fabrications,” ‘‘character assassination,” and ‘‘destroy people’s char-
acter.”’ This request was made upon advice of the station’s same coun-
sel, who without any hesitation had previously permitted ADL’s
Forster to smear Booth, to play down the facts about the Israeli de-
fense industry, and to otherwise propagandize for Israel. To end the
controversies, Booth had graciously consented to the deletion, al-
though protesting the censorship. But the New York Times subsidiary
never satisfactorily answered his query as to why the ADL had been
given time to talk about articles, sermons, and matters neither ger-
mane to the original eighty-second reference to Israel nor ever heard
by the listeners of station WQXR.
Booth, who had once been a journalist and whose stirring ser-
mons and writings, including the classic Introducing Unitarianism, had
won him wide acclaim, explained how he had become involved in the
Arab-Israeli conflict:!9
When I preached a single sermon in 1967 entitled The Moral Case for the Arabs,
I did not realize that a turning point in my life would occur. Anyone familiar
with my ministry in the metropolitan Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles areas
can rattle off the issues that I have staunchly faced in pulpit and press: abor-
tion, race, Vietnam, censorship, conservation, over-population, war, muni-
tions manufacturing . . . and the rest.
The headaches resulting from these latter controversies paralleled those
of liberal colleagues who have been unafraid to tackle prophetic issues. An
occasional parishioner became inactive or resigned; some persons in the com-
munity viewed me as a “communist,” a destroyer of social safeguards, or one
who ought to stick to the Bible.
The reaction to the Middle Eastern sermon staggered my understanding.
I learned the meaning of being defamed, isolated, threatened, and facing
professional ruin for having taken a forthright stand. And it mattered little that
my entire life has been fighting on many fronts for the underdog, human rights
and international justice.
The Blitz 44]
Rabbinical friends abruptly became abusive beyond belief. Had their reac-
tion been framed in courteous but firm analyses of areas of disagreement, it
would have been understandable and proper. But name calling, accusations
of prejudice, ignorance or Hitlerism larded their letters and phone calls. . . .
A brief letter published in the Los Angeles Times (1/4/69), scoring our
government for selling fifty jet fighters to Israel, kept my phone ringing every
fifteen minutes, night and day, for about fifty-six hours. Obscenity and vilifica-
tion flowed over the line. Letters and telegrams called me a “fucking bastard,”
“‘a paid agent of the anti-Semite groups,” and one for whom “‘a gas oven would
be too good.”
As the months passed, our home in Southern California was splattered
with rotten eggs; during a service in the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles,
while I was preaching on Amencan Freedom and Zionist Power, security men were
stationed in the sanctuary for my protection. I was warned that my ministerial
career would fade away or be abruptly terminated. Clergymen with an idealis-
tic view of Zionism are shocked to learn that we are not necessarily dealing with
altruistic humanitarians or respecters of democratic freedoms.
Booth still bears the scars of the traumatic experience of having
Rabbi Elisha Nattiv of Temple Shalom, West Covina, California,
march down the aisle of the Covina Church at the conclusion of the
sermon on the Middle East conflict and, after an hysterical harangue,
raise his arm, point to the pulpit, and cry out: “I am going to run him
out of here.”
Because a clergyman’s sermons are in the public domain, Booth
found that his pulpit remarks directed against Zionism, particularly
one on the B’nai B’rith exposing the Zionist apparatus, were picked up
without his permission and reprinted by extreme right-wing, if not
anti-Semitic groups. For this the California clergyman was further
assailed and labeled. But it was his article in Forrest’s United Church
Observer that subjected both that editor and himself to further harass-
ment and character assassination. Instead of trying to refute the facts,
a gaggle of professors, rabbis, and editors employed vivid and per-
sonal invective against Forrest and Booth, invoking guilt by association
through the appearance of the latter’s heavily documented sermon in
Gerald L. K. Smith’s The Cross and the Flag.
In a widely reported speech,?° Booth was torn apart by Catholic
Father Gregory Baum, teacher of theology at the University of
Toronto and a convert from Judaism, for having quoted Jean Paul
Sartre in his Observer piece to support “the idea that Jews must invent
anti-Semitism as a myth for their survival.’’ The article actually had
read: “Sartre regards some threat of anti-Semitism as essential to hold Jews
together.’ (Italics added.] Numerous groups in history have required an
442 THE COVER-OVER
outside threat to bring about unity, and Booth had noted a common,
unethical Zionist defensive strategy: “If there is no actual anti-Semi-
tism present, then it [meaning the claim that is present] must be
created. The fact that it is a falsehood and a reputation may be dam-
aged seemingly offends few consciences.”’ The Booth article set forth
varied devastating examples of this, and the Toronto reaction pro-
vided additional substantiation of his thesis.
Ominously, stringent censorship over dissent in pulpit and press
emerged as the ultimate goal of Canadian Zionists. In an acceptance
address for an honorary degree from St. Andrew’s College, a United
Church institution in Saskatoon, Dr. Fackenheim slashed out at the
host’s denomination, its magazine, the editor, and this writer, and
added to the astonishment of his listeners: “Merely to call the Jewish
state into question is implicitly to condone the continuation of the
unholy combination of anti-Jewish ideology with Jewish powerless-
ness... .
In the Toronto Globe and Mail May 4, 1972, the Zionist leader
disclosed his true motivation to smother a free press: “True reconcilia-
tion can come for the Jewish community and the United Church of
Canada only when the church acts so as to place all anti-Jewish bias,
however shabbily disguised as ‘anti-Zionism’ or ‘concern for Arab
refugees,’ firmly beyond the bounds of editorial freedom.”’ [Italics added.] A
more total suppression of the communications media, ban on discus-
sion of a critical subject, or disregard for the plight of refugees can
hardly be imagined. Fackenheim, ironically enough, is himself a refu-
gee from Germany.
The trials and tribulations of John Nichols Booth were heightened
by an early 1973 incident that rocked the Detroit area. South End, the
Wayne State University campus paper, reprinted in installments run-
ning from January 10 to 12 a sermon that had been delivered by Booth
at the First Unitarian Church the previous November. But the articles
appeared under a superimposed drawing of a swastika inside a Jewish
Star of David. The articles, thus unfortunately emblemed, roused to
fury the Jewish community, which otherwise probably would have paid
scant attention to the ordinary writings of a well-known anti-Zionist.
College President George E. Gullen, Jr., issued a blistering state-
ment declaring the articles ‘‘an affront to the Jewish community and
an embarrassment to the University.’”” The campus paper was sup-
ported by university funds, and it was a little ironic to hear Zionist
voices raised in protest against the ‘misuse of government tax-free
dollars.” The Detroit Free Press had a full banner headline “WSU Head
The Blitz 443
Assails School Paper for Insulting Jews.”
The South End editors apologized for the illustration and admitted
that “the Middle East was not an issue we want to live or die for’; they
merely had wished to attract attention to a different viewpoint on the
Middle East. Such attention-getting tactics (also unfortunately occa-
sionally used by the Palestinians to their grave detriment) played right
into the hands of the Zionists and further victimized Booth.
Although still being subjected to an organized and thorough “‘tail-
ing,” Booth undauntingly sought to bring the facts to “the undecided,
confused or perhaps not-yet concerned 80 percent of the American
people.” But he soon learned that even his own liberal Unitarian
Church was no longer free. The Journal of the Liberal Ministry, the official
organ of the Unitarian/Universalist Ministers Association, flatly re-
jected an article from him after they had requested contributions to a
special issue on “‘freedom of the pulpit.” In returning the piece, the
editor frankly stated the reason:
We would like to publish your views on this very important topic, but frankly,
after some lengthy study and thought about your article, I have concluded that
it would not be to our advantage to publish material which arouses dissension
among members of the association, not on matters of principle, but on ways
of assuring that principles are implimented.
Apparently this was a religious editor who had little respect for Win-
ston Churchill’s observation that ‘‘it is the church’s duty to lash the
conscience of a guilty age” —particularly where the sensitive issue of
Israel and Zionism is involved.
Another clergyman who felt the brunt of the blitz was the Catholic
priest Father Daniel J. Berrigan. Ironically, he had been the idol of the
liberals and radicals, including a number of Jews, for some years due
to his courageous stand on the Vietnam war. But then he made the
mistake of also speaking out against what he felt were wrongs in the
Middle East. Admittedly, Berrigan used some strong words in his
speech at the Arab American University Graduates Convention in
Washington, D.C.:
It is a tragedy that in place of Jewish prophetic wisdom, Israel should launch
an Orwellian nightmare of double talk, racism, fifth-rate sociological jargon
aimed at proving its racial superiority to the people it has crushed. . . . The
dream of Israel has become a nightmare. Israel has not abolished poverty and
misery; rather, she manufactures human waste, the byproducts of her entre-
preneurs, the military-industrial complex. . . . Israel has not freed the captives,
she has expanded the prison system, perfected her espionage, exported on the
444 THE COVER-OVER
world market that expensive, blood-ridden commodity, the savage triumph of
the technologized West: violence and the tools of violence.?!
Not words to everyone’s taste or opinion, but certainly within the limits
of free speech and open debate in this country. Far harsher things were
said by Berrigan about his own nation during the Vietnam war years,
and still far harsher things have been said by the Israelists about the
Palestinians and Arabs. But the storm that broke around Berrigan was
scarcely believable. His previous forthrightness and courage were to-
tally forgotten by his liberal friends as he came in for the full repression
treatment. For instance, he had been slated to receive the Gandhi
Peace Award for his antiwar activities from a New Haven group. The
presentation was to have been made by Rev. Harrington on January
9, 1974, but was canceled. Harrington assailed Berrigan for “aggravat-
ing Israeli fears and Arab intransigence at a time when the only hope
for peace is to calm Israeli fears and to reduce Arab intransigence.”
(If ever a statement revealed how biased the anti-anti-Semitism cultist
can become, it was this declamation, implying that Israel alone is
justified in having fears and the Arabs are the only intransigent force
in the Middle East.)
In a critical article in the Times, reporter Irving Spiegel brought
to light an attack in the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal, in
which Michael Novak stated that Berrigan’s charges ‘‘are as ominous
as any tone the human voice can utter.’’?? While the two attacks on
Berrigan were prominently displayed up front in the Times, Berrigan’s
rejection of the award in a letter to Harrington as ‘‘a degrading consen-
sus game”’ was buried away at the bottom of page 26. When the office
of Middle East Perspective phoned the Times to give a wrap-up statement
on the affair, attacking the cult, Spiegel, thinking that this was to be
another anti-Berrigan attack, informed the caller: ‘Sorry, J can’t give
any more attention to that. We have fanned that fire as much as we can.”
The power of the cult was amply demonstrated by the lengths to
which syndicated columnist Peter Hamill was forced to go to disprove
that he was not anti-Semitic. It is paradoxical when a “‘liberal” like
Hamill, who only rarely deviates from the Israelist line and has never
been reticent in pinning the heinous label on the Arabs, is forced to
defend himself against charges of anti-Semitism. This occurred at the
hands of defenders of the wretched Bernard Bergman, the ordained
rabbi who had grossly exploited the aged and poor residenced in his
nursing homes and was ultimately convicted for his crime.?3
Outraged and incensed when he himself became victimized by the
The Blitz 445
label callers, Hamill wrote a lengthy piece for the Village Voice. Both to
disprove the charges, as well as to retain membership in the “club,”
Hamill cried out: “I am no anti-Semite, but I know one when I see
one,” promptly pointing his finger at the controversial Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George S. Brown, who had recently
become the cult’s latest victim.
Five weeks?4 after Brown had delivered a lecture at Duke Univer-
sity Law School, not one line of which was reported anywhere in the
press save in the North Carolina Anvil, a so-called ‘alternative’ news-
paper published in Durham, a totally out-of-context parenthetical re-
mark, made at the end of a lengthy question-and-answer period, was
manipulated onto the front pages by the Washington Post on November
13, 1974, and built up the next day by the ever-compliant media into
a national scandal. Senator William Proxmire called for Brown’s resig-
nation; Senator Jacob Javits demanded an investigation; the Jewish
War Veterans insisted on an apology. In a telegram to President Ford,
the President of the American Jewish Congress, Rabbi Arthur Hertz-
berg, stated that the General’s remarks demonstrated “a degree of
ignorance and suscepubility to classic anti-Semitic propaganda that
cast grave doubts on his ability to serve in his presently critically
important position.”
Demagoguery raised its ugly head in the Congress. New York’s
Bella Abzug screamed: “General Brown’s remarks are the kind that
one would expect from a Nazi general, not from the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Her fellow congressman from New York, Ed-
ward I. Koch (now Mayor of New York), called the Brown words
“reminiscent of .. . Charles Lindbergh, who, when leading the Amer-
ica First rally in New York in support of Nazi Germany, talked of Jewish
money and power.”
In answering the question of one student concerning whether the
U.S. was contemplating force against oil-producing nations, the Joint
Chiefs Chairman had replied:
I don’t know. I hope not. We have no plans to. It is conceivable, I guess, it’s
kind of almost as bad as the “Seven Days in May”’ thing, but you can conjure
up a Situation which there is another oil-embargo and people in this country
are not only inconvenienced and uncomfortable, but suffer, and they get
tough-minded enough to set down the Jewish influence in this country.
It is so strong, you wouldn’t believe it. We have the Israelis coming to us
for equipment. We say we can’t possibly get the Congress to support a pro-
gram like that. They say, ‘““Don’t worry about the Congress. We'll take care of
the Congress.”
446 THE COVER-OVER
Now this is somebody from another country, but they can do it. They own,
you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers. You just look at where
the Jewish money is in this country.
Had the General’s ill-considered remarks been said of some other
ethnic or religious minority, they would have passed without an enor-
mous hue and cry. But the Zionist cultists of anti-anti-Semitism desper-
ately needed to detract attention from the U.N. appearance of Pales-
tine Liberation Organization chieftain Yasir Arafat and the
overwhelming 89-8 vote in the General Assembly declaring that the
Palestinian people have both a right to nationhood and a right to
return to “their homes and property.”
Taken out of context and by itself, Brown’s remarks may have
smacked of “‘hoary anti-Semitism,” as one writer claimed. But Peter J.
Kahn, Chairman of the Duke University group that had invited the
General to speak, and who is a Jew himself, said, ‘From the tenor of
his remarks during the speech and the rest of the question-and-answer
session, as well as statements throughout the course of his visit here,
there is absolutely no indication that General Brown in any way holds
anti-Semitic views.”’
Cultists everywhere gladly added to the distortion by embroider-
ing on the story. Hamill had Brown saying that “Americans would be
not only inconvenienced and uncomfortable, but suffer unless they get
tough-minded enough to set down the Jewish influence in this coun-
try.” This conveyed a totally different meaning from what the General
had said.
As Air Force Chief of Staff, Brown had been in charge of the 1973
USS. airlift that helped stave off military defeat for the Israelis. Conse-
quently, he was only too familiar with the tremendous, unbelievable
pressures then exerted by the Israelis directly on the White House, the
State Department, and the Pentagon to speed this airlift, even as U.S.
military strength was denuded. This was minutely described in the
celebrated Marvin and Bernard Kalb biography of Kissinger.?5
By latching onto Brown’s gratuitous misstatement regarding the
Jewish ownership of the banks and the newspapers—ill-advised but in
no way anti-Semitic—the ADL, the politicians, Hamill, et al., hoped to
divert public attention from the real thrust behind the Chief of Staffs
remarks: the unabating pressure on Washington to continue to give
away to a foreign country scarce American military equipment paid for
by U.S. taxpayers for the defense of their own country. As Evans and
Novak stated it, “quite apart from the General’s inexcusable rhetoric,
The Blitz 447
the Pentagon views the Middle East in terms of long-range U:S. strate-
gic interests, a view that does not always parallel those of Israel.”’
It was on the very day of the bitter confrontation at the U.N.
between the PLO and Israel that the media blew up this out-of-context
parenthetical remark by Brown. The Zionist press had a field day for
weeks with the Brown affair. James Wechsler in the New York Post
assailed President Ford for dismissing this “anti-Semitic tirade” as
“one unfortunate mistake” and administering only a mild reprimand.
Calling the Brown performance ‘‘a crime and a blunder,” the New
York editor-columnist maintained that dismissal or resignation should
have been meted out for this act of “military demagogy,”’ all the more
necessary because of the “many hidden currents of prejudice in the
military.”26 And his fellow Post columnist, the last authority on all
“‘liberal’’ subjects, Harriet Van Horne, used the uproar to take off on
the military, whose “warped philosophy” is part of ‘‘an entrenched
system that is doing the country no good.”
A lengthy article by the Washington Post’s deputy editorial page
editor, Meg Greenfield, ‘‘Jewish Control of the Banks is about as Real
as Jewish Control of the Archdiocese,” adroitly twisted around a few
words and grossly distorted what the General had said: “[there was]
need to get tough-minded with the Jews who own the banks, you
know.” Without a shred of evidence, she then denied the influence of
an Israel lobby.
As their answer to the charge of Jewish press control, the real
point behind the Brown allegation of ownership, Hamill, Time, Green-
field, and other cultists noted that ‘in 1972 of 1,748 newspapers, only
3.1 percent were owned by Jews.” These ownership figures tell noth-
ing, whatsoever, of course, about the control exercised by a large
number of strategically placed Jews.
Even President Ford’s rebuke of General Brown’s gaffe did not
halt the continuing furor, although Senator Fulbright’s kindred
thoughts on November 2 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri,
where Churchill had made his famed “iron curtain” address, had
drawn sketchy coverage and minor condemnation. The Arkansas Sen-
ator charged in his address, ‘““The Clear and Present Danger,”’ that
“the majority of officeholders in the U.S.” had fallen under “Israeli
domination” and commented:
Neither the Israelis nor their uncritical supporters in our Congress and in our
media have appreciated what is at stake in the enormous distortion of Ameri-
can interests in our Mideast course. Endlessly pressing the United States for
448 THE COVER-OVER
money and arms—and invariably getting all and more than she asks—Israel
makes bad use of a good friend. We and we alone have made it possible for
Israel to exist as a state. Surely it is not too much to ask in return that Israel
give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank as the necessary means of breaking
a chain of events which threatens us all with ruin.2?7
But Senator Fulbright already had paid the price for his ‘‘Face the
Nation” charge that the Israelis control the policy in the Congress. He
had been ‘“‘taken care of’ in the Democratic primary by Zionist candi-
date Governor Dale Bumpers, while Brown was still at his desk in the
Pentagon.
Two weeks before Election Day 1976, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff was under attack again. In an interview with Israeli-born
Newsweek journalist and cartoonist Ranan Lurie (who had served in the
Israeli army), Brown had suggested that from the “‘pure military point
of view to the United States, Israel has just got to be considered a
burden.”?8 As the release of the previous controversial statement had
been delayed for the appropriate timing, so this new Brown gaffe was
released six months after the April 12 interview and right in the midst
of the presidental campaign. Aimed obviously at embarrassing Presi-
dent Ford—and possibly at forcing the dismissal of the General—the
statement galvanized a call for Brown’s resignation from every pid-
dling Democrat—and many Republicans, too—pandering the Jewish
vote. Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Walter Mondale declared
the Brown statement a “‘vicious attack on American Jews,” and he said
people like the General ‘‘should not be sewage commissioners.” Presi-
dent Ford indicated that he did not agree with his top general’s “poor
choice of words,” but admitted that Israel had been a liability at the
time of the 1973 war because of the drain the airlift caused to our
military supplies, but that “her situation had since changed.”
Ironically, despite the public uproar which Jewish organizations
had inspired, American Jewish Committee Washington lobbyist
Hyman Bookbinder is said to have admitted privately that General
Brown was “an intelligent, thoughtful, civil guy who helped save Israel
in 1973 by running down U.S. Air Force stocks in Germany. If he can
be provoked into saying things like that, we have reason to be worried
. .. We should not overreact. Getting his scalp would give credence
to his charges.”?9 Israel’s Premier Yitzhak Rabin took a similar line,
telling a December 5, 1974 Tel Aviv audience that General Brown
“probably helped Israel during the last war more than anyone else
did.””8°
The Zionist blitz has even attempted to impose rigid censorship
The Blitz 449
over full-time working journalists. Nationally syndicated columnists
Evans and Novak earned a place of honor for themselves in the
Forster-Epstein epic merely by reporting that leaders of the powerful
American Jewish community were annoyed with Israel over the 1973
Lebanese plane incident (Israel had intercepted a Lebanese plane and
then forced it to land in Israel), which ought to be ‘‘an ominous
warning to the country which controls by far the most powerful mili-
tary might anywhere in the Arab Middle East.”’ Further “anti-Semi-
tism”’ was depicted in the columnists’ caution against “the explosive
ingredicat in Israel's seeming contempt for the opinion of major U.S.
allies, particularly in Western Europe, and for the U.S. itself” and for
their mention of Israeli plans “to build a city for 50,000 on the Israeli-
occupied (but Syrian) Golan Heights and an urban center in Israeli-
occupied (but Egyptian) northern Sinai.” Nothing untrue, nothing
libelous, nothing bigoted, but nevertheless set forth in the ADL book
annotating examples of alleged anti-Semitism.
That was in 1974, and Evans and Novak were kept under close
surveillance. Indeed, they came under such continued fire for some of
their independent views that by January 1975 the columnists felt com-
pelled to devote an entire column to a defense against the Near East
Report charge that their column “had an anti-Israel bias”’:
Our consistent thesis is that U.S. policy in the Arab-Israel conflict must be
determined by American interests, not those of Israel or of the Arab States
surrounding it. Our reporting on the Middle East has always sought to disen-
tangle real American interests from claims and counterclaims of both Israel
and the Arabs—making us neither pro-Israel nor anti-Israel, neither pro-Arab
nor anti-Arab.3!
Again, Near East Report put the finger on a correspondent. In its
account of the General Brown affair, veteran CBS commentator Eric
Severeid had been praised for his customary “felicity, polish, and
perception,” but he had apparently betrayed his trust by concluding
a discussion of the remarks of the Joint Chiefs Chairman with this
observation: “A growing number of American Jews are . . . torn ina
soul-searching internal debate as to just where their loyalties should
lie and how far they should go in honoring them.”
Overnight Eric Severeid became a member of that very exclusive
club made up of those vilified by the Zionists and stigmatized as anti-
Semites. How the Jewish Establishment could turn on a friend and
strike with the deadliness of an asp unless he crossed each “¢’’ and
“age
dotted every “7” in accordance with their personal predilections must
450 THE COVER-OVER
have been a bitter lesson to the veteran newscaster.
His younger and far more conservative colleague in CBS, Jeffrey
St. John, was probably less stunned when he ran aground on the same
ADL shoals, likewise for treading, among other things, on the ver-
boten subject of dual loyalties. On the radio network program “Spec-
trum” St. John had this to say:
The reason, it seems to me, that we don’t have an ongoing debate in this
country as to whether we have been paying a high price to guarantee Isra-
eli security, is that American public opinion is shaped largely by a pro-Isra-
eli viewpoint. And whenever someone suggests we should begin changing
our policy, as an American oil company executive did recently, the pro-Isra-
elt propaganda machine in America crucifies him in public. [Italics added.] What
this lop-sided state of affairs suggests is an insecurity on the part of many
American Jews to thrash out in the open the issue of Arab oil and U.S.
support of Israel. In fact, ever since the founding of the State of Israel, the
Arabs have had precious little opportunity to present their point of view in
this country.
Emotions, not reason, govern our policy toward Israel. This emotion
translates itself into political support from American Jews. But I suggest that
the Arab oil vs. Israel debate raises a touchy issue that American Jews don’t
like to talk about, especially those Jews who are devoted Zionists and support
the State of Israel. The issue is whether you are an Amenican first and a Jew second and
if forced to choose, which commands your loyalty first. The Arab oil vs. U.S. support
of Israel may be the first of many hard questions American Jews must face.3?
[Italics added.]}
Cultists Forster and Epstein responded with this scarcely believa-
ble comment in their tome: “St. John’s use of the word crucified in
relation to the ‘pro-Israeli propaganda machine’ was a clear appeal to
the hardiest of the roots of anti-Semitism. His raising of the dual-
loyalty canard was in much the same category. . . .”33 But commentator
St. John added insult to injury for later stating that U.S. Middle East
policy ‘thas been and continues to be shaped in large measure by the
financial and political power of American Jewry.” It was shortly there-
after that CBS dropped him from this network show.
There are many others in recent years whose careers or personal
lives have been subjected to the Zionist blitz. Parliamentarian Marga-
ret McKay, who represented the constituency of Clapham and had
been Britain’s delegate to the U.N. Commission on the Status of
Women, expressed a deep sympathy for the sufferings of the Pales-
tinian Arabs in speeches on the floor of the House of Commons and
outside. In answer to letters in London’s Evening Standard from per-
The Blitz 451
sons antipathetic to her views, McKay detailed the reaction to her
viewpoint:
In consequence, I am being subjected to extreme pressures. I am enduring
unpleasant telephone calls; receiving obscene letters (some containing ex-
creta); I am attacked in the press; similar letters have been sent to the union
which sponsors my Parliamentary candidature. I have had a death threat letter.
My secretary has been physically pushed around. The police and other services
have been sent on hoax bomb threat calls to an exhibition I held in Piccadilly.
This exhibition was broken into. The windows of this centre were defaced.
Rumours are being circulated in my constituency; pressure is being exercised
through my local party; other Members have been approached as to my finan-
cial probity.34
Another George Brown—the one-time British Foreign Secretary
and Deputy Leader of the Labor Party—also paid a price for express-
ing an opinion somewhat at variance with the prevailing line. Brown,
never one to indulge in British understatement, caused something of
an international uproar when seated at a dinner party next to Golda
Meir he said, “You are merely a Jewess from Russia who came to Israel
via America.” The outspoken and often tactless Laborite, whose
tongue was often further loosened by demon rum, was merely caution-
ing the Israeli leader against speaking so possessively about Palestine.
Brown was never forgiven by organized Jewish interests for his inde-
pendent views on Israel, which, added to other pressures, hastened his
premature retirement to the House of Lords.
Even the prestigious Christian Science Monitor (generally re-
garded as the most objective and reliable U.S. paper) has come
under violent attack, charged with being “anti-Israel and pro-
Arab,” the facile allegation so often leveled against those who dis-
please Israel’s powerful friends in this country. Like so many other
U.S. newspapers, the Monitor has been facing financial difficulties
the past several years, which had not been relieved by the change
of its format to tabloid size. To broaden its subscription base, a
special offer was made to the 153,000 members of the League of
Women Voters. But the Zionist apparatus increased the pressures
already leveled at the Monitor for its unbiased reporting and went
to work to break up this arrangement, which would have been mu-
tually advantageous. In a blistering attack that appeared in the Bos-
ton Jewish Advocate, prominent Bostonian Dr. Gerald W. Wohlberg
referred to the Monitor as ‘‘one of the most persistent and vitriolic
critics of Israel and purveyors of pro-Arab sentiment in the U.S.”°5
452 THE COVER-OVER
Referring to the paper’s reaction to the 1972 Munich tragedy, the
writer condemned the “mild rebuke to their Arab friends that they
were doing their cause no good.”
The Monitor's ‘pervasive style of liberal, pro-Palestine reporting”
also came under attack, which the writer claimed was particularly dam-
aging because of the paper’s international reputation. “Bright, respon-
sible Jewish women who have devoted enormous energies towards
supporting the League” were urged “to write to League headquarters
and make them aware of the potential pitfalls involved in their action,
which would imply agreement with the Monitor’s anti-Zionist declama-
tions.”
Shortly thereafter a very noticeable change began to take place
in the stance of the Monitor. Creditable ads, which would have
helped replenish the Monitor coffers, were rejected when presented
by the Arab Information Center and Middle East Perspective (its con-
troversial full-page advertisement had been run in early 1975), and
the fluid, concise, on-the-spot reports of John Cooley presenting an
in-depth analysis of Arab thinking were relegated to less conspicu-
ous spots. The years of visitations by the ADL and other Zionist
groups were having an effect, particularly as the Monitor increas-
ingly was forced to tighten its belt and could not afford to alienate
any blocs of readers.
Neither were the Quakers able to escape the tarbrush of the muck-
rakers. The study of the American Friends Service Committee,
“Search for Peace in the Middle East,” which was widely distributed,?6
was labeled by the ADL pandits a “pro-Arab document masquerading
under repeated claims of objectivity in a rewrite of history.” This
study’s gross crime was that, while it had evenly distributed blame for
the six-day war on the Arabs and the Israelis, it placed the onus for the
failure to bring about peace squarely on Israel. What particularly drew
Zionist fire was an earlier draft of the Quaker report, which achieved
some circulation:
We do appeal to the leaders of the powerful American Jewish community,
whose hard work and generous financial support have been so important to
the building and sustaining of Israel, to reassess the character of their support and
the nature of their role in American politics. Our impression . . . is that there is a
tendency for the American Jewish establishment to identify themselves with
the more hard-line elements inside the Israeli Cabinet, to out-hawk the hawks, and
to ignore and discount the dissident elements in and out of the Israeli govern-
ment that are searching for more creative ways to solve the Middle East
problems. . ..
The Blitz 453
However, the heavy-handed nature of some of these pressures and their extensiveness
have served to inhibit calm and rational public discussion of the issues in the Arab-Israeli
confiict. It is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it is nonetheless
disturbing to have Congressmen complain privately that they have signed public
statements giving unqualified endorsement for Israel, even though they do not
believe in those statements, or have agreed to sponsor resolutions concerning
American policy toward Israel, of which they secretly disapprove—simply be-
cause they are intimidated by Jewish pressure groups. In this situation are clear dangers
ofan anti-Semitic backlash. No one who is truly concerned about the long-term fate of Israel
and the long-term threats to interfaith harmony and brotherhood can be indifferent to these
dangers. [Italics added. ]
The deep concern only earned the Quakers further calumny, al-
though the language in the first draft was considerably altered and all
reference to congressional “intmidation”’ was omitted. In citing the
Christian Century’s view that the Quaker study was ‘“‘an instructive and
fair-minded primer . . . , the authors undoubtedly were also implying
anti-Semitism on the part of that journal, too.
The American Friends Service Committee came under further
Zionist attack when they invited Israeli dissident, Retired Major Gen-
eral Matityahu Peled, who headed the dovish Israeli Council for Isra-
eli-Palestinian Peace, to address its 1977 mid-February national con-
ference in Washington. The AFSC was accused by the President of the
Zionist Organization of America “of advocating Arab positions which
would endanger the survival of the Jewish state.”
Nor were Jews immune from the blitz. Prior to the 1973 war,
moderate-minded Jewish supporters of Israel, who believed in an
open-minded search for peace, formed a new organization called
Breira (meaning alternative). By opposing the “Rally Against Terror”
called by Organized Jewry against the 1974 U.N. Arafat appearance
and favoring an ‘affirmation of the legitimate human and national
aspirations of the Palestinian people with whom the Israeli people
must eventually find a way to live,” Breira found itself bitterly attacked
by the B’nai B’rith and smeared by Jewish Week, the paper sent gratis
to every UJA contributor. Two Breira members had even dared to
meet with two PLO members, it was charged.
Before its first national 1977 conference convened in Chevy
Chase, Maryland, Breira had been condemned by the Jewish Commu-
nity Council of Greater Washington, and Israeli consulates in three
cities had pressured Breira members not to attend. The Jewish De-
fense League called on its members to demonstrate at the convention.
Bearing placards “‘Breira are Jew-Hating Communists,” forty JDL’ers
454 THE COVER-OVER
burst into the conference center, overturning tables, tearing up docu-
ments, and assaulting some attendants. One JDL member who was
then permitted to address the conference harangued the audience,
vowing the “destruction of Breira.”’
The “witch hunt,” the words used by Village Voice columnists Alex-
ander Cockburn and James Ridgeway to describe the campaign against
Breira, did not end here.3”7 Breira members who were employed by
B'nai B’rith Hillel organizations on college campuses were cautioned
that they would be fired if they persisted to make contacts with the
PLO. Three Boston members were called in by the Israeli consulate
there to receive the personal vitriol of a high-ranking member of the
Israeli Foreign Office: “People who have not served in the Israeli
armed forces have no right to speak out against Israeli foreign pol-
icy."”38
Professor of political science Klaus Herrmann of Concordia Uni-
versity in Canada found himself facing ouster from a 26-year member-
ship in the University Lodge of B’nai B’rith after he had written an
article on his interpretation of anti-Zionism for the Protestant Student
Movement of Germany and attended, with other anti-Zionist Jews from
Europe and North America, a conference on Zionism and Racism in
Tripoli, Libya.
If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this
occurred when the ADL leveled the accusatory finger at Walter J.
Minton, President of publishing house G. P. Putnam, because of the
New York Times advertisement on the book Lansky.39 Mobster Meyer
Lansky had been brought back to the U.S. from Israel under federal
indictment. Admitting that the book by Hank Messick was not ant-
Semitic, the cultists attacked Putnam’s Times ad headed “‘Jews Control
Crime in the United States” (June 24, 1971).
Minton, not so easily frightened, answered the ADL:
I've got enough Jewish, Protestant and Catholic antecedents in my own imme-
diate background so that when I observe a Jew, a Protestant or a Catholic
doing something I believe he should not be doing, I judge that action without
feeling I am falling prey to prejudice.
I regret that your letter suggests that a man in your position is not capable
of so doing. There are crooked Jews in America, and if you read Hank Mes-
sick’s Lansky you will learn something about some of them.?°
Whereas others have refused to bow to blackmail, the head of the
second largest U.S. oil corporation capitulated totally to pressure, as
revealed in the following correspondence between the National Chair-
The Blitz 455
man of the ADL and Bob R. Dorsey, Chairman of Gulf Oil Corpora-
tion:
Dear Mr. Dorsey:
As undoubtedly you are aware, there is great concern in the American
Jewish community at the revelation that Gulf Oil Corporation contributed a
sum of money to a source in Beirut, Lebanon, which was used for a pro-Arab
propaganda campaign in the United States. One result was a critical resolution
adopted on May 27 last at a plenary session of the Conference of Presidents
of Major American Jewish Organizations. B’nai B’rith and its Anti-Defamation
League are constituent members of this umbrella body.
Our agencies have had, and continue to receive, an increasing number of
inquiries from interested citizens across the land about this Gulf gift. In order
that we may more intelligently respond to these inquiries, may we have from
you an official statement of explanation.
And Mr. Dorsey’s reply:
Dear Mr. Graubard:
I acknowledge and thank you for your letter of August 15. We share your
concern about the contribution which Gulf made abroad for educational pur-
poses in the United States.
I must tell you that I had no knowledge of the contribution at the time
it was made. It is my view that this company should not have made a contribu-
ion to support political activities for foreign interests in the United States, and
I can assure you it never was our intention to do so. The contribution in
question was regrettable, and you may be certain that it will not happen
again.‘!
This contribution ($50,000) went to an American effort to tell the
untold side of the Middle East struggle, but such has been the power
and force of the anti-anti-Semitism blitz that a mighty corporation like
Gulf Oil becomes a quivering mass of jelly in the face of a scolding
from the Anti-Defamation League. Yet who thinks to raise even a
whisper to challenge the many corporations—Jewish and otherwise—
individuals, and organizations, for their multi-multi-million-dollar tax-
free contributions every year for so-called ‘“‘educational purposes”’ on
behalf of Israel?
Perhaps the answer to this anomaly lies in the fact that one aim
of Israel’s “educational purposes” is to brainwash Americans into
believing that propaganda for Israel is somehow “right’’ and
“proper,” but that in behalf of the Arabs is equally ‘beyond the
fringe,” and that whereas the Arabs pertain to something ‘‘foreign,”
the Israelis very much do not. As a writer for Life succinctly expressed
456 THE COVER-OVER
it, “The net effect of pro-Israeli propaganda and relentless pressure
over the past twenty-five years has been to make us all feel slightly
Jewish and to feel that the Israelis are ‘our kind of people,’ while the
Arab is our sworn enemy. It has been a masterwork of brainwash-
ing.’’42 By this peculiar, twisted logic, Israel becomes an extension of
the U.S. And if that is the case, there is certainly no more glaring
example of the tail wagging the dog.
This writer, no matter how hard he would try, could never present
the record of repression in the U.S. in its massive entirety for the very
valid reason that the more submissive victims of Zionist pressure are
usually too afraid or too ashamed to publicize their experience. What
has been written here is only some of the details in the more renowned
cases. And there have been many other Americans from all over the
country who have been similarly blitzed. That story perhaps someday
will be completely unfolded.
It goes without saying that I have been one of the chief targets of
the silencers for nearly thirty years, the full recital of which will be the
subject of a future work. But a few select episodes may further impart
to readers who have had no first-hand experience with this type of
situation, the flavor of the subtle, insidious manner in which this cam-
paign has been conducted.
From my very first lecture on December 16, 1952, in which I
mentioned the plight of the Palestinian Arabs to the Women’s Club of
Wheeling, West Virginia, through my May 10, 1976, appearance at the
College of Marin in California, there have been pressures on the spon-
sor, if not on the lecture agent, to cancel engagements. Where these
efforts failed, there have been planned attempts to disrupt the meet-
ing. The few of us who expressed the unpopular ‘‘other side” have
never known when we started out on a lecture tour what would happen
to our engagements and whether we would still have a lecture agent
on our return. The Anti-Defamation League was capable of frighten-
ing them—or bribing by offering them many lucrative lectures for one
of their speakers—and this they did with such long-established agen-
cies as Keedick’s Lecture Bureau.
Embarrassment often faced a lecturer from the outset of his talk.
Shortly after the publication of What Pnce Israel?, the Briush Empire
Club of Providence, Rhode Island, invited the budding young author
to speak to them. Chairman Dr. Percy Hodgson in introducing me
related that ‘‘a certain lady”’ had telephoned him saying, ““Our commu-
nity has lived in friendship all these years. We do not want to break
that relationship.” Strongly suggesting that they ought to cancel the
The Blitz 457
lecture, the lady issued a veiled threat: ‘‘We will be happy to learn that
you have taken the necessary action because Lilienthal’s views are
dangerous.”
Hodgson replied that he would be happy to have one of their
speakers at a later date; ‘We want to hear all views.”” The trouble was
—and is—that 99 percent of the time is given to one point of view, and
when by dint of perseverance one percent has been accorded the
Anu-Zionist side, one is forced to split even that little time, so that the
Zionist position winds up with 99/2 percent of the time. This inevitable
pressure, exerted even on the Rotary Club on the small out-to-sea
island of Nantucket, has been a great factor discouraging program
chairmen from booking any Middle East speakers.
What has been far more than a tempest in a glass of Manischewitz
has occurred on the lecture circuit across the country, no matter how
remote and academic the setting, in places where one might assume
the blitz could not possibly reach. Read—exactly as set down in Middle
East Perspective—from a “diary” of experiences on a trip to the West
Coast in 1968:
Louisiana: Here, at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, I was rudely re-
minded that Zionist pressures can reach even into the deepest part of the
South. The local rabbi had called the President of the College, and other
interested parties had hinted elsewhere that it might be better for the school
if Lilienthal’s lectures were cancelled. The morning lecture to the full student
body was followed by a tempestuous question period in which both the rabbi’s
wife and the Anti-Defamation League representative vociferously intervened.
“We find democracy only in Israel and the U.S. must therefore support this
small bastion of freedom,” was the latter’s argument. When in my rebuttal I
pointed to the treatment of Arabs in Israel and to discrimination against
Oriental Jews, the rabbi’s wife quickly interevened: “That is a question we
(italics mine) will solve in time.” I retorted, ““Who is we? Are you talking as
an American?” Without hesitation her answer was: “I am talking as a Jew, a
Zionist, and an American.”
And on to California, a state that prides itself on allowing people
of every persuasion and extreme to have their say:
Louis Lomax, who had invited me on his KT TV popular interview program,
called to say his owners, Metromedia, insisted that I could not appear alone
as originally scheduled but must share the program with a Zionist. I was forced
to debate with a representative of a local Zionist organization. His charges:
“Lilienthal’s books are sold by the Paul Revere Society.” The Paul Revere
Society is ‘‘anui-Semitic, anti-Negro” and so, by inference, is Lilienthal. An
attorney friend moved subsequently against this slander but the release, which
458 THE COVER-OVER
you unwittingly usually sign just three minutes before recording time, as you
sit in the dark wings off the set, contains in unreadable small print a waiver
for any such damages.
In response to a February 7, 1974 Wall Street Journal ad, ‘“‘Do Arms
for Israel Mean No Gasoline for Americans,” which I signed as Editor
of Middle East Perspective, we received many positive letters. The vast
majority of the negative letters and smut written across ad coupons
were unsigned, bearing a New York City postmark. Some were amus-
ing despite their four-letter vulgarity: ‘“Tell the God Damn Arabs that
they can stick their damn oil up their stinking ass.” “Hitler killed
bastards like you. Too bad he missed you.” “‘Considering your name,
you are either a German or a Jew. If you are a German, your ad is what
we expect from a German, a brother of Hitler. If you are a Jew, my
contempt for you is beyond expression. You are a traitor, a liar, twist-
ing the facts which you ignore.”
One letter merely listed the names of eighteen concentration
camps. Another declared: ‘You are a Communist Jew paid by Russia
to spread distrust so that the Communists can take over.”” A coupon
signed Adolf Hitler had stapled to it a 20,000-mark Reichbanknote: “I
will give $5,000 for your funeral.”
While heretics naturally arouse a fury beyond all reason, the dead-
lier threat that unreasoned supporters of Israel pose is to human
freedom. Dr. Israel Shahak, who himself has been the object of an
organized campaign, from the U.S. as well as his own country, to
dismiss him from his academic post at Hebrew University, in these
words attributes the blitz to ‘‘areas of totalitarianism in the U.S.”:
... In regard to anything relating to the Middle East or Jewish subjects, the
USA has many of the characteristics of a totalitarian country and many of the
groups who call themselves ‘‘liberal” or ‘peace camp”’ or “radical” are on that
subject the most intolerant, the most totalitarian, the most dishonest and
racist. . . . A totalitarian society not only does not tolerate a freedom of
opinion, but it cultivates by all means in its power a “received opinion,” which
all have to parrot, not only without checking it, but often without any under-
standing of what it means... .
Perhaps some Americans will think that I exaggerate. But the danger of
a totalitarian regime was always thought to be exaggerated before it arrived.
Only afterwards, when it was too late, was it found that the society was already
totalitarian in some aspects which were merely enlarged.
There is only one sure antidote to the totalitarian danger: To fight all
aspects of totalitarianism in all the parts of one’s society and to follow always
the dictum of Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, and there-
The Blitz 459
fore with the utmost freedom and without fear of any blackmail to examine
everything in the light of a universal concept of justice, applicable equally to
all human beings.*3
In forging their own brand of totalitarianism in the U-S., the
Zionists continue to manipulate the victims of the Nazi holocaust as
their chief weapon.
XIII The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires
This—all this—was in the olden Time long ago.
—Edgar Allan Poe
Yad Vashem, a large compound on the Mount of Remembrance in
Jerusalem, is a memorial to the Jewish martyrs and heroes of World
War II. The Hall of Remembrance is a large rectangular building of
basalt boulders and uneven concrete, purposely recreating the appear-
ance of a Nazi gas chamber. Within, on a floor of inlaid ule, are
inscribed the names of the twenty-one largest Nazi concentration
camps. A shaft admitted through a skylight illuminates the eternal
flame contained in the hollow of a colossal broken bronze urn.
Next to the hall is a large square where thousands gather annually
for the ceremonies on Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day in
April, the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. To the left of the floor
is a double-story museum, on the top floor of which are kept the names
of those who perished in camps. A photographic recreation of the
history of Nazi anti-Semitism is on the bottom floor.
Guarding the museum is an anguished statue of Job by the sculp-
tor Nathan Rappaport. Circling these buildings is a small forest called
the Avenue of the Righteous Genules, which honors Gentiles who
risked their lives to save Jews. The archives contain records of rescue
activities by Jewish organizations, and documents captured in Ger-
many and satellite countries. Upon leaving Yad Vashem, one passes
the Pillar of Heroism, a very modern, severe triangular shaft of stain-
less steel rising seventy feet on the Judean hill. Deeds of Jewish valor
are carved into the surrounding stones.
This sanctification of the holocaust,! together with the Masada
monument commemorating the Zealots who killed themselves rather
than surrender to the Romans, carries out the biblical command: Tell
460
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 461
your children of it and let your children tell their children, and their
children, another generation.
Yad Vashem epitomizes the last trump of the professional anti-
anti-Semite. The holocaust is the weapon that hovers behind the cov-
er-up and supplies the principal prop to the cover-over. When ail else
fails, the six million Jews killed during the Nazi holocaust remain the
ultimate silencer. These six million are quite literally pulled from the
ovens, propped up, and pushed forward to confront any who might
raise the slightest question or smallest voice of dissent. Even the mere
threat of this suffices to silence most people. But on many occasions,
the six million are ritually brought out. Silence ensues. The line is
maintained. Hitler had made reluctant Zionists out of many guilt-
ridden Christians and assimilated Western Jews.
As Hitler exploited the Jews, it is paradoxical that certain Jews
should have exploited and up to this very moment are still very much
intent upon exploiting Hitler for Zionist propaganda purposes. There
has been an almost continuing conspiracy, fostered by an unholy alli-
ance between the media and the Zionists, to keep us all in the era of
1940-45. Since there can be only one side to any issue where the
alternative would be Hitler, the aim of the game is to keep Adolf and
his gang alive.
In 1952, 1967, early in 1972, and later again in November of that
year, the hue and cry was raised: ‘He is alive.’”’ And there appeared in
the world press still another widely distributed photo of someone
alleged to be Martin Bormann, Nazi adjutant to Adolf Hitler. On
further investigation, the stories have faded into nothingness. But this
speculation, widely encouraged by the media and based on total
rumor, brought on a new spate of articles and books about Nazism,
further flavoring the atmosphere in which the Middle East conflict was
being judged and additionally pinching the Christian conscience lest
the already growing number of those disenchanted with Israel further
increase.
The latest Bormann episode was by far the most elaborate. It was
built around a series of articles by the writer-historian Ladislas Farago,
which appeared in a six-part account in both the London Daily Ex-
press? and the New York Daily News.* Sensational articles appeared in
other newspapers concerning the series on Bormann and the Nazis,
unul New York Times correspondent Joseph Novitski printed an inter-
view with one José Velasco of the Argentine Intelligence Service, who
denied ever having questioned Bormann at an Argentine checkpoint,
as alleged by Farago. Velasco stated that the photograph in question
462 THE COVER-OVER
showed him not with Bormann, but with a high school teacher named
Rudolpho Sira in downtown Buenos Aires.
The Farago contention that Bormann, aided by the Vatican and
Juan Perén, then dictator of Argentina, had escaped from Berlin and
managed to smuggle out of Germany treasures in excess of $200
million in the last days of the Hitler regime, was debunked by writer
Charles Dana Gibson. Putting finishing touches himself to a book
dealing with German blockade-running during World War II, Gibson
declared it was impossible to remove loot without the knowledge of
Hitler and it was also most unlikely that Bormann ‘‘could have ar-
ranged such a cargo shipment on a U-boat.’”4
As a reply to their own correspondent, the Jimes, in line with its
usual “‘liberal tradition,” permitted Farago a three-column rebuttal, in
which he rehashed the whole Nazi bit and claimed his evidence regard-
ing Bormann was “authoritative, authentic, and accurate.” He was
then completing The Aftermath® for which Simon & Schuster had given
him a $100,000-plus contract. The cult of anti-anti-Semitism appar-
ently was about to be fattened anew.
A last word was had by English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper,
Oxford Professor of Modern History and the author of The Last Days
of Hitler, in a piece in the magazine section of the Sunday New York
Times.6 The whole past controversy was reviewed and an elaborate
history of Bormann as well as some of his Nazi colleagues was added.
But not one shred of new evidence had been provided to prove that
Bormann was alive, even as the Hitler era was relived all over again.
All this was brought to the attention of the Sunday readers with
this caption in black, bold type: “The world has never had any difficulty
remembering his name, but has almost forgotten who he was.” There
were very few, indeed, who would bet that this would ever be allowed
to happen.
Off the presses has come an unbelievable, endless spate of books
pricking the world’s conscience, as if there was still a Nazi peril today.
Scarcely a week passes without an addition to the already imposing list
of gory tomes. It would seem that writers of fiction and nonfiction, for
television, the movies, and the stage alike, had no other theme than the
holocaust. We should have thought Arthur Morse’s While Six Million
Died,? Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945,8
Myron S. Kaufmann’s The Coming Destruction of Israel: Will the U.S. Toler-
ate Russian Intervention in the Middle East,9 Richard Chernoff, Edward
Klein, and Robert Littel’s /f /srael Lost the War!© would have been more
than enough. But then along came an imposing advertisement to tell
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 463
the readers of the Times of Eli Wiesel’s One Generation After.1\ Wiesel’s
Night}? and then a new spate of books in the wake of the October war
and the latest ‘‘threat’” of genocide to Jews followed in 1974.
Other aspects of the holocaust were set forth in Open the Gates ,18
The Destruction of European Jews,'4 and They Fought Back,'® all of which
with the Dawidowicz book “were reviewed together by Libertarian mag-
azine.!6 The latter, referred to by the cultists as a “classic,” was supple-
mented in 1977 by a new work by the same authoress, The Jewish
Presence,'7 in which she assailed Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem
for placing some of the blame for Jewish extermination on the leaders
of the Jewish Community Councils, the Judenrat, who “‘cooperated in
one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.”
After a lengthy Times review of this new Dawidowicz collection of
essays on a Sunday,!® Times chief reviewer Christopher Lehmann-
Haupt gave the book another forward push in his daily ‘Book of the
Times” column the next day.!9 What should have appeared in the first
or second paragraph of the critique, where the reviewer praised the
authoress for her other writings and her habitual “‘do not forget the
six million” thesis, was kept to the very last three lines of the two
columns: ‘‘The Jewish Presence simply lacks what would have made it as
fresh and surprising as a good collection of essays ought to be.” And,
of all people, the readers of the Times scarcely had to be told by
Lehmann-Haupt: ‘‘Nor do we need to be reminded that the struggle
of Israel to remain alive, particularly during the six-day and Yom
Kippur wars, has served to raise the consciousness of Jews and non-
Jews all over the world.”
Thirty-two years after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker, and hun-
dreds of volumes later, no book on the German Fiihrer, no matter how
trivial its contribution or how ineptly it is written, still failed to win big,
bold headlines on the “Books of the Times” page. Lehmann-Haupt
even apologized, “Why read yet another book about Hitler?”?° And
then he proceeded to dissect John Toland’s Adolf Hitler?! at length,
using the gathering of “tidbits of new information” as his excuse. The
real reason, of course, must be the endless compulsion that this chief
Times book reviewer feels to lend a hand to “little Israel” by propogat-
ing the syndrome of anti-anti-Semitism.
Nor did this end it. The Times of July 12, 1977, carried a half-page
advertisement of a “gripping, powerful portrait,’ the new book, The
Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler,?? which was given the benefit of prepubli-
cation features in major New York Times and Time magazine stories and
rave notices in Harriet Van Horne’s syndicated column and in Publish-
464 THE COVER-OVER
ers Weekly for putting “‘the lie to the view that Hitler may not have
known about the crimes committed against the Jews.”
And Hitler himself was not the only theme pursued. A few months
earlier the Howard Blum book, Wanted: The Search for Nazis in Amer-
ica, 23 had been released and was synthesized in a New York Post?4 series,
illustrated by more horror pictures of Nazi deeds. The takeover of G.
P. Putnam’s Sons publishing house by Music Corporation of America
(whose chairman, Lew Wasserman, was described in the Robert Scheer
Los Angeles Times 1978 controversial series as “‘the most powerful Jew
in Los Angeles as well as the most powerful leader of the entertain-
ment industry’) was reflected in the publication and promotion of
such books as 17 Ben-Gurion.25 According to an advertisement in the
Times, the book concerned “‘the terrorist-ridden Middle East in this
big, exciting novel of a ruthless Palestinian terrorist organization plot-
ting to destroy Israel—and Israeli Intelligence agents racing against
time to trace the conspiracy to its source and smash it forever.’’?6
Within three weeks came the companion novel, The Plot to Destroy Israel,
“documenting how the Arab nations intend to wipe Israel off the face
of the earth.’’27
The emerging power of the PLO, the threat of OPEC, the growing
recession, and the open speculation about U.S. armed intervention in
the Middle East caused consternation in Jewish-American circles. Ger-
ald S. Strober, a former staff member of the American Jewish Commit-
tee, in his book American Jews: Community in Crisis predicted that current
trends will make “life rather unpleasant for the individual Jew” in
America, and that U.S. Jews are now entering ‘the most perilous
period”’ in their history.?® Eli Wiesel claimed in the New York Times?°
that for the first time he could ‘‘foresee the possibility of Jews being
massacred in the cities of America or in the foresteps of Europe”
because of ‘‘a certain climate, a certain mood in the making.” Accord-
ing to Cynthia Ozick in her Esquire piece “All the World Wants the Jews
Dead,” Israel’s survival was in grave doubt, and with it Zionism and
thus all Jews. She proclaimed “The Jews are one people. . . . You
cannot separate parent from child, the Jews from Zion.’’3°
The rash of hysterical articles continued: Alfred Kazin’s piece
in the Atlantic Monthly;3! Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz’s
January 1975 article in the New York Times3? and his 1976 editorial
article in his own magazine;33 Richard Reeves’ New York magazine
article, “If Jews Will Not Be for Themselves, Who Will Be for
Them?’’34 All were aimed at creating panic among Jews, at linking
anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and at crushing any sullborn op-
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 465
position to the maintenance of the Middle East status quo.
The lead article in the New York Times Magazine of June 19, 1977
was the Helen Epstein emotional outpouring, ‘““The Heirs of the Holo-
caust,”’ in which controversy was built over whether children and
grand-children should or should not feel guilty for having survived
their parents and grandparents. Speculation was kept alive by the
publication of eight letters the following month, which generally ex-
pressed a “deep feeling of guilt for having survived our parents and
for being an heir of the holocaust. Because I am a Jew and because the
suffering was so great, I can carry only an infinitesimal part of this
sorrow.”’55 Even obituary page headlines in the Times, ‘Rudolf Weiss,
77, Actor Who Fled Austria After Nazi Invasion, Dead,” are used to
fasten attention on the holocaust.3¢
The Sunday New York Times’ Travel Section is not immune. On
September 3, 1972, it carried one article on anti-Semitism in Germany
and another on concentration camps in Poland over a three-page
spread including a tremendous picture of a skull-capped Jew baring his
Nazi tatto. Rarely has writing as contrived, platitudinous and banal as
Stephen Birnbaum’s ‘‘Germany: The End of Assimilation” appeared
anywhere, let alone in the promotion of tourism. A visitor dropped
from another planet would have believed that the Third Reich was still
ruling Germany and threatening the world.
This writer, calling himself an assimilationist but referring to
“Rosh Hashonah, 5372,” feels forced in 1972 to make excuses for
making a trip to West Germany. By his own confession he has avoided
attending a synagogue for eighteen years. On this first visit to Ger-
many, while enjoying his first meal in a German home on the North
Sea coast, his eyes happen to fall upon an oil painting of the Nazi SS
father of his host. He can scarcely keep down his food, and the next
day he rushes to a “spiritual reunion” in a Regensburg synagogue.
Television likewise continued to keep viewers back in the unfor-
gettable 1940s. In late 1974, for instance, a two-part documentary
study of Adolf Hitler had been cunningly timed by WNET Educational
Television to fall as Jews celebrated Hanukkah. According to the New
York Times, it was ‘‘a devastating reminder and sombre warning of a
madness that was able to grip a large part of the world in this century.”
This was followed in January on Channel 9 by ‘“‘In Our Time,” a 1944
drama of Nazi-shadowed Poland, starring Ida Lupino and Paul Hen-
ried; then a Sunday evening “Report on World War II” depicting the
concentration camps of Belsen and Auschwitz; and then a revival of the
de Sica film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the story of Jewish persecu-
466 THE COVER-OVER
tion under Italian Fascism. This, even as the Odessa File with its blatant
propaganda about a fictitious Nazi-Egyptian spy ring in Frankfurt, was
drawing tears from thousands, who had stood in long cues to view the
new hit purporting to show Egyptians and resurgent Nazis building a
rocket assembly line to threaten the very existence of Israel. In short
order this was followed by the appearance of Rosebud, the Otto Prem-
inger film about a hijacking by Black September Palestinians of a yacht
on which there are five wealthy girls, one of whom is Jewish. Among
the propaganda ploys used by the film was an Israeli intelligence
officer uttering, ‘““They’ll never get us in gas chambers again,” as he
shows off his skillful “know-how” of American equipment locating the
guerrillas’ Corsica hideout.37
This outpouring came in the wake of the PLO’s appearance before
the bar of international opinion and was endless. Nearly two full pages
of the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section of the New York Times was
covered by an Alfred Kazin piece, ““Can Today’s Movies Tell the Truth
about Fascism?” The article started off with the admission, ‘World
War II is by now the longest running movie of all time,” an assessment
with which no objective observer could quarrel, only hoping the writer
would not further prolong it. Two tremendous pictures, each 9 X 642
inches, evoked the immediate sympathy of the reader. One showed “a
Jewish girl in occupied Paris seeking a priest’s aid in the movie Black
Thursday,” and the other was a pretty shot of a Jewish mother and her
little son escaping the Nazis in the movie Les Villons du Bal. But the
author decried the happy ending in which mother and son ‘‘manage
to slip under the barbed wire and a benevolent Swiss guard looks down
on them and croons ‘Now you are free.’ ”’ History, he claimed, was not
so kind. ‘‘For the Swiss were as gentle to ‘illegal immigrants’ as one
of their bank tellers would be to a pauper.”
French filmakers, stimulated by Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the
Pity in 1972, began to portray their countrymen in less than Resist-
ance-hero terms, with an alleged anti-Semitism that even at times
exceeded that of the Nazis. Their products were greeted with great
popularity in the U.S., as in France, with the help of Zionist stimula-
tion. But Kazin still was far from satisfied. Even when a movie did give
a picture of Jews being tormented, the persecution was often not vivid
or horrible enough for Kazin’s taste, as was the case of Louis Malle’s
exceptionally interesting and intelligent film Lacombe, Lucien. The pro-
ducer was held to be “not altogether well-informed because he was
only thirteen when the war ended.”
Hollywood continued to advance the cult, although not always
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 467
successfully. The Voyage of the Damned, the film based on the story of the
1939 attempt by 937 Jews aboard the St. Louis to find a refuge from
Hitler in Cuba, was reviewed by Vincent Canby as ‘clumsy, tasteless
and self-righteous,” another attempt to “wildly fictionalize and exploit
the tragedies of real people.”’88 The 1977 Alain Delon’s Mr. Klein
brought to the screen a novel aspect of anti-Semitism—an exposure of
someone from the haute monde, who though “‘not an active Nazi sup-
porter, found anti-Semitic sketches in a cabaret revue amusing and
brought objects d’art at rock-bottom prices from Jews fleeing the
country,”’39
Again, after the emergence of Menachem Begin in power in Israel,
amidst the subsequent soul-searching by American Jews and the
emerging debate over the Geneva Conference, the holocaust burst
anew on the television screens of New York viewers. ‘““The World at
War: The Final Solution” was given seven hours August 1-4, 1977, on
Mutual’s outlet, Channel 9 (WOR-TV). On the night this series ended,
an old third-rate movie, Operation Eichmann, was dug up out of the
morgue and shown.
Later that month smatterings of the persecution theme were
woven into the first of three ‘‘Jewish Tradition” series of ten Sunday
half-hour shows and in ‘Jerusalem Lives” over Channel 13 (WNET).
That station had earlier shown, as part of a network program, L ‘Chaim,
the story of the Jewish people in Europe from the mid-19th century
through the Nazi period to the present.
In the 1977 series Israel: A Family Portrait, which was unveiled as
a special four-part series September 7-9, 1977, over WABC (Channel
7) “Eyewitness News” at prime 6:00 p.m. time, correspondent Joel
Siegel was shown visiting relatives in the Zionist state. Here a cousin
who survived ‘‘the concentration camp where 300,000 Jews were mas-
sacred” described the holocuast and his heightened feelings about
Israel. In addition to such ‘‘news” outlets, a special half-hour feature
picked up Siegel’s narration for the September 17 season premiere of
Mort Fleischer’s WABC’s award-winning public affairs series, ‘‘People,
Places, Things.”
Many television stations in all parts of the country on all networks
repeatedly through 1976 and 1977 showed the half-hour United Jew-
ish Appeal-produced film, The Commitment, which depicted Jewish per-
secution under the Nazis and closed with an appeal for funds. Israeli-
American singer of note, Theodore Bikel, did the narrating. This
propaganda-laden presentation was shown as a public service, at no
charge whatsoever to the UJA.
468 THE COVER-OVER
In addition to keeping alive the Hitler days and the holocaust,
there has been the related phenomenon of bringing to life the fear of
imminent revivals of Nazism and Fascism*° both abroad and at home.
The Nazi shadow and peril were kept aglow by a plethora of New York
Times stories and the competition between the networks in trying to
magnify the importance of the U.S. Nazi party.
An NBC “Tomorrow” show interviewed American Nazi leader
Frank Collin who defended his vehement anti-Jewish, anti-black posi-
tion. The New Rochelle shooting spree of crazed Fred Cowan pro-
vided the excuse for focusing national attention on a fascist movement
whose membership numbered little more than 1000. Not to be out-
done, a CBS “‘Sixty Minutes” on February 20, 1977 presented another
view of the U.S. Nazis. These fanatics were pictured against a back-
ground of swastikas as a growing force of hate. When asked by their
Nazi parents, little children six to seven years of age responded cor-
rectly before the cameras with a quick “Kill the Jews.”
The American Nazi Party claimed less than 1000 total member-
ship, forty-one of whose members turned up at its 1978 national con-
vention in St. Louis to reelect Collin as successor to the notorious
deceased George Lincoln Rockwell. Although this conclave had al-
ready received prominent reportage, the Times accorded two full col-
umns on April 18, 1978 to the “Nazis in the U.S.,”’ with pictures of a
swastika-armed Rockwell and of swastika-dominated “Nazis on parade
in St. Louis last month” (all of twenty-five had marched). The article
admitted bringing ‘‘American Nazis a notoriety that seems to be
greatly disproportionte to their numbers.”
The scheduled July 4, 1977 Nazi march through Skokie, the Chi-
cago suburb with its fifty-seven percent Jewish population of 40,000,
including 7,000 former concentration camp inmates, opened up new
areas for propaganda. Through the long court fight to halt the parade,
the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist groups had a field day
in picturing a ‘‘grave new threat” to America. This was heightened by
media attention to the “growing” Ku Klux Klan with its 7,000 mem-
bers, split into three principal vying groups, the most articulate leader
of which was David Duke.
Both Collin and Duke appeared with leaders of the black commu-
nity on most of the stations of National Educational Television’s
“Black Perspective’! on which the danger from these fascist groups
was grossly exaggerated. The Ku Klux Klanner was given ample time
to attack Jews and Zionists alike for “forcing” a pro-Israel Middle East
policy on the United States.
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 469
On December 14, 1977 WNET Channel 13 avid Israelist Seymour
Lipset, Anti-Defamation League representative Irwin Suall, and
American Civil Liberties Union executive Bruce Ennis engaged in the
pros and cons on how to cope with the threat of the Rockaway (Long
Island) Klan chapter of fifty members (admittedly already reduced to
twenty through an ADL campaign). Suall argued: “They are capable
of perpetrating violence and constitute a real danger. It is a real obliga-
tion to point out what they stand for and what they did in our times.’’
To help achieve this goal, the American Jewish Committee, closely
allied with the ADL, published and widely distributed a specially pre-
pared three-article series ‘‘Nazi Groups Flourishing Throughout the
U.S.A.” The fearsters were determined to justify the large tax-deducti-
ble gifts given to their tax-free treasuries to fight the dangers of anti-
Semitism and at the same time to spread propaganda which could only
improve Israel’s position in the U.S. This is why the Jewish groups
rejected Collin’s offer in late May 1978 to cancel the Nazi march
through Skokie if the legislation barring the June 25 parade were
withdrawn. The sponsors of the bill replied: ‘He is not the kind of
person you make a deal with.” And the New York organization, Survi-
vors of Nazi Camps and Resistance Fighters, pointing to the Skokie
march as “evidence that Nazi activities were not terminated with the
demise of Hitler,”” sent out a broad mail appeal for more information
on victims of the holocaust to be added to the central archives of Yad
Vashem.
Earlier attention had been directed to incidents in Germany and
Italy, building upon occasional rumors and unconfirmed reports of
rising anti-Semitism to create an atmosphere of constant fear. After a
small German extreme rightist group gained a victory in local elections
in one West German state, the drums began to roll “The Nazis are
coming.” Old scare stories and exaggerated figures were dragged out.
When the election came, this ‘“‘big”’ threat polled less than one percent
in the federal elections and won no seats.*2
The continued spate of stories on the apprehension, release, ex-
tension of statute of limitations, conviction, and even escape of former
Nazi and alleged Nazi criminals used up valuable newsprint inches.
The Times was ever digging up Nazi terror stories, as they did in
pointing the finger at the German Catholic Bishop of Munich for the
alleged execution twenty-five years earlier of twenty-seven Italians in
the small village of Filetto Di Camarda, running the accusation under
and across the page heading: “‘Priest and Red in Italian Village Battle
Over Role of German, Now a Bishop, in Wartime Reprisal Killing.”’*?
470 THE COVER-OVER
In one single issue of the monthly Jewish Currents, 44 which is more
broadminded in its view toward the Palestianians, there were articles
on “Holocaust and Jewish Resistance,” “Flight from Hitler, 1939,”
and “‘Obstacles to Nazi Hunting.”” When this periodical was not calling
some people anti-Semitic, they were clearing others of a similar charge
spread by other Jewish groups. Certain remarks had been adduced by
the Yiddish and Jewish student press to prove that even Benjamin
Franklin had been a pronounced bigot. And not too many days were
allowed to pass without some human interest Times story bringing back
the holocaust—a reunion of survivors of Buchenwald, Dachau or of the
Cracow Ghetto which was accorded large coverage and a four-column
head.45
The extent to which the Masada complex in Israel and its U.S.
counterpart, the holocaust saga, had taken hold was illustrated in
1971, during one of the alleged Bormann “sightings.”” When ques-
tioned on a David Frost television show, Foreign Minister Abba Eban
carelessly exclaimed that he was “hardly interested” in whether “some
wretched man in Paraguay or Brazil is brought to justice.’’ Front-page
headlines in Israeli papers, from the English-language Jerusalem Post to
Israel's Hebrew newspapers, resounded with group as well as individ-
ual castigation of Israel’s most eloquent voice. Someone was threaten-
ing to put a yawning hole in the reservoir from which the anti-anti-
Semitic syndrome must draw its publicity, and this was not to be
tolerated. The concentration camp commemoration groups shrieked
loudly and called for Eban’s resignation. Golda Meir, neither publicly
disavowing nor supporting her minister, refused to become involved
at that critical moment in the post-Nasser period on yet another front,
and as quoted, “‘swept the matter under the rug.”
It did not end with this. An opposition party motion in the Knes-
set, brought by Menachem Begin’s Gahal alignment and calling for
Eban’s resignation, failed only by a 27-22 margin. Such was the power
of the syndrome that an unusually large number of Labor party coali-
tion members abstained from voting in the face of the charge that their
Foreign Minister’s indifference was providing the Germans with the
excuse to discontinue other planned Nazi war trials. And this was
practically on the eve of a vital U.N. debate in which Eban was to
assume the leading role in presenting the Israeli position.
Because it sought to link Nazi war criminals with Nasser’s Egypt,
The Champagne Spy, *® the colorful story of the espionage work of top
Israeli agent Wolfgang Lotz, found ready publishers and received
favorable reviews. Operating within Cairo’s haut monde under the cover
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 471
of a wealthy German horsebreeder, Lotz was apprehended in February
1965 by Egyptian security officers after three years of sending back to
Israeli intelligence such invaluble information as the disposition of
Egyptian troops, which facilitated the 1967 attack. Lotz and his attrac-
tive wife, Waltrand, were arrested in February 1965 and became the
center of a sensational public-show trial involving certain leading per-
sonalities in Egypt.
According to Lotz’s interesting recital, he had encouraged the
rumor that he was an ex-SS officer hiding from arrest for war crimes,
which allegedly forthrightly opened doors for him in the Egyptian
capital, particularly among the influential circle of German business-
men and scientists there who were working on the development of
rockets and other lethal instruments. Described as nonfiction, it was
most difficult to know where the anecdote ended and the fiction began.
An Egyptian-Nazi conspiracy against “‘little” Israel was continuously
depicted.
When the Lotzes were apprehended after they made their way into
a top-secret post off the Cairo-Alexandria desert road where important
secret missiles were being tested and manufactured, a phone call to an
influential military friend freed them. The base commandant was
quoted apologizing as follows:
Of course, Sir, if you say so, I will not pry into your affairs. Yours is a secret
to be proud of. The SS, they tell me, was the créme de la créme of the German
Reich. I have read a great deal about it. We, too, will have a great Arab Reich
one day. Installations like our missile base here will help to destroy Israel soon.
Now you understand why we guard it so carefully.*7
Lotz’s artificial and stilted wording failed to bring to life an Egyptian
speaking this language. Whatever this book had to say in depicting
inefficient, corrupt, venal, and nepotistic Egyptians, no amount of
clichéd language could convincingly convey a portrait of Egyptians as
Nazi-loving bigots. This was just not in line with their character. But
to give his book the right flavor, the Egyptian prosecutor was alleged
to have quoted from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his summation
against spy Lotz, and every German introduced to the readers was
insinuated to be a Nazi or neo-Nazi. Apparently the author was not
acquainted with the large number of German non-Nazi scientists
whose talents the U.S. had most advantageously used.*8
Undeniably, one special objective of the persistent raking up of
the Nazi past has been Germany itself. Through constant harassment
Germans were not allowed to forget the Hitler days, and at all levels
472 THE COVER-OVER
of society they were placed under continued pressure to redeem them-
selves. The ritual visits of German leaders to Israel for the purpose of
unloading guilt, and the return visits of Israeli leaders to Germany for
purposes of piling on more guilt, have kept the pot boiling.
On an important trip to West Germany in 1970, lengthy articles
prominently placed with a photograph revealed that Foreign Minister
Abba Eban had proceeded directly from the airport to the site of the
Nazi Dachau crematory even before calling on his host, German Chan-
cellor Willi Brandt. Likewise, the energetic Chancellor, when he went
to Warsaw to sign the German-Polish treaty finalizing agreement on
the Oder-Niesse boundary, was shown by the press of the world kneel-
ing in front of the memorial to Jewish insurgents killed by the Nazis
in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
In 1973 the state visit of Brandt to Israel overflowed with emotion
and national significance from the moment the Israeli army band
struck up “Deutschland Uber Alles” through his departure four days
later. Wearing a dark blue suit and black homburg and accompanied
by Gideon Hausner, prosecutor at the Eichmann trial and Chairman
of the memorial complex, the Chancellor’s first official act was to visit
Yad Vashem, where he donned a yarmulka and laid a wreath. Brandt
climaxed his stay with the statement that “‘what was done cannot be
undone” but accepted the moral responsibility for Nazi genocide and
declared all-out support of Israel’s demand for direct negotiations and
her insistence there be no substantial changes in the border of the
Zionist state.
The enormous German sense of guilt, deeply felt by its postwar
leadership of Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, and Willy Brandt
found expression in the words of West German editor Axel Springer:
“Since the German Jewish Community no longer exists for any practi-
cal purposes, I believe it is our duty to make all possible efforts to
support Israel.’’49 With the payment of $3.9 billions in reparations and
in restitution, Germany was second only to the U.S. in keeping Israel
economically afloat.
In July 1975 Yitzhak Rabin became the first Israeli head of state
to visit Germany (the 1973 October war had spared a reluctant Golda
Meir this visit).5° Scarcely had he touched down at Frankfurt Airport
amidst tightest security, when he was whisked away by army helicopter
to visit the former death camp of Bergen-Belsen. (The same treatment
was accorded Moshe Dayan on his first visit to Germany in the fall of
1977.) A New York Times news story July 9, 1975, described his feelings:
“Israel’s first native-born premier, Mr. Rabin did not suffer directly
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 473
from the Nazis. But he has described himself as ‘an heir to the holo-
caust,’ and his aides say that he felt strongly that the first official visit
by an Israeli chief of government should begin with some recognition
of the past.”
Mrs. Rabin, who accompanied her husband, had been born in
Germany and had learned German as her first language. While Ber-
gen-Belsen today resembles more a park than “‘an apocalyptic vision
of a vast death camp” (language of the Times), the reality of what
happened among its green fields confronted the Rabins as they
stepped into the modern museum at the entrance. The Times related,
“On all the walls hung huge pictures of the faces and twisted bodies
of the camp’s thousands of victims, the faces standing out of the pic-
tures with eyes hollowed out by anguish.”
The 1976 visit to his German birthplace of Fiirth by Secretary
Kissinger, on which he was accompanied by his parents, his wife, his
brother, and his sister-in-law, provided the Times with a new opportu-
nity to spotlight attention on one of their favorite topics. Its account
seemed to go far out of its way to note that ‘“‘the anly synagogue which
the Nazis had not burned to the ground”’ was that which the Kissinger
family had attended, and to quote the wording of a plaque in Hebrew
and German inside the house of worship (which incidentally the Secre-
tary and his family did not visit) reading: “On the 22nd of March, 1942,
the last occupants of this building, 33 orphaned children, were sent to
their deaths in Izbica with their teacher and director, Dr. Isaak Hal-
lemann.’’5}
In West Germany today there are more than twenty-six million
men and women who were born after 1945, nearly half of the popula-
tion alive today. And most of these, according to Der Spiegel and other
sources, are beginning to question the awkward, special relationship
that their parents’ generation built with Israel. ‘After all,” said a
twenty-three-year-old student from Munich, “why should I feel guilty.
I was not born then. I had nothing to do with it.’”’ Most of that age
group feel that Germany’s present relationship should be replaced by
more normal balanced ties taking into account the Arab states. Virtu-
ally all Germans now insist that Germany has already paid sufficient
moral and financial reparations.
It is for these in Germany and the new generations all over the
world that the Zionist ploy must be advanced with gusto. “Hitler
.., “the Nazis... ,” “the six million. .. .’’ One by one these icons
have been and are today continuously invoked at any moment, into any
present-day question of Jewish or Israeli affairs.
474 THE COVER-OVER
Under the impact of the holocaust, even those like sixty-nine-year-
old French novelist Simone de Beauvoir, who moved in left-wing cir-
cles and would normally be alienated from Israel, assailed France’s
attitude toward Israel in an angry Jerusalem interview:
One of my reasons for coming here is to demonstrate the fact that some leftists
have a positive attitude towards Israel and support its right to exist like any
other nation. I was a witness to the Holocaust and its horrors and felt the lack
of a Jewish homeland. I saw this not merely as a Jewish problem, but as
something very personal.
As the one weapon that will never let “them” forget how ‘‘we”’
suffered, the holocaust continues to be immemorialized whenever Jews
will it, and their multifold actions, exacted as many pounds of flesh,
are never questioned. In 1976 the Endowment for the Humanities in
Washington announced a $76,544 grant for writing a ninety-minute
historical film to examine the experiences of the victims of the Nazi
occupation of Poland; in 1978 a youth grant was awarded to three
children of holocaust survivors to produce a documentary film on the
story of their own families.
To ingrain the State of Israel more deeply into the Jewish con-
sciousness, the International Association of Conservative Rabbis in-
corporated the events of the last 2,000 years in prayer. The death of
the six million as well as the establishment of Israel, the June war, and
the reunification of Jerusalem were all woven into the revised liturgy.
The greater the need for Israel to defend itself against pressure
to yield the occupied territories, the more the holocaust was pushed
before the American public. Two days before Begin’s March talks with
President Carter, the Times’ Op-Ed piece, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich,’’5?
illustrated with a swastika, described the takeover of a suburb of
Vienna, the burning of the synagogue, and other Nazi criminal actions.
At a time the Middle East was in flames over the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, the recital of this forty-year outdated, newsless, and un-
related incident could have had no other purpose than to prick the
world conscience anew.
Nothing, not even Begin’s first visit to the U.S. in the summer of
1977, was as widely heralded as the NBC 94-hour, four-episode se-
ries, ‘‘Holocaust.”’ For thirteen months the Brodkin-Green series
filmed in Vienna and funded by NBC and World Vision Enterprises®9
had been promoted as a rival to ‘‘Roots.” The story spanned 1933-45
and followed a Jewish doctor from his secure social and financial posi-
tion in Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto. The Mauthausen concentration
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 475
camp and Reinhold Heydrich’s office were used as locations to inject
the appropriate Nazi flavor.
Spread over three pages of TV Guide of April 15 was the article “A
Wreath on the Graves of the Six Million” to kick off the NBC telecast
April 17-20 of its series. The showings, originally scheduled for the
fall, were moved up to coincide with the start of Passover and, more
importantly, when disaffection with Begin was increasing in the U.S.
following his most unsympathetic visit with Carter in Washington and
the invasion of Lebanon. NBC’s publicity department grinded out
release after release during the series, claiming that 120 million had
seen one or more installments, outdrawing “Roots.”
The New York Times carried a full-page adverusement, “Six Million
Jews Who Were Not Intransigent,” drawing attention to the programs
and paid for by Americans for a Safe Israel.54 Taking up a good portion
of the page was the ever-familiar photo of the pitiful youngster with
his hands raised in the face of Nazi guns, and an awe-inspiring illustra-
tion of a burning crematorium. This page left no doubt as to the
purpose of the spotlight on the holocaust. While NBC and the Anti-
Defamation League were claiming merely to be imparting a history
lesson, the ad sponsors were laying down guidelines for the present
and the future: Support “Israel’s promise to the future, send this ad
to the President and Congress . . . post this in your synagogue or
church . . . place this ad in your local newspaper.”’
The Nielsen ratings revealed that the viewing audience of ‘“‘Holo-
caust”’ did not nearly match “Roots”; on the first night “Laverne and
Shirley,”’ ““Three’s Company,” and ““M.A.S.H.” outdrew the televised
dramatization of Jewish extermination.5> But network officials ex-
pressed satisfaction when Part Two outdrew ABC’s offbeat Western,
“‘A Man Called Horse.” The 370 phoned complaints (390 calls praised
the telecasts) “appeared to be part of an organized campaign,” said
NBC to the Times. 56
Viewers’ reaction could be summed up in the words of a fifty-year-
old Roman Catholic: ‘“‘As I watched the show, I wanted to turn it off
but couldn't. I was drawn to the story even though I am not sure if it
was a true enough portrayal.”” At Columbia University’s Furnald Dor-
mitory some students watched ‘Holocaust,’ while in one room they
waited for “Rhoda” to end before tuning in, and in another ‘“‘Holo-
caust”’ was tuned out at 9:00 p.m. in favor of the James Bond film on
ABC. Most metropolitan papers in New York and Washington inter-
viewed Jewish viewers, but some Jews as well as Christians complained
that the commercials—for cars, toothpaste, bandage strips, and soft
476 THE COVER-OVER
drinks—proved an absurd complement to the drama. For example,
immediately following a brutal rape scene involving a teenage girl, an
elated Bill Cosby came on to expound the benefits of driving a Ford.
This should not have upset any intelligent viewer. The whole
performance, after all, was nothing but one big commercial: “‘Let’s
support Israel or this will happen again.”’ As Near East Report phrased
it: “Anyone who watched NBC’s ‘Holocaust’ this week should have a
better understanding of Israel’s intense preoccupation with security.
The television drama and book by Gerald Green furnished six million
reasons why the Jewish state’s leaders insist upon defensible bor-
ders.’’57
The ensuing raging controversy among critics and viewers over
the artistic merits of “Holocaust” only served to spread the propa-
ganda message further. In the first of his two reviews, New York Times
columnist John J. O’Connor accused writer Green of ‘transforming
events and attitudes into a stereotypical collection of wooden charac-
ters and impossible coincidences.”’ He called the series “less of a noble
failure than a presumptuous venture.”’58
The Times reviewer, generally sympathetic to Zionist propaganda,
added: ‘In a master stroke of public relations, many religious groups,
Jewish and non-Jewish, were recruited to participate in related ‘educa-
tional’ projects effectively endorsing a program they hadn’t seen and
thus reducing the possibilities for their being critical. The program’s
content is indeed raising questions of an ‘educational’ nature. In
searching for an upbeat angle on the story of harrowing devastation,
the writer and producer settled on the Zionist cause and the founding
of Israel.’’59
Elie Wiesel joined O’Connor in assailing “the trivializing of the
holocaust” in his article spread over two pages of the Sunday New York
Times the day the miniseries commenced. In calling the film “untrue,
offensive, cheap—an insult to those who perished,’’® Wiesel brought
the dramatization to the attention of the 1.4 million readers, some of
whom by chance might have missed the enormous, continuous public-
ity buildup. And the two pages of letters, pro and con, that the Times
published two Sundays later helped realize Wiesel’s final words: ‘“The
holocaust must be remembered. But not as a show.”
To capture the attention of its more plebian readership, the New
York Daily News carried that same Sunday the first of a serialization of
the Green novel and a full-page story in the Leisure Section by its
long-time Zionist-oriented television editor, Kay Gardella,6! who
called the film “harrowing and riveting.” In her zeal to give the drama-
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 477
tization a boost, she let the cat out of the bag by unwittingly but
pointedly linking the television program to growing Palestinian sym-
pathy. And the more subtle Washington Post carried an historical piece,
“Prelude to Holocaust,” on 1% pages with pictures that Sunday in its
“Outlook” section.
After querying why television viewers should have been “ex-
periencing the pain of extensive treatment of the degradation, torture,
and killing of the Jews,” columnist William Buckley answered his own
question by noting that there “was no way of undoing retroactively
what the Nazis did.” He then courageously made the point that “‘inno-
cent Lebanese were killed by the survivors of the holocaust in the
recent operations against Lebanon. So why interest oneself in the
wholesale massacres of the past?’’62
This writer and other critics were also bothered by the ‘‘Holo-
caust”’ denigration of the Christian church and total indifference to the
sufferings of others. Dr. Norbert Capek, minister of the world’s largest
Unitarian church, and 1,000 Catholic priests were shot at Dachau.
Eastern Rite Bishop Thomas V. Dolinay boldly labeled the series
“clever propaganda” in the June 8 Wanderer.
Following an initial 450,000 printing, Bantam sent the Green
book back to the presses eight times, the ninth printing just before the
series opened; the imprint total was just over 12 million. Copies were
even widely used in lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill to help congress-
men who were wavering on the question of death planes for Israel,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Rival networks picked up on NBC’s theme. For a full week of
afternoon movies ABC-TV Channel 7 showed Leon Uris’s “QB VII”
and ‘‘Exodus”’ so that the spirit of the holocaust would not be entirely
lost. To CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” Mike Wallace brought on April 16 the
“Annual Reunion of Auschwitz Survivors,” featuring actress-author
Fania Fenelon, to whom the Times also gave a half-page story. (There
is even a World Federation of the Bergen-Belsen Associations.)
To thrust the ultimate weapon, “You are either for the Jews and
Israel or you are for Hitler” at every possible American, the Anti-
Defamation League's sixteen-page ““The Record: The Holocaust in
History, 1933-1945” was distributed to some twenty million readers
as an advertising supplement across the country. The National Council
for the Social Studies in Washington and a staff of ten cooperated in
assembling the detailed highlights of Nazi genocide and whole kit of
the holocaust saga. Articles included were Otto Tolschus’s ‘““The Pro-
grom: Kristallnacht” (night of broken glass), Wiesel’s “Teaching the
478 THE COVER-OVER
’
Holocaust,”’ author and scriptwriter Green’s comments on his NBC
series, and such ‘“‘current’”’ news pieces as “Eichmann Directs Jewish
Extermination,” “Hitler Hints at New Attacks on Jews,” and ‘‘Goeb-
bels Warning to the Jews.”” Among the photographs were those of
Anne Frank, the famed Life magazine Margaret Bourke-White’s ‘“The
Living Dead at Buchenwald,” and the Nuremberg war criminals in the
docket. The myth of Albert Einstein’s support of Zionist nationalism
was portrayed in a piece on the “Physicist at Sixty,”’ with a picture of
the doctor, his wife, and daughter swearing allegiance receiving their
American citizenship papers.
The most complete listing of source materials closed this ‘‘educa-
tional guide,” which had been inserted into the regular sections of
leading dailies and weeklies through the generosity of leading Zionists
and advertisers—with Uncle Sam’s tax-free dollars. In some cities a
full-page advertisement explained that it was ‘‘being brought as a
public service of this newspaper in conjunction with the Anti-Defama-
tion League,” but included three pages of ads to cover the cost of the
paper’s “generosity.”
The week of the “Holocaust” series Christians were enlisted to
wear the Nazi yellow badges. Sunday services expressing solidarity
with Jews were held in many churches, and the New York Post of April
18 showed Michael Moriarty, who played the role of Nazi SS officer
Eric Dorf in the miniseries, leaving Riverside Church with the Rever-
end Dr. William Sloane Coffin.
With the help of glowing press releases from the National Educa-
tion Association in praise of the NBC series and the “educational
follow-up,” the entre American public school system was reached. In
March NEA Executive Director Terry Herndon had participated with
religious leaders and educators on a national televised symposium,
‘“*Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” which was fed by closed circuit to NBC
affiliates for broadcast at their convenience as promotion for the min-
iseries. Nearly one million study guides prepared by the Anti-Defama-
tion League, the National Council of Churches, the American Federa-
tion of Teachers, and NBC were distributed to schools and religious
groups to aid the students as they watched ‘“‘Holocaust.”” Schools were
also sent an NEA Rozanne Weissman feature declaring the holocaust
to be ‘an ideal ninth grade unit for teaching persecution and preju-
dice.”’ To boot, Health, Education and Welfare Deputy Commissioner
of the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education Thomas Minter
pledged more coordinated federal funding for teaching about the
holocaust.
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 479
Europe was not neglected either. International distribution rights
for “Holocaust” were sold to ten countries including West Germany,
where the two national channels competed for the purchase. But in
Israel where ever financially alert Knesset Member Shmuel Flatto-
Sharon had bought the rights, a debate over the sensitivity of the
subject held up production.
To keep the spirit of the holocaust ablaze, the 35th anniversary of
the Warsaw ghetto uprising was commemorated on April 30 with
Collective Remembrance Day, marked by front-page coverage and
large newspaper advertisements. Guest speakers at Temple Emanu-El
included Elie Wiesel, the Israeli Ambassador, the Governor of New
York, and the Mayor. As New York’s Fifth Avenue synagogue was
filing up, the New York Times’ good music FM radio station WQXR
shifted from the classical music of Verdi to a program of “holocaust
music,”’ including the rendition by Jan Peerce and others of such songs
as “Our Town Is Burning.’’63
The public school system in the U.S. has been gradually pene-
trated by the holocaust. The front page of the second section of the
New York Times on January 12, 1976, carried a six-column story headed
“Students at Teaneck High Agonize Over the Holocaust.’ Reprinted
once again was Bourke-White’s famed Buchenwald photo, which had
first appeared in Life magazine and Time some thirty-one years previ-
ously and innumerable times since. The article, replete with many
references to the “‘six million,” indicated that the ADL, in cooperation
with the New Jersey Education Association, was sponsoring pilot pro-
jects to raise more than $1 million to make available books, clippings,
films, and other teaching materials to high schools and junior high
schools in many parts of the country to emphasize the holocaust and
its meaning. The inspiration for this program had come from a Great
Barrington, Massachusetts, high school where the holocaust was being
studied in the classroom.
In an unprecedented step the New York City Board of Education
designated the week of April 18-22, 1977, as the first annual ‘Jewish
Heritage Week” for all students, Jews and non-Jews, which was kicked
off with celebrations in the districts, schools, departments, and class-
rooms and highlighted “Solidarity for Soviet Jewry,” “Israeli Indepen-
dence Day,” and the “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” Included in material
prepared by the Jewish Labor Committee and distributed in “‘instruc-
tor kits” at a teachers’ workshop promoting the week on the previous
Tuesday were pamphlets, including a bibliography of Zionist books
and a catalog of audiovisual materials, both of which were saturated
480 THE COVER-OVER
with the story of the holocaust, the history of Masada,®4 and the film
Anti-Semitism in America. ®°
Teachers were advised to promote appearances of concentration
camp survivors at classroom meetings. The students were told that the
three major concerns of American Jews were ‘‘the holocaust, Soviet
Jewry, and the security of Israel.”
The following October a course of study on the holocaust was
introduced by the New York Board of Education with the hope it would
be made mandatory in all of the city high schools the following year.
The 461-page curriculum, “The Holocaust, a Study of Genocide,”
included extracts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, pictures and descriptions
of the death camps, poems, plays, maps, and programs for class discus-
sion. The course was to supplant, said Board President Steven R.
Aiello, the brief discussion of Nazi genocide taken up in history and
other social studies courses. His goal was ‘‘at least two weeks of man-
datory Holocaust Study” after the initial year’s experimentation (70
percent of the students in New York City schools are black or His-
panic).
In a three-column Times Letter to the Editor,®7 given the bold
heading ‘‘Holocaust Study: The Intent Is to Inform, Not Inflame,”
Board of Education Chancellor Irving Anker defended the course as
“part of history” from which an understanding of “prejudice and
racism” will help ‘“‘young people to know and respect one another’s
differences.’ The Chancellor stated that it was ‘‘never the intention to
pass over the sufferings of other groups,” but no plans were an-
nounced for parallel courses.
The Philadelphia secondary public schools went one step further
than New York. Over the rigorous protest of the city’s largest German-
American organization, the school system announced in September
1977 “plans to require virtually all students in secondary public
schools to study the Holocaust of the Jews in Nazi Germany.’’68 The
program, begun in some schools the year before, was to be expanded
and introduced as part of a required world history course in the ninth
grade in the city’s twenty-six senior high schools and forty junior high
schools.
The Chairman of the German-American Committee of Greater
Philadelphia protested that the 127-page curriculum guide gave the
impression “that the Jews were the only ones who suffered to any great
extent and that the Nazis were the only ones who committed crimes
against humanity.”” But this made little impact on Dr. Franklin H.
Littell, Chairman of the religion department at Temple University,
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 48]
who developed the program after he had directed and participated in
national conferences on the holocaust.
For the benefit of high school history textbooks and college texts,
whose treatment of Nazism was found to be “‘brief, bland, superficial,
and misleading,” ADL pamphleteer Henry Friedlander wrote a
lengthy tome, and ADL subsidized author Milton Meltzer’s 217-page
book Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust,®® published by Harper &
Row and reviewed by the Times Sunday Book Review.7° Widely dis-
tributed in all schools and colleges was the six-page ADL bulletin
listing the publications and audiovisual material available on the holo-
caust. In addition to making it possible for major publishing houses to
put out new tomes, the organization made available books already
published. The cultists prepared new anthologies-studies on Auschwitz,
the Eichmann Tnal, The Third Reich in Perspective, and The Anatomy of
Nazism. Their selected Reading List on the holocaust contained seven-
teen well-known titles.
Whenever all else failed and the Zionist juggernaut seemed to be
stalled, Nazi pursuer Simon Wiesenthal was brought into the limelight.
Although Israel has proclaimed a new relationship with West Ger-
many, she has not been adverse to accepting any propaganda gains
that might be reaped from the James Bond ‘‘007”’-like efforts of man-
hunter Wiesenthal, whose continuing search for Nazis spasmodically
erupts into healthy media coverage. ‘““The Nazi Hunter’’ was the sub-
ject of a June 19, 1977, interview on CBS’s ‘“Who’s Who” on “Sixty
Minutes,” and a vast field was opened by introducing Dan Rather to
the notorious anti-Nazi.
With the announcement of a new series of children’s books to be
written by Wiesenthal for Raintree Publishers in Milwaukee, the very
young were not to be given fairy tales—or were they?—but recitals of
the Wiesenthal adventures in tracking down war criminals. The first
was to deal with his search for the Gestapo police officer in occupied
Holland who arrested Anne Frank, the overpublicized teenager whose
diary (in twenty-six editions) told of Jewish persecution in Holland
under the Nazis, but the veracity of whose saga has since come under
serious question.7!
Another Wiesenthal horror book was to describe the hunt for Adolf
Eichmann, who was executed by Israel in 1961 for his war crimes. “I
want to make this story alive so a young man will read and understandit,”
said author Wiesenthal. “It is something for society—for the new gen-
eration.”” Who but the Zionists would try to emulate the Nazis by cap-
turing the minds of the young. Happily, the project was dropped.”
482 THE COVER-OVER
Wiesenthal’s books were scarcely the first on the holocaust for the
young. On one Sunday in November 197273 Elie Wiesel, then recently
appointed Professor of Jewish Studies at City University of New York,
reviewed seven books intended to add to the traumas and complexes
of young readers by acquainting them with one aspect or another of
the Hitler period. The books were described as ‘‘valuable, moving, and
perceptible” to one degree or another. The review was illustrated with
the oft-repeated 1943 photo of women and children being arrested in
Warsaw.
Congress joined the act, too. Spearheaded by Representatives
Joshua Eilberg, Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on
Immigration, and Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, both Israel-First-
ers, the publicity war against Hitler continued thirty-one years after the
fact. The front page of the October 3, 1976, New York Times carried the
story: ‘‘Nazi War Criminal Suspects in US Face Deportation as Drive
Widens.” Some of the “alleged” criminals had been brought to the
country by U.S. intelligence agents to assist in the development of such
scientific ventures as the space capsule.
But with the cooperation of the anti-anti-Semitic cult, Wiesenthal
and Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Nazi war-crimes documentation
center in Haifa, Israel, helped inspire a “New US Nazi Hunt,” as the
Times7* announced in a half-page Sunday “‘Week in Review” spread
featured by the well-known, oft-reprinted photo of the Nazi defend-
ants in the dock, at the 1946 Nuremberg war-crimes trial. By 1976
there were pending investigations by the U.S. Immigration and Natu-
ralization Service of some eighty-five naturalized American citizens
and resident aliens for alleged atrocities in Nazi-occupied Europe and
illegal entrance into the U.S. after the war. Cases involving three
elderly men, two Latvians and a Lithuanian, and Rumanian Orthodox
Bishop of America Valerian D. Trifa, received widespread publicity.
The television programs “Sixty Minutes,” “A.M. America,” and the
David Suskind show devoted extensive ume to the war-crimes issue
despite the fact that as the cameras showed, there was a definite lack
of public enthusiasm for this theme. Neighbors of one of the Nazis
being “‘pursued,” Boleslaus Maikovskis, felt he should be left alone at
this stage of his life. (The 73-year-old Latvian was shot, but not fatally,
on August 4, 1978, ostensibly by the JDL.) But such opinions were, of
course, totally ignored by the media’s compulsive attraction to this
subject, and nothing could halt the Nazi hunter’s successful quest for
funds for the new Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in
California.75
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 483
On one occasion when hard-pressed in diplomatic jousting, Prime
Minister Meir audaciously declared: “You did nothing to save Jews in
the holocaust. You shall not preach to us now.’’76 This kind of emo-
tional blackmail is apt to be used by anyone and to appear any place.
The New York Review of Books, for instance, has been recognized as one
of the few influential publications that has given some small space to
dissenting views on the Middle East—albeit from the Left. I. F. Stone
and Noam Chomsky, in particular, have been allowed in recent years
to present most controversial positions on the Palestinians. Yet even
in this magazine, a long piece, ‘““Among the Israelis,”’?? by Stephen
Spender, the noted British poet and critic, was climaxed with a moving
but emotional account of his visit to Yad Vashem. Coming at the end
of Spender’s article, this served to wipe away the pros and cons that
he had evidently been trying to balance in the course of his writing.
All that was left was the black slate of the concentration camps. Against
such atrocities, what chance had the Palestinians or the arguments of
“the Arabists’’78 with whom Spender passed much of his time in the
Holy Land.
No one disputes that the Nazi era was one of the lowest points,
if not the lowest, in human civilization. It must not be overlooked,
however, that millions of people other than Jews perished, and for
these the bell does not seem to have been tolling. And it is not out of
line to inquire of the cultists, these people so intent on keeping this
issue of the ‘‘six million” alive, whether they have ever given any
consideration to the Zionist role in the deaths of these “six million”
victims? In discussing alleged Vatican indifference to the holocaust,
the Jewish Observer, the organ of the Orthodox Agadath Israel of Amer-
ica, pointed out a Jewish parallel:
We are forced to realize with deep pain that this passivity had its echo on the
Jewish scene, too. ... There was not only the intrusion of politics into various
aspects of the rescue efforts that were made. The writings . . . clearly prove
that actual rescue opportunities were neglected or even blocked because they
did not fit in with the plans of the Zionist leadership to force a showdown over
the Israel state in the making.79
Ben Hecht’s fully documented Perfidy®® blatantly exposed the ex-
tent to which Zionists cooperated in the annihilation of their fellow
Jews. This early supporter of Jewish statehood in Palestine described
the criminal libel suit brought against Malkiel Greenwald for charging
high-ranking Israeli official Rudolf Kastner of collaboration in the
responsibility for the slaughter of Hungary’s one million Jews. ““Tim-
484 THE COVER-OVER
orous Jewish lodge members in Zion, London and America . . . these
Zionist leaders who let their six million kinsmen burn, choke, hang
without protest, with indifference” is Hecht’s description of the reac-
tion of Jewish leaders who, he insisted, knew in advance the timing,
method, and place of the impending annihilation, but refused to warn
the victims—out of greater concern for the creation of a political state
than for saving Jewish lives.’’§!
Many of the Hungarian Jews, according to Hecht, were but three
miles from the Rumanian border and were guarded by a very small
Nazi military contingent as they were fed reassurances by Zionist
leader Kastner up to the very moment they were shipped to the crema-
toria. He had intimate ties with such Nazis as Eichmann, Himmler, and
their aide Lieutenant General Kurt Becher, in whose behalf Kastner
later intervened to save from conviction at Nuremberg. But when Joel
Kastner was permitted to come out of the Hungarian hell as an inter-
mediary from the Nazis with a barter deal of trucks for human lives,
President-to-be of Israel Chaim Weizmann refused to see him for
weeks, and Kastner then permitted the deal to fall through.
Sixteen years later, The Holocaust Victims®? by Rabbi Moshe Schon-
feld corroborated Hecht’s evidence that the Zionist leadership was
concerned only in the creation of a state, “not the saving of Jewish
lives,” and had permitted thousands of their own people to go to their
death so that they might advance political goals. Photostated docu-
ments and copies of letters, written by some of those accused by Rabbi
Schonfeld, supported the charge of betrayal against Weizmann, Rabbi
Stephen Wise, and Jewish Agency Chairman Yitzhak Greenbaum, to
whom the Jewish slaughter only meant further emphasis on their insis-
tence that the creation of a Zionist state in Israel was the only hope for
surviving Jews.
Greenbaum was quoted as having said, “One cow in Palestine is
worth more than all the Jews in Poland.” Wise was alleged to have
lobbied to make sure that relief packages of food were denied to
starving Jews in Europe so that they would be forced to seek Zionist
goals. At a time when money was needed to save Eastern European
Jews, Greenbaum wrote, ““‘When they asked me, couldn’t you give
money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews
in Europe, I said ‘No,’ and I say again ‘No!’ One should resist this wave
which pushes Zionist activities, i.e. the creation of a state, to secondary
importance.”
In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,®3 Hannah Arendt verified the
intimate connection, Lucy Dawidowicz notwithstanding, between the
The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires 485
Nazis and Zionist leaders, who were the only Jews in the early months
of the Hitler regime to associate with the German authorities and who
used their position to discredit anti- and non-Zionist Jews. According
to Arendt, they urged the adoption of the slogan, “Wear the yellow
star with pride” to end Jewish assimilation and to encourage the Nazis
to send the Jews to Palestine. A secret agreement was reached between
the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Nazi authorities to assist in Zionist
plans for illegal immigration into the Holy Land, toward which end
even the Gestapo and the SS were willing to cooperate, for this was
another method of ridding Europe of the ‘“‘hated Jews.”
The cumulative effect of keeping the holocaust in the forefront of
the entertainment, cultural, and political worlds can only be under-
stood when one tries to speak on the Middle East conflict before even
as impartial an audience as the American Humanist Society and emo-
tional, near-crazed partisans wildly interrupt: ‘“‘What about the six
million?” To Israelis and their nationalist-minded American followers,
the deaths of no one else counted.84 Hemingway’s advice to F. Scott
Fitzgerald meant absolutely nothing: “We are all tragic figures . . .
when you receive a damned hurt use it. . . . don’t cheat with it.” Yad
Vashem and the holocaust keep remembrance of the tragic past aglow,
blot out the growing Palestinian shadow and help hold Christians in
bondage.
XIV__—‘ Christians in Bondage
It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do
what’s required.
—Winston Churchill
If all but a very few exceptional individuals have been silenced by the
image of the Nazi holocaust and the threat of being called anti-Semitic,
there still ought to have been one voice raised in conscientious protest
—that of Christianity. Christians should be able to disentangle the
distortions from the truth, and they ought to act without fear. After all,
in sheer numbers alone Christians far surpass the Jews of this world,
and granted that Jews hold a disproportionate number of positions of
influence, Christians still hold many more.
The Christian voice, moreover, has become increasingly out-
spoken in recent years on social and economic issues, and at times even
political affairs, from which the Christian church previously long shied
away. While the Palestine question calls for a political solution, it is of
course primarily a human problem. The dispersion into exile or sub-
jection to alien domination of Palestinian Arabs, including many Chris-
tians,! poses an inescapable moral issue for the church, just as did
America’s treatment of its own minorities. Why have we not heard
from this large and otherwise aware Christian presence?
Quite aside from general mora! principles, Christians have a real
and personal reason for wanting to establish the truth in this matter.
The Christian experience, historically and otherwise, is most relevant
to many of the matters under discussion: Palestine is also the “Holy
Land” of the Christians, and Jerusalem is their Holy City, too. Who
more than Christians should have a deep interest in airing the pros and
cons of the conflict for control of the Holy Land, and should be ex-
pected to speak out?
486
Christians in Bondage 487
But it is the irrefutability of the holocaust as a fact of the past that
has hamstrung the Christian world at large, and American Christians
in particular. The insinuations of anti-Semitism, backed up by threats,
are manipulated to co-opt the Christian and to tie him up, signed,
sealed, and delivered, for the Zionist-Israelist claque.
Christians—Protestants and Catholics alike, and from all denomi-
nations, even those who prefer not to socialize with Jews?—have lent
their voices to the Zionist cause in varied ways. Sometimes it may be
quite explicit and open, as in the case of the City Editor of a daily
Rochester, New York, newspaper, who when confronted with the
charge of bias in reporting said: ‘‘Sure, we feel sorry for the Jews after
what happened to them. These people have to have a home of their
own.”
Sometimes this support even gets out of control. In 1969 Aus-
tralian Christian fundamentalist Michael Rohan set fire to the Al-Aqsa
Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest places, in occupied Arab Jerusalem.
The frenzied arsonist had been welcomed to and had lived in an Israeli
kibbutz, as he rabidly preached: “There must be no mosques in this
land so that the Jews may return to rebuild their temple and the final
coming of Christ may be realized.”
Fundamentalist Christians are victimized by the mistaken equa-
tion of modern political Israel with biblical spiritual Israel. They
viewed with favor the establishment of the state as part of God’s plan,
the necessary precursor to the second coming of Jesus and the end of
the world. Particularly in the Bible Belt, these fundamentalists have
given fullest support to Israel in its conflict with the Arabs. This bibli-
cal influence undoubtedly played no small part in molding born-again
Baptist Jimmy Carter’s attitudes toward the Middle East.
A full-page New York Times advertisement of July 1, 1976, to which
105 fundamentalist churches throughout the country affixed their sig-
natures, asserted that anyone opposing the Zionist claim to the land
of Israel “isn’t just fighting Israel, but God and time itself.”’
During the diplomatic jockeying over the Geneva Conference, this
fundamentalist theme was picked up in two further full-page New York
Times ads in November 1977. One expressed ‘Evangelicals’ Concern
for Israel” and was signed by actor Pat Boone, past President of the
National Association of Evangelicals Hudson Armerding, Trinity Col-
lege President Harry Evans, President-elect of the Institute of Holy
Land Studies in Jerusalem and Coordinator President Emeritus of the
Evangelical Free Church of America Arnold T. Olson, and President
of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem George Giacumakis,
488 THE COVER-OVER
Jr. The other, captioned “Fundamentalists Vote with Israel,” was paid
for, among others, by President of International Council of Christian
Churches Carl McIntyre, General Secretary of the Independent Board
for Presbyterian Home Missions Jack Weisenfeld, and General Secre-
tary of American Christian Action Committee Wes Auger.‘ Similar
statements of unstinting loyalty to Zionist Israel were expressed by the
Southern Baptist Convention.
At times support given to the Zionist-Israelist cause is indirect and
subtle, if not insidious, but certainly no less influential in the way it
permeates Christian outlets.5 The two million monthly copies of Her-
bert W. Armstrong’s Plain Truth are filled with predictions of the future
based on biblical interpretation favoring the return of Jews to Pales-
tine. Oral Roberts’ books and telecasts, reaching millions, have been
devoted to the same end. The Late Great Planet Earth,® with its 47
printings in paperback within seven years through 1977, worked the
Israeli state into the center of its apocalyptic fundamentalist-scenario
and converted thousands of semi-literate Christians of Bible Belt
America into rabid Zionists. ““As Armegeddon,” readers are told, “be-
gins with the invasion of Israel by the Arabs and the Russian confeder-
acy, and their consequent swift destruction, the greatest period of
Jewish conversion to the true Messiah will begin.” The movie of the
same title added further adherents.
A particularly vivid influence has been the beautiful film made by
Billy Graham, His Land, which has been viewed by fifteen million
across this country and Canada. This superbly photographed visual
survey of the land of Israel, accompanied by narrated biblical prophe-
cies and religious songs, celebrates the fact that God has kept His word
to the Jew, that He has fulfilled prophetic promises’ given 2,500 years
ago by restoring Israel in the 20th century. As the film’s advertise-
ments put it: “Israel today is a living testimony to the words of the Old
Testament prophets, and a portent of the triumphant return of Christ.
The rebirth of the State of Israel by United Nations decree on Novem-
ber 29, 1947, is by far the greatest biblical event that has taken place
during the twentieth century.”
But as Dr. J. Calvin Keene, former head of the Department of
Religion at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, pointed out,
“the scriptural passages of supposed prediction are not numerous and
upon a close inspection are found to be either very vague in their
meaning and consequently unconvincing, or predictions of events
which did in fact occur soon after the time of writing, or passages lifted
out of context, made to imply ideas not found in their original set-
tings.’’8
Christians in Bondage 489
It should be made clear that His Land was not a scholarly disserta-
tion. It did not develop its theme as a thesis supported by a reasoned
exposition of evidence. The literal interpretation of prophecy, and the
Christian’s ability to identify events of modern history as prophecy
fulfilled, were simply assumed to be true. It was taken for granted that
the modern State of Israel zs ancient Israel restored according to God's
prophetic word. There was no hint that many Christians either totally
disagree or have serious problems with this interpretation, no allusion
to the possibility that other valid interpretations of prophecy and ex-
planations for the formation of modern Israel may exist.
For example, Paul Jersild, writing in the May 10, 1975, issue of the
Jesuit publication America, stated:
To create a “theological politics” and a nation of ‘‘chosen people” based on
ethnic and religious factors is to create an immediate problem in any nation’s
relations with its neighbors. The Israeli claim to Palestine must be judged on
the political and humanitarian realities of the 20th century, without reference
to the history that took place several millenia ago. To refer to the Bible in any
prescriptive sense in settling this problem is an unhistorical and wresponsible use
of scripture. [Italics added.]9
However, the reason that a film such as His Land appealed to so
many Christians was that it provided a set of easy, clear answers in an
area where there appeared to be only problems and question marks.
Most of us are at least superficially familiar with modern Israel from
the news media. All of us have been bombarded almost daily for nearly
thirty years with news about the solution-defying confrontation of
Israel with the Arabs. Yet a clear Christian position on this modern
crisis has been largely absent. So, for many, His Land provided the first
and only Christian explanation for the creation of modern Israel. And
such a beautiful explanation, so simple: God’s word come true! God
has kept his promises after 2,500 years! One could walk away satisfied
from a picture like that.
Although not a film about the political issues in which modern
Israel is involved, it did manage to establish a correlation between
biblical prophecy and 20th-century political history. It did refer to
Israel’s restoration of the land, her building of modern cities, and
her reconquest of the site of the Temple in the 1967 war. For the
rest, the film was silent about Israel’s history in the Middle East.
But because the identification of prophecy with modern events was
made, the silence about most events and the selection of only a few
resulted in a dangerously slanted portrayal of Israel. For example,
the omission of the fact that the foundation of Israel in 1947 was
490 THE COVER-OVER
accompanied by vehement Arab opposition (no Jordanian opposi-
tion to the conquest of the Holy City was shown or mentioned) left
the audience with the impression that today’s opposition by the
Arab world must be unwarranted. To the viewer Israel was justified
and blameless, and Arab claims on Palestine were not even worth
mentioning.
The moral issues involved were totally disregarded. The Old Tes-
tament unmistakably teaches that no Jewish return save in righteous-
ness may be countenanced and, as the true Orthodox insist, it may be
only Messiah-led.
The film, as Professor Bert De Vries of Calvin College in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, pointed out in his lengthy study! of the Graham
film, advances the widely accepted American argument that “‘the right
of ownership to the piece of property is based on industrious and
correct maintenance of that property.”’ The colonialist reasoning goes
something like this: “The Arabs had their chance. They owned the
land for centuries and ruined it completely. They even were incompe-
tent and slothful stewards. Now the Israelis have transformed it from
a desert to a garden. The Arabs failed; the Israelis succeeded. There-
fore the Israelis have earned the right to the land.” De Vries’ answer
to this kind of reasoning: ‘Should I hand over the keys of my Oldsmo-
bile to someone else just because I allowed it to get rusty and I failed
to fix the dents in the fenders?”
The assumption that Israel today is a manifestation of biblical
prophecy was not an invention of Billy Graham, but there is no de-
nying that such a film has brilliantly exploited this aspect of Jewish-
American relations. The fact that so many of the Zionists who do
the exploiting are atheists and agnostics indicates the cynicism with
which they both manipulate the naive religiosity of fundamentalist
Christians to promote Israeli political nationalism and almost wel-
come its basically anti-Judaistic aim to convert all Jews to Christian-
ity.
Zionist groups and their allied forces have gone far beyond films
in their untiring efforts. From the outset of Israel’s creation, they have
not been satisfied merely to exert pressure upon Christian lay and
clerical organizations, but rather have been intent on crushing any
budding opposition in the Christian community. This they have been
able to accomplish by means of meticulous organization and an alert,
ubiquitous intelligence service. On August 10, 1960, Rabbi Marc
Tanenbaum, then Executive Director of the Synagogue Council of
America, in a “Confidential, not for Publication or Attribution”’ mem-
Chnstians in Bondage 491
orandum to Officers and Executive Directors of the Council of Jewish
Federation and Welfare Funds (his financial backers), summarized the
organization’s program “‘in interpreting to key leaders in the national
Catholic and Protestant church federations the religious aspect of
American Jewry’s relationship to the people and the State of Israel.”
Referring to “this unpublicized chapter in Christian and Jewish
relations,’ Tanenbaum claimed the following accomplishments over a
two-year period:
1) “Forced the adoption by the National Council of Churches, represent-
ing 39 major Protestant denominations, of its first resolution acknowledg-
ing the de facto and de jure existence of the state of Israel and calling upon
its 145,000 member churches and 900 local councils of churches to help
safeguard the security of Israel and to assure its present fronters.”
2) Through ‘day-to-day contacts prevailed upon” the Council, which had
begun to disseminate documents on the Arab refugees as part of their
contribution to World Refugee Year, to distribute to all local councils and
individual churches a memorandum, including a bibliography on the Middle
East prepared by the Synagogue Council, “explaining the spiritual ties
which link American Jews to the State of Israel and counteracting charges
of dual loyalties.” Exerted pressure simultaneously upon the Council to
cease all efforts in behalf of the Arab refugees.
3) Helped block a resolution pending before the Board of Directors of
the U.S. Committee for Refugees that called for a study of the Arab refugee
question.
4) Won agreement from the National Council of Churches to table the
strong report growing out of the Beirut Conference on Refugees, which
“reflected the anti-Israel and pro-Arab sympathies of the Foreign Missions
within the National Council of Churches and the World Council of
Churches.”
5) Intervened and testified before the House Foreign Affairs and Senate
Foreign Relations Committees in favor of maintaining the status quo for
Mutual Security Act grants to Israel when these in April 1959 were threat-
ened with drastic reduction.
6) Protested use of UNESCO funds to help Arab teachers in refugee
camps because they “taught their students hatred of Israel.” Won adoption
of a resolution denying funds to any member nation that “exploits these
funds to create tensions and animosities against each other.”
7) Stimulated a ‘Human Relations Project” in Catholic elementary high
schools that was conducted by a Jewish scholar with a background in Catho-
lic theology ‘“‘to help Catholic students achieve a better image of the Jew,
his religion, and his relationship to the State of Israel.”
8) Brought about the delivery by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of a paper,
“Judaism, Zionism and Israel,” before both the World and National Coun-
492 THE COVER-OVER
cils of Churches, which was later published in book form as The Zionsst Idea.
9) Blocked a World Council of Churches plan to study the question of
religious liberty in the State of Israel.
10) Persuaded Dr. E. T. Dahlberg, the President of the National Council
of Churches, to include Israel in his tour of world refugee camps, and had
the Chief Rabbi of Israel and foreign ministry officials receive and talk to
him.
11) Guided the National Council of Churches in preparing for distribu-
tion through the council educational material designed for “the average
church member interpreting the Jewish community in the U.S., its relation-
ship to Israel, etc.”
In sending out this confidential memorandum, the active rabbi
propagandist was not afraid to attribute much of the success of the
Synagogue Council program “‘to the annual allocations received from
various Jewish welfare funds and federations in the United States” —
an admission that tax-free “religious and eleemosynary’ American
dollars had been used to propagandize the cause of Israel to the most
potent Christian religious groups in the country.
Tanenbaum’s net came up with his biggest Christian ‘‘fish’’ when
he and Billy Graham made common cause in the fall of 1977 after
Graham had been in close contact with another born-again Christian,
Jimmy Carter. During the administration’s first moral crisis, according
to columnists Evans and Novak,!! the President sought Graham’s ad-
vice and in turn was strongly cautioned against permitting Moscow
back into the Middle East diplomatic negotiations. To block such a
move, an Evangelical-Zionist coalition was formed, with Graham giv-
ing the keynote address at the American Jewish Committee’s National
Executive Council meeting in Atlanta. The call for rededication to the
existence of Israel and the end to talk of a Palestinian state made no
mention of the implied secret agreement: political support for Zionism
in return for Jewish conversions to Christianity.
Main-line Protestants have been more reluctant than their funda-
mentalist brethren to view the Middle East conflict through Zionist-
tinted lenses. In fact, the National Council of Churches has been at
times condemned by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B'rith for
“pronounced anti-Israel prejudice.””’ However, even the Protestant
Episcopal church has had some of its leaders publicly espouse pro-
Zionist causes—e.g., Bishops John H. Burt of Ohio, Jonathan Sherman
of Long Island, and the late somewhat eccentric James A. Pike of
California, who ended his life by walking out into the Judaean wilder-
ness.
Chnstians in Bondage 493
This hymn, often included in Easter Sunday services, is a reminder
of the manner in which the sanctity of the State of Israel receives
Episcopal approbation:
Come ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness
God has brought his Israel
Into joy from sadness.
Loose from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke,
Jacob’s sons and daughters
Led them with unmoistened foot
Through the Red Sea waters.!?
The choice of “Israel” as the name for the new state was no
accident. It further linked religion and nation; for the world, Israel, is
irrevocably bound to the prayers recited on all occasions in the syna-
gogues of all Jewish sects, as it is often in certain Christian churches.
It is fair to say that American Catholics look at the Middle East in
the same manner as Americans in general look at the area, namely,
with a marked partiality for Israel. This bias is also a product of the cult
of anti-anti-Semitism, many such people being acutely sensitive to
Jewish pressures and reluctant to be called anti-Semitic. At the outset
of the Palestine question, because of their strong ties with the Holy
Land, the Catholics in the U.S., as well as at the Vatican (which has
never recognized the State of Israel), had been more critical of the
Zionist coup in establishing its state and had continued to give tangible
humanitarian support to help alleviate the plight of the Palestinian
refugees. But the Catholic leadership soon found it impolitic to es-
pouse the Palestinian cause, even if their efforts were confined to the
displaced Palestinians. The full brunt of the Zionist persuasion was
directed toward them as they were importuned both to accept as a fact
the special “religious” link between American Jews and the State of
Israel and also to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
The fear in Catholic circles of being labeled anti-Semitic became
an even more pulverizing weapon after the issuance of the declaration
of Vatican II. The Council’s Declaration on the Jews, adopted in 1965
by a vote of 2,221 to 88, repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt
for the death of Jesus and rejected anti-Semitism. Rabbi Tanenbaum
continued to browbeat Catholics for failing to educate their parishion-
ers with his interpretation of the Vatican Council’s declaration equat-
ing repudiation of the canard of Jewish responsibility for the death of
Jesus with a blanket immunity for any criticism of Zionist-Israeli poli-
494 THE COVER-OVER
cies. Of course it remained unsaid that the declaration, according to
Cardinal Augustin Bea, who headed the Secretariat that drafted it, was
to have ‘“‘no political implications” and thus was not to be interpreted
as taking sides in the complicated political dispute over Palestine.
Some Catholic leaders needed no admonishment from the Rabbi.
In order to advance Catholic-Jewish relations in his diocese and to
overcome what some thought to be “‘racial” prejudice, the late Cardi-
nal Richard Cushing spoke out clearly and passionately in favor of
Israel. On one occasion, when one of his Palestinian flock called to tell
the Cardinal how outrageous his remarks were to Palestinians and
asked him how he could have said such a thing, the Cardinal replied
in his characteristic manner of speaking, ‘“‘Oh, don’t pay any attention
to that.” While the Palestinian was shocked but felt slightly better,
Boston Catholics who heard the Cardinal deliver his eulogy of Israel
understood the statement only in its context. And the powerful Cardi-
nal’s words, intended only for local consumption, carried far beyond
Boston environs.
Perhaps the apotheosis of Zionist nationalism among the Catholic
clergy is expressed by Msgr. John M. Oesterreicher, a convert from
Judaism and the Director of the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies at
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. The institute,
founded in 1953 ostensibly to promote ecumenical understanding
between the Christian and Hebrew religions, has since the 1967 six-
day war become a sounding board for the most blatant pro-Israel
propaganda.
Oesterreicher makes support for Israel ‘‘a test for every Chris-
tian’’; advocates arms aid for the Zionist state; rejects as “absolutely
ridiculous” the proposition that Palestinian self-determination is es-
sential to peace; and has publicly rhapsodized that “we must shout
from the housetops that this state [Israel] has a right to live.”!8
In the wake of the 1970 bombing of a Swiss airliner by Palestinian
commandos, Oesterreicher called upon Americans to impose eco-
nomic sanctions against the Palestinians. On every possible occasion,
using the garments of the church, the Monsignor has condemned the
refugees as ‘‘terrorists.”” When Israel took legal steps to annex the
eastern sector of Jerusalem in the face of many protesting U.N. resolu-
tions, he maneuvered another tax-free organization, the National Con-
ference of Christians and Jews, ostensibly established to improve rela-
tions between the two religions by opposing bigotry, to use their
headquarters for launching a national campaign supporting the Israeli
takeover of the Holy City.
Christians in Bondage 495
Notwithstanding Oesterreicher’s extreme Zionist chauvinism, he
has enjoyed the support of Seton Hall faculty and administration,
exemplified by the public purchase of $250,000 of State of Israel
Bonds by the University’s President.
Pro-Zionist publicity from Christian leaders continued to ema-
nate from the National Conference headquarters, which has quickly
emerged as another Zionist front organization even as its counter-
part, the Council for Christians and Jews in the United Kingdom, was
doing a most effective job of smothering anti-Zionist British senti-
ment by equating all dissent with anti-Semitism. The General Secre-
tary of the prestigious Council, whose officers include the Archbish-
ops of Canterbury and Westminster, the Chief Rabbi of the United
Hebrew Congregation, and financiers Baring and Rothschild, was as-
siduously hunting down writers who, by dint of perseverance,
managed to break into the letter columns of the biased press, and
endeavored to make them feel guilty for their expressions of dissent.
After centuries of religious prejudice against Jews, determined Chris-
tians, under astute direction, were trying to make certain that no crit-
icism of the Israeli state, however valid, reached the surface—all this
in the name of tolerance.
Seton Hall’s contributions toward keeping Christians enchained
were varied. On June 2, 1974, more than 400 Essex County, New
Jersey, Jews joined to show their solidarity in support of oppressed
Jews of the Soviet Union, staging a march from a South Orange temple
to Seton Hall University for a rally. Greetings were extended by Msgr.
Thomas Fahy, President of Seton Hall, where the conference had been
held since 1970. In 1976 Fahy received the State of Israel Award from
Joseph H. Lerner, Vice President of the Zionist Organization of Amer-
ica. And in 1977 University Adviser to the International Students
Office John E. McLoughlin received the Justice Brandeis Brotherhood
Award from the New Jersey region of the Zionist Organization of
America. !4
In February 1975 Professor J. C. Hurewitz of the Middle East
Institute of Columbia University opened a series of seven lectures on
“Israel, the Arabs and the World Community” at Seton Hall, spon-
sored by the Jewish Education Association of Metropolitan New Jersey
and Seton Hall’s Department of History in conjunction with the He-
brew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion of the New York
School of Education, and the Zionist Federation of Essex and Union
Counties. Other Zionist spokesmen who followed were Dr. Roy Eck-
hardt of Lehigh University, Professor Gil Carl Al Roy of Hunter Col-
496 THE COVER-OVER
lege, Professor Chaim I. Waxman of Brooklyn College, and Professor
Joseph Neyer of Rutgers.
Rivaling Oesterreicher in his devotion to Israel was the Reverend
Edward H. Flannery, formerly director of the U.S. Bishop’s Office for
Catholic-Jewish Relations and until recently head of the Office of Cath-
olic-Jewish Relations of the Conference of Catholic Bishops. Flannery
has publicly chided Catholics for being ‘‘callous’’ to Jewish suffering;
charged that most anti-Zionists are “‘anti-Semitic’’; suggested that “‘an-
ti-Semitism” among the Roman curia was one of the reasons the Vati-
can has not recognized Israel. He addressed Zionist audiences on the
theme “Why Israel is precious to me,” and authored the book The
Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism. 15
The Op-Ed page of the Times was open to Flannery for a lengthy
article, ““The Greatest Hatred in History,” in which the Catholic priest
assailed General George Brown for his ‘“‘hoary lie about Jewish owner-
ship of banks and newspapers”; President Nixon for his alleged 1972
warning to Haldeman, “The arts, you know—they’re Jews—they’re
left-wing—stay away”; and Attorney General William Saxbe for a ref-
erence to the Jewish intellectual of the McCarthy era ‘‘who was, in
those days, very enamored of the Communist party.””'!® These current
examples of alleged anti-Semitism were shrewedly intermixed with the
history of early Catholic bigotry and deicides.!”
But elsewhere at least some other Catholics were challenging
Zionist operations. Alaska’s Archbishop Joseph T. Ryan, former Direc-
tor of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and the Pontifical
Mission for Palestine, called on American Catholic bishops to ‘‘speak
up and speak up now.” The Archbishop urged: “Make the world know
that Christianity and Islam are in Jerusalem by right, not by sufferance.
Make the world know that Christianity does not—cannot—accept the
ethnic domination of, or political sovereignty, of one religion over
another.”’18
While many Christians in the Western world continued to make
reparations for crimes against the Jews in which they felt they had
shared, if only vicariously, some refused to be entirely silenced regard-
ing the plight of the Palestinian refugees. In 1968 both the National
Council of Churches and the Mennonite Central Committee, following
study tours, issued parallel reports that stressed the conviction of the
five million Christians in the Mideast area that, as the National Council
of Churches put it, “Western Christians and Churches are indifferent
to their situation and even have betrayed them.” The Mennonite rap-
porteurs decried the fact that the Arab side of the story had been so
Christians in Bondage 497
“underrepresented” and that “not only does the West not know the
Arab and his cause, but the Christian West has hardly become aware
of the Christians in the Arab world.”” The Cyprus meeting of the World
Council of Churches admitted that existing programs were not ‘an
adequate Christian response to the injustice and misery”’ of the Pales-
tinians.
In 1970 still another voice was heard. The majority of British
participants at the World Conference of Christians for Palestine issued
a statement in Beirut declaring in part: ‘“‘We consider the political
creed of Zionism to be the negation of Christianity. Mankind is indivisi-
ble, and for this reason we reaffirm our belief in plural states, epito-
mized by the concept of a secular Palestine where Christians, Jews and
Moslems can play an equal part in building a nation.’’!9
This Christian “revolt” led to a fiery statement by Rabbi Tanen-
baum, distributed nationally to the religious columns of all papers,
accusing major Protestant bodies of “actively disseminating pro-Arab
propaganda through their church structures.” The response of certain
Protestant denominations to church mission reports from the area, the
rabbi alleged, ‘‘amount to virtual collusion with foreign Arab govern-
ment representatives.”
The suppression campaign had already begun with the 1969
“confidential letter” sent out under the signature of the rabbi as Direc-
tor of Religious Affairs on the letterhead of the American Jewish Com-
mittee (whose chairman was Arthur Goldberg), calling for combat
against growing Protestant sympathy for the Arabs. Intensified Arab
propaganda had penetrated church groups and publications, Tanen-
baum alleged. Expressing concern over reports from Christian church
delegations to the Middle East, some of which ‘‘slide from an ‘anti-
Zionist’ stance into ‘anti-Semitism,’”’ the letter detailed suggested
rabbinical action in organizing the Jewish community, including
“monitoring of Christian publications, speakers, programs, etc., that
take place in church settings.” Jewish communities were urged to
“organize one-day Jewish-Christian ‘Institutes’ ’’ and to send letters to
“public officials, general and religious press and to radio and TV
program directors.’’ The Tanenbaum letter detailed other intimate
links that were necessary between Jewish “religious” and other groups
so as to make the far-flung suppression operations successful.
The Vatican II goal of encouraging “‘study and dialogue’’ between
Christians and Jews fits perfectly into Zionist plans. Accordingly, rab-
bis around the country organized one-day institutes in an endeavor to
remind Christians that the Jewish concern for Israel was a religious
498 THE COVER-OVER
belief and that anti-Zionism must be equated to anti-Semitism. At the
same time Catholic leaders were browbeaten for failing to educate
their parishioners in accordance with the Zionist interpretation of the
Vatican Council’s declaration.
In order to explain the presence of even a most moderate anti-
Zionist speaker at an institute held in Queens, Zionist Chairman Rabbi
Usher Kornblum, in a confidential widely distributed memorandum to
boost attendance, made this explanation: ‘“The meeting of December
2 is a must for every rabbi. Reverend John Sutton?? is a ‘lo m’shelaner’
[not one of ours] as far as Israel is concerned. But I had to include him
to give the Institute a semblance of impartiality. We have an opportunity to
activate a number of Christian clergymen on behalf of Israel. There-
fore, your presence and participation is desired.” (Emphasis added.)
The report on one of the first institutes held in Long Beach in-
dicated that about forty persons were present, of whom eight were
rabbis. Rabbi Max Nussbaum of Hollywood expounded at great length
to the assembled clergymen on the centrality in Jewish thought of the
Holy Land and the relationship between Israel and the ‘Jewish peo-
ple.” Here is the reaction of one of the ministers who attended the
institute to the kind of “dialogue’’ that followed:
We had been invited to ask questions or make comments after the rabbi spoke.
Comments were really not wanted, only verbal questions. I challenged the
rabbi courteously, but after about two minutes, the presiding rabbi broke in
impatiently: “Well, what is your question?” Two or three others made com-
ments, but none were as much as a minute long. It was obvious that there was
no intent to permit a real exchange of ideas.
Dr. John Nicholls Booth had been given a place at the speakers’
table next to the Israeli Consul in Los Angeles, Moshe Yegar. The
Consul and the minister had a delightful chat throughout luncheon
about Burma, Unitarianism, and everything but Israel. Yegar did not
know or realize who Booth was until he, Yegar, started to speak and
consulted his notes. When he found that he had come to Long Beach
to discuss a local clergyman’s sermon, “Zionist Myth-Information Ex-
amined,” that was being widely distributed by ‘‘Arab students on cam-
puses,”’ his eyes widened and he declared, ‘I suddenly suspect that I
have been sitting next to him all through lunch.” The place rocked
with laughter.
“He is such a nice fellow,” Yegar continued, “I will have to de-
stroy all, or at least some, of my notes. How could such a nice man say
such terrible things?” Then the Consul politely proceeded to attack
Christians in Bondage 499
the published Booth sermon, particularly taking issue with the charge
that it was difficult to criticize Israel because then one is invariably
called anti-Semitic. Yegar declared—and this was most prominently
picked up in the local press—‘‘I never heard any Israeli or any Ameri-
can Jew who did that. It never occurred to us to call those who differed
with us anti-Semitic. That is nonsense.’’ The Consul finished his talk
at nearly two o’clock, the time set for adjournment. All Booth could
do with this limitation in time was to rise and say that he would be glad
to provide a copy of the sermon under attack so that others could read
and judge for themselves.
Reports from the Claremont-Pomona Institute and others across
the country were more of the same: Only one side of the conflict was
ever allowed to be aired.
In his confidential letter Tanenbaum had set forth a list of “allies”
with whom rabbis and followers were advised to check when program-
ming activities or seeking speakers. Leading the list was the organiza-
tion euphemistically calling itself American Professors for Peace in the
Middle East. During a speech purporting to describe the Christian
response to the Arab-Israeli confrontation, which had been delivered
at its national conference the previous winter at MIT in Cambridge,
Lehigh University Professor A. Roy Eckardt had concluded that
“Christian anti-Zionism’ could not finally be separated from ‘Chris-
tian anti-Semitism.’ ”
Another leader in this Zionist-oriented group is ordained Chris-
tian clergyman and Temple Professor Dr. Franklin H. Littell, under
whose aegis the study of the holocaust was included in the Philadelphia
school curriculum. The Reinhold Niebuhr-founded scholarly Christian-
ity and Cnsis had published a piece critical of Israel’s treatment of
Arabs, written by Dr. Israel Shahak. Littell protested the article, called
its author a “renegade Jew,” and said that the matter “‘seemed to be
completely outside civilized, let alone Christian, discussion.”” He am-
plified on the theme in another article that was widely distributed, in
which he indicted and linked into one group the Radical Right, Julius
Streicher, Joseph Goebbels, John Nicholls Booth, A. C. Forrest, The
Amencan Mercury, The Cross and Flag, the Volkische Beobachter, and the
United Church of Canada Observer. The obsessed professor offered ‘‘to
supply [editors of Christianity and Crsis} appropriate paragraphs from
Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels that attack Israel.” (Both Nazi
leaders died three years before the State of Israel came into being.)
At the same time as the institutes were being launched, rabbinical
bodies sought to panic religion editors into full support of their drive
500 THE COVER-OVER
to kill any criticism of Israel, Zionism, or Jews by linking ‘‘lack of
support” among church groups with the theological “dialogue” be-
tween Christians and Jews. President of the Central Conference of
American Rabbis Levi A. Olan attributed “‘Christian coolness” to what
he described as the ‘“‘church doctrine that Israel’s successful existence
is a Christian heresy; the people that reject Jesus, the Saviour, must fail
and suffer so that their sinfulness will be proved.” In a letter to the
New York Times,2! Rabbi Elmer Berger, the head of Jewish Alternatives
to Zionism,?? pointed out that the Olan approach failed ‘‘to distinguish
between the historic concept of ‘Israel’ as a spiritual term in the reli-
gious cultures of the world and the State of Israel as a contemporary
political entity.”
The blatant distortion of the belated and weak Christian attempt?
to present but a bit of “the other side of the coin” represented another
example of thinly veiled coercion and intimidation aimed at silencing
critics. Such tactics have generally been successful save for an occa-
sional courageous statement, as by the Central Massachusetts chapter
of the Universalist Ministers Association and the eight-denominational
protest in the Boston area, pointing to the “selective application of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights to deprive the Palestinian
people of justice.’’?4
In its relentless efforts to keep the issue of anti-Semitism before
the Christian conscience, the long arm of Organized Jewry had
reached across the ocean and joined Roman Catholics in sponsoring
courses on special religious and racial groups ever since 1962, when
funds for a Chair of Tolerance were provided to Rome’s Pro Deo
University for Social Studies by the American Jewish Committee. The
primary goal to be pursued in the announced quest for ‘‘world-wide
inter-religious cooperation” was the study of ‘anti-Semitism as the
international prototype of group hostility.’’?5 These ‘‘social scientists”
were not to be deterred in their pursuit of uncovering “‘prejudice”’ by
the 1965-66 ecumenical moves of the Vatican to ban hostility toward
Judaism in religious texts. Their own study of prejudice in Catholic
religious textbooks in Italy and Spain, under the auspices of the Uni-
versity’s Sperry Center (named after an American Jewish community
leader in Los Angeles), went forward and was published with a bang.
A Times story June 26, 1967, out of Rome, filed by Robert Doty, former
correspondent in Cairo, carried an eight-column headline across page
12: ‘“‘Anti-Semitic Reference Found in Italian and Spanish Texts 3
Years After Ban by Vatican.”
The text of the Doty article refuted the implications of this grossly
Christians in Bondage 501
distorted, inaccurate headline. It stated that in the next year four new
texts, edited in the spirit of Vatican II, would replace the literally
hundreds of texts under analysis and then in use containing offensive
material.
This study also clearly indicated (but one had to read carefully this
article to the very end to find it out) that there was a ‘“‘large amount
of hosulity against other groups as well as against Jews,” and that there
were more positive references to Judaism in the texts under study than
to Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus
combined. Once again, in the new ethos of anti-Semitism, any hostility
toward Jews, even if directed equally toward others, was nevertheless
to be viewed as anti-Semitism. Here was but one of many stories filed
from abroad, to which Kennett Love and other former Times foreign
correspondents can attest, that were carefully headlined, juggled, and
cut to proportions to fit the predilections of the most powerful newspa-
per in the world.
The Italian Catholic front was further opened up with an eight-
column Times spread?® “Italian Jews Disturbed by a Spate of Anu-
Semitism, Regard Neo-Fascist Sentiment as Major Cause.”’ Vicious
anonymous letters (“prepare your bags today, tomorrow may be too
late”) were alleged to have been received. At the time there were
33,000 Italian Jews, almost half in Rome. How many letters, the exact
nature of them, and whether they were merely from crackpots was not
revealed.
Attesting to the revived anti-Semitism in Italy was the head of the
Jewish community and Sociology Professor Alfonso di Nola at the Pro
Deo University, where a conference ‘‘On Religion and Prejudice’ had
exposed the susceptibility of the “growing lower middle class,”’ which
is ‘‘isolated alike from Marxist and Catholic cultural traditions,’’ to the
“message of power inherent in anti-Semitism.” Di Nola charged: “Pro-
Arab groups often confuse Zionists with Jews at large and are thus
responsible for the spread of anti-Jewish propaganda, and the Vatican
has not eased the situation.”’ (Italics added.)
The money had been flowing for nine years from distant coffers
to this institution with its Chair of Tolerance and had brought divi-
dends in a series of such flimsy reports, published in both the general
press and in academic circles, keeping the issue of anti-Semitism be-
fore the Christian conscience. Di Nola charged that the shelves of
downtown Rome bookstores were overflowing with anti-Semitic texts,
such as Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Catholic priest Luigi Cozzi’s
The Star, the Cross, and the Swastika. As Dr. Elmer Berger pointed out at
502 THE COVER-OVER
the time, the impreciseness of the term “anti-Semitism” leads to the
facile labeling. But Catholics in Italy have been constantly and well
alerted against saying, writing, or even thinking anything that might
remotely be considered anti-Semitic.
Through the tireless efforts of Rabbi Tanenbaum, the ADL and
its many supporting groups (the number of Jewish organizations ad-
vancing the Israeli cause and the anti-anti-Semitism syndrome took up
thirty-two pages in the 1977 Amencan Jewish Year Book compiled by the
American Jewish Committee) progress continued to be made in pene-
trating the Catholic Church and reaching the Catholic community.
Under the guise of the ‘altogether special dialogue,” ostensibly aimed
toward ‘‘a spiritual renewal of Judaic and Christian traditions,” the
Apostolic Delegate to Washington, Belgian-born Archbishop Jean
Jadot, addressed a dinner of the Synagogue Council of America. This
marked the first occasion on which a papal representative addressed
a major Jewish organization in the U.S. In his remarks Jadot empha-
sized the struggle against anti-Semitism, which he declared ‘‘is not
over.” And weekly, Rabbi Tanenbaum used his WINS religious news
broadcasts to broaden the scope of the definition of anti-Semitism,
helping create the atmosphere in which no criticism of Israel or Zion-
ism would be brooked.
As the pronouncements of Vatican IT became increasingly warped
to give a meaning never intended by the conferees, Catholic publica-
tions, which at the outset of the Palestine problem were not afraid to
either denounce expansionist Zionism or express sympathy for the
Palestinian Arabs, became silent. Typical of the new reportage were
the articles in the Catholic News after the 1973 war by columnist Joseph
Breig, who could talk only of ‘‘an Arab vendetta against Israel” and the
need for recognition by the Arab nations of Israel’s right to exist,
without saying a word about Palestinian rights,?? and by Edith Kermit
Roosevelt, who blasted the Arabs for the oil boycott in a piece that
literally breathed personal hatred: ‘If West Freezes, Arabs Could
Starve.”28 Like William Buckley in National Review, she advocated the
strongest retaliatory measures to bust the “‘oil producing states-Soviet
Union conspiracy.”
In the Holy Land itself the Catholic community was forced to
adapt itself to ‘‘a recognition of the facts of life,” to use the words of
one Catholic writer. Apostolic delegate Pio Laghi, who showed a deep
sympathy for the Palestinians, ran into many personal obstacles in
carrying out his duties. And when the Greek Catholic Archbishop of
Jerusalem, Hilarion Capucci, was tried and convicted in 1974 on
Chnstians in Bondage — 503
charges of smuggling arms into the Holy City for the Palestinians, the
Church was powerless to move in his behalf. Although the Vatican
expressed its “pain and grief’ at the Archbishop’s sentencing,?? he
remained in prison for almost three years until released upon a written
request from Pope Paul to Israeli President Ephraim Katzir.
The New York Times carried a letter by Professor Eckardt asserting,
‘Living today, Jesus would be called an Israeli... . He would condemn
Archbishop Capucci to everlasting perdition.’’89 Quite an attribution
to the carpenter from Nazareth who declared that his kingdom was not
of this world, that his spiritual message was for all mankind, and who
carefully avoided even the slightest identification with the Jewish na-
tionalists of his time.
The squeeze exerted by the Israeli government on the Catholics
in the Holy Land assumed many forms. The great Basilica of the
Catholic Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, designed by the
renowned Italian architect Giovanni Muzio, was built by Solel Boneh,
a construction company owned by wealthy, prominent Israelis. This
exposition of the growing, necessary ties between the Catholic Church
and Israel was thus explained by the monograph writer:
There are numerous signs that the Catholic Church is appraising realistically
a new situation in which the Israel factor must not be underestimated. In the
theological field, that situation appears more acceptable in view of the change
in atutudes towards Judaism resulting from the memorable decisions arrived
at by the Ecumenical Council. Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem and through-
out the Holy Land is a fact which cannot be ignored; the Church adopted a
posture of remarkable correctness in its day-to-day de facto relations with
Israeli authorities.3!
In line with this development, the Israeli government began to
exhibit great public relations finesse in dealing with Christians under
its jurisdiction. According to the book The Arabs in Israel?? by Sabri
Jiryis, responsible government groups have made great efforts to es-
tablish contact with both Arab and other Christian clergymen, their
eagerness bordering on flattery. The Christians have in many cases
responded with enthusiasm, or at least with an acceptance of peaceful
coexistence with the Israeli regime. This is quite a change from the
1950s, when a joint declaration by the two Israeli Grand Rabbis, Her-
zog and Nissan, referred to the Christian clergy as ‘‘emissaries of
Satan, covering the land of Israel like a plague of locusts.”
The efforts of Rabbi Tanenbaum and other American Jews to
strengthen friendship for Israel among Christians were undercut by
504 THE COVER-OVER
new “‘antimissionary”’ laws enacted in December 1977 and made effec-
tive the following April 1. The law imposed a five-year prison sentence
for anyone who offers ‘‘material inducement” to change religion, and
three years for anyone who accepts. Menachem Begin’s latest partners
in the Likud coalition, the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel party, respon-
sible for the legislation, would have preferred a broader law against
proselytizing. Prosecutor in the Eichmann trial Gideon Hausner, a
member of the Knesset, defended the new law: “I cannot divorce
myself completely from the history of compulsory conversion through-
out the ages.’’35
Citizens Rights Party member Mrs. Shulamit Aloni, who vocifer-
ously opposed the new law, claimed there had been only four cases in
1974, nine in 1975, and six in 1976 in which Jews converted to Christi-
anity; in these cases bribery was not even alleged.?4 Richard Maas,
American Jewish Committee president, protested to the Israeli gov-
ernment that “sweeping provisions” of the Israeli law appeared “‘in-
tended to intimidate the Christian community.’’35 The law was so
broadly written that many feared that even a gift of a Bible, rosary, or
religious medal could be considered material inducement to conver-
sion.
In the U.S. Tanenbaum, however, continued to produce Catholic
support for Israel. As an answer to a statement of American bishops,
calling for the inclusion of the Palestinian Arab refugees as partners
in any peace negotiations, the acceptance of their right to a state and
compensation for past losses, Father Donald P. Merrifield, President
of Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, wrote in the Jesuit journal
America®:
I fear that the Jewish reaction to the Vatican’s concerns and the echoes of
those concerns by the Bishops might quite appropriately be: ‘‘Where were
your concerns when the Nazis were trying to exterminate us, where is your
concern about Jews in Russia, in North Africa, in other parts of the world,
where was your concern about the Arab dedication to wipe Israel from the
map?
... Among many Catholics, I’m sure there is a recognition that Jews don’t
share most of our concerns, don’t join us in the fight against abortion or for
aid to parochial schools, so why should we share their concerns?
And yet in the midst of such an apparent indifference on the part of many
American Catholics, there is the continuing subtle growth of the sense of our
own Jewish origins and of all that we have in common with the Jewish people.
But this is low, arising from Vatican II and the more recent scriptural scholar-
ship, and not really reaching all Catholics as yet. The challenge is upon leaders
Christians in Bondage 505
in the Catholic community to include among their other concerns a concern
that the Catholic people grow in their understanding of their Jewish neighbors
and in their understanding of the magnificent undertaking that is Israel and
of the significance of Israel for Jewish identity and survival. And each Catholic
should examine his own conscience to discover whether his own attitudes
toward the Jewish people and toward Israel are in harmony with the love that
the Father of both Christians and Jews bears toward these chosen people, the
Jews, whom He has never rejected and from whom we, the Gentiles, have
received everything including Him whom we call the Christ.37
The Vatican, however, had not perceptibly changed its attitude
toward Israel, however strongly Cardinals Francis Spellman, Richard
Cushing, and Lawrence Shehan,?® Father Merrifield, and a myriad of
staunch friends strove to help Zionism attain its goals in the U.S. Even
Golda Meir, with few dismal strikeouts on her escutcheon, failed nota-
bly to bend the Holy Father to her will.
The “historic” meeting of Meir with Pope Paul in the Vatican on
January 15, 1973, proved to be a colossal flop. The Israeli leader had
flown in from Paris to repair some of the damage done in the French
capital, where she had received a rebuke from President Georges Pom-
pidou and found herself picketed by hundreds of Parisians in a noisy
protest against her Palestine policy.
While an Israeli Prime Minister had been received by the Pope for
the first time, the meeting only reafhrmed their basic disagreements
and ‘produced irritation later on both sides.”” According to a Washing-
ton Post correspondent, the brief official communiqué after the sixty-
five-minute meeting failed even to include such ritual words as ‘‘cor-
dial” or “‘friendly.’’ In fact, the Vatican went to great lengths to deny
the Zionist the slightest propaganda victory from the meeting.
Both the AP and UP accounts clearly indicated that the Vatican
had gone out of its way to deny that it had softened its stand on
Jerusalem and on the Palestinian refugees. In an unusually blunt state-
ment, Vatican spokesman Federico Alessandrini stated that the meet-
ing “does not signify nor imply the least change in the attitude of the
Holy See concerning the problems of the Holy Land.” He contradicted
an Israeli government statement that Meir had come to Rome at Pope
Paul’s invitation. The audience had been requested by the Israeli Pre-
mier, and there had been no previous discussion on the matter. The
Vatican spokesman pointedly noted that “Pope Paul had received King
Hussein of Jordan and other personalities from the Arab world and
countries. And the Holy See, as is known, has warm relations with
Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as entertaining diplomatic relations
506 THE COVER-OVER
with various other Arab countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Kuwait, and
Iraq.”
If one had read the New York Times account, one could scarcely
imagine that the reference was being made to the same meeting.
Where the press associations and other newspapers headlined the fact
that the Pope and the Prime Minister were at odds (even the New York
Post: ‘Pope and Golda: Tough Talk”), the New York Times said, ‘‘Mrs.
Meir Confers with Pope in Vatican.” All one could read in the front-
page portion of this account was Meir’s triumphal first encounter with
the head of the Roman Catholic Church and reference to the problems
of Arab terrorism and the condition of Jews in the Soviet Union, which
she raised with him. In paragraph three attention was called to the fact
that Pope Paul “recalled the history and the sufferings of the Jewish
people.”
Here was one of the crassest illustrations of slanting by position,
in which the 7imes excels. The frosty Alessandrini statement, placing
the meeting in its proper perspective, was buried away on page 6. But
the truth always has a way of rearing its ugly head, and Israel itself was
the source. An interview with the Premier by the newspaper Ma ‘anv
was carried on the AP wires and picked up a few days later by the New
York Post. The Times could do nothing else but run the story the
following morning under the caption: “Mrs. Meir Says Tension
Marked Talk with Pope.”’ This account totally blasted the impression
created by the paper’s previous account of a “‘successful meeting,”’
laying bare at the same time an incomparable arrogance and brazen-
ness that has rarely been displayed publicly by any individual, let alone
by a head of government.
The tone and implications of the Meir remarks constituted a grave
insult to the faith she claimed to represent and to the adherents of
ethical, universal Judaism. Rarely had Jewish nationalism and the cult
of anti-anti-Semitism so crudely exposed itself:
“I didn’t like the opening at all,”’ Mrs. Meir was quoted as saying. “The Pope
said to me at the outset that he found it hard to understand why the Jewish
people, who are supposed to act mercifully, respond so fiercely in their own
country.
“I can’t stand it when we are talked to hike that. I’ve had previous experi-
ences of this sort, and I won't give in to anyone who begins a conversation in
this way.
“So I said to the Pope: ‘Your holiness . . . do you know what my earliest
memory is? A pogrom in Kiev. When we were merciful and when we had no
homeland and when we were weak, we were led to the gas chambers.’
Chnstians in Bondage — 5507
“T sat and thought to myself, here is the head of the Church, sitting face
to face with the Jewess from Israel, and he’s listening to what I’m saying—
about the Jewish people, about their home in Israel, about their rights. . . .
“There were moments of tension. I felt that I was saying what I was saying
to the man of the cross, who heads the Church whose symbol is the cross,
under which Jews were killed for generations. I could not escape this feeling.
It stuck with me.
“And he felt it, that a Jewess was sitting opposite him, and he said: ‘This
is an historic moment.’
“Everything went off in meticulous quiet, in holiness,” the Israeli premier
said in the Ma ‘anv interview. “But we gazed at each other frankly. His eyes
bored deep into me, and I looked back with an open, strong, honest gaze, and
I decided I would not lower my eyes under any circumstances. And I didn’t.’’39
Inasmuch as the Vatican persists in its policy of nonrecognition of
Israel, recognition of Palestinian rights, and international control-trus-
teeship of Jerusalem to be administered by the three monotheistic
faiths (a shift from the previous position of formal internationalization
as a territorial entity), the Zionists have played their big trump card:
They have sought to gain a hold over the Church of Rome by stepping
up the game of blackmail through expanding on the thesis that Eu-
genio Pacelli, wartime Pope Pius XII, lacked compassion toward the
Jews who faced death under Hitler and permitted many to be led to
Nazi crematories. Action on his part, the stories intimated, could have
saved those Jewish lives. The famed, highly successful play The Deputy
by Rolf Hochhuth, which ran on Broadway in 1964,4° was an exposi-
tion of this theme, as were the Saul Friedlaender book,*! and the Carlo
Ponti film Reprisal. According to the cinema story, the Nazis executed
ten political prisoners for each of thirty-three soldiers murdered by a
Red bomb thrown into the ranks of a German platoon in the center
of Rome in March 1944. Pope Pius was alleged to have done nothing
to stop the execution of the prisoners, who were mainly of Socialist,
Communist, and anarchist background, previously arrested for terror-
ist activity, many of whom were of Jewish origin.
The defamation action brought against the producer, the director,
and the film writer, American Robert Katz, by Countess Elizabeth
Rossignori, niece of the Pontiff, and a newly organized committee,
“Pro-Papa Pio XII,” revealed for the first time the many positive ac-
tions taken by the warume Pope on behalf of endangered Jews. In
1934, for example, as Papal Secretary of State, Pacelli had urged Pope
Pius XI to open the doors of Vatican City to Italian and German
dissidents, and later he prepared the 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender
508 THE COVER-OVER
Sorge,* deploring the harassment of Catholics of Germany, which
caused official protest from the German Ambassador to the Holy See.
Shortly before his election, the Pope-to-be demonstrated his concern
for Jewish intellectuals by sending a letter (dated January 12, 1939) to
the four Cardinals of the U.S. and Canada, begging them to try to
remedy the ‘“‘deplorable reluctance” of Catholic universities in those
countries to accept more German Jewish professors and Jewish think-
ers on their faculties.
As Pope the following year, he founded the Catholic Refugee
Committee in Rome and put in charge of this activity his own secretary,
Father Robert Leiber, and his housekeeper, Mother Pasqualina. Ac-
cording to Monsignor G. Roche’s well-documented study Pie XII Avant
Histoire, this committee paved the way for tens of thousands of Ger-
man Jews to enter America as Catholics, providing them with a regular
and efficient service documentation, baptismal certificates, financial
aid, and arrangements abroad. This French historian estimated that by
1942 over one million Jews, on Vatican directives, were being housed
in convents and monasteries throughout Europe. The Holy Father
himself set an example by taking care of some 15,000 Jews at Castel
Gandolfo, as well as several thousand in Vatican City, where the re-
fugees of all faiths included such famed diplemats as the future Chris-
tian Democratic Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi and the present
Socialist leader Pietro Nenni. By 1943 these refugees were overflowing
into the Papal apartments themselves. The Chief Rabbi of Rome,
Israel Zolli, subsequently became a Catholic convert, allegedly in grati-
tude for Pius’s wartime protection, and took as his given name, Eu-
genio, Pius XII’s given name.
Meanwhile, under the personal authorization of Pope Pius, Monsi-
gnor Angello Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was working as-
siduously at his Istanbul post to help many hundreds of thousands of
Eastern European Jews on their way to Palestine. In France the Pope’s
Deputy, Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, and his Joint Distribution Com-
mittee were doing everything in their power to facilitate Jewish emigra-
tion under the very nose of the government of Marshall Henri Philippe
Pétain. An underground printing press at Nice, protected by the Arch-
bishop and the Mayor of the city, produced 1,895 identity cards, 1,360
work permits, 1,230 birth certificates, 428 demobilization letters, and
950 baptismal certificates before it was discovered. And as far as Hun-
gary was concerned, the Holy Father, through personal correspon-
*With Intense Concern
Chnistians in Bondage 509
dence with Regent Miklés Horthy, won guarantees that the country’s
800,000 Jews would not be deported if they submitted to mass bap-
tism.
In their ever-constant pursuit of recalling the Nazi evil, Zionists
have of course exploited the fact that Pope Pacelli, who had spent
twelve years as Nuncio in pre-Hitler Germany, surrounded himself
with so many Germans, including Mother Pasqualina Lehnert and his
secretaries, Fathers Leiber and Hentrich. His confessor was Father
Augustin Bea, and other assistants were also of that ethnic persuasion.
In fact, Pius was sometimes referred to in Rome as // Papa Tedesco (the
German Pope). Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, who held the post of Rector
of St. Peter’s Basilica, had been the chairman of the Center party,
suppressed by the Hitler government. And while letters, reports, and
documents point to a continuous line of rebuffs to Mussolini, Hitler,
and their emissaries, the Pontuffs correspondence in contrast shows
warmth and cordiality where President Roosevelt, his Ambassador to
the Vatican Myron C. Taylor, or Cardinal Francis Spellman was con-
cerned. On his part, the American wartime President addressed the
Pope as “My Old and Good Friend.”
Because of his show of concern for the Jewish plight, often in a
spectacular way, Eugenio Pacelli might rather have been accused of
pro-Zionist sympathies. As a Cardinal coming into the New York har-
bor in October 1937 aboard the Conte di Savoia, he asked the ship’s
captain to fly, alongside the Papal flag, the six-pointed star of the
future state of Israel in honor of the 600 Jewish refugees then on
board. And just prior to the entrance of the German army into Rome
in 1943, the Pope ordered the Papal seal to be prominently engraved
on the main Roman synagogue for its protection.
It is true—and this was the main condemnatory line of attack in
Hochhuth’s play—that the Pope, on the basis of the evidence pre-
sented to him, refused to go along with President Roosevelt’s sugges-
tion that he make a public condemnation of the extermination of the
millions of Jews at Auschwitz. The Pope’s line of reasoning had been:
“Up to the present time, it has not been possible to verify the accuracy
of the only report available—that of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.”
But did that reluctance to take up the Roosevelt suggestion spell
anti-Semitism? As Father Leiber wrote: ‘“The Pope sided very un-
equivocally with the Jews at that time. He spent the entire fortune he
inherited from his family as a Pacelli on their behalf.” The Holy Father
had also been silent on any condemnation of the multifold illegal
actions and cruelties of the Communist regime, which was fighting the
510 THE COVER-OVER
Hitler horde, but this was in accordance with a specific promise ex-
tracted from him by the U.S. and Britain, who had meanwhile become
allied with the Soviet Union.
The necessity for the utmost secrecy in the relations between the
Vatican and the Allied Powers as the Nazis spread their hold on Europe
was further emphasized in British documents. Whereas Jewish authors
exposed the involvement of Zionist leaders in Nazi extermination,
historical documentation has bared the injustice of tarring the late
Pope with the anti-Semitic brush. The 1972 release of British Foreign
Office papers showed that Pope Pius XII had learned of the Nazi plans
for invading France and the Low Countries in May 1940, and had then
tipped off the British. According to Jesuit historian Reverend Robert
Graham, the Pope’s information about the impending assault had
come from a German spy, who was in fact a double agent. The invalu-
able information was forwarded to 10 Downing Street in a coded cable
from the British Minister at the Holy See. The Holy Father was at the
same time involved in negotiations with certain anti-Hitler officers
seeking a British guarantee for nonhumiliating peace terms in the
event that their planned coup d’etat should be successfully staged.4?
After the fall of France the Pope asked the British to destroy any
record of the Vatican’s involvement in abortive negotiations with the
anti-Hitler resistance. Apparently Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax de-
stroyed his personal copies, but other copies were retained in the
Foreign Office, documenting the Pope’s activities; if uncovered, this
could have meant the Nazi seizure of Vatican City. This historical
exposure tore to shreds the entire thesis of The Deputy, charging the
late Pope Pius with alleged apathy, or worse, in the face of the Nazi
extermination of Jews. Hochhuth nevertheless conunued to advance
his thesis in other writings.
The release by the Vatican of its own documents for 1943 showed
that Rome had been deeply disturbed by the growing possibility of a
Jewish state in the Middle East. But opposition to statehood did not
vitiate the quiet diplomacy carried on in behalf of the European Jews,
as these papers revealed. The Catholic leadership had long insisted
that refugeeism be distinguished from statehood. Cardinal Luigi Mag-
lione, then Secretary of State, suggested “‘other territories which
would be more suitable”’ for a Jewish entity, while Pope John—even
when as Papal Nuncio in Istanbul helping Jewish refugees reach Pales-
tine—was expressing fears that his efforts might lead to the “‘realiza-
tion of the Messianic dream.”’
Monsignor Domencio Tardini, Deputy Secretary of State, wrote to
Chnstians in Bondage 511
the Papal Legate in London, Monsignor William Godfrey, that “the
Holy See had never approved the plan to make Palestine a Jewish
homeland.” This followed in a clear line the traditional Vatican oppo-
siuon to the objectives of Zionism, expressed guardedly by Benedict
XV in 1921 and forthrightly by Pius X to Herzl himself in 1904.
But this same 688-page volume contained documents that the
Vatican protested strongly the mass arrest of 1,027 Jews in the Rome
ghetto and their transportation to death camps north of Italy. Cardinal
Maglione summoned the German Ambassador to the Holy See, Baron
Ernst von Weizaecker, and in the strongest language (according to the
introduction to the volume) indicated that the raid on the Jewish
quarter ‘‘was painful for the Holy Father, painful beyond words, that
in Rome itself, under the very eyes of a common Father, so many
persons are made to suffer simply because they belong to another
race.”
“What would the Holy See do if things were to continue like this?”
asked the German envoy.
“The Holy See would not like to be faced with the necessity of
voicing its disapproval,” the Cardinal replied, indicating that the Pope
might make a public protest, the first of the war. “For now the Holy
See hopes not to say anything that the German people might consider
an act of hostility during a terrible war, but there are limits.”
The Ambassador indicated that the raid in Rome had been made
on orders from Berlin and Hitler. He asked whether he could keep the
protest to himself and not report it to Berlin, and the Cardinal agreed.
“Your Excellency has told me that you will do something for the
poor Jews,” the Cardinal said. “I thank you. I leave the rest to your
judgment. If you think it more opportune not to make any mention of
our conversation, so be it.”
Secretiveness was maintained because mention of the conversa-
tion was deemed to be “dangerous and counterproductive.”’ Of the
1,027 Jews arrested on October 6, 1943, about fifteen returned alive.
But, as British Minister to the Holy See Sir Francis Godolphin D’Arcy
Osborne noted in the British Foreign Office documents, the Vatican’s
intervention ‘‘seems to have saved a certain number of Jews,” and
there were no further mass arrests after the Vatican’s move. The 22,-
000 Jews who remained in Rome went into hiding as of that day, often
helped by local Catholic clergymen, including the most famous, the
Reverend Marie Benoit, a Cappucine, who became a legendary figure
in rescuing Roman Jews.
Perhaps the best summation of Pius XII's efforts on behalf of the
512 THE COVER-OVER
Jews was contained in the book Three Popes and the Jews, by the Israeli
journalist and diplomat Pinchas E. Lapide:
The Catholic Church under the pontificate of Pius XII was instrumental in
saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000, Jews from certain
death at Nazi hands . . . these figures exceed by far those saved by all other
churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations combined.*3
There has even been an attempt to blame Pius’s predecessor,
Pope Pius XI, for failure to act to prevent Hitlerian anu-Semitism.
According to a 1972 story in the National Catholic Reporter,4* the Pope
in June 1938—fifteen months before the outbreak of World War II—
had commissioned the American Jesuit editor of America, Father John
La Farge, to write an encyclical attacking racism and anti-Semitism. For
uncertain reasons the draft of the encyclical was never seen by Pope
Pius before his death in February 1939. But this did not prevent the
Washington Post from running a front-page story, under the continua-
tion headlines on page 4: “Could Pius XI Have Saved the Jews?”’#4 The
article speculated through four columns on the answer to that ques-
tion, and intimated that Pius XII would not have been elected had this
draft encyclical been published, which ‘would have brought European
Catholics face-to-face with anti-Semitism before Hitler got underway
full swing.”
In his May 1974 confidential memorandum to the Board of Gover-
nors, B’nai B’rith Washington representative Herman Edelsberg opin-
ioned that
. . the issue which offers by far the richest promise for a long-sustained
propaganda campaign is the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union. Experience has
shown that this issue can be exploited to block or at least delay agreements
made at the Summit. No President or Presidential candidate can afford to
brush it aside. It is therefore the opinion of the International Council that the
Board should consider an increase in the budgetary appropriations earmarked
for pressing this issue.
Judging by the amount of political and media attention that has
been given to the question of Jews in the Soviet Union, the increased
appropriation must have been a substantial one. And Christians, par-
ticularly anti-Communist ones, have been held in a tighter vise than
ever.
XV Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter
It is time that someone invented a new plot, or that the author
came out of the bushes.
—Virginia Woolf
Perhaps nowhere have American Christians been so tied up in the
Zionist double-bind as in the matter of Soviet Jewry. Here anti-anti-
Semitism, the Nazi holocaust, and Christian guilt feelings, wedded to
the specter of Stalin, are manipulated to force compliance with Zionist
goals. The deep-seated anti-Communist sentiment of a large number
of American conservatives and moderates has made such exploitation
highly successful.
One of the simplest methods of arousing sympathy for Israel has
been the incessant campaign to bring Soviet Jews to the Zionist state.
The Soviet refusal to allow Jews to emigrate freely to Israel, and the
accompanying suppression of Jewish activities within the U.S.S.R., is
presented as a continuation of Hitlerian anti-Semitism, or as a revival
of traditional, pre-Soviet, Russian anti-Semitism. Effective spot ads,
half-page appeals, and full-page petitions, overloaded with thousands
of signatures from academic life and from the entertainment! and
political worlds, public rallies and vigils, and dissemination of litera-
ture on the streets have all been employed by varied committees to stir
up the American public against the Soviet policy toward its Jewish
minority. In May 1977 Dr. William Korey, Director of B’nai B’rith’s
International Council, stated, “Soviet Jews have detected ‘the smell of
pogrom’ in recent events in the Soviet Union.”
The 1971 Leningrad trials of the would-be Jewish hijackers of a
Soviet aircraft provided an occasion for whipping up hysteria. The
emotionalism generated by Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense
League in New York swept across to the Pacific. In San Francisco the
513
514 THE COVER-OVER
Soviet Jewry Action Committee initiated a tourist boycott; all travel
agencies in the Bay area were sent a letter calling on them ‘‘to help
secure freedom for three million Jews unfortunate enough to have
been born in the Soviet Union” and threatening those who did not
respond favorably to the letter. Brochures charging that Soviet Jews
were “the only minority in the U.S.S.R. who are being forced as far as
possible to assimilate” were widely distributed. Offices of Aeroflot, the
Soviet airline, were damaged, and in 1975 shots from a .22-caliber rifle
were fired through the windows of the Soviet Mission to the U.N.?
The charge of Soviet anti-Semitism has been increasingly em-
ployed as Zionist propaganda ever since Israel’s relations with the
Soviet Union deteriorated. The Soviet Union had voted for the 1947
U.N. partition resolution, and arms from its Czech satellite were indis-
pensable to the Israeli forces during the 1948 war for independence.
As normalization of Israel-West Germany relations grew, the Nazi
peril became outmoded as the principal weapon of propaganda. Krem-
lin “anti-Semitism” came more in vogue as Jews were depicted as
“singular victims of Communist terror” who ought to be permitted to
go to Israel.3 There was, however, little evidence presented that these
Jews were necessarily any worse off than any of the many other reli-
gious, ethnic, or minority groups behind the iron curtain,* nor was
there any objective information as to how many Soviet Jews wished to
be “rescued” and brought to the ‘“‘promised land.”
The hue and cry about persecution of Soviet Jewry is in marked
contrast to the almost deafening silence> concerning the extirpation of
the Crimean Tartars and various minor Caucasian ethnic groups, the
transplanting of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and
Estonians to Siberia, and the forced “‘conversion”’ of five million East-
ern-rite Ukrainian Catholics to Russian Orthodoxy.
According to the New York Post of May 28, 1974, the twenty-five
million Soviet Muslims, concentrated in the Uzbek, Kirgiz, Turkmen,
Tadzhik, Azerbaidzhan, and Kazakh Republics, are considered ‘‘politi-
cally unreliable,” have had their religion officially described as “‘poi-
son,” and are permitted but ‘‘few Mosques and few religious leaders.”
About these people there is little protesting.
The Soviet Jewry question presents a most complex situation that
does not allow for simplistic reduction. Of the approximately 2.6 mil-
lion people® who consider themselves Jews, probably not more than
10 percent are to any slight degree religious.”? While the overwhelming
majority of the Soviet Jews regard themselves as ethnically and cultur-
ally Jewish, most are undoubtedly atheists with the same attitudes
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 515
toward Communist institutions prevailing among other Soviet na-
uionalities. In Mother Russia all citizens are idenufied by nationality,
including Jews.
The Jews face no residential bars nor organizational social bans,
such as sul persist in certain parts of the Western world, save in
military and government circles. But Benyamin Dymshyts served as
Vice Premier of the Soviet Union, and a number of assistant secretaries
and undersecretaries in various ministries have also been Jewish.®
David Dragunsky has held the rank of Colonel-General in the Soviet
Army, while 170,000 Jews were decorated for valor in combat during
World War II. And in nongovernmental endeavor, Jews in profes-
sional, intellectual, and managerial pursuits are several times as nu-
merous as their percentage of the population.
Three times as many Jewish undergraduates attend college com-
pared to their ratio in the Soviet population. Jews in 1961 only ac-
counted for a httle more than one percent of the Soviet population but
accounted for nearly one-tenth of the country’s roughly 400,000 scien-
tific workers. While this percentage has somewhat dwindled, the Jew-
ish share in such a highly respected and well-paid social category still
hovers around 7 percent to 9 percent. Only Russians and Ukrainians
are more numerous in this field.
There are certain other fields in which Jews have a share quite out
of proportion to their percentage of the population. Fifteen percent of
the physicians, 8.5 percent of the writers and newspapermen, 7 per-
cent of the musicians and painters and sculptors and actors, more than
20 percent of the composers, 13 percent of the artists, 33 percent of
the film industry personnel, and 10 percent of the country’s jurists and
lawyers are Jews.9 The percentage of Jews among the winners of the
Lenin Prize never fails to be fantasuc—from 15 percent to as high as
25 percent. Out of 844 persons receiving this most coveted honor in
the Soviet Union, there were 564 Russians, 96 Jews, and 184 of all
other nationalities. According to statistics published in late 1975, there
are 8,000 Jewish deputies in the Supreme and local Soviets.
While the number of synagogues for Jews in the Soviet Union has
been greatly reduced, the post-Stalin governments have continued to
heighten their campaign against all religions. Many Russian Orthodox
churches have been closed to worshipers; some have reopened as
atheist museums and others have been left falling to rack and ruin
along the roadsides.
The U.S.S.R., it is true, has universally refused to allow citizens
to emigrate freely. The emigration ban, applying also to the other 107
516 THE COVER-OVER
national-ethnic-religious groups making up the Soviet Union, helps
advance the concept of national exclusiveness and achieves the single-
handedness, and single-purposefulness, of state authoritarianism. But
the number of Jews granted permission to leave has multiplied since
the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev. His successor, Alexi Kosygin, at first
allowed Jews the right to join their families in Israel, but after the 1967
war, with the Israelis refusing to yield the large amounts of occupied
Arab territory in accordance with U.N. Resolution 242, and with grow-
ing protests from their Arab friends, the Kremlin was more restrictive
in permitting Jewish emigration.
In the face of the war-hysteria, media exaggerations, and political
propaganda, totally beclouding the verity of the facts, it is impossible
to ascertain the truth about Soviet Jewry. U.S. Senate members point
to the dwindling number of Yiddish publications in the Soviet Union
as evidence of discrimination. But as far back as the 1959 census,
Yiddish was the native language of only 21 percent of all Soviet Jews,
and that number has since greatly shrunk still further.
The claim is continuously advanced that anti-Semitism in the So-
viet Union can be readily evidenced by discriminatory safeguards taken
only against Jewish citizens. If they have received treatment different
from that accorded to other nationality groups, it is, at least in part,
because of their peculiar relations, expressed openly and on all possi-
ble occasions (as when Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and later Foreign
Minister Golda Meir visited the Moscow synagogue, and pro-Israeli
pamphlets were handed out), and because of other nonreligious activi-
ties related to the State of Israel, with whom the Soviet Union is
engaged in a cold war. And the worldwide campaign to rescue Soviet
Jewry via the emigration route certainly has not helped the status of
those Jews.
There is little doubt that rising Jewish nationalism, particularly
after Israel’s success in the 1967 war, instilled in some of the Jewish
population the same yearning for identity as other nationality groups
in “protest against an atomizing, increasingly anonymous mass soci-
ety, an expression of inward self-consciousness as in some of the
radical youth movements in the Western world.””!° The only difference
had been that their rising nationalist feeling happened to be related
to Israel, a foreign state that has been at war with friends or even
“wards” of the Soviet Union and is supported by the Soviet Union's
big power rival, the U.S. Jews in the Soviet Union may be insisting that
they have common temperamental characteristics and that they do
form a special group. But, like American Jews, they encounter a prob-
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 517
lem when their separateness does not accord with the feeling of many
of the people in the country, eventually leading to a tide of prejudice
and discrimination, which sooner or later is labeled anti-Semitism by
most outsiders. It has been said that young Jews, who have no inkling
of Yiddish or Hebrew and regard themselves as atheists, nevertheless
become conscious of a common bond, heightened by listening to
Radio Tel Aviv, which is not jammed and can be heard in most of
European U.S.S.R., and by occasional anti-Semitic remarks from uned-
ucated Russians or Ukrainians, which only serves as a reminder of their
separateness.
This raises the old familiar question: Which came first, the chicken
or the egg? Did the separateness lead to the prejudicial remarks, or did
the prejudicial remarks bring on the separateness? Did the strange
yearning and feeling of relationship toward the State of Israel bring
about discrimination, or did discrimination bring about this feeling
toward Israel? The correct answer would take a great deal of probing.
In a highly controversial article, ‘‘Jews in the Soviet Union,” in
Issues, Peter Worthington, Bureau Chief in Moscow at that time of the
Toronto, Canada, Telegram, expressed a belief that he could find little
“state-sponsored anti-Semitism,” and “‘nothing of what we would call
persecution against Jews.”’!! He admitted running into many examples
of individual anti-Semitism, but not enough to warrant charges that the
Soviet state had been following a deliberate and isolated policy against
its Jewish citizens. He stated adamantly that Jews were not singled out
for special abuse, but that in some ways they led better lives than most
citizens. “Jews who were neither excessively religious nor ardently
pro-Zionist,’” Worthington claimed, “‘stood a better chance statistically
of leading a physically more comfortable life than the average Soviet
citizen... .””
“There is no question,” Worthington wrote, “that it has been the
Soviet intention to liquidate Jewish culture—just as it has been their
planned intent to liquidate all vigorous cultures. But this is not ant-
Semitism. It is simply Sovietism, which is overrunning all minority
groups alike!”
This meant, as the writer pointed out, that “charges of Soviet
discrimination against Jews, while possibly valid in an absolute sense,
seem less significant in a relative sense. Other groups have had it
worse, are having it worse, will have it worse.”
For these statements Worthington was assailed on many fronts.
Moshe Decter poured invective on him, calling the Worthington article
“lengthy, disjointed and laughably ignorant,” published by a ‘‘discred-
518 THE COVER-OVER
ited and irrelevent group.’’!2 In Jewish Week the Worthington piece was
found to resemble ‘‘the same propagandistic technique as the Czarist
bigots,” and its sponsor was roundly condemned. Worthington was
called an “‘apologist”’ for the Soviet Union. In the words of Rabbi Israel
Miller, “Only willful ignorance or deliberate malice can lie behind the
charge that Zionist elements in the U.S. might be helping to exagger-
ate the plight of Soviet Jews.’’!8
However, Acting Director of the Columbia University Institute on
Central Europe Istvan Deak wrote, “Soviet anu-Semitism has been
greatly exaggerated in the United States, and this for purely political
purposes.” His comment on the Worthington piece: “I am grateful
... for dissenting points of view.”
In a rebuttal to his critics, Worthington pointed to a report of a
six-man group sent to the Ukraine by the Communist party in Canada,
which found evidence of differences in treatment of nationality groups
and expressed the hope that Ukrainians would get the same privileges
that Jews had been getting in the Soviet Union: ‘In the past few years,
there has been seen the flourishing of literary creativity among Jewish
writers, the emergence of new cultural forces. . . .”
State Department hearings in 1971 revealed that although Soviet
Jewry had to endure special hardships, their condition had not wors-
ened in recent years and they were not undergoing special ordeals.
“All Soviet citizens—not just Jews—sufter from the Soviet govern-
ment’s policy of militant atheism and its refusal to consider migrating
as a right rather than a rare privilege,” said Richard T. Davies, Deputy
Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, in his testimony before the
House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, which was holding a two-day
session on “Denial of Rights to Soviet Jews” under the chairmanship
of Zionist activist Congressman Benjamin S. Rosenthal (Dem.-Queens,
N.Y.). He had timed the hearings just prior to President Nixon’s visit
to the Soviet Union.
Limitations on the emigration of Soviet Jews have undoubtedly
been more stringent than those on other Russians, but as the State
Department official pointed out in his testimony, it was because of
certain of ‘‘their ties to the West and Israel” and because some Soviet
officials regard Jewishness “‘as a more alien phenomenon than the fact
of association with other major religious or national cultures.”” There
could, he added, “be no comparison with Stalin’s blood purge of
Jewish intellectuals and the libel of the Jewish doctors’ ‘plot.’!4 The
overwhelming majority of Jews are living in a normal fashion,” and the
charge that “Soviet Jews as a community are living in a state of terror
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 519
seems to have been grossly overdrawn.”’ Jews, Davies added, con-
tinued to be “eminent in the Soviet economic, journalistic, scientific,
medical, and cultural world in numbers far out of proportion to their
percentage of the population.”
Soviet Jews, it was pointed out, still remained the best educated
Soviet minority, and there was no evidence that the regime’s “anti-
Zionist”” propaganda “had spilled over into outright, widespread anti-
Semitism or deliberate, sustained efforts to fan a pogrom mentality in
Soviet society at large.” Davies’ words were borne out by Saul Po-
lansky, a Foreign Service officer who himself was Jewish, when he
returned from a three-year tour in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Po-
lansky said, ‘‘Based on my own experience and travels in the Soviet
Union, it would be an exaggeration to state that Jews lived in a state
of terror.” He noted that synagogues in Moscow and Central Asia were
usually full, and that many Jews spoke frankly with him about their
situation. At this very time (November 1971), representatives of the
Soviet government were seeing their wives spat upon in the streets of
New York, and rifles brought into play against defenseless Soviet chil-
dren by Jewish Defense League fanatics.
While thousands of Soviet Jewish immigrants have passed
through Vienna on the way to Israel, there has also been a steadily
growing reverse “Aliya,” many seeking to return to Mother Russia.
Said one returnee, a dressmaker from Odessa, ‘‘We all make mistakes
for sure, but now we want to go back home.”
A Tiflis shopkeeper, commenting on the reasons for the reverse
migration, stated: “It’s the fault of the American Jewish millionaires—
they pay their money but want us to bear the brunt. A boil is good on
somebody else’s body.” These Russian Jews were also disillusioned by
the permissiveness of life in modern, secular Israel in contrast to the
discipline and totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which strangely
enough they preferred. Once again it was demonstrated that the melt-
ing pot in Israel, called by Israelis ‘the pressure cooker,” does not
always melt the separate distinct nationalisms of those ingathered.
Notwithstanding the great desire of Russian Jews for identification
with “the Jewish people,” it is hard for them, as it is for those of Czech,
Chilean, American, etc., origin, to shed themselves of the culture of the
many lands in which they have lived before becoming Israelis.
As Time magazine described it, ‘“These immigrants suddenly
sensed the loss of the double cocoon that had enfolded them. In the
Soviet Union the inner layer was a comforting circle of their Jewish
communities. The outer layer, even for Jews, was the paternalism of
520 THE COVER-OVER
the Soviet state, which furnished everything from cheap concerts to
free medical care. The result is that these emigrants disliked the demo-
cratic individualism of Israel.”’
Even Dr. Nahum Goldmann argued that the constant pressure
being brought by Zionist propaganda against the Soviet Union endan-
gered the position of Soviet Jewry, the overwhelming majority of
whom, he admitted, wished to stay there. He was outspoken in his
criticism of Israelist tactics, insisting that the emphasis should be
placed on helping to improve the lives of Soviet Jews rather than
sacrificing everything to get a few out.
Goldmann reasoned that in the absence of normal relations be-
tween Israel and the Soviet Union, and of peace in the Middle East,
“the Soviets will not give more facilities to the Jewish minority to live
as Jews because they argue that all Jews who want to live as Jews are
attached to Israel. So long as they see Israel as an enemy and what they
call an American satellite, why should they encourage a minority,
which is more attached to their enemy than to them, to express their
views?”
But Jewish leadership in the U.S. disagreed with Goldmann, and
the endless hullabaloo over Zionist Jewry continued. Early on a late
May 1973 morning, film actress Joanne Woodward called on the radio
for a large turnout for the big annual parade on “Solidarity Sunday for
Soviet Jews.” The parade down Fifth Avenue, with signs “Let Our
People Go,” attracted 75,000 to 100,000 people.
The U.S. appearance of every artist in the U.S.S.R. who has cho-
sen to defect or not to defect has been exploited. The famed Russian
Jewish violinist Leonid Kogan was victimized by extremists when he
performed at Carnegie Hall in February 1971. In an attempt to disrupt
the concert, a stink bomb was dropped in the balcony during the
performance, while outside pickets carried signs, ‘‘Kogan is unfair to
Zionists, Israel and the U.S.”’ (The reference to the U.S. had been
hastily added to impart an appearance of American patriotism.) Rus-
sian Jews performing with the Moiseyev and the Bolshoi have also been
similarly victimized, always to the tune of good publicity. A Jewish
Defense League bomb, set off in the office of impresario Sol Hurok,
who had sponsored the U.S. appearance of many famed Soviet artists,
killed his secretary.
The fuss and cry raised in the U.S. to release ballet dancers Valery
and Galina Panov to go to Israel reverberated to Britain without loss
of one whit of emotionalism. A London Times article by Bernard Levin
attacked the Lord Mayor and Corporation of Manchester at great
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 521
length for permitting the Kirov Ballet to visit their city, and called
upon the theatrical profession to join in the protest to bring about
cancellation of the performance.
His emigration finally achieved, Valery Panov hailed the press for
its role in his exodus from the U.S.S.R.!5 And well he might. Rarely
has there been so much reportage-propaganda lavished as on the
Panov case for more than two years. Scarcely a week passed that the
media did not feature some comment/speculation on the dancers.
Zionist groups even suggested that the State Department hold up the
scheduled visit of the Bolshoi dance troop until exit visits were granted
the Panovs.
When the Panovs ceased to make good copy, prominent space was
taken up with other Soviet Jewry tales of woe, such as the trial of
physicist Viktor Polsky, accused of reckless driving in hitting the
daughter of a Russian General. The official Soviet press agency Tass,
in its English-language commentary, condemned the editors of the
New York 7imes for “literally going out of their way” to exploit the case
as proof of the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Jewry issue provided Israelists with the best club with
which to maintain pressure on Washington and prevent any change in
U.S. Middle East policy. During the 1972 presidential campaign, the
Nixon claim (as spread by Governor Nelson Rockefeller) that his visit
to Moscow had all but saved Soviet Jewry was refuted in a sensational
Los Angeles Times article claiming that the trip had, in fact, been a
disaster for them. Pro-McGovern newspapers, such as the New York
Post, gave prominent space to this item as a means both of discrediting
the Republican candidate and of helping the Zionists apply pressures
on the White House—plain political blackmail—to bar trade conces-
sions to the Soviet Union unless the schedule of payments exacted
from Soviet Jews for exit permits was rescinded.
The Israel-First bloc moved on all fronts to detrain all legislation
involving the Soviet Union. Spurred on by the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee and encouraged by favorable press coverage, con-
gressmen moved to amend the foreign aid bill to prohibit the use of
the programs of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and
Export-Import Bank activities to assist in financing and developing
trade until the Soviet Union terminated what an Ohio congressman
called the “ransom” policy of the Kremlin.
Prior to the Secretary of State’s departure for Moscow in late
spring 1973 to arrange details for the Brezhnev visit to Washington,
the Chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Presi-
522 THE COVER-OVER
dent of the Council on Jewish Federations and Welfare, and the Chair-
man of the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations met
with Henry Kissinger. The Jewish leadership wanted to make certain
that President Nixon took up the Soviet Jewry issue with Brezhnev and
that neither the Soviet Union nor the Arabs would be successful in
persuading the Nixon administration to exert new pressures on Israel
to yield the occupied Arab territories. The Arabs, led by King Faisal,
were making ominous noises.
The Jewish emissaries brought Kissinger “‘fact sheets” about the
cases of forty-two Soviet Jews then imprisoned and about more than
100 Jewish families experiencing unusual difficulty in getting permis-
sion to leave—an ideal diversionary weapon to use as needed counter-
leverage with the Soviets. And the press cooperated by providing an
endless spate of stories to help push the campaign. On May 29 the New
York Post carried a byline story that 100 Moscow Jews had appealed to
world Jewish organizations to help save ailing Yevgeny Levich, a noted
astrophysicist who had been sent “‘either to a military unit in the north
or to a labor camp on the Arctic Coast.’’ His father, a leading physicist,
was the only member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to have re-
quested permission to emigrate to Israel. The New York Times, which
had run a brief piece previously, now followed with a longer and more
detailed story.
On June 11, based upon an AP report from Moscow, a promi-
nently placed Times article was headed ‘7 Jewish Scientists, Forbidden
to Quit Soviet, in Hunger Strike.” And one week later, equally well-
placed, appeared a three-columned ‘‘7 Soviet Jews Appeal for World-
wide Support” article. Whatever the news agencies or their corre-
spondents dug up was promptly passed on to the readership as
world-shaking news items.
The approaching summit meeting between President Nixon and
Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev provided even a greater field day
for Zionist propaganda. A large Washington rally urged Brezhnev to
permit free emigration of Soviet Jewry. Similar demonstrations were
held against the Soviets by the very conservative Young Americans for
Freedom, who, to be truthful, probably preferred that all Jews go live
in Israel rather than enjoy equal rights in the U.S. Because he refused
to be stampeded into an anti-Soviet declaration supportive of academi-
cian Andrei Sakharov’s sweeping attack on Moscow, even Secretary of
State-designate Henry Kissinger came in for editorial criticism from
the Times.
In the fall of 1973 the East Coast media, particularly the daily
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter — 523
newspapers, continued negative—and sometimes abusive—reportage
on events taking place within the Soviet Union. As part of the obvious
campaign, the 7imes opened its letters and news column to one and all
who would attack the Soviet Union. One day there was a lengthy story
in the Sunday edition headed “U.S. Scholar Calls Soviet an ‘Unreliable
Partner.’ 16 On another morning: ‘‘Moscow Jews Demonstrate to Pro-
test Emigration Curb,”!7 based on a UPI story about twelve demon-
strators wearing yellow Stars of David as they staged their protest
outside the Moscow Central Synagogue. On still another day there was
an article headed ‘Soviet Jews Protest” plus a page 2 account under
the heading ‘‘Soviet Arrests a Jew, Detains Newsman” about ‘‘a lone
demonstrating Jew and an American correspondent whose film was
confiscated for covering his arrest.””!8 Many of these articles appeared
only with the accreditation “Special to The Times.’ The general antago-
nism being engendered toward the Soviet Union only added to the
resounding popular support for Israel on the eve of the October 1973
war.
President Nixon did bring up the matter of the emigration of
Soviet Jewry at the summit meeting with Brezhnev, which may have
been another reason this U.S.-Soviet meeting was not as successful as
others had been. Aside from the Soviet resentment over an intrusion
into what the Russians view as an internal matter, this problem in-
volved an additional irritant. The Arabs would be antagonized if more
visas were granted so that Soviet Jews could add to the Israeli military
potential, a situation about which certain Arab states had consistently
complained to the Kremlin as Jewish emigration mounted in the early
1970s.
Even as the Nixon-Brezhnev Washington summit was taking
place, the Syrians and Egyptians were making their final plans for their
offensive to liberate their Israeli-occupied lands, and U.S.-Soviet rela-
tions faced greater strains. Following the October war, with its Arab
moral victory, an even more crying need for the propaganda use of
Soviet Jews developed.
Behind the heightened campaign “to rescue Soviet Jewry” was a
many-faceted design. To bring Washington inexorably to her side, Tel
Aviv sought the dimunition or end of détente and the revival of the
very dangerous polarization pitting a U.S.-Israel alignment against a
U.S.S.R.-Arab world axis. The total, unalterable protection of the U.S.
to supplement less firm commitments of the past was viewed by Israeli
tacticians as the only way out of a vast sea of trouble engulfing the
Zionist state. The Arabs were flexing their oil muscles, and certain
524 THE COVER-OVER
European countries, formerly at least partially submissive to Zionist
pressures, were adjusting their policies to the new power relation-
ship.'9 A new offensive, using Soviet Jewry as pawns, could help de-
tract from traumatic problems at home and abroad. The task had been
entrusted to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, created and
financed by the State of Israel, according to files of B’nai B'rith, and
to their best friends in Congress, led by inflexible anti-Communist
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who in the famed “bagel and lox’”’
1972 Florida primary had left no doubt about his position.
“Scoop,” upset by Senator George McGovern at the 1972 Demo-
cratic Convention, still harbored strong presidential ambitions, and
thus felt continuing need for Zionist votes, campaign contributions,
and media support. Consequently it was Jackson who forcefully inter-
jected an overriding concern for strengthening the demographic posi-
tion of the State of Israel into the lengthy and delicate U.S.-Soviet
negotiations over a sweeping trade package between the two coun-
tries.
The Soviet trade agreement was to have provided most-favored-
nation treatment for the Soviet Union (the U.S. had granted similar
nondiscriminatory benefits to most of its other trading power partners,
both allies and nonallies, such as Poland and Yugoslavia). The agree-
ment called for payment by Moscow of World War II Lend-Lease
indebtedness of $722 million. Back in 1960 talks had broken off with
a Russian offer of $300 million as a just settlement. Under the pro-
posed agreement, total U.S.-Soviet trade would triple the $500 million
rate of the previous three years. This was over and beyond the $1
billion worth of grain purchased by Moscow for delivery in 1973. Such
closer ties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were envisioned as
part of the détente policy, the principal objective of the two Nixon-
Brezhnev summits.
The Conference of Presidents of Jewish Organizations, the Na-
tional Conference on Soviet Jewry, and other Zionist-Israelist groups,
lobbying in Washington, worked closely in cooperation with Senator
Jackson?° and other members of the “Israel-First’’ bloc to halt passage
of the Nixon trade bill. They were assisted to no small extent by the
incessant press barrage of stories concerning the plight of Soviet intel-
lectuals and dissidents. Endless statements by author Alexander
Solzhenitsyn and physicist-civil rights advocate Andrei Sakharov never
failed to make the front pages of the friendly East Coast press, particu-
larly the Times, no matter how contrary such views may have been to
the otherwise “‘liberal”’ tradition of that paper. Zionist groups latched
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 525
onto every incident regarding dissidents and fully exploited their
grievances, including that of Anatoly Shcharansky, despite the confir-
mation of the close links of his ‘‘roommate,” Dina Beilin, with the
CIA.?! They were encouraged in these activities by Washington.
After the barrier of the emigration fees had been removed by
satisfactory Soviet action, there still remained the obstacle posed by
the sponsors of the Jackson-Vanik?2 Amendment to the trade bill.
Warnings by the White House that linking improved trade relations
with the Soviet Union to the emigration of Soviet Jews would endanger
U.S. relations with Moscow staved off the restrictive legislation during
the last days of the Nixon administration.
But the strength of the Zionist lobby was not to be denied. In the
words of Stephen D. Issacs in his book Jews and American Politics:
Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on
Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests. These young
men... drafted the Jackson Amendment concerning Soviet emigration, deny-
ing America’s most favored nation status to the Soviet Union unless it allows
its citizens the right to emigrate. These two, working with a network of other
Jewish and non-Jewish activists on Capitol Hill, organized support and en-
listed seventy-six Senators to co-sponsor the Amendment. . . .?3
With the help of incoming President Ford, the drawn-out three
years of negotiations between the White House and members of Con-
gress over the Soviet trade bill were brought to a climax. An exchange
of unparalleled letters between Secretary Kissinger and Senator Jack-
son paved the way for passage of the legislation. On the basis of certain
assurances allegedly received from the Kremlin, Kissinger in turn as-
sured the Democratic presidential aspirant in writing that the Russians
would permit at least 60,000 Jews to emigrate annually and would
impose no punitive measures on those seeking to leave. In his familiar
role as mediator, the Secretary of State had engineered negotiations
to which Soviet officialdom publically acknowledged no connection.
According to the senatorial triumverate Jackson, Javits, and Ribicoff,
the “‘good faith” of Moscow was assumed or else the trade benefits
were to be rescinded at the end of an initial eighteen-month trial
period.
The assurances of Soviet exemplary behavior toward Jewish
would-be émigrés conveyed to the legislators by the Secretary
sounded like pages out of Alice In Wonderland. With several strokes of
his pen, an American Secretary of State was seeming to guarantee for
certain citizens of a totalitarian regime a so-preferential treatment, the
526 THE COVER-OVER
mere request for which constituted the grossest interference in the
internal affairs of a sovereign nation. The attempt to push any sover-
eign state, albeit one politically structured as the Soviet Union, to
guarantee that “applications for emigration will be processed in order
of receipt” and on a “nondiscriminatory basis,” or that “individuals
holding certain security clearances who desire to emigrate” are to be
notified of the date on which they may expect to become eligible for
emigration, was scarcely believable. What was the fire and fury of The
Gulag Archipelago, then, all about?
As a silent partner, but allegedly privy to the negotiations, the
Kremlin leadership had indicated the extreme lengths to which it
seemed to wish to go in order to trade with the U.S. and to extend
détente. But no one ought to have been surprised when Foreign Minis-
ter Andrei Gromyko denounced this legislative attempt to swap U.S.
markets for Soviet Jewish emigration as a gross intrusion into the
internal affairs of the Soviet Union. At the same time Gromyko in-
dicated that a letter to this effect had been given to Kissinger on
October 26 in Moscow and apparently rested inside the Secretary’s
pocket for three months, even as an agreement on the legislation,
premised on alleged Soviet willingness ‘‘to increase the rate of emigra-
tion from the 1973 level of 35,000, which would continue to rise to
correspond to the number of applicants” (the words of the Kissinger
letter?4 to Jackson), was being hammered out with Congress.?5 The
last-minute passage by Congress of legislation imposing a $300 million
limitation over a four-year term on Export-Import Bank guarantees of
credit to the Soviet Union, deemed the most vital part of the trade
exchange by the Kremlin, likewise was an additional irritant to Mos-
cow. The Soviet-American trade agreement of 1972 was nullified by an
irate Moscow.?6
In fighting the U.N. resolution on Zionism and Racism, Israel and
friends were forced to fall back on their most reliable, readily available
ploy, “Rescue Soviet Jewry.” The Zionist state faced near total isola-
tion in the world community as the U.S., together with the apartheid
South African Republic, its only friends and allies—and even U.S.
support was under some fire at the hands of economy- and isolationist-
minded members of Congress. Moreover, a deep recession, inflation,
corruption, Palestinian unrest, and the disturbing balance between
emigration from and immigration into Israel hit the internal structure
of Israel deep and hard.
Mustering its total strength on behalf of Zionist sovereignty,
which rarely had felt itself so threatened in the twenty-four years since
the campaign for statehood had been launched at the Biltmore Hotel,
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 527
World Jewish leadership convened the 1976 Brussels Conference on
Soviet Jewry. The time was ripe, for detente, under fire on many fronts,
particularly as a result of the ignominious Kissinger defeat in Angola,
could give way to a revival of the Cold War, ensuring the Middle East
polarization, always sought by Tel Aviv.
Called just five years after the first international assembly on the
“plight” of Soviet Jewry had convened in the Belgian capital, Brussels
II (February 17-19, 1976) brought together top supporters of the
Zionist movement from all over the world, headed by former Israeli
Premier Golda Meir. The delegates gathered under the sponsorship of
the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Conference of Presi-
dents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the B’nai B’rith Inter-
nauional, the European Conference on Soviet Jewry, the Israel Public
Council for Soviet Jews, the Latin American Jewish Congress, the
World Jewish Congress, and the World Zionist Organization. This
imposing list of convenors at Brussels II told only part of the story of
the importance Zionist-Israelist chieftains had given to the event. The
presence of nearly a dozen members of Congress, headed by Senator
Frank Church (Dem.-Idaho), a ranking member of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee as well as a presidential aspirant, was a reminder
both of the fact that this was an election year in the U.S. and of the
extent to which the Zionist movement had depended on vote and
campaign contribution-seeking American legislators since its very in-
ception.
At the final session of the three-day international gathering in the
Palais de Congréss, the 1,200 delegates from thirty-two countries
heard Meir issue a ringing call for unified action, as she declared that
the meeting had been “‘one of the great emotional experiences of my
life, and I have the feeling that I have witnessed one more period of
Jewish history.” Appealing to Soviet authorities to end their alleged
acts of anti-Semitism, she declared:
We want the Jews there to be the masters of their own fate. We cannot accept
that teaching Hebrew is counter-revolutionary, that three million Jews have no
newspaper, no theatre, and a few—very, very few—synagogues are left. . . .?7
We just refuse to disappear no matter how strong and brutal and ruthless
the forces against us may be, here we are. Millions of bodies broken, buried
alive, burned to death, but never has anyone been able to succeed in breaking
the spirit of the people.
In her lengthy harangue to the delegates, the Israeli leader set
forth the claim that Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration were a
repudiation of the pledge signed in 1975 by the Soviet Union at the
528 THE COVER-OVER
Helsinki European Security Conference to permit ‘‘a free movement
of people and ideas.”
While the exact strategy to be pursued by the eight large Jewish
sponsoring organizations was not spelled out at the conclave, one
speaker hinted at a possible course of action in making the understate-
ment of any day: “We have grossly under-utilized our extensive busi-
ness contacts.”” However, there was nothing vague about the closing
declaration of the meeting:
We call on all men and women of conscience and all governments cherish-
ing humanitarian ideals to speak out on behalf of the Jews in the USSR.
We have the right and duty to say to them, a generation after the Holocaust, that they
dare not remain silent in the face of renewed threats confronting the Jewrsh people.
History has taught that these threats imperil human rights everywhere.
[Italics added. ]
The incessant Zionist campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry has been
disastrous to all parties concerned. Far from relaxing restrictions on
Jewish emigration, these efforts proved counterproductive. In testify-
ing before the House International Relations Committee in 1977,
former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan declared
that the Jackson-Vanik Amendment had served ‘“‘no useful purpose,
not even from the standpoint of the people it was supposed to benefit,
and I see no reason to preserve it.”?8 Emigration, which had reached
34,922 during the peak year of 1973, fell to 20,081 in 1974 and to
13,159 in 1975, then rose the following year to 14,138.29 In 1977 and
in the first five months of 1978 it was on the rise again, but far under
the peak.
The untold story, however, has been the recital of the fate of the
3,000 Soviet Jews out of the 120,000 immigrants to Israel, who have
left and have been trying to resettle themselves either in Europe or
waiting to be forgiven to go back home to Mother Russia. In 1975, 200
of these hapless Jews were being housed in Westende, a tiny Belgian
resort near Ostend, receiving their only assistance from a Catholic
charity there. Some 600 other Russian Jewish migrants were scattered
around Brussels.
Such migrants in Europe are not uncommon. There has always
been a two-way traffic to and from Israel, but what makes these 800
or so Jews in Belgium newsworthy is that these were the Soviet Jews
who had been portrayed by the media as martyrs, who had been ready
to hazard their homes, possessions, careers, prospects, and personal
safety for the joy of living in Israel. But the resurgence of that Jewish
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 529
feeling, which according to Zionist dogma would flow through their
veins upon their return to their “homeland,” in many cases never took
place.
According to a 1975 London Observer story, this is how a Jew from
Kishinev, who was interviewed, viewed it:
I don’t want to say much against Israel except that the people have had false
ideas about life in their state. They treat Russians badly, no houses, no jobs,
and the people were too bad. I left because I did not get anything I needed
—no peace. Look at me, over fifty, and all my life I have been running, and
when I go: to Israel, what did I find? Darkness, blackouts, war, massacres,
bombs, rockets. I suppose if you have been brought up in Israel you can learn
to live with it. I could not.
The attitude of many of these Soviet migrants could be summed
up in the words of a middle-aged Odessa Jew: ‘“‘Things in Russia are
not as bad as you think they are, and things in Israel are not as good
as we thought they were.”
Ironically, one of the main reasons for the size of the Israeli
bureaucracy was the elaborate machine that had been set up to help
the immigrants, and no immigrants have been reputed to have been
helped more generously and lavishly than the Russians. They have
been the so-called privileged group, and their privileges had aroused
the animosity of the local population, especially the Oriental Jews, the
Jews from Muslim countries. The Soviet Jews have had shouted at
them on Tel Aviv streets, “Go back to Moscow.”’ Some have formed
small transitory communities in Rome, Paris, West Berlin, and Vienna
in addition to Belgium. The Catholic charities have been their saviors,
as there seems to have been a tacit agreement among the Israelis that
these Russian Jews should not be helped. “I could pay for them my-
self,” said a diamond merchant, ‘“‘but what sort of Jews are they? They
have no loyalty to Israel.”
Reports of increasing Soviet Jewry ‘‘dropouts”—those who re-
ceived exit visas for Israel, changed horses in the middle of Europe,
and decided to emigrate elsewhere—were ignored by the pro-Israel
press until the 7imes finally ran a story on December 20, 1976 (in early
September a short article had appeared in the first edition but was
dropped in later editions) that the number had reached 54 percent in
November and 47.4 percent for the entire year. Zionists were con-
cerned about the effect of the dropouts on the Soviets, who had been
squaring themselves with their Arab friends through the fiction that
they were granting Jews permission to leave so that these emigrés
530 THE COVER-OVER
(many were dissidents whom the Soviet Union was happy to see de-
part) could be united with their families in Israel. They were even more
deeply worried about the effect on Israeli manpower. Prior to the
six-day war, the fate of Soviet Jewry evoked little interest. But subse-
quently, the need to colonize certain Arab territories, particularly East
Jerusalem, forced the Israeli authorities to seek new settlers from
wherever they might be obtained. Since the six million-strong Ameri-
can Jewish community evinced little interest in moving to Eretz Israel,
the next largest bloc of potential Diaspora emigrants were those in the
Soviet Union.
Many of the dropouts who came to the Italian beach resort of
Ostia, outside of Rome, have been waiting for more than two years to
obtain U.S. visas and have been enduring dire circumstances.°° A
bitter clash among Israeli and American Zionist “philanthropic” agen-
cies pitted those who wished Jews to be rescued from the grasp of the
Soviet Union at any cost and those who would only see them as immi-
gration fodder for Israel. The latter won out, and a decision was
reached that Soviet Jews must go to Israel and nowhere else.3! All aid
was cut off for those who dropped out. This harsh treatment also
applied to Soviet Jews who went to Israel and then left. Zionists strove
to deny these Russian Jews the status of refugees so that they would
be unable to obtain admission into any country outside of Israel.
Zionism openly and dramatically had demonstrated what their leader-
ship had always been quietly stating: Political statemaking, not human-
itarian refugeeism, is our business.3?
This inhuman action, totally contrary to the charitable and hu-
mane tradition of Judaism, decided by the Committee of Eight, was an
echo of the famed Klausner Report of post-World War II, which
recommended that those Jewish displaced persons in camps “‘who are
not interested in going to Palestine are no longer to be wards of the
Jewish community or to be maintained in camps, fed and clothed.’33
But the controversy over the Soviet Jewry dropouts and émigrés%4
focused attention on the broader problem of the growing exodus from
the Promised Land, whose numbers had so increased by the fall of
1976 that Premier Rabin felt forced to issue a vehement statement
calling them ‘“‘nemoshots’”’—deserters. Israel’s outflow had increased
from 33,000 in 1974 to close to 80,000 by the end of 1976. (It has been
estimated that there are more than 85,000 Israelis in the New York
area, 80,000 in Los Angeles, and 40,000 in Montreal, and few seem
disposed to return to Israel, except for temporary visits.) This was
accompanied by the alarming and drastic fall in the number of new
Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter 531
settlers from 55,000 in 1973 to 32,000 in 1974, 17,000 in 1975. The
rise in 1977 to 24,000 immigrants, a net gain of 8,000 over outbound,
according to official figures, was made up of virtually all Soviet Jews.
The forty percent annual rate of inflation, the world’s highest taxes,
which were taking forty-six percent of the country’s gross national
product, housing shortages, unemployment, bureaucratic red tape,
social inequalities, violent crime, drug abuse, and prostitution ac-
counted for what the San Francisco Examiner called ‘“‘Israel’s Modern
Exodus: It Goes the Wrong Way.’’35
Washington manipulations over Soviet Jewry again illustrate the
subordination of American national interests to those of Israel.
Whether détente is good or bad for the U.S. is enough of an intricate
and devastatingly complex issue in itself without injecting the accept-
ance of liberalized emigration as the criterion for deciding this ques-
tion. There are overwhelming obstacles and unresolved ambiguities
already blocking Super-Power understanding and agreement on the
SALT disarmament talks, the success of which is necessary for the
removal of the dangers of nuclear confrontation engulfing the entire
world.
As a result of the nullification of the trade agreement, which had
been approved in principle by both political parties two years earlier,
Moscow turned to other Western countries and to Japan for the pur-
chase of equipment and technology that otherwise would have come
from the U.S. The loss of billions in trade meant the loss of many new
jobs.
“The public be damned”’ attitude was demonstrated in still an-
other direction. The American people have been subsidizing to date
the movement of Soviet Union Jews to fulfill the manpower needs of
the State of Israel through congressional appropriations of $50 million
in 1973, $36.5 million in 1974, $40 million in 1975, and $15 million
in 1976.36 Zionists even succeeded in pressuring Congress to stipulate
that none of the latter funds ‘“‘may be used to resettle refugees in any
country other than Israel.”
Additional funds to move Jews from the Soviet Union, as well as
from other lands around the globe, are, of course, derived from tax-
deductible contributions to the United Jewish Appeal. The already
intolerably overburdened American taxpayer has thus been further
imposed upon through the disbursement of his monies for the political
objective of building the population of a foreign state, which scarcely
falls within the ‘‘religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational
purposes” criteria set by the IRS for tax deductibility—and to boot,
532 THE COVER-OVER
such expenditure of his funds has proved to be diametrically opposed
to his own self-interest, his quest for peace.
Time and tide seem to have overtaken the William F. Buckley
suggestion of a fifty-first-state status for Israel. America’s Mediterra-
nean ward long ago affirmed its right to be acknowledged as the first
state of the Union as close examination of U.S. foreign policy will bear
out.
PART FOUR
POLITICS OR POLICY
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one Nation for another
produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facili-
tating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where
no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities
of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels
and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justifica-
tion. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privi-
leges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation
making the concessions: by unnecessarily parting with what ought
to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a
disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges
are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted or deluded
citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite Nation) facility to
betray, or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without
odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding with the appear-
ances of a virtuous sense of obligation a commendable deference
for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or
foolish compliances of ambition, corruption or infatuation . . . Real
Patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to
become suspected and odious while its tools and dupes usurp the
applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.
GEORGE WASHINGTON’s Farewell Address
XVI _ The Eisenhower, Kennedy,
and Johnson Years
A star looks down at me, And says, ‘‘Here I and you Stand, each
in our degree: What do you mean to do?”
—Thomas Hardy
Changes of administration in Washington generally made slight differ-
ence in the attitude of the White House or of Congress toward the
Middle East problem. When the House Foreign Affairs Committee
required a study on the Palestine question, the task was assigned to the
then Republican congressman (now Senator) Jacob Javits of New York.
Although his pro-Israel views were well known, Javits requested and
received this assignment with the tacit acknowledgment of his col-
leagues that objectivity or impartiality on this subject was impossible
—even undesirable.
President Eisenhower’s administration was the exception. The
wartime military leader strove to steer the country on a neutral course
in the Middle East, and away from the Truman blatant bias toward
Israel. Ike proved to be the only American Chief Executive to stand
firm against the full brunt of Zionist pressures when, in the fall of 1956,
even though it was a national election year, he refused to yield to
political blackmail and sent his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,
to the U.N. to halt the tri-pronged invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain,
and France. The long-simmering dispute over the Suez Canal had
come to a head.
On October 19, 1954, the British and Egyptian governments had
signed the Suez Evacuation Agreement, bringing Britain’s seventy-
five-year occupation of the country to an end. This pact provided for
removal of British troops from the Canal Zone but left unsettled the
question of control of the Canal. The fate of that vital transportation
artery became tied to the plans of Egypt for building the High Dam
at Aswan.
535
536 POLITICS OR POLICY
On July 19, 1956, Dulles summoned Egyptian Ambassador
Ahmed Hussein to his office and handed him a letter in which the U.S.
government precipitately announced the withdrawal of its previous
offer to contribute $56 million toward the financing of the dam (later
referred to by Eisenhower as the ‘damn dam’’). The Secretary was
responding to a strange combination of political bedfellows: Southern-
ers who feared increased competition from Egyptian cotton, election-
year, economy-minded conservatives, anti-Communists resentful of
Egypt’s Czech arms deal and her recognition of Red China, and pro-
Israeli Senators succumbing to the demands of the Zionist lobby. The
next day Britain and the World Bank withdrew their promises of loans
to Egypt, which were contingent upon the U.S. contribution.
Then followed President Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez
Canal Company, the 1956 war, and the ensuing world crisis, which
came close to detonating World War III. The story of the physical
occupation of the Canal by a small task force led by Mahmoud Younes,
armed with a series of sealed envelopes to be opened with the utter-
ance of the magic word by President Nasser in the course of a televi-
sion broadcast from Alexandria to the Egyptian people on the fourth
anniversary of the July 23 revolution, was worthy of Ian Fleming.!
Tension mounted during the ensuing three months as Britain and
France fulminated and threatened. The Users Association, a U.S. im-
provisation for running the Canal, aroused little enthusiasm from any-
one.
Israel, armed by France and the West, had been carrying on in-
creasing intermittent warfare through pulverizing raids against Syria,
Jordan, and Egypt. Nasser’s deal with Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia
netted important weaponry after the U.S. refused to supply arms Egypt
needed. Major General E. L. M. Burns of the U.N. Truce Supervision
Organization was encountering grave difficulties in controlling border
incidents. At this time the Archbishop of York declared the Jordanian-
Israeli truce line “absurd,” and the prelate referred to the “terrible
retaliation” by Israel for isolated raids by individual Arabs, which led
to the ‘“‘widespread feeling that Israelis are provoking incidents.” And,
as Burns publicly acknowledged, infiltration was not likely to end so
long as the Palestinian Arab refugees were not permanently settled.
When Golda Meir succeeded moderate Moshe Sharett as Ben-
Gurion’s Foreign Minister, preventive war rather than further reprisal
raids seemed in the offing.
British, French, and Israeli representatives met quietly in France
and decided on a course of action that bound them to military action.
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 537
It took the world many years to realize “the private determination of
Anthony Eden, Guy Mollet, and David Ben-Gurion to destroy
Nasser,’’? which was formalized in the secret treaty drawn up at Sévres.
In his zeal to keep the collusion with Israel a secret, the British Foreign
Minister did not even disclose to his own planners and commanders
that the Israelis were about to march into Sinai.3
The invasion followed. Israel struck at Egypt first on October 29
and, in the guise of separating the combatants, British and French
forces followed after the Israeli troops had made large advances. Port
Said and Ismalia were heavily bombed, the cities destroyed, and hun-
dreds of Egyptians killed.
Then came the long, drawn-out negotiations on forcing the Israe-
lis to evacuate the territory they had seized and held. The British and
French moved out quickly when faced with a U.S.S.R. ultimatum
“couched in the most brutal language and threatening the bombard-
ment of Britain with long-range guided missiles equipped with atomic
warheads.”’* But it was not until early spring that Eisenhower's deter-
mination not to let aggression pay off resulted in the Israelis pulling
back unconditionally from the Sinai peninsula, Gaza, and two tiny
islands in the Straits of Tiran. The Israeli demand for a prior guarantee
that Egypt would cease threatening Israel’s national security was an-
swered by the President in his famed television address to the nation
on February 20, 1957, in which he stated:
Israel insists on firm guarantees as a condition to withdrawing its forces of
invasion. If we agree that armed attack can properly achieve the purposes of
the assailant, then I fear we will have turned back the clock of internal order.
We will have countenanced the use of force as a means of settling international
differences and gaining national advantage. . . . If the U.N. once admits that
international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have de-
stroyed the very foundation of the organization and our best hope of establish-
ing a real world order.
For once the formulation of policy prevailed over domestic politi-
cal expediency. This was the high-water mark in American resistance
to Zionist pressure on the White House, climaxed by the Eisenhower
refusal to be bamboozled by either the timing of the Israeli attack a
week before Election Day or the fact that the two oldest U.S. allies,
England and France, had joined together in this conspiracy to unseat
Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Eisenhower reelection sweep
against the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson came in the face of the distri-
bution of hundreds of thousands of pamphlets in New York and other
538 POLITICS OR POLICY
large urban areas saying: ‘‘A vote for Ike is a vote for Nasser, Nixon,
and Dulles.”
Stalwart courage, rarely seen in public life, had paid off and made
the actual existence of a deliverable Jewish vote a legitimate question.
But rarely does the supine politician, who lives under the illusion that
there is indeed such a deliverable vote, challenge the blackmailer, and
the game of subordinating the national interest to the whims and
fancies of domestic politics has continued, with this one Eisenhower
exception, io the gravest detriment of the national interest. When Ike’s
Vice President, Richard Nixon, assumed the Presidency eleven years
later, he chose not to apply the 1957 Eisenhower guidelines, prefer-
ring to follow the lead of President Johnson, who had refused to exert
any pressure whatsoever on Israel to return even larger territories
seized in 1967.
The disastrous British attack on Egypt brought the heretofore
brilliant career of Anthony Eden to an ignominious end. Strangely
enough, he earlier had seen the Middle East problem in its true per-
spective. But humiliated by the Israelis, he had chosen to take his
sorely wounded pride out on the Egyptians.
Britain, like the U.S., increasingly molded her Middle East policy
less in terms of her own interests and more to suit the predilections
of the Israeli Prime Minister. The lessons of the past continued to go
unheeded. In 1941 the pleas of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri es-Said fell
on deaf ears at 10 Downing Street, leading to the downfall of his
pro-West government, the seizure of power by Rashid Ali al-Gailani,
and the brief entrance of the Nazis into Iraq. Nuri had urged the British
to reconfirm the 1939 McDonald White Paper on Palestine, limiting
further Jewish immigration into the Holy Land and calling for a unitary
Palestinian state in which control was to be shared by Arabs and Jews
who “‘would both be as Palestinian as English and Scottish [living] in
Britain are British.” Where it was the Nazis who had initially benefited,
it was the Russians who subsequently became the chief beneficiaries of
the British refusal to ask themselves the question: ‘What Price Israel?”’
Nuri, the strong, fourteen-time Iraqi Prime Minister who, more
than the Hashemite rulers under whom he served, governed the coun-
try, incessantly kept urging the British Foreign Office to do something
about Israel, not merely the
. continual and ordinary disputes about boundaries and refugees, which
everyone in the West knew about and could read about. Their need related
much more to the hidden dynamics of Israel’s diplomacy and propaganda, to
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 539
the evidence he saw that the divisions and hostilities gave Israel an opportunity
of territorial gain which she intended to exploit, not defensively but in a spirit
of conquest; that with this intention it was to Israel’s interests to aggravate the
divisions and inflame the hostilities, and that Israel’s gain might inescapably
be Britain’s loss, if only because it would undermine Nuri and the Baghdad
Pact.5
With the indispensable help of Western countries, Israel mastered
the “divide and rule” game. The dogged, determined Nasserite oppo-
sition to the British played directly into the Zionists’ hands by making
it impossible for Nuri to stand up for Britain in the face of the on-
slaught from Iraqi nationalists.
In an October 8, 1956, interview with a correspondent of the
London Times, Nuri sought to win British public opinion support for
an Arab-Israeli settlement based on persuading Tel Aviv to negotiate
with the Arab countries on the basis of the U.N. Palestine resolutions
of 1947. He warned the West: “‘We are with you, but the ball is now
in your court. I’ve taken the initiative, but you must come to meet me
on this question of Israel. You must not leave me beating the air. If
you do not make a real move now to get the Israeli and the refugee
question settled while I am still in power, while there is yet time, then
all will be lost.” No such move was made.
When Israel shortly thereafter launched an attack on Jordan (at
Qalqilya), Iraq was prepared, at the request of her then-partner in the
short-lived confederated kingdom, to send troops to the Jordanian
fronuer. The Israeli government acted quickly and contemptuously in
announcing that this would be viewed as “a threat to Israel’s secu-
rity.”"6 And England, under Eden, cooled off in support of Nuri pre-
cisely in the same manner as the Churchill government had turned
down Nuri’s 1941 appeal.
These events were the prelude to the Iraqi revolution of 1958; the
assassination of Nuri and young King Faisal, bringing to an end its
Hashemite rule; and the demise of the British in that country. Wash-
ington and London knew the truth but continually looked the other
way for fear of offending Israel. Stability in the Middle East was a
possibility, but only at the risk of incurring the ill will of the potent
Israeli-Zionist machine. And neither the Foreign Office nor the State
Department was prepared to pay this price.
Although in the 1956 presidential election Adlai Stevenson car-
ried traditionally Democratic New York City by a mere 65,000 votes
(the usual plurality ranged from 350,000 up to 600,00) at the very time
when his opponent, President Eisenhower, bore the responsibility for
540 POLITICS OR POLICY
halting the Israeli armies at the gates of Sinai, the candidates in the
next national election (1960) played the game as if there were a deliv-
erable Jewish vote.
Nixon’s running mate, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, was
given the particular assignment of wooing this vote. In a New York
address to an important Jewish fund-raising organization, the Vice
Presidential nominee declared: “A very high-level effort to settle Mid-
dle East tensions is necessary” and pledged continuing support for
Israel. Nixon let it be known that if elected he intended to let his Vice
President handle the ‘‘problems of Israel’s relations with her Arab
neighbors.”
Lodge had to do some personal expiating of his own. During the
Suez Canal crisis he had been the Eisenhower instrumentality at the
U.N. who had carried out the “stop-Israel” action. A widely distributed
piece of Democratic campaign literature quoted columnist Drew Pear-
son to the effect that: ‘“There is no one in American diplomacy who
is considered by the Zionists more anti-Israel than Henry Cabot
Lodge.” Lodge was further alleged to have “championed Nasser and
favored punitive measures against Israel to halt the invasion’’—a
charge Cleveland’s Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, endorsing the Nixon-
Lodge ticket, attempted to refute.
A key architect of this Lodge stratagem to become the spokesman
on the Israeli question was Maxwell Rabb, the former Secretary to the
Eisenhower Cabinet. Rabb had ingratiated himself with Organized
Jewry by accepting the Chairmanship of the District of Columbia UA
drive (most of which funds were going to Israel) even while serving in
a most sensitive position in a Cabinet of a President who was trying to
veer America’s policy in a more evenhanded direction.
An unusual foreign intrusion into an American election, intended
to help the Nixon-Lodge ticket, also marked the campaign. The Israeli
press intervened openly and—singularly enough—attacked the Demo-
cratic presidential nominee. Herut, the organ of Menachem Begin’s
Israeli expansionist party of the same name, claimed that Senator
Kennedy’s father “‘ncver loved the Jews and therefore there is a ques-
tion whether the father did not inject some poisonous drops of anti-
Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s.”’ This
same newspaper further alleged that Nasser was close to Adlai Steven-
son and Senator Fulbright, who were among Senator Kennedy’s clos-
est advisers: ‘‘How can the future of Israel be entrusted to these men
who might come to power, thanks to Jewish votes, strange and para-
doxical as this may seem?”’?
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 541
Leaflets containing these and other partisan attacks were dis-
tributed to the Jewish-American public in a frank attempt to influence
the outcome of the election. William Zukerman wrote in the Jewish
Newsletter, ‘No other state which had more at stake in the election than
Israel dared take such action. It revealed the curious dogmatic mental-
ity of the Israelis, who seriously looked upon American Jews as their
colonial subjects to whom they can give orders in an important elec-
tion.’’8
Both of the 1960 presidential candidates, Vice President Nixon
and Senator Kennedy, realized that the forty-five New York State elec-
toral votes might be crucial to their election, and therefore at times
they seemed to be conducting themselves more as candidates for the
Presidency of Israel than of the U.S. Competitive pro-Israel promises
filled the air, alternating with bitter attacks on the rival party as anti-
Israel, if not anti-Semitic.
To keep up with Nixon’s wooing of the B’nai B’rith, Kennedy did
the unprecedented by coming in August to New York City to address
the convention of the Zionist Organization of America. Elaborating on
the Democratic platform with a four-point program, he proposed
using “all the authority of the White House to call into conference the
leaders of Israel and of the Arab states to consider privately their
common problems.’’? The Senator noted that “the ideals of Zionism
have been endorsed by both parties”’ so that ‘‘friendship for Israel is
a national commitment.”
Kennedy placed complete blame for the continued unrest in the
Middle East on the Arabs, depicting “‘little Israel’? as the innocent
victim of hatred and aggression. It was almost inconceivable that the
Democratic candidate, a student as well as a writer of history, could
have prepared, no less presented, so partisan an account of the ten-
sions besetting the area. The familiarity he displayed in this address
with Zionist phraseology and dogma, dating from Herzl to the present
day, clearly indicated that a battery of Zionist-oriented writers must
have worked closely with him in preparing this talk.
In a message to the same convention, Nixon reminded the audi-
ence that Dulles had stated that the preservation of the State of Israel
was ‘‘one of the essential goals of U.S. foreign policy,” and he, too,
pledged to use his best offices to bring about a stable Arab-Israeli
relationship. At this stage of the campaign there was every indication
that, faced with the choice of moving forward from the Eisenhower
administration’s intent to assume a more impartial posture in the
Middle East struggle or of retreating to the definite bias of the Tru-
542 POLITICS OR POLICY
man administration, Kennedy would be inclined to follow the well-
trod path of his party with its pro-Israel orientation. There was al-
ways the chance, however, that the political pronouncements of Can-
didate Kennedy might give way to statesmanlike actions of President
Kennedy.
This indeed was the hope of the Arab world in the fall of 1960
when I visited there. The Senator was the overwhelming favorite over
Nixon. His courageous speech in the Senate on Algeria in 1957 had
made many friends for him, and the Arabs could see little difference
in the present behavior of the two political parties toward the Middle
East. Kennedy’s verve, good looks, and fine talk were personally at-
tracting friends in this part of the world as in the rest. Likewise, the
well-publicized strong opposition of former President Truman to the
Kennedy nomination from the start endeared the Massachusetts Sena-
tor to Arabs, who considered the man from Independence their chief
béte noire.
Before his political ambitions soared in the direction of the Vice
Presidency in 1956, Kennedy had traveled to Southeast Asia, had
visited the Arab refugee camps on his way back, and had subsequently
expressed on television a deep feeling of sympathy for these displaced
Palestinians. But not long thereafter, in his quest for second place on
the Democratic ticket, he was addressing Israel Bond gatherings at a
Yankee Stadium rally in support of arms for Israel. In his earlier
Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage, the Senator had done
a neat job of analyzing the pressures confronting the conscientious
lawmaker. He listed as the first pressure “‘a form of pressure rarely
recognized by the general public. Americans want to be liked.”!°
When he assumed office, it remained to be seen whether his past
actions in regard to the Middle East represented political expediency
or his better judgment.
At the outset of his administration, President Kennedy threw a
damper on the hope of those who were optimistic enough to believe
that statesmanship might become the immediate order of the day. One
of his first key appointments was Philip M. Klutznick, housing devel-
oper from Illinois, as U.S. Representative to the U.N. Economic and
Social Council. Klutznick was quickly confirmed by the Senate, even
though he had served as President of the pro-Israel B’nai B’rith and
of the Anti-Defamation League, and was still active in their governing
councils. He also had been responsible for the creation of the vital
lobbying group, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organi-
zations. And just prior to his nomination to the key U.N. position,
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 543
Klutznick had been elected Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal’s
1961 drive to raise $72 million for Israel.
During the course of the hearings on his confirmation before the
Subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, the members went
deeply into the nominee’s background, which confirmed his overwean-
ing absorption with Israel, his intimate ties both with Israel and with
Jewish organizations dedicated to advancing Israeli interests, and his
own necessarily strong subjectivity on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Appar-
ently his assurance that he would divest himself of the positions he
held in these pro-Israel organizations satisfied the members of the
committee passing upon his nomination. They did not doubt that he
could also divest himself of his close associations and strong feelings
voiced over many years, expressed only weeks prior to the confirma-
tion proceedings.
Those who anticipated a new look under Kennedy toward the
Middle East were doomed to be disappointed in other directions, too.
The U.S. opposed the Security Council move to censure Israel for
defying the decrees of the Jordan-Israel Mixed Armistice Commission
in April 1961 by parading tanks and other heavy armaments in viola-
tion of a general armistice agreement during a Jerusalem celebration
of the thirteenth anniversary of the creation of Israel. And then the
U.S. voted against a General Assembly Afro-Asian resolution calling
for implementation of the 1948 U.N. resolution on the refugees
through the establishment of a custodian over Palestinian Arab refu-
gee property in Israel. This resolution had been supported by a 47 to
19 vote in the Special Political Committee, but without U.S. help in
mustering support from the Western powers and from Latin American
countries, the two-thirds needed in the General Assembly was not
forthcoming. Israel had been saved “‘serious embarrassment” accord-
ing to the London Jewish Chronicle,!! because of the American insis-
tence that the resolution would involve the U.N. in undertaking new
functions that it could not legally or practicably carry out.
When the U.N. discussed the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, Saudi
Arabia and four other Arab countries condemned the U.S. for giving
support and military assistance to Cuban refugees who had been
ousted from their country while at the same ume rejecting the plight
of the Palestinian Arab refugees who were similarly suffering. The
Saudis, while bound closely to the Arab neutralist camp, were usually
in the anti-Communist bloc when Middle East issues were not at stake.
But on this occasion, to show their pique with the neophyte Kennedy
administration, they had joined other Arab states in rebuking the U.S.
544 POLITICS OR POLICY
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s private visit to New York, where he
adroitly maneuvered himself into a meeting with President Kennedy
at the Carlyle Hotel just prior to the Chief Executive’s departure for
his Vienna meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, forced President Kennedy
to send simultaneous reassurances to the Chiefs of State of five Arab
Middle East countries—U.A.R.’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, King
Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, Prime Minister Abdul
Karim Qasim of Iraq, and President Fouad Shehab of Lebanon.
Through these letters, which started a personal correspondence with
Nasser carried on until the Dallas assassination, Kennedy hoped to
allay Arab fears resulting from the Ben-Gurion meeting. The Arab
leaders were reminded that “the concepts of our founding patriots, of
Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
have played such a great part in the emergence of vigorous, indepen-
dent Arab states respected as sovereign equals in the international
community.’’ Kennedy, however, had said nothing new. To the Arab
leaders, what the President said were so many words, and to a people
who are the possessors of the richest of languages and hands-up past
masters in the art of speech, it simply represented “‘kellam, kellam bey-
doun manah (‘‘words, words without meaning’’).
However, in his correspondence with President Kennedy, Nasser
made some headway in convincing the American leader that the Arab
attitude “was not based simply on emotion, but on real experience,”
and was a result of ‘‘an agression launched in the past, of present
dangers and of fears for the future.’’ The Egyptian President explained
to the American President that “continued Jewish immigration” cre-
ates a pressure within Israel that has to explode and head for expan-
sion. “Israel,” he contended, “was constantly liable to be used by
‘imperialism’ as a ‘tool to divide the Arab nation geographically’ and
as a base from which to threaten the Arab liberation movement.”
Kennedy’s subsequent peacemaking initiatives ran into a stone wall
when Prime Minister Ben-Gurion categorically rejected Washington's
suggestion that Israel should begin the settlement process by taking
back some of the Palestinian refugees.
The contents of the Kennedy letters were not made known until
much later, since the President desired a maximum of secrecy so as to
avoid the counterpressures American Israelists would certainly exert
against his move to build friendlier relations with the Arab leaders.
The extremely politically aware Kennedy was only too familiar with the
lengths to which the Israelis could and would go, as in the Lavon Affair,
in order to torpedo even the slightest attempt to improve American-
Arab relations.
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 545
This effort to develop a closer relationship with Arab leaders was
particularly directed toward overcoming the effects of the widespread
rumors that Kennedy had made important commitments to Ben-
Gurion at their New York meeting, including military and political
guarantees, and offers to help in financing Israeli purchases of French
arms. In his letter to Arab leaders, Kennedy made a specific point
regarding the Palestinians: ‘We are willing to help resolve the tragic
Palestine refugee problem on the basis of the principle of repatriation
and compensation for property.”
Ben-Gurion, beset by his own domesuc problems on his bid for
reelection in the face of the spotlight on the Lavon Affair, had been
most anxious to convey the impression that the Kennedy administra-
tion had departed from the formula of the U.N. settlement in talks with
him. The 1960 Democratic campaign platform had been purposefully
vague in talking of encouragement “to the resettlement of Arab re-
fugees in lands where there is room and opportunity for them.” This
implied resettlement outside Israel would have been a definite contra-
vention of the U.N. resolution giving the refugees the right to choose
between repatriation and compensation.
Meanwhile, Kennedy was constantly being prodded by other
politicians to take positive action to win a peace settlement favorable
to Israel. New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller, still with his eye
on the White House, asked Kennedy to carry out his campaign pro-
mises to build peace in the Middle East. A member of his own party,
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, insisted that the U.S. had ‘the main
responsibility” for fostering peace between Israel and the Arab states.
Illinois Senator Paul Douglas, another Democrat close to the Presi-
dent, in addressing a meeting of visiting Libyan legislators, had the
temerity to tell them: “Israel is here to stay, and the U.S. will see that
she remains in the Middle East. It therefore behooves the government
of Libya to take the necessary immediate steps to recognize Israel.” In
Republican New York State, everyone from Congressmen to Governor
was playing domestic politics with the Middle East conflict so as to
further embarrass the President.
While the President, more often through Vice President Lyndon
Johnson, gave much lip service to Israelist aspirations, his administra-
tion continued to resist pressures, including a round-robin petition
signed by 226 Congressmen of both parties (aided by a large New York
Times advertisement on May 28, 1962) to initiate direct Arab-Israeli
negotiations. Kennedy had decided to shelve his pledge in the Demo-
cratic platform to bring Israeli and Arab leaders together around a
peace table in order to settle the Palestine question. There is little
546 POLITICS OR POLICY
doubt that this shift was largely due to the influence and respect
Kennedy had for the views of eminent columnist Walter Lippmann,
who after a visit to Cairo had written that he was convinced that the
“no war-no peace”’ status was “destined to continue.”
There cannot be peace, because no Arab statesman, beginning with President
Nasser himself, can afford to make a settlement which recognized the existence
of Israel. Almost certainly, if he tried to do that, he would be assassinated.
... [tis as impossible for an Arab to be pro-Israel as for a Catholic cardinal
to be aCommunist_ In Egypt and among Arab states near Israel, a permanent
state of hostility to Israel is for politicians a necessity. They may think what
they like, but in public they must be irreconcilable. !?
It was not until the Kennedy administration had been in office
twenty-one months that the concrete action for which Tel Aviv had
been angling since the Ben-Gurion visit became a reality. On Septem-
ber 26, 1962, the U.S. announced that it had agreed to sell Israel
short-range defensive ground-to-air Hawk missiles. “US to Sell Israel
Hawk Missiles to Meet Arab Threat,” sang out the Washington Post. The
tanks, jet fghters, and long-range bombers received by the U.A.R. and
Iraq in the previous months allegedly had tipped the balance of mili-
tary power to the Arabs and were the justification, according to the
statement attributed to “State Department officials” confirming the
action. This marked the first ime that the U.S. had departed from the
policy of permitting France and Britain to serve as military suppliers
for the Middle East.
This action had been presaged four days earlier by a widely publi-
cized speech in Washington to 600 American and Canadian leaders of
the Israel Bond Drive in which Levi Eshkol, then Finance Minister
(later Prime Minister), charged that his nation’s “‘security was im-
periled by rockets possessed by the U.A.R.”’ This was carried by the
New York Times on September 23, 1962, and the following day a dis-
patch from Tel Aviv by the Times reported that the U.S. was “expected
to make an effort soon”’ to restore “the balance of power in the Middle
East.”
The New York paper was unable to restrain itself from comment-
ing editorially on the cynical timing of the Washington announcement.
Not only had the President and his aides leaked news of the decision
to leaders of Jewish groups in the U.S. before it was publicly an-
nounced—and Myer Feldman, the top Kennedy assistant in charge of
Jewish affairs, had done likewise in the Israeli capital—but the action
was made a matter of public record just as the campaign of the Demo-
The Etsenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 547
cratic candidate for the governorship of New York was beginning to
build up steam.
Washington appeared totally unconcerned about the likely reper-
cussions from this latest action, coming at a time when a shadow could
not help being cast on the sincerity of recent American efforts toward
disarmament and when there was a growing trend toward complete
neutralization of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, in line with
the thinking of the Ben Bella government in Algeria. American bases
in Morocco were to be abandoned in 1963, Bizerte was to be evacuated
by the French, and everywhere new problems were being posed for
NATO.
Even after the initial U.S. arms sale to Israel, Congress continued
to maintain pressures on the White House. With the declaration in
April 1963 of the tripartite federated United Arab Republic (which was
to have comprised Egypt, Syria, and Iraq but never went beyond the
intent), members of the Senate provided unmistakable evidence that
another election year was coming up. The “Israel-First’’ bloc in the
Senate attacked the administration for failing to conclude a defense
pact to protect Israel and to call an embargo on all arms shipments to
the Middle East. The legislators reechoed the Ben-Gurion contention
that Israel had fallen behind in the arms race. Nasser, they claimed, was
ready for a “push-button war. Israel is easy to pinpoint and destroy and
cannot retaliate against four or five Arab states at once.’’!3
With the sale of the Hawk missiles, Washington had helped give
credence to the Communist propaganda picturization of an “‘imperial-
ist’” Uncle Sam stepping into the shoes of the old European colonial-
ists. And those in the “liberal school”’ to whom President Kennedy was
likely to turn for guidance on foreign policy, such as Chester Bowles
and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who otherwise would have been so quick
to note the burden of colonialism with which the U.S. was handicap-
ping its efforts to woo the noncommitted nations, remained silent in
support of this latest pro-Israel move. The Kremlin continued to label
the U.S.-Israel relationship as ‘‘the last attempt by the West to main-
tain a colonial outpost in the Middle East.”
The Arabs themselves envisioned the fledgling Israeli state alter-
nately as a “child” who provided a continual threat, which the U.S. as
“parents” could now hold against the Arabs as it grew stronger at their
expense, or as a many-headed monster who held the U.S. and the
Western powers by the throat and could dictate policy to them—the
latter an image immeasurably strengthened by the Israeli-British-
French 1956 invasion of Egypt. Whichever hypothesis was correct, the
548 POLITICS OR POLICY
Arabs had firmly come to regard Israel ‘‘as the prime expression of the
Western aim to maintain exclusive military control over Middle East
affairs.’’!4
While major foreign policy adjustments had either already taken
place or were being made on other fronts to woo the increasingly
powerful Afro-Asian bloc, Washington did not view the quietly sim-
mering Middle East situation with undue alarm. Perhaps the Soviet
failure to move into Iraq immediately and to fill the vacuum there had
inspired an optimism reflected in the equation of area stability with
maintenance of the status quo. A widely disseminated report of June
1960 by the staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, of
which Kennedy had been a member before becaming President, had
concluded that ‘‘the gravity of the Soviet threat in the Middle East
loses perspective easily. It is often exaggerated and almost as often it
is foolishly minimized.”!5 While carefully diagnosing the symptoms of
Middle East unrest, including the 1958 revolt, which saw the crushing
of the royal regime in Iraq, and calling attention to the West’s need
of “persuading the Arab states of their otherwise disinterested motives
in their offers of assistance,” this Senate report did not suggest that
alteration of the U.S. policy of partiality toward Israel might provide
the patient’s cure. And the new President likewise was slow in moving
in this direction.
There is little question, however, that Kennedy intended to move
decisively in his second term. This was evidenced as far back as his
personal letter of September 30, 1960, addressed to this writer in reply
to a chiding for his B'nai Brith speech: “I wholly agree with you that
American partiality in the Arab-Israeli conflict is dangerous both to the
U.S. and the Free World’’—one of the most significant and perspica-
cious Middle East statements made by any President.!® It is hard to
assay exactly what Kennedy would have done had he lived, but cer-
tainly the state of continued tension in the Middle East must have
instilled in a President of his temperament ideas and plans for going
far beyond the Kismet-like hope with which his senatorial committee
had ended its Middle East study, that “the patience and ingenuity of
the West will outlast the problems that have made the Middle East a
chronically worrisome, dangerously unstable region.”
The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas on November
22, 1963, shattered the possibility that his second term might see
Washington start to free itself from the grave burdens of U.S. partisan-
ship on the Arab-Israeli conflict and of continuous politicking for
domestic votes. President Johnson went into office with a great reputa-
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 549
tion in his legislative dealings, to use his own words, as “‘a compro-
miser and maneuverer.”’ The 1964 campaign was approaching, and the
conscious politicking for votes over the Middle East issue was stepped
up. Where his predecessor drew his main political strength from the
populous states of the North with their large Jewish concentrations,
the new President appeared strongest in the South, and therefore his
political needs required wooing of the states where the Zionist lobby
was strongest.
This task was not too difficult for Johnson. As Vice President he
had maintained close contact with the varied Israelist organizations,
having often been delegated by Kennedy to represent the White
House in bringing the administration’s blessings to Zionist, UJA, and
other similar conclaves. On his own, the new occupant in the White
House had long been deeply committed to the Israeli cause in the U.S.
During the Suez crisis in February 1957, when the Eisenhower ad-
ministration was considering invoking economic sanctions against a
stubborn Israel to force a withdrawal of her troops from the Sinai
peninsula, the then majority Senate leader is said to have summoned
his chauffeur and driven to the White House, where a heated session
ensued.!? The Republican President was bluntly told by the Texas
Democrat that the Senate would never approve punitive sanctions
against Israel. To Secretary Dulles and Henry Cabot Lodge, he decried
such threats as “‘unwise, unfair, and one-sided.’ And on the Senate
floor he charged that it was “Egyptian maintenance of a state of war
and the exercise of belligerent rights . . . that resulted in Israel's
military counteraction.’’!8
After his election to the Vice Presidency, Johnson visited Israel
and continued to give whatever comfort he could to the Zionist posi-
tion. Both he and Mrs. Johnson went out of their way to demonstrate
their support of Israeli philanthropic needs by a well-publicized pur-
chase of Israel Bonds. When Lady Bird Johnson accepted the honorary
chairmanship of a Washington Independence Ball to push the sale of
bonds, the Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires futilely protested this action as a
breach of neutrality. Both the Vice President and his wife expressed
deep resentment of this Arab attitude.
The Johnson administration early announced the retention of the
services of Myer Feldman, President Kennedy’s Adviser on Middle
East issues, who had been a key figure in bringing about the sale to
Israel of the U.S. ground-to-air missiles. Feldman, dubbed by the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency ‘“‘the White House’s Watchman for Israel,”
succeeded Theodore Sorensen in April 1964 as Special Counsel to the
550 POLITICS OR POLICY
President, and his role far eclipsed in importance that of Jewish Affairs
Adviser David K. Niles!9 in the Truman administration or of Maxwell
Rabb in the Eisenhower administration.
At the Weizmann Institute dinner in New York Johnson accepted
on behalf of the late President a posthumous honorary fellowship, and
clearly indicated that no Israeli watchman was really needed in the
White House. The President disclosed that the U.S. had offered to
cooperate with Israel in using nuclear power to solve the water short-
age in the Middle East. He was ecstatically cheered by the Waldorf
banqueters time and again for his sympathetic references to Israel and
his announcement of the first joint venture by the U.S. with another
country in desalinization research. One of the Arab objections to Is-
raeli plans to irrigate the Negev by diverting Jordan River waters was
the consequent salinizing effect this would have on the water flowing
to Arab countries.
As Israel proceeded with its diversion of Jordan waters from
Lake Tiberias, the fat was now even more than ever in the fire. The
Arabs had drawn up a military plan to protect their own Jordan River
diversion scheme. But even in the ‘“‘era of Arab coexistence,” as Rob-
ert Stephens called it in his biography of Nasser,?° featured by
U.A.R.-galvanized summit meetings and other diplomatic measures
to draw the Arabs into one front, Arab leaders could reach no agree-
ment on effective implementary action. Although Arab internecine
struggles blocked any joint reaction to meet the Israeli challenge, the
June 1967 war, three years away, was now in the making, and it was
only a question of time. And where the U.S. had in the past done
everything to sustain Nasser of Egypt in power while at the same
time protecting its ward, Israel, now Johnson allowed his personal
dislike of the Egyptian leader to command his policy, and he did
little to avert the disaster that overcame Cairo in June 1967. The
President was not idealistically motivated, as his predecessor would
have been in a second term, to make a real effort to settle the Pales-
tine question on the basis of justice for both sides. In one of his
urgent messages to Kosygin concerning the impending war, LB] re-
ferred only to “the increasing harassment of Israel by elements
based in Syria,” refusing to admit the slightest relationship to the
worsening Palestinian plight. (Some light on Johnson’s penchant for
Israel is reflected in the Saul Bellow tale that the President once re-
ceived Abba Eban and said, ‘‘Mr. Ambassador, Ah’m sittin’ here
scratchin’ my ass and thinkin’ about Is-ra-el.”?!)
Relations between Washington and Cairo had been gradually
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 551
deteriorating since 1965. If Washington had ever been a purposeful
plan, as maintained by Miles Copeland in his book The Game of Na-
tions,?? to help Nasser continue to rule Egypt since the overthrow of
King Farouk in the bloodless revolution of July 1952, this was very
clearly abandoned under Johnson.
At a meeting of the Palestine Council in Cairo in the late spring
of 1965, Nasser cautioned the Arabs to proceed carefully, and pointed
out that it was unwise to go to war at that time, with 50,000 Egyptian
troops in Yemen. The Egyptian leader incurred Washington’s wrath
by giving moral support to the Congolese rebels in Stanleyville who
were opposing the U.S.-backed Congo government under Moise
Tshombe, a development the Egyptian leader viewed as blatant impe-
rialism. This action in Africa contributed to Johnson’s very sharp anti-
Nasser feeling, leading the U.S. to hold back on vital wheat shipments
to Cairo. Hopes for any rapprochement between the U.S. and the
U.A.R. quickly faded.
On his part Nasser up to this moment had been rejecting calls
from Arab extremists for war against Israel. In November 1966 Israel’s
near-leveling of the Jordanian village of Es-Samu’a near Hebron had
put Nasser’s leadership in the Arab world to the test. Jordan’s Prime
Minister Wasfi el-Tal, who was assassinated six years later in Beirut,
blustered, “Where is the air cover Cairo promised?”
On April 7 Damascus was buzzed by Israeli planes and six Syrian
jets were shot down. Still Nasser did not move. As U.S. Ambassador
to the U.N. Charles Yost put it in his Foreign Affairs article of January
1968, ‘“The Arab-Israeli war—How It Began’’: ‘‘For the second time
in six months Arab forces suffered a very bloody nose at the hands of
Israel without the ‘Unified Arab Command’ in Cairo lifting a finger.”
Nasser still was following his 1965 philosophy of determining when to
battle and of not fighting on a new front with so many troops tied down
in Yemen:
They say “drive out UNEF”’; suppose that we do. Is it not essential that we have
a plan? If Israeli aggression takes place in Syria, shall I attack Israel? Then
Israel is the one which detetermines the battle for me. Is this the wise way?
We have to determine the battle. Israel may wish us to enter a war with it now.
. . . Is this conceivable while there are fifty thousand Egyptian troops in
Yemen??3
Border warfare between Israel and Egypt and between Israel
and Jordan was mounting, and Cairo found itself in a very dangerous
position. Egypt needed $100 million for wheat; the local currency
552 POLITICS OR POLICY
deal advanced by Kennedy was rejected by a thoroughly angered
Johnson. At this juncture the U.S.S.R. added to the tensions by
painting an alarmist’s picture of Israeli intentions toward Syria.
Gromyko might even have called attention to this possible threat to
Syria, Stephens tells us, as part of the Soviet effort to end Cairo-
Damascus feuding and to bring the two countries closer together.
But certainly Nasser became convinced of a plot to bring down the
Damascus regime on the basis of Syrian, Soviet, and his own reports
that Israel was massing eleven to thirteen brigades on the Syrian bor-
der. Anwar el-Sadat, heading a parliamentary group on a visit to
Moscow, was informed at the Kremlin that the “invasion of Syria was
imminent.’’24
The situation was inflamed by public statements from both quar-
ters (but only the Arab threats were reported to Americans). Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol declared, ‘Israel may have to teach Syria a
sharper lesson than that of the 7 of April,’ and then Chief of Staff
General Yitzhak Rabin said that ‘‘only the overthrow of the Damascus
regime could end the Fatah raids.” Ambassador Yost noted both par-
ties “had frequently proclaimed their intentions to go to war under
certain circumstances” and alluded to other strong statements by Isra-
eli Prime Minister Eshkol, including a public speech in Tel Aviv in-
dicating that ‘“‘his government regarded the wave of sabotage and
infiltration gravely. . . .”” James Feron in the 7imes reported from Tel
Aviv (May 12) that ‘‘some Israeli leaders have decided that the use of
force against Syria may be the only way to curtail increasing terror-
ism.” “‘Any such Israeli reaction to continued infiltration,” they ar-
gued, ‘“‘would be of considerable strength, but of short duration and
limited in area.”
The singular Israeli decision to divert the Jordan River waters and
the development of Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor were certainly
prime factors leading directly to the conflict, but were scarcely re-
ported in the 300-odd books written since 1967 by Israeli enthusiasts,
apologists, crusaders, etc. Their emphasis was always on the alleged
“drive-you-into-the-sea”’ Nasser attitude, which was reinforced by the
slanted reportage on the Egyptian President's address to the Council
of Trade Unions in Cairo on May 26, ten days before the outbreak of
war. American headlines and news leads on radio and television
quoted the Egyptian leader as saying, ‘We will destroy Israel.’’ Here
is exactly what the Egyptian President said in full, as translated by the
Foreign Broadcasting Information Service, a U.S. agency in Washing-
ton:
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 5538
If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt, the battle against
Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the Syrian or
Egyptian border. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will
be to destroy Israel.
It was only the last eight words that Huntley and Brinkley, Cron-
kite, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other elements of the
media reported at the time. (If there was ever an Oscar to be awarded
for one single distortion that has been most widely used, it was this.
Prime Minister Golda Meir, in an appearance in December 1971—four
years later—on ‘‘Meet the Press” when she was importuning the Presi-
dent of the U.S. for further aid, was still repeating the canard.)
What the Western media did not report at all was only revealed
seven years later when Doubleday published The Cairo Documents from
the pen of Nasser’s closest associate, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal (de-
scribed in the Edward Sheehan introduction as ‘the most powerful
journalist in the world’’). In speeches on May 27 and 29 Nasser had
explicitly stated: ““We are not going to fire the first shot... we are not
going to start an attack.”’25 This was a public pledge to Lyndon John-
son, Charles de Gaulle, and the Kremlin, all of whom had anxiously
queried Cario as to its intentions after Israeli Foreign Minister Abba
Eban had gone to the State Department and told Secretary Dean Rusk
that “Israel is going to be attacked and destroyed today.”26 Eban
sought a public U.S. statement of support against “‘threatened”’ Nasser
aggression, but the Pentagon and CIA found no evidence that Egypt
was planning attack.?7
In his meeting with President Johnson on May 26, Eban was dis-
satisfied with an aide-memoire assuring the “‘safety of Israel” and the
opening of the Straits of Tiran to “free passage by vessels of all na-
tions,” but sought a declaration that ‘an attack on Israel would be
considered an attack on the U.S.” When the Israeli left the White
House, Johnson is said to have turned to his advisers and stated: “I've
failed; they'll go.’’28
In his report to the Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General U
Thant referred to the “intemperate and bellicose utterances on both
sides of the line in the Near East,” and then noted that “recent reports
emanating from Israel have attributed to some high officials state-
ments so threatening as to be particularly inflammatory in the sense
they could only heighten emotions and thereby increase tensions on
the other side of the lines.”?® The State Department even expressed
their concern to Israeli authorities.
554 POLITICS OR POLICY
Ambassador Yost, who certainly was in a position to know,
pointed out that the dialogue between the U.S. and the U.A.R. con-
tinued right up until the outbreak of the war. As late as June 4, an
agreement had been announced that U.A.R. Vice President Zahkaria
Mohieddin would visit Washington within the following few days and
that Vice President Hubert Humphrey would then return the visit.
Member of Parliament Christopher Mayhew interviewed Nasser
on June 2. The Egyptian chieftain was asked: “If Israel does not attack,
will you let them alone?”’
“Yes, we will leave them alone. We have no intention of attacking
Israel.”’
This prompted Ambassador Yost to write: “Yet even at this late
date (three days before the war), despite all these verbal pyrotechnics
and concentrations of force, there does not seem to have been any
intention in Cairo to initiate a war.”
Both sides had good reason to believe that the other was likely to
attack. And Nasser, no doubt, overestimated the military strength of
Egypt and Syria, augmented as it was by King Hussein, who in a
last-minute dash to Carto rejoined the alliance two days after Syrian
and Jordanian forces had been engaged in savage tank battles. Previ-
ously, Radio Cairo ard Damascus had been heaping nightly diatribes
on both King Hussein (‘‘the Hashemite harlot”) and King Faisal (‘‘the
bearded bigot’’).2° As usual, the Arabs were badly fragmented.
The decision by the U.A.R., finding itself in command of the
Straits of Tiran, to exercise its rights as a belligerent by imposing the
blockade perhaps provided the Eshkol government with the very ex-
cuse Israel had been seeking to launch a preclusive attack. Although
the blockade of the port of Eilat was hurting them little,3! Israel chose
to deem this an act of aggression and struck swiftly against Egypt and
Syria with precision in the early dawn of June 5. Her fateful decision
came just after Iraq had joined the Arab military pact and despite the
promised exchange of vice-presidential visits, the result of tireless
efforts to stave off the conflict by Ambassador Yost and Special Envoy
Robert Anderson, the former Secretary of the Treasury.
The May 30 visit (under an assumed name) to Washington of the
head of Israeli’s intelligence service, Brigadier Meir Amit, played an
important part in the later stages of Tel Aviv’s debate on war and
peace. Apparently the head of the Israeli CIA did not quite trust what
Foreign Minister Abba Eban had accomplished in his last-minute ma-
neuverings in the American capital, and he went to find out for himself.
As Stevens expressed it: ‘‘From his opposite number in Washington,
mm
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 555
Brigadier Amit may perhaps have gained the impression, like the kill-
ers of Thomas a Becket from the thinking-out-loud of King Henry, that
a swift military victory by Israel would, in the Pentagon’s view, save the
United States a lot of trouble.”
Israel, fearful of a possible shift in the balance of power whereby
the nation might find itself at a later stage in a weaker position to resist
pressure for further concessions, decided to seize this opportunity to
strike a crippling blow at Nasser’s military forces. Lacking deep confi-
dence in a U.S. under Johnson, the Israelis
. saw themselves in a position of Czechoslovakia dealing with the Nazis at
the time of Munich. Faced with what they believed to be the threat of eventual
conquest, it was better to fight sooner from strength than later from a weaker
position. This was an understandable analysis, given the assumption made by
the Israeli government about the rightness and the necessity of the position
they were defending—the political and territorial status quo that existed in the
ten years after the Sinai campaign. Where the wisdom of Israeli policy may be
more justly questioned is in the failure to recognize that the status quo itself
was inherently dangerous and unstable, not because Arabs were vengeful
fanatics, but because Israel had long been attempting by military tour de force
to maintain a situation which imposed serious human and practical disabilities
on her Arab neighbors. The real question was whether or not Israel would
have been wiser to use her military power to support a search for a more stable
compromise settlement rather than to rely on maintaining military supremacy
alone.3?
This same psychological cul-de-sac continued to govern Israeli
policy until the present, just as it controlled individual attitudes of
American and other Diaspora Jews who reacted to Middle East events
purely and simply on the basis of the Hitler 1945 tragedy and the
perennial Jewish persecution. The Masada complex governed Israel
thinking internally and the Jewish world’s outlook externally.
According to the account of Aubrey Hodes, Editor of the Israeli
magazine New Outlook, the Israeli Cabinet at a secret meeting on the
night of June 3 decided to strike first:
At the end of the week Israeli diplomats in Washington reported their con-
viction that, if Israel attacked Egypt the United States would not intervene
and would not call for an Israeli withdrawal as it had in 1956. This was
what Jerusalem was waiting for, and it set the seal on the approaching de-
cision!
The preemptive attack was fixed for the morning of Monday, June 5. War
was only thirty-six hours away. The same evening Dayan drew a red herring
across the trail. He held a press conference in Tel Aviv—his first public appear-
556 POLITICS OR POLICY
ance as Defense Minister. One correspondent asked him whether Israel had
lost its military advantage by waiting. He replied blandly: “I would think just
now it’s too late and too early: too late to react right away against the blockade
and too early to draw any conclusion on the diplomatic way of handling the
matter! Before I became a member of the Government, it decided on diplo-
macy. We must give it a chance.’’94
The Israelis took advantage of each of the many Arab blunders
and inherent weaknesses. Egyptian senior commanders left their com-
mand posts to go to the airfield to greet Field Marshall Abdel Hakim
Amer even as the Israelis struck. They waited ten hours to put their
more distant bases on the alert because ‘‘you don’t pass along bad
news to your superiors.” And no one can forget the beautiful picture
of the smug Syrian sitting tightly in the Maginot Line-type defenses on
the Golan Heights.
It was quite obvious that the U.S. under Johnson (as opposed to
the Eisenhower era) was not in the least inclined—and Israel knew this
—to restrain Israel from attacking (nor later to force Israel back behind
her original borders) unless the Egyptian leader was prepared to ac-
cede to the return of the U.N. Emergency Force. Even such an Egyp-
tian loss of face probably would have had very little effect; U.S.-Egyp-
tian relations had reached their lowest level, eventually to be worsened
by the groundless Cairo charge that American planes had joined in the
initia! sneak attack on Arab airfields. The availability to the Israeli
intelligence of detailed photography of Egyptian airfields provided by
USS. spy satellites, which helped make their air strike so successful, was
a far more plausible explanation for the disaster than any participation
in combat of U.S. planes. But, again, the Arabs proved they could be
a far worse enemy to themselves and their cause than all the combined
Israeli military might.
The cease-fire that ended the brief war six days later brought a
humihating defeat for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. In addressing the
Knesset on June 12, Prime Minister Eshkol related how the Arab
invasion of Israeli territory had begun the war: ‘“‘The very existence of
the State of Israel hung upon a thread, but Arab leaders’ hopes of
annihilating Israel have been confounded.” Three days earlier the
London Times had been told by the Israeli Ambassador to the U.K.
Aharon Remez:
In the early hours of the 5th the Egyptian attack was clearly started and the
Israeli plan of defense . . . was put in operation. At that time, Egyptian planes
in considerable quantities were picked up upon the radar screens. They were
The Etsenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 557
flying in the general direction of the Tel Aviv area, and it was not difficult to
imagine their intention.
This statement in the London paper must have confused observ-
ers inasmuch as not a single Arab aircraft was ever shot down over
Israeli territory, nor was a single disabled Arab tank or any other
military vehicle found inside Israel.
Once again Arab public relations ineptness helped the world ac-
cept the story that “‘tittle Israel” had been in danger of being attacked,
if she had not already been, and that she was engaged in but another
war for Jewish survival. In a Le Monde interview General Yitzhak Rabin
admitted: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions
which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to
unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it, and we knew it.”34
The serious debunking of this propaganda surrounding the six-
day war began with the April 14, 1971, publication in the Israeli news-
paper Al-Hamishmar of a statement from Mordecai Bentov, a member
of the Israeli coalition government during the 1967 war: ‘‘The entire
story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and
exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab terri-
tory.”” The myth that the momentous June 3 decision at the secret
meeting of the Israeli Cabinet to attack Arab airports was dictated by
the “‘necessity of military action in order to liberate Israel’’ after hear-
ing reports that “the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are deployed
for immediate multi-front aggression, threatening the very existence
of the State,” was fully exposed in the spring of 1972.
Israeli General Matetiyahu Peled, in speaking to a political literary
club in Tel Aviv, stated: ‘““The thesis according to which the danger of
genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was
fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which
was born and bred after the war.’’?5 General Peled had served as Chief
of Logistical Command during the six-day war, one of twelve members
of the Israeli General Staff. On Israel Radio General Peled claimed the
state was never in real danger and that there was no evidence Egypt
had any real intention of attacking Israel: ‘““The Egyptians concen-
trated 80,000 soldiers in the Sinai, and we mobilized hundreds of
thousands of men against them,” he said. Egypt, according to Israeli
Intelligence, “was not prepared for war.”
His radio debate opponent, General Haim Herzog, former head
of Military Intelligence, (and after 1975 Israel’s Ambassador to the
U.N.), readily admitted this. He stated: ‘““There was no danger of anni-
558 POLITICS OR POLICY
hilation. Neither Israeli headquarters nor the Pentagon—as the me-
moirs of President Johnson proved—believed in this danger.’ The
previous Chief of Staff, Haim Bar-Lev (later Minister of Commerce),
after whom Israel’s defense line on the east side of the Suez Canal had
been named, confirmed this opinion by stating: ““‘We were not threat-
ened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never
thought of such possibility.’’56
In a later interview with Ma’arnv, General Peled added pertinently
to his observations:
All those stones about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size,
an argument expounded once the war was over, had never been considered in our calcula-
tions prior to the unleashing of hostilities. While we proceeded towards the full
mobilization of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all
this force was necessary to our ‘defense’ against the Egyptian threat. This force
was necessary to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet
masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on
our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence does not only insult
the intelligence of any person capable of analyzing this kind of situation, but
is primarily an insult to the Israeli army. [Italics added.]
These latter observations are even more remarkable because, ac-
cording to Le Monde, the assessments come from someone who was not
a leftist and was well known for his pro-American and anti-Soviet
stance.3”
General Ezer Weizman, nephew of Israel’s first President, who
had been Chief of Operations during the 1967 war and is at this writing
Minister of Defense, said: ““There was never a danger of extermina-
tion.” He added, ‘‘This hypothesis had never been considered in any
serious meeting.’’38 According to the Israeli Labor party weekly maga-
zine OT, another respected Israeli General, Yeshayer Gavish, shared
the view that ‘“‘the danger of Israel’s extermination was hardly present
before the six-day war.”
General Weizman also contended, “If the Egyptians had opened
fire first, they would have suffered an acute defeat. The duration of the
war would have been longer, and the Israeli Air Force would have
required thirteen hours instead of three to insure its mastery of the air.
The price of victory would have been higher, too.’’39
The final military witness to the real purpose of the attack was
Brigadier Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force, who
admitted one month after the surprise attack on the Arabs had been
launched: “Sixteen years’ planning had gone into those initial eighty
The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years 559
minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan.
Constantly we perfected it.”
There has been no attempt to refute the statements of these Israeli
generals, and strangely very little discussion within Israel. Several
Israeli journalists allegedly approached them, before they spoke out,
in an appeal to their “‘civic sense of duty,” urging them “‘not to exercise
their inalienable right of free speech lest they preyudice world opinion
and the Jewish Diaspora against Israel.’”” General Weizman’s reply to
this was interesting: ‘““The Jews of the Diaspora would like, for reasons
of their own, to see us as heroes, our backs to the wall. This desire of
theirs, however, will not affect the reality of the situation.”4° And the
General concluded that had Israel “refrained from attacking the Egyp-
tians, the Jordanians, and the Syrians, the State of Israel would have
ceased to exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodtes.
... We entered the Six-Day War in order to secure a position in which
we can manage our lives without the external pressures.’’4! [Italics
added]
With the crushing defeat in 1967, Nasser faced the darkest mo-
ment in his career. Almost all international sympathy had been concen-
trated on “beleaguered Israel,’’ and on all sides derision was heaped
on the Egyptians as their promise and performance did not jibe. At this
stage Nasser tendered his resignation. At his home headquarters in
Manshiet el-Bakri as he read the text of a speech for television on the
evening of June 9, he appeared to be a broken man, looking drawn and
haggard. Nasser’s defense was simple. He told the Egyptians that he
had listened to the warnings of President Johnson and the Soviet
Union not to strike the first blow. His valedictory summed up his
accomplishments since 1952, including the evacuation of “British im-
perialism,”’ the independence of Egypt, the inauguration of the Social-
ist revolution, the recovery of the Suez Canal, and the building of the
High Dam generating power networks all over the Nile Valley. No
sooner were Nasser’s dramatic words finished than came the amazing
public response so vividly described by Eric Rouleau in Le Monde: ‘In
the twilight and semi-black-out streets, hundreds of thousands, some
of them still in pajamas and the women in nightgowns, came out of the
houses weeping and shouting, ‘Nasser, Nasser, don’t leave us, we need
you.’ The noise was like a rising storm. Tens of thousands threatened
to kill any deputies who did not vote for Nasser. Half a million people
massed along the five miles from Nasser’s home, millions more began
to pour into Cairo from all over Egypt to make sure that Nasser
Stayed.”
560 POLITICS OR POLICY
And Nasser did stay. The 1967 war accomplished nothing save to
bring the world again to the brink, greater tragedy only being averted
by the use of the White House-Kremlin hot line.
Moscow shared with Washington a reluctance to turn the Middle
East conflict into a direct Super Powers confrontation. While the
Kremlin never hesitated to pour further coals on the caldron that its
support of partition had helped create, “‘an Arab victory, in the view
of many foreign policy students, aside from the almost inevitable U.S.
intervention to prevent it,” would have presented the Soviet Union
with extremely unpalatable alternatives.42 The Arabs would then no
longer need the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. wanted an Arab world
reliant on her, but totally humiliated Arab clients could only drastically
reduce Moscow’s bargaining leverage.
There is now little doubt that Israel’s unconscionable use of mili-
tary power had been carried out, with the aid and abetment of Wash-
ington, under a cover of gross deceit that beguiled American public
opinion and guaranteed support both for the continued Israeli occupa-
tion of Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian territories and for the ruthless
suppression of Palestinian human rights. And in the post-conflict eu-
phoria, a major U.S. naval disaster was totally blacked out.
XVII The Attack on Liberty
Mourn not the dead . . . but rather mourn the apathetic throng
... who see the world’s great anguish, and its wrong, and dare not
speak.
—Ralph Chaplin
When two American officers of the U.N. Security Force in Panmunjom,
Korea, were killed on August 18, 1976 by North Korean military forces
in the demilitarized zone, the U.S. replied with stern warnings and
comprehensive military preparations that were countered by the North
Koreans. When Major Arthur G. Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark T.
Barrett were buried with full military honors at West Point and Co-
lumbia, South Carolina, the front page of the New York Times (August
25, 1976) carried a picture of the grieving Bonifas family. This incident
received widest, front-page coverage and comment; for a time it
seemed that the U.S. might take military action.
In contrast, the media were strangely silent about the thirty-four
American naval personnel killed and seventy-five wounded aboard the
unarmed ship U.S.S. Liberty on June 8, 1967. As Israel mounted its
offensive to gain the Golan Heights and added to the prize of Sinai and
the West Bank, there was no indignant press reaction to the onslaught
against this clearly marked vessel in international waters. There were
no honored and publicized burials. Israel’s apology to the U.S. govern-
ment for a “mistake”? was accepted. Death benefits were negotiated
quietly and reported in the smallest print on the back pages of Ameri-
can newspapers.
On June 5, 1967, Israel had attacked Egyptian airfields and thrown
crack paratroopers against the Jordanian Legion in Jerusalem. Despite
the stubborn resistance of the Legion, the Israelis captured Jerusalem
on June 7 and completed their conquest of Jordan’s West Bank on the
8th. On that same morning the Liberty, a World War I]-vintage Victory
ship, the former Simmons Victory, with a sophisticated system of radio
561
562 POLITICS OR POLICY
antennae, including a “Big Ear’ sonar-radio listening device with a
clear capability range of over 500 miles, was steaming off the Sinai
peninsula. It also carried a TRSSCOMS,! a radio device that could
send messages directly to the U.S. by bouncing signals off the moon.
A sister ship of the Pueblo, which was captured by the North Ko-
reans in 1968,? the Liberty was a spy ship, a “ferret”’ in Navy terms,
whose movements were in fact controlled by the Joints Chiefs of Staff
and the National Security Agency in Washington. She was faster than
most ships of her type, with a top speed of eighteen knots; on her
forecastle and deckhouse aft of the bridge she carried two pedestal-
mounted .50-caliber Browning machine guns. These four guns, on
open mounts without even splinter shields, were her only defenses.
The communications areas below decks—which housed intricate
computers, decoding and listening devices manned by linguistic ex-
perts and other personnel who could be changed according to the
ship’s mission—were off limits to the crew, including the officer in
charge, Commander (later Captain) William L. McGonagle. The com-
munications areas were under direct control of a National Security
Agency technician, known to the crew simply as “the Major,” who had
joined the ship with two other civilians at Rota, in Spain. When he first
came aboard, the “Major” wore civilian clothes; later he wore khaki
drill fatigues without rank insignia.
The Liberty had sailed from Rota on June 2 with orders to hasten
to a Mideast operational area ‘‘north of the Sinai Peninsula.” Off Gaza
on June 8, the fourth day of the war, the crew could clearly see the
minaret of the mosque at El Arish. The sea was calm, the sky blue and
empty. Pillars of smoke over Sinai denoted the war.
The Liberty moved inshore in a ‘modified condition of readiness
three,’ a normal state during operations, which meant that she had a
regular steaming watch with one man on the forward machine guns
and bridge lookouts ready to man the after-guns in an emergency.
Shortly after daybreak on June 8, the Liberty’s officer of the deck spot-
ted an airplane, identified as a French-built ‘‘Noratlas” transport,
which circled the ship three times and flew off toward Gaza or Tel Aviv.
When the Liberty reached the eastern boundary of her operating
area at 8:50 a.m. and turned on a southwesterly course, a single uni-
denufied jet crossed her wake about three to five miles eastern, circled
the ship, and flew away to the mainland. It gave no signal; neither did
the ship.
The Liberty was cruising at ten knots, slow for a noncombatant
vessel in an alien war zone but average for a civilian freighter. A
The Attack on Liberty 563
standard American flag, five by eight feet, flew from her masthead on
the ensign staff; the ship’s name was painted clearly on her stern, and
she had large U.S. Navy letters and numbers on her bows. There could
be no mistaking her. At 11:30 two delta-wing jet fighters circled the
ship twice and flew off toward the south. The markings could not be
identified, but as Richard K. Smith indicated in his study ‘“The Viola-
tion of Liberty, ’’3 ‘since the morning of 5 June the skies over Sinai had
been the exclusive property of Israel.”
At 10:56 the Noratlas appeared again and circled the Liberty three
or four times; it reappeared overhead also at 11:26 and 12:20. On each
overflight, according to Officer of the Deck James G. Ennes, it circled
the ship for about ten minutes and made no attempt to signal. The
Liberty had cut speed to five knots to allow monitoring operations and
radar fixings; she continued at this speed for the rest of the morning,
sighting no more planes.
Although reconnaissance aircraft often study a foreign ship,
McGonagle was puzzled by this surveillance, assuming (rightly) that
the planes were from the Israeli Air Force. The “Major” had men-
tioned that transmissions monitored the previous day had caused him
concern. They had worked out a careful cover story, in case the ship
were challenged: They would say that the Liberty was monitoring So-
viet radar systems used by the Egyptians.
McGonagle had received no further orders from his base and
therefore assumed that he was to remain at the designated station. He
did not know that three messages from the Joint Chiefs of Staff order-
ing him to retreat had already been sent, but they never reached him.
These messages, rated “pinnacle,” or highest priority, were “mis-
routed, delayed, and not received until after the attack.’’4 They wound
up back in a desk at Fort Meade, and the Navy has never vouchsafed
an explanation.
The last message was sent only moments before three Mirages
(fast Dassault French fighters that had destroyed the Egyptian Air
Force on the ground three days before), which could carry up to
seventy-two rockets, and carried two 30-mm cannon, swooped in an
attack pattern at 2.05 p.m. A sudden explosion shook the ship. Elec-
tronic equipment sparked and flashed in the communications room. A
seaman was thrown off his feet. Someone shouted that the boiler room
had gone. McGonagle rushed up onto the deck, where men who had
been working and laughing lay still, or crawled about bleeding and
crying. The decks splintered under heavy-caliber bullets. McGonagle
shouted to Lieutenant Stephen Toth to get to the lookout and to
564 POLITICS OR POLICY
identify the planes. As the Lieutenant arrived at his station, a rocket
wrecked the forward bridge quarter and the lookout position, killing
him instantly. Lieutenant Commander Philip Armstrong was killed as
he ran to jettison two blazing cans of gasoline.
The Mirages made rapid, furious, crisscross attacks on the ship
for seven minutes, hitting her with more rockets and strafing her with
cannon fire (shipyard examination later showed there were 821 holes
on the hull and superstructure, not counting shrapnel damage). Isra-
eli pilots with the greatest ease could ‘‘butcher a large, slow-moving,
and defenseless target like the Liberty,’ and the Mirages’ ordnance,
designed to penetrate the armor of tanks, ‘‘punched through the Lib-
erly’s 22-year-old shell plating like a hammer against an old block of
cheese.”’5
McGonagle had ordered a report to the Chief of Naval Opera-
tions, and at 2:10 p.m. he broadcast an open-channel ‘‘Mayday”’ dis-
tress call. Unsure of his communications, because the jets had de-
stroyed all the ship’s channels within minutes by pounding the
antennae, he was fortunate that this message got through to the Sixth
Fleet 600 miles to the northwest and the aircraft carrier Little Rock:
“Mayday! Mayday! Am under attack from jet aircraft. Immediate assis-
tance required.”” The rockets and machine guns silenced the radio.
The Liberty was sull fighting fires when three motor torpedo boats
bore down on the ship, riddling her with their 20-mm and 40-mm
guns. One of the three torpedoes launched struck the communications
room dead center in No. 3 hold, killing twenty-five of the technicians
and crew, including the ‘‘Major,” leaving them entombed in the
flooded wreckage. The awesome consequences of the combined air
and sea attacks was graphically summarized ten years later in a letter
to the Washington Star by one of the seamen aboard:
In less than 39 minutes a fine ship was reduced to a bullet-riddled, napalm
scorched and helpless floating graveyard. In those 39 minutes boys brought
up in the peaceful aftermath of a horrendous world war experienced their first,
and for some their last, trial by fire.®
In his testimony before the Naval Board of Inquiry, McGonagle
stated that he thought he saw an Israeli flag through the smoke, but
he could not be sure. He was incredulous when, instead of another
torpedo, he saw a lamp flashing out, “Do you need assistance?” from
one of the MTBs, which then drifted along with the Liberty. The
printed record of the hearings’ says the Liberty signaled “No thank
you,” but auditors on the spot say McGonagle shouted, “Go to hell!”
The Attack on Liberty 565
According to McGonagle, about forty-five minutes later two
helicopters with the Star of David ensignia clearly visible ap-
proached the ship and “circled around and around at a distance of
about 100 yards.” They never made a direct approach, nor did
they fire. As one of the Liderty’s personnel later related to author
Richard Smith, ‘““These helicopters hovered off the ship as if they
did not know what to do next. They were not there for rescue ser-
vices; they were observed to be carrying armed troops. Neither at-
tempted to signal the ship, and as mysteriously as they approached,
they mysteriously departed.”
The torpedo boats, which had left the general area of the ship and
had gone to a range of about five miles, “‘again headed toward the ship
at high speed.’’8 To the Commander their intentions were unknown,
and “when at about the same time, two jets approached starboard side
in similar fashion to that which preceeded the initial attack, all hands
were again alerted to the possibility of another attack. But none oc-
curred and the aircraft left the scene. An hour later the torpedo boats
commenced retiring.’’?
Around 6:40 p.m. while limping northward at eight knots, steering
from the emergency station and by magnetic compass, the ship was
approached by a helicopter bearing Star of David markings. When the
request to land a man on board was refused, a message was dropped
on the ship’s forecastle. It was the calling card of the Naval Attaché of
the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, on the back of which was written: “Have
you casualties?”
After fifteen minutes of unsuccessful efforts to communicate an
answer, the helicopter departed. But in full view were the blood-spat-
tered decks, and while the wounded had been removed to battle dress-
ing stations below, three bodies, one almost completely decapitated,
rested in full evidence on the forecastle to the main deck.
Somehow the remaining crew repaired the damage enough to
hand-steer the Liberty. McGonagle, who had been badly injured in the
attack, remained on the bridge and steered all night, while the ship’s
doctor coped with the injured. The crippled ship arrived in Malta on
June 14, escorted by a destroyer, the U.S.S. David, and a Sixth Fleet
tug.
Admiral John S. McCain, Commander in Chief of U.S. Naval
Forces in Europe, conducted a naval court of inquiry, which com-
menced hearings in London and then went on board the Liberty at
Malta. The court consisted of Rear Admiral I. C. Kidd (President),
Captain Bernard J. Lauff, and Captain Bert M. Atkinson, of Admiral
566 POLITICS OR POLICY
McCain's headquarters. Captain Ward Boston served as counsel. In its
findings, approved by Admiral McCain on June 18, the court said:
“From the time of the first attack onward, attackers were well-coordinated,
accurate, and determined. Crisscrossing rocket and machine gun runs from
both bows, both beams and quarters effectively chewed up the entire top-side
including ship control and internal communications (sound powered) net-
work. Well-directed initial air attacks wiped out the ability of the four .50-
caliber machine guns to be effective.!°
Three months later writer James Kilpatrick noted, “For the time
being, there is no way for the outside observer to form an independent
judgment, from the record, upon the Court’s conclusions.’”"!!
Apart from scattered newsmagazine references, Kilpatrick's sev-
en-page article broke the media silence about the Liberty. While ac-
knowledging that some of the Israeli excuses might have been valid
(the ensign hoisted by the Liberty might have been drooping and un-
recognizable on the windless day; the side of the vessel might have
been blotted out by smoke, as an Israeli naval reservist from one of the
torpedo boats had claimed in an article for Associated Press on July
6), Kilpatrick expressed skepticism about the official explanation. He
quoted Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip G. Goulding’s refusal to
“accept an attack upon a clearly marked noncombatant U.S. naval ship
in international waters as ‘plausible’ under any circumstances whatso-
ever. The identification markings of U.S. naval vessels have proven
satisfactory for international recognition for nearly 200 years.”
Apparently shying from controversy, Kilpatrick presented his ac-
count as a ‘‘sea story; nothing more.” But after describing the extreme
heroism of the Captain and crew, he rejected the official explanations:
During the past month, press service interviews with survivors of the attack
have turned up a uniform conviction that the attack was deliberate. Sailors
point to the morning-long aerial surveillance; the presence of the flag; the
known configuration of the Liberty; her name in English on the stern . . . her
slow progression in international waters. All these factors support the crew's
conclusion that the assault was no accident... .
Skeptical observers will continue to assume that Liberty was engaged upon
a general mission of intelligence-gathering and code-breaking; and they will
wonder what might have been received, translated, tape-recorded, and fed
into computers between, say, 10 o’clock and noon on June 8 that resulted in
the pinpoint destruction of the very hull compartments—frame 53 to frame 66
—where the electronic gear was housed.!?
The American and international press preferred to forget the
incident and to ignore such provocative questions. From the outset the
The Attack on Liberty 567
Israelis had insisted on minimal publicity “for the sake of the families’
dead and wounded.” Only the Malta News dared print that “the attack
on the Liberty was no mistake.”” On November 4, 1967, Newsweek re-
ported briefly that Israel, contrary to what had been announced June
21, would take no court-martial action against any of the pilots or
seamen who fired on the Liberty. The Israeli Court of Inquiry had
concluded that the Liberty had been mistaken for an Egyptian supply
ship. The report made no mention of the killed or wounded, but
merely stated that Israel apologized and offered compensation.
After nearly ten years, Anthony Pearson, a veteran British journal-
ist who has covered other wars for the Manchester Guardian, the London
Times, and Parts Match, broke this silence with two revealing articles,
peculiarly enough in the magazine Penthouse (May and June, 1976).
Pearson had wondered for years why the Arabs fought on after all
seemed lost in 1967 and why the Israelis had attacked the Liberty. In
his articles he noted the close links between Mossad (the Israeli intelli-
gence agency) and the CIA. He also observed that during the Lyndon
Johnson administration the State Department was caught between its
anxiety about Soviet penetration of the Middle East and the strong
pressures to support Israel, which were brought to bear at that time
by U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, Eugene Rostow in the State
Department, and his brother Walt Rostow, who had been appointed
Special Adviser to the President on National Security just a year before
the 1967 war. Rostow insisted that America should give fullest support
to Israel to balance Russian aid to the Arabs, and this point of view was
strongly backed by the American security agencies.
Chief of the CIA Richard Helms continued to allow all U.S. in-
telligence operations inside Israel to be conducted through Mos-
sad. There was no CIA station chief in Tel Aviv; officers working
under cover in the American Embassy acted in consort with Israeli
intelligence officers, each supposedly having full access to the
other’s information.
James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, had established
these ties with the Israelis after the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on
Suez in 1956. As part of the plan, he helped supply Israel with technical
assistance for developing nuclear weapons. His partner and opposite
number in Mossad was Ephraim ‘“‘Eppy” Evron, Deputy Israeli Ambas-
sador to Washington in 1967, who had been involved in the unsuccess-
ful 1954 Lavon Affair and had disappeared from public view until May
1967, when reporters noticed that he was involved in much activity
with the State Department and the White House. He ‘‘seemed to have
greater significance at the Israeli Embassy than his chief, Avraham
568 POLITICS OR POLICY
Harman,” according to Pearson, and became a vital link in a complex
plan to overthrow President Nasser.
After President Nasser exposed an illegal American arms deal to
Israel in 1965, James Angleton and several Mossad officers decided to
oust Nasser by forcing Egypt to confront Israel. The fiery threats of the
ill-starred Palestinian leader Ahmed Shukairy helped them. Following
a series of secret meetings in Tel Aviv and Washington, CIA officers,
the Israeli general staff, certain Israeli politicians, and inner members
of Johnson’s administration agreed to promote a contained war be-
tween Israel and Egypt, which would not affect territorial lines between
Israel, Syria, and Jordan. Yigal Allon, Intelligence Chief Meir Amit,
Aharon Yariv (head of army intelligence), Shimon Peres (Deputy Min-
ister of Defense), Ezer Weizman (head of army operations), Mordechai
Hod (air force chief), David Hacohen (head of the Knesset Committee
for Foreign and Security Affairs), and Moshe Dayan (soon to be ap-
pointed Minister of Defense) organized this plan in Israel.!3 Eppy
Evron was their liaison officer in Washington, dealing directly with
Angleton at the CIA and with Eugene Rostow at the State Department.
Nasser’s increasingly hard line and the Soviet buildup in Egypt and
Syria could be exploited to arouse public opinion for war, and the
Israeli army would be placed on full alert to goad Damascus or Cairo
into action. The Israelis assured the Americans that the ensuing war
would be fought to the predesigned American plan of containment.
Knowing that American intelligence from Israel came through
Mossad, Evron believed that he could tell the American government
what he wished, and he assured all his Washington contacts night up
to the outbreak of war that Israeli troop movements were simply
precautionary. Evron did not know about the Liberty, but as the war
began, the spy ship’s listening devices tuned in to transmissions from
both the Arabs and the Israelis. Its presence off the battle zone was to
make sure that Israel did not overstep the objectives of the contain-
ment plan.
The observers on the Liberty discovered that while the Arabs failed
to crack Israeli codes, the Israelis had penetrated Egyptian and Jor-
danian codes as soon as the war began. Somewhere between Amman
and Cairo, according to Pearson, the messages between King Hussein
and President Nasser were intercepted, reconstructed, and passed on
by the Israelis without detection, a process called “‘cooking.”’ The
Israelis blocked the message from Cairo that advised King Hussein of
the bad military situation on the Egyptian front, rewording it to misin-
form the King that three-quarters of the Israeli Air Force had been
The Attack on Liberty 569
destroyed over Cairo and that he was picking up Egyptian jets raiding
targets in Israel on his radar. (They were actually Israeli jets returning
from the destruction of Egyptian airfields.)
The Israelis continued to “‘cook” messages to give the impression
that the war was going well for the Arabs. They falsely informed the
King that Egypt was counterattacking in Sinai and needed support in
form of attacks on Israel in the Hebron area, obliging him to withdraw
his forces from the planned crucial offensive designed to cut Israel in
two. The Egyptians were likewise misled; thinking that the Jordanians
had made a successful attack in Hebron, they counterattacked during
the early hours of June 8, ignoring a U.N. call for a cease-fire. Thus
the Israelis gained enough time to seize all of the West Bank they
wanted, to consolidate their gains in Sinai, and to move their troops
right up to the east bank of the Suez Canal.
On June 7 Eugene Rostow called Avraham Harman to the State
Department and warned him that the Israeli attack must stop immedi-
ately; he informed Harman that the Americans knew about the “‘cook-
ing” of communications. Four hours later in Tel Aviv the Minister of
Defense and the Commander of the air force’s offices ordered surveil-
lance of the American communications ship operating off Sinai. Four
hours after that, the same sources ordered that the ship be sunk. This
daring and vicious plan failed only because the desperate open-chan-
nel “Mayday” message brought help from the carrier America. The
approach of rescue planes was picked up by the Israelis, who were
forced to pull back while there was still time to make the only possible
excuse—mistaken identity.
In retrospect, every shred of evidence pointed to the flimsiness of
Israeli contentions. June 8 was a clear day with visibility unlimited,
which made the flag flying from a huge tripod mast towering almost
100 feet above the flying bridge exceedingly perceptible. According to
Engineering Officer George H. Golden, an hour and a quarter before
the first attack there was “‘a slight breeze blowing and the flag flying
from the foremast was standing where it could be seen—not com-
pletely the full length, but where it could be seen.’"!4 When the stan-
dard was shot down early in the action, it was replaced prior to the PTB
attack by a larger holiday ensign.
The large lettering on the stern in English was hard to confuse
with Arabic script on Egyptian ships. The numeral ‘‘5” on the Liberty’s
bows were almost twelve feet tall, freshly painted only a few weeks
before, and quite distinctive at one or two miles in good visibility—
and on this day off El Arish the visibility was excellent. The Israeli
570 POLITICS OR POLICY
claim that the 10,000-ton, 459-foot Liberty was mistaken for the an-
cient Egyptian troopship E/ Quseir of 2,640 tons and only 275 feet
was difficult to accept. The one thing that the two ships had in com-
mon was flotation. The unmistakable silhouette of the ubiquitous
Victory ship, not to mention the Liberty’s unique antenna array and
hull markings, made for immediate recognition.!> The several hours
of close reconnaissance by Israeli aircraft added to the impossibility
that the Israelis did not recognize the Liberty. There was significant
aerial surveillance, as the inquiry’s findings pointed out, on three
separate occasions: ‘five hours and thirteen minutes before the at-
tack, three hours and thirteen minutes before the attack, and two
hours and thirty-seven minutes before the attack. .. . In five of the
six attacks from various angles, two or more jet aircraft at a time
conducted rocket and incendiary attacks.”’!6
Contrariwise, all facts indicate that the Israelis knew exactly what
they were doing. The American Naval Attaché at Tel Aviv cabled the
Board of Inquiry that he could not understand “how trained profes-
sionals could have been so inept as to carry out the attack,” and he
reasoned that ‘“‘the erroneous attack resulted from trigger-happy ea-
gerness to glean some portion of the great victory being shared by the
Israeli Army and Air Force and in which the Navy was not sharing.””!?
There were two plausible motivations for this premeditated Israeli
attack on an American ship. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, according
to Israeli author Zeev Schiff, had masterminded the great ‘‘befuddle
plan,” which called for a news blackout on Israeli victories so as to
prevent the intervention of a cease-fire inspired by the U.S.S.R. or the
U.N.!8 The Liberty, with its extremely sophisticated intelligence equip-
ment, had been monitoring Arab and Israeli transmissions from her
post off Gaza and was keeping the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington
directly informed of the overwhelming Israeli victory that by then
included Jerusalem and the West Bank. Such information gathered by
the Liberty increased the likelihood of a cease-fire, which Dayan def-
nitely did not want.
Alternatively, if indeed the U.S. had been party to a conspiracy to
unseat Nasser, the Liberty had gathered definite proof that Washington
had been doublecrossed and that Jordan, whose territories were to
remain untouched, had been sucked into the war through Israel’s
code-breaking and “‘cooking”’ of false messages. More important to the
Israeli Establishment even than ridding themselves of their hated
Egyptian enemy was crushing the potential challenge to their very
existence by seizing the West Bank and Gaza, the likely site of any
Palestinian state.
The Attack on Liberty 571
The savagery of the strafing and shelling from air and sea, “‘the
awesome combined firepower of the aircraft and torpedo boats,’"!9
were indications of Israeli intent to destroy whatever vital information
the Liberty’s complex intelligence apparatus had gathered and to kill
any Americans who might in any way be privy thereto. The painstaking
June 8-10 Israeli aerial search from El Arish to Rafah, ostensibly for
personnel who might have been washed overboard, seemed more
directed for possible incriminating evidence that might have escaped
from the Liberty’s communications room. The helicopters with armed
troops and the hovering torpedo boats appeared ready to do a mop-up
job on any survivors having the slightest knowledge of what the sensi-
tive communications antennae had carried to the communications
room, but the signal of approaching American planes eliminated this
option.
The communication facilities of the ship from early in the morn-
ing, according to the testimony of Chief Technician Cryptologist Carl
Larkin, had been “‘jammed so loud that the Radioman Chief W. L.
Smith thought at first it was our transmitters which were malfunction-
ing, but he noted, regardless of frequency, this loud jamming noise.’’20
The Israelis were trying to prevent any intelligence findings or call for
help from leaving the ship.
According to the findings of the inquiry, chaired by Rear Admiral
Kidd, “The attack on the Liberty was, in fact, a case of mistaken iden-
tty,”’?! although in an appendix the Court ruled out the Israeli conten-
tion that because the Egyptian town of El Arish, then in Israeli hands,
had been bombarded from the sea, it could have been the act of the
Liberty: “It is inconceivable that either the Israeli Navy or Air Force
would associate Liberty, with her 4.50-caliber machineguns, or El Qu-
seir, armed with two 3-pounders, with a shore bombardment.”’2? The
ship had remained at all times in international waters and at one point
was as much as 13.6 miles from the coast. And still the inquiry con-
cluded that ‘there was no available indication that the attack was
intended against a U.S. ship.”"?3 The Court significantly pointed out
that “there were no Communications Officers left alive with first-hand
knowledge of the missed message backlog on 8 June.’’?4 (One of the
more remarkable aspects of the Israelis’ “error” was that they jammed
U.S. Navy communications frequencies, but claimed they thought they
were attacking an Egyptian ship.)
The whitewash of Israel was complete. The Office of the Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs issued on the very day of the
June 8 attack press release 542-67 accepting the Israeli version that the
attack “‘was made in error”’ and that an apology had been received.*5
572 POLITICS OR POLICY
While Rear Admiral David M. Cooney, Chief of Navy Information,
maintained “‘that the Department of Defense endeavored to keep the
American public informed of the incident through the news media,’’*6
an examination of the two press releases showed a dearth of informa-
tion and referred to only four deaths.
“The Committee for Immediate Action—Families and Friends of
Victims of the USS Liberty,” formed to extract compensation from the
State of Israel, encountered great problems. When the organizers, Mr.
and Mrs. Thomas Reilly, sued Israel at the World Court at the Hague
for $50 million, a State Department representative asked them to
withdraw the claim. They did not. Writer Pearson suggested that the
Court ignored the complaint under coercion of the U.S. State Depart-
ment.
When Captain Joe Toth, father of Lieutenant Stephen Toth,
claimed damages on behalf of his dead son and of two other officers,
the State Department warned him not to make trouble. Despite a bad
heart condition, Captain Toth lodged a suit against the State Depart-
ment. Although supported by his friends, Admiral McCain in the Pen-
tagon and Admiral Kidd, who had conducted the Liberty inquiry, no
one could tell him what action the Israelis were taking against those
responsible. Inquiries in Tel Aviv yielded nothing. The congressional
hearings remained secret, but one or two small leaks revealed that two
of the pilots in the attack were Americans. Doubtlessly, Washington
had connived with the Israelis to hush things up. Even the American
commendations for the ship and for Captain McGonagle’s Medal of
Honor were censored in behalf of the Israelis: All reference to the
nationality of the attackers was deleted. McGonagle’s citation simply
referred to ‘‘jet aircraft and motor torpedo boats,’ and that of the
ship’s to “foreign fighter aircraft and motor torpedo boats.”
The Pentagon and the State Department were not allowed to let
the matter rest. Captain Toth’s lawyers threatened to issue open-court
writs if compensation were not quickly forthcoming. Mrs. Toth told
Pearson:
”
They killed my husband. . . . First my son, then my husband. The harassment
took the form of tireats and claims that Joe was damaging national security,
and there was surveillance and pressure from people like the IRS. It was too
much for his bad heart. It took a year to kill him, but it did.
In May 1968 the Israeli government paid $3.3 million to the
families of the thirty-four Liberty dead, and one year later they paid
$3.5 million to the 164 injured. The U.S. government claimed $7.6
The Attack on Liberty 573
million for damage to the ship, not a farthing of which has ever been
remitted, although the Israeli government had initially publicly pro-
mised to pay for all material damage.”A year later, according to a
story in Haaretz?’ the Israeli government was contending that the
Liberty had not received the instructions sent by the Joint Chiefs to
move away from the fighting and was subsequently hit. The U.S. Am-
bassador in Tel Aviv indicated that if the matter were raised, he
would point out “that whatever communications errors there may
have been on the U.S. side in no way affects the Israeli Government
responsibility, deriving from the fact that the ship was in interna-
uonal waters when attacked.’’28
After a final interview with Captain McGonagle, who, faithful to
his military pledges, revealed nothing further, Pearson returned to the
Middle East, where he discovered that the Israeli investigation and
court-martial announced on June 21, 1967, had never taken place:
The U.S. State Department had agreed wholeheartedly with the Israelis that
the entire affair be swept under the carpet. No one was eager to have the pilots
involved give sworn testimony about who ordered their mission. For that
matter, if there was truth to the stories that some of the pilots were American,
any testimony might have been a severe embarrassment to both govern-
ments.?9
Although the partial revelations of a most serious conspiracy on
an international scale warranted some investigation at the highest
level, the American press for years totally ignored the incident. It
remained for the Ledger-Gazette (circulation 9,117), a small-town news-
paper in Lancaster, California, to comment on May 5, 1976:
One does not usually associate serious purpose with a “skin” publication. This
may explain the virtual absence of reaction so far among investigative journal-
ists to a press release widely distributed by Penthouse magazine concerning a
startling article in its current May issue. Or perhaps the allegations in the
article are simply too startling for credence.
Penthouse itself soon regretted its role in publishing the two arti-
cles. Enormous Zionist pressures, about which the editors refused to
talk, were brought to bear. Successful efforts to remove copies from
newsstands in Canada were ascribed to the issue’s “naked breasts”’
rather than to the ‘“‘naked truth.”
The failure of editors and investigative journalists to probe such
a sensitive and tendentious matter has left individuals and private
organizations to seek the answers to the many questions raised by the
574 POLITICS OR POLICY
Liberty incident. Following the publication of the Pearson articles, the
American Council on the Middle East (ACME) approached the Depart-
ment of State and succeeded in getting some relevant documents
released. These confirmed details of the attack and the compensation
paid by the Israelis, but threw no significant new light on the subject.
ACME likewise obtained a censored transcript of the U.S. Naval Court
of Inquiry findings, but the 532 legal-size pages and photographs,
some barely legible, revealed little new information.
The organization appealed the State Department decision to re-
tain some classified documents and continues to urge the release of all
relevant material. Ina letter to the Chairman of the Council on Classifi-
cation Policy, ACME Secretary Eliot Sharp said:
What were apparently leaks to an author writing for a magazine of mass
circulation, led to his alleging conspiracy by the Johnson administration, in-
cluding President Johnson, Arthur Goldberg, Walt Rostow and Eugene Ros-
tow, with the State of Israel in its June, 1967, attack on Egypt. The requester
therefore seeks verification or refutation of these allegations, for if they are
true, there has been a cover-up of a conspiracy. Disclosure of any such con-
spiracy is of utmost importance to the American people as revealing the
United States’ relations with the State of Israel, and the action of our coun-
try’s leaders which might have precipitated the United States into a cata-
strophic war... .
The Freedom of Information Director in the State Department
admitted there were eleven memoranda among the Rostows, Gold-
berg, and President Johnson at the time of the six-day war. But he
refused to declassify and release four of these documents, which to-
gether with nine still classified documents of forty-eight pages deal-
ing with the Liberty, might provide the answer to key unanswered
questions.
UPI reported on September 18, 1977, that the American Palestine
Committee had obtained CIA documents through the Freedom of
Information Act revealing that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan
had himself ordered the attack on the Liberty. One document, dated
November 9, 1967, released by APC Chairman Norman Dacey, quoted
unnamed agency informants:
Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship. One of his generals ada-
mantly opposed the action and said, “This is pure murder!’’ One of the
admirals who was present also disapproved the action, and it was he who
ordered it stopped.
The Attack on Liberty 575
The sole comment from the CIA was that the documents had been
“unevaluated for accuracy.” CIA Director Stansfield Turner on na-
tional television questioned the validity of the documents and asserted
his belief that the Israeli attack had been an honest mistake.3° But the
accusation leveled against Dayan jibes with the theory advanced for the
Israeli attack by a National Security Agency source.3! The Liberty, sent
to intercept details of Israeli intelligence, had learned that Dayan had
ordered his victorious troops on to Damascus and Cairo, and had so
informed Washington. President Johnson then brought intense pres-
sure on Israel to halt further troop movement and at the same time
warned President Kosygin against what appeared to be Soviet airborne
operations aimed at Israel from bases in Bulgaria. The Liberty con-
stituted a grave menace to the plans of Minister Dayan.
What is patently clear under any theory is that had the Israelis
been successful in sinking the Liberty, the atrocity would have been
blamed on the Egyptians and produced a Pearl Harbor reaction in the
U.S. When the first news of the Liberty attack reached the Sixth Fleet,
so certain was American reaction that it was the Egyptians who had
struck, that a squadron of jets was sent in a threatening sweep over
Cairo as if in a preliminary to war. Dayan in 1967 was determined to
succeed where he had failed in the 1954 Lavon Affair—to shatter
U.S.-Egyptian and eventually U.S.-Arab relations.
The Liberty was long ago scrapped. The discouraged survivors and
their relatives remain to this day reluctant or frightened to talk about
the incident, around which an iron curtain had been placed from the
very outset. While the attack occurred on June 8, parents of wounded
sailors did not know whether their sons were alive or dead until they
finally received telegrams on June 11. The wounded, placed on board
the carrier U.S.S. America, were immediately warned by a representa-
tive of the CIA not to talk to anyone about what had happened.3?
Those with head wounds were taken to the Landstuh, Germany, U.S.
Army hospital, and while there they were kept under guard with tight-
est security. Inquiries from congressmen who represented the families
of the deceased were never answered, and the surviving members of
the Liberty’s crew were dispersed throughout the Navy, no two men
being sent to the same place.
On June 8 at 12:02 the recently arrived U.S. Ambassador in Cairo,
Richard Nolte, sent the following cable to Secretary of State Dean Rusk
in Washington: “‘We had better get our story on torpedoing the U.S.S.
Liberty out fast, and it had better be good.”’53 For obvious reasons this
advice was never followed. A total Washington blackout then and since
576 POLITICS OR POLICY
became the order of the day; the CIA never even made an analysis on
the origins of the attack. For the White House had known and under-
stood exactly what Israel planned.
Nevertheless, despite the secrecy and the cover-up, more than
enough facts had emerged to confirm suspicions that the silence
masked a complex scandal and mammoth international conspiracy to
which the U.S. government had been a party. And the Republicans
who ousted the Democrats eighteen months later rigidly maintained
this concealment.
*Spurred on by the threat of retiring Senator Adlai Stevenson III to launch an
investigation into the facts behind the Liberty attack, Israel finally agreed to pay the U.S.
$6-million for damages to the electronic surveillance vessel. But Washington officialdom
continued to pretend the attack never occurred.
XVIII Oil on Troubled Waters:
The Nixon Years
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him.
—Alexander Pope
Although elected by only a narrow margin over Hubert Humphrey in
1968, Richard M. Nixon had a golden opportunity on coming into
office to bring pressure to bear on Israel for the immediate withdrawal
of troops from the occupied Arab territories, as the first essential step
toward peace.
The forensics with which the quadrennial bid for the Jewish vote
reached new heights in this campaign had given way to the realities of
a tense, fearful situation in the Middle East. The President-elect’s
personal message to the Arab chiefs of state, as well as the fact-finding
mission to the area of former Pennsylvania Governor William Scran-
ton, were clear-cut indications of Mr. Nixon’s deep concern even be-
fore he took office.
In crossing the Allenby Bridge from Israel into Jordan, Scranton
made a most significant declaration. He urged U.S. Middle East policy
to be ‘more evenhanded”’—the first time that word had been used.
And he added: “I think it is important for the United States to take into
consideration the feelings of all persons and all countries in the Middle
East and not necessarily espouse one nation over some other.” This
statement following closely upon a Life magazine editorial that stated:
“There are more hopeful avenues towards peace than a simplistic,
automatic backing of Israel.”
As second in command under President Eisenhower, Mr. Nixon
had given at least implied consent to the halting of the Israeli-British-
French invasion of Egypt in 1956, and then to President Eisenhower's
firm stand forcing the unconditional Israeli withdrawal from occupied
Egyptian territory. On January 5, 1969 the President-elect received a
577
578 POLITICS OR POLICY
personal note from Nasser calling upon him to take a more forthright
position regarding Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied
since 1967. In an obvious bid for time, the reply of the victorious
Republican candidate was noncommittal.
Nixon had not been obligated to the Jewish vote for his election,
and yet he had already contributed to Israel’s militarily impregnable
position. During the campaign, candidate Nixon had confounded the
world in his speech before the B’nai B’rith Convention in Washington
by enunciating a policy “that would give Israel a technical military
margin to more than offset hostile neighbors and numerical strength”
and had called for the immediate delivery of Phantom jets for Israel:!
President Johnson, sensing the unpopularity of his stand on the war
in Vietnam, had already announced that he would not seek re-election
and would retire at the end of his term. In a belated effort to push the
faltering presidential campaign of his Vice-President, Hubert Hum-
phrey, he implemented the Republican candidate’s call. Under a secret
informal agreement between Johnson and the Israeli Prime Minister
Levi Eshkol, Israel had been assured of receiving fifty of these U.S.-
made fighter bombers, the most advanced aircraft in combat in the
Middle East and a more than adequate replacement for the fifty French
Mirages blocked by de Gaulle’s boycott imposed at the time of the
six-day war. (Not too long after these U.S. aircraft had been delivered,
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was asking for additional Phan-
toms.)
The war of attrition across the Suez Canal and along the Jordan
River mounted. The Palestinian guerrillas emerged as an important
new factor following the battle of Karameh. And terrorism, sometimes
threatening to burgeon into full-scale war, was on the increase. The
continued failure of the mission of Sweden’s Ambassador to the
U.S.S.R. Gunnar V. Jarring, designated U.N. representative, to bring
the Middle East disputants together, provided the White House with
further incentive to act.
Middle East violence had taken a giant step forward before Nixon
took his first oath of office on January 20, 1969. Just as fun-loving
Lebanese were preparing to celebrate their New Year’s Eve, Beirut was
assaulted by Israeli planes. The apron of Khalde Airport, the pride of
Israel’s northern neighbor and the hub of the area’s commercial air
traffic, was turned into a smoldering mass of burnt-out fuselages from
thirteen planes. The Israeli attack, conducted by a helicopter force,
was excused by Tel Aviv as retaliation for the Arab attack in Athens
in which an Israeli citizen had been killed.
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 579
The modern Hebrews had picked up the Old Testament slogan
and brought it up-to-date, in true Arab fashion: ‘Ten eyes for an eye
—ten teeth for a tooth.” It was David Ben-Gurion who, as Prime
Minister, had first initiated reprisals 50 to 100 times as strong as the
original attack. Whenever the Israelis judged that Arab attacks had
reached an intolerable level, they retaliated massively as in 1966 when
they wiped out the Jordanian village of Es-Samu’a.
In their onslaught against Beirut, the Israelis had an additional
motivation. They hoped to further split the Lebanese Maronite Chris-
uians, who for long had demonstrated their insistence on remaining
aloof from the Arab-Israeli conflict, from the Muslims, who as fervent
Palestinian supporters wished to ensure that Lebanon remained part
and parcel of the Arab world. The widely disparate views of these two
religious groups had led to the Lebananese civil war of 1958.
Not since American troops landed on the beaches near the same
airport in July that year, in the wake of the assassination of King Faisal
in Iraq, had little Lebanon been so shaken. But even the U.N. Security
Council’s unanimous censure of Israel, in one of the strongest of its
many resolutions dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, had little effect
on the White House, although it stirred world public opinion. When
Pope Paul VI, in a telegram to Lebanese President Charles Helou,
deplored the Israeli attack and expressed hope that Lebanon would
refrain from violent countermeasures, Organized Jewry struck back.
Led by the Synagogue Council of America, Jewish religious and lay
organizations unanimously assailed the Pontifical message. Foreign
Minister Abba Eban immediately interpreted the rebuke from the out-
side world as another instance of ‘anti-Semitism’: “The attitude of
foreign countries cannot be entirely divorced from the traditional atti-
tude of the non-Jewish world to the Jewish world.”
At his first press conference on January 27, Nixon recognized the
grave danger:
We need new initiatives and new leadership on the part of the U.S. in order
to cool off the situation in the Middle East. I consider it a powder keg, very
explosive . . . the next explosion in the Mideast I think could involve very well
a confrontation between the nuclear powers which we want to avoid.
But the new President offered no palliative. Where an undaunted
Eisenhower had defied the Zionist threat in 1956, Nixon mouthed
words. This was the ideal moment to have implemented the Scranton
initiative for evenhandedness, but the President chose otherwise. Like
President Johnson before him, Nixon ignored the declarations of their
580 POLITICS OR POLICY
three predecessors pledging U.S. support for ‘the political indepen-
dence and territorial integrity of a// the nations of the Middle East.”
(Italics added.) Victorious Israel continued to remain undisturbed in
her occupancy of captured Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian territory.
The basic Nixon approach during his tenure in office, despite
vacillations here and there, was based on the premise that Middle East
peace could only be achieved by keeping Israel stronger than all her
neighbors combined, as he had pledged in the campaign. This com-
pletely ignored the fact that Israel had already been stronger than all
her neighbors combined for the previous two decades, had won three
wars, and yet peace was further away than ever before. This was
pointed up by a group of Americans, concerned with the future of the
U.S. in the area and the flouting of justice, in an open letter to the new
President, which appeared in the New York Times as a full-page adver-
usement.? But they found this viewpoint unwelcomed at the White
House.
The successful September 1969 revolution in Libya, ousting the
royalist, corrupt regime of King Idris, with the consequent relinquish-
ment of the U.S. Wheelus Air Base and the near-successful putsch
against King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, shook the Capital deeply. Once
again, ‘“evenhandedness” was taken out of mothballs as the Arabs
summitted at Rabat in what many predicted might be a “‘Council of
War against Israel.’ The Israelis had just launched their fiercest at-
tack across the Canal—four hours of strafing, bombings, and napalm
had both hurt as well as infuriated the Egyptians.
Fearful of an irrevocable Arab stand at their summit, and faced by
the failure of the Big Two and Big Four power conclaves to agree on
a single interpretation of the Security Council resolution, which was
necessary to advance the peace momentum, Secretary of State William
P. Rogers made public a new American peace initiative on December
9, the details of which had been handed to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly
F. Dobrynin six weeks earlier. Speaking at the Galaxy Conference on
Adult Education in Washington, Rogers called for virtual total Israeli
withdrawal from occupied Arab territory and joint Israeli-Jordanian
control over Jerusalem in return for negotiated and binding Arab
peace commitments. The Secretary declared that ‘‘any changes in the
preexisting lines should not reflect the weight of conquest and should
be confined to unsubstantiated alterations required for initial secu-
rity.” Countervailing domestic pressures immediately came into play.
Prime Minister Golda Meir flayed the Rogers proposals as an
attempt to make us “‘start all over again as though it were 1948,” and
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 581
her supporters in the U.S. picked up the familiar refrain, ‘It’s oil that
is opposing little Israel.”” (Where anti-Semitism could not be injected
as a weapon, this secondary line of argumentation was invariably ad-
duced and was invariably as successful.) The leak by the New York Times
on its front page (December 22, 1969) of the secret White House
meeting of a group of top bankers and industrialists, including oil
company representatives, at which the President had been warned that
the ‘U.S. was losing political and economic influence in the Arab
world because of its policies,” together with State Department inept-
ness in presenting the new Rogers initiative, provided the Zionist
campaign with new momentum.‘ It did not take the pack long to latch
onto the word “oil” and wage the same kind of a campaign of vilifica-
tion as had been directed against James Forrestal twenty-two years
previously.
Former Democratic standard bearer Senator Hubert Humphrey,
who previously had been most sympathetic to the administration in its
Vietnam objectives, lashed out at Rogers’ suggestions. The Confer-
ence of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, claiming to have 4!
million members in its thirty-three constituent groups, met with Secre-
tary Rogers, following which their President, Rabbi Herschel Schacter,
announced the mobilization of American Jewry “‘to counter Nixon’s
lagging support of Israel.” The Conference vehemently opposed the
Secretary’s proposals. Both Tel Aviv and its New York supporters
viewed this new initiative, which set forth in detail for the first time
terms for a peace agreement, as smacking of an imposed settlement.
The stipulation for the return to Israel of an unspecified number of
Palestinian refugees was likewise galling to Tel Aviv and its friends.
Marshaling of action against what was now proclaimed to be an
“indefensible U.S. retreat’’ began. Members of the groups represented
in the Conference of Presidents were requested to send telegrams to
their elected representatives in Washington, to President Nixon, and
to Secretary Rogers decrying “‘a U.S. peace proposal released without
any previous knowledge of the Israeli government, as incompatible
with election campaign commitments” and stressing ‘‘arms and eco-
nomic aid needed by Israel to defend herself.’ Newspapers, radio and
television stations were contacted in the all-out assault on the new
Washington plan, to which the announcement of France’s sale of jet
fighters to Libya added more fuel.
What most aroused the spleen of these Israelists was that Wash-
ington was now insisting that Israeli-Arab bargaining was to begin on
the basis of the pre-war boundaries. The counterprovisos, calling for
582 POLITICS OR POLICY
Arab pledges of peace and nonbelligerence, free rights of Israeli pas-
sage through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, and special
demilitarized frontier zones to be defined by the parties, were not
deemed a sufficient quid pro quo for the near-total Israeli withdrawal
required.
The Nixon Administration was already in trouble with Israeli sup-
porters frustrated by their failure to convince the White House to
speed the release of the promised Phantoms and to permit Israel to
purchase twenty-five more Phantoms and one hundred Skyhawks. A
story that Israel was on the verge of producing its own nuclear missiles
and launching vehicles, widely circulated by London’s reliable and
pro-Zionist Jewish Chronicle, certainly had not helped in its quest for
Jets. This development, although nowhere reported in the US press,
together with Israel’s adamant refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonprolifer-
ation Treaty, had figured in the U.S. decision heretofore not to sell
more Phantoms. Where Germany and Japan had been forced to sign
the treaty, Israel had thus far resisted pressures from both the Johnson
and Nixon administrations. With the Japanese signature, the treaty had
gone into effect. According to the 1970 Jane’s World Aircraft,® Israel
would have a nuclear warhead that year capable of being delivered by
missiles developed for them under contract with the Dassault Aircraft
Company in France. This missile, to be launched from mobile ramps,
was said to have a range of 150 miles, long enough to reach and to
devastate Arab capitals. If these reports were true, Israel had become
the sixth nuclear power, joining the U.S., U.S.S.R., U.K., France, and
China—the first of the world’s small powers to develop such a poten-
tial.
In other directions, too, Israel had not helped its bid for more
Phantoms. The strike and counterstrike of the war of attrition was now
involving civilians as victims of the cruelest blows. The bombing of an
Egyptian industrial plant at Abu Zabal, in which 80 workers were killed
in February, was followed on April 8 by an Israeli aerial raid on Bahr
al Bakr, 50 miles north of Cairo, which brought death to forty school-
children. Resentment heightened in the international community.®
Reporters who visited the scene of the schoo] bombing received
firsthand accounts of the ‘“‘badly mutilated bodies of the dead chil-
dren.” Resentment spread throughout the international community.
Anger against Israel mounted, and Nasser came under criticism at
home for exposing Egypt to such attacks.
The entire picture then changed overnight. While Cairo still
donned its blackout clothing at night and appeared to be very much
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 583
at war, the Nile near where the infant Moses was found by the daugh-
ters of Pharaoh among the bullrushes was again resplendent on its
Friday holiday with canoes, rowboats, and feluccas. The appearance of
new SAM-3 missiles, supplied and manned by the Soviet Union, in-
stalled around Cairo and the Nile Delta to defend against low-flying
Israeli fighter bombers, had given the people new confidence. Presi-
dent Christopher Thoren of the American University in Cairo would
certainly not have felt as secure weeks earlier about entertaining me
and other guests on his terrace, looking down on the burgeoning city
of over five million. And not too far away, the war of attrition assumed
a new look.
For the first time since Israeli airpower had virtually silenced
Egyptian batteries along the Suez in July, the Egyptians had seized the
military initiative. The Israelis made the serious charge that Russian
pilots, who had been instructing the Egyptian air force on the new
advanced SAM-3s, were now manning the Egyptian MIGs protecting
Nasser’s capital. Washington’s anxieties mounted. Cairo’s first re-
sponse to the Rogers peace initiative was negative, and Amman was
silent. A year earlier both President Nasser and King Hussein would
have eagerly jumped at Washington’s suggestions. But by 1970 the
U.A.R. and Jordan had to deal with a new dynamic force that Washing-
ton scarcely recognized—the Palestinian Arabs.
While the Arab chieftains at their Rabat summit in December 1969
had publicly agreed only to disagree and the cleavage between right-
and left-wing countries had widened, the Palestinian movement had
emerged from the wreckage of this December Arab summit with en-
hanced prestige and a heightened image. But this new Palestinian
phenomenon was complicating the already complex Middle East
search for peace, running into the conflicting interests of some Arab
States as well as bitter Israeli opposition and Washington negativeness.
Although very aware of the need for including the Palestinians in
any settlement, Nasser was responding to his great losses in the war
of attrition when he indicated in February in the course of his Me-
tromedia network interview from Cairo, a strong willingness to accept
a political solution in line with Security Council Resolution 242 of
November 1967. The Egyptian leader went even further when he
appeared in May 1970 on the National Educational Television Show
“The Advocates” and, for the first time, indicated he would recognize
the existence of the State of Israel if that were necessary to obtain the
withdrawal of Israel from occupied Arab territories.”
Bolstered by the Soviet SAM defenses, the Egyptian leader made
584 POLITICS OR POLICY
a dramatic May Day appeal to President Nixon to force the Israelis to
end the occupation. And the Egyptian leader dispatched special en-
voys to each of the Arab capitals with the purpose of molding closer
collaboration “against Israeli aggression and the United States’ atti-
tude toward it.”’
The Palestinians had stepped up their attacks, launched in No-
vember from Lebanon’s snow-topped Mount Hermon, on Israeli set-
tlements in East Galilee. Invariably, these led to Israeli reprisal raids
against Lebanese villages, with houses of innocents demolished and
many killed. When two Israelis were killed by rockets dropping into
Kiryat Shemona, Israelis quickly entered six villages near the Hasbani
River and carried out a massive retaliatory raid, ferreting out Pales-
tinian fedayeen. Lebanese border villages of Bint Jbeil, Yaroun, Aita-
roun, and Blida fell under heavy Israeli artillery attack after a Pales-
tinian raid on a bus load of Israeli children from Avivim, an Israeli
cooperative farm.
Nixon, who had been closely studying reports of increased Soviet
involvement, including the Israeli allegation that the Soviets were
flying defensive missions over Cairo, was quoted as saying that “the
Middle East had taken an ominous turn.” Israel was using all of its
influence to further the Big Power polarization and to push her Ameri-
can patron into a direct confrontation with the Soviets.
The Intercontinental Hotel in Jordan, which had been relatively
calm since the rejection by the government of the proposed visit of
Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco, became the scene in June
1970 of part one in the internecine struggle between Hussein and the
Palestinians. During my stay ten days earlier at the Hotel on Jebel
Amman, one still could enjoy the pleasure of the lovely site with its
sparkling swimming pool, although the crackle of machine gun fire
occasionally shattered the quiet of dusk as Palestinians and the Jor-
danian military clashed intermittently. But a fierce three days of bloody
warfare saw the Palestinians seize the hotel and take sixty-two foreign
guests as hostages as the Jordanian army began rounding up guerrillas
elsewhere and shelled the refugee camps with artillery fire. Among the
several hundreds killed in the struggle was Major Robert P. Perry,
Arab-speaking U.S. Army Attaché in Amman.
This Jordanian showdown with the Palestinians came to an end
with a truce arranged between Hussein and Al Fatah leader Yasir
Arafat, who declared that “we will never give up Jordan as a base of
operations” and gained the satisfaction of winning the dismissal of
Sherif Nasser ben Jamil, the King’s hated commander-in-chief of the
army.
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 585
Aware of these and other grave dangers, Secretary Rogers de-
clared it was time “‘to stop shouting and start talking.’ At a press
conference June 25 he outlined a proposal for a three-month cease-
fire, for Israeli withdrawal, and for Arab recognition of Israel’s right
to exist. This was to be accompanied by U.N. mediation and indirect
peace talks under the guidance of mediator Ambassador Gunnar V.
Jarring. President Nasser and King Hussein forthrightly accepted the
Rogers plan. On the eighteenth anniversary of the coup that deposed
King Farouk, the Egyptian leader told 1,200 followers packed into a
Cairo University hall that while ‘“‘in all honesty we found nothing new
in this, it is an opportunity.”
Prime Minister Meir, put on the spot by her foes, reluctantly
accepted the proposal after the resignation from her government of
the extreme right-wing Gahal party led by Menachem Begin, who had
joined the Cabinet just prior to the six-day war. The Israelis were wary
lest the the truce be used by the Arabs to prepare for war along the
Canal. The Big Two had spoken, and when Washington and Moscow
were on the same wavelength, Israel could do little to resist American
pressures.
Nasser, whose May Day appeal had now been answered, had him-
self responded affirmatively only after a visit to the Soviet Union, which
apparently also favored this truce to lessen the alarmingly increasing
tensions. The Egyptian President announced, “This is a last chance.
While we inform the U.S. that we have accepted its proposal, we must
also tell them that our real belief is that whatever is taken by force
cannot be returned except by force.”” The Egyptian leader also reite-
rated that the Arabs would yield “‘not one inch” of the territory seized
in 1967 and still held by the Israelis.
The acceptance by Nasser and then by Hussein in August of the
cease-fire signaled the end of the war of attrition but the beginning of
a new internal Arab struggle. The Palestinians, while they could not
afford to fight Nasser’s decision to seek a political rather than a military
solution, turned to meet the challenge of Hussein in Jordan, where
most of the Palestinians lived and from where the fedayeen movement
was then launching its attacks on Israel. Three previous showdowns
between Hussein and the fedayeen had been inconclusive. Hussein
viewed the armed, free-wheeling Palestinians as a continuing threat to
his sovereignty that had to be faced sooner or later. When the Pales-
tinians, determined not to be forgotten under the cease-fire, hijacked
TWA, Swissair, and BOAC planes, fifty-four hostages (there were 300
Originally), and then blew up the aircraft—all on a desert airstrip
known by the British in World War II as Dawson’s Field, twenty-five
586 POLITICS OR POLICY
miles northwest of Amman—the Jordanian sovereign moved against
them. The Jordanian civil war then erupted in earnest. The Hashemite
ruler had determined this time to make himself sole ruler of his coun-
try.
After Hussein placed the country under martial law on September
15 and ordered his generals, who had replaced the previous civilian
government, to destroy the commando movement, the U.S. readied
itself to move militarily. The aircraft carriers Saratoga and Independence
joined the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean; a group of C-130 trans-
port planes carrying airborne troops flew from Europe to Turkey;
helicopter carriers and Marine landing teams were readied in North
Carolina.
In the ensuing crisis, when Syrian tanks moved into Jordan to
assist the Palestinians and helped in the capture of the Jordanian town
of Irbid, the U.S. unmistakably indicated the high priority it placed on
the freedom of the small Hashemite kingdom. The 82nd Airborne was
alerted and the augmented Sixth Fleet was ordered to move further
eastward in the Mediterranean.
Knowing that direct U.S. intervention could both endanger any
future Washington initiative as a mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict
and might bring the Soviet Union onto the scene in behalf of the
Syrians, the U.S. asked the Israelis, through Prime Minister Meir (then
visiting Washington), if they would agree to intervene in Hussein’s
behalf with planes. The wily Meir, at the time angling for $500 million
in aid, in return exacted approval of her request as well as the dispatch
of eighteen Phantoms ahead of schedule. The Israeli Cabinet meeting
to which she rushed from her U.S. visit consented to bailing out Hus-
sein if necessary, provided the U.S. would permit Israel to use ground
as well as air forces against the Syrians and Palestinians.®
Israeli intervention became unnecessary when the Jordanians
turned the tide in the tank battle that followed; the Syrians, persuaded
by the Soviet Union, pulled back their forces across the border; and
the Palestinian fedayeen proved to be no match for Hussein’s 56,000-
man force, the best drilled and most efficient army in the Arab world.
Three days after the Syrian retreat, the New York Times released
maps and details of the Pentagon military plan under which U.S. and
Israeli forces were to have coordinated their efforts in supporting
Hussein, according to the joint design of their intelligence units. An-
other Big Power clash had been averted, in the course of which inti-
mate U.S.-Jordan and U.S.-Israel ties, if not U.S.-Israel-Jordan ties,
had been clearly revealed.9
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 587
The Arab Summit, called by President Nasser, sought to bring the
fighting to an end. After arranging a shaky cease-fire between the
combatants, the Egyptian President used all the prestige and persua-
sion he could command as he tirelessly struggled to bring about a
reconciliation between King Hussein and Arafat to maintain some
semblance of Arab unity. Qaddafi and Algeria’s President Houari
Boumedienne had wanted to send troops to join the Palestinians
against Hussein. The King and Arafat flew to Cairo for a conciliatory
handshake. But the effort was too much for Nasser, who had kept his
ailing health a secret from all but the Russians, whose doctors had
been treating him for some time.
As December 7, 1941, for Americans was a ‘‘day that will live in
infamy,” to use the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so September
28, 1970, became for the Egyptian people a “day that will live in
catastrophe.” Their great and beloved leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser,
suddenly succumbed to a heart attack, and was taken from them in the
prime of life. Unul the moment his body was buried three days later,
the masses of Egypt seemed unable to accept the will of God.
Nasser, a dedicated, intelligent, resourceful man, maintained his
popularity for eighteen years im a region of the world particularly
noted for instability and internecine struggles. As the standard bearer
of a new Egyptian-Arab consciousness, he endowed his people with a
sense of dignity they never dared possess before. He was the first
Egyptian to rule the land of the Pharaohs in more than 2,000 years,
freeing that land from foreign domination. Both literally and figura-
tively, Nasser had placed the U.A.R. on the map. Even his worst enemy
was invariably deeply impressed upon meeting the handsome, charis-
matic, solidly built six-footer with boundless energy and extraordinary
personality. A master tactician in the art of balancing the U.S. against
the Soviet Union, Nasser like the proverbial lucky Pierre, managed
somehow to maintain himself in the middle.
Nasser’s personal magnetism held Egypt under his rule while the
world around him and its leadership constantly changed. His strength,
undoubtedly, led to the CIA decision to help keep Nasser in power,
at the same time exerting pressure on the Egyptian to temper his
attitude toward Israel.!° The Egyptian leader’s problems were mag-
nified by his worst blunder: intervention in Yemen, which he referred
to as “my Vietnam.”
Nasser had fallen far short of his goal of welding the 150 million
Arabs of 15 countries into one spiritual nation and became the vicum
of his own strivings in the midst of super-strenuous efforts to end the
588 POLITICS OR POLICY
crisis in Jordan. The cry, ““Min badak, ya Gamal!”’ (Who will come after
you, O Gamal!) echoed across the oceans and continents as the passing
of Nasser left a giant void. His funeral in Cairo indicated that perhaps
no world leader had enjoyed his people’s adulation as much as Nasser
had. Television viewers throughout the world could see endless,
speechless mass demonstrations of grief for which there have been few
parallels in the annals of man.
At the time, Nixon was on a European tour visiting Marshal Tito
in Yugoslavia. Had he chosen to attend the funeral, he could have
endeared himself and his country to the Arab masses.!! But he would
have had to face the wrath of a Zionist lobby, already exercised over
Israeh charges that the Egyptians were violating the cease-fire by
bringing new rockets, missiles, and other weapons into the standsull
zones along the Canal.
Ata special General Assembly debate on the Middle East, initiated
that November by the new Sadat government, an Afro-Asian resolu-
tion was overwhelmingly adopted, calling for Israeli withdrawal from
occupied territories and an unconditional resumption of Arab-Israeli
peace talks under Ambassador Jarring, U.N. Secretary-General U
Thant’s peace representative. The U.S., supported only by Israel and
fourteen other countries—but not by such normal allies as Italy, Bel-
gium, Luxembourg, China (Taiwan), Japan, and the Philippines—op-
posed the resolution on the grounds that it ‘‘upset the balance between
the need for withdrawal from the occupied lands and for acknowledg-
ment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political indepen-
dence of all Middle East countries.”’ This international jockeying over
which comes first—Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories or Arab
recognition of Israel—continues to dominate diplomatic maneuver-
ings up to the present.
What stunned the U.N. was the announcement by Palestinian Dr.
Fayez Sayegh, speaking for the Kuwaiti, Algerian, Syrian, Iraqi, Saudi
Arabian, South Yemeni, and Yemeni delegations, that these countries
were reluctantly abstaining in the vote on the draft resolution. The
original draft recognized that “full respect for the inalienable rights of
the Arab people of Palestine was a prerequisite to a just and lasting
peace in the Middle East.”’ But in the course of two revisions, the word
“inalienable” disappeared and “prerequisite” became “indispens-
able.” This, in the eyes of the Palestinians, was marked retrogression,
and thus seven of the then fourteen Arab League members refrained
from voting.!2 The post-Nasser Arab disunity had begun.
But the Palestinian cause received additional recognition in other
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 589
directions. Within a two-week span both State Department spokesman
John F. King and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Charles Yost were
quoted as saying that peace in the Middle East depended on “taking
into account the legitimate concerns and aspirations of the Palestini-
ans.” (Secretary Rogers had earlier noted that ‘‘any just settlement
must take into account the desires and aspirations of the refugees.”’)!3
And the lengthy, scathing report of the U.N. Special Committee to
Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Popula-
tion of the Occupied Territories, comprised of representatives of Sri
Lanka (Ceylon), Somalia, and Yugoslavia, condemned Israel for gross
violations of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which had been ‘‘adopted
as an expression of the international community’s sense of revulsion
at the treatment accorded Jews under the Nazi regime.”
Although pushed by the international community to implement
the U.N. resolutions calling for Israeli withdrawal and recognition of
Palestinian rights, Washington was not forgotting the Nixon campaign
promise to maintain Israel’s military superiority, and had rushed
through the $500 million, open-ended military appropriations bill in
the fall of 1970 as part of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s
strategy to checkmate the Soviet Union challenge in any part of the
globe where the free world was being challenged by proponents or
wards of the East. The rivalry with Moscow in the Middle East heated
up as the Soviet Union signed a twenty-year friendship agreement with
Cairo, although still not giving Cairo the offensive weapons to meet
the challenge of the flow of U.S. armaments to Israel.
Meanwhile, in the face of delays, charges, and countercharges
regarding violation of the truce, the U.N. mediating efforts of Ambas-
sador Jarring had floundered. The Israeli Cabinet remained badly split
over the strategy to be pursued. On February 8, 1971, in identical
aides-mémoire, Egypt was called on to commit itself to a peace agree-
ment with Israel, and Israel was asked to withdraw its forces from
occupied Egyptian territory to the former international boundary.
These commitments were to be simultaneous and reciprocal, as
preliminaries to a determination of other aspects of a peace settlement
called for by the still extant Security Council Resolution 242 ending
the 1967 war.
One week later, Egypt indicated that it would accept the specific
commitments requested and would be ready to enter into a peace
agreement with Israel if that nation would give commitments covering
its own obligations under the resolution, including the withdrawal of
its armed forces from Sinai and the Gaza Strip and achievement of a
590 POLITICS OR POLICY
just settlement of the refugee problem in accordance with U.N. resolu-
tions.
On February 17 the Special Representative informed Israel of
Egypt’s reply to his azde-memoire. On February 26 Israel, without spe-
cific reference to the commitment the Special Representative had
sought from that government, stated that it viewed favorably Egypt’s
expression of readiness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel,
and reiterated that it was prepared for meaningful negotiations on all
subjects relevant to a peace agreement. Israel considered that both
parties, having presented their basic positions, should now pursue
detailed and concrete negotiations without prior conditions.!4
On the question of withdrawal, on which Ambassador Jarring had
sought a commitment, the Israeli unequivocal position was that it
would promise to withdraw from the Israel-Egyptian cease-fire lines to
“secure, recognized, and agreed boundaries” to be established by
negotiations in the peace agreement; it would not withdraw to the lines
existing prior to June 1967.15
To divert attention from the Israeli refusal to give Ambassador
Jarring a definitive answer regarding what occupied lands Israel would
be willing to relinquish, the alleged Soviet maltreatment of its Jews, as
dramatized in the Leningrad hijackers, provided an excellent smoke
screen for Israeli intransigency. Ted Kennedy indicated that Chap-
paquiddick was now far behind him as he wooed the block vote by
blasting the Nixon administration for being ‘‘lax on helping Russian
Jews to leave the Soviet Union.’’!6
However much the media simulated progress to invent news, sell
papers, and ttillate the public fancy, there still remained the irrecon-
cilable gap between Israel’s goal of partial withdrawal from Arab-
occupied territories and total peace, and the U.A.R. target of total
withdrawal and partial peace. In agreeing to a third extension of the
cease-fire, President Sadat called for a significant withdrawal of Israeli
troops from the Suez Canal area. If this were done, the Egyptians
would begin clearing the Canal and ready it for international traffic.
The Egyptian cities on the eastern shore would of course be liberated.
This new initiative had been spurred by the efforts of the committee
of ten African heads of state of the Organization of African Unity.
To the trial balloon of Nasser’s successor, Tel Aviv fired back the
forthright question through Ambassador Jarring: “Does international
traffic include Israel?” There was no direct response from Cairo.
Both sides wished to avoid renewal of the costly war of attrition,
particularly in early spring, which is not good military weather. The
Oul on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 591
Middle East wars, like the tempers of the protagonists, wax warmer in
higher temperatures, and the Sadat offer of opening the Suez Canal
was calculated to water Western mouths, as well as to appeal to those
oil companies in the U.K. and Europe that had been paying the exces-
sively higher tolls forced by the closing of the artery. While the open-
ing of the Canal would serve to advance the Soviet Union’s naval thrust
toward the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, this would be balanced by
the savings to Western oil companies. In acquiescing to the opening
of the Canal, Meir adroitly avoided any commitment as to Israeli troop
withdrawal. And so the parties sparred without reaching any definite
decision and continued their jockeying for support of world public
opinion.
Although President Sadat’s warning that April might be for the
Middle East what the Ides of March had been for Julius Caesar made
little impression on Washington, the Israeli Prime Minister wanted to
make sure that election-minded legislators understood her goals.
Going over President Nixon’s head, Mrs. Meir dispatched her most
talented, unexcelled orator, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, to Washing-
ton to engage in an extraordinary briefing session attended by almost
one half the members of the Senate. Like so many other opponents of
the Israelist machine, Secretary of State Rogers was then reduced to
the degrading position of having to ask for equal time in a closed-door
Senate meeting, attended by only a handful of legislators, in order to
try and set the record straight.
Recruited influence was not to be halted, however. Democratic
presidential aspirant Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana told a large New
York audience that Washington must not pressure Israel ‘‘to rely on
promises”’ that can be “forgotten or ignored.” The conservative media
gave vent to its anti-Communist sentiments by both exaggerating the
extent and strength of the latest build-up of Soviet air reinforcements
to Egypt, and deceiving its readership into believing that the Russian
MIG-23s and the supreme interceptor Sukhoi-lls, allegedly pouring
into Cairo, were capable of more than defensive potency.
The strong declaration of the newly announced Egyptian-Libyan-
Syrian confederation!” that there would be ‘‘no abandoning of one
inch of Arab territory,” and “no relinquishing of the rights of the
Palestinians” added another obstacle for UN mediator Jarring, and
provided Tel Aviv with an opportunity to wiggle out of the ught spot
in which Sadat’s Suez Canal offer had placed the Israelis. Although as
the Christian Science Monitor pointed out, the Arab confederation was
Only “‘a paper alliance,” which faced greater obstacles than other past,
592 POLITICS OR POLICY
unsuccessful, similar attempts, the rising star of charismatic Libyan
leader Colonel Mua’mmar Qaddafi added to Israeli concern.
Even as the media and other supporters of Israel continued to rant
hysterically about alleged Egyptian infractions of the stand-sull agree-
ment, one had to read the Anglo-Jewish press to learn that Deputy
Prime Minister Allon had told 300 members of a UJA mission group
at a farewell dinner, “Israel has not been resting on its laurels in the
Canal Zone during the past three months and is now stronger than she
was before the cease-fire.””!8 And Chief of Staff General Bar-Lev dis-
closed that “‘Israel’s fortifications have been strengthened to withstand
the heaviest bombardment, including the massive shells of the Soviet
2-03mm artillery being supplied to Egypt in large quanuties.”’ The
General frankly revealed that “during the three-month truce, new
roads have been constructed and fuel systems improved.” This was
stated even as the Nixon administration was pushing through its latest
defense appropriation for Israel so as to preserve, in the words of
President Nixon, “‘the delicate military balance.”
The five-country Middle East mission by Secretary Rogers in the
spring of 1971 brought little progress toward reopening the Canal, but
did buy time in the form of another extension of the cease-fire. The
Secretary, evenhanded at all times, drew Israeli criticism because of his
alleged ‘‘supersensitivity” toward Arab feelings by refusing to drive
around the occupied sector of Jerusalem with the Israeli official flag
flying from his car. His arrival in Cairo coincided with Sadat’s move
against the leftist clique led by Ali Sabri. With the house arrest of the
Ministers of War and Interior, and with other key opponents to disen-
gagement under lock and key, the Sadat government pushed harder
for a Canal agreement and Israeli withdrawal from the East Bank as a
first step toward total withdrawal from all occupied territories. But as
Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon clearly indicated to Secretary Ro-
gers, Israel would never consent to even a partial pullback from the
Canal if it were to be construed as the beginning of total Israeli with-
drawal.
White House pressures on Israel to withdraw to effectuate the
goals of the Secretary of State were constantly being leavened by
promises of economic assistance to the faltering Israeli economy. With
the next national elections looming on the horizon, the Zionist com-
bine daily tightened its net around the President. The situation was
well summed up by columnists Evans and Novak in this manner:
“Thus, Nixon is caught in a bind. He must decide either to use his
enormous power to back Israel down or risk losing everything he has
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 593
gained in two years of hard diplomacy, with another war at the end of
that road.’’!9
Speaking on the eve of the anniversary, Sadat warned the mem-
bers of the Arab Socialist Union, “1971 must be decisive either by
fighting or by peace.”” While Washington had responded with fine
words and proposals to the Arab insistence on near-total Israeli with-
drawal from all occupied territories, there was still no indication what-
soever of when and how the U.S. would exert real pressure on Israel
to force appropriate action, even though the Meir government was
particularly vulnerable at this time.
Despite the interregnum of temporary peace ushered in by the
cease-fire, Israel faced grave economic problems and rising internal
unrest. The little-discussed Georges Friedman book The End of the
Jeunsh People?® had predicted how peace could bring deep internal
frictions and even constituted a greater threat to Israel than did the
Arabs.
Meir’s fall 1971 visit to the U.S. saw a low watermark in U.S.-Israel
relations. There seemed to be an unbreachable impasse: Israel de-
manded more Phantoms, Secretary Rogers wanted Israel to start with-
drawing. Although Congress had been continuously resoluting for
more Phantom aircraft deliveries to Israel, Rogers, according to an
account in the Israeli daily Ma‘ariv, vehemently retorted to the de-
mand of eight Senators (and the Israeli Premier herself alluded to
these alleged remarks in a major foreign policy address in the Knesset
on November 25): “Israel is a state which is falling apart from within
and there are elements within it who do not agree on the present
policy. Even the Pope in Rome defines Israel’s policy as inflexible, and,
in fact, Israel is today the most isolated state in the world.”
The Secretary of State and the Israeli leaders exchanged bitter
words in a face-to-face confrontation. The President and the Israeli
Prime Minister were at odds after an angry telephone conversation on
Thanksgiving Day. And then suddenly, as happened before and since,
the storm evaporated and blue skies broke through. (As on other
subjects, the Nixon Memoirs are very selective—there is much praise of
Mrs. Meir and no criticism so that little light is shed on this ‘‘family”
quarrel.)
The continued pressure on the White House from Congress and
from influential forces within the administration, including Detroit
industrialist Max Fisher who, as a Vice Chairman of the National Com-
mittee to Re-elect the President, had been rallying Jews across the
country to the President’s standard, resulted in the collapse of Rogers’
594 POLITICS OR POLICY
resistance. Kissinger’s guidelines prevailed: The U.S. must support
Israel because the Soviets were giving all-out help to the Arabs. This
Nixonian version of the policy of containment by matching Commu-
nist strength and maintaining the so-called military balance in the area
was given priority over Rogers’ judgment as to what should be done
in the Middle East. The rash of Soviet arms shipments were cited as
justification for the decision that there now had been a shift in the arms
balance requiring the U.S. to send the Phantoms demanded by Israel
and to make other undisclosed commitments to Meir’s government.
Months earlier, at the start of the August 1970 cease-fire, when the
Kremlin had rushed SAM-2s and SAM-3s into the Egyptian front lines
and Israel had consequently balked at entering into the Jarring talks
until she was given more security in the form of Phantoms, Washing-
ton had refused to view this an excuse for stepping up the arms escala-
tion demanded by Israel. But at that time there was no upcoming
presidential election, which, as Watergate was soon to prove, was
placed above all by the Nixon administration.
There could be little doubt that Washington’s shift had been
inspired by concern over national politics. Six months before the Wa-
tergate break-in, initial public opinion polls were of deep concern to
the White House, whose Republican occupant was not as ideologically
drawn to the Zionist cause as were the several Democratic presidential
aspirants. After all, it was the party of Truman and Johnson that had
always so closely identified itself with the Tel Aviv-New York axis,
whereas the GOP usually tagged along lest they face inevitable vital
domestic political consequences. The calendar had thus invaluably
assisted Israeli perseverance to gain its latest gift of air armaments.
After seeing the President and the Secretary of State in Washing-
ton, Meir spent five days in New York City and was able to say to the
press: ‘‘We want aircraft. We were never happy about the necessity of
bringing the subject up in the open. I’ve done my best to explain why
additional aircraft are needed for Israel and why, if delivered, such
aircraft would not obstruct negotiations for a final peace agreement or
even an interim Suez Canal agreement.” Despite her strenuous deni-
als, it was all too obvious that Meir had acceded to U.S. wishes. The
quid pro quo for the Phantoms she was to receive was the resumption
of the important talks with U.N. conciliator Jarring, disrupted at the
time of the Canal proposal discussions and later ground to a full halt
with Israel’s refusal to provide the mediator with a pledge to withdraw
from the occupied territories.
Meir appeared thoroughly satisfied. But about what? Was it
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 595
merely the Phantoms, or had she won a great deal more—her longtime
real primary objective of a U.S. security guarantee that would remain
steady and unchanging through all political, diplomatic, and military
changes and, unlike a treaty, would not be subject to legislative ratifica-
tion nor public approval? The latter hypothesis was supported by the
relative ease with which the U.S. was able to persuade Israel to exercise
moderation in the face of the ruthless Lydda Airport slaughter (June
1972) by the Japanese hirelings of the Marxist Palestinian movement.
Threats of an immediate reprisal against Lebanon were never ex-
ecuted, suggesting the likelihood of a U.S.-Israel relationship over and
above a mere jet deal.
Incredible as it may seem, the U.S. may have involved itself in a
new secret undertaking at the very moment the nation was recovering
from the shock of the Southeast Asia secret commitments, revealed by
the Ellsberg-stolen Pentagon Papers.
In the course of the 1971 Nixon-Meir talks in Washington, the
Israeli Prime Minister’s natural concern as to the U.S. position at the
Moscow summit, scheduled to take place in May six months hence, had
led her to exact promises to ensure the fullest protection of Israel’s
interests. Whatever the President of the U.S. promised the Prime Min-
ister of Israel at that ume concerning what he would say to the party
leader of the Soviet Union must have been carried out, according to
these exuberant comments over Israeli radio by then-Israeli Ambassa-
dor to the U.S. Yitzhak Rabin: “‘President Nixon’s express commit-
ment at the summit with Soviet leaders in Moscow proved he is the best
friend Israel ever had at the White House.”’?!
The communiqué issued after these first Nixon-Brezhnev talks
was totally barren of any new peace initiatives save the agreement for
resumption of the Jarring talks. The interim Suez Canal agreement was
put to sleep, and other Kremlin pressures in behalf of the Arabs were
resisted. The status quo preserving the Israeli position had not been
impaired in the slightest.
By January 1972, after her return home, Meir completely changed
her tune. The more dovish members of her Cabinet who had ad-
vocated a more flexible line (including at times Foreign Minister Abba
Eban) were now overruled by the Prime Minister, Moshe Dayan, and
Information Minister Galili. Meir’s U.S. operation had been successful,
and the Sadat’s “year of decision” had run out without any Egyptian
aa “No new Israeli concessions” became the Israeli order of the
ay.
Ambassador Jarring began his first round of renewed talks and
596 POLITICS OR POLICY
demanded a commitment of withdrawal to the international borders
of Egypt. But Tel Aviv, rejuvenated by the new Washington determina-
tion to back Israel, remained firm in its refusal to the request of the
U.N. conciliator. In fact, the U.N. mediator was now openly assailed
as being ‘‘biased’’ for having exceeded his mandate in his February
1971 memorandum by insisting upon a prenegotiations pledge from
Israel.
Publicly, Israeli leadership interpreted the sale of the Phantoms as
a Nixon admission of past failures in peacemaking efforts. Some quar-
ters alleged that the Russian victory in the India-Pakistan war had
forced the U.S. President to send the planes as a show of strength, a
riposte prior to the Moscow summit. In the eyes of Tel Aviv, the
Pakistani defeat also confirmed the Israeli viewpoint that neither U.N.
nor other international guarantees could ever safeguard the security
of any small state. The subcontinent war had, in addition, diverted
attention from the Middle East conflict and had destroyed Sadat’s
plans to focus attention at the U.N. once more on Israeli intransigency.
In his February 9, 1972, message on foreign policy, Nixon ex-
pressed deep concern about the growing danger of a confrontation,
and the ‘‘common interest in not becoming involved in a war.” The
President emphasized the dire need for Big Power restraint. The injec-
tion into the region of the “global strategic rivalry” was incompatible
with Middle East peace and with the détente in U.S.-Soviet relations,
he declared. White House researchers displayed an improvement over
past performance in the presidential reminder that “‘one of the ironies
of history finds that the 20th century has thrown together into bitter
conflict these two peoples who had lived together and worked peace-
fully side by side in the Middle East for centuries.” In his retirement
Eisenhower had to be reminded how incorrect he was in his Reader's
Digest article reference to ‘‘the centuries-old animosity between Arabs
and Jews.’’2?
The Middle East stalemate continued, however. Time and again
the Nixon administration was forced to admit its inability to make any
breakthrough toward peace, aside from the extension of the 1970
cease-fire. The close proximity talks between the adversaries, along
the lines of the Rhodes indirect negotiations favored by Israel, were
resoundly vetoed by Cairo while Israel, in turn, adamantly refused to
give Jarring any magic words that would move the talks along.
Held at bay on the military front as Moscow continued to refuse
to give firm backing to Cairo for any serious move across the Canal
against Israeli power, Sadat decided on a new tack. A new Saudi
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 597
Arabia-Egyptian alliance had been in the making since the visits to
Cairo of Saudi Arabian Defense Minister Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz,
brother of King Faisal, and return visits to Riyadh by President Sadat.
It was obvious that the advice given Sadat by his Saudi cousins was to
move closer to the U.S., by relieving himself of the growing influence
of the Soviet Union, which Faisal feared as much or more than the U.S.
did. Apparently Kissinger’s veiled remark about action “to expel” the
Russians,23 made at a background briefing of news during the 1970
Palestinian-Jordanian struggle following the plane hijackings, had
made a lasting impression on politically aware Sadat.
The Egyptian President had failed in trips to Moscow and in
negotiations with the Russians to obtain the offensive weapons he
needed. The MIGs he was getting carried a very low bomb load with
nowhere near the speed nor maneuverability of the rival Phantoms.
These were purely defensive weapons. The Russians indicated they
would continue to supply Egypt with land-to-air defense missile sys-
tems but not land-to-land, and they were not willing to part with their
latest planes, which could outspeed the American Phantoms. The So-
viet Union also rejected Egyptian requests for SS-4 Sandal missiles
with a striking range of 1,200 miles, and the SS-1C Scud short-range
missiles with a range of 185 miles, capable of delivering both conven-
tional and nuclear warheads. Egypt’s Frog-3 surface-to-surface mis-
siles were not capable of reaching targets in Israel.
At this juncture Sadat made his famed move of July 17, 1972,
abruptly expelling the Soviet military advisers and technicians, num-
bering between 15,000 and 18,000. In his official announcement,
Sadat said Egypt was taking over all Soviet installations as well. He
referred repeatedly to his recent problems in securing offensive weap-
ons from the Russians: “This is what made me say we needed to
reevaluate our position.”
In the days following, experts felt Sadat was opening the door for
a direct Egyptian approach to the U.S. But in his first public speech
following the expulsion, Sadat portrayed himself as a leader misled by
the U.S., which promised help in getting peace and had never followed
through, and by the Soviet Union, which promised the means to make
war but then withheld them. He expressed frustration with both super
powers and said Egypt must turn to a policy of self-reliance, seeking
more help from the Arab world and from Western Europe. He also
hoped the latter would help pressure the U.S. toward the Arab posi-
tion.
The ouster of the Russians provided Washington with a golden
598 POLITICS OR POLICY
opportunity, coming at the most opportune moment. In the wake of
the Peking and Moscow summits, there had seemed to be few further
spectaculars that the Nixon administration could or needed to mount
as additional reelection campaign fodder. Then came the astounding
Middle East development. After a certain period of evaluation and
hesitation, Secretary Rogers appealed for a forthright resumption of
Middle East negotiations. The State Department chieftain clearly in-
dicated that these did not necessarily have to be direct talks at the
outset.
But this minuscule bait held out to the Egyptians was unaccom-
panied by other indications that at this most sensitive domestic polit-
cal period Washington had any intention of prodding Israel into a
more flexible mood. Neither Prime Minister Meir’s extension of the
olive branch in her dramatic direct appeal to Sadat nor Moshe Dayan’s
television announcement of the redeployment of the Suez-line Israeli
troops was sufficient evidence that the U.S. President had exerted the
pressure anticipated by Sadat’s daring move. No one in any way was
as yet speaking “‘harshly” to Tel Aviv, the necessary prerequisite for
appropriate Israeli action.
In fact, at this juncture Nixon seemed concerned only with trying
to outbid the Democrats for Zionist support at the polls. In his message
to the Zionist Organization of America on July 13 on the occasion of
its Diamond Jubilee Convention in Jerusalem, the President extended
salutations ‘‘to a people who truly share the heritage of two great
nations, Israel and the United States. Both countries are strengthened
by your leadership and both share a common goal, the preservation
of freedom and peace in the world.” In this patent pursuit of the Jewish
vote, he had endowed American Jews, the overwhelming majority of
whom had never set foot in Israel, with a dual heritage. And two weeks
later, in talking by telephone to Meir on July 28 for three minutes as
part of the inauguration of a new Israeli satellite ground communica-
tions station, the President stated (and this was prominently publicized
by his press people) that he would continue to work for “‘a just peace
in the Mideast, which will protect the integrity of Israel.”
Nixon’s newly demonstrated support of Israel paid large divi-
dends in the November 7 elections. In his overwhelming defeat of
Senator McGovern, the President more than doubled his 1968 vote in
the cities with Jewish population concentrations, helping to add to the
Democratic rout.
On Meir’s first visit to Washington after the elections, Nixon
agreed not only to sell four squadrons of combat jets but also to assist
Owl on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 599
the Israelis with production and technical help in manufacturing its
own Super Mirage, an advanced design based on the French Mirage
fighter series and powered by the same General Electric jet engines
used in the sophisticated F-4 bombers. By June Israel would have
received about 12 VF-4s and 200 A-4s. Delivery under the 1971 agree-
ment between Washington and Tel Aviv was not scheduled to be
completed until the end of the year.
This latest aid for Israel and the Beirut assassinations of PLO
leaders deeply angered the Arab world. Widespread allegations of U.S.
complicity in the Israeli raid into the heart of Lebanon, although
without any proof linking the American Embassy, added to mounting
Arab anti-U.S. feeling.
The summer of 1973 saw the area cold war heating up considera-
bly. A new wave of hyacking and airport violence included the killing
of fifty-five by alleged Black September Palestinians in an Athens air
lounge. The Big Two’s determination to avoid any conflict remained
the sole constraint as the battlefield spread to the U.S. home front.
The energy crisis became more acute. Gasoline was being doled
out in several parts of the country, gas stations were closing, protests
were registered, and the possibility of compulsory rationing emerged.
In the face of public resentment over energy shortages and the first
public hints that a change in U.S. Middle East policy might help meet
the crisis, Washington continued to vacillate, on the one hand trying
to maintain a modicum of Arab goodwill so as not to further imperil
American interests, and on the other hand responding to the same old
pressures at home from politicians, liberals, and the cultists of anti-
anti-Semitism. Events at the U.N. only tended to heighten the resist-
ance of Saudi Arabia to U.S. pressures for an increase in oil production
as well as strengthen the Arab world’s determination to use oil as a
political weapon.
In late July the Security Council meeting concluded its Middle
East debate, adjourned from the previous month, and the U.S. then
cast its veto to defeat an otherwise unanimous agreement—another
indication of the growing isolation of the Washington-Tel Aviv alli-
ance. The vetoed resolution, strongly deploring Israel’s continued
occupation of Arab lands, was supported by the U.K., France, Aus-
tralia, Austria, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Panama, Peru, the
Sudan, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. China abstained, protesting
that the resolution failed to “strongly condemn the Israeli Zionists for
their prolonged aggression against Arabs” and to “call upon all gov-
ernments and people to give their firm support to the Arab peoples in
600 POLITICS OR POLICY
their just struggle to recover their lost territory.”’
This was only the fifth time that the U.S. had exercised the veto
in the twenty-seven-year history of the U.N., and the second time it had
been used in connection with a Middle East resolution. U.S. Ambassa-
dor to the U.N. John A. Scali told the Security Council that the resolu-
tion was not balanced and would undermine “the one agreed basis on
which a solution in the Middle East could be reconstructed, namely
Resolution 242 of 1967.”
Two weeks later, in August, after Israel had forced a Lebanese
commercial airliner with eighty-one persons aboard to alter its course
and land in Israel, the U.S. did join in a unanimous resolution con-
demning the piracy of Israel. In explaining his vote, Scali emphasized
that the endorsement of the resolution “‘in no way represents a change
in U.S. policy on the problems and possibilities for a settlement. Nor
should it be interpreted as our endorsing the use of sanctions as a
means of dealing with this problem.” The Lebanese gratefully ac-
cepted what small blessings they could from the unanimous censure.
Washington had vigorously opposed convening the Council to
hear the Lebanese complaint, coming right on the heels of its previous
veto, and made it clear during the debate that the bare mention of the
possibility of sanctions against Israel in the resolution, as favored by
Egypt, would draw another negative American vote. The new resolu-
tion therefore avoided any language that would force two U.S. vetoes
in a row.
Suddenly, two of the four parent companies of the Arabian Ameri-
can Oil Company (Aramco) in Saudi Arabia, largest of American oil
interests in the Middle East and the largest single U.S. investment
abroad, awakened to the grave dangers confronting themselves, as
well as their country. Heretofore only John G. McLean of Continental
Oil (Conoco), a smaller company, had mustered the courage to speak
out. Full-page advertisements in January in such papers as the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and two-page
spreads in four news magazines and in business publications, carried
Conoco’s concise message based on a speech of Board Chairman
McLean. The startling copy stressed “the need for cooperation in the
development of a sound framework of political relationships with the
countries of the Middle East to promote stability and peace in the
area,” and called for both “a new look at our foreign policies with
respect to the Middle East, as well as attaching to them a much higher
priority than they had thus far been accorded.” Guts had paid off.
Continental received few of the brickbats overcautious friends had
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 601
predicted and was rewarded by a flood of requests for the complete
text of the McLean talk.
Prodded by the increased public criticism of oil companies for the
energy shortage and by Libya’s stepped-up nationalization of Ameri-
can oil interests, one of the major oil companies now spoke up. The
1971 takeover of the assets of British Petroleum had been followed by
a 51 percent nationalization of Oasis, Amoseas, and Occidental. Al-
though not yet affected, Mobil Oil “screwed its courage to the sticking
post” with an advertisement, ‘“The U.S. Stake in Middle East Peace,”
which dared to link the energy crisis with U.S. foreign policy failures.
In the light of Mobil’s past performance,?4 boldness characterized
their appeal to Americans to:
... understand the changed and still changing conditions in the Middle East
... that if our country’s relations with the Arab world continue to deteriorate,
Saudi Arabia may conclude it is not in its interest to look favorably on U.S.
requests for increased petroleum supplies. .. . The government of that country
has the power to decide how much oil is to be produced within its borders,
and to what countries that oil can be shipped.
In the last analysis, political considerations may become the critical ele-
ment in Saudi Arabia’s decisions, because we will need the oil more than Saudi
Arabia will need the money. That country could reduce oil exports three
million barrels a day below present levels and, with its small population, still
finance its domestic development programs with a comfortable margin for
reserves...
It is therefore time for the American people to begin adapting to a new
energy age, to a vastly changed world situation, to the realities with which we
will have to learn to live. Nothing less than clear thinking, a sense of urgency,
and a grasp of what is at stake can lay the base for achieving a durable peace
in the Middle East . . . a settlement that will bring justice and security to all
the peoples and to all the states of the region. Nobody can afford another war
in the Middle East. Nobody. Nobody.25
Mobil’s noncontroversial ads in the New York Times invariably ap-
peared in a key position, generally on the Op-Ed page opposite the
editorial page, where a maximum of readers could be counted on to
read the message. But this ‘controversial’ statement was relegated to
Mconspicuous space back on page 30. The scheduled follow-up ad
never was run—a combined result of pressure and fear.
Standard Oil of California, another of the four owners of Aramco,
€mulated the stand taken by her sister company’s ad in a letter dated
July 26, 1973, sent by Board Chairman Otto N. Miller to all stockhold-
€rs and employees, urging them to support closer ties between Arab
602 POLITICS OR POLICY
countries and the U.S. in order to help solve the energy crisis. “There
must be understanding on our part of the aspirations of the Arab
people,” he wrote, ‘‘and more positive support of their efforts toward
peace with the Middle East.”
Since its first oil discovery on the island of Bahrain in the Arabian
Gulf in 1932, SOCAL, as this California company was called, had been
an important basic supply source for Western Europe and Japan and,
of course, an obvious indispensable source for the U.S. For more than
forty years, since the conclusion of its historic agreement with King
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, the company could boast of a
conunuous and cordial relationship with the Arab people. But it now
felt forced to note with great dismay ‘‘a growing feeling in much of the
Arab world that the U.S. had turned its back on the Arab people.”
In response to the Miller letter, which objectively could only be
deemed a constructive approach to the growing energy crisis, Los
Angeles Zionists rallied American Jews to war on the company. In a
statement issued from the office of President of the Jewish Federation
Council of Greater Los Angeles Edward Sanders, as reported by the
Chicago Daily News, he expressed “shock and dismay”’ and declared that
“he still had a tankful of Standard gas in his car and a Standard credit
card, but he’d decide what to do only after Standard Board Chairman
Miller decides whether to send out a new letter.”” And Sanders added:
“If he doesn’t, we as a community will consider what we will do
next.’’26
The Jewish War Veterans demanded a boycott of all SOCAL pro-
ducts. The Anti-Defamation League, the Southern California Council
for Soviet Jewry, and other Jewish “defense” groups assailed the Miller
letter, raising the usual cry of ‘‘anti-Semitism.’”” SOCAL was accused
of trading “Jewish blood for Arab oil.”?” American Zionist Federation
head Rabbi Israel Miller said, ‘“‘We are confident that the American
government will not surrender to blackmail either by Arab govern-
ments or by Standard Oil of California.” Simultaneously, the Jewish
News of Los Angeles asked that California Standard’s credit cards be
torn in half ‘‘so we can send a ton to the company marketing Chevron
gasoline.” The office buildings of the company in Los Angeles and San
Francisco were splashed by early morning vandals with red paint in
plastic bags thrown from automobiles.
Organized Jewry across the country picked up the hue and cry, as
the story was embroidered upon by the New York Times, the Washing-
ton Post, and the Chicago Daily News. The letter sent to an estimated
300,000 stockholders and employees did not, as reported by the media
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 603
(with the notable exception of the AP), ask support for “the aspirations
of the Arab people of the Middle East,” only that there be an ‘“‘under-
standing on our part of Arab efforts toward peace in the Middle East”
—something quite different. And in their accounts neither the Times
nor the Post referred to the last two paragraphs of the letter in which
the SOCAL Chairman asked that the “‘legitimate interests of all of the
people of the Middle East”’ (italics added) be acknowledged and that
they be helped to “achieve security and a dependable economic fu-
ture.”
As Zionists have done customarily, they injected their Christian
political supporters, members of the congressional “‘Israel-First”’ bloc,
prominently into the campaign aimed to silence anyone who might link
the growing energy crisis to U.S. Middle East policy and thereby bestir
Americans to raise the $64 question, ‘‘What Price Israel?’’ Senator
John V. Tunney (Dem.-Calif.) assailed the Miller letter as ‘““counterpro-
ductive to peace,” declaring, ‘“We cannot solve our fuel crisis by selling
out Israel.”’
One of the more ludicrous assertions in the growing contro-
versy was contributed by the Jewish Federation Chairman’s com-
plaint that the letter “raises serious ethical and moral questions as
to the utilizauon of a vast profit-making organization to influence
American foreign policy.” He insisted that such nonprofit, tax-
exempt, and tax-deductible organizations as his own, or the South-
ern California Council for Soviet Jewry, the Anu-Defamation
League, and the American Zionist Federation—all of which had
been immediately mobilized and were now engaged in public battle
—be solely entitled to influence foreign policy, and by way of tax-
free dollars, of course.
Forced to respond to the political protests, letters, and phone
calls, SOCAL Board Chairman Miller wrote the Chairman of the San
Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, explaining that his
Original letter had been concerned, as it expressly stated, “with the
legitimate interests of all Middle East peoples,” obviously including
Israel.28
To prevent American gasoline consumers from stumbling on any
linkage between U.S. pro-Israel policy and the country’s energy plight,
varied inspired articles and television-radio commentaries placed the
blame at Washington's door for not having provided alternate energy
Sources. ‘“There is no energy shortage—it is all the invention of the oil
companies.”29 The salient fact being hidden from public consumption
was that U.S. imports of oil, accounting in 1973 for 35 percent of its
604 POLITICS OR POLICY
oil requirements as against 21 percent in 1970, would by 1980 reach
50 to 60 percent.
Virtually every oil analyst agreed that Saudi Arabia with reserves
of more than 150 billion barrels,?° would be the crucial single foreign
source supply for the U.S. during the next decade. A Senior Vice
President of Exxon publicly warned that it would take four to ten years
before there could be production from new U.S. discoveries of oil and
gas. And, to make matters worse, Canada indicated at this time that she
would no longer tolerate the depletion of her reserves by exports to
the U.S. Wishing to insulate her domestic price from the fast-changing
world market price, the Canadian government planned to draw almost
all the oil that Canada used from her own huge reserves rather than
import or export further oil. This would cut off a daily export to the
U.S. of perhaps 500,000 barrels per day, a critical loss at a critical time.
The desperate situation facing the U.S. could be seen in true
perspective only through such bare facts as that the U.S., with only 6
percent of the world population, was a consumer of over 30 percent
of the world’s energy. Or as U.S. Energy Commissioner John A. Love
phrased it: ‘“The average American uses as much energy in less than
a week as half of the world’s population on an individual basis con-
sumes in a year.”’
Other vital oil facts rounded out the story. While less than half of
the 4.7 million barrels of oil the U.S. imported daily in 1972 came from
the Middle East, 75 percent of Western Europe’s 14.4 million barrel
daily import and 86 percent of Japan’s 5 million barrels come from the
Middle East. Demand for oil by the free world had leaped far ahead
of forecasts. By 1980 the U.S. alone would be importing as much as
15 million barrels daily, 11 million of which would have to come from
where 60 percent plus of the proven free world reserves were located,
namely the Middle East and North Africa. And these Middle East
deposits would be the sole place from which the increased demand for
oil might come, aside from Alaska. Europe, estimated to require 26
million barrels by 1980, and Japan, requiring 13 million, were already
totally dependent on Middle East-North African oil. With its one-
fourth of all middle East oil production and one-fourth of the oil
reserves of the world, Faisal’s Saudi Arabia assumed the command
position.
During a 1973 spring visit to Washington many important new
ideas were unveiled and trial balloons floated by the politically astute
Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
Where King Faisal had previously clearly disdained the use of oil as a
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 605
political weapon, his petroleum chieftain hinted at this possibility and
injected this thought into his talks with congressional leaders and
administration chiefs. The sheikh indicated that Saudi Arabia would
not significantly expand production unless Washington moved from
its pro-Israel stance to a more evenhanded policy. The Saudi Higher
Petroleum Council recommended that the production/expansion pro-
gram planned by Aramco, which would be the primary factor in meet-
ing U.S. increased petroleum demands, be suspended or significantly
reduced. Yamani had hinted that “if we consider only local interests,
then we should not produce more oil—perhaps less.” Washington was
hoping for increased Saudi production from eight million to twenty
million barrels daily over the next ten years. But at the same time the
Arab oil leader extended the firm hand of friendship and offered a
virtual partnership with U.S. industry through large capital investment
in exchange for technological assistance.
In his late spring visit to Paris for a most cordial interchange with
France’s President Pompidou, King Faisal expressed full support of his
Minister of Petroleum’s refusal to expand the present oil production
significantly until Washington moved toward a more evenhanded Mid-
dle East policy. As an expression of his gratitude for the increasingly
pro-Arab French position, which was in vivid contrast to the attitude
of the Quai d’Orsay in the 1940s and 1950s when Paris was an even
closer ally of Israel than Washington, Faisal agreed to stepped-up
political, military, and economic cooperation between the two coun-
tries. France would be helping Saudi Arabia in the development of a
French-made color television system, already used by Egypt and Leba-
non, in preference to the rival German system. The Saudis also had
under consideration the purchase of two Anglo-French supersonic
Concorde airliners, as well as a number of super-Mirage fighter bomb-
ers already purchased or about to be purchased by Abu Dhabi, Kuwait,
and other Gulf states. With his purchase of $650 million of military
hardware from Britain, Faisal further indicated the trend to push the
U.S. out of its favored economic position in the Arab world until
Washington accommodated itself to minimum Saudi political de-
mands.
The visit of the ruler of Iran to the American capital that same
summer could have brought little comfort to either Washington or Tel
Aviv. The scene was cordial enough, pleasantries being exchanged
between Nixon and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. But the essential
unchanged fact affecting the oil situation was placed in focus when the
Shah appeared on the “Meet the Press’’ television program. The
606 POLITICS OR POLICY
Iranian ruler indicated that by 1978 it was expected his country would
be able to produce eight million barrels daily, but that production
would thereafter be definitely leveled off. The U.S., therefore, could
not look to that country’s supply should the Saudi Arabians continue
to stick to their resolve not to increase production, let alone possibly
even cut back, as Minister Yamani indicated they might do.
When King Faisal called Aramco Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer Frank Jungers to the palace in Riyadh, repeated Yamani’s cau-
tion, and indicated that he could not long resist pressure from other
Arab states, the warning was passed along to Washington, where it was
promptly ignored.
Although King Faisal had always shown the friendliest disposition
toward the U.S.—among other things he had sent all of his children
to be educated there—he also undoubtedly still retained bitter memo-
ries of wretched treatment at the hands of American politicians under
Zionist command. There had been the cancellation of the dinner
scheduled in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum by New York’s
Mayor Lindsay in 1971 and, before that, the violent snub by Mayor
Wagner to his brother King Saud in January 1957. U.S. oil shortages
were already piling up when King Faisal indicated in an interview with
John Cooley of the Monitor that increases in production would in the
future be linked to “the revision of U.S. policy vis-a-vis the Arab
world.”3! And on NBC’s September 4 three-hour television program,
“The Energy Crisis—an American White Paper,” the Saudi monarch
with utmost frankness warned the viewer in the Frank McGee docu-
mentary: ‘‘We do not wish to place any restrictions on our oil exports
to the U.S., but America’s complete support of Zionism against the
Arabs makes it extremely difficult for us to continue to supply U.S.
petroleum needs and even to maintain our friendly relations.”
Most Washington legislators insisted that the King was bluffing.
Senator Bayh claimed Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries
could not afford to shut the U.S. off from its marketing structure
because ‘‘the supply-demand curve will shift against the oil-producing
nations as new sources of oil are brought in from the North Sea and
Glasgow.”’ California’s Senator Alan Cranston picked up the Zionist
line on Capitol Hill with equally dangerous wishful thinking, which
only helped further confuse and deceive his energy-hungry constitu-
ents.
A handful of responsible Senators appreciated the seriousness of
the situation. Oklahoma Senator Dewey F. Bartlett stated that the
“recent threat by Saudi Arabia to cut back if the U.S. does not change
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 607
its policy is so serious that it should have been spread across the front
page of every newspaper in the U.S.’’8?
Senator Fulbright warned of the damaging consequences of U.S.
Middle East policy:
The OPEC countries thus far have been reasonably moderate and responsible,
and there remains in the Arab world, despite everything, a remarkable reser-
voir of good will toward the United States. But as the mounting desperation
of the Palestinians shows, that reservoir is fast being drained. . . . In the service
of a profound emotional commitment to Israel, we have all but kicked over the
traces on our other interests in the Middle East—an economic interest in oil,
a stategic interest in peace, and a perfectly ordinary human interest in the
friendship of peoples who, whatever their quarrel with Israel, have never done
anything to harm the United States.33
Others, like Congressman Richard T. Hanna from California, sud-
denly began to bestir themselves. Heretofore he had only reacted tu
the demands of Zionist pressure in support of Israel, but the energy
squeeze had made him appreciate, almost for the first time, the needs
of other of his constituents, including the Los Angeles Power Com-
pany, which required oil to service their many customers. Inserting a
bland rebuke to the U.S. unevenhanded policy into the Congressional
Record, this enterprising congressman** with the help of oil compa-
nies was enabled to go to Saudi Arabia and meet with the King in
Riyadh, where he had the nerve to plead personally for a special
allotment for his California constituents. To the bitter end, the politi-
cians, whose misdeeds and nondeeds underlay the entire tragedy that
has befallen the area, were determined to have it both ways.
That the Saudi Arabians meant business and would have to be
taken seriously was indicated by Nixon at his press conference two days
after King Faisal’s NBC appearance, when he announced he was mov-
ing to end the deadlock in the negotiations between the Arab states
and Israel and that he would use his total influence to get negotiations
“off dead center.” This was the first real positive U.S. response to the
July 1972 removal of Soviet troops by Sadat, inspired by King Faisal.
And at this White House meeting with the media, the Chief Executive
for the first time linked Middle East diplomacy with the question of
petroleum supplies.
Previously the administration had blinded itself to—or at least
refused to acknowledge publicly—the possibility that the Saudi Ara-
bian government might withhold oil unless the U.S. altered its policy.
And the State Department, in marked contrast to the independence
608 POLITICS OR POLICY
shown by foreign service officers in the face of the advice offered by
President Truman on the Palestine problem, had been reechoing
White House denials that energy shortages had anything to do with
U.S. policy. In spring and early summer energy hearings on Capitol
Hill, State Department representatives had told congressional com-
mittees that Saudi Arabia, in the last analysis, would be guided by their
desire for increased royalties and would continue to increase their
production by dipping further into their reserves so as to end the
threat of a drastic U.S. oil curtailment, even should other Arab coun-
tries, closer to the Palestine question, refuse to grant a supply and hold
back. The King “‘is only bluffing’ proclaimed one State Department
spokesman, who added that we can “‘always get the oil from Iran.”
These American foreign service officers were also undoubtedly
counting on past Arab weaknesses—corruption and venality, enabling
almost every American oil company to have one Arab in his back
pocket upon whom he could count—to throw a wrench into the works
whenever Arab unity seemed to be making headway. But they under-
estimated Faisal’s determination to right Arab honor, heightened no
little both by the King’s role in having encouraged Sadat to remove the
Soviet influence as well as his keen awareness of the Palestinian pres-
ence that had figured in the two attempted summer conspiracies
against him by officers of the Saudi Air Force. Along with many of the
leading Saudi politicians and businessmen, Faisal was determined to
do everything to find an end to the debilitating and dangerous Pales-
tine question and to be able to pray once again in the Al-Aksa Mosque
in occupied East Jerusalem.
In response to a press question, Nixon was now forced to admit
that ‘“‘we presently depend upon oil in the Middle East—we depend on
it not, of course, nearly as much as Europe, but we’re all in the same
bag when you really come down to it.”” (Nixon was to find out sadly
later that Europe chose not to remain in the same bag, if indeed they
ever were.)
Both in this press conference®> and in a message to Congress
asking for action on seven proposals, including the Alaska pipeline, the
President emphasized the importance of tackling the energy problem
facing the country. The President confessed that the energy shortage
was “‘tied up with the Arab-Israeli dispute,” and that both he and
Kissinger, at that time his nominee as Secretary of State, were assign-
ing “‘highest priority” to making some progress toward a settlement.
And deep concern was expressed over Saudi Arabia's refusal to hold
production at the current level, let alone not raise it to the twenty
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 609
million daily barrels sought by the West, unless the U.S. applied pres-
sure to Israel.
Confronted with a direct question as to the possibility that “the
threat of limiting the supply of oil might cause a moderation of U.S.
support of Israel,” the President neatly ducked a direct answer by
saying it would be “highly inappropriate” for an American President
to “relate our policy toward Israel’? to what happens to Arab oil (a
seeming inconsistency with his previous remark). Declaring that the
U.S. continued to be ‘‘dedicated to the independence of Israel,” the
President warned:
Israel simply can’t wait for the dust to settle. The Arabs can’t wait for the dust
to settle in the Mid-East. Both sides are at fault, both sides need to start
negotiating. That is our position. We are not pro-Israel and we are not pro-
Arab. And we’re not any more pro-Arab because they have oil and Israel
hasn't.
We are pro-peace. And it’s in the interests of the whole area for us to get
these negotiations off dead center. That’s why we will use our influence with
Israel, and we will use our—what influence we have—with the various Arab
states to get these negotiations on. Now, one of the dividends of having
successful negotiations will be to reduce the oil pressure.36
Arab oil policy was becoming more militant. OPEC in mid-Sep-
tember 1977 at a meeting in Vienna not only raised prices but declared
support for Libya’s nationalization move, warning of ‘“‘appropriate
measures” should oil companies take action against Tripoli’s deci-
sion.37 And even as Zionist brainwashing of the American public con-
tinued unabatingly, it was becoming more obvious that the Arab states
would resort to the one sure weapon at their command—oil. While
observers still contended that the Arabs could not “drink their oil” and
propagandists insisted that the U.S. was only to the smallest degree
dependent on their oil, the Arab states continued to raise the posted
prices—the drastic increases to the oil companies being passed along
to the consumer—and to lay the groundwork for the eventuality of a
total petroleum cutoff if necessary.
The vision of oil as a political weapon, once held only by such
Arab “radicals” as former Saudi Arabian Minister of Petroleum Abdul-
lah Tariki, was now assuming a bandwagon movement as even moder-
ate Arabs demanded militancy toward the West. Pressure was being
exerted successfully on Faisal—and on Sadat, too—and from nonter-
rorist Palestinian elements. The Arab petroleum-exporting nations
were described in a determined mood by Dr. Nadim Pachachi, former
610 POLITICS OR POLICY
Secretary-General of OPEC: “‘We would not be consistent with our-
selves if we agreed to help a country that has no qualms or scruples
in helping our political foe. If the U.S. abandoned the policy of blind
support to Israel, there would not be any need to speak of security or
insecurity of supply.”
Sadat’s diplomacy was yielding rewards and new strength. He
persuaded Saudi Arabia’s ruler to use oil and financial resources as a
big stick in behalf of the Arab cause and as the important bargaining
lever in whatever negotiations might develop from either the reac-
tivated Jarring mission or the fresh U.S. initiative to be undertaken by
newly-designated Secretary Kissinger. Inspired by Nixon’s begrudging
recognition of the linkage between the energy crisis and U.S. policy,
the Arabs had begun to pull together for the first time since Nasser’s
death.
With the new Egyptian-Saudi amity came financial backing for
Cairo’s depressed economic structure and a tacit recognition of
Faisal’s leadership in a realigned Arab world. Qaddafi's goal of imme-
diate unification of Egypt and Libya was soon reduced to a proclama-
tion of a new state, with the actual unification through a joint constitu-
ent assembly and one chief of state put off to some future indefinite
date.%8
The healing of the breach with Amman by both Cairo and Damas-
cus marked another important step toward mobilizing total Arab re-
sources for a possible conflict with Israel and the recapture of Arab
territories. When Hussein began his campaign to prevent the Palestini-
ans from operating inside his country in 1970 and the bitter interne-
cine warfare ensued, first Syria and then Egypt had broken off diplo-
matic relations with the Hashemite ruler. For all practical purposes,
the eastern military front against Israel became a dead issue. Hussein’s
meeting in Cairo with Sadat and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad
revived the possibilities of a common total approach against Israel.
The repaired amity had been strengthened by granting amnesty to
Palestinian guerrilla fighters, including leader Daoud Odeh, languish-
ing in Jordanian prisons.
While many Palestinians skeptically viewed the quarreling among
their brother Arabs as moves toward strengthening themselves for a
political settlement to which the refugee movement was then vehe-
mently opposed, the new euphoria flowing from the use of oil as the
big leverage, inspired a period of internal Arab harmony.
Zionist writers, overtaken by the invariable paroxysms of fear
whenever inter-Arab cooperation replaced normal internal warfare,
Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 611
overexploded with gall at the new “Faisal-Sadat axis,’ when the Saudi
monarch included Yasir Arafat in a receiving line at a diplomatic recep-
tion in Jeddah, ‘forcing shocked foreign diplomats, including Nicholas
Thatcher, to greet him.” Of course, it remained to be seen whether
Arab discipline would be developed to the point where the Arabs
would, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, really be ‘‘speaking softly as
they carried a big stick.”
The new Nixon peace initiative had indeed added to incipient
Zionist fears that the U.S. might really be adopting a new tougher line
toward Israel. In joining in the Security Council censure of Israel, the
US had failed to insist upon balancing the Israeli misdeed with ‘the
long history of terrorist activity’ —the invariable standard followed by
Washington in past voting at the U.N., including its July veto.
Despite the campaign of suppression, the Miller socal letter had
stirred some influential stockholders, and the Zionist panic button was
really pushed with the wide publicity given to Assistant Secretary of
State Joseph J. Sisco’s declaration over Israeli television:
We have important political, economic, and strategic interests in the entire
area, whether in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, or the Arabian Peninsula.
There is increasing concern in our country over the energy crisis, and I believe
that it is foolhardy to believe that it is not a factor.
To this was added the caution of former Secretary of Commerce
Peter G. Peterson that the U.S. must understand “the Arab view that
American policy too often sounds like an echo of Israeli policy” which
drew instantaneous angry Zionist fire.?9
While the New York Times and NBC spread the meaningless talk of
the possibility of developing alternate sources of energy as an answer
to the immediate problem,*® Secretary of State-designate Kissinger
admitted he could see “no near-term alternative to increasing imports
of oil from the Middle East.”” Nixon, however, still preferred to de-
scribe the growing shortages as “a problem, not a crisis.” To the
repeated White House suggestion that an answer could be found by
expanding domestic supplies and improving research, petroleum ex-
perts replied: ‘It is not only not true, but it is nonsense—dangerous
nonsense! If you do not accept the idea that there is a valid crisis, you
can hardly be expected to take the kinds of steps necessary to solve it.”
By late September the new Nixon initiative seemed stalled and the
Middle East status quo engrained. The ten-day visit of U.N. Secretary-
General Kurt Waldheim to Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan
had yielded very little beyond expressions of hope. Upon his return to
612 POLITICS OR POLICY
U.N. headquarters in New York, he indicated that the Jarring mission
would continue its efforts, but if the international diplomat had re-
ceived any evidence that the past deadlock could be resolved, he re-
vealed no details. Israel still refused to submit the sought-after com-
mitment to withdraw to the borders that existed before the 1967
Arab-Israeli war.
Israel was still rejecting all prodding from the State Department
that she produce some fresh ideas to break the stalemate. In a last
interview in New York before returning home, Foreign Minister Eban
had stuck stubbornly to the policy of “‘unconditional talks with the
understanding beforehand that Israel would not withdraw from all
territory occupied since the 1967 war.’ Eban contemptuously dis-
missed the contention that there was any connection between the
energy shortage facing the U.S. and events in the Middle East. “Oil
companies,” the veteran diplomat noted, “‘should devote more atten-
tion to research and analysis rather than become amateur diplomats.”
Casting further shadows on hopes for a settlement, Israel more
than ever regarded the occupied territories as her own national lands.
In every way the cease-fire lines were fast becoming de facto borders
as Israel announced she would continue to build Jewish settlements
and to sell lands to Jews in the occupied territories, a project advanced
by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. This came at the very same time
as Tel Aviv was curbing the hiring of Arab farm labor by Israeli settlers
in the occupied Arab territories and limiting the visitations by civilians
to the new Israeli agriculture settlements, both “on security grounds.”
More than a year had passed since Sadat’s summary expulsion of
the Soviet military advisers, and there had been as yet no honest
Washington effort to pressure Israel into withdrawing from Arab ter-
ritories. The national elections were long since over, and the decisive
reelection of President Nixon ought to have freed the incumbent from
the power of the Jewish bloc. But still there had been scarcely a move
away from Washington’s “‘Israel-First” position. The U.S. veto at the
Security Council had thwarted the Egyptian effort to force Israel’s
withdrawal. And the Kissinger luncheon given for Arab League mem-
bers the second week of the new General Assembly session brought no
encouraging news, only more inconsequential language.
Its long campaign on the diplomatic front to induce an Israeli
pullback having been a total failure, Cairo now moved ahead with
plans to put Washington on the spot as war became inevitable.*! The
Egyptians sincerely believed that in a Middle East conflict the U.S.
would be forced to stand by the principle of the inadmissibility of
might be for Egypt, would force the Big Powers to intervene and bring
about a settlement returning the occupied territories. Doing nothing
would yield nothing.
The Egyptian leader solidified his relations with Saudi Arabia and
prepared with Syria to put their war plans into effect. In the final
analysis, it could be said that the October nineteen-day war had its
roots in President Sadat’s frustrations. He had incessantly threatened
action for three years to recover Egyptian territories under Israeli
occupation for six years but had done nothing until he moved, silently
and precisely, on the morning of October 5, 1973.
Oul on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years 613
territory by conquest, and that a war with Israel, however painful it
mE —————————————
XIX War Again
In a world of wolves one must be a fox.
—Niccolé Machiavelli
Reports of the arrival of a large number of Soviet transport ships in
Cairo and of Syrian tank movements in late September 1973 caused
Washington a bit of concern. But exchanges of intelligence informa-
tion between the U.S. and Israel revealed as late as September 29, a
“defensive Syrian posture.” And at the time in these circles, Sadat was
being called a ‘‘clown,” Faisal a “‘religious fanatic.”
On Friday, October 5, the day before the war broke out, the
Israelis too were sensing danger, but they were not certain. Their
usually superb intelligence had learned of unusual Arab troop deploy-
ment, but apparently had failed in calculating the intentions of the
enemy. Chief of Staff General David Elazer canceled all military leaves.
General Ariel Sharon was recalled from retirement at his Beersheba
farm, but no call for general mobilization was issued. In defense of this
failure, the Israeli Establishment later contended that they had bowed
to the repeated warnings from Secretary Kissinger that under no cir-
cumstances were they to “‘start the war—don’t ever preempt.” (Israe-
lis, of course, had been similarly cautioned by President Johnson in
1967, and had then ignored Washington.) It was Meir who was said to
have overruled Dayan and his Chief of Staff in maintaining the posture
demanded by Kissinger.
The Secretary himself misread the evidence that war was coming.!
He was incommunicado at the Waldorf Astoria in New York when the
Department of State’s Intelligence Bureau indicated the conflict was
but a few hours away. The attack was launched by the Egyptians shortly
before 12:00 G.m.T. on what in Israel was the Yom Kippur and in the
Arab world was Ramadan. The onslaught fell on the 1,350th anniver-
614
War Again 615
sary of the Battle of Badr, which launched Mohammed’s triumphal
entry into Mecca. This was the reason the day had been chosen, even
though it was in the middle of Ramadan when Arab fighters are not
at their best, not because it was the holiest Jewish day of the year.
Having the advantage of surprise and having set up pontoon
bridges for their tanks and heavy armaments, the Egyptians crossed
the Suez Canal, then overran the defenders and the vaunted Bar-Lev
line with its chain of twenty forticiations. The Syrians, too, were push-
ing ahead on the front they had opened on the Golan plateau. The
Western press assailed the “Arab invasion of Israel’”’; only the Christian
Science Monitor indicated the conflict had been launched onto Israeli-
held territories.
In 1967 the Security Council had met within hours of the outbreak
of fighting, but in 1973 they did not meet until the evening of the third
day, and then did not adopt a resolution until seventeen days after the
war had begun. Neither Big Power seemed anxious to bring about an
immediate cease-fire as they had in the earlier war, each sensing some
advantage in keeping the fighting going. For the Soviets, their wards
—or former wards—were making progress. The U.S. perhaps saw in
the initial gain of the Arabs an opportunity to exercise leverage on
Israel to comply with the withdrawal provisions of Resolution 242. It
was also possible that Washington delayed taking action to permit
Israel to gain the upper hand after the initial retreat and the surprise
Egyptian crossing of the Canal. The Pentagon was convinced that
Israel would shortly gain the offensive and push the Arabs back to
where they had been at the end of the 1967 war.
When the Security Council first met on October 8, the Soviet
and U.S. representatives were miles apart, and hopes for a U.N.
cease-fire were dim. Only Austria and Australia seemed to favor
such a course. The other eight nonpermanent members, including
the Sudan, were in no hurry to join in any demand for stoppage of
the war. The Soviet-Arab position, supported by most of the non-
permanent members, would have called on Israel to withdraw from
all occupied territories as well as accept a cease-fire. But such a
draft resolution was known to face a certain American veto. The
Arabs, the Soviet Union, and their friends, together with most of
the neutrals, were determined that the current fighting be used as a
means of implementing Resolution 242 and bringing about the
long sought-after Israeli withdrawal.
While calling for a halt in fighting, the U.S. did not push hard for
4 cease-fire. Kissinger shared the Pentagon view that Israel would win
616 POLITICS OR POLICY
a quick victory, and he never envisioned the necessity of a massive
emergency pipeline of supplies for Israel. The Secretary did intervene
with the Pentagon to permit Israeli planes to land in the U.S. to pick
up ammunition and spare parts (the tails of the supply planes had to
be painted over to hide the identifying six-pointed star) at the Oceana
Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.
Meanwhile, massive Soviet airlifts to assist the Arabs were arriving
in Arab ports and near the battlefield as relations between the Super
Powers became extremely strained. At an important dinner meeting in
Washington, Kissinger warned that “détente cannot survive irrespon-
sibility in any area, including the Middle East.”?
Upon his return from Israel on October 8, three days after the war
began, Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz maintained unrelenting
pressure on both the Pentagon and the State Department to expedite
delivery of some of the forty-eight Phantoms promised to Israel on
Meir’s last visit, together with replacements for both jets and Skyhawks
lost in battle. Reports of further Soviet airlifts and Dinitz persistence
brought a U.S. agreement on the sixth day of the war to use twenty U.S.
military planes to fly emergency supplies and planes to Israel after
private U.S. companies had refused to become involved in any charter
arrangements.
Kissinger saw the need of correcting the “military imbalance.”
CIA reports on the 12th that the Russians had mobilized three air-
borne divisions strengthened the Secretary of State’s hand in dealing
with Defense Secretary Schlesinger, who at least at this stage had been
resisting Ambassador Dinitz’s demands for more than the sixteen
Phantoms to replace losses that had taken place. His deputy, William
Clements, had told Dinitz ‘the needed more information about Ameri-
can inventories before he could provide the Israelis with an exact
timetable for deliveries.’”?
What to the impatient Israelis were bureaucratic difficulties ac-
counting for the delays was actually weighted consideration of U.S.
needs by the Pentagon. Secretary Schlesinger himself was said to have
cautioned the Ambassador that the U.S. had to operate “in a low
profile in order not to create an Arab reaction’”—an unmistakable
allusion to oil.
Dinitz kept prodding Kissinger to prod Schlesinger: ‘“These
delays are costing lives. Who’s playing games?’’* In his sometimes
hourly telephone calls and visits to Kissinger, the Israeli diplomat
never hesitated to imply that he could “always appeal to a large group
of congressmen and columnists, most of whom were not Jewish” for
War Again = 617
assistance. Kissinger is said to have referred humorously to these as
Dinitz’s ‘‘shock troops.”
Supported by varied outcries from Congress demanding all-out
support for Israel, Dinitz laid down the law: “If a massive American
airlift to Israel does not start immediately, then I will know that the
U.S. is reneging on its promises and its policy, and we will have to draw
very serious conclusions from all this.”’> The determined Israeli, in
close touch with the “‘Israel-First’’ bloc on the Hill, further warned that
Washington’s failure to keep its word would precipitate a ‘‘crisis in
Israeli-American relations.” The Ambassador threatened “‘to go pub-
lic,” to carry Israel’s case to the Congress and the American people,
which would have been disastrous to an already badly Watergate-
battered administration. Kissinger saw to it that the Israeli timetable
was met.
President Nixon ordered his aide, General Alexander Haig, to
make sure that at least ten of the Phantoms reached Israel by midnight
Sunday, the deadline for the start of Israel’s counterattack. To achieve
this, giant C-5 transports were employed, the U.S. answer to the So-
viet’s Antonov 22s. Kissinger made certain that more planes followed,
even though four out of the first fourteen had come out of America’s
own inventory; the Secretary was determined to match and exceed the
Soviets in volume and sophistication of weapons pouring into the
Middle East.
No wonder that one cynic remarked that Big Power involvement
in the October war was calculated solely to test their new weapons.
And U.S. officers claimed that the Pentagon learned more about Soviet
weapons in the seventeen days of this combat than in seven years of
Vietnam.
The Israelis had halted the Egyptian advance after an epic tank
battle, in scale overshadowing the famed Alamein conflict of World
War II, and were pushing back the Syrians when giant cargo aircraft,
from bases across the U.S., ferried their 100-ton payloads via Lajes
Airfield in the Azores to landing strips in Israel and occupied Sinai.
The tide of battle turned drastically in Israel’s favor. The Egyp-
tians had paid dearly for fatal tactical failure, allegedly Russian strat-
egy, to move forward immediately in the Sinai and attack Mitla and
Gidi passes rather than waiting to regroup, which gave the Israelis time
to bring up new forces and stem the Egyptian advance. One U.S.
analyst said: ‘“The Egyptians could have overwhelmed the Israeli de-
fenses while they were still weak, taking the desert passes and making
some bold armor thrusts to annihilate the Israeli tanks and artillery.”
618 POLITICS OR POLICY
In an address before the People’s Assembly on the eleventh day
of the war, Sadat declared, as an open message to President Nixon,
that he was ready to accept a cease-fire based on the principle of
immediate Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 5 borders, to open the
Suez Canal and to attend a U.N. peace conference. Israeli and Egyptian
tanks were still locked in a bitter battle on the Sinai Peninsula. With
increasing Israeli air superiority the decisive factor, Israeli ground
forces under General Sharon forced their way across to the West Bank
of the Canal, knocked out SAM missile sites in the Bitter Lakes region,
and cleared the way for air power and a vital bridgehead. The consoli-
dation of Israeli forces on the West Bank of the Canal drove a wedge
between Egyptian forces and established a salient at Deversoir. The
Third Egyptian Army on the Israeli side of the Canal was being
squeezed into a pocket as the Israelis widened their bridgehead on the
West Bank and poured down from the north on the east side of the
Canal.
The Big Two had been moving toward a cease-fire. But before
they agreed on a formula for stopping the war, Kosygin visited with
Sadat and Kissinger with the Israelis. The Secretary of State offered an
enticing lollipop by way of direct Arab-Israeli negotiations at a peace
conference rather than through third parties. Then the two leaders
met in Moscow to pin down the cease-fire. Through his trip to Moscow,
Kissinger brought Israel an extra seventy-two hours to improve her
military situation, which he later boasted about in his December confi-
dential talk with Jewish intellectuals in New York.®
The new Security Council Resolution 338 of October 22 provided
for an immediate cease-fire to take place within twelve hours in the
positions then occupied, and called upon the parties concerned to start
the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 “‘in all of its
parts” immediately after the cease-fire. However, it did not attempt to
clarify the alleged ambiguity inherent in the phrase “withdrawal from
occupied territories.”7
The Palestinians, who had figured little in the war and seemed
almost the forgotten people, were brought into the picture by new
thinking enlarging upon the 1967 concept of Palestinians only as re-
fugees under Resolution 242. In accepting the October 22 cease-fire,
Sadat talked of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinians,” and two days
later in his acceptance Syrian President Assad still further broadened
the concept to the “legitimate national rights of the Palestinians.”
Moscow, too, made its bid, and in its talks with the leaders of the PLO
indicated it would accord recognition to them as the legal spokesman
War Again 619
for the Palestinians. The Kremlin’s formula was spelled out in terms
of “the rights and interests of the Palestinian people.” And for the first
time the Palestinian leaders, with the exception of the PFLP’s George
Habash, seemed inclined to consider the gradualist political approach,
long preached by President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, of starting
with a possible West Bank-Gaza state as a first step toward reunifying
Palestine as the homeland of both Arabs and Jews.
The October cease-fire was flouted by Israel, which stepped up
the fighting between Ismailia and Port Suez in order to completely cut
off the Egyptian army on the East Bank. A second U.N. resolution, 339
of October 23, called on the combatants to return to the cease-fire
positions of October 22 and provided for a U.N. emergency police
force to supervise the cease-fire rather than the observer group author-
ized by the resolution of the day before. This still did not bring an end
to the fighting nor halt the advancing Israeli army. Sadat became
panic-stricken as the position of his beleaguered forces worsened. In
the absence of any U.N. truce supervision forces, he radioed an urgent
appeal to Washington and to Moscow to send a joint Soviet-American
force to police the cease-fire. Kissinger and the U.S. had long been on
record as opposed to any action that would bring Soviet Union troops
into the area, necessitating similar action on the part of the U.S. with
all the dangers implicit therein.
The Kremlin accepted the Sadat appeal and had Soviet Ambassa-
dor Dobrynin deliver at 9:25 on the same evening, October 24, the
following urgent personal note to Nixon:
Let us together dispatch Soviet and American contingents to Egypt. Israel is
brazenly challenging both the Soviet Union and the United States. We cannot
allow arbitrariness on Israel’s part. I will say it straight, that if you find it
impossible to act together with us in this matter, we should be faced with the
necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilat-
erally. Israel cannot be permitted to get away with the violations.
That same day four more Soviet airborne divisions were put on
alert, and five or six Soviet transport ships allegedly were seen crossing
into the Mediterranean, raising the Russian naval presence to an un-
precedented eighty-five. U.S. intelligence viewed with alarm the Soviet
activization of two mechanized divisions near the Black Sea. Washing-
ton could see trouble in the wind.
The National Security Council met in the White House at 11 P.M.
and declared a national military alert. Nixon was upstairs in his quar-
ters but had authorized his Secretary of State to take whatever action
620 POLITICS OR POLICY
was necessary. Defense Secretary Schlesinger, CIA Chief William
Colby, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer,
White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, and Brigadier General
Brent Scowcroft concurred in the Kissinger decision, which was
relayed to Nixon. U.S. ground, sea, and air forces, conventional as well
as nuclear, were placed on military alert.
Although the second Middle East cease-fire had gone into effect,
the world now stood on the precipice of a nuclear confrontation. The
aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy with dozens of A-4 attack jets was dis-
patched toward the Mediterranean; B-52 bombers were ordered from
Guam to the U.S.; 15,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne based at North
Carolina were added to the alert and were told to be ready by 6:00 a.m.
The entire Strategic Air Command (SAC), with its nuclear strike
forces, was likewise put on alert. At a press conference called at noon
the next day and carried nationwide by television and radio, the Secre-
tary vigorously denied that the alert might have been prompted by
“domestic requirements”’ (Watergate), and declared the U.S. nuclear
forces had been placed on a stand-by alert around the world in an
effort ‘‘to dissuade Russia from taking unilateral action in the Middle
East.”’ (Nothing was said about the necessity to safeguard the U.N.
cease-fire.) And Kissinger added:
We possess each of us nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating humanity. We,
both of us, have a special duty to see to it that confrontations are kept within
bounds that do not threaten civilized life [Note: Exactly as Metternich would
have phrased it. A Secretary of State had, one would think, a special duty to
avoid confrontations rather than merely keeping them within bounds.] Both
of us, sooner or later, will have to come to realize that the issues that divide
the world today, and foreseeable issues, do not justify the unparalleled catas-
trophe that a nuclear war would represent.
Then, extending the olive branch, Kissinger declared: ““We do not
consider ourselves in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. We do not
believe it is necessary at this moment to have a confrontation.” When
the Security Council adopted Resolution 340 setting up a U.N. emer-
gency police force, which specifically barred the personnel of perma-
nent members of the Security Council, the crisis abated. The U.S.
called off the military alert the next day, although Soviet airborne units
had not been returned to their prealert status. Nixon in a prime-time
TV news conference, in which he emotionally lashed out at the media
for its Watergate coverage, still implied that Moscow had not only
threatened the U.S. but that the Soviet Union ‘“‘was planning to send
'
War Again 621
a very substantial force into the Mideast—a military force.”
Both the President and Kissinger had highlighted the infinitely
dreadful implications of the alert for all peoples as the possible initial
step toward doomsday for much of the world. Yet the decision was
handily staged with such dreadful casualness and inadequacy.
As of two weeks earlier, at the ume of the airlift to Israel, U.S.
allies were given no notice whatsoever. There had been no prior con-
sultation with NATO countries or Japan, although they could have
been targets of nuclear missiles, housing as they did U.S. military
forces that had been placed on military alert. The U.S. defense of Israel
had left them open to attack from the Arabs and then the Soviet Union.
These countries had their own interests in the Middle East and had
opted for neutrality,8 which Washington violated by shipping huge
amounts of war matériel to Israel.
Philadelphia lawyer-critic Hamilton A. Long leveled an accusation
against the President and Kissinger that cannot be hghtly dismissed.
He charged them with having acted with “criminal wanton reckless-
ness, if not sheer madness, causing U.S. military personnel worldwide
to assume that war actually threatened any moment, to stand ready for
instant action, with itchy finger on nuclear triggers.’’ Many shared the
view that the alert was ‘““a monumental fraud” to create a cover-up at
a time when the Watergate disclosures were most seriously affecting
Nixon.? A post-facto examination of the facts lends support to the view
that, at the least, the administration and its several intelligence arms
had misread the Russian signals and had strongly overreacted.
In the Brezhnev note to the President, the Soviet leader merely
stated that if the U.S. refused to join in sending troops to enforce the
cease-fire (which was certainly being ignored by Israel, if not by both
sides), ‘‘we should be faced with the necessity to consider the question of
taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” [Italics added] Kissinger ig-
nored the patent Soviet hedge and chose to interpret it as a bald threat
of unilateral action. Although the Kremlin had requested a prompt
reply to its proposal, none was sent before issuing the alert that night.
Then the U.S. answer addressed itself only to the charge that Israel was
violating the cease-fire, which the Secretary of State denied.
The Soviet message meant, at worst, a U.S.-U.S.S.R. joint enforce-
ment of the U.N. cease-fire in Arab lands, or by the U.S.S.R. alone if
the U.S. declined to act, and it had been couched in soft language,
requesting U.S. cooperation. Only if this was not forthcoming would
the Kremlin then “consider the question of taking appropriate steps.”
(Emphasis added.)
622 POLITICS OR POLICY
Prior to calling the nuclear war alert, the U.S. had made no at-
tempt to discuss the Kremlin proposal. The Soviet Ambassador in
Washington was not telephoned, although he had personally delivered
his chieftain’s message. Nor was the hot line used; it had served an
important purpose as a direct connection between the White House
and Pentagon with the Kremlin in the Cuban missile crisis of 1963 and
again during the 1967 war. The meeting at which the very serious U.S.
decision had been made in the White House lasted all of thirty min-
utes, and it was only some fifty-five minutes from the time the Kremlin
message had first reached Kissinger.
At his press conference on the 25th, Kissinger had promised that
within a week the full facts behind the alert would be bared to reporters
and the public. Under the pretext of a reluctance to engage in further
controversy with the Soviet Union, no such disclosure was ever made.
At a subsequent press conference four weeks later, the Secretary of
State brazenly scoffed at the value and meaningfulness of his own press
statements and said he “‘regretted’”’ having made this promise. No
“useful purpose could be served’ by telling the people these details,
he concluded.
The military alert dramatically illustrated the stupendous power
exercised by Israel. Kissinger had consistently maintained that his
primary goal was success in the SALT talks, looking toward limiting
the use and manufacture of nuclear weapons, with the immediate
purpose to get the Soviet Union to “become more flexible, more
sensible, more willing to engage in meaningful discussion with us.”
Yet his overweening concern for Israel, egged on by the “‘Israel-First”
bloc in Congress, had forced him to endanger this most constructive
goal—first through an unprecedented airlift, which dropped supplies
literally on the battlefield and made the U.S. military a near appendage
of the Israeli army, and which in turn brought on the foreseeable
Soviet countermeasured arms escalation, and then through an alert
that threatened the annihilation of mankind.
On October 7, the second day of the fighting, Iraq nationalized
the 23.75 percent share in the Basra Petroleum Company held by U.S.
companies Exxon and Mobil. The next day Syria and Lebanon sus-
pended oil shipments passing through their pipelines. On October 16,
the day after the U.S. airlift had begun to pour 800 tons a day of
military supplies into Israel to turn the tide of battle, six Arabian Gulf
producers—Abu Dhabi, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—
announced an immediate 17 percent increase in the price of their
crude oil. This amounted to a staggering $2 per barrel increase on
War Again 623
light crude and marked the first time that the producers had unilater-
ally set the posted prices for oil. The following day the five Arab
producing states announced a cut of no less than 5 percent of the
September production and the maintenance of the same rate of reduc-
tion each month thereafter ‘‘until such time as the international com-
munity compels Israel to relinquish our occupied territories.’’!° Coun-
tries who had helped the Arab ‘‘just cause’’ were not to be made to
suffer, while countries who continued to “demonstrate moral and ma-
terial support to the Israeli enemy” were to be subjected ‘‘to severe
and progressive reduction in Arab oil supplies, leading to a complete
halt.”
Nixon’s special message to Congress the following day requesting
$2.2 million as emergency military aid for Israel was answered with
further Arab production cuts. Then, on the basis ‘‘of the massive arms
supplies and facilities in helping the transport of the U.S. supply of
deadly sophisticated war matériel to Israel by air and sea,” the Arab
countries individually declared that a total embargo on oil exports to
the U.S. and Holland was in effect. King Faisal’s patience had become
exhausted.'! Saudi Arabia, whose daily production had reached 8.2
million barrels in September, the base to be used for the production
cuts, soon lowered her oil outflow to 5.8 million barrels. In early
November the Arab states agreed on further production cuts.
The Arab oil producers’ decision would have been worse for the
U.S. had militants prevailed over the moderate Saudi approach. Mea-
sures demanded by Iraq and Libya included withdrawal of all Arab
deposits from U.S. banks, massive sales of Arab dollars on the interna-
tional market to injure the American currency standing (some of which
was undoubtedly done on an unofficial basis), and a total import boy-
cott of goods from the U.S. and other pro-Israel countries. One Arab
nationalist-minded newspaper reminded its readers:
It is no secret that the huge Arab reserves in the banks of Europe constitute
an efficient financial weight. Such balances should be directed against the
American interests in an attempt to put an end to the provocative American
attitudes toward the Arabs, as well as to the false empire of the U.S. dollar.
The Arab world should, without any restrictions, enter the Arab-Zionist con-
flict and use their effective weapon against the enemies of the Arabs and their
allies,
There were even some insistent demands for a takeover of 51
Percent of all American assets on Arab soil. No doubt veiled threats
of U.S. intervention, hinted in certain statements and implicit in Sena-
624 POLITICS OR POLICY
tor Fulbright’s disclosure of contingent Pentagon military plans for a
takeover by American surrogates (Israel and/or Iran), were important
factors moderating Arab decisionmaking at this time.
The first official energy statements, both local and federal, in
concert with Zionist propagandists, belittled the effect of the Arab
embargo, asserting that only about 6 percent of American imports was
involved. Yet with the passage of each day of the embargo as the oil
noose tightened, it became more obvious that John Doe Public had not
been given the true facts. U.S. Energy Adviser John Love was forced
to admit the crisis to be ‘‘far more serious than thought a week ago.”
The plain fact was that in 1972 Arab countries had directly supplied
9.5 percent of U.S. imports, and that did not include large quantities
of Arab crude sent to Europe and then transshipped as fuel oil to the
States. Thus total American dependence on Arab oil was already closer
to 15 percent.
U.S. and European efforts to circumvent the effects of the em-
bargo by creating an oil-users’ cartel resulted in the same fate as had
befallen John Foster Dulles’ “Suez Canal Users’’ folly in the fall of
1956 prior to the first Suez war. Fear, always heretofore a stalwart ally
of the Zionists, now became an invaluable tool of Arab economic
warfare against Israel, as embargoed states carefully avoided any col-
laborative action that might inspire further Arab reprisals against
them.
Zionist fear of an Arab oil embargo and the possible effect on
Israel’s position had been assuaged by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba
Eban’s Miami Beach reassurances prior to the outbreak of fighting:
“There is not the slightest possibility that the Arab countries would
withhold oil from the U.S. The oil-buying countries have alternate
places in which to buy; the Arab states have no alternative but to sell
their oil because they have no other resources at all... .”!? This was
an echo of “the Arabs can’t eat their petroleum,” which had been
reverberating for months in the press.
The day after the war started, Jewish leaders meeting in New
York’s Plaza Hotel at a special emergency meeting cheered the Foreign
Minister as he demanded: ‘Will there be a massive demonstration of
Jewish solidarity? Of Jewish indignation? The answer is in your
hands.” In reply, Jacob Stein, Chairman of the Conference of Presi-
dents of Major American Jewish Organizations, insisted: ‘The Ameri-
can Jewish community stands today ready for any challenge put before
it to come to the aid of Israel no matter what effort or commitment.”
No sooner had the oil embargo begun and the energy crisis wors-
War Again 625
ened than the leaders of various Jewish service organizations com-
menced an all-out campaign to abort any adverse American reaction
to Washington’s Middle East policy. On the sixtieth anniversary of the
ADL on November 15, the group’s National Chairman told a crowded
audience: “The Arab states, with the skillful assistance of the Soviet
Union, are using oil to drive a wedge between Israel and the U.S. and
to picture American Jews as those to be held responsible for empty gas
tanks and unheated homes this winter.””!3
The American Jewish Committee widely distributed pamphlets
designed to show that the Arab world embargo was only a minor factor
in the “energy crisis.” The Conference of Presidents issued its own
Middle East memo in mid-February entitled “The Energy Crisis—
Who's to Blame?” They extracted articles from a New York Times report
that attributed the oil shortage to many causes other than the Arab
embargo.
The cover-up to prevent the American people from finding out
why they had been undergoing unnecessary hardships continued long
after the Arab oil embargo had been lifted, with gasoline rationing
ended and gas stations no longer closed on Sunday. The American
Jewish Congress, the oldest defender of Jewish nationalism in tracts
and advertisements, maintained, “‘It is clearly understood that Israel
is not to blame . . . the present oil shortage by the Arab oil sheikhdoms
has nothing to do with political events in the Middle East.”’ Meetings,
letters to the editor, advertisements, and other pressure-group activi-
ties, all of which were widely covered by the media, were directed
toward this end. Almost the sole offset to this great influence on
unknowledgeable Americans were bumper stickers attainable only by
mail from a few questionable Midwest organizations, which stated “Oil
Yes—Israel No.” The motivations impelling this campaign were in-
deed highly dubious.
The American people were deeply disturbed over the energy
crunch, and some few were even seeing the linkage to U.S. partiality
in the Middle East conflict, although there had been no campaign to
explain the motivations of King Faisal and the other Arab embargoists
to the American people. Due to the skillful Zionist-Israelist cover-up
Propaganda, and the corresponding inexpert, abysmal Arab public
relations, most Americans were kept unaware of the inescapable facts.
The occasionally widely quoted remarks of charismatic Saudi Minister
of Petroleum Yamani, who obviously had a personal axe to grind,
Scarcely filled the void. There were no American voices speaking out
im terms of American interests to go along with Yamani’s words, and
626 POLITICS OR POLICY
to give emphasis to his statement: “I assure you if we can solve the
Israeli problem, the price of oil will come down.”
Granted that U.S. national energy planning had been grossly
shortsighted and that Americans had been criminally negligent in
wastage of resources, they would then still have had all the gasoline
needed for their cars, all the heat for their homes, and all the oil for
their industrial complex—and would not have been as threatened by
a serious recession—had it not been for the U.S. “Israel-First’’ policy.
Aside from Harvard Professor Thomas R. Stauffer, whose views went
untrumpeted, very few dared adopt the slogan “interdependence”
instead of “‘independence’’!* and admit that the sole source of meeting
U.S. increasing petroleum needs for the coming decade was the Arab
world, with whom the U.S. was virtually at war.
The $2.2 billion legislation in military grants/loans to cover the
costs of the October airlift and to continue the military flow so as to
maintain Israel’s superiority had another devastating effect: The ship-
ment of military supplies to Israel had dangerously impaired U.S.
capabilities. Huge stocks of armaments were rushed out of U.S. and
NATO reserves. Some 1,000 late-model M-60 tanks—an equivalent of
three years production—were airlifted from U.S. military depots in
West Germany and flown to the Middle East battlefield. What was
given away in six weeks was found to be most difficult to replace, as
American industry was unable or unwilling to manufacture castings to
expand this production.!5 The concern for U.S. needs had been one
of the factors behind the hesitancy of the Defense Department and of
Secretary Schlesinger in meeting the Dinitz-Kissinger demands that
the airlift proceed without any delay. A large number of F-4 fighter
aircraft, M-48 tanks, and nearly half the highly sophisticated TOW
antitank missiles were also airlifted together with other weapons.
As part of the postconflict shipment, the U.S. agreed to provide
Israel advanced surface-to-surface ballistic missiles; high-performance
fighter aircraft; decoy, reconnaissance, and strike remotely piloted
vehicles; and tactical missiles. Additional Phantoms and new armored
personnel carriers, vital to the multifronted defense system, were also
on Israel’s list, most of which have been since sent.
An authoritative Pentagon source later declared that ‘‘the deple-
tion of the U.S. arsenal for the benefit of Israel during the October war
left our country without a single combat-ready division anywhere.”
The Zionist lobby, responsible for this serious military drain, was what
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George S. Brown had been
talking about in his Duke Law School controversial reference, for
War Again 627
which he had become a member of the very exclusive ‘those who have
been blitzed by the Zionists” club (see pages 444-448).
While the American people were unaware how vital the U.S. sup-
ply airlift had been to Israel, the military leaders in Tel Aviv never lost
sight of the fact. The second cease-fire did not end the fighting; Israeli
forces continued to encircle the entrapped Egyptian Third Corps,
which in turn tried to break out of the Israeli encirclement. For pur-
poses of bringing the Arabs to the negotiating table to face the Israelis,
Kissinger did not wish to deprive the Egyptians of the feeling that they
had won at least a moral victory in exposing the noninvincibility of
Israeli military might. He insisted that the Israelis permit food, water,
and medicine through the U.N. cease-fire lines to the beleaguered
Egyptian forces.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s first response was: “This
is absurd. We are at war, and you ask us to supply our enemy.” But
Kissinger was said to have warned: “If you don’t supply them, then we
will supply them. Furthermore, you will have to wage your next war
alone.” As Dayan told the Knesset on October 30: “The supply of the
Third Army with food was undertaken by us not in a humanitarian
manner but rather because we had no choice in the question. The
other choices, to be more precise, were worse.” Only the day before
Premier Meir was quoted as saying during a visit to the troops at the
Suez Canal: ‘It was perfectly clear that the Americans would not take
with any specific pleasure our negative answer, and as it is known, we
haven’t got any particular surplus of friends around the world. The
U.S. since 1970 has been our supplier, essential to our army. . . .”” And
sO, once again, as in the very rare instance of the 1953 Eisenhower days
when Israel had defied the U.N. edict against the diversion of waters
in the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria in the vicinity of
Lake Huleh, American pressure had been forcefully and successfully
brought to bear on Israel—behind the scenes, of course, lest the Zion-
ist apparatus be aroused and seek to undermine Washington determi-
nation.
With Egyptian pride saved and a total cease-fire in effect after an
agreement was finally reached at Kilo 101 on the Suez-Cairo road by
the Egyptian and Israelis on November 15,16 the momentum toward
the Geneva Conference went forward under the shuttling guidance of
mercurial Henry. To persuade Israel to negotiate for further disen-
Sagement of military forces along the Suez front, it was obvious that
he had promised Israel more arms and security. And it was equally
obvious that the Secretary had promised the Arabs on his initial trip
628 POLITICS OR POLICY
to their world that disengagement would be but a first step in an Israeli
pullback leading to total withdrawal from occupied territories. With
Sadat it was “‘love”’ at first sight, and the Egyptian leader agreed to
come to Geneva. However, the persuasive doctor was unable to simi-
larly influence Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. The peace conclave
opened at Geneva in the Palais des Nations on December 21 with the
foreign ministers of the U.S., Soviet Union, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel
in attendance, and without Syrian representation.
The conference adjourned the next day, giving way to the negotia-
tions between Egypt and Israel conducted by the peregrinating, per-
sistent Kissinger between Aswan and Jerusalem. Eight days later there
was a signed agreement providing for Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank of the Suez and from the East Bank as far south as the Gulf of
Suez, the twenty miles of Sinai territory yielded to be divided into three
buffer zones.
The Nixon-Kissinger team could claim two further Middle East
triumphs prior to the resignation of the President. After four weeks of
shuttle diplomacy, Syria and Israel were induced to come to terms on
a limited disengagement agreement on the Golan Heights. But to
accomplish this, a little gentle Washington arm-twisting had to be
applied in personal correspondence with Meir even as Nixon was com-
ing under heaviest Watergate fire. According to the Israeli newspaper
Ma‘ariv, Nixon sent three personal messages to Israel asking for a
show of flexibility and warning the Israeli leader not to take on itself
the onus for foiling the newly presented opportunity to bring peace to
the Middle East. The last private note pointedly reminded Meir that
history does not repeat itself—apparently alluding to the possibility
that there might not be arms to save that country the next time if Israel
did not cooperate in the current negotiations. In reporting the diplo-
matic exchange, the Israeli journal insisted that the course of Israeli
action would have been the same, but due to the frequency of the notes
“and the insistence of their style, the freedom of movement of the
government was certainly limited.”
While the State Department and Kissinger publicly denied that
any secret treaties were involved in the Golan Heights disengagement
agreement, the document was scarcely signed than it was revealed that
the U.S. would henceforth provide Israel with long-term arming and
military procurement instead of, as previously, on an ad hoc basis.
Aside from enormous military grants-in-aid, the purchases were to be
made on the best possible financial terms.
At the same time the Nixon administration sought to strengthen
War Again 629
relations with the Arab world so as to retain the image as an even-
handed mediator that it was seeking. The President’s enthusiastic re-
ception on his May visit to Cairo, Aswan, and Riyadh augmented the
growing ties being cemented by Kissinger. But every step forward
encountered Zionist obstructionism that viewed new relations with
their enemies as a setback for Israel. Israelists, on and off Capitol Hill,
reacted with anger at the Nixon announcement from Cairo that Egypt
would be helped toward nuclear development and that a U.S. military
mission was even then visiting Egypt to discuss details.
If disengagement had reduced the ability to wage immediate fur-
ther war, the possibilities of achieving real peace seemed little ad-
vanced, although both sides had suffered tremendous human and ma-
terial losses. In view of her size and numbers, Israel’s 2,517 killed,
7,500 wounded,!” and $9 billion cost in the nineteen days of fighting
was far greater. But a reading of translations of the Hebrew press as
well as of the Arabic clearly revealed that neither side possessed even
a modicum of the essential ingredient for peace: limited trust in the
other party. Writer Daniel Dishon in a lengthy Jerusalem Post article
claimed that the ultimate vision of Anwar Sadat still was a triumph over
rather than friendship with Israel, and that the Arabs really had never
abandoned their idea of “pushing Israel into the sea.”
But it was Israel that continued to do the “pushing” and expand-
ing. The Israeli government announced plans for the expenditure of
more than $80 million for the development of settlements on the
occupied Golan Heights over a two-year period, aimed to more than
double the Israeli population. These cooperative industrial villages
and the $20 million industrial center of Katroun in the heart of the
Golan were the key projects on the planning boards. In creating an-
other fait accompli, Israel was already violating the basic understanding
behind President Assad’s capitulation to the Kissinger urgings. The
return to the Syrians of the devastated city of Quneitra never repre-
sented the ultimum to the Syrian President; it was undoubtedly the
understanding that return of the bulk of the Golan Heights was to be
negotiated by the parties at a reconvened Geneva Conference.
No sooner had Nixon returned from his triumphant Middle East
“peace” tour than the Israelis let loose four days of the heaviest repri-
sal aerial raids against Palestinian camps in South Lebanon, allegedly
I response to the attacks on Kiryat Shemona, Ma’alot, and Shamir.
South Lebanon was devastated as Sadat declared that the “Egyptian
Army could not much longer hold the peace” and in a personal note
called on Nixon to take a “firm stand against Israel’s repeated aggres-
630 POLITICS OR POLICY
sions on Lebanon.”’ The insecure government of Lebanese Prime Min-
ister Takieddin Solh hesitated to bring charges against Israel to the
Security Council lest he disrupt the Nixon peace momentum. Israel
apparently sought some understanding with the Christian Lebanese
that would seal off the borders and prevent Palestinians from mount-
ing any future attacks.
There was precious little peace and negligible trust in view as the
bomb racks seemed in the process of being rereadied for loading. Yasir
Arafat charged Israel with possessing five atom bombs—not missiles
—of the Nagasaki type. The Soviet Union’s arms shipments to Syria
and Iraq, accompanied by loud gustos, clearly indicated its intent not
to relinquish her foothold, so expensively won, in the Arab world.
Moshe Dayan’s successor, Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres,
sounded the alarum: Syria is being armed for further battle. The shrill
Israeli warning was calculated for U.S. consumption to prepare the
American people for the eventual breakdown in the peace momentum
and also to serve as a reminder to UJA fund-raisers that there was
another “‘year of crisis’’ ahead. New York City radio programs (WCBS,
WINS, etc.) continually alluded to ‘Israeli fears of Arab intentions,”
to the arms purchases by “‘oil-rich Arab potentates,”’ and to “the frag-
ile peace.”
To cap the cold war, Israel carried out a twenty-four-hour trial
mobilization to test the speed with which 75,000-300,000 reservists
could be called up. Syria, doubting the intentions of Israel, placed her
troops on an emergency call. A wrong pushbutton, and the disengage-
ment agreement would have been in the scrap heap, another war on
the way.
These maneuverings, obviously directed toward a reconvened Ge-
neva Conference, coincided with the resignation of Nixon in the wake
of the release of the three condemnatory tapes and his admission that
he had lied to the Judiciary Committee, to the Congress, and to his
personal counsel. As Vice President Gerald Ford took over the reins
of a deeply shaken U.S. government, the twenty-year voting record in
congress of the new White House incumbent on measures relating to
Israel scarcely augured well for peace in the Middle East.
xx The Ford Interlude
I always voted at my party’s call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
—Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore
No President, including Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, brought
to the White House a more pro-Israel record and more fulsome Zionist
connections than did Gerald R. Ford. If Max Fisher, Nixon’s Ambassa-
dor to the Jews, could term the outgoing President a “Jewish delight,”
he must have viewed his successor a ‘‘super delight.”
The entire four-page issue of the Zionist Establishment’s weekly
Washington organ, Near East Report, was devoted on August 14, 1974,
to the views, public statements, and actions of congressman and Vice
President Ford on behalf of Israel. To quote editor I. L. Kenen, “As
House Republican leader, Ford consistently and vigorously urged the
Executive branch to strengthen Israel . . . there were critical periods
when the Nixon Administration, like its predecessors, wavered in its
course and Congress moved to counteract any weakening in the tradi-
tional bi-partisan commitment to Israel.”” The Grand Rapids congress-
man helped to ‘“‘develop a Capitol Hill consensus in favor of Israel,”’
and was in the forefront on the House side of the “Israel-First Bloc,”
which not only favored economic and military aid to Israel and urged
direct Arab-Israel peace negotiations, but also strongly opposed any
Israeli withdrawal from any territory.!
In addition to addressing five annual policy conferences in Wash-
ington of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, Ford spon-
sored or cosponsored many congressional resolutions and declara-
tions from 1954 onward for Israel or against the Arabs, including an
attempt to cut off surplus foods to Egypt because of what he consid-
ered to be Nasser’s latent anti-American policy. He later led the hue
631
632 POLITICS OR POLICY
and cry against “lawless’’ Arab students who, with pitiful efforts, were
trying to win support for the Palestinian cause on U.S. college cam-
puses.
During the Johnson administration the new President had fought
the temporary arms embargo to Israel and had helped persuade the
President to sell her the first fifty Phantom jets. Congressman Ford
even suggested that the U.S. lend—or give—Israel a destroyer to re-
place the Elath, sunk by a U.A.R.-directed Soviet Styx missile. On
several occasions the President-to-be assailed the Soviet Union for its
attitude on the Soviet Jewry emigration question, working closely with
Senator Henry Jackson, and he vied with former New York Governor
Averell Harriman in advancing a lend-lease concept of aid to Israel so
as to ensure a continuity in the supply of jets.
In many other ways, too, the new Chief Executive had endeavored
for twenty years to turn the U.S. Congress into an Israeli legislative
body. All his actions, as he indicated to a Zionist conclave in the
nations’s capital in 1969, were dictated by his sincere belief that “the
fate of Israel is linked to the national security interests of the U.S. I
cannot conceive of a situation in which the U.S. will sell Israel down
the Nile.’”?
One of Ford’s first acts after being named by Nixon as Vice Presi-
dent to succeed Spiro Agnew,} even before he had won final congres-
sional approval, was to fly to Hauppauge, Long Island, to attend the
$250-a-plate “Dinner for Life’’ organized by the United Jewish Appeal.
Stating that he was appearing as ‘‘a friend,” the Vice President-desig-
nate spoke of ‘bridge building in the Middle East’’ and promised
further administration support to Israel. To make matters worse, the
new President at the outset surrounded himself with people even more
committed to the Zionist dream than he, including Nelson Rockefeller,
his designee as Vice President.
The Arab world’s initial reaction was to view the Nixon downfall
with great dismay. Their sympathies rested with the displaced Chief
Executive who had so effectively projected himself on his Middle East
tour three months earlier. Some writers even brought their usual keen
sense of exaggeration into play, interpreting the Watergate incident as
a conspiracy aimed at the President’s open-minded approach to the
Arabs. Few of the newspapers were the slightest bit informed as to the
new President’s attitude on Middle East affairs, although Beirut’s An
Nahar did point out that “President Nixon’s replacement was the only
American politician to have publicly recognized Jerusalem as the
‘unified capital of Israel.’’’ (Hubert Humphrey had done likewise.)
The Ford Interlude 633
The incoming President retained Kissinger as his Secretary of
State (despite previous rumors to the contrary), appointed ‘‘even-
handed” Governor William Scranton as U.S. representative to the
U.N., and insisted in the first pronouncement of the new administra-
tion at his August 28 press conference that efforts ‘“‘to attain a Middle
East settlement and improve ties with the Arab world” would go for-
ward.* The big problem was now to achieve such goals without arous-
ing Zionist-Israeli antagonism. As Israel’s insistence on “secure
boundaries,” which she had never defined, was shaped in terms of the
Masada complex and of Zionist ideological expansionism, whatever
steps the Ford administration took toward meeting Arab demands
would inevitably be construed by Israel and her supporters as being
at her expense.
It was difficult for the “Israel-First’’ bloc on the Hill to oppose
Egypt’s request for additional wheat and food sought early in the
administration by Washington visitor Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy
and a top-expert delegation from Cairo. But when it came to sending
six C-130 giant transport planes and other military supplies to Egypt,
these congressmen put up a fight. At the same time the House Interna-
tional Affairs Committee indicated that their slogan was ‘Impartial but
pro-Israel.” The economic grant-in-aid to Israel was increased from
$50 million, voted in the three previous years, to $250 million for
1974-75, although the U.S. was in the middle of a deep recession. The
grant to assist the emigration of Soviet Jewry to Israel was likewise
increased.
Kissinger, obviously more in charge than ever, had to come up
with some answer to the Arab world’s persistent demands for the
return of the occupied territories in accordance with Security Council
resolutions. Couldn’t the U.S. sidetrack implementation of these reso-
lutions by a new variation of the old British game of “divide and rule”
by paying off Egypt and Jordan with new goodies and keeping the
Palestinians at bay?
Kissinger, because of the fact and not despite the fact that he was
a Jew, had been able to spark Arab postwar willingness, particularly
Sadat’s, to make sincere moves toward peace with Israel. But was the
U.S. prepared to pay the awesome domestic political price for the kind
of settlement envisioned by the Arabs, which inevitably would only
lead to the mobilization of American Jewry against the Ford-Rock-
efeller administration, with dire consequences in 1976? What Kiss-
'nger had promised in the euphoria of his shuttle diplomacy and what
the Arabs could reasonably expect were no doubt legions apart.
634 POLITICS OR POLICY
Unrecognized by the U.S., cynical Palestinians insisted that the
principal aim of Washington was to hold off a new war as long as
possible by separating the Arab and Israeli armies, meanwhile pro-
longing the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. The reiteration by
King Faisal that the Arabs would reimpose the oil embargo if the U.S.
deserted evenhandedness indicated the strong misgivings of the Saudi
monarch.
What mitigated most against hopes for peace was that the Ameri-
can Jewish community seemed to have learned next to nothing from
the lessons of the October war. Deceived by their own propaganda,
Israelists in the U.S. had little understanding of the new Arab feeling
of confidence and strength, permitting its leadership to consider seri-
ously for the first time some kind of coexistence with some kind of an
Israel state, albeit there was still no one common Arab approach as to
what shape this should take. Blinded by their own arrogance stemming
from their financial and political power, and spiritually sustained by
their persecution saga—if you were not with them 100 percent you
were a Nazi—Organized Jewry plotted the destruction of any U.S.
rapprochement with the Arab world, particularly with the Palestinians,
who to them remained nothing more than “terrorists.” And this
American Jewish-Israeli determination to maintain the status quo in
the Middle East was no little strengthened by the knowledge that in
Gerald Ford they had a far stronger supporter than Richard Nixon had
ever been.
Even as Arabs and Israelis were competing as to who could make
a bigger hero of Kissinger after the initial disengagement agreements,
Zionism in the U.S. kept its pressure upon the State Department to
obtain more planes and arms. In March the Zionist Organization of
America newsletter sarcastically referred to Kissinger as “‘a new suitor
for embracement by sheikhs, presidents and kings of Arabia.”’ Before
needed suasion could be applied to Israel to pull back, the Secretary
of State was himself being subjected to the greatest pressures in the
complex political chess game. Ever mindful of the larger territorial
adjustments that lay ahead, the Anglo-Jewish press throughout the
country took new potshots at the State Department and its chief.
In Israel an earlier feeling of compromise, exuded by the incom-
ing government of General Yitzhak Rabin which had succeeded the
repudiated Meir rule in June, soon faded under the bombardment of
chauvinists and nationalists, no small part due to its exceedingly small
margin of control (exactly two) in the Knesset. The National Religious
party, which for the first time in Israel’s history was not part of the
The Ford Interlude 635
ruling Labor coalition, had extracted from the caretaker Meir govern-
ment in the post-1973 war period the important concession that there
would be no change in status of the West Bank (to them Samaria and
Judea) without a plebiscite, and no yielding of any territory to Jordan
or Palestinians.
Trial balloons sent up by Israeli Information Minister Aharon
Yariv proved to be nothing more than that. Yariv had indicated that
Israel might negotiate with the PLO if that organization recognized
Israel’s right to exist and ended its attacks against Israel. Ten days later
Prime Minister Rabin and his Cabinet revealed that while there might
be some minority support for such negotiations, the Israeli administra-
tion’s viewpoint was quite contrary. ‘‘An Israeli decision today to con-
duct negouations with a Palestinian delegation would be tantamount
to granting representation to Israel’s chief enemies—to those who do
not want to recognize its existence and who declare their main aim is
its liquidation.” While there was no official PLO response, an impor-
tant ‘Palestinian personality” was quoted as saying: “When an appar-
ently reasonable offer to negotiate is surrounded by impossible condi-
tions, it is mockery. The Israelis want us to give up our goal of the
liberation of Palestine without even offering to give up their preten-
sions to the expansion of Israel.”
With Syrian, Jordanian,® and Egyptian foreign ministers flowing
into Washington for consultations with Kissinger, the Israelis jockeyed
for position with bluster and the customary propaganda, spread by the
ever-sympathetic media, conjuring up the ever-familiar picture of
“vengeful Arabs, terrorist Palestinians, and anti-Semitic Muslims.’’6
Although all parties concerned fully appreciated the great benefits
that would flow from an honest peace, it daily became more obvious
to the student of the area that Middle East settlement was still light-
years away. While the U.S. and the Soviet Union carefully avoided a
confrontation, their continuing rivalry posed insurmountable obsta-
cles to peace. Moscow, which had been lavishing varied help to differ-
ent Arab countries to match U.S. support to Israel, had been unable
to find an alternate to the exploitation of anti-U.S. sentiment as the
means of maintaining her influence in the area. Concern over being
shut out of the area was heightened by the new U.S. role as mediator
under Kissinger’s guidance, which had been accepted by not only
Israel and Egypt, but Syria as well. New Soviet strategies included
increased arms shipment to Iraq and Syria, open recognition of the
PLO, and new economic aid to South Yemen.
But Israel persisted in its policy of nonrecognition of the PLO,
636 POLITICS OR POLICY
insisting that any negotiations for the return of the West Bank be
carried on with Jordan, whose “open bridge”’ policy would more read-
ily assure for Israel the Palestinian labor supply in the event of the
return of any of the territory. Still financially strapped from the war
despite large U.S. gifts and guaranteed securities, Israel desperately
required the continued flow of people, goods, and capital between
Israel and the West Bank.
Prime Minister Rabin’s bare majority afforded him an excuse for
inflexibility. Any attempt to give back the West Bank would brook the
forthright opposition of the National Religious party and result in the
fall of his government to the totally intransigent, ultranationalist, Be-
gin-led Likud. Return to Egypt of occupied Sinai territory would in-
volve the loss of close to $300 million in oil revenues and $50 million
from the Eilat-Ashkelon trans-Israel pipeline, the substitute for the
closed Suez Canal, which constituted one-third of Israel’s export earn-
ings.
The early months of the Ford administration were not the happi-
est for Kissinger, who in addition to allegations regarding links to past
White House surveillance and wiretapping, encountered setbacks else-
where. His intense personal dislike of Archbishop Makarios and mis-
trust of Soviet intentions led to the failure to take decisive action at the
outset of the Greek-Turkish conflict over Cyprus, greatly weakening
NATO and forcing further U.S. reliance on Israel as its ‘‘bastion” in
Mare Nostrum. And the designation of the PLO as the sole representa-
tive of the Palestinian people was certainly not in line with Kissinger
planning.
The lifting of the oil embargo on March 18 at the direction of King
Faisal had neither provided assurances of a halt to skyrocketing oil
prices nor of the flow of essential energy supplies. The Saudis had left
the door open to the very real possibility of reimposition of the em-
bargo if the peace momentum and Israeli withdrawal came to a halt.
Reacting to the danger, the speeches of President Ford to the
Economic Club in Detroit and to the U.N. fairly bristled with implied
threats (‘End the Oil Gouging” was how the press headlined the
presidential remarks), as did public echoes from Kissinger and Trea-
sury Secretary Williain Simon. The President warned the General As-
sembly that ‘‘the two pressing world supply crises of oil and food either
could be resolved on the basis of cooperation or can be made unman-
ageable on the basis of confrontation.” The delegates of 138 nations
responded most coolly.
The oil-producing countries did not remain silent. Speaking to
The Ford Interlude 637
the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, the Shah of Iran de-
clared his firm opposition to a reduction in oil prices unless the prices
of the twenty to thirty staple commodities Middle East countries were
importing from the West were likewise reduced. “‘No one can dictate
to us—no one can wave a finger at us, because we will wave a finger
back,” the Iranian monarch expostulated. Kuwaiti Oil Minister Abdul
Rahman al-Ateeqi similarly warned that the oil producers would fight
back.
Clarifying the administration’s position in a very significant and
widely quoted interview with Business Week,7 Kissinger declared that an
American military takeover of the Middle East oil fields would be ‘“‘a
very dangerous course, but one which has not been ruled out.”” While
military intervention would not be used to drive the price of oil down,
it would be quite another matter ‘‘where there is some critical strangu-
lation of the industrialized world’’—an ominous warning to the Arabs
not to invoke a new embargo.
The Vladivostok Summit and the Ford-Brezhnev discussions on
the Middle East yielded only another agreement to disagree. The
failure of Ford’s inflation and energy program, growing worldwide
balance of payments pressure, the downward trend in crop yields, and
the rapid movement of currencies all created a mood of uncertainty
and added to possibilities of military action as 1975 began. With the
energy pinch tightening and the PLO-Israel impasse deepening, the
war party in the U.S. grew. A renowned psychologist writing in an
academic journal felt that the stage was being set for American military
intervention in the Middle East because such a war could “be justified
on the grounds of self-interest’’—shutting off of the U.S. oil supply.®
In an article in Commentary,? Johns Hopkins’ Professor Robert W.
Tucker suggested that the best area for a massive U.S. airborne assault
would be the coastal strip from Kuwait to Qatar, ‘“‘which accounts for
40 percent of Arab oil production and where there are few people, few
forests, negligible Arab military forces” and where U.S. forces would
not be harassed as they were in the jungles of Vietnam.!°
Exuding far more hatred of the Arabs was the Andrew Tobias New
York magazine piece, “‘War—The Ultimate Anti-Trust Action,” which
was featured by a half-page of instructions on “How to Blow Up An
Oil Well.” The writer asked: “Could we, technically, pull off an inva-
sion of one of the nations belonging to OPEC? If so, should we do such
a thing? And in any case, might we, or some other country, try it?””!!
To pick up the peace momentum, Kissinger counted on his magic
with Sadat and the irreparable cleavage between Moscow and Cairo,
638 POLITICS OR POLICY
only superficially papered over by Sadat-Gromyko talks in which the
Egyptian leader’s request for spare parts and replacements for 1973
losses and a moratorium on the enormous indebtedness for past arms
deliveries was rejected. Egypt's vulnerable military position and even
more desperate economic picture impelled Sadat to take the big
chance of venturing into Kissinger-conducted bilateral negotiations
with Israel. Only a few months previously, Sadat had joined Assad and
Arafat in announcing opposition to any idea of a partial political settle-
ment: “The Arab cause is our cause.”” Now Syria and the PLO champed
on the sidelines, fearful that their Arab partner might succumb to the
wiles of Washington and totally isolate them. Dead set against any
Egyptian-Israeli solo with no movement on the Golan Heights or the
West Bank, Assad and Arafat vehemently opposed the Israeli demand
of a Sadat no-war pledge for a period of three to five years. The
Kissinger grant to Syria of $25 million from the previously appro-
priated $100 million contingency ‘‘to encourage further development
of U.S.-Syrian bilateral relations,” as the Secretary phrased it, did not
help bridge the wide gap between the two countries.
Few weeks were more significant to the history of the Middle East
than that of March 23-30, 1975, into which were crowded the failure
of the latest Kissinger shuttling between Egypt and Israel, the Ford call
for reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy, the assassination of King
Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and the announcement by Sadat that he would
open the Suez Canal to trafhc on June 5.
Given the circumstances of domestic politics in the U.S., Israel,
and Egypt, the outcome of Kissinger’s March efforts was inevitable.
The Rabin government was in a bind between its own Masada complex
and its deep concern with opposition, both within and outside the
Cabinet. To increase its control in the Knesset, Rabin had brought the
ultrachauvinistic, unyielding National Religious party into the govern-
ment. But his own Labor party, now divided into Peres, Allon, and
Rabin factions, was at odds over whether a statement of the “end of
belligerency” or merely “‘nonuse of force” should be exacted from
Egypt as the quid pro quo for relinquishment of the Sinai Mitla and Gidi
passes and the Abu Rudeis oil fields supplying 55 percent of Israel’s
petroleum needs. A retreat to the center of the passes was unaccept-
able to Cairo, and Rabin’s “bull in a china shop” diplomacy did not
help breach the gap between Israel and Egypt.
The U.S. media, as could be expected, laid the responsibility for
the diplomatic failure to Egypt’s unwillingness to end the state of
belligerency rather than to the Israeli reluctance to give back territory.
The Ford Interlude 639
But it actually had been the absence of realistic U.S. pressure on Israel
that accounted for its nonsuccess. Neither the President nor his Secre-
tary of State was truly prepared to twist Israel’s arm. The personal
not-too-strongly worded telegram from Ford to Rabin, allegedly
drafted by the perambulating Secretary of State, asking for acceptance
of Egyptian terms and vaguely warning of damaged U-.S.-Israel rela-
tions was not taken too seriously. Shortly after his return from Jerusa-
lem, Kissinger met with concerned congressional leaders and quickly
dispelled the rumor that Israel had been faced with even the vaguest
threat of a rejection to her newest request for $7.5 million in military
aid over the next three years. Israel sought approval of a shift from
year-to-year to long-term giving. Without taking action on this larger
amount, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted Israel an addi-
tional $696 million over what had been already appropriated for the
year.
The Israelis, as always, were handled with the silkiest of gloves.
With the 1976 elections on the horizon, Gerald Ford was not about
to antagonize the Jewish community. Washington distress signals
brought no help as the White House, et al., tried to muster support
for pressure from many, including Max Fisher. The off-the-record
Kissinger statement placing the blame for the negotiations failure on
Israel, but relieving his good friend Rabin of fault by noting that he
would not have remained in office had he accepted the Sadat pro-
posal, alerted the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organi-
zations. Ambassador Dinitz called up his ‘‘shock troops,” as he had
threatened during the 1973 airlift crisis, and at a New York meeting
surred 250 Jewish leaders to issue a call for “‘a nationwide drive to
mobilize broad public support for Israel’s cause among our fellow
citizens.”’ Kissinger was obliged to deny that the policy reassessment
in any way implied a rejection of the Israeli request for long-term
military and economic aid.!? Secretary Schlesinger also poured
soothing ointment on Israeli wounds by telling Ambassador Dinitz
that Israel’s safety and security would be assured through the U.S.
sophisticated weaponry sought.
Following his October 1973 difficulties, the Secretary of Defense
had been gaining favor in the Israeli camp ever since his January 6,
1974, television declaration that there was a “high risk” of force being
used against Arab nations if they continued their oil embargo. Obvi-
ously brandishing this option, Schlesinger again reminded the Arab
world that the U.S. would not readily tolerate a fresh embargo. In his
reply to the question as to what action the U.S. would pursue: ‘““That
640 POLITICS OR POLICY
remains to be seen, but I think the reaction of the U.S. might be far
more severe this time than the last.”
In an atmosphere pervaded by U.S. ambivalency, or worse, rather
than evenhandedness, Sadat had reasoned that it was best for him to
fend for himself. Watching him in his lengthy television interview with
NBC’s John Chancellor, one could appreciate the “spot” in which the
Egyptian President had been placed. He did not wish to be beholden
to the Kremlin again; he desperately needed U.S. economic coopera-
tion; he personally liked and trusted Kissinger very much. But he had
been let down and felt forced to make a dramatic move. The opening
of the Canal without an Israeli pullback from the strategic passes was
a calculated risk—a bow both to Moscow and to the Western European
countries that would benefit from this. But the assassination of King
Faisal, Sadat’s ally and “‘banker,’”’ no doubt largely contributed to the
surprising decision.
The removal of the moderating influence of the Saudi Arabian
monarch added to Middle East instability. Faisal’s conservatism always
balanced the “rejectionist forces” of Libya, Iraq, and Algeria, not to
mention South Yemen. It was he who in 1972 and 1973 had forged the
Egyptian-Saudi Arabian alliance. A staunch friend of the U.S., Faisal
had reluctantly invoked the oil embargo in November 1973. (When
this writer questioned the King in May 1974 in Riyadh as to the possi-
bility of another embargo, he declared that if the Arabs were forced
into another war with Israel, and if the U.S. did not remain even-
handed, he would not hesitate to invoke this weapon again. But the
Saudi Arabian monarch indicated that the great confidence he felt in
Kissinger would make such an eventuality unnecessary.
Faisal always seemed to have everyone in his pocket at the right
time. He could moderate, he could mediate the Arab internal rivalries,
even put brakes on Yasir Arafat. He was the only Arab leader since the
passing of Nasser able to bring about a united Arab stand. He was the
generally recognized leader of the Arab-Muslim world, challenged
only by the rising prestige of Iran’s Shah Pahlevi. His death at th
hands of his “maddened”! American-educated nephew, as he sat i
Majlis on the Prophet’s birthday, greatly weakened the Arab cause, a
well as hopes for peace in the area.
The reopening of the Canal, an imposing, globally televised spec
tacular, turned out to be a successful Sadat gambit, the new Suez toll
adding some small strength to the Egyptian economy. But ever sinc
the Sadat-Ford meeting in Salzburg in May, Cairo had been proddin
Washington for a meaningful Israeli pullback. Washington used Israe
The Ford Interlude 641
li’s deep concern over her still-pending request for military aid and her
deteriorating economic situation to force the Rabin government to
yield the Sinai passes, conditional upon a U.S.—not a U.N.—presence
in conjunction with electronic warning systems to be established. A
number of extravagent, indispensable goodies proferred to both par-
ties highlighted the brief twelve-day Kissinger shuttle in late August,
turning the “‘no”’ of March into the “yes” of September.
The second Israeli-Egyptian agreement became a fact on Septem-
ber 2,'4 not so much because Israel could not afford to deny Uncle Sam
its way a second time, but because of the marvelous deal Tel Aviv had
wrested for itself from Washington. Sadat had not done too badly,
either, once the promises of economic aid were implemented. Neither
antagonist, in fact, gave up too much, as both “‘begrudgingly” ac-
cepted Washington’s “payoff.” It was John Doe, the American tax-
payer, who once again was burdened with another foreign fiasco.
While headlines warned that New York City required $3.3 billion
to keep its machinery going, the State of Israel was requesting that very
sum for military and economic aid. Rabin’s loot for only doing a
minuscule portion of what was required of Israel under U.N. Security
Council Resolutions 242 of 1967 and 338 of 1973 did not quite reach
the figure New York sought. It was only $2.4 billion, but nevertheless
considerable largesse from a government still battling a heavy infla-
tion, a deep recession, and the threatened bankruptcy of its larger
cities. Indeed, an Israel nearly fatally isolated from the rest of the
world had won more U:S. concessions by yielding to so-called pressure
than the previous Meir-Dayan hawk Cabinet with its intransigency had
been able to squeeze out of the Nixon administration.
The new agreement was scarcely signed before Jerusalem, Cairo,
and Washington were giving varied interpretations of what was con-
tained in the pact’s secret pledges. The differences, however, were
solved when the New York Times again proved that it constituted the
invisible government of the U.S. No documents, however secret, ever
fail to come into possession of the scrutinizing eyes of this monolithic
Journal. To scoops on the Pentagon Papers dealing with Vietnam and
the Watergate tapes were now added the texts of the U.S. documents
accompanying the Sinai accord, published by the Sulzberger journal
On September 17 and 18.
Under any view, Israel had emerged more than ever as the 51st
State of the Union. Spelled out in detail in the Jerusalem Post were the
US. pledges not to attempt to pressure Israel either into “any large-
Scale withdrawal,” if and when negotiations over the Golan Heights
642 POLITICS OR POLICY
were initiated between Israel and Syria, or into any interim agreement
with Jordan; not to present any plan for any overall settlement without
Israeli consent; and neither to recognize nor hold talks with the PLO.
In addition to limiting U.S. options vis-a-vis Syria and Jordan, the
secret covenant with Israel pledged aid and assistance in the event of
an attack by another superpower, the two governments undertaking to
consult promptly on the nature of such assistance. (A similar secret
pledge was rumored to have been given in November 1971 by Nixon
to Meir when their quarrel was healed prior to the national campaign
and the successful presidential bid for the “Jewish vote.’’) Fearful of
Soviet reaction to this covenant, Kissinger told the press upon his
return from the Middle East, that the pledges made had been ‘‘qua-
lified by references to congressional action and American resources.”
There was nothing secret about the U.S. commitment to an en-
larged, dangerous role in the Middle East through the presence of 200
American technicians to share in the operations of the Israeli and
Egyptian surveillance stations in the Mitla and Gidi passes, and to
operate six other stations in the territory from which Israel was to
withdraw. The Israelis and the Egyptians had both insisted on this U.S.
presence, Rabin rejecting the proposal that the U.N. fill this active role
because ‘‘an attack through U.N. lines does not carry the same sym-
bolic gravity as an attack through American stations would.”
The other unchallenged U.S. commitment provided for the en-
larged financial allocation to Israel and Egypt (lumped together in
press reports as from $3 to $3.3 billion without any indication that at
least $2.6 billion of this was for Israel, of which $1.8 billion was a
military grant). In addition to this huge largesse, Israel was seeking,
according to Finance Minister Yeshoshua Rabinowitz,!5 $550 to $700
million more in order to reconstruct a new Sinai defense line ($150
million), replace the oil of Abu Rudeis ($350 million), and build up her
oil reserves ($50 million a year for four years).
There was little doubt that the financial aspects of the U.S. com-
mitment—far more than the Israeli withdrawal from five kilometers of
Egyptian soil, or even the return of the oil fields—were what President
Sadat could not resist. Whether he had received verbal guarantees that
a Syrian disengagement accord would follow or that Washington
would alter its views on the Palestinians constituted another of those
dark and undisclosed areas, which were of primary concern to other
Arab states. But it was ‘‘Yankee dollars” that had moved Sadat, just as
it had Rabin.
Even as the Egyptian leader was charged by Palestinians and other
The Ford Interlude 643
Arab nationalists with a sellout, the American people were expressing
their own doubts about this new U.S. involvement, whose small man-
power beginnings paralleled the insignificant, initial undertaking in
Vietnam. The mail received at the White House was running ten-
to-one against sending the technicians to the Sinai, and a National
Observer plebiscite among its readers showed 77 percent opposed. John
Doe similarly informed his congressmen of his misgivings. A New York
City resident voiced popular sentiment when he stated: ‘‘There is no
such thing as a slight pregnancy. No American advisers to the Sinai.
An American behind a computer is far more vulnerable than a soldier
with a gun in hand.”
Even the New York Times reluctantly was forced to concede editori-
ally that “serious dialogue on the Palestinian issue in the months ahead
would be far more directly to the core of the Middle East conflict than
another round of bitter disputation over a few square kilometers of
territory.’"!6
Equally obnoxious to “‘energy-conscious” American was the U.S.
guarantee to Israel of an adequate supply of oil as the Abu Rudeis
fields were returned to Egypt after eight years of occupation. The
U.S. pledged the sale to Israel of her domestic requirements and
“every effort to help Israel secure necessary means of transporta-
tion.” And more of the unique relationship was spelled out in the
proviso whereby Israel could purchase oil from the U.S. ‘‘in accord-
ance with the International Energy Agency conservation and alloca-
tion formula” should the U.S. be prevented from meeting Israel’s
normal requirements due to an embargo or otherwise. Further, it
was convenanted that Congress would be requested funds both to
cover any Israeli additional expenditures for the import of oil to re-
place the Abu Rudeis and Ras Sudar fields and for the construction
and storage of oil reserves in Israel. (A Gannett News Service poll
showed 64 percent opposed to U.S. compensating Israel for the loss
of its formerly held Egyptian oil.)
While Democratic majority leader Mike Mansfield and some other
congressional leaders indicated initial opposition to the enlarged U.S.
Middle East role, the Senate soon provided the necessary green light
to Kissinger’s pact. The early dissent of Senator Jackson only pointed
up the irrationalism of certain Israelist opposition to the pact. The
Likud and other expansionists had tried to turn Kissinger’s last shut-
tling visits to Jerusalem into street riots and violent demonstrations;
the police had been forced to intervene several times. To such zealots,
the so-called ‘“‘peace” involvement by U.S. forces was not a sufficient
644 POLITICS OR POLICY
quid pro quo for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the passes and the
return of the oil fields.
But Jackson and his Israeli cohorts could have been nothing but
pleased when Foreign Defense Minister Shimon Peres arrived at the
Pentagon shortly afterwards with a $2.4 billion arms shopping list.
Secretary Schlesinger could voice no objection to the Israeli request
for the most sophisticated weapons yet to be produced, some of which
were in short—or even no—supply. The Israelis wanted more Lance
missiles, laser bombs, F-15 planes, and the brand-new F-16 combat
aircraft, as well as Pershing missiles with a 450-mile range, which
would place Cairo and other Arab capitals within Israeli firing distance
of an atomic-bearing weapon.
Speaking at Washington’s prestigious Press Club on September
17, Peres claimed that Israel needed the Pershing missiles to balance
the Arab’s Russian-provided SCUD. Yet it was a recognized fact that
the latter had a range of 150 to 175 miles, only about one-third of that
of the American missile, and the Pershing assembly line had been
closed down for three months. According to columnists Evans and
Novak, the only immediate source for Israel was to pull the missiles
down from NATO operational inventory or a training unit based in the
U.S. And the U.N. Association of the U.S., heretofore always very
sympathetic to Israeli goals, decreed the introduction of the Pershing
into the Middle East would raise “dangerous ambiguities concerning
not only Israel’s nuclear capability but its nuclear intentions as well.’’!7
The administration had previously indicated that it would sell to
Israel for the first time 200 Lance short-range missiles, capable of
carrying nuclear as well as conventional warheads, to balance the chal-
lenge of Soviet antiaircraft sites, which Egypt and Syria had used so
effectively in the early stages of the October war. The Lance, a “cluster
bomblet,” consists of baseball-size bombs that are hurled over a wide
area when the warhead strikes the ground.
While this had spurred new Arab attempts to acquire atomic
weapons abroad—Sadat’s bid for an atomic reactor was turned down
by President Giscard d’Estaing in January 1975 just as Mua’mmar
Qaddafi had been earlier rejected by President Pompidou—angry pro-
tests emanated from those who already viewed the new step-by-step
accord with repugnance or skepticism, even some Egyptian leaders
(notably Saed Marei, the powerful Speaker of the People’s Assembly) !8
who had previously applauded the Sinai agreement. Even as the im-
portant SALT disarmament talks with the Kremlin floundered, this
further escalation of the never-ending arms race with the Soviet Union
The Ford Interlude 645
went forward by way of U.S. arms shipments to Israel, Jordan, and
Saudi Arabia (in exchange for good petrodollars)—all part of the per-
nicious madness coursed by Washington, which had brought nothing
but war and near-war to the area.
In addition to the vastly enlarged U.S. commitments, the principal
quid pro quo for Israel’s relinquishment of the oil fields and of five
kilometers of strategic territory (Israel retained the towering Jebel
Gidi, the highest point in the region, and Israel, the U.S., and Egypt
jointly shared control of the buffer zones established on the territory
yielded), Israeli Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur claimed his government
had even improved its position militarily because the greater distance
now separating the opposing forces would require Egypt to attack on
the move, a great disadvantage for the latter’s accustomed type of
military operations.
Arab bitterness against Egypt’s disengagement mounted. Syria
and the PLO attacked Cairo for going it alone; the PDFLP called for
sabotage of the accord. The fear in other Arab quarters was that the
Sinai accord would freeze the situation on other Middle East fronts.
President Sadat’s first visit to the U.S. in October 1975 only increased
the venom. Although he told both the U.N. General Assembly and the
Congress that “the year 1976 will be the ‘Palestine year,’ ’”’ Sadat made
little progress in overcoming the Syrian-PLO charge that his very trip
to the American capital constituted ‘‘another betrayal.”’
On the other hand, the “Israel-First”’ bloc boycotted the Egyptian
President’s address to Congress and demanded—and was assured—
equal time for Premier Rabin on a visit scheduled early in 1976. They
and other Israelists resented the goodwill the Egyptian leader was
building up in the States and feared further U.S.-Egyptian rapproache-
ment, no little of which was being advanced through the help of attrac-
tive, articulate Madame Jihan Sadat, who had accompanied her hus-
band to the States. Everywhere Zionists strove to undermine Sadat
gains and blunt a U.S.-Egyptian rapproachment.
Although building personal popularity, Sadat was not getting
what he most needed: a transfusion of private American investment
and technicians, far more essential to Cairo than the $1 billion in
promised aid. The Sadat bid for arms was turned down with a polite,
“Bring this matter up later and we'll take a second look.” And Egypt
had only been seeking cargo planes, trucks, and technical facilities
(after a long battle Congress finally approved the shipment of six
C-150s), compared to the sophisticated weaponry requested by and
given to Israel.!9 The Egyptian leader spent most of his time on his first
646 POLITICS OR POLICY
visit to the U.S. in private meetings with industrial leaders attempting
to induce hesitant American companies to invest in Egypt’s future,
which was the theme of a major address before the prestigious Eco-
nomic Club in New York City.
The Palestinians, already beset by internal strife, appeared to be
even bigger losers from disengagement than the Syrians, as Kissinger
continued to exploit Arab divisiveness. Lebanon, torn asunder by
mounting civil strife between the haves and the have-nots, the Chris-
tians and the Muslims, the conservatives and the radicals, faced grow-
ing collapse. And in this struggle the Palestinians, intent on maintain-
ing their position in the one country from which it could best and most
freely carry on guerrilla warfare against Israel, encountered another
shock upon discovery that their own interests did not always coincide
with that of their heretofore staunchest friend and ally, Syria.
As a quid pro quo for agreeing to another six-month extension of
the U.N. truce-keeping forces on the Golan Heights, Damascus how-
ever exacted the price of a full-scale U.N. Security Council debate on
the Palestine question in which the PLO was to participate. This move
came on top of the shattering November U.N. move against Zionism.
Kissinger had done everything to defeat the resolution and block a
debate, which could only enhance Palestinian prestige. The Rabin
Cabinet, in an emergency session, indicated it regarded his failure as
an American betrayal of the disengagement promise not to recognize
the PLO, and Washington was so informed.
Apparently the Israelis were so upset that Ford felt it politically
necessary to take the time during his arduous visit to Peking to send
an urgent message to Jerusalem, which might be paraphrased in this
way: ‘‘Look here, boys, we're still friends, and the situation has not
changed as a result of any action at the U.N.” Foreign Minister Allon
had earlier attempted to reach him by phone aboard the presidential
plane to express Israeli anger-fear, for the U.N. discussions were now
going to the core of the Palestine problem and were raising the ques-
tion of Israel’s very right to exist. The Israelis had been exercised over
a possible U.S. policy shift toward the PLO ever since Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Harold H.
Saunders, in testimony on November 12, 1975, before the Special
Subcommittee on Investigations of the House International Affairs
Committee, had stated boldly and clearly:
... The legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account
in the negotiations of an Arab-Israeli peace. In many ways the Palestinian
The Ford Interlude 647
dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the heart of that conflict. Final resolu-
ion of the problems arising from the partition of Palestine, the establishment
of the State of Israel and Arab opposition to these events will not be possible
until agreement is reached defining a just and permanent status for the Arab
peoples who consider themselves Palestinians. . . .
It is a fact that many of the 3 million or so people who call themselves
Palestinians today increasingly regard themselves as taving their own identity
as a people and desire a voice in determining their political status . .. The issue
is not whether Palestinian interests should be expressed in a final settlement,
but how. There will be no peace unless an agreement is found . . . We are
prepared to consider any reasonable proposal from any quarter and we will
expect other parties to the negotiations to be equally broadminded.®° [Italics
added. ]
The extent of Israel’s alarm over the scheduled U.N. debate was
demonstrated in the government’s refusal to permit Rabbi Moshe
Hirsch, leader of the militant anti-Zionist Neturei Karta, to come to
New York and make known his group’s views favoring establishment
of a Palestinian state. Although possessing an American passport, the
Rabbi, who considered himself and his followers to be “Palestinian
Jews,”’ was apprehended by Israeli police as he attempted to board a
plane at Lod Airport. (Nota line about this shocking incident appeared
in the U.S. press, although it was reported by Reuters and detailed at
a well-covered U.N. press conference.?!)
The U.S. soon indicated that it was maintaining its unique rela-
tionship with Israel, first through its lone negative vote®2 out of the
fifteen members on the procedural question over seating the PLO at
this full-dress Security Council debate of January 12-26, 1976, and
then, at the conclusion of this airing of the Palestine question, by its
veto of the resolution that called for establishment of an independent
Palestinian state and total Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories
occupied in the 1967 war. Although the resolution supported Israel’s
right to exist by providing guarantees for the ‘“‘security and territorial
independence” of all Middle East states, and a stronger Arab draft had
been withdrawn, U.S. Ambassador Moynihan still opposed passage on
the grounds that it altered the existing framework for Middle East
negotiations. The Council’s attempt to clarify the ambiguity in the
phrase “withdraw from territories occupied” in Resolution 242 (did
this mean all the territories or only some?) was resolutely resisted, as
was the U.N. aim to upgrade the reference to the Palestinians as a
“refugee problem” to the “‘political rights” of the Palestinian people.
This, Moynihan insisted,?? could only be settled by negotiations be-
648 POLITICS OR POLICY
tween the parties. The original resolution had been adopted at the end
of the 1967 war, at which time the necessity of some reference to the
national rights of the Palestinian people was not apparent.
Although civil war was raging in Lebanon, with Syria as well as
Israel threatening to intervene, and Palestinian frustrations were
reaching new heights in the face of continued U.S. intransigency to-
ward them, Ford still could muster these words for his 1976 State of
the Union address to the new Congress: ““The key elements for peace
among the nations of the Middle East now exist.’ Trust between the
protagonists was even more lacking than five months earlier, when
Time magazine and other periodicals were hailing the Israel-Egyptian
second disengagement as ‘‘peace in our ume.”
The bitter internecine struggle in Lebanon proceeded to worsen,
one cease-fire after another failing. In an attempt to right the balance
so as to temper the demand of the Christian forces led by Pierre
Geymayel and Camille Chamoun for a partition of the country, Presi-
dent Assad threw his forces to their side against the Palestinians. A
bitter struggle took place in which Syrian and PLO forces were anoma-
lously pitted against each other and had as their respective allies the
varied Christian groups and the leftist-Druze alliance. The PLO, prov-
ing no match for the professional army of Assad, was crushed, its
Beirut stronghold of Tel Zaitar wiped out in the bloodiest encounter
of the war. After many innocents had been killed and much destruction
added to the already devastated city of Beirut, peace was finally estab-
lished under Syrian control. As Lebanon’s new President Elias Sarkis
gradually took over control from the Syrians, South Lebanon with its
Litani waters eyed enviously as ever by Israel, remained a trouble spot.
The Israelis drew a fictional red line near the Litani River, 15 miles
from the Israeli border, seeking to prevent the return of Palestimans
south of this boundary. Toward this objective, they gained the immedi-
ate support of Phalangist-Christian forces. A new Israeli-Christian
Lebanese alliance, featured by well-publicized excursions of Lebanese
civilians across the borders into Israel for medical help and even for
jobs, as well as by a flow of arms and increased Israeli-Christian mili-
tary cooperation became hard fact. North of Beirut, Junieh functioned
as a separate Christian center and the military capital for the opposi-
tion of the Chamounist-Gemayel forces to the central government in
Beirut. President Sarkis struggled against the very real danger of parti-
tion.
In the face of Lebanon’s near dismemberment and growing Israeli
involvement, Washington pursued a ‘“‘do-nothing”’ policy, particularly
The Ford Interlude 649
after the assassination of U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Francis Melloy,
who had been trying to mediate between Christian and Muslim forces.
The Palestinian debacle certainly was not displeasing to the Secretary
of State, as it relieved the U.S. of much of the immediate pressure to
recognize the PLO. But Assad’s preoccupation with the Lebanese war,
and then his victory, did not encourage the Secretary to push forward
with the next scheduled step, which was to have involved a withdrawal
from the Golan Heights. This had been contemplated in the terms of
the secret Kissinger-Sadat memorandum, part of the quid pro quo for
the second Israel-Egypuan disengagement.
On Kissinger’s last visit to Damascus en route home from Alex-
andria in August after the second Sinai agreement, he had faced
Assad’s accusation of dividing “the Arab nation” and rejection of any
“cosmetic,” minuscule Israeli withdrawal on the Golan Heights. Cut
off from Egypt, the Syrian leader moved to forge a new alliance with
King Hussein, once a bitter rival.
Sadat would have welcomed further accords to strengthen and
speed implementation of the $700 million promised to him by Kiss-
inger, which his economy desperately needed. As a dramatic step to
emphasize Egypt’s strategic divorce from the Soviet Union, which had
begun with the expulsion of Soviet technicians in the summer of 1972,
and as an appeal both to his Saudi bankers and potential U.S. inves-
tors, Sadat convened the Peoples Assembly on March 14 and unilater-
ally abrogated Egypt’s 1971 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
with the Soviet Union. With the end of what was to have been a
fifteen-year arrangement, Egyptian ports were closed to vessels of the
Soviet navy.
If Sadat’s move was calculated to bring about renewed U.S. efforts
to push Israel into further withdrawals, the timing was absolutely
wrong. No U.S. gestures toward Egypt could be expected as the 1976
presidential campaign took over and, as usual, superseded everything
else—even U.N. action.
As a replacement for the militantly pro-Israel Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, whose hysterical rhetoric spawned hatred of the Arab and
Third Worlds, William Scranton was making many friends in diplo-
matic circles that had been under blistering, insulting attacks from his
predecessor. In his first remarks before the U.N. Security Council,
Ambassador Scranton strongly criticized the Israeli government for its
Policy of establishing settlements in the occupied territories as a con-
travention of U.N. resolutions and the Geneva Convention. But having
issued this verbal rebuke, the U.S. representative—under instructions
650 POLITICS OR POLICY
from Washington—then vetoed the mildest kind of a resolution, which
had watered down a proposed strong censure by merely ‘“‘deploring”’
Zionist actions. Later in May when outraged Arab, African, and Asian
nations, joined by a few courageous Western countries, sought to halt
ruthless Israeli military actions in the occupied territories, Scranton,
again upon clear instructions from his Chief in the White House,
refused to approve any resolution that might offend Israel and, more
importantly, that country’s supporters in the U.S. Even the wording of
a statement to be issued by the Security Council chairman merely as
representing a ‘‘consensus’’ of the members, as distinct from a vote,
became came a matter of many days of futile negotiations over verbi-
age between the overwhelming Council majority and Ambassador
Scranton. The U.S. representative disassociated himself from the
“consensus” statement, read by French Security Council President
Louis de Guiringuad—by then a meaningless expression of nothing-
ness—but nevertheless bitterly attacked by Israeli Ambassador Chaim
Herzog. The Washington Post headline the next day read: “Israel At-
tacks U.S. Stand on Settlements.’ While the Israeli representative
insisted he had not meant to include the U.S. in his scathing censure,
Herzog had pointedly rebuffed the U.S. opposition to Israeli settle-
ments in saying:
Any attempt to point the finger at Israel’s actions and to characterize them as
obstacles to peace is nothing but a cynical falsification of history. ... We reject
it out of hand.?4
This was as direct an attack as possible on the U.S. position expressed
at the U.N. in the two lengthy Council debates on settlements.
Why was the U.S. thinking one way but voting another at the U.N.?
It was because Governor Ronald Reagan had won startling primary
victories in Texas, Nebraska, and Indiana as well as expected wins in
the South, and was threatening to go to the Republican Convention
in Kansas City with more pledged votes than the President. The Jewish
vote in June primaries could perhaps swing the balance. Ford could
not afford to antagonize the Jewish bloc through even the mildest
censure of Israel at the U.N. Republican fund-raiser Max Fisher had
been unsuccessful both in making these same “‘Jewish fat-cats,”” who
had poured contributions into the Nixon coffers, donate to the Ford
campaign or in arousing enthusiasm among Jewish voters for the Presi-
dent. Nixon, who boasted he had given more military and economic
aid to Israel than his three predecessors together, allegedly received
35 percent of the Jewish vote four years previously—the highest ever
The Ford Interlude 651
to be won by a Republican candidate. Ford needed those same votes
on his side in the primaries, let alone in the general election. Speaking
on the West Coast in Oregon two days before the important primary
there, the President claimed credit for establishing ‘‘friendly relations
with moderate Arab states,’”’ but noted emphatically that the U.S. was
pledged as ever ‘“‘to maintain the security and survival of Israel.”
On the Democratic side, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter,
with his infectious smile and clarion call for an American moral revival,
seemed to have appealed to the American psyche as he won successive
primaries in the North, South, and Midwest. Out of the nearly dozen
serious candidates who had initially bid for the nomination of the
Democratic party, by mid-May only four serious Carter rivals re-
mained: Senators Henry Jackson and Frank Church, Congressman
Morris Udall, and California’s Governor Jerry Brown.
The Middle East conflict had been only scantily raised in the
primaries during the first four months. In interviews and speeches,
Carter made no mistake about his deep-seated religious convictions
and his fervent Baptist fundamentalism. In his most important Middle
East pronouncement, he attacked U.N. resolutions in behalf of the
“terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization.” He flatly stated that “‘a
Palestinian state should not be recognized by Israel until the Palestini-
ans afhrmed Israel’s right to exist in peace.” Israel’s sovereignty and
security was primary to candidate Carter, but he did at least declare
himself in favor of the ‘‘recognition of Palestine as a people, as a nation
with a place to live and a right to choose their own leaders.”
Carter, like every other politician, was surrounded in his campaign
by important Jews: Campaign Treasurer R. J. Lipchutz, Advertising
Chief Gerald Rafshoon, and Internal Issues Coordinator Stuart Eizen-
stat. When speechwriter Robert Shrum was fired, he was widely quoted
in the Jewish Press, largest Jewish weekly in the U.S. (once edited by
Jewish Defense Leaguer Meir Kahane) and an organ of the right-wing
Likud movements in which Menachem Begin’s weekly column ap-
peared, accusing Carter of saying: ““We have to be cautious. We don’t
want to offend anybody. . . . I don’t want any more statements on the
Middle East or Lebanon. [Senator Henry M.] Jackson has all the Jews
anyway. It doesn’t matter how far I go. I won’t get four percent of the
Jewish vote anyway, so forget it. We'll get the Christians.”’ Eizenstat,
a leader of Atlanta’s Jewish community, lest these alleged remarks be
construed as ‘‘anti-Semitic,” instantaneously declared them to be a
total “fabrication.” The Carter media spokesman declared the state-
ment regarding the Jewish votes was “totally ridiculous and contradic-
652 POLITICS OR POLICY
tory to the concern Carter has felt and expressed.”
When the Carter bandwagon began to falter with losses in Ne-
braska to ambitious, anti-big-business Senator Frank Church, and in
Maryland to young, attractive Governor Jerry Brown, the move to draft
Senator Hubert Humphrey as a candidate was seriously revived. The
former Vice President and Democratic candidate in 1968 had an-
nounced he would not enter the primary elections and would not be
an active aspirant. But he indicated he would be available if the dele-
gates at the Convention were to honestly draft him. Humphrey’s out-
right pro-Zionist record was unquestioned. There was a great possibil-
ity that a deadlocked convention, with Carter unable to win a majority
on the first ballot, might turn to a Humphrey-Kennedy ticket, which
would be far more pleasing to the political party professionals, who
disliked Carter.
The threat to the Georgian from this competition was used by the
Zionists to press the Democratic front runner for further commitments
to Israel. Confidential reports carried this—the Jewish press boasted
of it. It has always been axiomatic that the closer the November Elec-
tion Day approached, the more the Middle East issue is pushed to the
forefront and the blackmail intensifies.
When Brown carried his fight to Ohio and New Jersey, states with
large Jewish populaces, he declared ‘“‘the capital of Israel is not Tel
Aviv, but in Jerusalem, and that is where our embassy ought to be.”
The Carter Committee for President countered with a full-page adver-
tisement in the New York Daily News, the tabloid paper with the largest
circulation in the U.S., also enjoying a very large number of readers
in neighboring and suburban New Jersey. Here he was addressing
himself to the working man and the nonintellectual community, and
he talked to them in their language when he stated on June 3:
As long as I am President, the American people will never sacrifice the security
or survival of Israel for barrels of oil. A lasting peace must be based on the
absolute assurance of Israel’s survival and security. I would never yield on that
point, and it is very important for us to make this clear to the rest of the world.
This country was the first to recognize Israel’s existence as a country, and we
must remain the first country to which Israel can turn with assurance.
Ignored in the ad were the Palestinians to whom he had referred
ten days earlier in an interview with US News and World Report: ‘‘The
legitimate interests of the Palestinians have to be recognized. But I
would not favor recognition of the PLO or other government entities
representing the Palestinians until they have convinced me that they
The Ford Interlude 653
recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace.”
Then this energetic candidate spoke to 2,000 people at the Jewish
Educational Institute in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and expanded still fur-
ther on his pro-Israel views, two days before the primary elections in
that state. Wearing a yarmulke, the small headcap worn by Jews in
orthodox houses of worship, Jimmy—as he insisted on being called—
expressed “unswerving”’ support for Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish
national state. This was his principal response to the disquiet ex-
pressed by some American Jews who were fearful about the prospects
of a “born again” Southern Baptist in the White House, when that
church was alleged to have had a long history of ‘‘anti-Catholicism,
anti-Semitism,” and other bigotry. Just as the late John F. Kennedy had
reassured churchmen in Dallas in 1960 about the prospect of a Roman
Catholic President, so Carter had to quell the disquiet of Jews about
a Baptist President. And as so many other Christians before him,
Carter tried to allay fears of anti-Semitism through the most forthright
protestations of support of Israel. ““The survival of Israel,” he stated,
“is not a political issue. It is a moral imperative, and I would never
yield on that point.”
Carter used his total support of Israel as the weapon to calm
“doubting Thomases” and to further clinch Jewish support. Jimmy
noted that when the U.S. granted immediate recognition to Israel in
1948, the President had been Harry Truman, a Baptist and a Demo-
crat. His listeners were not unmindful of the fact that Baptist dogma,
with its fundamentalist literal approach to biblical prophecy, supports
the return of the Jews to Palestine.
A summary of this address to a Jewish audience was carried far and
near by the syndicated New York Times Service and the major televi-
sion and radio stations. With victory at the convention in sight, Carter
was looking forward to the general elections in November and to
cutting the Jewish votes for the Republican party back to normalcy
from the high that Nixon had won in 1972. A highly publicized meeting
was arranged for the Georgian candidate by Washington attorney
Lester S. Hyman with Israel’s former Prime Minister Golda Meir at her
suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York City, where she was staying
before going to Wellesley College for an honorary degree (they had
met during a 1973 trip to Israel). Jimmy described his position on
Israel as ‘‘unshakable”’ and denied that the meeting had been designed
to gain Jewish votes, although he pointed out that his chief Democratic
rival, Senator Jackson, had had more opportunities to make his viru-
lent pro-Israel position better known.
654 POLITICS OR POLICY
This blatant bid for the Jewish vote came at a time when Ford was
in deep trouble due to his inability to find some solution to the critical
Lebanese situation and to the very serious challenge of Governor
Reagan, who was closing in on the President. Decisions that had to be
made regarding the Middle East could only lose delegate votes for
Ford at the August convention and gain them for Reagan, who was
plunking for all-out support of Israel.
The question of additional aid for Israel in the transitional quarter
period under the new fiscal-year arrangement was a source of embar-
rassment to Ford. Israeli proponents demanded $550 million addi-
tional to the $2.35 billion already voted the Zionist state for military
and economic aid. The President contended that Israel, already as-
sured of just over 50 percent of the total allocated to the entire world,
did not need this large an increment.?5 But the Zionists, using the
elections as a leverage, brought forward a new team of former Defense
Secretary Schlesinger and Senator Humphrey to charge the Adminis-
tration with going back on its promises to Israel and to force the
inclusion of an additional $350 million.
To help recoup Ford’s political losses, Governor Scranton?¢ exer-
cised the third U.S. veto on a Security Council resolution calling for
implementation of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people
through the withdrawal of Israelis from occupied Arab territories and
the return, in two phases, of Palestinians to their lands under their
sovereignty. This occurred as the Democrats were on the verge of
nominating their strongest candidate.
Jimmy Carter, former Governor and peanut king from rural
Plains, Georgia (pop. 683), accomplished the politically impossible by
capturing the Democratic nomination for President at the New York
convention by virtual acclamation over the earlier strong opposition
of the political professionals and elected public officials in his party.
The political miracle of the fifty-one-year-old Georgian ranked as a
greater accomplishment than the 1940 coup of another outsider, Re-
publican Wendell Willkie. Jimmy’s energy, which enabled him to sur-
vive thirty primary elections and twenty state conventions, hundreds
of motel rooms, thousands of bolted meals, tens of thousands of hand-
shakes, and hundreds of thousands of air miles, spelled success for the
tireless, enterprising Georgian. Nineteen months of twenty-hour days
paid off.
Carter appeared to be the right man in the right place at the right
time. The only suspense at the convention revolved around the ques-
tion of the Vice Presidential candidate. Minnesota Senator Walter Fritz
The Ford Interlude 655
Mondale was chosen by the Georgian nominee from an original field
of seven. The balance that swung the scales in favor of Senator Mon-
dale, a Protestant, over Maine’s better known Senator Muskie, who
would have brought wide Catholic support to the ticket, was his long-
time preeminent role in support of Israel and Zionism. When Israel
had problems about foreign aid in the past, the Minnesota Senator, a
protégé of fiery pro-Zionist Hubert Humphrey, had helped bail the
Zionists out. And in his acceptance speech to the New York City Con-
vention, the Vice Presidential candidate won a loud burst of applause
when he referred to Israel’s Entebbe Airport rescue: “Israel, always
the bulwark of liberty, has set an historic example for freedom-loving
peoples around the world by its bold and brave mission to Uganda.”
Fulsome praise of Israel continued to resound from both Republi-
can and Democratic electioneering platforms. The President, still
seeking needed votes to win the Republican nomination, sent an un-
precedented public message of congratulations to Premier Yitzhak
Rabin for the dramatic Entebbe rescue. The insane hijacking by the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine proved a godsend to the
heretofore very hard-pressed Zionists in Israel and in the U.S., whose
fears of an immediate U.S. rapprochement with the Palestinians were
now diminished and whose pride was bursting again as before the 1973
military upset.
The Democrats indicated at their convention their determination
to win back that large share of the Jewish vote, the 85 percent they
normally had captured until the Nixon landslide of 1972. The pressure
was mounting on Carter, originally indifferent to the Zionist cause.?7
In his last interview on foreign affairs just prior to the convention,
Carter had indicated that if elected he planned ‘‘to continue economic
and military aid to Israel indefinitely’ —President Ford was only mak-
ing an annual $2.5 billion commitment for three years—although he
would make ‘“‘an annual judgment on the exact amount of aid that was
absolutely necessary.”
The chief academician for Carter on foreign affairs was Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Director of Columbia University’s Research Institute on
International Change. A few months before the convention, Brzezinski
wrote this Middle East appraisal, somewhat reminiscent of Henry Kiss-
Inger:
America has in the Middle East a combination of moral, political and economic
interests—the most important one is the moral one which entails our commit-
ment to Israel and its survival. We were instrumental in the creation of Israel,
656 POLITICS OR POLICY
and therefore we have to be instrumental in its preservation. Our political
interests are to make certain that the area is not controlled by forces hostile
to us and that includes quite clearly the Soviet Union. Our economic interest
is obviously the one pertaining to oil, which not only bears on our own
stability, but very directly on the security and stability of our principal allies,
West Europe and Japan.
The United States perhaps can continue to support both sides in the
Middle East provided this support is designed to promote a settlement in the
not too distant future. I do not believe that we can continue to do this in the
context either of a stalemate or the absence of a settlement, neither of which,
in my judgment can endure. If they do not endure, conflict again will resume,
and in that context, it would be impossible for the United States to support
both sides at the same time.28
In passing the Columbia academician mentioned that ‘‘some opportu-
nity must be provided for the Palestinians to resolve their fate.”
As Ford and Reagan continued to tear one another apart in the
quest for the 1,130 delegate votes needed to win the nomination at
Kansas City, giving every indication that the intraparty struggle would
leave a Republican party beset by strife and bitterness, Carter used the
five weeks before his opponent was chosen to get off to a big head start.
And the Zionist lobby used this leverage to exert heightened pressure
in all directions.
Not since 1884 had a presidential incumbent been so close to
being repudiated by his party as Gerald Ford was at the hands of
Reagan. That year Republican President Chester A. Arthur, who
like Ford had not been elected President but had succeeded to the
Presidency, was turned down by his party. The challenge posed to
Ford came from the more aggressive, more outspoken, and more
conservative one-time film actor, Ronald Reagan, who with his
lovely wife had crisscrossed the country, effectively campaigning for
nine months and rallying right-wing and some Zionist forces be-
hind him. The outcome was in doubt when the convention opened
on August 15.
Where the New York City convention that chose Carter had been
a love feast, the Republican gathering in Kansas City seemed more like
a council of war as charges and claims emanated from both Kansas City
camps. Charges of bribery and a bitter fight over a proposed change
in convention rules added to the acrimony.
On the third night of the convention, Ford beat back the challenge
of the Reagan forces and won the nomination. The prestige of the
White House carried the day. And then as at their rivals’ earlier con-_
The Ford Interlude 657
clave, the suspense centered on the choice of a vice presidential candi-
date.
Favorite Tennessee Senator Howard Baker had eliminated him-
self when he revealed in a frank television interview that his wife once
had a drinking problem. In the aftermath of Watergate, ‘Mr. Clean”
was a necessary prerequisite for all candidates. In an attempt to bind
the party’s wounds, Reagan was consulted—if not offered the vice-
presidential nomination—and agreed to the selection of Kansas Sena-
tor Robert Dole. A former Chairman of the Republican National Com-
mittee, the choice of Dole was as warmly received by the Zionists as
that of his senatorial colleague, Fritz Mondale. If “Who Dole?” echoed
across the country as ““Who Carter?” had a year earlier, this was not
so in Israelist circles. Dole had been almost as strong an advocate of
Israel in the Senate as Gerald Ford had been when he served in the
House. One of the Senator’s closest friends and intimate advisers was
a Jewish businessman who enjoyed high-ranking contacts with the
Israeli government and continued even after the campaign to keep the
Kansas legislator most active in Zionist propaganda activity.
The Senator himself enjoyed a very close relationship with Pre-
mier Rabin when the latter served as Israeli Ambassador in Washing-
ton. Rabin went to Kansas City to speak at a dinner during the Dole
1974 campaign when he was encountering difficulties in his reelection
bid. Such important connections made the Kansan a “strong asset”’ to
the ticket in the eyes of the President and his political managers.
In their pursuit of the critical and pivotal Jewish vote, the Re-
publican platform declared that ‘the commitment to Israel is fun-
damental and enduring. We have honored and will continue to
honor that commitment in every way—politically, economically, and
by providing the military aid that Israel requires to remain strong
enough to deter any potential aggression.” The party platform also
emphasized that “40 percent of all U.S. aid that Israel has received
since its creation in 1948 has come in the last two fiscal years, as a
result of Republican initiatives. Our policy must remain one of de-
Cisive support for the security and integrity of Israel.’ Elsewhere,
the Republican policy statement praised Israel for the “daring res-
cue of innocent civilian hostages.”
Judging by the remainder of this plank, in which the word Arab
did not appear once (Israel was specifically mentioned eight times), the
Republican party seemed to be concerned only with ‘“‘that peace in the
Middle East” that could bring “recognition of safe, secure, and defen-
sible borders for Israel.” This Republican 1976 platform probably
658 POLITICS OR POLICY
contained the most ardent pro-Israel declarations ever adopted by the
GOP.
While the Reagan forces were outspokenly critical of the Kissinger
failure to end the war in Lebanon, nothing on this subject appeared
in the platform. The tragedy of Lebanon, of course, only strengthened
the Zionist position in the U.S. as PLO prestige plummeted and gen-
eral repugnance toward the Arabs grew in the face of the unbelievable
atrocities committed by both sides in the civil war.
While emphasis in the presidential campaign that followed the
conventions was early placed on the economic state of the nation—
both inflation and unemployment—the Middle East came in for its
share of discussion, although no substantial differences separated the
candidates or their parties regarding all-out support for Israel. But
both Democratic nominee for the Senate in New York Daniel P. Moyni-
han in his race against incumbent James Buckley, and the head of his
ticket, Jimmy Carter, took advantage of the administration’s initial
opposition to the strong anti-Arab boycott legislation pending in the
Congress. The Democrats leveled charges that the Department of
Commerce had been playing ball with the Arabs by advising American
businessmen not to comply with the requirement that they file all
information about Arab boycott demands. The “‘Israel-First’”’ bloc,
headed by Senators Ribicoff and Case and New York Congressmen
Rosenthal and Bingham, led the fight for the enactment of legislation
that would have made compliance with the Arab boycott impossible.
The Ford administration had let it be known that it did not favor
legislation that might cripple U.S.-Arab business dealings, thus adding
to the mounting U.S. balance-of-trade deficit. The President was trying
to reconcile his desire for Jewish votes and the necessity of building
friendlier relations with the oil-producing Arab countries, particularly
Saudi Arabia, whose Foreign Minister, Prince Saud bin Faisal, already
upset over congressional opposition to the sale of Maverick missiles to
Saudi Arabia, had sternly warned against Washington challenging the
economic boycott of Israel.
As Ford, according to the public opinion polls, gradually cut into
the Carter lead, the critical “Jewish vote”’ increasingly emerged as the
decisive factor. It was obvious that in a close election those extra
Jewish votes, which Nixon had not needed, could put Ford over in
California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Jewish vote-
getter and fund-raiser Fisher pursued a new strategy of gaining en-
dorsements of Ford from nationally prominent Jewish personalities to
carry the day with Jewish laymen. Among those whom he had brought
The Ford Interlude 659
into camp was former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Organizations Rabbi Israel Miller. And, of course, the
principal consideration extended to these Jewish leaders were assur-
ances of continued total support for Israel.
This was taking place even as Arab forces became bogged down
once again in the mire of internecine rivalries. Israel’s triumph at
Entebbe, the brutality of the Lebanese conflict, and then the spectacle
of the hanging of the Palestinian guerrillas in Damascus heightened
pro-Israel public opinion, making it easier for the Zionist lobby to
continue its blackmail of both major political parties.
The Democratic party remained the favorite of the Jewish-Zionist
lobby. It was not that Nixon and Ford did little, but that Jews usually
voted the Democratic line and Democrats were believed to be more
reliable friends of Israel. If pro-Israel Jewish voters turned from the
Democrats on Election Day, it would be only because of a mistrust of
Carter and his economic fuzziness.
But the Israeli government, playing both sides, did not turn its
back on the Ford candidacy. Rabin and the President were old friends,
and no objections were voiced to the widespread use of Republican
advertisements showing the two together and quoting the Israeli
Prime Minister's words in August to the Rabbinical Council of Amer-
ica:
The U.S. government supports Israel in the international arena, in the supply
of arms and in economic aid and almost with no precedence. The margin
between what we want and what we get is very small.
The Middle East did not figure in the first of the three historic
presidential television debates, featured by unplanned drama of a
twenty-eight-minute mechanical breakdown in communications be-
tween the Old Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia and a national audience
estimated at 100 million viewers. But three weeks later from San Fran-
cisco Ford and Carter crossed swords on foreign policy and defense
issues. The Republican and Democratic candidates made little effort
to conceal their principal objective. The word “Israel” was mentioned
no less than thirteen times—allies Britain and France and hot spots
Cyprus, Angola, Greece, and Turkey not once—and this did not in-
clude references to Prime Minister Rabin and to Jews. Each aspirant
tned to outdo the other with claims of what he had done in the past
and what he would do in the future for the State of Israel. The Presi-
dent and the former Governor shamelessly comported themselves as
if they were candidates for the Presidency of the tiny Middle East state
660 POLITICS OR POLICY
rather than of the U.S. And in the course of their sordid, competitive
calls for unconditional support of Israel, the American national inter-
est was totally, abysmally neglected.
Carter won that debate because he had the President on the defen-
sive. In their differences over an approach to the Arab boycott, the
President lacked the courage to explain forcefully to his audience the
absolute imperativeness to the American economy of maintaining a
semblance of an evenhandedness so as not to alienate totally the Arab
world with its oil and wealth, so vital to U.S. energy supplies and to
our critical balance-of-payments shortage. (By the first part of 1977
there was over $14 billion of Arab money in U.S. banks.)
The Arab boycott issue had already been reprehensibly be-
clouded, with the help of the media and notably the New York Times,
by the injection of the charge of religious bigotry into what was totally
a question of economic warfare. As an answer to the Carter allegations
that the White House had yielded to Arab pressures, was permitting
the boycott of American business companies for trading with Israel,
and had encouraged the Secretary of Commerce not to reveal the
names of American companies who had been subjected to the boycott,
Ford noted that his administration had sold the Israelis over $4 billion
in military hardware and “was dedicated to the survival and security
of that country.” The President also pointed out that he had already
signed an amendment to the 1976 tax bill that penalized companies for
cooperating with the Arab boycott.
The Ford statement in the debate that the people of Eastern
Europe were not under the iron hand of the Soviet Union aroused
angry outcries from Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, and other Eastern
European ethnic groups in the U.S. This biggest boo-boo of the cam-
paign was immediately seized upon by Carter as the President vainly
tried to explain away the words, which had slipped out, by pointing to
his own consistent anti-Communist record in behalf of the oppressed
people of that part of the world.
In an attempt to make up for important ground lost to Carter in
this debate, the Republican incumbent intensified his efforts to play up
to the Jewish bloc vote. The states in which offended Americans of
Eastern European ancestry were heavily concentrated were the very
same industrial states—New York, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and
New Jersey—in which Jewish voters were concentrated. For thirty
years, as Michigan congressman and Republican Minority Leader in
the House of Representatives, no one had excelled Ford in his pro-
Israel, anti-Arab zeal. And now by new deeds the President was being
The Ford Interlude 661
forced to show once more how pro-Zionist he was, if not anti-Arab.
As Steven Ford, the youngest of the President’s sons, was march-
ing up New York Fifth’s Avenue with other vote-seeking politicians in
the Columbus Day Parade, so dear to the American-Italian, Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin was announcing to his Cabinet that President
Ford had at last agreed to a long-standing Israeli request to lift the ban
on the sale of some sophisticated American military equipment and to
speed up the delivery of other hardware already approved.
This politically-inspired move by Ford was given additional prom-
inence because the President at that moment was receiving Israeli
Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, and television cameras brought into
American homes the picture of the beaming Israeli diplomat at the
White House as he welcomed the announcement regarding the new
military items, which included night-fighting electronic equipment and
cluster bombs capable of causing extensive fire and concussion dam-
age (this bomb contains fuel-air explosives and is most effective against
large groups of enemy forces, because it not only causes wide incendi-
ary damage but can create a temporary vacuum capable of suffocating
the enemy). The U.S. bestowal of these arms came at a time when
rebellious Arabs within Israel proper were already running up against
local police armed with American weapons, and Muslim villages in
South Lebanon were falling prey to Christian attackers supplied with
arms bearing Hebrew markings, all made possible through the U.S.
arms and dollars flowing to Israel.
Also on order to be sent to Israel were armed helicopter gun ships
equipped with antitank missiles, ultramodern radar equipment, new
models of the wire-guided antitank missiles, and M-160 heavy tanks,
of which the U.S. was still in short supply. Much of this military equip-
ment had not yet been made available to European U.S. allies.
The cost of the ordered military equipment was to be covered by
the large amount of aid approved for Israel by the Congress just before
the adjournment for the elections. Over the twenty-seven-month pe-
riod from July 1, 1975, to August 1, 1977, Israel had been authorized
to receive about $4.4 billion in assistance, of which nearly $3 billion
was for military credits, half of which would not have to be repaid. The
alleged excuse for U.S. arms shipments to Israel at this time, the Soviet
arming of Arab countries, was no longer valid, as Moscow military
Supplies to the area had drastically declined with Egypt-U.S.S.R. rela-
tions at almost the cold war stage. And the “splendid state” of the
Israeli military forces had only just been widely proclaimed in Jerusa-
lem by Defense Minister Shimon Peres.
662 POLITICS OR POLICY
In response to Carter taunts of letting Israel down, the President
quoted Prime Minister Rabin as saying that U.S.-Israel relations had
never been better. To further emphasize to his Jewish constituents the
presidential concern for Israel, Ford stated in the televised debate that —
the names of U.S. firms that had complied with the Arab boycott would
be immediately released by the Department of Commerce. This step
was intended to offset Zionist-Democratic criticism of the administra-
tion’s pressure to gain congressional approval of the delayed sale of
Maverick missiles to Saudi Arabia. And on the very next morning after
his promise. New York City and other radio stations across the country
incessantly droned forth the names of U.S. companies, released by the
Commerce Department, that had complied with the Arab boycott. The
New York Times?9 listing of the companies included the Jewish clothing
firm Kayser-Roth, indicating to the careful reader that the boycott was
not aimed at Jews gua Jews, but at all companies that aided Israel
economically. (Many Muslin firms were being boycotted by the Arabs.)
This Jewish firm apparently preferred to do business with the Arabs
and not assist Israel’s economy.
The front page of the New York Times (although obviously still
supporting Carter) carried a three-column photo of the President visit-
ing the Succoth booth in which religious Jews eat during their fall
holiday. Ford told his Jewish audience what it wanted to hear—that he
would visit Israel “in my next term when such a trip would contribute
most to peace’”—and he attacked terrorism, an obvious poke at the
Palestinians, who at that moment were faring exceedingly badly on all
sides. In a private meeting with a group of Jewish leaders, the Presi-
dent seemed to answer all their questions satisfactorily.
Despite these efforts, the American voters on November 2, for the
first time in 128 years, sent a son of the Deep South to Washington,
ousting from office the first presidential incumbent since Republican
Herbert Hoover was swept into retirement by the Great Depression in
1936. The demand of the American votes for change had overpowered
their fear of the unknown in one of the closest presidential elections
of the century. And it was the capture of three of the five largest
Electoral College states—New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—tha
carried the day for Jimmy Carter. Although Ford had run a courageous
race and had come up from far behind, he could not overcome th
many adverse factors that overwhelmed him. The weight of Watergate
the pardoning of President Nixon, and the foundering economy wer
all undoubtedly factors, as were the powerful last-minute combine
efforts of the labor unions and the Democratic party chieftains. Bul
The Ford Interlude 663
what was most decisive was the Jewish vote in New York City, Philadel-
phia, and Cleveland, which went 80 percent plus for the son of Georgia
and gave him the 93 big fat electoral votes to put him over the top.
In all parts of New York City, Carter ran well ahead of the Jewish
vote received in 1972 by Senator George McGovern. And in the State
of Ohio, Senator Robert Taft, although possessing one of the most
revered American political names, went down to defeat to a staunch
Zionist Jew, Howard Metzenbaum, in another “I can do most for
Israel” contest. If a “beautiful new spirit,”’ to quote the words of the
President-elect, was being ushered in, it was the same old Zionist
concentration in the nation’s largest cities, and its traditional prefer-
ence for the Democratic party that had sealed the doom of Ford, in
spite of his degrading wooing of this bloc vote and a seeming reticence
of certain Jews to favor a Southern Baptist with an obscure economic
outlook.#°
The number of voters who turned out—just over eighty million—
was the largest in U.S. history, which surprised political observers
because of the alleged apathy of the electorate toward both candidates.
But the percentage of Americans either eligible to vote or registered
to vote was less than it had been in 1968 and 1972. This and the very
narrow Carter margin, particularly in the Electoral College count,
indicated that the new President had received no mandate from the
American people. And the most difficult decisions, which now had to
be faced in Middle East policy, spelled real trouble ahead for the
incoming Chief Executive.
XXI _—_- Exit Henry Kissinger?
Words are given to men to conceal their thoughts and not to
express them.
—Talleyrand
The election of Jimmy Carter not only ended the interregnum of
Gerald Ford but, of course, brought to a close the unparalleled spec-
tacular rule over U.S. foreign policy by Henry Kissinger. In what
turned out to be his valedictory, his principal 1976 campaign speech
to the Synagogue Council of America at its Fiftieth Anniversary Jubilee
Dinner, Kissinger unequivocally stated that the principal goal of the
U.S. in its Middle East foreign policy has been “the survival and secu-
rity of Israel.” To the delight of his listeners, he indulged in Zionist
phraseology, talking of the “needs of the Jewish people’ and the
devotion required in the “unending struggle.”
Invoking Eisenhower's ‘‘there is no alternative to peace’’—but
with no reference to Ike’s famed fiat against the imposition of condi-
tions for withdrawal by occupiers of conquered territory—he bestowed
fulsome praise on Israel: ‘‘No people yearn for comprehensive peace
more than the people of Israel, whose existence has not been recog-
nized by any of its neighbors throughout its history.”
While at no time a Zionist in the conventional sense of the word,
and never part of the Jewish Establishment, Kissinger had been i
close contact with its leaders and intellectual spokesmen through hi
Rockefeller, Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard connections.
There is little doubt that he was deeply affected by his experience i
Germany, where he grew up in the city of Firth.! Twelve of his rela
tives were killed by the Nazis, and he and his family fled in Augus
1938, just three months before Crystal Night of November 9-10 whe
so many Jews were arrested, if not killed, in raids throughout Germany:
664
Ext Henry Kissinger? 665
Although he declared that “political persecutions of my childhood
are not what control my life,” he rarely concealed his strong concern
for the Jewish state. As he told one close friend, “‘Look, anyone who
has been through what I have been through has some very special
feeling for the survival of the State of Israel.’’? Allegedly he sent a
check in 1971 to the Jewish National Fund in memory of his boyhood
chum, Kurt Fleischmann, who had died without going to Israel. A
grove of 300 trees on the Jordan hills near Jerusalem stands in memory
of his friend from Firth.
While Kissinger could be said to be staunchly anti-Communist
and very wary of Moscow’s intentions, he never shared Secretary of
State John Foster Dulles’ view that massive retaliation was the answer
to the Soviet threat. A student of nuclear development, Kissinger
believed in the deterrent strategy of limited nuclear warfare, at the
same time strongly advocating the broadest possible agreement with
Moscow for the limitation of nuclear weapons. Long before he took
over the Secretaryship, he placed a top priority on a successful culmi-
nation of the SALT negotiations. If the Big Two could delimit nuclear
weapons, then they could together bring, if not impose, peace on the
Middle East. It had long been his belief that Russia and the U.S. were
under obligation to ‘foster an accommodation between Israel and the
Arab states.’
Although he served as National Security Adviser to the President
from the outset of the Nixon administration, Kissinger’s personal
preoccupation with the Middle East did not begin until he had re-
placed William Rogers as Secretary of State in September 1973. At the
time he made the surprising move of joining the administration in
1969, he had never set foot in any Arab country, and had only been
to Israel twice.
The Kalbs, authors of his biography, maintained that the profes-
sor had kept out of the same personal involvement in this region that
marked U.S. relations with China, the Soviet Union, and Southeast
Asia at the expressed wish of the President, who preferred that he
“yield the Middle East to Rogers and Sisco.” His low profile in this
area was calculated, we are told, ‘‘to avoid becoming a target of Arab
extremist propaganda—the kind of venomous anti-Semitic propa-
ganda that Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and some Palestinian groups had
hurled at Arthur Goldberg and at Eugene and Walter Rostow.’”3
Kissinger was too good a student of history to have ever accepted
this myth of Arab anti-Semitism as a reason for abstaining from earlier
Personal attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The truth was that he
666 POLITICS OR POLICY
was overly preoccupied elsewhere, and just as he was to be wrong on
many of the military aspects of the October conflict—including his
miscalculation as to its approach—so he had been dead wrong in
underestimating the urgency of defusing the Middle East. If fear of
heightened Arab bigotry because he was a Jew had been holding him
back, Kissinger would hardly have ventured so deeply into the fray
after the October war, which saw a strengthened and newly rein-
vigorated Arab world. On the contrary, as the almost too-brilliant
student of history that he was, he knew and counted on the Arab with
his tolerance to lean over backwards and perhaps accord Kissinger, the
Jew, far more consideration than any Christian counterpart might pos-
sibly have been accorded.
A better reason, perhaps, for not becoming deeply involved in the
Middle East imbroglio until he was at the helm of the State Department
on the eve of the 1973 conflict, was that he did not see eye-to-eye wit
Secretary Rogers’ insistence on initial Israeli withdrawal from occu
pied Arab territories, with only “unsubstantial” border changes. Nor
did he thoroughly share the vague sentiment of the administration fo
the evenhandedness recommended by Governor Scranton.4
But even in the period of nonparticipation in Middle East policy-
making, Kissinger insisted that the U.S. had a “historical commitment’
to Israel and that the preservation of that country was in the America
national interest. He opposed any veering from fullest support o
Israel so long as the Soviet Union was deeply entrenched in Egypt. Th
pro-Israelism inherent in Kissinger thinking—which became U.S. pol
icy—stemmed less from any love of Israel and an advocacy of Zionis
than from his total insistence on a 20th-century recreation of th
19th-century concept of balance of power, under which Israel, as th
U.S. ward in the Middle East, must always be maintained at equal (i
not greater) strength than the Soviets’ Arab wards.
Kissinger patterned this thinking after that of Austria’s Mette
nich, Germany’s Bismarck, and England’s Castlereagh, under who
guidance Europe had enjoyed a period of relative tranquility and pea
from the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 to the beginning of Wor
War I. As set forth in his doctoral dissertation® at Harvard, his politic
philosophy was based on the successful balance of power his hero
managed to achieve:
A framework in which it was in no country’s interest to escalate a war to t
point of toppling the carefully balanced structure; a framework in which ea
of the major countries had a vested interest in stability. This ‘‘stability” w
Exit Henry Kissinger? = 667
as close as mankind could come to “peace.” It might not be ideal, but it offered
the best chance for survival.§
To attain this balance of power, Kissinger believed, as the Euro-
peans before him, that the end justified any and all means:
Statesmen must use cunning and patience. They must be able to manipulate
events and people. They must play the power game in total secrecy, uncon-
strained by parliaments which lack the temperament for diplomacy. And they
must also connive with the largest possible number of allies. They must not
shy away from duplicity, cynicism or unscrupulousness, all of which are accept-
able tools of statecraft. They must never burn their bridges behind them and,
if possible, they must always be charming, clever and visible.”
This was exactly the way in which Metternich and Bismarck played
the game, and a fair description of Kissinger’s methodology. Any anal-
ysis of the precise admixture of these attributes, which he employed
in his renowned diplomatic shuttling, would vary between admirer and
detractor, and whether it came from Anwar el-Sadat, Amin al-Hafez,
Golda Meir, or Yitzhak Rabin.
It was apparently Kissinger who must receive the credit for the
Nixon insistence, expounded in the 1968 and 1972 campaigns, that
Israel enjoy a military superiority, not a mere balance with the Arabs.
Under normal conditions, “if there were two opponents of roughly
equal strength,” the professor would say, ‘‘you want to bring about a
military balance; but a military balance is death for Israel because a war
of attrition means mathematically that Israel will be destroyed.”’® The
fear that the “‘eastern Mediterranean might become a Soviet lake”’
dominated Kissinger’s thinking; as he expressed it, ‘what they are
doing in the Middle East, whatever their intentions, pose the gravest
threats in the long run for Western Europe and Japan and, therefore,
for us.’’9
Although the former Harvard professor’s apocalyptic vision fas-
tened onto the lethal weapon of oil, he eschewed any course of action
that would really have liberated the Arabs from their intermittent
reliance on the Soviet Union. This would have been counterproductive
to his insistence on the strategy of building Israel into a “bastion of
American democracy in the Middle East,”’ endowed with military supe-
Nority. While very cognizant of the danger, as he expressed it, that
“the wealth and strategic value of the Middle East could be denied to
the West, which would shift the balance of power irrevocably in
Russia’s favor,” Kissinger’s sole formula for preventing such an even-
tuality was to rely on Israeli strength and on the hope that the Soviets
668 POLITICS OR POLICY
would be ‘“‘expelled” from the area.
In a June 26, 1970, briefing to news editors in San Clemente, the
Secretary of State-to-be let the cat out of the bag: “We are trying to
get a settlement in such a way that the moderate regimes are strength-
ened and not the radical regimes. . . . We are trying to expel the Soviet
military presence.!® (Italics added.) Ironically enough, the October
airlift to Israel was the very step that placed Arab oil reserves beyond
U.S. and Western reach and kept the Soviet military presence, with its
competitive arming of the Egyptians and Syrians, still prominently in
the area. And if the Kissinger outlook was based on the threat of the
Soviet Union and Communism to this most strategic of areas, it is
hardly understandable how a student of world affairs, such as he,
should have risked antagonizing the most obvious instrumentality to-
ward meeting this threat—the basic conservative anti-Communism of
most Arab Muslims stemming from the strong theism of Islam, which
was epitomized by the Saudi Arabian monarchy. Here again, it was a
case of wanting to eat as well as have the cake. If anti-Communist
support was dependent on standing up to the Israelist political ma-
chinery, that support wouldn’t be commandeered, as far as Kissinger
was concerned. Kissinger, as had the British in World War I, very much
preferred to rely on Zionist cooperation in the area rather than on
Arabs in carrying out his designs.
The Secretary of State regarded Israel as a vital part of ‘‘a large
strategic context” with the Soviet Union, but a special feeling towards
the Zionist state was nourished by the intermittent xenophobia of
some of Israel’s Arab enemies, which was readily equated to Commu-
nism and thus brought into play application of his obsessive balance
of power. His Israeli ties were also strengthened through a unique
relationship, going back to 1964, with his special friend, Israeli Ambas-
sador Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli Chief of Staff, who had ordered
the air assault against Egypt and Syria opening the 1967 war. Kissinger
often met Rabin off the record to discuss the Middle East crisis, but
kept his distance publicly.!!
Whenever Secretary Rogers started to exert a little pressure on
Rabin to make concessions in the ongoing Jarring negotiations, even
to the point of threatening to hold up the delivery of Phantom jets, it
was Kissinger, at Rabin’s urging, who interceded. He assured Rabin
that “plane deliveries would continue and State Department pressure
would stop.” It was Kissinger’s intercession that paved the way for
Meir’s second visit to the U.S. in November 1971, when the differences
among her, the President, and his Secretary of State were patched up.
|
Ext Henry Kissinger? 669
This led to the all-out support given to the Nixon candidacy in the
1972 elections by Ambassador Rabin (and his government), an un-
heard of intervention in U.S. politics on the part of a foreign diplomat.
In that campaign the Secretary appeared at meetings sponsored by
Max Fisher and Goldman Sachs’ Gustave Levy to raise big money from
Jewish sources, and he never attempted to hide from contributors his
strong pro-Israel feelings, even as he was negotiating with the Arabs
as a neutral mediator.
It was part of his Metternichian balancing to give the impression
of primary concern both for the Israelis and the Egyptians, concealing
from them his ambivalency. In 1973 he certainly had done everything
he could to prevent an outright Arab victory. Spurred by a message
from Prime Minister Meir the Saturday night of the second week of
fighting, personally delivered by Foreign Minister Abba Eban, that
Israel had only enough ammunition for about four days of continued
fighting, the Secretary had galvanized final U.S. action to meet the
deadline for the arms airlift, which turned Israeli defeat to near victory.
But his plan of strategy did not call for Israel winning a decisive
victory as it had in 1967. Kissinger ‘‘cajoled, pressured, urged, im-
plored, warned, threatened, and pleaded with Israeli envoy Dinitz to
understand his logic and accept his policy of a non-victory for Israel.1!2
Kissinger wanted a military stalemate. With Israel on the West Bank
and Egypt on the East Bank, each side would have leverage over the
other, which would advance his design for settlement. That is why he
insisted on sending in food and supplies, blocking Israeli intended
decimation of the Egyptian Third Corps, which, he felt, could not
bring peace and could only create new animosities, triggering still
another war. To Kissinger, a clear-cut Israeli victory through U.S. aid
would only mean further isolation of Israel and encourage a new wave
of anti-Americanism in the Middle East in which the oil embargo,
rather than being a tactical weapon, might emerge as a permanent
feature of Arab policy. He strove to use his rescue of the Third Corps
as a demonstration of new U.S. impartiality, which Sadat, at least of the
Arabs, accepted.
In the fall of 1975 U.S. foreign policy objectives conformed strictly
to the political needs of a nonelected President struggling to win mass
approval for a reelection in 1976. This required able trusted aide
Henry Kissinger to maintain, above all, the status quo and to prevent
any further war. Kissinger dangled new bait in front of the Arabs: ‘““The
Soviet Union can give you weapons, but only the U.S. can give you a
fair and just solution through which you may regain your lands.” It was
670 POLITICS OR POLICY
a very “hungry” and desperate Sadat who had latched onto Kissinger’s
word “expel” and peremptorily thrown out the Russians, putting all
his eggs into Kissinger’s basket. And to keep the eggs there, in his talks
in Riyadh with King Faisal and Prince Sultan, the Secretary stressed
forthcoming continued U.S. evenhandedness toward settling the con-
flict. The October war of 1973 presented the U.S. with new realities
that had to be faced: not only had the Arabs fielded a fighting force,
which had momentarily threatened Israeli military forces, but more
importantly they had developed the powerful weapon of oil, whose
strength inad been proven.
Kissinger’s preoccupation with the Middle East was now directed
toward neutralizing this political weapon and curbing the growing
power of OPEC, which had defeated Kissinger’s first efforts to rouse
the oil producers and world public opinion against it. The realistic
Secretary could not help recognize that the Arabs had come into their
own. As Ghassan Tuéni, editor of An Nahar, expressed it:
The October war represented one great Arab achievement. They showed that
they are not fossils. They are not doomed to ossify as the modern world passes
them by. October showed that the Arabs are a living nation. They can develop;
they can acquire the education and culture needed to handle modern technol-
ogy. They can forge the social coherence, the trust in one another that alone
enables men to go to war together and win. October showed that the Arabs
can face the challenge of modern times. It showed that, to their quantity, th
Arabs have begun to add quality.!%
Kissinger must have been aware of the dangerous anomaly im
plicit in his 1975 triumphal disengagement agreement. If Arab unit
was destroyed, as seemed to be one of the concomitants, if not objec
tives, of the second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement, the Arabs woul
lose their capacity to enforce progress toward peace. And for the U.S.
as it had been for the British in 1958, it would be another case 0!
“divide and lose.”” Those Arab countries, deprived of sharing in th
benefits from the new ‘evenhanded’ stance of the U-S., naturall
opposed Egypt’s unilateral approach to Israel. Sadat’s signing of th
disengagement agreement and his trip to the U.S. led to formation
a new anti-U.S. bloc made up of Syria, the PLO, and Libya, with Ira
standing in the wings only because of the long-standing differenc
between the Damascus and Baghdad branches of the Ba’ath part
(History almost exactly repeated itself two years later when Sadat we
to Jerusalem in November 1977, unilaterally extended legitimacy
the Israeli state, and convened the ensuing Cairo Conference.)
Exit Henry Kissinger? — 671
Splitting the Arab world may have seemed to serve Kissinger goals
of inching the protagonists through step-by-step negotiations toward
a final settlement. But with the neutralization of Egypt, Syria and other
Arab states turned to the Soviet Union, giving the Kremlin a new lease
on life in the Middle East. Instead of the Soviet Union being effectively
thrown out of the area, as Kissinger hoped, the more the U.S. strove
to divide the Arab world, the more the Soviet Union seemed to work
its way into these divisions, some of which fizzled on their own,!4
In the face of the continued arms escalation, Kissinger constantly
contended that U.S. arms shipments to Israel were necessary for main-
tenance of a military balance in the area, the alleged prerequisite for
peace. In this balancing act Kissinger had to overcome certain realities
by constantly creating new facts. The late Colonel William Eddy, first
American Minister to Saudi Arabia, used to tell of a Dutch innkeeper
who, when asked to explain the proportions of horse and rabbit in his
famed hassenpfeffer, answered: ‘‘Fifty-fifty, of course. One horse and
one rabbit.” The balancing of an Israel against even a disunited Arab
world certainly yielded a most unpalatable “‘stew”’ for the U.S., even
before oil became such an important factor and marked the diminution
in the qualitative differences between the two ‘‘halves”’ of the Middle
East. A balance between twenty-two Arab states, with a population of
150 million and covering in excess of five million square miles, and one
Israeli state of 3.3 million people with an area of less than 7,000 square
miles, has to be arbitrary, artifical, and capricious, and must necessarily
fail in its objective of bringing stability and peace to the area.
Sending Phantoms to the Israelis has only meant more Soviet
MIGs for the Arabs. Sending Lance and Pershing missiles could mean
only more SCUDs and other sophisticated Soviet missiles. Such a
balancing act has contributed to war, not brought peace. Shattering
Arab unity by treating certain Arabs as “‘good”’ Arabs and by any other
possible means became a necessity to the Kissinger endeavor. While
he told his Synagogue Council audience that “history teaches us that
balances based on constant tests of strength have always erupted into
war,”’ the Secretary himself was guilty of failing to take concrete action
to avoid these tests of strength, which instead of retarding only ag-
8ravated dangers of Big Power polarization.
During Kissinger’s first visit of November 1973 to Cairo, in a
Conversation with Mohamed Heikal, the Al-Ahram editor before he was
forced into retirement by Sadat,!5 Kissinger indicated the lengths to
Which he would go in pursuit of his “balance”: ‘Do not deceive your-
Self. The U.S. could not—either today or tomorrow—allow Soviet
672 POLITICS OR POLICY
arms to win a big victory, even if it was not decisive, against U.S. arms.
This has nothing to do with Israel or with you.”
In his balancing act, Kissinger blindly refused to recognize the
fundamental difference between those countries whose ties with the
Soviet Union stemmed from ideological compatability and the Arab
world, whose links to the Kremlin primarily stemmed from the apho-
rism ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’”—and, one might add, a
damn good friend. This accounted in part for the Secretary’s relentless
opposition to the Palestinian and PLO aspirations. By his incessant
pursuit of a fixed balance between the Superpowers, and by equating
Arab ties with the Soviet Union to Israel’s links with the U.S., Kissinger
subjected his country to the gravest and most unnecessary risks.
A step-by-step formula, calling for separate Egypuan, Jordanian,
and Syrian negotiations with Israel, was Kissinger’s means of circum-
venting the Arab 1974 Rabat Conference decision and U.N. resolu-
tions recognizing the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian
people and a necessary negotiating party at any reconvened Geneva
Conference. The veto power over U.S. recognition of the PLO, given
to Israel as part of the second disengagement agreement, constituted
another anti-Palestinian Kissinger move in behalf of Zionism.
If Richard Nixon was “Tricky Dick,” what should Henry Kissinger
be called? Despite denials to the contrary, there were secret commit-
ments given that glued together the disengagement decisions ham-
mered out in Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus; among the most impor-
tant was the promise to provide Israel with long-term military
assistance rather than the previous ad hoc annual grants of military aid.
And who could believe that the decision announced in Washington by
President Nixon shortly after his return from the Middle East, to write
off an additional $500 million in military aid debts to Israel, was not
part of the package deal that had led the reluctant Israeli Cabinet to
change its mind and accept disengagement with Syria’s Hafez Assad.
And no doubt the many economic goodies promised Egypt helped
bring Sadat around, including a $2 million White House helicopter,
which pro-Israel Senators vehemently protested ‘‘as a policy of pur-
chasing friendship with such a lavish and uncalled-for gift.”
From the outset, students of Middle East Affairs suspected that
Kissinger’s goal was to buy immediate time rather than grow long-term
peace-roots, and by any Metternichian means possible. The lengthy
Marilyn Berger account in the Washington Post'® of a Kissinger meeting
on December 6, 1973 with several Jewish intellectuals scarely pre-
sented the Secretary in a much better moral light than the Watergate
Exit Henry Kissinger? — 673
tapes revealed his chief. The leakage of notes about this lengthy ‘Pearl
Harbor Day” meeting projected an image of Kissinger as more of a
wheeler-dealer than a Nobel Prize winner.
The meeting had been arranged by lawyer Rita Hauser, who,
before she had been active in garnering Jewish support for Nixon’s
reelection in the 1972 presidential campaign, had not hesitated to
abuse her position as U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on
Human Rights by a blatant defense of the Israeli occupation at a
Zionist conclave in California and on educational television.!7 Those
in attendance were Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; Irving
Howe, editor of Dissent; Henry Rosovsky, Dean of the faculty of Arts
and Sciences at Harvard; and Harvard Professors Seymour M. Lipset
(now at Stanford), Michael Walzer, David Landes, and Kenneth Arrow.
All were pronounced and active Israelists. Lipset had authored the
January 1971 horrendous New York Times Sunday magazine piece that
endeavored by every means possible to place the label of anti-Semitism
on anything and everything opposed to Israel, Jews, or Zionism. Pro-
fessor Arrow was one of the Harvard economic Nobel Prize laureates
who warned Washington not to bow to Arab oil pressures. Irving
Howe, following the meeting, likewise made his contribution in New
York magazine in which he urged Jews to speak out against potential
pressures that Kissinger and Washington might bring to bear. He
concluded his piece with this warning:
A time may come when it will be necessary to turn to more dramatic and
militant methods, perhaps a march on Washington. A ume may come when
the traditional Jewish outcry of gevalt! provoking scorn and worse may be
necessary. Let us keep our voices in readiness, but meanwhile there is the work
of politics, pressure, persuasion. Silence is intolerable.'8
Lawyer Hauser ascribed the ‘‘nervousness” in the Jewish commu-
nity over Kissinger’s intentions as the reason for the meeting. Podho-
retz told Kissinger that some Israelis were wondering whether he was
a “Churchill disguised as a Chamberlain or a Chamberlain disguised
as a Churchill.}9
Kissinger emphasized that he had been instrumental in getting the
arms lift to Israel approved at a time when Israel was nearly out of
ammunition and when congressional support was visibly declining in
the face of the energy crisis. He also detailed how he had resisted
Soviet urgings to halt the war at an earlier stage, when Egypt’s surprise
attack was pushing the Israelis back on the eastern side of the Canal.
The Secretary, adding to his acknowledged accomplishments for Is-
674 POLITICS OR POLICY
rael, boasted that he had won an added ninety-six hours for the Israeli
army while he went to Moscow to discuss the terms for the October
cease-fire. He also claimed to have gained support of the provision for
direct negotiations between Israel and the Arab states, something Tel
Aviv had been seeking long before the six-day war.
In his earlier talks with Heikal in Cairo, Kissinger denied he had
been taking Israel’s side at any stage and insisted he had been only
helping the Egyptians:
All our exper‘s believed, if you restarted the war, you would be exposing
yourselves to a decisive attack by the Israeli armed forces. It was then that I
proposed a cease-fire and a return to the original lines. / believed this measure
would benefit you more than Israel. [Italics added. |
To the Jewish intellectuals, the former Harvard professor main-
tained that the Israelis could not have kept going without the U.S.
airlift, for which he was principally responsible, because they had run
out of ammunition. He reportedly told Heikal: “Even if the Israelis had
not had the arms we sent them, they would not have been in the
powerless situation you imagine. They had prepared their counter-
attack of the Suez Cana! before even receiving our aid.”
Kissinger frankly indicated why he felt that it had been necessary
for the Israelis to end the war and start negotiating. He was fearful that
congressional support of arms for Israel] might not be forthcoming
under similar circumstances again. He indicated that it was two-to-one
against his being able to pull off another such airlift.
Kissinger was reported to have used extremely harsh language
concerning the anxiety of European countries to placate the Arabs and
obtain oil. “Craven,” “contemptible,” “pernicious,” and “‘jackals’’?®
were words he used to describe their behavior. And the U.S. Secretary,
who shortly thereafter was embracing and holding hands with the
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, delighted his Harvard colleagues by
then labeling King Faisal a “religious fanatic, concerned mostly about
Jerusalem with little interest in the Sinai or the Palestinians.” Fearful
that Israel was to be ““Taiwanized” and sacrificed for the sake of dé-
tente, his listeners pressed the Secretary for details of his immediate
goals. Apparently he generally satisfied the concerns of the intellectu-
als, some of whom felt even more assured after his diplomatic efforts
yielded the disengagement agreements.
Kissinger certainly did not start out as a Jewish nationalist,?! but
like Herzl he had been very much of an assimilationist. His second wife
was Christian, as were many of his earlier female companions and close
19 66
Exit Henry Kissinger? 675
associates. But he was pressured by overwhelming Zionist, Jewish, and
then Israeli connections. And he particularly wished to be both re-
spected and loved, and to bask in the spotlight of international fame
as his “‘every whim and quip was chronicled by a worshipful press
corps.”?2 (Even on his ‘‘secretive” 1974 honeymoon the press was
flashed the news that Henry and Nancy were “hiding” in Acapulco.)
Kissinger sought, above all, not to cross the Jewish apparatus
publicly which would have crushed his aspiration to earn a unique
position in Jewish annals. Apparently his first visit to Israel had
changed the viewpoint he held as a college student that the creation
of a Jewish state “would be a potential and historic disaster.” He
became personally and professionally committed to help the state
survive. Kissinger believed that Israel’s best security was to get a firm
security commitment from the U.S. in return for the relinquishment of
the conquered territories, and from the Arabs full rights of peace,
commerce and interchange.
In wanting the credit for giving Israel recognized, secure, and
guaranteed boundaries as his greatest accomplishment, Kissinger as-
pired to follow in the footsteps of Moses Maimonides, Judah Halevi,
and other Jews who perennially had served under Muslim leaders,
bringing dignity and honor to Muslim-Arab-Jewish relationships dur-
ing the Golden Era of Judaism. This was a challenge the Jewish side
of Henry Kissinger could not resist.
Although ultraconservative Zionists assailed him and Begin’s
Likud railed at him when he initiated the disengagement agreements,
the overwhelming majority of Israelis and American Jews loved their
dynamic Henry. Not only was he their Jewish boy who had made good,
but they felt he had tried to get the Arabs to accept Israel on Israel’s
terms. The question remains whether or not in reciprocating this love,
Kissinger had betrayed his solemn pledge, given at the press confer-
ence following his swearing-in as Secretary of State, that he would
“conduct the foreign policy of the U.S. regardless of religious and
national heritage” and “in pursuit of the national interest.”
If Secretary Kissinger’s intellectual fiber was strong enough to
override emotional compulsions driving him toward the Israeli camp,
then it was indeed a gigantic misjudgment to have chosen Israel as the
pawn on the Middle East chessboard to checkmate ‘‘the Soviet’s”’
Arabs and their oil. Even after the inexorable burdens of the Water-
gate Affair were no longer directly hampering foreign policy im-
plementation and President Ford had given him fullest latitude in
foreign affairs, Israel continued to be the albatross around the U.S.
676 POLITICS OR POLICY
neck. And the Kissinger admixture of ‘“‘balance of power” with “but
Israel, too” invariably resulted in the sacrifice of American interests.
Ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union
were delayed or hampered in the hope that Moscow would first be-
come more conciliatory on the Middle East issue. The U.S.-U.S.S.R.
trade agreement was abrogated because the Kremlin refused to make
Kissinger-sought concessions regarding Jewish emigration. As fore-
most expert on Soviet affairs George F. Kennan pointed out in a May
7, 1978, interview with Marilyn Berger of the New York Times Magazine:
“The number of Jews coming abroad on the contrary has declined. I
don’t understand this policy on our part. I don’t think it is entirely
thought through.”
Every external economic and political relationship that the U.S.
maintained remained complicated by the unique relationship with the
State of Israel. The October war, the oil embargo, and the continuing
energy crisis had strained U.S. ties with France, Britain, and others of
U.S. European allies as well as Japan, who opted for an “Israel Sec-
ond” policy in seeking unilateral agreements to assure themselves of
adequate petroleum supplies. In what was a matter of life and death
for their industrial machines and civilian day-to-day living, there was
little hesitation in resisting all Kissinger efforts to promote a united
consumers’ front against the oil-producing countries.
The failure to consult U.S. allies prior to the airlift to Israel
and the all-out military alert on October 23 shattered NATO unity,
already impaired by the Kissinger policy toward the Cyprus crisis,
in which the U.S. managed to antagonize Greeks, Turks, and Cypri-
ots alike. And though he left office in a burst of glory, elsewhere
the Kissinger policy also proved to be a flop. On the subcontinent
the U.S.-Pakistan alliance had proved to be a most unfelicitous bal-
ancing attempt. What was earlier considered enough of a triumph
in Vietnam to earn him the Nobel Peace Prize turned out to be an-
other U.S. disaster.
In the Middle East the singular Kissinger accomplishment was
to avoid a major military conflict between the Arabs and Israel.
What little effort had been directed toward halting the Lebanese
civil war had always been tempered by an overriding regard for Is-
raeli interests in southern Lebanon. The U.S. continued to seek t
pacify rather than to solve problems, thus merely putting off a pos-
sible eviler day.
In addressing the luncheon he gave for Arab Ambassadors at th
U.N. on September 25, 1973, the Secretary said:
Exit Henry Kissinger? 677
We will show understanding, and we hope you for your part will do the same
. .. what is needed is to find ways to turn what is promptly acceptable to you
into a situation with which you can live.
These words were hardly fashioned to halt the drastic military
action Egypt and Syria launched eleven days later. While Kissinger had
declared that he was ‘‘prepared to work with all the parties toward a
solution of all issues yet remaining—including the issue of the future
of the Palestinians,’’?3 the invariable impediment to implementing the
welter of fine words was his concern for Israel (and his fear of the
Zionist connection). Only a desperate Sadat, who a month before the
first failure at a second disengagement was still holding meetings with
Andrei Gromyko, allowed himself to be ruled by the proffer of Kiss-
inger’s future good intentions.
Through disengagement II, Israel had not only killed the Rogers
plan to force her back to the 1967 lines but had “wrested from the
U.S.,” in the words of author Edward R. F. Sheehan,?4 ‘‘a moral,
monetary, and military cornucopia unattained by any other foreign
power.” Indeed, as a senior Israeli official told Time magazine: ““The
agreement delayed Geneva, assuring us arms, money, a coordinated
policy with Washington, and quiet in Sinai. .. . We gave up a little for
a lot."25
As he was waiting in late August for the Israeli government to
ratify the terms of the disengagement agreement, Kissinger spent his
last hours before leaving the Holy City on a visit to the Yad Vashem
Memorial. This paralleled the final waiting period spent in Jerusalem
the previous March, when his shuttling had failed and he had visited
Masada. While reporters and photographers were allegedly barred
from accompanying him to the Hall of Remembrance, where he laid
a wreath and lit the memorial flame, a Jerusalem Post story recited the
close examination by the Secretary of alleged anti-Semitic literature
printed in Arab countries (Kissinger reads neither Arabic nor Hebrew)
and study of new material on the holocaust. He asked to be sent copies
of leaflets and books printed by “Arab propagandists who claim the
killing of six million Jews never occurred.” Kissinger was said to have
told his guide that “‘something must be done to prevent the tragedy
of the holocaust from recurring.’’26
The boy from Fiirth could never forget his past. Down deep as a
Jew, he felt that he could not conduct a policy that could ever be said
to have led to any Israel setback or defeat. If he were ever forced to
that point, he had privately admitted that he would quit. In the wake
678 POLITICS OR POLICY
of his initial disengagement failure, Kissinger is said to have asked
several of his Jewish visitors, “How could I, as a Jew, do anything to
betray my people?’’?? This is why he rallied to Begin’s side, despite the
Israeli leader’s previous antagonism toward him. Kissinger spent 70
minutes giving the Prime Minister tactical advice at the Waldorf prior
to the Begin critical March (1978) meeting with Carter, which followed
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. And the former Secretary of State con-
tinued to warn, ‘“‘A separate Arab state on the West Bank, whatever its
declarations, whatever its intentions, must have an objective that can-
not have compatability with the tranquility of the Middle East.”?8
During his first audience with King Faisal in Riyadh, Kissinger was
said to have pronounced words to this effect: “I arranged détente with
Russia. I opened the door to China. I brought peace to the Middle
East. I hate failure. I have not failed. I shall not fail.”’?9
Three years later, Anwar el-Sadat endeavored to go it alone, and
prove, with the blessings of the new Carter Administration, that his
mentor, Henry, had made no empty boast.3°
XXII Enter Carter—and Then Begin
Richard sometimes reminds me of an unhappy gentleman who
comes to the shore of a January sea, heroically strips to swim, and
then seems powerless to advance or retire, either to take the shock
of the water or to immerse himself again in his warm clothes, and
so stands cursing the sea, the air, the season, anything except
himself, as blue as a plucked goose.
—Christopher Fry, The Dark Is Light Enough
The Zionist lobby in Washington could not have been more pleased
with the results of the November 1976 elections. Once again in power
was the Democratic party, which had always been so closely attached
to Israel and its U.S. apparatus. The Democrats had increased their
hold over the lower house in the new Congress and broke even in the
upper house, where the “‘Israel-First’”” bloc was greatly strengthened
by the new presence of Ohio’s Senator Howard M. Metzenbaym and
New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The latter had assiduously used
his U.N. post as a platform to gain his political goal, after having
declared that he should be considered immoral if he ever did this. This
bombastic politician had given every indication that he would outshine
even his senior New York colleague, Jacob Javits, in devotion to the
Zionist cause. Along with Metzenbaum and the presiding officer of the
Senate, Vice President Mondale, there was now a new, potent Israelist
MMM in the Congress, and the number of Jews in the Senate had
increased to five! and in the lower house there were now twenty-two.
The new occupant in the White House had of recent years been
cultivating close ties with many Israeli and Zionist leaders. While Presi-
dent Ford expressed some small concern during the campaign about
U.S. relations with the Arab world (which he increasingly shed as
Election Day drew closer), Carter had never varied his 1,000 percent
679
680 POLITICS OR POLICY
pro-Israel stand. He took a much harder position on the Soviet Jewry
issue, and he pledged enactment of the Bingham-Rosenthal-Stevenson
anti-Arab boycott legislation early in his administration. During his
drive for the White House, Carter was surrounded by important Jews,
including his campaign treasurer, advertising chief, and internal issues
coordinator. And Edward Sanders, president of AIPAC (the Israeli
lobby), who had so fiercely assailed the president of SOCAL in 1973,?
had resigned his post to become Deputy National Campaign Chair-
man.
In line with his major June 6 Middle East campaign speech before
the Jewish Educational Institute in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Presi-
dent was expected to move away from the step-by-step diplomacy
practiced by Kissinger toward an overall settlement to be sealed at
Geneva. In that speech, Jimmy listed concessions to be required of the
Arabs in any peace settlement: recognition of and diplomatic relations
with Israel, a peace treaty, end of the embargo, end of official hostile
propaganda, open borders, economic interdependence between the
West Bank and Israel, and demilitarization of the West Bank—in short,
all steps required to make clear that the war was really ended once and
for all.
The speech was allegedly drafted by Henry Owens of the Brook-
ings Institute, and a memo attached to the draft was said to have
indicated that some kind of input had been received by Israeli officials,
who were deeply concerned that the President might be contemplating
the inclusion ofa Palestinian state as part of a settlement. The previous
December (1975), he had stated in a college address at Medford,
Massachusetts, that peace must be based on “recognition of the rights
of the Palestinian people, but the PLO would have to recognize the
rights of Israel, who must withdraw to the 1967 boundaries.’
That same December the Brookings Institute Report, prepared by
a study group of sixteen including Israelist leader Philip Klutznick, six
other prominent Jews, and Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski,
approved the principle of Palestinian self-determination in the form of
a West Bank state independent or federated with Jordan, but subject
to recognition of Israel by the Palestinians. The report also called for
gradual Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Behind the scenes,
Israeli Ambassador Dinitz vigorously fought these recommendation
but had succeeded only in preventing one other Jewish member fro
endorsing the panel’s conclusions.
Shortly after Brzezinski’s appointment as National Security Ad
viser to President Carter, he privately informed the Israeli governmen
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 681
and Secretary Cyrus Vance, according to columnists Evans and
Novak,‘ that he no longer agreed with the 1975 proposal for ‘‘a Pales-
tinian state next to Israel.’’ At the same time, David Aaron, formerly
Vice President Mondale’s long-time legislative assistant and a fervent
Israelist, was placed in charge of the Brzezinski National Security
Council staff.
Carter’s first significant remarks on the Middle East came in re-
sponse to a question during his widely publicized town meeting in
Clinton, Massachusetts. After referring to the establishment of Israel
as “one of the finest acts of the world’s nations,” and declaring that
“the first prerequisite of a lasting peace is the recognition of Israel’s
right to exist,’’> with borders a matter to be negotiated between the
Arab countries and Israel, the President then made his controversial
statement: ‘“There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian
refugees, who have suffered for many, many years.”® Immediately
threatening clouds gathered. In and out of Congress, Zionists were up
in arms at the mere mention of a Palestinian homeland. The Israel
lobby opened its lines into the White House. Brzezinski was alerted,
and told a press briefing at the U.N. prior to the President’s speech on
human rights the next day that the President had used the word
“homeland” generically, and had intended no change in U.S. policy.
What took place in March was characteristic of Carter’s moves on
the Middle East during his first year in office—one step forward and
one step back as he persisted on being all things to all people. Israel’s
political power in the U.S. had to be balanced against concern over
Arab oil prices and even the possibility of an Arab shutoff in the
unlikely chance of war. To assuage angered Israelists, Secretary of
State Vance promised to ship ‘‘advanced technology”’ to Israel. This
balanced Washington’s cancellation of the devastatingly powerful
CBU-72 concussion bombs, promised by Ford as a political gesture
during the campaign, and the $500 million in aid given to Egypt as a
partial answer to the January food riots in which 80 were killed, 800
hurt, and 1000 arrested. On his first swing through the Middle East in
an effort to restore the peace momentum, the Secretary was told by
Sadat, allegedly with the approval of Arafat, that he favored an “official
link between the Palestinian state and Jordan, even before Geneva
talks started.’’ But there was still little give on either side in the strug-
gle as to which came first: recognition and secure borders for Israel or
Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories and recognition of
Palestinian rights.
Meeting in quick succession Israel’s Rabin, Egypt's Sadat, Jor-
682 POLITICS OR POLICY
dan’s Hussein in Washington, then Syria’s President Assad on May 8
in Geneva and the Saudi Arabian Prime Minister Crown Prince Fahd,
the President resumed his efforts to push for reconvening of the Ge-
neva Conference in late summer or fall. But the disaster that had
overtaken Prime Minister Rabin for a domestic impropriety, forcing
the May Israeli elections, complicated the process and called for an-
other visitation to Washington by the victorious Israeli candidate.
A suave Anwar Sadat came, saw, and what he conquered in Wash-
ington was not then visible. The freewheeling, shoot-from-the-hip
Carter style suited the Egyptian’s own infatuation with words. The
affecuon he felt for Kissinger was now transferred to the President,
whom Sadat talked of as a “‘great statesman,” a ‘sweet man,” and ‘“‘an
inspiration.” For all the flattery bestowed, Sadat seemed to come away
with precious little in hand. At an intimate, final press gathering at
Blair House for Middle East “experts,” there was no reference to the
“shopping list”? of military equipment reported earlier in his visit, and
he refused to divulge any details of economic aid he might have gar-
nered during his visit.
In his appearance on the CBS show “Sixty Minutes,” the Egyptian
leader opposed the March 9 Carter press conference suggestion that
Israel be given temporary ‘“‘secure borders,” which would extend for
a limited undesignated period of time Israel’s legal boundaries (a
response to Foreign Minister Allon’s demand for “defensible bor-
ders”). Sadat declared: “Sovereignty is indivisible and we can’t have
two borders. Sovereignty always means one border.” The Egyptian
leader was full of praise, however, for the presidential reference to a
Palestinian homeland.
The President’s meetings with King Hussein and President Assad
had tempered his hopes for Geneva, and he was said to have been
downcast as he saw the Jordanian King into a limousine outside the
Oval Office. To Assad, Carter reiterated the need for a homeland for
the Palestinians, but, as he told the press upon his return from his
meeting with the Syrian President, the degree of independence of the
Palestinian entity, its relationship with Jordan, and other details had
to be worked out by “the parties involved. But for the Palestinians to
have a homeland and for the refugee question to be resolved is obvi-
ously of crucial importance.”’7
Although the President then repeated that “‘it is absolutely critical
that no one in our country or around the world ever doubt that our
number-one commitment in the Middle East is to protect the right of
Israel to exist, to exist permanently, and to exist in peace,” talk of a
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 683
Palestinian homeland deeply upset the Israelis, who had to be assured
by Vance that the U.S. was not planning to impose a solution but
merely wanted to “help facilitate the process of peacemaking.” The
U.S. hoped that the parties would agree upon a five-point peace plan
consisting of Palestinian recognition of Israel; Israeli support for a
Palestinian state or homeland; Israeli withdrawal to roughly the 1967
lines with security lines beyond its legal frontiers; the eventual normal-
ization of travel, trade, and other relations between Israel and its
neighbors, so as to create an atmosphere of peace; and a major move-
ment toward a settlement that year.
Almost at the same time as Carter was telling an audience at Notre
Dame University (May 22) that he expected Israel would withdraw
from the occupied territories west of the Jordan River and that failure
to agree on peace could be disastrous, newly-elected Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin was telling viewers of ABC’s “Issues and
Answers” that Israel, quite the contrary, would not only not return the
West Bank area, but that he considered this “liberated territory,” open
to further Israeli settlements. He called this region—and required his
press to do likewise—Judea and Samaria, part of ‘Eretz Israel,’ land
given by the Lord to the Jews in the covenant with Abraham. Begin had
won his surprising election on the Likud platform featured by a Mes-
sianic advocacy of a Greater Israel:
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is an eternal and inalienable
right, and is also an integral part of the night to security and peace; thus Judea
and Samaria [the entire West Bank] will never be turned over to foreign
control; between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.
At Carter’s May 26 press conference covering his first four months
in office, the President was asked by an obviously pro-Israeli reporter
whether there was any way Israeli retention of the West Bank might
be viewed as a “minor adjustment” to territorial boundaries from
which Israel would not have to withdraw. The President cited U.N.
resolutions in support of Palestinian rights to a homeland and com-
pensation for losses suffered, but attributed them to the Security
Council. This led to the issuance of a White House correction stating
the President had been mistaken as to any such Security Council reso-
lutions, but making no mention of the many General Assembly resolu-
tions, where the U.S. veto does not operate, unequivocally affirming
Palestinian rights, which Carter must have initially had in mind.
In addition to Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, giving the
refugees the right to return home or to be compensated, which had
684 POLITICS OR POLICY
been reafirmed with near unanimity every year since (and usually
submitted by the U.S. delegation), there have been numerous reitera-
tions of the “inalienable rights” of the Palestinians, of their right to
political independence and self-determination in Palestine, of the le-
gitimacy of their struggle for independence by all means available,
including the use of armed force. Two standing U.N. bodies, the
Committee on Exercise of Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting
the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, were
given permanent jurisdiction over the resoluted items. In December
1977 the General Assembly voted $456,000 for publicizing these
“inalienable rights of the Palestinians.”’
Following a meeting with Prince Fahd at the White House in June,
the President was ebullient enough to say that he and his guest “‘had
no disturbing differences at all” on basic issues, including a Middle
East settlement—a remark that disturbed the Israelis no end and again
led to further pressures on the White House.
To answer growing discontent with Carter policy, Vice President
Mondale was dispatched to speak in San Francisco before the affluent
World Affairs Council of Northern California. He stressed the special
U.S.-Israel relationship and assured his audience that Israel would
never be asked to ‘“‘withdraw unless it can secure in return real peace
from its neighbors.”” The Palestinians, the Vice President asserted,
“‘must be given a stake in peace so they will turn away from the violence
of the past and toward a future in which they can express their legiti-
mate political aspirations peacefully.” If they ‘recognized Israel’s right
to exist in peace,” he added, the Palestinians should be provided
“some arrangement for a Palestinian homeland or entity—preferably
in association with Jordan,” the specifics of which “‘are for the parties
themselves to work out.’
Concerned about continued reiterations by the Begin government
of the “liberation of Judea and Samaria,” the administration issued a
statement on June 27 through the State Department reminding Tel
Aviv that in return for Arab agreement for peace with Israel, Prime
Minister Begin must agree “‘to a withdrawal from occupied lands om
all fronts and to the formation of a Palestinian homeland.”!°
It was time for the administration to hold out a carrot to go wit
its stick. The Pentagon approved the sale to Israel of $115 million I
military equipment, including 200 antitank missiles, 700 M-13 ar
mored carriers, and 15 M-778 tank bulldozers. This was in addition to
the earlier sale of $200 million in tanks in which the U.S. was still ¥
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 685
such short supply. But this action did not spare the President from the
blistering criticism of Senators Javits, Richard Stone (Dem.-Fla.), and
Richard S. Schweiker (Rep.-Pa.) that the administration had been de-
manding far more from the Israelis than from the Arabs in outlining
terms for a settlement.
Upset by the dangers stemming from the initial adverse reaction
to the election of extreme nationalist Begin and what they viewed as
a sterner line by the President, the Zionist lobby intensified its country-
wide efforts. A thousand letters a week urging stronger support for
Israel poured into the White House. Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler,
who as head of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American
Organizations and as former President of the Union of American He-
brew Congregations (an umbrella group for 750 Reform temples with
an alleged or claimed membership of 1.3 million) was emerging as the
top spokesman for Zionist-Israelist interests, boasted to Time maga-
zine that White House aide Hamilton Jordan seemed to reflect a
change in mood over the telephone: ‘“Then I knew that the question
of American-Israeli relations had become a serious political matter and
they weren’t treating us as if we were part of a foreign relations depart-
ment. Carter was beginning to perceive the importance of wooing the
American Jewish community.”!!
Vance, Brzezinski, Jordan, and White House Issues Coordinator
Eizenstat invited individual Jewish leaders to meetings or luncheons,
fielding their complaints and assuring them that they had nothing to
fear from Carter. Mondale had half a dozen meetings with Schindler
and Washington Chief of the American Jewish Committee Hyman
Bookbinder, but still leaders felt, ‘‘He’s not the President.’ The Zion-
ists were determined to apply more heat directly on the President prior
to his meeting with Begin.
Carter, who only the week before had called for a three-week
moratorium on comments about the Middle East until the Begin ar-
rival, met at the White House on July 6 with fifty-three Jewish leaders
representing all secular and relious organizations. He told them that
the Arab nations should establish full diplomatic relations with Israel
as part of an overall Middle East settlement. To further assuage some
of the Jewish fears about his call for a Palestinian “homeland,” the
President stated that he did not favor a separate Palestinian state,
which could be a threat to peace, but only an entity to be a part of
Jordan.
No solution, he added, could be imposed; it would have to be
negouated. As the President was imparting this comfort to the Israelist
686 POLITICS OR POLICY
leaders, the administration was announcing rejection of the second
effort by Israel to sell Ecuador twenty-four Kfir fighter-bombers
equipped with American engines.
Rabbi Schindler, shuttling back and forth between Israel and the
U.S., assisted by flying visits to Israel of Senators Javits and Stone
dispelled the ‘“‘wild man” image of Menachem Begin. ‘‘He’s a states-
man,” they insisted, “‘who wants to bring peace to his country.” The
theme was picked up by editors of the 130-odd Jewish weeklies as they
depicted the new Prime Minister as a ‘freedom fighter” who had
always sought to avoid civilian casualties in his ‘battle against the
British.” There were only a handful of iconclasts, such as Jewish chap-
lain at Yale and Breira National Chairman Rabbi Arnold Wolf, who
persisted in criticizing Begin. ““Why can’t I call him a right-wing fa-
natic? I think it’s outrageous that American Jews are supposed to
suppress their feelings in the interests of the Jewish people.” !? Behind
the banner ‘“‘We’re pledged to the security of Israel,” monolithic Jew-
ish support for Begin was mustered.
For Begin, the visit to Washington was exceedingly successful.
With the help of the media, the image of a charming, kind, and flexible
leader totally displaced that of an intransigent hard-nosed terrorist.
The two leaders responded to each other exceedingly well, often con-
versing in words of the Bible. Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter
formed an instantaneous mutual admiration society. “‘Never in my
thirty years in public life,” said Begin, ‘‘have I been as impressed by
a political leader.” Carter called Begin ‘ta man of truth and great
dignity. I don’t think the meeting could have been any better.” He
made clear to Begin that the U.S. goal was to achieve a comprehensive
settlement to be arrived at by the parties, which suited Begin perfectly;
he indicated he did not wish to negotiate an agreement with the U.S.
but simply wanted to get started negotiating with the Arabs.
On a more practical level, Washington agreed to provide $106
million for the production of new Israeli Chariot tanks and to supply
eighteen attack helicopters and an undetermined number of FS-16
fighters. Through military and economic grants, the U.S. was helping
Israel fight its battle against inflation, worsened by a cut in subsidies
on home commodities that forced a 25 percent rise in prices of such
staples as bread, cheese, milk, and gasoline.
Carter softened his concept of a “homeland” for the Palestinians,
but Begin would give little ground, still opposing one single Arab
delegation at Geneva and insisting that under no circumstances could
known members of the PLO participate, even as members of the Jor
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 687
danian delegation. Through maps he had carried to the U.S., the
Israeli leader attempted to show the President how vulnerable Israel
would be to an Arab surprise attack should Israel be required to
withdraw. And to the President’s concern about the continued settle-
ments on the West Bank, Begin responded with a most irrelevant
comment: ‘“There are eight Hebrons and four Bethlehems in the
U.S.” And “I could scarcely refuse to let Jews settle there.”
Sunday, July 24, was the last of Begin’s nine days in the States, and
there was more of the “Rally Round the Flag, Boys.” His first visitor
at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria was Henry Kissinger, whom I had
heard in a Jerusalem square in the spring of 1974 being wildly ex-
coriated by the Prime Minister-to-be in an outdoors emotional out-
pouring before thousands, with the kind of bombastic language one
would not permit his mother to hear. The shuttling Secretary was, at
the time, safely ensconced with his retinue at the King David Hotel,
surrounded by U.S. Secret Service and Israeli Security forces.
The Times Sunday “Week in Review” literally glowed with the
“smooth start on the high road to Geneva,” which had been made by
Begin in his more than five hours of face-to-face talks with Carter,
although admittedly there were still wide differences over such essen-
tials as the recognition of the PLO and its possible presence at Geneva.
The Israeli reiterated that under no circumstances would he sit down
with the PLO. The only Begin sop to the Palestinians was that no one
would look at the credentials of the Jordanians and there would be no
objection if some were Palestinians.
In his questioning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”’ the Israeli took
over totally. Before the questioning could begin, he launched into
a three-minute peroration that the ‘Jewish people” would never
face extermination again. Otherwise, Begin adroitly and _ totally
avoided efforts of the panelists on the program to pin him down to
specifics.
Carter apparently had turned “‘pussy cat” in the face of the iron-
willed Begin. He failed to ask the Israeli his intentions regarding exist-
ing unauthorized but not as yet legalized settlements in the occupied
territories,!4 although Carter had made clear that the U.S. considered
these settlements illegal and that the establishment of new settlements
would be “an obstacle to peace.’’!5 Less than a week after he left
Washington, Begin gave legal status to three previously unauthorized
Israeli setthkements, Kadum, Ofra, and Maale Adumim in the West
Bank, bringing the total of Israeli settlements to ninety—nine in the
outskirts of Jerusalem, thirty-six on the West Bank, twenty-five on the
688 POLITICS OR POLICY
Golan Heights, and 20 in Sinai and Gaza. (By the end of 1977 there
were ninety-six.)
Secretary Vance’s mild censure, “this was contrary to interna-
tional law and an obstacle to peace,” was Washington’s sole reply.
Although not quoted publicly, the President himself was believed to
have been infuriated. The staunch friend of Israel, the Washington Post,
called the action “reckless, provocative and indefensible . . . a frontal
assault on the American effort to arrange a settlement.”!® But there
was nothing unusual about the Begin move to have surprised anyone.
It was consonant both with Israel’s ten-year policy of “creeping annex-
ation” and with Herut leader Begin’s oft-enunciated dogma of a
“Greater Israel.” But the White House continued to ‘‘wafHe” on the
Palestinian issue, stating that the negotiations would determine that
homeland’s “degree of independence.”
The August swing of Secretary Vance through the Arab world and
Israel resulted in a hardening of attitudes by Israel. Begin declared he
would not accept a West Bank enclave under Jordanian sovereignty,
a formula that the Rabin-Peres government had been prepared to
accept, and the Israeli Prime Minister described the PLO philosophy
as ‘‘an Arabic Mein Kampf which was a danger to all free nations.” This
was at a time the PLO seemed to have become more flexible and,
under the moderating influence of Saudi Arabia, whose financial back-
ing was always needed, was said to be contemplating some change in
its attitude toward recognition of Israel, provided that Resolution 242
were amended to alter the Palestinian status from that of refugees to
Palestinian nationals.
And the only carrot Washington was offering the PLO was to open
talks in exchange for an acceptance of Resolution 242, but with no
guarantee of a place when and if Geneva reconvened. The Vance
flirtation with so-called ‘““West Bank dignitaries” during his August
visit to Jerusalem did not help relations with the Arafat-led PLO, which)
had been strengthened by a reconciliation with the Habash PFLP and
a joint determination to push for an independent state on the West
Bank and in Gaza.
Two weeks later the PLO executive committee, meeting in Damas-
cus, ruled out ‘‘a dialogue with the Carter administration” and assailed
“Zionism and American imperialism” for continuing to attempt to split
the Arab world and for ignoring the “‘national rights of the Palestinian
people.” The front-page Times James Markham article!” made the PLO
the villains of the piece for rejecting U.S. terms requiring recognition
of Israel by the PLO, without any equivalent amendment to Resolutio
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 689
242 recognizing Palestinian rights.
The more intransigent and chauvinistic Begin became, the more
his popularity at home, and the greater the respect for him in Washing-
ton. There was a frantic closing of ranks behind the leader. Nothing
succeeds like success. Nothing dazzles more than defying the President
of the U.S. By mid-October General Yael Yadin and his Democratic
Movement for Democratic Change with its fifteen seats, despite its
earlier opposition to the government’s settlement policy, joined the
government and greatly strengthened Begin’s control in the Knesset.
The establishment of the three additional West Bank settlements
brought the mildest Washington reaction—a State Department lecture
to the Israeli Ambassador, not from Secretary Vance but from Under-
secretary Philip Habib.
Nor did the Begin administration seem to be embarrassed by
Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan,!8 first leaked to Ma‘anv, for
thirty additional settlements and three urban centers in the Western
half of the occupied territory. The main Arab population centers
would be cut off by settling two million Jews over twenty years in
territories extending from Golan to Sharm el-Sheikh, at the southern
tip of Sinai. Eighty-two percent of Israelis polled favored some kind of
settlements in the occupied territories. In the face of these ‘‘signposts
to destruction,’ as Lord Caradon, who had drafted Resolution 242,
referred to the settlements,!9 Begin still maintained he wanted peace.
“Everything is negotiable”’ the Israeli leader consistently proclaimed
in an incessant flow of articles and interviews, which invariably de-
picted the Zionist state as prepared to give back its conquests for a
“real peace.’” The announcement of the extension to the “liberated
territories” of Israeli government facilities, including electric power,
improved water supply, and telephone service, was hailed by the Zion-
ist-oriented media as a conciliatory move toward the Arabs, by Israeli
expansionists as indicative of the permanency of the government’s
control in the area.
Before the Arab Middle East foreign ministers and Dayan con-
vened in the U.S. for unilateral meetings with Carter, the Arab League
tacitly admitted Israel’s right to existence as a state in calling for Israeli
withdrawal from Arab territories occupied during 1967 but making no
reference to Israel’s 1948 boundaries.
The September State Department statement that “lasting Middle
East peace will be impossible without Palestinian involvement in Arab-
Israeli negotiations’?° led to instantaneous, militant mobilization.
Telegrams to the White House, telephone calls to congressmen, let-
690 POLITICS OR POLICY
ters to the editor, Op-Ed pieces by Rita E. Hauser?! and others in the
New York Times all sounded warnings against a PLO state. Israelists had
been in a state of alarm since former Ambassador William W. Scran-
ton, a close friend of Secretary Vance, had allegedly met informally
and unofficially with a PLO representative in London.
At the time Israelis were dedicating new settlements at Reihana on
the West Bank near the Arab town of Jenin, the Israeli Foreign Minis-
ter was en route to the U.S. carrying in his pocket a “peace treaty,”’ the
draft of which showed that questions of a Palestinian entity and the
status of East Jerusalem, in particular, were not up for discussion. By
a 92-4 vote the Knesset had declared that under no circumstances was
the PLO to be made a party to the negouations. In Dayan’s words, it
was “‘less dangerous to oppose a Palestinian state and risk a war now,
than it would be to accept such a state and risk a war in the future, when
presumably hostile groups would be resident in a sovereign state next
door.”” Time reported: “Anyone who thinks that this government is
going to withdraw from the West Bank is suffering delusions.’’2?
En route to the U.S. Dayan made a sudden side trip to Tangier in
full disguise and met with King Hassan, from whom he allegedly re-
ceived a critical message that Egypt would consider interim talks if
Geneva negotiations failed and, according to 7ime,?3 the Saudis would
interpose no objections. The groundwork for the startling Sadat No-
vember pilgrimage, perhaps started by Rumanian President Nicolae
Ceausescu, may then have been further advanced. An earlier London
Dayan secret meeting had not been productive, as King Hussein had
been ‘‘carefully noncommittal’’?* to a proposal for a nonbelligerency
treaty in exchange for Jordan-Israel sharing responsibility for the West
Bank.
Dayan flew back to Israel for consultations before his appearance
at the White House. The only concession the Israelis would make was
to permit Palestinians, but not known members of the PLO, to be
represented at the opening ceremonies in Geneva as members of the
Pan-Arab delegation, and only within the Jordanian party. After that
the Israelis would negotiate separately with the Arab states directly
involved in the talks—namely, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—and the
Palestinians could attend these talks as members of Jordan’s delega-
tion. Secretary Vance at this stage announced that the new Israeli
position had ‘“‘added conditions that do not accurately reflect our
views.” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy called the Israeli pro-
posal ‘‘a nonstarter.”” The PLO’s Farouk Kaddoumi reacted, “We re-
ject it, full stop.”
Enter Carter—and Then Begin 691
On the eve of the meeting with Dayan, the White House statement
that “the Palestinians must be represented at Geneva’ added to
mounutng pressures directed at a President already greatly weakened
by the Bert Lance affair and the growing congressional opposition to
the proposed Panama Canal Treaty and his energy program. And the
stock market had slid to the lowest levels in twenty months.
Hoping to avoid the long-feared collision with Israel, which
seemed to be increasingly inevitable in the light of Begin’s inflexibility
on the issue of the West Bank, the President turned to the Soviet
Union. On October | the world was taken totally by surprise with the
issuance of a three-point joint statement by the Geneva cochairmen on
the desirability of reconvening the conference before the end of the
year, ensuring ‘‘the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” and
enabling “normal peaceful relations in the region.” The U.S. accepted
for the first ume the concept of Palestinian “rights” as against ‘‘inter-
ests,’ and the Soviet Union acquiesced in a statement that did not
mention the PLO, although Moscow had long insisted that the PLO,
as the legitimate spokesmen for the more than three million Palestini-
ans, had to participate in any Geneva Conference.
The onslaught against the joint demarche was led by the media.
Both the New York Post and the New York Times editorially and news-
wise lent their columns prominently to Israel’s protests. The Zionist
state was portrayed as a victim of a “Big Power-imposed settlement,’’25
and U.S. pressure on Israel was declared to be equivalent to “diplo-
matic isolation.”’ The 7imes accused the President of using the ‘‘euphe-
mism of Palestinian ‘rights’ to something approaching the creation of
an independent Palestinian state abutting their [Israel’s] borders and
surrounding Jerusalem,” and of wrongdoing in bringing the Russians
into the negotiations ‘‘at this early stage of the negotiations.”?6 The
President apparently had hoped Moscow would apply pressure on the
Syrians to accept less than full PLO representation at Geneva.
When Carter appeared before the U.N. General Assembly on
October 4 and again declared that ‘‘the legitimate rights of the Pales-
uinians must be recognized,” the opposition to the President’s pro-
gram took on an open campaign. Chairman Rabbi Schindler an-
nounced that he and Dayan would visit Chicago, Atlanta, and Los
Angeles to mobilize the public against the Carter administration. The
1973 threat of Ambassador Dinitz to go over the head of the U.S.
Government directly to the American people was now being carried
out. And in Washington the White House had already been informed,
according to the National Review Bulletin, that any undue pressure on
692 POLITICS OR POLICY
Menachem Begin could result in ‘hard Congressional lumps on the
[Panama] Canal”’ issue.
The seven-hour stormy meeting of Carter, Vance, and Dayan at
the U.N. Plaza Hotel followed. While assuring Dayan of the U.S. com-
mitment to Israel, the President tried to exact more flexibility on the
Palestinian issue. Adamantly refusing to agree to an independent
Palestinian entity or homeland on the West Bank or to accept the PLO
at Geneva, the Israeli instead confronted the President with an alleged
list of broken promises by U.S. Presidents who failed to give the Zion-
ists all they wanted—from Roosevelt, who did not open U.S. gates to
Jewish refugees, through even Johnson, who allegedly stated: ““The
U.S. is not a policeman of the world” when asked to ensure the previ-
ous Eisenhower promise of freedom of navigation through the Suez
Canal.
The working U.S.-Israel paper on Geneva procedures that would
permit Palestinians, but no PLO representatives, to be present at Ge-
neva and then only to participate in any bilateral negotiations as part
of the Jordanian delegation, marked another Israeli victory, although
Carter continued to talk about an undefined Palestinian ‘‘home-
land.’’27 For Israel to go to Geneva, she did not have to accept what
the administration now called the “hopes” expressed in the U.S.-
U.S.S.R. statement.
For their part, the Israelis continued to demonstrate the deepest
trepidation that the Palestinians would raise the issue of Zionist usur-
pation of land and would question the legitimacy of the Zionist state.
It was much more difficult to make the Hitler label stick to homeless
Palestinians, whose dispossession could be recited in moving terms,
than to the Arab states, whose sole bone of contention was a piece of
territory occupied by Israel through conquest. It was fear of the reac-
tion of world public opinion, particularly in the U.S., to the moral issue
that might be leveled against them that crazed the Israelis—and this
at a moment when the Zionist state never felt as militarily secure. Its
tremendous superiority over the Arabs in weaponry constantly in-
creased, as the U.S. $2 million-plus military pipeline flowed continu-
ously while Arab arining faltered and sputtered at Soviet hands of
remained as unfulfilled promises of European countries.
Political pressures on the President did not cease. “I’d rather
commit political suicide than hurt Israel,’’ Carter told a delegation 0
Jewish members of Congress. He took the occasion to effectuate
reconciliation with New York mayoralty candidate Congressman Ed
ward I. Koch, who was carrying forward the Lindsay-Wagner traditio
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 693
of acting as if he aspired to be Mayor of Tel Aviv. Upon the President’s
arrival in the city to address the U.N., the Mayor-to-be handed Carter
a letter denouncing the U.S.-U.S.S.R. communiqué, as media cameras
ground away and all newspapers headlined the incident. (Previously
Congressman Koch had called for the dismissal of General Brown and
accused the Syrian government of anti-Semitism, despite the thrice-
repeated Mike Wallace program on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes”’ exposing
this charge as pure propaganda.)
As Washington pressed for Geneva “this year,”’ the Israeli Cabinet
and Knesset accepted the U.S.-Israel working paper, with Dayan em-
phasizing that there would be a walkout from the conference if there
was any insistence upon a Palestinian state. Syria’s President Assad
indicated: “No PLO, no Geneva for us.”” The White House attempted
through personal assurances to assauge Sadat, who opposed the work-
ing paper because of the elimination of the PLO. In the wake of Arafat
meetings with Sadat, PLO spokesmen indicated formation of a provi-
sional government was under consideration.
The President was still very much on the defensive. Although the
administration had unmistakably indicated its opposition to Israeli
settlements in the occupied territories, the U.S. abstained in the 131-
to-1 October 28 U.N. vote on the Egyptian-sponsored resolution cen-
suring Israel for ‘‘changing the legal status, geographical nature, and
demographic composition” of the territories in violation of the U.N.
Charter and of the Geneva Convention. If Washington was exerting
any pressure on Israel behind the scenes, up front Carter was now
maintaining a very pro-Israel posture as Israel’s press allies joined the
fray.
A Pranay Gupte-prepared article rehashed Stanford’s Dr. Sey-
mour M. Lipset’s thesis from Commentary magazine®$ that Carter’s call
for the ‘‘legitimate rights” of the Palestinians ‘‘would have a devastat-
ing effect on President Carter’s chance for re-election.” Lipset closed
with the warning that ‘because the political and financial support of
this portion of the electorate is usually significant in a presidential
election, any move on the part of Mr. Carter perceived as detrimental
to Israel would adversely affect his political future.’’29
_ Far more subtle than any editorial critical of the President for
sisting on a greater voice in peace negotiations for the Palestinians,
this lengthy, contrived “news piece” two days after a lengthy front-
Page Sunday article, ‘“Growing Alarm Among U.S. Jews Threatening
Carter’s Mideast Policy,’’2° placed additional pressure on the White
House and added incentive to the Zionists, already steamed up after
694 POLITICS OR POLICY
unsatisfactory talks with Secretary Vance,3! to war on the President,
In early November Carter addressed a gathering of 800 Jewish
leaders from forty-one countries who were attending a Washington
meeting of the World Jewish Congress. The President begged for
support of the “‘best opportunity for a permanent Middle East settle-
ment in our lifetime,’ and assured these Zionists that Israel would
never be forced to deal directly with major officials of the PLO.32
Senator Howard H. Baker (Rep.-Tenn.), who also addressed this con-
ference, pursued the partisan tactics of the Republican party Chair-
man, former Senator William Brock, in accusing the administration 0
breaking with past U.S. policy established under presidents of both
parties. The ugly and perennial quest for ‘‘the Jewish vote” was not
even subtly concealed. And Andrew Young’s statement that the U.S.
was “bolstering Israel’’ in its Mideast policy represented the latest
political bid of the ambitious U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
While his appointment had been greeted with great enthusiasm by
Arab and black African nations, the handsome one-time aide to Dr.
Martin Luther King soon indicated on which side of the street he was
going to walk. At his first press conference on January 3 before the
Senate had confirmed his appointment, Young defended his viewpoint
toward the Rhodesian crisis by stating: “I would no more want th
400,000 whites in Rhodesia to be driven into the sea than the thre
million Jews of Israel.’ Following this gratuitous remark, the Ambassa
dor further indicated the depth of his feelings (or more precisely, hi
political attachment) toward Israel. After being sworn in as Ambassa
dor by the President in Washington and presenting his credentials t
Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, his very first act was to rush ove
and pay a courtesy call on ‘this old friend” Israeli Ambassador Chai
Herzog—this was prior to any call on any other Ambassador, Africa
or otherwise.
Two months later in a New York City meeting with members ©
the Conference of Presidents, Young declared that he had experience
in 1966 “a brutal awakening” to the hatred of Jews by Arabs, a
experience that “brought terror to my heart.” As a result, Young tol
the visiting Zionists, “I saw the need for Israel to be strong and secu
to cope with the hatred of its neighbors.”’33
The meeting had been closed to the press, but Young’s present
tion had been leaked to the New York Post by a spokesman for t
organization. Young had gone on to say that he had experienced “‘t
Ku Klux Klan mentality of hatred in the South,” but the first ume
ever saw hatred by “‘intellectuals” was during a 1966 visit to Jordan
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 695
a hatred aimed at the Jews, Young reported. The Ambassador’s peace
formula was to make Israel as ‘‘secure as possible militarily, as strong
as possible politically, and as adventurous diplomatically” as the Israe-
lis wish.
A candidate who could sew up the Jewish as well as the black vote
would make an ideal Vice Presidential running mate for Walter Mon-
dale in 1984. And then in 1992, who knows? The first black in the
White House?
As Washington was weighing the effect of vying Geneva “‘peace”’
formulas on Carter’s political future, the scene in South Lebanon
scarcely reflected tranquillity. As a means of further intimidation of the
Palestinians and of improving its bargaining position, Israel flexed its
military muscle in fierce “reprisal” aerial onslaughts on refugee camps
and civilian sites, with more than 100 casualties—the first Israeli strike
into South Lebanon in nearly two years. This may have helped divert
Israeli attention from intolerable economic problems at home wrought
by the moves away from Israel’s socialist-oriented past toward free
enterprise. The subsidy-cutting, instituted by Finance Minister Simha
Ehrlich and resulting in 10 to 30 percent price rises, led to demonstra-
tions and strikes.
Inflexibility of both sides over the Palestinian issue was proving
to be an insurmountable obstacle to any Geneva reconvening. Talk—
and rumor—of American Arab professors representing the PLO came
to nothing. The meeting of Arab Foreign Ministers in Tunis resolved
no problems, only bared new internecine rifts.
Sadat faced mounting economic problems, and the only solution
seemed to be the speediest possible peace. American investment had
not flowed to Cairo, as he hoped after the second disengagement
agreement. His 1975 and 1977 trips to the U.S. and long talks with
businessmen indicated that the risks of area war would have to be
removed before there was a serious flow of American capital. At one
point he even considered reopening his option of dealing with the
Soviet Union again in the hope of persuading the Kremlin to resched-
ule Egypt’s debt payments, estimated at close to $4 billion, and to
resume desperately needed arms deliveries.
His own military, aware of the overwhelming Israeli superiority,
Strongly pushed for a Geneva settlement. It was Minister of War Mo-
hammed el-Gamasy who allegedly had hinted to his opposite number
in September 1975 at the Kilo 101 disengagement initialing that there
might be a way out other than war, but Meir had paid no attention
when this was reported to her.
696 POLITICS OR POLICY
There had been other Egyptian peace soundings. A forty-member
delegation of the Zionist-oriented American Professors for Peace in
the Middle East had been given the red-carpet treatment during a
spring 1975 visit and had met with the Minister of Information. At
Kissinger’s insistent urging, Sadat had received Zionist columnist Jo-
seph Alsop in Alexandria, rejecting all other interviewers after the May
1975 opening of the Suez Canal, and helped in the composition of the
New York Times Magazine piece, ““An Open Letter to an Israeli
Friend,’’?4 portraying a moderate Sadat seeking peace. The Egyptian
leader was not unmindful of the great financial advantages that could
flow from the same Jewish coffers that were keeping Israel afloat, if he
could find ways of agreeing with Begin’s formula. To boot, he was very
aware that it would take months, if ever, to overcome procedural
obstacles and get the Geneva talks underway.
Meanwhile there was the real possibility of an Israeli preemptive
strike against which General Gamasy conceded there could be little
defense. He pledged to back Sadat in any move he would make. Ac-
cording to 7imes military expert Drew Middleton, Egypt’s forces were
weak in major areas and faced an acute shortage of spare parts, particu-
larly for the Soviet bombers, fighter-bombers, and interceptors and for
Soviet antitank and antiaircraft missile systems.35 Egypt had not re-
ceived its Mirage F-15 and Crotale surface-to-air missiles from France.
It was accepted that no combination of Arab countries, with or without
Egypt, could stand up to Israel’s military might.
Quite suddenly, Middle East politics were revolving around on
everyone’s axis in a world that seemed to have gone from mad to
madder. A Sadat challenge, enunciated to the Egyptian National As-
sembly that he would be ready “‘to come to the Israeli Parliament in
order to prevent a single Egyptian soldier from being wounded, ’’6 at
first considered to be a theatrical gesture, was picked up by Menachem
Begin. With a formal invitation then extended and accepted through
the U.S. embassies in Tel Aviv and Cairo, the way was paved for the
most dramatic turn in Middle East affairs since the creation of Israel:
the unprecedented November 19-20 Anwar el-Sadat pilgrimage to
Jerusalem and the return December 25 summit visit of Begin to Is-
mailia.
It was Sadat, who in the past had so often said things that he more
than often did not mean, and there he was in Jerusalem. All Americans
were glued to television to view the thirty-six-hour amazing visit of the
Egypuan leader to Israel. Sadat was warmly greeted by Prime Minister
Begin, prayed at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, visited the Yad Vashem memo-
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 697
rial, laid a wreath at the Eternal Flame monument to Israel’s war dead,
addressed the Knesset (his entrance into the Israeli parliament was
heralded by the sounding of trumpets), and held private talks with his
Israeli host. In the receiving line of Israeli VIPs at the airport, the
exuberant Sadat nearly kissed Golda Meir, whom he used to call “that
old lady,” and particularly sought to clasp the hand of Ariel Sharon,
one of the five generals in the Israel ‘“‘peace’”’ Cabinet, who in the 1973
war had nearly crushed the Egyptian Third Corps with his brilliant
maneuverings.
The euphoric euphoria, which swept over the U.S. and all of the
West, reached new heights as CBS’s Walter Cronkite, ABC’s Barbara
Walters, and NBC’s John Chancellor competed with one another in
advancing the new “‘diplomacy of television” to show the “‘love”’ that
radiated in the Holy City. The press accounts were as ecstatic in de-
scribing the cordiality prevalent in the unprecedented Jerusalem meet-
ing as they were merciless in their mockery of those Arabs, principally
the PLO and the Syrians, who were critical of the unilateral Sadat
approach. The media relented not one whit in their customary slant-
ings and distortions, the unbridled enthusiasm only providing an ex-
cuse for being more than ever totally anti-Palestinian. While the New
York Post carried an elegy, “‘On a Day of Hope, Memories of Death,”
detailing onto two pages the sorrows of the family of one of the two
victims of a Palestinian rocket attack on Nahariya, its readers were told
nothing about the reprisal assault that leveled the Lebanese village of
Hazziye and once again hit the Palestinian refugee camp at Nabatieh,
killing close to 120 people in all. Only author Edward Sheehan, ap-
pearing on Channel 11 in New York, was allowed to cast the slightest
shadow on “‘the television pax” in suggesting that the isolation of the
Palestinians could lead to new problems and that a violent division in
the Arab world could be counterproductive to any reconvening of
Geneva.
The euphoriacs poured forth their fantasies regarding the ‘‘new
peace.” Rabbis piously intonated from their pulpits: ‘““The dialogue we
have sought is now at hand’’—this from the very voices who either
individually or organizationally had done everything in their power for
thirty years to ruthlessly crush the opinions of any and all who refused
to view the Israeli state as less than the Messiah come. Even the noviti-
ate on Middle East affairs must have been puzzled to read in print the
glowing reams of praise for Sadat from the pens of such chauvinists
as the New York Post’s Max Lerner, who referred to Sadat’s mission as
the “impossible dream,”’ where only a few days earlier all Arabs, in-
698 POLITICS OR POLICY
cluding the Egyptian leader, were either filthy bedouins or intransigent
extremists who could never appreciate the uplifting from neighboring
“Jewish culture” and wished to “throw all Israelis into the sea.”
For months the press, TV, and radio, in the guise of news report-
age, had been engaged in the grandiose task of reconstructing a new
Menachem Begin for public consumption. Now they speedily fash-
ioned a different Anwar Sadat, who with his pledge “‘no more war” (at
that moment as much a statement of military inability as a promise)
tactily was admitting that the Arabs had been the aggressors, was
hailed for breaking down the “psychological barriers’’ to peace.
Overnight, Israelis and Egyptians had become fellow Semites,
whom Begin declared had in the past and could in the future live
peaceably together. And he claimed he, too, was a Palestinian. As the
second disengagement had been hailed in 1975, so now “peace” was
universally acclaimed and every critic or sceptic damned, even after
Begin’s contemptuous reply in the Knesset following Sadat’s speech.
Aside from graciously accepting the Egyptian’s peace offering, the
Israeli leader offered not the slightest concession, while vigorously
expounding Zionist dogma of a land first given to Jews by God and
later consecrated tu Zionism by the holocaust.
The Egyptian solo initiative was attacked by the PLO, Syria, Iraq,
Libya, Algeria, and South Yemen. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf
States remained uncommitted. King Hussein, following the lead of
President Assad, declined to participate in the mid-December Cairo
conference that was announced to the Egyptian National Assembly by
an exhilarated Sadat on his return from Jerusalem. Nor did the Jor-
danian ruler go to the Tripoli rejectionist summit called by Qaddafi
and attended by al-Assad, Arafat, and Boumedienne as well as top
Iraqi and South Yemeni representatives.
Sadat stated that ‘‘all parties involved in the Middle East con-
flict’’3? were being invited to the conclave, and specifically mentioned
“Secretary Waldheim, the two Super Powers, Israel as well as other
Arab countnes.”’ (Italics added.) In both his Jerusalem and Cairo
speeches Sadat had carefully avoided any mention of the PLO, al-
though he had talked of Palestinian rights. Before the names of the
invitees could even be released, a PLO spokesman in Damascus de-
clined the invitation and assailed Sadat. While the flags of the nonat-
tendant PLO, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the U.S.S.R. were all flown,
prior to protests of the Israeli delegation, on the first day at the Mena
House, scene of the conference near the Pyramids, there was no indica-
tion that Sadat had ever intended to include the Arafat-led group in
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 699
the conclave. Israel had made it perfectly clear that she would never
sit down around any table with this feared enemy, which Begin cer-
tainly had emphasized privately to Sadat. And Washington had never
recognized the existence of the PLO. This spotlighted the importance
of the provision in the secret annex to the second Sinai disengagement
agreement, where Kissinger had seen to it that the Israelis were given
the right of veto over any such move by any American President unul
the PLO recognized Israel's existence. Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy,
who resigned when Sadat informed him of his peace initiative, had at
the time asked the U.S. Secretary of State: “‘How could you have
mortgaged your future to a piece of paper like that?”
The name of the game seemed to be “Bypass the PLO,” and the
U.S. appeared to be more than an innocent bystander. Despite vigor-
ous Washington denials as to its involvement in the Jerusalem meet-
ing, Hamilton Jordan was quoted as saying, “Now that we brought
them together, they are on their own.” Carter admitted being in almost
daily touch with Sadat, and with Begin only to a lesser extent. The
smooth manner with which U.S. Ambassador Hermann Eilts in Cairo
acted as intermediary for the formal invitation from Begin to Sadat,
and in which other communications were set up between Cairo and
Jerusalem, suggested a little more than casual participation by Uncle
Sam.
While Carter drew some sharp criticism for taking his time before
accepting the invitation and designating Assistant Secretary of State
Alfred L. Atherton instead of Secretary Vance to attend Sadat’s Cairo
conclave, many in the administration shared with their Israeli friends
the satisfaction of seeing the Arab world torn asunder by the surprising
Sadat move. As long as Saudi Arabia appeared to be playing it safe and
to be not too disturbed by the Sadat initiative (remaining quiet until
the late December statement from the Foreign Ministry calling for full
withdrawal and implementation of Palestinian ‘‘rights’’38), Washing-
ton was not upset.
Kissinger had kept in close touch with the fast-moving events. The
former Secretary of State had met Anwar, his protégé, during his
spring visit and had an introductory meeting with Begin at the Waldorf
on the last day of the Israeli leader’s summer visit. He talked by phone
to both leaders during the weekend of the Sadat visit to Jerusalem, and
hailed the mission as “one of those historic events that cannot be
permitted to fail.” It represented the fulfillment of his efforts, his
dreams come true. While denying that he had anything to do with the
initiative, the former Secretary of State again reiterated his opposition
700 POLITICS OR POLICY
to efforts seeking ‘‘a comprehensive Middle East settlement’’39—
something which, coincidentally, Begin had long indicated he greatly
feared.
To Begin, so long as Cairo and Damascus thought along the same
lines, there was a threat to his West Bank policy of legalizing existing
settlements and authorizing further new ones. He reasoned that the
Arabs, if not fragmented, would eventually be forced to go to war over
this and the other occupied territories. Even though they knew they
could not win, it would be the lesser of two evils for them.
But once Sadat had broken the Arab freeze by coming to Jerusa-
lem, Begin could and did assume an increasingly tougher position
toward the Arabs and Washington. The legitimacy of the Zionist state
had been given the recognition of the largest Arab state, obfuscating
the ‘original sin” and Palestinian grievances. The Israeli leader
refused to permit key military or security issues to be discussed in the
initial phases of the Cairo conference. Director General of the Prime
Minister’s Office Eliahu ben-Elissar and Legal Adviser to the Foreign
Ministry Meir Rosenne were not to operate at the level of a “piece of
territory for a piece of peace.’’4° Before the Mena House conference
convened, the Jerusalem Post carried the names of Givon and Bet
Heron, the two latest Israeli setthements in Judea and Samaria.*!
After Carter had been further softened up by the Zionist lobby
and the “‘Israel-First” bloc in Congress, Begin announced to Washing-
ton that he was flying in to “show” Carter his peace plan before
presenting it to Sadat on Christmas Day in Ismailia. He had not come,
Begin averred, to win presidential support of the plan, only his non-
disapproval. What the canny Israeli chieftain most wanted was another
chance to reach the American public—which the media, in particular
“Face the Nation,” afforded him—and to further encourage his pres-
sure boys on the Hill. The White House made no statement, nor did
it dispute the claim of the Israeli leader that Carter viewed the Israeli
plan as a “‘fair basis for negotiations.” (It was not until the day after
Begin left that it was leaked that Carter had “reportedly” cautioned the
Israelis that his plan as to the Palestinians ‘‘won’t satisfy Sadat and
suggested new packaging’’#? another instance of Carter's fear of an-
tagonizing the Zionists.)
When Sadat opened up his Santa Claus gift from his Israeli guest,
he found a very “old hat’’—the proposal for so-called Palestinian ‘‘self-
rule’’ on the West Bank, which combined features of the extant Allon
and Dayan plans maintaining Israeli military and strategic control
while permitting the Palestinians limited civil government, and retain-
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 701
ing the Israeli settlements strategically placed around Arab towns and
villages. The twenty-six-point plan giving the Palestinians, referred to
as ‘‘residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza,” no right of self-determina-
tion, only the option to choose Israeli or Jordanian citizenship, and
maintaining Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, was to be subject
to review after a five-year period.
Begin at his press conference in Ismailia again excoriated the PLO
as the ‘‘vilest organization of murderers in history with the exception
of the Nazi armed organizations.” Under his plan the immigration of
Palestinians into the “territories” would be closely regulated—a
means of barring entry from Lebanon and Syria of PLO members. But
Israeli Jews could without restriction settle in the “‘territories” and
would be under direct Israeli, not Arab authority.
No joint communiqué followed the Ismailia summit. After the
terms of the Israeli “‘peace’’ plan were announced, Jordan flatly re-
jected the proposal, and Sadat asked Israel to reconsider its stand.
When Carter in a television interview prior to his year-end trip to six
countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, praised the Israeli leader
for taking a “‘long step forward” and expressed opposition to a Pales-
tinian state, the Egyptian leader declared that he was “disappointed”
and “embarrassed” by the President’s statement. (On a stopover in
Aswan the following week, Carter tried to patch over the differences.)
Screaming headlines in the New York Post*? translated the Sadat
reaction into “Sadat Slams Carter’s Stand” and played up Begin’s
determination not to ‘surrender’ to international pressure. The
media’s honeymoon with Sadat quickly evaporated as full-scale anti-
Arab slanting was resumed. And in Israel as the tumultuous year 1977
wound up, the media there was alternately attacking Sadat because
“his appetite has grown instead of diminishing” and Begin for making
“too many concessions too soon.”
The man whom Kissinger had transformed from an ally of the
Soviet Union into an ally of the U.S. faced the danger of being caught
in a squeeze of his own making, unless he was seeking a separate peace,
which he vigorously denied. (Sadat claimed that while in Jerusalem he
had been offered by Begin a separate peace pact in exchange for
complete withdrawal from Sinai, which he had summarily rejected.) All
Arabs, including Sadat and particularly the Saudis, could see no indica-
tion in the Begin-Dayan plan of any Israeli turnabout from its “‘creep-
ing annexation.” And the deteriorating PLO position, compounded by
its totally inept image-building, was adding to the dangers of the
Situation through frustrated flirtations with Moscow and Red China.
702 POLITICS OR POLICY
On the basis of the Palestinians’ alleged negativism and radicalism,
Carter joined Israel in closing the door to any recognition of or nego-
tiating with the PLO. Israel’s desire for further Big Power polarization
was being realized.
The Sadat boldness placed everyone on the spot, no one more
than Carter, as Israel was forced for the first ume to detail its concept
of a Palestinian settlement. The President, it appeared, had been re-
sponsible for imprecise utterances as to a Palestinian “homeland” and
“legitimate rights”’ so as to stave off the Arabs, particularly the Saudis,
while encouraging Sadat to make his move and become Begin’s first
Arab “waltzing partner.” The Carter New Year’s Day meeting with
Hussein in Teheran was calculated to overcome previous Hashemite
reluctance to join the “dance” but failed as other similar efforts had
in the past and up to this writing.
The Saudis somehow had to be kept happy. There was an es-
timated 39 billion plus of OPEC monies, nearly three-quarters Saudi,
in Treasury securities, banks, bonds, stocks, and other investments in
the U.S. A further oil price increase could bring economic chaos and
usher in Paul Erdman’s Crash of ’79.
It remained Washington's constant hope that Saudi preoccupa-
tion with its own long-range economic development would make them
more flexible—and hence make Sadat more amenable to what had
been practically presented, through Begin’s maneuverings, as a U.S.-
Israeli plan for a solution to the West Bank problem.
While the Israeli-Egyptian talks in Cairo on the military aspects of
a peace settlement were reporting some limited progress in resolving
differences over the future of Israeli settlements around the Rafah
Salient in the Sinai and the fate of Israeli airfields at Bir Gifgata, Eitam,
and Etzion, the Jerusalem political talks were abruptly broken off in
mid-January by Sadat. Foreign Minister Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel
was recalled, after the Jatter’s airport arrival declaration that “Israel
must give up Jerusalem” and Begin’s subsequent insulting dinner
toast, the Israeli leader attempting to draw a parallel between Arab
demands for Palestinian rights and Hitler’s misuse of Sudeten self-
determination.
In meeting later with Egyptian editors before their departure,
Begin called Kamel’s Jerusalem remark “the most preposterous ever
made by a guest—pure ‘chutzpah’ ”’ (colossal impudence). When re-
minded by one Egyptian that he should have been impressed by
Sadat’s acceptance of Israel’s existence, the Israeli leader exploded:
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 703
We have never asked anybody to recognize our right to exist. We exist, my
dear Egyptian friends, without your recognition for 3,700 years. Our right to
exist was given by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. We never asked your
President or your Government to recognize our right to exist. What we expect
from you is to recognize our right to our land.44
The negotiations had already been floundering with vast differ-
ences over the set of principles on which the comprehensive Middle
East settlement was to be based. The Sadat move was intended to
emphasize his insistence on complete Israeli withdrawal and Pales-
tinian self-determination. In place of the previous euphoria and good-
will, a war of words was waged between the Egyptian and Israeli press,
in which even the charge of “‘anti-Semitism” was hurled at Cairo edi-
tors.
As Dayan warned “Egypt cannot put a pistol to Israel’s head” and
Secretary Vance tried to bridge the differences, the U.S. became the
principal battleground. Sadat flew to Washington for a Camp David
weekend with the President, and ensuing public relations efforts pre-
sented his case to key members of Congress, to some Jewish leaders,
and principally to the American people. On the heels of what was a
most successful visit for Sadat—particularly the National Press Club
luncheon where he most favorably impressed newsmen and Washing-
ton dignitaries—came Moshe Dayan, who under the guise of UJA
fund-raising, once more rallied American Jews around the country and
the “Israeli-Firsters” in Congress to the Zionist cause. Sadat was press-
ing his case in a swing through Western Europe, where Begin also was
striving for support.
Intent on reviving the peace process, which had ground to a near-
total halt, Carter found himself haunted by his temporizing attitude
toward the Israeli settlements on the West Bank and fear of Israel’s
supporters. Despite unaltering U.S. opposition to these settlements as
violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention and as provocations to the
Arabs, the Israelis continued to establish new ones and to claim that
the U.S. “does not object seriously” to these actions. Exasperated by
the announcement of a new settlement on the site of ancient Shiloh
(in the guise of an excavation dig), Vance protested, and upon instruc-
tions from the President, the State Department on February 7 released
the chronology (just covering the previous month) of U.S. reiterations
of its position in communications between the President and the Israeli
Chief of State, including a sharp note of January 27 regarding Tel
Aviv’s actions.
Begin, then in Geneva, arrogantly and contemptuously “‘re-
704 POLITICS OR POLICY
jected’’45 the U.S. position that the settlements were illegal and nega-
tive, and later added that the Vance remarks were “in complete contra-
diction” to the comments made by Carter at their December meeting
in Washington. Once more the White House, this time through Press
Secretary Jody Powell, ignominiously attempted to clarify the record
—‘reluctantly and with no desire to prolong the argument,” as he
stated—to indicate that the U.S. view of these settlements has been
repeated “publicly and privately by various American officials since
1967” and that there had been no “‘contradiction at any time between
that position and any presidential statement any ume.’’46
When the Israeli cabinet on February 26, after two days of debate,
decided not to change its policy and approved the plan to expand
Jewish settlements in northern Sinai and establish three new ones‘” on
the West Bank, the U.S. withheld immediate comment pending the
Begin March visit to Washington.*8 But a head-on collision between
Washington and Tel Aviv seemed unavoidable. Carter was under in-
cessant pressure to shift the U.S. role in the negotiations from modera-
tor to Zionist protagonist, even as totally consistent evenhandedness
appeared to be his principal weapon in persuading the Arabs to con-
tinue to believe that the only road to peace led through the White
House. The words of Lebanon’s An Nahar served as a serious reminder
to Washington: “The Arab world has heard enough brave words from
various American leaders. What is wanted now is concrete evidence of
the U.S. collective determination to put its power where its mouth
is.”"49
Since the President came into office, the noose around his neck
had gradually been tightened, as it had been in the past around the
necks of his predecessors, under the meticulously manipulated weight
of the Zionist connections through the Jewish connectors and their
Christian affiliates. No one was more important to the President than
his Chief Staff Aide for Domestic Affairs, Stuart Eizenstat, ‘““The Man
the President Listens To.’’5° Then there was Counsel Lipshutz, wit
his intimate B'nai B'rith ties, former Democratic National Committe
Chairman and Chief Trade Negotiator Robert S. Strauss, and th
Secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, and Energy, who were particu
larly pervious to Zionist pressures. Visiting Israel in October 1977 fo’
the signing of the agreement establishing an $80 million agricultur
research fund (an increase of $20 million over last year’s U.S. contrib
tion), Treasury Secretary Blumenthal told the Israelis that “Egypt’
disastrous economic situation will force it toward a peace settlemen
with Israel within three years.”’5!
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 705
The 1978 congressional elections were around the next corner,
and pro-Israel pollsters were warning Washington that Carter’s falling
popularity was due to his Middle East policy. The Times came up even
with a selected poll among “‘those who were informed on the Middle
East’? to show disapproval of the new Carter approach. A poll of 300
people taken at random among Jews was also used as a weapon to show
that Carter was losing his support because of his Mideast policy and
his election might be endangered. CBS Newsradio 88 intoned the
doom of the Democratic candidate—‘‘American Jews do not like
Carter’s turnabout on Israel.”’ An Israeli editorial writer commented,
“God’s gift to Israel is that the U.S. has this type of election cycle,” and
a noted American Jewish scholar remarked, “It’s as if we are fifty
million strong in this country—it’s unbelievable.’’53
Of no small contribution to such exuberance was the continued
performance of the New York Times. As the new year dawned, the
Sulzberger paper sparkled with slantings by headlining**; letters to the
editor weighted by size and placement®5; myth-information of Flora
Lewis columns®®; and editorial support for the latest Tel Aviv-Wash-
ington fall-back position that @ radical Palestiman state alongside Israel
could not be tolerated.5”
But with the peace momentum stalled in late February, primarily
over the West Bank-Gaza issue, and U.S. Ambassador Atherton shut-
tling to break the deadlock, the Times ran a surprising, moderately
objective three-part series on the Palestinians and the PLO,®8 and the
columns of the “‘new” Anthony Lewis increasingly continued to pre-
sent a more balanced look “‘at reality.”59 Everyone concerned—the
Israelis, Egyptians, Americans, Palestinians, other Arabs, and the
media, too—seemed to be reconciled to settling down to long-pro-
tracted maneuverings over the peace negotiations.
To help offset Israel’s request, presented in Washington by visit-
ing Defense Minister Weizman, for a long-term U.S. armaments com-
mitment of some $12 billion over a ten-year period (in addition to what
was already in the pipeline for 1978 and 1979), the White House
Proposed a $4.8 billion package plane deal. Egypt was to be sold fifty
F-5E jet interceptors, Saudi Arabia sixty F-15 fighter bombers, and
Israel was to be given by grant-credit fifteen F-15s and seventy-five of
the most advanced F-16 fighters. Zionists emitted the wildest howls of
Spposition to supplying the Saudis a replacement for their force of
British-built Lightning interceptors. This, they maintained, would
Upset the military balance, even though the planes would not be deliv-
€red before 1982, and it was very doubtful that Saudi Arabia, with 100
706 POLITICS OR POLICY
trained fighter pilots and equally limited ground personnel, could
handle such sophisticated planes. They would be sent, the Israelis
averred, to Arab confrontation states. But the Saudis had indicated
they were making the sale of these jets the test of professed U.S.
friendship.
The Israel-First bloc in Congress, impressed by the Zionist ar-
gumentation that the F-15s would be based at the Saudi base of Tabuk,
only 275 miles from Tel Aviv, persisted in their opposition to the
package deal, which would have blocked approval of planes for Israel
without a similar assent for Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The White House
countered, a la Rodgers and Hammerstein, “‘With us, it’s all or noth-
ing.”
As intensive lobbying on Capitol Hill went forward against this
Carter proposal, the publicity spotlight centered on the resignation of
Mark Siegel, White House liaison with the American Jewish commu-
nity, who declared he could no longer defend a policy that he had little
voice in shaping and with which he often disagreed. This coincided
with Begin’s hardened position; he insisted that no withdrawal from
the West Bank was required under his interpretation of Resolution
242, whatever partial withdrawal in the Sinai and Golan Heights might
be agreed to in the negotiating process—an interpretation character-
ized by William Buckley as “‘so idiosyncratic that even true believers
had difficulty keeping a straight face.”
In rallying a united Jewish front behind Begin prior to his sched-
uled March visit to Washington for the thorny discussions on settle-
ments and withdrawal, Rabbi Schindler insinuated that Security Ad-
viser Brzezinski was ‘‘anti-Semitic.”” The President himself, not
immune from attack, was now declared “‘a question mark in the eyes
of American Jews’’—ploys even the New York Times was obliged to
decry as “scurrilous” and “‘insulting.’’6°
The deep divisions over Begin’s policy within Israel and among
her U.S. supporters all but vanished with the March 11 raid into Israel
in which thirty-seven Israelis were killed and some seventy-five
wounded by a PLO band of guerrillas that landed from rubber boats
and hijacked a tourist bus. The abortive Palestinian fedayeen intended
to capture hostages in exchange for companions held in Israeli raids.
As Time magazine pointed out, “the bloody massacre that ensued;
unfortunately, may have been as much the result of Israeli incompe
tence as Palestinian menace. . . . The police commander at the road-
block gave a blanket open-fire order to terrified traffic cops, and thet
wild fusillade when the bus was finally halted probably killed mor
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 707
hostages than did the terrorists.’’6!
Three days later, in Israel’s largest military operation since the
1973 war and by far her deadliest retaliatory raid, 15,000 combined air,
naval, and land forces swept across the borders into Lebanon and
rained death on innocent Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians
alike. Begin, returning to the tactics of his Irgun days, called it “‘a
purification of Lebanon,” a drive to “‘cut off the arm of evil,” the PLO.
Pro-Zionist papers, such as the New York Post, labeled it “REVENGE’’62
in large letters across the front page. The operation claimed close to
2,000 lives, and some 265,000 refugees fled northward toward Sidon
and Beirut.
Most of the casualties were civilians with no affiliation whatsoever
with the PLO. No military targets were struck, and what had been hit
hard were civilian dwellings. Military correspondents calculated that
the Israelis fired an average of a dozen 155-millimeter shells for every
guerrilla known to have been in the area (some 220 were killed and 23
captured), and dropped at least twenty tons of high explosives per
bunker and village.63 Time could only conclude that this had been
‘deliberate counterterror on the part of the Israelis.’’64
Under the pretext of establishing a six-mile ‘‘cordon sanitaire”’ be-
tween Lebanon and Israel, ‘‘Stone of Wisdom,” the plan long on the
military establishment’s drawing board, was updated and put into
effect. Within six days the overpowering Israeli forces had subdued
Palestinian resistance and swept to the long-coveted Litani River; all
of southern Lebanon was in their hands before the U.N. cease-fire
could take effect and the international peacekeeping force (UNIFIL),
under the command of Ghanian General Emmanuel Alexander Er-
skine, could assume its duties. As U.N. forces moved in, there were few
signs the Israelis intended to leave, the digging of trenches and placing
of barbed wire indicating the contrary. Despite the U.N. Security
Council Resolution 425 calling for forthright and total withdrawal, it
was not until June 14 that Israel finally completed its removal from
Lebanese soil. But just as they had deliberately encouraged turmoil in
the south by refusing to allow the Syrian peacekeeping troops there at
the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1976, now the Israelis turned over
twenty of the most vital portions along a forty-mile border front, three
to five miles deep, to their allies, the right-wing Lebanese Christian
militia commanded by Major Saad Haddad, instead of to General
Erskine’s U.N. forces. Israel was determined not to surrender control
of fully fortified villages, maintained as forward bases for its potential
Operations.
708 POLITICS OR POLICY
As Begin flew to Washington on March 19 for his week-delayed
meeting with Carter to iron out existing differences, to which was
added the critical occupation of southern Lebanon, the Israeli leader’s
philosophy about the West Bank could be summed up in these words
of Robert Frost: ‘““The land was ours before we were the land’s.’’65
The Carter-Begin talks were a total failure. To avoid an open
confrontation, the customary joint communiqué was not issued by the
White House. As Begin returned home “‘to put his house in order,”
reports that the White House was out to unseat the Israeli leader,
vehemently denied in Washington, were widely spread through media
sources closest to the Israelis. Banner front-page New York Post head-
lines screamed one day: “U.S. vs. Israel: Worst Crisis,’’®® and the
following day: “‘U.S. Presses for Ouster of Begin.’’®” The alleged at-
tempted sandbagging of Begin was another means of rallying Jews
against Carter. And Begin himself added fuel to the rumors by curtly
declaring, ““The Premier of Israel is elected by the people of Israel, not
by the President of the United States.”
Although General Weizman had called for new directions, the
Cabinet unanimously supported Begin’s position, and a parliamentary
vote of confidence was carried 64 to 32. As the Arab states struggled
to reach an agreement on the necessity of a summit conference to close
their divided ranks and face the consequences of the latest disaster in
Lebanon, Yasir Arafat pledged observance of the U.N. cease-fire. But
it was unreasonable to believe that the PLO would give up the war of
liberation it had been waging for fourteen years, and that the more
moderate Al Fatah could stop the more radical Habash group from
attacking Christian positions in the south or crossing in forays into
Israel. Guerrilla warfare, a la Vietnam, loomed ahead.
The Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza did not remain quie
during the invasion of Lebanon, once more strongly indicating thet
PLO affinity, although this was not reported in the U.S. unul muc
later. For five days the region seethed with unrest, ‘‘schools wer
closed and youths roamed the streets, throwing stones and settin
fires.’’68 The retaliation of Israeli soldiers was severe, and in one inc
dent two boys of eight and sixteen were killed when an army truck ra
into them. At a school in Beit Jala, five miles south of Jerusalem, fif
Israeli troops rolled up in trucks, ordered the pupils—all in their ear
teens—to close their windows, then hurled beer-can-size canisters
U.S.-made antiriot gas into the packed classrooms. Several severe ac
dents followed.6° Raymonda Taweel, Palestinian activist,7° was seize
in her home by seven Israeli soldiers and plainclothes officers an
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 709
thrown into prison. The charge: ‘“Terrorist activities and creating pub-
lic disturbances.”
Sadat criticized both the PLO and Israel for their actions, which
complicated the waning peace momentum. He indicated he would not
yet desert his initiative and still favored further efforts to reach some
sort of an agreement with Begin. Whatever the final outcome, the
Egyptian leader could at least boast that he had ‘‘Aushed”’ his Israeli
adversary out into the open and for the first time had bared Zionist
aspirations for the world to see.
While Carter’s attention was momentarily diverted from the Mid-
dle East to other problems on his four-country trip to Venezuela,
Brazil, Nigeria, and Liberia, the Zionist lobby was struggling to main-
tain both its inordinate influence in Congress and its monolithic con-
trol over the Jewish community in the face of growing criticism of
Israeli intransigency being voiced publicly by such leaders as Senator
Abraham Ribicoff,”! foreign trade negotiator Robert Strauss and,
more surprisingly, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, who allegedly had told
White House officials that the Conference of Presidents, the spearhead
of Jewish political lobbying, had become a “destructive force,” a
“major obstacle to peace in the Middle East.’’?7? To silence the dissent,
the leaders of organized Jewry stoutly insisted that open criticism of
Israel amounted to heresy. “The strength of Israel depends on the
strength of the American Jewish community and its unity in support
of Israel,” Rabbi Schindler contended.
The Zionist lobby continued to pull every possible string on its
powerful congressional bow to block the plane package deal and to
prevent the President from using aid in any way as leverage in dealing
with Israel. In a similar 1975 test of strength, when President Ford
tried to exert a little pressure, he was speedily reminded in a letter
signed by seventy-six Senators ‘‘to be responsive to Israel’s urgent
military and economic needs.” At that time the Israelis received what
they wanted. Carter, facing a bitter and possibly losing fight in Con-
gress, softened his language about treating the $4.8 billion sale of
planes to the three countries as a package to permit separate congres-
Sional consideration of each sale, but at the same time declared that
if planes for one country were voted down, he would withdraw the
Proposal to sell to the other two countries. To further mollify the
“Israel-First’” bloc and avoid a confrontation, the White House agreed
to increase by twenty the number of jets for Israel, in line with Kiss-
Inger’s proposal in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations
ommittee.
710 POLITICS OR POLICY
Using Israel’s thirtieth anniversary as an excuse, Begin came to
the U.S. again on April 30, the fourth visit within ten months. At the
State Department and the White House he received the warmest wel-
comes. Afterward, at a reception and ceremony on the White House
lawn attended by Jewish leaders and rabbis from across the country,
the President pledged “total, absolute commitment to Israel’s secu-
rity.” In response, Begin called Carter’s speech “one of the greatest
moral statements ever.”
Traveling on his own Israeli Boeing 707, Begin flew coast to coast.
He spoke befoie enthusiastic audiences in Los Angeles (and politicked
with ambitious Governor Jerry Brown), Chicago, and New York, where
overflow crowds greeted him at an Israel Bond luncheon, a parade up
Fifth Avenue, and a festival in Central Park. At Northwestern Univer-
sity in Evanston, Illinois, an honorary degree was bestowed on the
Israeli leader, although the student body had voted 1,199 to 907
against this action. (The university’s public relations action was not
unrelated to its refusal to remove Arthur Butz, the professor who had
written The Hoax of the 20th Century, the very controversial book deny-
ing any holocaust had taken place.)
Not only did Begin raise money and sell bonds for Israel, but
he asked American Jews to support his opposition to relinquishing
Arab territories and to the three-way jet sale. No foreign chief of
state, as One news magazine put it, had ever “so unabashedly ven-
tured out into the hustings, as it were, to drum up support for his
policies.”’73 And American Jewry had been programmed for top re-
ceptivity to Begin through the holocaust frenzy into which the NBC
miniseries and vast accompanying propaganda had cast them.
While the media reported little else but exuberant reaction to the
Begin exhortations, the U.S. and the Begin government were on a
confrontation course.
Refusing to accept advice from House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill
for a delay, the President sent the controversial package to Congress.
Following a tie vote in its Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate 1
a stunning upset refused to block the plane deal. The Israel lobb
combine of American-Israel Policy Affairs Committee director Morr
Amitay and chairman of the Conference of Presidents Rabbi Alex
ander Schindler hoped that their magic, which had never before faile
with Congress, would bring victory over the administration. But th
President was upheld in a 54-44 vote in which there were untol
surprises.
Senator Abraham Ribicoff was joined by other stalwart Israel su
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 711
porters such as Mike Gravel (Dem.-Alaska), Tom Eagleton (Dem.-
Mo.), and Adlai Stevenson, Jr. (Dem.-IIl.) in support of the package
because, as heretofore staunch Zionist Ribicoff explained it, ““The
Saudis are essential to the search for peace. They have a moral and
economic force in the Islamic world.”
The White House packed a lobbying wallop of its own by persuad-
ing Hubert Humphrey’s widow through a combined Carter-Mondale
effort to support the program in the committee and in winning over
Republican Senate House leader, Howard Baker. The Tennessee Sen-
ator, although presidentially ambitious, shifted drastically from his
past record of catering to the Zionists and carried twenty-five other
critical votes from his party. This upset the strategy of National Chair-
man William Brock, who had hoped to play further domestic politics
with this serious issue.
Many of the Senators agonized over their votes. In the end, anti-
Communist sentiment and the necessity of keeping OPEC on a course
of moderate pricing prevailed. King Khalid’s letter citing the need to
halt potential Communist dangers in the region had been effective,
although Foreign Minister Prince Saud bin Faisal had made clear he
would accept only limitations on deployment of its F-15s that are of
“general applicability and not aimed at Saudi Arabia for a specific
requirement.” Moshe Dayan had made it easier to support the Presi-
dent by indicating that rather than Israel not receive her planes, he
would prefer the passage of the package even if this meant aircraft for
the Saudis and the Egyptians as well.
Only three Democratic Senators who were running for reelection
in six months voted for the proposal. Votes and campaign funds from
Jewish backers have always been decisive to their party, and the Israel
lobby was very far from vanquished.
In addressing the two-day annual conference of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington a week before the cru-
cial Senate vote, Republican presidential aspirant Connecticut Senator
Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., attacked the Carter Middle East stand. He
Suggested that the administration was trying to make Jews the scape-
goats for its foreign policy difficulties and noted that “time and time
again”’ in history ‘‘when national leaders ran into difficulties, they
found it convenient to blame problems on the Jews. We know the
results.”” This insinuation of anti-Semitism against the President and
Brzezinski was calculated to rouse the deep-seated fears of his 1,000
listeners, who interrupted his remarks twenty-six times with applause,
including his statement, “If I were President, I would have his (Brze-
712 POLITICS OR POLICY
zinski’s) resignation before sundown, and his reputation for break-
fast.”’74
The Senator declared that the NBC “Holocaust” program
“helped put into perspective Israel’s concern for security.” He added:
“Mr. Carter and Mr. Brzezinski see Menachem Begin as an agent of
reaction. I see him as a guardian and one of the principal architects of
one of the greatest acts of redemption in the history of man.”
Presidential Counsel Robert Lipshutz was immediately granted
the right to reply to Weicker. He attacked “with sorrow” this gross —
demagoguery, as did subsequently Senators Ribicoff, Javits, and Percy.
(Weicker’s Press Secretary, Rebecca Lett, later stated that the Senator
stood by his speech.) The divisions among American supporters of
Israel were drastically widening. The solidarity of American and Israeli
Jews was very much in question.
Die-hard Zionists such as Senator Javits considered the sale of
planes for Egypt and Saudi Arabia “‘a grave threat to the special U.S.-
Israel relationship.” To them the plane vote was a test of their ability
to break the Saudi connection before it blossomed into another com-
peting special relationship. They ought to have taken much comfort
from what Vice President Mondale stated in seeking to calm the bitter-
ness in the American Jewish community: “Of the total U.S. military aid
abroad in next year’s budget, 42 percent of the supporting assistance,
48 percent of military sales credits, and 56 percent of all military grants
go to Israel. Moreover, repayment of about half of those $1 billion
worth of credits is consistently forgiven.”’75 (Since 1974, $3 billion out
of $5.5 billion in military purchases have been turned into outright
grants.)
While a Senate rejection of the plane deal would have been a
death blow to what was left of the Sadat initiative, the positive benefits
seemed to be minimal as the roadblocks to a Middle East settlement
remained. Doors to peace have seldom been opened by a flow of
deadly weaponry. The refusal of the Begin cabinet on June 18, despite
Washington pressure, to give any commitment regarding the perma-
nent status of the West Bank and Gaza until after the end of the five
years of so-called Palestinian self-rule, indicated just how far away the
end of the conflict was. Washington very quietly registered its displeas-
ure and called on Sadat to come up with a detailed plan for the Pales-
tinians. The Egyptian President was already wallowing in domestic
troubles brought on by his suppression of opposition parties, con-
tinued economic woes, and growing popular discontent, particularly
in the military, which was heightened by the defection of former Chief
ae
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 713
of Staff Lt. General Saad Eddin el-Shazli, who from his exile abroad
wrote his searing book, The Crossing of the Suez,’® and led the
opposition outside the country.
After attempting to dilute support of Begin by meeting with
Defense Minister Weizman and Opposition Leader Peres, Sadat sought
to satisfy his internal critics by expelling the Israeli military mission
based in Cairo since January. As the Arabs quietly tried to close their
ranks and find means of persuading Sadat to gracefully drop his peace
initiative, the U.S. endeavored to impart an illusion of progress through
staged conferences, such as at Leeds Castle in England, where Secretary
Vance and Foreign Ministers Dayan and Kamel held their inconclusive
talks, and by the resumption of shuttle diplomacy by Ambassador Alfred
Atherton.
It was declining public approval of his conduct as President, at a
time the autumn Congressional elections were quickly approaching,
that induced Carter to assume the grave hazards of asummit. Only a visit
to Jerusalem and Alexandria by the Secretary of State, armed with
personal letters from the White House, persuaded the stalemated Israeli
and Egyptian leaders to agree to join President Carter in a Camp David
summit on September 5.
Washington’s fears, based on reports of Egyptian military prepara-
tions or a possible Sadat move into the Sinai by refusing to agree to an
extension of the 1975 disengagement agreement, prompted Carter to
schedule the Camp David spectacular. Israeli plans to establish five new
settlements in the Jordan Rift, only temporarily shelved until after the
summit, added to U.S. imperatives for keeping the dialogue open. The
Gush Emunim, Begin’s most enthusiastic supporters, announced a plan
which would provide a Jewish majority in ‘Judea and Samaria” (the
West Bank), by the end of the century. Begin held a midnight,
clandestine meeting with Lebanese anti-Palestinian leader Camille
Chamoun in Jerusalem.
The media continued its slanted reportage, particularly misleading
regarding the nature of the Lebanese war. Endless misleading headlines,
“Christians Attacked,” ‘“Beirut’s Christians Return to Streets,’’ etc.,
misrepresented the conflict as a religious one. Hidden from the public
were the pernicious efforts of the Israeli-supported Phalangist forces of
Pierre Geymayel and Chamoun, representing only a portion of the
Maronite Catholics and bitterly opposed by the Greek and Syrian
Orthodox, Melkites, as well as other Catholic and Protestant groups, to
bring about a partition of the country. Lebanon’s Major Haddad, who
refused to accept dismissal by Beirut from his army post, continued both
714 POLITICS OR POLICY
to harass the U.N. forces and to block the deployment of units of the
regular Lebanese army, thus preventing them from taking over the
60-mile border strip which remained subservient to Israel. In his efforts
to stabilize the country by maintaining a balance of power, Syria’s Hafez
Assad remained caught in a military-political quagmire.
The Camp David negotiations between Sadat, Begin and Carter,
shrouded in complete secrecy, were long and intensive. At one point,
Sadat threatened to leave and had a helicopter ready unless all of the
Sinai, not part, as the Israelis envisioned, were returned and all Israeli
settlements abandoned. In return for Sadat yielding on his Palestinian
position, Begin gave way on the Sinai. Sharon, then Minister of
Agriculture, indicated that there were ‘‘no security risks in giving up the
Sinai provided that there was a firm hold on the West Bank.”’
After twelve days, the talks were successfully concluded and two
accords initialed by Egypt and Israel on September 17. A nationwide
television audience was treated to the unusual picture of Sadat and
Begin embracing one another, with a beaming Carter looking on. “‘A
framework for peace in the Middle East” covered the future of the West
Bank and Gaza, and ‘‘a framework for the conclusion of a peace treaty
between Egyptand Israel”’ covered Sinai and bilateral relations between
Egypt and Israel.
With Cairo and Tel Aviv in disagreement on many points, the
three-months deadline for signing the treaty passed. Just when it seemed
that certain defeat faced him, Carter flew to the Middle East, and
shuttling back and forth between Cairo and Tel Aviv, he miraculously
bridged the differences and brought the Egyptian and Israeli leaders to
Washington for the signing of the treaty in a widely publicized
extravaganza on March 26. Almost with one voice the press in the
Arab world vehemently assailed the treaty as a ‘‘sell-out.”
The flexibility of both parties to the treaty had been molded by the
additional goodies Carter dished out to turn the tide at the breakfast
meeting with Begin, followed by the airport conclave with Sadat. All
concerned were deliriously happy. Begin had the peace he so cherished
with his most powerful Arab foe; Sadat had iron-clad guarantees for the
return of the Sinai; and Carter triumphantly returned to Washington to
stem his decline in the public opinion polls.
The unwitting American taxpayer, of course, picked upa little chit
for the treaty. Israel received supplementary assistance of $2.2-billion in
military credits and $800-million in grants for construction of two air
bases in the Negev to replace the Sinai bases being surrendered. Egypt
was given an additional $1.5-billion in military credits, $200-million in
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 715
economic grants, and $100-million in economic loans. For regular
foreign assistance for fiscal year '79 Israel received $1.79-billion and
$1.79-billion for fiscal year 1980. Egypt received $902-million for fiscal
year '79 and $971-million for fiscal year 80. The U.S. also agreed to raise
aid to Israel up to $2-billion for fiscal year '8] and $2.2-billion for fiscal
year ‘82. Egypt would receive $1.4-billion for fiscal year ’81 and $1.6-
billion for fiscal year 1982. This brought the total amount under the
treaty to a mere $17.5 billion.
The Egyptian Cabinet voted unanimously to approve the treaty,
and there were only two opposing votes in the Israeli Cabinet. Begin
assured the Knesset that there would ‘‘never be a Palestinian state on the
West Bank”’ and that Jerusalem would ‘‘never be divided again.’’ What
was more important to the Israelis was the U.S. commitment both to
strengthen its forces in the area to prevent any treaty violations which
threatened the security of Israel and to veto any U.N. Security Council
action which would be detrimental to the accord.
What helped induce Sadat to sign was the promise by the U.S. that it
would both supply some troops to the Sinai peace-keeping forces and
would be a partner in future peace negotiations—and, of course, the
hope of additional economic rewards. The Egyptian leader was still
seeking meaningful American investment to help alleviate the ever-
worsening economic plight which had so seriously plagued the land of
the Pharaohs since the days of the Khedive Ismail, who was forced to sell
the Suez Canal to the British government and French private interests.
Arab opponents of Camp David met in Baghdad to take action to
limit the effects of the accords and the treaty. A fifteen-billion dollar offer
to Sadat to change his mind was rejected. All the Arab countries, save
Sudan, Oman and Somalia, severed relations with Cairo and withdrew
their diplomatic representatives. The headquarters of the Arab League
were moved from Cairo to Tunis.
The attitude of the Palestinians and Arab intellectuals could best be
summed up in the words of Palestinian scholar Dr. Fayez Sayegh:
Under the Camp David accords, a fraction of the Palestinian people (under
one-third of the whole) is promised a fraction of its rights (not including the
national right to self-determination and statehood) and a fraction of its
homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole); this promise is to be
fulfilled several years from now, through a step-by-step process in which Israel is
able at every point to exercise a decisive veto power over any agreement. Beyond
that, the vast majority of Palestinians is condemned to permanent loss of its
Palestinian identity, to permanent exile and statelessness, to permanent
separation from one another and from Palestine—to a life without national
716 POLITICS OR POLICY
hope or meaning! 77
In negotiations for a fruitful definition of autonomy, Sadat found
Begin even more than at Camp David to be obdurate, obstinate and
intransigent in his insistence that the West Bank was Biblical Judea and
Samaria, which had been given to the Jewish people by God. Autonomy,
he contended, applied to West Bank and Gaza inhabitants—not to the
territory—and was to be limited to administrative control of local
affairs. The Palestinians would exercise no right of self-determination,
with a review of the status of the occupied territories only after the
five-year transition period.
Washington tried to help out. Roving Ambassador Robert Strauss,
although an inveterate Zionist who, as a former chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, had been steeped in domestic politics,
was given the difficult task of putting Cairo and Tel Aviv on the same
wavelength regarding Palestinian autonomy. When he left this
thankless job, another Zionist took over this important negotiating post,
former Xerox chairman Sol Linowitz. He was no more successful.
The input of private citizen Henry Kissinger, who at all times has
visibly demonstrated that he has never really exited from Washington,
was far more important than either of these two official negotiators. The
former Secretary of State had done all he could to encourage both Sadat
and Begin in the final moments to come to terms and sign the treaty.
Although most critical of other aspects of the foreign policy of the Carter
Administration, he told Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borgrave:
On the Middle East I would give the Administration high marks. The basic
strategy is correct, Camp David was the right approach in the sense that it
represented a solution by stages. 78
Kissinger could not but have been a little pleased and even flattered
to see to what extent his Democratic successors, Vance-Brzezinski-Carter,
carried forward his divide-and-rule policy. Arab disunity became a joint
goal of U.S. and Israel foreign policy in response to the Arafat
conciliatory visit to King Hussein in Amman and the truce in the
twelve-year-old feud between the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath Parties (only
temporary, as union efforts between these two countries failed, and Syria
soon supported Iran in the war against Iraq).
The concession the Israeli Labor government wrested from
Kissinger in 1975 as a price for signing Disengagement II], namely, that
the United States would not dialogue with the PLO until Israel was
recognized, continued to plague American diplomatic efforts. This was
dramatically highlighted by the Andrew Young affair. The U.S.
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 717
Ambassador to the U.N. met secretly at the home of Kuwaiti Ambassador
Abdulla Bishara where PLO Observer at the U.N. Zehdi Terzi was
present. They discussed the postponement of the Security Council
debate which would have resulted in a certain U.S. veto of an Arab-
Third World resolution favoring Palestinian self-determination, an
acuon Washington wished to avoid. Young was fired for doing the
verboten, talking to the PLO. Sentimental Arabs did not press for the
resolution at the resumed Security Council meeting so as not to force the
reuring Ambassador to exercise a veto as his last act as U.S. representative.
As an aftermath to the Young resignation, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, under the chairmanship of the Rev. Joseph
Lowery as well as black leader Jesse Jackson, moved to closer ties with
the PLO. Jackson and Lowery visited Arafat in Beirut, where they issued
strong statements denouncing the continued bombing of Lebanon and
otherwise indicated support for the Palestinians. But this shift of some
of its leaders had little affect on the total black sentiment largely
expressed through organizations which continued to ally themselves
closely with Organized Jewry.
The 1975 disengagement agreement contained still another Kissinger
gift for Israel. Iran’s Shah Pahlevi, totally impervious to the needs of his
people, was driven from his peacock throne and flew to Aswan in Egypt
on January 16, 1979. In one of their first moves, the Ayatollah Khomeini
and his fundamentalist mullahs turned the Israeli Embassy over to the
PLO for its headquarters. (The Khomeini-Arafat empathy lasted long
enough for the PLO leader to arrange the early release of seven American
hostages.)
The fall of the Shah emphasized other dangers for Israel. Iranian oi]
production was the source for sixty percent of the Israeli state’s supply.
But with his foresight, Kissinger had made sure in a side accord to the
agreement that the U.S. assumed the responsibility for making up to Tel
Aviv any petroleum shortages she might incur from Iran or elsewhere.
Very cognizant of the importance of their many American
connections and connectors, the Israelis moved to strengthen these ties
for the battle over autonomy. At a Spring (1979) luncheon, Finance
Minister Simcha Erlich reminded guests at a Greater New York
Committee for Israel Bonds gathering: ‘‘We must mobilize the
tremendous reserves of Arab oil and money.’’?? Begin told the several
thousand Jewish leaders from all over the U.S. ‘‘how powerful was their
clout in Washington, and their strength is such that Washington quails
before them.” (Subsequently, he tried to tie the hands of rebel leaders in
Organized Jewry by urging them to ‘“‘consider whether the public
718 POLITICS OR POLICY
statements of dissent from Israeli policy would strengthen or weaken
those who negotiate for Israel.’’)
Sadat increasingly became only too aware of just how enormous
this power was. He underestimated the strength of Zionist pressures over
the White House. Ambiguities in the accords, never resolved at Camp
David, were resolved by Israeli faits accomplis. Less than four weeks
after the treaty signing, Israel announced the establishment of two new
West Bank settlements as Begin claimed that the freeze was to take place
only during the three-month period during which the treaty was being
negotiated. He assured settlers at Hebron that they represented “‘only the
start of the development of the land.”
Originally, Sadat insisted that he could never accept Jewish
settlements on the West Bank and an Israeli military presence there,
which Begin contended was not merely to assume public order, but to
guarantee the ‘‘permanent security of the borders.’’
The autonomy talks which began in Alexandria and then were
moved to the Netherlands and Herzlia in Israel, with the U.S. inter-
mittently present, failed to resolve basic differences. The Israelis still
insisted that the Palestinians be given only inconsequential adminis-
trative powers, while matters of security, water, land and other more
important aspects of self-rule were to be left in the hands of the Israeli
government. The Egyptian Parliament strongly insisted on the return of
East Jerusalem to Arab hands.
The talks were called off by Sadat, only to be resumed when Carter
intervened by telephone. Once again, they were terminated, only to be
resumed, although Israel made clear that it would never agree to the
creation of a Palestinian state and that East Jerusalem was not to come
under the autonomy plan.
There was little help from within Israel to move the autonomy talks
along. The leaders of Israel’s Peace Now movement, doves if judged by a
strong reluctance to go to war and opposition to further settlements,
were, however, equally reluctant to oppose Zionist nationalist philos-
ophy. Their own widely distributed major pamphlet expostulated:
“Now, for the first time in over thirty years, we have the opportunity to
move from negative Zionism, the enforced concern with defense, to
positive Zionism.” In a letter to the Jerusalem Post defending its
position, the group claimed that nothing which it advocated had not
already been advocated ‘“‘by Israeli leaders whose Zionist credentials
cannot be doubted.”’ The image of the state rather than justice for the
Palestinians seemed to be its primary concern.
The Knesset voted to permit further new settlements on the West
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 719
Bank, even over the protests of Washington. Minister of Defense
Weizman, labeled a moderate simply because he was not as extreme as
Begin or Sharon, announced plans for six para-military settlements.
Even in the face of some opposition at home, he permitted the
establishment of new settlements at Elon Moreh near Nablus and the
construction of religious and field schools in Hebron, the largest Arab
city on the West Bank.
Angered by the successful Arafat-Bruno Kreisky- Willi Brandt meeting
with its strong statement of support for Palestinian rights and by the
new European initiative to push toward Palestinian self-determination,
Begin lashed out in continuous vehement denunciations of the PLO to
whom he invariably referred as ‘‘a murderous neo-Nazi organization.”
To the March U.N. 1980 call to dismantle existing settlements and
cease construction and planning of new ones, the Israelis answered
arrogantly and defiantly. Although Washington—both the White
House and the President—made it clear that it considered such
settlements illegal and contrary to the Camp David accords, Begin
strongly denied any controvention in letter or spirit of the treaty he had
signed with Sadat.
The foment in the occupied territories increased when gunmen near
the Israel settlement in Hebron killed four Israelis and one American
Jew and wounded seventeen others as they returned home from Sabbath
worship. This ugly incident had followed in the wake of a night raid
into Hebron by Israeli settlers (many, followers of Meir Kahane) in
which cars were destroyed, doors smashed down, hundreds of homes
entered, and all that was glass—radios, televisions, windows—broken so
that one commentator referred to it as the West Bank’s ‘“‘Kristalnacht.”’
For allegedly encouraging the attack on the Israelis, Halhoul Mayor
Mohammed Milhem, Hebron Mayor Fahd Qawasmeh, and chief of the
Hebron Religious Court Sheikh Rajab Bayyoud Tamimi were summarily
deported.
To add to the unrest, a seventeen-year-old-boy in the smal] village of
Anabta was killed and two other students wounded when the Israeli
military governor and his aides entered the yard of a secondary school
where a peaceful May Day demonstration was being held, words were
exchanged, stones were thrown and shots fired. When the three
deportees, backed by hundreds of supporters, attempted to push their
way across the King Hussein Bridge, Israeli soldiers blocked the path
with steel barriers, causing considerable violence over the River Jordan.
In ensuing clashes between Israeli troops and demonstrating West Bank
Students, six youngsters were hospitalized. Bir Zeit University was
720 POLITICS OR POLICY
intermittently opened and closed as the campus was rocked by
demonstrations and Israeli military interventions.
With the arrest and imprisonment of Nablus Mayor Bassam Shaka,
all the other twenty-five mayors on the West Bank resigned in sympathy.
Israeli soldiers raided and attacked the Jalazoun refugee camp. From
their exile in Amman and Beirut, the deported leaders called on the
Palestinians in the occupied area to revolt as a curfew was imposed ona
large portion of the West Bank and Gaza as demonstrations spread.
Efforts through near-unanimous U.N. resolutions to stem the violence
were of no avail.
In support of its settlement plans, the Israeli government ended the
regulations which had heretofore prohibited Israeli citizens and
businesses from buying land in the occupied Arab territories. In
response to Cairo’s protests, Tel Aviv upbraided Egypt for tts fatlure to
proceed with the normalization of relations as provided by the Camp
David accords.
Although election day was some eighteen months away, the
quadrennial Presidential campaigning had begun, and Sadat’s quiet
prodding of Washington to exert pressure on Israe] to show more
flexibility went unheeded. In stating that there should not be ‘‘a fairly
radical, new, and independent nation tn the heart of the Middle East,”
Carter accepted Tel Aviv’s fiat for limited autonomy and disappointed
his Egypuan friend.
Sadat flew to Washington, but had to retreat from his position,
fearful of alienating the White House and of endangering his public
image. As the man who had brought “‘peace,’’ he was more popular than
any Western leader, a position which could be seriously endangered by
Begin’s repeated accusation that “the Egyptians were resorting to
notorious anti-Semitic expressions.” The Zionist groups saw to it that
the contestants in the on-going presidential sweepstakes were made very
aware of Begin's words and views.
President Carter early amassed a seemingly unbeatable lead in his
battle for renomination by the Democratic Conclave in New York City.
But a presidential flip-flop presented Ted Kennedy with a golden
opportunity to exploit the Jewish vote and cut heavily into delegates
pledged to Carter.
The U.S. had joined other U.N. Security Council members in a
unanimous vote on a resolution calling upon Israel] to dismantle
existing settlements and to cease the construction and planning of new
settlements in the ‘Arab territories occupied since 1967, including
Jerusalem.”’ The resolution further requested member states to provide
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 721
Israel with no foreign aid ‘‘to be used specifically in connection with the
settlements.”
Prior to the vote, unbelievable pressures were exerted on the White
House to alter its position, and even afterwards the condemnations
continued to roll in. Other presidential aspirants from both major
political parties and independent Congressman John Anderson joined
Kennedy in upbraiding the President for the position he had taken.
Once more, as in previous presidential campaigns, the air was filled
with a new version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s hit song from Annie
Get Your Gun. Recklessly echoing everywhere was ‘‘I can do more for
Israel than you can.”
Two days later, Carter stated that the U.S. voted in favor of the
resolution with the understanding that all references to Jerusalem
would be ‘‘deleted’’ and that a “failure to communicate’ with
Ambassador Donald McHenry had resulted in a U.S. vote disregarding
the original intent to abstain.
This vote change after the fact had no effect whatsoever; it did not
help Mr. Carter with the insatiable Zionists and only lowered the
President's image in the Arab world, as it did Uncle Sam’s.
By early 1979 Organized Jewry had already clearly indicated that the
vital Jewish vote would not go its traditional Democratic way in the 1980
elections. Carter had been the subject of attacks because of his gestures,
however vacillating, to the Palestinians. The Zionists were also mindful
of Washington's promise to the Saudis. In return for its moderation in
the face of demands by other OPEC members for further price increases
and their refusal to cut production, the house of Saud had been assured
there would be some movement towards relinquishment of Israeli-held
territories.
Carter also gained further Zionist enmity by siding with Sadat in the
interpretation given to Israeli settlements in the Camp David accords.
This led to bitter Zionist attacks on Carter, which accelerated after the
Security Council flip-flop. Presidential hopes were also further
hamstrung by the unfortunate Billy Carter affair, the exceedingly well-
publicized stories about his brother’s ties with Qaddafi and Libya.
On the Republican side, former Secretary of the Treasury John
Connolly evinced seeming sympathy for the Palestinian-Arab position
by urging the return of all Israeli-held territory and the right of the
Palestinians to determine their own fate. Immediately, he came under
heavy pressure from the Zionists, who barred him from a speaking
engagement in New York.
In announcing his formal candidacy for the Republican nomination
722 POLITICS OR POLICY
at the Washington National Press Club and becoming the sixth aspirant
(not counting Gerald Ford), the three-time former governor of Texas
showed himself to be an inveterate master of doubletalk. In the course of
discussing the Middle East and the serious situation in Iran, he swung
into euphoria over the Zionist state:
I have long looked on Israel not only as a nation that deserves our support from
the moral standpoint, but from a strategic standpoint...that it clearly brings into
sharp focus the importance of the preservation and strength of the State of Israel
today. Nothing could be more important at this moment.
Only a few minutes earlier, in responding to certain questions,
Connolly had defended the role of his large Houston law firm (208
lawyers), which had several Arab countries as clients. The Republican
aspirant declared that this would create:
no conflict of interest because as a candidate I won't be a member of the firm....
Let me assure you, the Arab clients have our professional abilities, but they do
not have our philosophy or our conscience.
Naturally, this was carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. When
well-known New York attorney Rita Hauser, one of Connolly’s earlier
ardent supporters, failed to commit him to further public support of
Israel, she resigned from the campaign and soon joined others in
attacking him.
Carter had not made himself more popular with the Zionists by
telling a Washington press conference that the U.S. ‘‘considers the
creation of Israeli settlements to be inconsistent with international law.”
However, he had prudently added: ‘There is a limit to what we can do to
impose our will on a sovereign nation.” Senator Kennedy slammed
Carter for his rebuke to Israeli settlements and claimed that he alone was
the hope for maintaining ‘‘our sacred alliance with Israel.”
To bolster his image with the Jewish community, sagging despite
his rescue of the peace treaty, the President even attended a Seder. This
night was indeed ‘‘different from all other nights,” because for the first
time the President was at the home of Assistant Stuart Eizenstat for this
Jewish holiday.
The 96th Congress certainly did not help to stem the continuing
politicalization of the Middle East section when it rejected legislation to
do away with the antiquated Electoral College system. Forty-two
senators under the leadership of Birch Bayh, supported by President
Carter, bowed to the power and pressures of well-entrenched minority
interest groups led by the powerful Zionists. *°
Enter Carter-and Then Begin 723
With the exception of Connolly’s vacillating position, all of the
twelve extant Democratic and Republican aspirants bowed completely
to Zionist power. As one indication of Ronald Reagan’s determination
to consolidate his hold on the Jewish Republican vote and break into
Democratic strength, he appointed ardent Israelist Maxwell Rabb®! as
vice chairman of his campaign committee. The initial Connolly nod to
the Palestinians had provided the Reagan forces with the opportunity to
push their bid for Zionist votes and accompanying dollars even further.
The independent candidacy of Anderson, marked by his vigorous and
blatant support of Israel, markedly affected the campaign tactics of his
rivals, President Carter and Governor Reagan, who had emerged
victorious at their conventions.
The shattering, overwhelming defeat of President Carter at the
hands of his California rival sent the Republican Party into the White
House without any obligation to the Jewish vote. Nonetheless, in a
statement which appeared November 17, President-elect Reagan told
Time magazine: ‘“The Muslims are returning to the idea that the way to
heaven is to lose your life fighting Christians or Jews.” Such a distortion
of why Muslims and Arabs were opposing U.S. policy could only have
been written for Reagan by his pro-Israel staff advisors, who included
Joseph Churba (the old friend of JDL leader Meir Kahane), Robert
Tucker, Edward Lutwak, and Uri Raanan, the latter two Israeli citizens.
The Republican sweep into the White House and control of the
Senate was marked by the deepest anti-Soviet sentiment, which further
manifested itself in a discernible antipathy toward the Palestinians in
general—and the PLO in particular—who were viewed as an integral
part of the Communist vortex. Such a polarization, however dangerous
to the rest of the world, could not but be most pleasing to Tel Aviv.
XXIII Reagan and Still Begin
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and
he that dares not reason is a slave.
—Sir William Drummond
The Reagan Administration gave unmistakable signs that it would be
primarily concerned at the outset with domestic affairs, principally in
winning the battle of the budget and fighting inflation. Foreign affairs
were well down on the list of presidential priorities, all the more so due
to a most pleasant inauguration present, the final release of the
American hostages in Teheran.
The hostage crisis following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had
tended to whip up a near-war fever among Americans. In such an
atmosphere in which Arabs were equated with Muslims and red-baiting
was most stylish, Israel flourished in its role as the sole dependable U.S.
friend in the Middle East.’’ Begin was counting on the Palestine
problem and certainly the Jerusalem question remaining on a
Washington back burner, barring a grave crisis, until after more Arab
disunity had been sown and the PLO further isolated.
Begin’s continued intransigency on Palestinian autonomy was
encouraged by Reagan’s early stand that his Administration did not
consider the settlements illegal, contrary to the previous position of the
White House and the State Department. The upcoming Israeli elections
also helped forge Washington acquiescence.
Reagan’s personal long-term ties with conservative Jews and
Zionist publications (including the Jewish Press of Brooklyn in which
in past years his syndicated articles had often appeared side-by-side with
those of Begin when the paper was edited by Meir Kahane) were reflected
in the roster of important appointments. Although the President did not
name one Jew to his cabinet—this is the first time this has happened
724
Reagan and Still Begin 725
since the Eisenhower Administration—there was no shortage of Jews at
the critical sub-cabinet level, particularly at the State Department, where
vital policy-making decisions affecting Israel are made. From the Zionist
point of view, having people in these slots was far more important than
having a Jewish cabinet minister who remained out of Middle East
diplomacy.
Sherwood (Woody) Goldberg, who worked for Secretary of State
Alexander Haig in Vietnam, now served as his right-hand man and office
chief of staff. Dr. Harvey Sicherman of the Foreign Policy Research
Institute in Philadelphia also was helping the Secretary, along with Dr.
David Korn, formerly of Howard University. Likewise, importantly
placed in the State Department was Undersecretary for Economic Affairs
Myer Rashish and Paul Wolfowitz as Director of the Policy Planning
Staff—and, of course, Mrs. Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Permanent Repre-
sentative at the U.N. Although a Christian, her devotion to Israel is
unsurpassed by anyone. The President also was receiving advice on
matters affecting the Jewish community from invaluable fundraisers,
Detroit’s Max Fisher and Ted Cummings of Los Angeles.
Richard Perle, formerly Senator Jackson’s principal liaison with
the Zionists in the important work done on the Hill for the Israeli lobby,'
was designated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Policy. Perle promptly appointed as consultant Stephen Bryen,
who had been forced to resign his post with the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on Middle Eastern Affairs after leaking material to the
Israelis.?
‘Taking advantage of Reagan’s reluctance to antagonize members of
Congress while he was seeking to win support for important domestic
programs, Israeli planes continued to attack targets in southern and
central Lebanon. Begin claimed the right of reconaissance over Lebanese
territory and arrogantly threatened to wipe out Syrian anti-aircraft
missile emplacements in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley near the border. Long
a strong advocate of Israel, Security Council Advisor Richard Allen’s
“hot pursuit” allusion on television supported the massive aerial
“retaliatory” attacks on alleged PLO bases.
The U.N. was unsuccessful in efforts to halt the continued raids,
bombing attacks and incursions on Lebanon by Israel. Internecine Arab
warring added to the woes of the beleaguered Lebanese. The cease-fire
following the March 1978 Israeli mammouth thrust into Lebanon had
been incessantly broken by warfare between the Syrian peace-keeping
forces and the Lebanese Maronites; between Chamounites vs. Geymayel
Phalangists; between the PLO and allies and the Israelis; between the
726 POLITICS OR POLICY
Palestinian forces and those of Israel’s ally, Major Saad Haddad,
operating from his 60-square mile enclave in south Lebanon. Added to
this was the unbelievable slaughter of innocents at the hands of private
Lebanese armed bands and freelance gunmen. Even UNIFIL (United
Nations International Forces in Lebanon) suffered considerable losses
in repeated clashes with the Israelis.
War, bombing, terror and devastation were sealing the doom of
Lebanon. Only an eyewitness can appreciate the irreparable tragedy that
has befallen Beirut. As the crackling of artillery could be heard on an
August afternoon from suburban Hadith, the scene of the latest conflict
between the Syrian peace-keeping forces and the Phalangists, f examined
the past years’ devastation of this once uniquely beautiful city. On top of
destruction has been added the influx of refugees from south Lebanon,
many squatting in the apartments of other Lebanese in the finest
residential areas or ensconced on the famed corniche in huts, shanties
and shacks overlooking the nearly deserted beaches. For these Beirutis
who have remained, the fear of tomorrow has been added to the torment
of yesterday.
The Syrians strove to prevent the partition of Lebanon. As the
peace-keeping forces of the Arab League, they attempted with little
success to stabilize and strengthen the Lebanese government so that it
would be able to take over policing duties in south Lebanon. Trumpeted
by the media, Israel warned that it would never permit ‘“‘the annihilation
of Lebanese Christians by Syrians’’ as the Maronite separatists moved
further away from any reconciliation with the central government in
Beirut. Begin strengthened his ties with Maronite leaders? in the north,
secretly meeting with Chamoun and signing an accord‘ with Major
Haddad who increasingly ruled his enclave as a separate country.
Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s first venture into hazardous
Middle East waters came with his Spring trip. He did not visit the West
Bank and was at least spared the embarrassment of Cyrus Vance’s futile
quest to find a substitute for the PLO. Returning from his tour, the
Secretary of State tried to convey the impression—with the help of the
ever-obliging media—that he had been most successful and that the
Arabs would adopt his priority, a containment of Soviet expansionism.
In fact, his reception at Riyadh, his most important stop, had been
very cool. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud bin Faisal had made it
very clear that, consonant with the position taken at the Foreign
Ministers Islamic Conference at Taif three months earlier, Israel was
considered the number-one danger to the Arab world, and that
Jerusalem—at the very least, East Jerusalem—was the center of Saudi
Reagan and Still Begin 727
concern. The Secretary was told that the implementation of U.N.
resolutions on Palestinian rights was essential. Neither the fall of the
Shah nor the siege of the mosque in Mecca by politically-motivated
zealous Muslims had instilled sufficient fear in the Saudi royal family to
drop its anti-Zionism and seek the shelter of Washington’s anti-
Communist umbrella. Israel’s surprise aerial assault against Iraq had
quite the opposite effect.
At 18:37 hrs. Baghdad local time, Sunday, June 7, Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin's eight F-16 jet fighter-bombers, newly
acquired from American factories and escorted by six F-15’s, flew from
their Etzion airbase in the Sinai and struck a deadly blow at global
security.
Dramatically illustrating once again the swift, uncanny prowess
and devastating accuracy of Israel’s innumerable earlier ‘“‘surgical’”’
strikes and blitzkriegs north, south and east of its own expanding
frontiers, ‘‘Operation Babylon,” as it was dubbed, hit the Tammuz 17
$260-million nuclear reactor complex, known to Europeans as Osirak at
Tuwaitha, about ten miles southwest of Baghdad and more than 500
miles distant from the borders of their own country.
The mission was widely hailed by military analysts as a masterpiece
of precision in the era of the supersonic jet and the ‘“‘smart bomb.”’ The
pilots, crack veterans of the Israeli-Arab air battles of the sixties and the
seventies, had rehearsed their task for months, complete with a mockup
of their ultimate target. Expressions of admiration, ranging from the
grudging to the enthusiastic, were widespread from Western strategists
and analysts for the pinpoint targeting and the hundreds of miles of
elusive flight which preceded it.
In attempting to justify his actions, Begin alluded to a secret
chamber 40 meters beneath Tammuz 17, where the Iraqis allegedly
engaged in clandestine nuclear armaments research. The mysterious
“room,” first put at a depth of 130 feet by Begin, was later raised toa level
of only 13 feet below the reactor. Israeli authorities abandoned the claim
after American intelligence politely found that ‘‘evidence for its
existence could not be verified.”’
Although French and American analysts estimated an Iraqi nuclear
weapons capacity years in the future, possibly not before the end of the
decade, much media ink was spilled in the wake of Israel’s nuclear blitz,
on the question of Iraq’s nuclear intentions: Was Baghdad going for the
nuclear bomb, and if so, when? Discussion was shifted to center on Iraqi
potential and intentions rather than on the bombing by Israel: ‘‘Iraq is
the potential aggressor and Israel the potential victim’”’ was the theme of
728 POLITICS OR POLICY
the swelling chorus of the Israeli lobby, which succeeded in surpassing,
in sheer decibel volume, the actual bombing itself.
Ata news conference three days later, President Reagan stated: ‘‘I do
think one has to recognize Israel had reason for concern with Iraq.” He
declared that Israel may have sincerely believed the raid was a defensive
move, adding: “It is very difficult for me to envision Israel as being a
threat to its neighbors.”
A widely publicized nuclear threat against Israel by Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein, allegedly published in the official Iraqi newspaper,
Al-Thawra, was soon exposed as a hoax despite the fact that such diverse
reputed foreign policy ‘experts’ as New York’s Mayor Edward I. Koch
and New York Times columnist William Safire had attested to the
remarks. Safire later apologized, blaming the error on a ‘‘mistranslation
of a loose paraphrase”’ by the Israeli Foreign Minister. (The New York
Times editorially called the attack ‘an act of inexcusable and short-
sighted aggression.”’)®
Dr. Sigvard Eklund of Sweden, Director-General of the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency, stated on June 9 that there was ‘‘a very
high probability” (in the Iraqi case, a “‘full guarantee,” according to the
New York Times) that the diversion of any highly enriched
uranium reactor fuel or the unreported production of plutonium for
weapons would have been spotted during inspections. Iraq, it was
agreed, could not have obtained a meaningful amount of fissionable
material for use in nuclear weapons without France or the International
Atomic Energy Agency knowing and abrogating its treaty commitments.
To offset this expert opinion, ardent Zionist-minded California
Senator Alan Cranston brought Roger Richter, a junior-level inspector,
who had worked in Vienna for the IAEA, but had never been to Iraq, to
testify at the Senate Foreign Relations hearings dealing with the
possible Israeli violation of the law governing foreign military sales. He
alleged that Iraq had the ability to develop a bomb dangerous to Israel
and that he had earlier tried to warn the State Department of this danger.
The White House had expressed shock at the Israeli attack, following
which President Reagan placed a temporary hold on the shipment of
four F-16’s scheduled for delivery to Israel that week. Claiming total
surprise, the State Department's spokesman Dean Fischer also declared
that the Israeli action might be a “possible violation” of the U.S.-Israel
agreements under which procured U.S. arms may be used only for
defensive purposes.
Inasmuch as the two intelligence services, the CIA and Israel’s
Mossad, are as close as two peas in a pod, it was hard to believe that
Reagan and Still Begin 729
Washington was not aware of Israel’s intent to attack the Osirak reactor.
‘The exact timing was kepta top secret even from Israeli cabinet members
until a special meeting was convened when the attackers were well on
their flight to Baghdad.
The Israeli daily, Maariv, alleged that American officials had
visited Israel several times in 1980 to keep Israelis informed on Iraq's
alleged progress towards producing a bomb. Another Israeli newspaper
reported that Israel relied on U.S. intelligence data before deciding to
carry out its bombing attack.
The nuclear fallout from Operation Babylon may have been
negligible, but the political and military fallout was considerable.
Shimon Peres’ planned visit to Cairo was indefinitely delayed; the
Philip Habib mission, on behalf of Israel, to get Syrian anti-aircraft
missiles removed from Lebanon was rendered even more hopeless.
‘‘Moderate”’ Anwar Sadat of Egypt voiced his outrage, having conferred
with Begin at Sharm el Sheikh only three days before; ‘‘moderate”’
Jordanian Prime Minister Mudar Badran reportedly wrote a despairing
letter to President Reagan; and the Saudis sternly warned the U.S. at the
highest level to reconsider its pro-Israeli orientation. The Haig-Reagan
policy goal of knitting the Arabian Gulf area countries together in an
anti-Soviet alliance appeared more elusive than ever.
For its part, ‘“The Iraqi Government vowed ... to press ahead with
its nuclear program despite the threat by Israel’s Prime Minister to order
a new attack if the nuclear reactor raided last Sunday was rebuilt.”
Information Minister Latif Nusayyef Jassem announced that his
country was capable of establishing new and better nuclear installations
and would do so after the French made it clear that they would favorably
view a request to aid in the reactor’s reconstruction.
Whatever Iraq’s original nuclear intentions may have been, it
became clear that its timetable had now been speeded up by the very
operation purporting to thwart it. In his first public reaction to the raid,
Iraqi President Hussein called on ‘‘all peace-loving nations to help the
Arabs acquire nuclear weapons to balance Israel's nuclear capacity.’ He
said it was a ‘‘rational move for Arabs to try to acquire a bomb” and
described it as ‘“‘a remedy for an existing situation in Israel”’ with its
possession of nuclear arms.
Apparently, at home the raid on the Iraqi reactor had worked to
Begin’s advantage. In an election many earlier feared he might lose, his
Party squeezed by on July 30 with a one-vote plurality over Labor
Alignment’s Peres, who had bested the incumbent in the big television
debate. To form a government, Begin had to rely on the votes of the
730 POLITICS OR POLICY
National Religious Party and two smaller splinter groups, Tami and
Tleme, with their five seats.
Undaunted by the strong unanimous Security Council condemna-
tion,® the wording of which had been worked out in lengthy U.N.
Delegates Lounge horsetrading (a call for sanctions certainly would
have drawn a U.S. veto) between Iraqi Foreign Minister Saadoun
Hammadi and American Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Israel’s
American bombers struck again five weeks later—this time into the heart
of Lebanon. Seeking to forestall PLO raids on Israel, the Israelis bombed
civilian areas of Beirut on July 17, allegedly to wipe out PLO
headquarters, killing 385 and wounding in excess of 600—more
casualties in this one raid than Israel suffered at the hands of the
Palestinians since the creation of the state. Lengthy Israeli-U.S.-Saudi-
PLO negotiations, which resulted finally in a cease-fire, constituted the
nearest thing to a Tel Aviv recognition of the Palestinians.
The Zionist influence over Reagan was severely tested by this latest
aerial onslaught against Beirut. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger
attacked Begin ina nationally televised interview, and Deputy Secretary
of State William Clark joined in the criticism. Even as Secretary Haig
was holding his fire during a breakfast meeting with reporters, other
lower echelon diplomats were accusing the Israelis of trying to split the
U.S. from its moderate Arab friends.
The President’s very special affection for Israel, strongly manifested
during the campaign, came to the fore. Calling Israel ‘“‘an oasis of
democracy in the area anda loyal ally,’ the President was alleged to have
personally ordered an end to the short-lived campaign by his aides to
condemn Begin for the attack on civilian Beirut. It was concluded that
everybody was mad as hell at Begin—except one man—‘“‘and he was the
one who counted.”
In meting out ‘‘punishment”’ to Israel for its bombing raids on the
Baghdad facility and on Beirut, Reagan behaved like most of his
predecessors—the mildest chastisement administered to Begin in the
form of a temporary embargo, first on four F-16 attack planes and then
after ‘‘the escalating level of violence” on an additional fourteen F-16’s
and two F-15 fighter-interceptors scheduled for delivery.
The embargo was lifted in August amid contradictory reports in the
press. First came a trial balloon that Israel would have to agree to the
customary limitations on the use of weapons for defensive purposes
which accompany any sale of U.S. weaponry. This only encouraged
further spirited verbal Israeli assault on the embargo as “‘unjust and
unjustifiable.’’ Administrative spokesman Larry Speakes was credited
Reagan and Still Begin 731
with the report that Israel had now agreed to the normal conditions
imposed on arms sales. But Begin declared he had no intention of
making any promises on the use of any weapons received from the U.S.
Haig was forced to admit that the U.S. had neither sought nor
received any assurances from Israel. The Secretary stated that the
arrangements ‘‘under which military assistance to Israel is provided are
clearly recognized on both sides,” and that the decision had been reached
following extensive ‘‘candid discussions’’ between them both.
As required under the terms of the Arms Export Control Act,
Secretary Haig reported the bombing of the Iraqi reactor to Congress,
and requested a response as to whether Israel had misused its weapons
and disregarded the conditions of sale. During his press conference
dealing with the lifting of the embargo, the Secretary had been asked
whether there had been an answer from Congress on the possible Israeli
violations. To this Haig simply said ‘‘there had never been one in the
past, and we do not feel it was necessary on this occasion. It’s just that
simple.’’?
However outraged the rest of the world may have been over the latest
Israeli attack, Secretary Haig wished to close the incident before Begin’s
visit, apparently to avoid antagonizing the Israel lobby and, even more
expressly, the Congress at that particular time, although he
emphatically denied any linkage between the end of the suspension and
the projected sale to the Saudis of frve AWACS. The sale also included
ground stations and spare parts for the sophisticated surveillance planes
as well as equipment for enhancing the performance of the sixty-two
F-15’s purchased by the Saudis in 1978, for a total of $8.5-billion.
Begin’s Washington September meeting with Ronald Reagan
netted the Israeli Prime Minister his greatest tiumph—not only what
was hailed as the start of a strong friendship between the two chiefs of
state, but, more pragmatically, the new agreement for “strategic
cooperation.”’ Such recognition of Israel as a strategic asset (the late
Chief of Staff General Brown had labeled Israel a “‘military burden,”’ see
Supra, p. 448) was far more to the liking of the Israelis than any defense
pact requiring Senate ratification and hence open to public purview and
debate.
In the aftermath of world repugnance over the Israeli bombing of
Beirut and ata time the Reagan Administration was desperately striving
to bring federal expenditures closer in line with income, Begin’s gains
were all the more astounding. Little wonder that he hailed ‘‘a new
U.S.-Israeli era’ and boasted that Reagan had made no mention of the
two outstanding sensitive issues, the distinction between offensive and
732 POLITICS OR POLICY
defensive Israeli use of American weapons and the West Bank.
While specifics of the U.S.-Israeli arrangements were to be kept
under total secrecy and spelled out later by military committees, there
was little doubt that Israel was provided with infinite new benefits and
many additional goodies. Openly included were the holding of joint
naval exercises, the stockpiling of military stores, the pre-positioning of
medical facilities in Israel, U.S. use of Israel for servicing and repairs of
military equipment, and joint planning to counter the Soviet Union.
Areas of cooperation, which both governments announced were
better left unpublished, included arrangements for the emergency
stationing of forward elements of the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force at
Israeli bases and a more significant exchange of intelligence with all
super-technology intelligence operations to be bared to the Mossad.
Already in possession of more American-supplied electronic warfare
gear than any of our European allies, Israel was allegedly granted access
to the top secret in the American technological arsenal: how to launch
so-called countermeasures against American-built aircraft, missiles and
reconnaissance systems that the Arabs had or were planning to buy
from U.S. manufacturers.
Israel, unlike other countries, would also enjoy the right to use U.S.
military aid dollars in support of its own military complex rather than
to make purchases from U.S. companies, which would bring desperately
needed dollars into the family. An additional figure of $2 to 3-billion
was reportedly to be tucked away for Tel Aviv somewhere in the defense
budget. No wonder the jubilation of Begin. Henceforth, Israel was not to
be the 51st state, as critics had complained, but the first state of the
Union.
Begin was allegedly urged to soft-pedal his opposition to the
AWACS sale in a pre-departure airport meeting with Secretary Haig,
who lefta National Security Council meeting in Washington to speak to
him. The strategic alliance, however, did not deter the Zionist lobby
from doing its utmost to defeat the sale. Although the Senate earlier had
overwhelmingly supported a resolution opposing the sale, President
Reagan was upheld on October 28 by an astounding 54 to 48 surprise
vote.
No president ever worked so assiduously on the Congress as did
Reagan, who over a period of weeks met personally at the White House,
on a one-to-one basis, with many senators, some of whom were deeply
committed to the opposition to the sale and others who had not made up
their minds. All of his charmand personality went into a prodigious job
of persuasion and arm-twisting. The Administration’s promise to the
Reagan and Still Begin 733
Saudis had to be kept, he insisted, for the sake of ‘‘regional peace and the
security” for all countries, including Israel.
Reagan for the first time experienced what every one of his
predecessors, beginning with Truman through Carter, had undergone
since Israel’s creation: inordinate lobbying pressures imposed on both
the executive and legislative branches, bolstered by simultaneous
outpourings on the theme of anti-Semitism. At the height of the battle,
the New York Times took the President severely to task in an editorial,
“Mr. Reagan Blames Mr. Begin”:
The President did not quite say ‘choose Begin or Reagan,’ or accuse the
opponents of his AWACS deal of putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s.
But those are the repugnant implications of his prepared statement that ‘itis not
the business of other nations to make American foreign policy.’ 8
The editorial ended with a less subtle evocation of the charge of
anti-Semitism:
To suggest that Congress is under foreign influence merely makes a bad
predicament worse. To raise the spectre of undue Israeli influence, with all the
ugly echoes that this scene can have in American society, risks turning a bad deal
into a disaster. [Emphasis added. ]
Hitler may have died in a Berlin bunker in 1945, but vital elements
of U.S. foreign policy were nevertheless still being decided on the basis of
the total human revulsion towards Nazism. The role of anti-Semitism
was, strangely enough, primary for both many who voted to uphold the
President and some who opposed. (Coincidentally, the AWACS vote
came on the day of the final session of the first International Liberators
Conference, organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, in
Washington.) Maine’s William S. Cohen voted with Reagan because he
felt the defeat of the sale would cause a backlash against both Israel and
American Jewry.9 Fundamentalist lowa’s Roger W. Jepsen dramatically
switched sides under impact of this reasoning and secret security
information divulged to him by the President. On October 1, Reagan
had broadened the American commitment in the Persian Gulf by
declaring, “Saudi Arabia we will not permit to be another Iran.” The
U.S., he said, would bar a takeover by forces, inside or outside, that
imperiled the flow of oil to the West.
Opponents to the sale feared that weapons in the hands of the
Saudis constituted a threat to Israel which could usher in a new
Holocaust, despite Presidential assurances that “‘Israel’s edge in arma-
ments, quantitatively and qualitatively, would be maintained.”’!!
734 POLITICS OR POLICY
Alleged Reagan pledges to senators that there would be joint U.S.-
Saudi crewing of the planes and that the delivery of the planes was
conditional upon Saudi Arabia's contribution to the peace effort
remained a matter of ambiguity and dispute.
The final outcome of the AWACS battle provided convincing proof
of crass American materialism. For the first time, forty business
institutions, who had been (and still are) earning billions from Saudi
petro dollars, banded together and met the challenge of the Israeli lobby.
Neither altruism, concern for the national interest nor alarm over
growing Zionist power had prompted U.S. and Saudi business interests
toact. With Mobil as their spokesman, they ran full-page advertisements
in eleven major newspapers and in Time, noting that 700 non-
petroleum companies had a $35-billion stake in business with Saudi
Arabia.
Unlike at any time during the long history of the Palestine
question,'? these companies lobbied, placed pressure on senators and
had their friends do likewise. They also persuaded their subcontractors
and suppliers to follow suit.
Their action was supplemented by that of thirty-four organizations
under the leadership of the American Security Council. Right-wing and
conservative, they had strong ties with junior GOP senators and
envisioned a grave blow to Reagan’s image in his possible defeat on this
issue, even damaging the manner in which he would be able to function
in the future. And these total efforts challenged for the first time the
heretofore omnipotence of the Zionist lobby and won. The shocking
passing of Anwar Sadat earlier in the month had also played a role in the
Senate vote.
While reviewing a military parade commemorating the 1973 war
with Israel, Sadat was assassinated on October 6 by a group of Egyptian
soldiers led by Lieutenant Khalid Ahmad al-Islambuli, who was a
member of a clandestine religious organization. Intermittent fighting
between security forces and religious militants followed in Assuit and
elsewhere, but order was restored as all public demonstrations were
barred.
World political leaders, mostly from Western countries (only four
Arab states were represented), including former Presidents Nixon, Ford
and Carter, attended the Sadat burial in Cairo. (Upon their return, Ford
and Carter jointly called for a policy of mutual recognition between the
PLO and Israel and for American dialogue with the PLO.)
Eight days later following elections, Vice President Hosni Mubarak
was sworn in to succeed the slain leader and promised to follow his
Reagan and Still Begin 735
predecessor's policies.
The death of Sadat in no way stirred his people as had Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s passing eleven years earlier. In Cairo, silence and closed doors
prevailed, even as Mayor Koch, who, as congressman during the ’73 war,
had unmercifully assailed the Egyptian leader, now paid tribute to him
for whom he predicted there will be ‘‘a deep outpouring of grief on the
streets of Cairo.’’ But wire associations and the New York Times were
equally hard put to come up with photos of mourners, save in Mit Abul
Kum, Sadat’s hamlet birthplace.
Stull at war with Qaddafi after the August shooting down of two
Libyan planes over the Gulf of Sidra and repeated charges that the
Libyan leader was plotting the death of Reagan, Washington at first
encouraged the media to attribute the assassination to a Libyan-Soviet-
PLO conspiracy, thus to cover up the widespread Egyptian discontent
with Sadat’s policies.
Clearly, Sadat was out of step with his own people. His last months
were increasingly stormy, marked by domestic unrest. The Egyptian
leader rarely brooked personal criticism, and he vindictively repressed
the increasing number of dissidents. These represented a wide spectrum:
the right and the left—religious militants, Nasserites, and intellectu-
als—Christians and Muslims—journalists, lawyers and politicians.
In early September he cracked down and arrested 1,600 of his critics,
prominent among whom was famed journalist Heikal. He declared the
Muslim Brotherhood illegal and cancelled the choice of Pope Shenuda
III as head of Egypt’s Copts. A correspondent of ABC television was
thrown out of the country because of an interview not to the President’s
liking. As an answer to what he deemed an important question by a
foreign reporter, Sadat stated: ‘‘In other times I would have shot you, but
it is democracy I am suffering from as much as I am suffering from the
opposition.”” No wonder the New York Times in its eulogy, “One
Extraordinary Man,” was forced to confess that ‘‘Anwar Sadat was alsoa
skillful despot.”’
After launching his attack on Muslims and Copts as a threat to the
unity of the country, Sadat accused a dozen former Egyptian officials of
“conniving” with the Soviet Union to destabilize his regime, and
expelled the Soviet ambassador, six members of his staff, two journalists
and more than 1,000 technicians working on projects throughout the
country. The Egypuan President claimed they tried to undermine the
regime, and the Cairo media thereafter ascribed the opposition to him to
communist subversion.
Although professing to protect Palestinian rights, Sadat’s
736 POLITICS OR POLICY
pragmatism led him to give up his earlier insistence on a timetabled
linkage between Palestinian rights and treaty ratification for concessions
on the Sinai. His acceptance of a “‘piece’’—the Sinai—asa substitute for
genuine peace won him acclaim and American euphoria because he was
able to so thoroughly convince the Western media that he was a “‘seer
endowed with almost mystical serenity.”’ The far-reaching consequences
of his role are described by two British writers in their new book, Sadat:
The international order which, since his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Sadat had
built and come to personify is still in place. But that his violent end, soeminently
foreseeable, should be regarded as having dealt such a devastating blow merely
illustrates how fragile and unnatural that order has always been. Rejoicing in
the Arab world was certainly in poor taste, but it was no more out of place than
the official grief and extravagant obituaries in the West.!3
As Lebanon's Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan noted:
Ill-fated Camp David involved the Arab world in a series of divisions and
conflicts and gave room for continuous arrogance, arbitrariness and aggression.
It inflicted victims and destruction on Lebanon. It was Camp David that killed
Sadat.!4
Ina move billed by the Israelis as a step towards implementation of
autonomy for Palestinians, Menachem Milson was designated civilian
administration director on the West Bank. A colonel in the Israeli Army
for many years, Milson’s sole claim to civilian status rested on a short
period spent as a lecturer at the Hebrew University.
Milson sought, as reported in his article in Commentary, to
restructure the political loyalties in the occupied territory by neutral-
izing all local authority and leadership as a prerequisite for carrying out
the Israeli interpretation of the autonomy commitment under Camp
David. His avowed purpose was to strengthen ‘“‘moderate’’ Arabs of the
Village Leagues (the first such league was set up in Hebron in 1978 when
he served as Arab Affairs Advisor to the military government) to counter
the influence of the ‘‘pro-PLO” elected mayors of the West Bank, whom
he claimed represented a minority view. According to the Jerusalem
Post: ‘‘Leaders chosen for the Village League were some of the most
discredited persons in the West Bank community (one had been
convicted by the Jordan government of embezzling municipal funds)
even before they agreed to collaborate with Israel, and their adjutants
regular ruffians who commanded plain loathing.”
The people of the West Bank were placed in the position of having
to choose between municipalities impoverished because of their support
of the PLO and shunned by the Zionist authorities on the one hand, and
Reagan and Still Begin 737
collaborators who were able both to dispense funds, supplied by Israel,
and were given access to the occupation forces for the permits required
for a wide range of everyday activities. For example, those needed for
travel abroad, formerly obtainable from the occupying authorities via
the municipality, could now only be secured through the Village
Leagues. Aid from Arab Gulf states and elsewhere, and from Palestinians
abroad to West Bank villages was frozen while Zionist authorities
showered favors on their Village League sycophants.
Viewed as a prelude to annexation, the institution of the civilian
administration set off violent demonstrations on the West Bank and the
University of Bir Zeit was closed once again. Within three weeks,
President of the Village League of Ramallah Yusuf el-Khatib and his
son were killed in an ambush set by Palestinians. The National
Committee of Arab Local Council Chairmen announced a general strike
to protest Israeli government failures to fund Arab councils adequately.
Israeli troops disbanded demonstrations, two bombs exploded in
Jerusalem, and several homes were demolished on suspicion that sons of
the owning families had thrown home-made Molotov cocktails at Israeli
troops. Demonstrators were arrested in Ramallah for protesting the
demolitions and the closing of Bir Zeit.
In December, Gaza businessmen began a general strike in protest of
an Israeli twelve per cent value-added tax on the income of doctors; in
the ensuing demonstrations one Arab teenager was killed and three
others were wounded by the Israeli army. Iwo days later, Army forces
welded shut two hundred merchants’ doors in retaliation for the
demonstrations, and Israeli troops entered the Women’s Training
Center in Ramallah for having conducted an illegal demonstration.
It was later that month that the Israeli Knesset voted to annex the
Golan Heights, a move unanimously condemned by the U.N. Security
Council, which called on Israel to rescind the annexation. The
following day the U.S. suspended the U.S.-Israeli Memorandum of
Understanding on strategic cooperation which had been signed by
Sharon and Weinberger the month before.
Begin literally frothed at the mouth: ‘‘What kind of talk is this,
‘punishing Israel’?”’ He railed: ‘‘Are we a vassal state of yours? Are wea
banana republic? Are we fourteen-year-olds, that if we misbehave we get
our wrists slapped?”’ The Israeli Prime Minister likened measures of the
Reagan Administration to those of an anti-Semitic British general in
pre-Israel Palestine.
As 12,000 Syrian Druze of the Golan Heights, witha few exceptions,
refused to accept Israeli identity cards, the Syrians failed to gain support
738 POLITICS OR POLICY
for a draft Security Council resolution that would have imposed
sanctions on Israel. However, they won a Phyrric victory when the
General Assembly adopted an ineffectual resolution calling for voluntary
suspension of diplomatic and trade relations with Israel. (Emphasis
added).
The Israeli announcement of the establishment of two new
settlements on the Golan Heights brought Druze protests and a curfew
was then imposed on their principal town of Majdal Shams. The Druze
continued to oppose the annexation by refusing to pay Israeli income
taxes or to sell lands to Israelis, by rejecting Israeli social security and
medical help, and by resisting new attempts to impose Israeli identity
cards. They insisted on identifying themselves as Syrians. Four of their
leaders were arrested for leading the protests, a general strike followed,
and schools were closed. The Israelis retaliated by firing several hundred
Druze employees and businesses.
For forty days the Israeli Army sealed off four Druze villages,
preventing food or people, including American and Israeli journalists,
from coming in or out. Ironically, heretofore, since the inception of
Israel, the Druze had been given greater privileges than any non-Jews
and even served in the Israeli Army, as they had always been considered
loyalists.
Israeli jurist members of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel
documented that troops had clubbed a three year-old Druze child,
shooting his mother when she tried to intervene; that troops had
vandalized village schools; that residents had refused emergency medical
care; that Druze telephone links were cut periodically; and that several o
them had been sentenced to prison in summary trials without repre
sentation by counsel.
With the massing of Israeli troop forces along the Lebanese borde
following the Golan annexation, rumors were rife of an Israeli invasio
of southern Lebanon. The U.S. government sent Philip Habib back t
the Middle East to receive assurances that Israel would not attack.
It was at this time that the turmoil escalated on the West Ban
spearheaded by Milson’s firing of Mayor Ibrahim Tawil of E]-Bireh f
refusing to cooperate with the Israeli civilian administration. Followin
a similar dismissal of Mayors Kareem Khalef of Ramallah, Bassa
Shaka of Nablus and Wahid Hamdallah of Anabta and replacement 4
Israelis, the worst violence since 1967 erupted on the West Bank in th
course of which fifteen Palestinians were killed, most of them teenage
A Security Council resolution aimed at forcing Israel to reverse t
dismissal of these elected mayors was vetoed by the U.S.
Reagan and Still Begin 739
Violence and disturbances further accelerated when on Easter
Sunday U.S. citizen Alan Goodman, who was serving in the Israeli
Army, opened fire at the Dome of the Rock, killing two Arabs and
wounding eleven others. Answering an appeal from Saudi Arabia's
King Khalid, the Muslim world staged a general strike to protest Israel's
failure to safeguard Jerusalem’s holy places. Again, it was the U.S. that
vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution which would have condemned
the sniper’s attack.
With the approach of April 25, the date for the final portion of the
Sinai to be turned back to Egypt, the opposition of Jewish settlers
increased. Reinforced by militant ultra-nationalists, including sup-
porters of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had moved into the region to fight
the evacuation, some Jewish settlers, particularly at the large settlement
of Yamit, rejected the huge offer of compensation (an average of
$245,000 for 1183 families), burned a government office and otherwise
resisted eviction notices with threats of suicide. The Israeli government
itself threatened to renege on its withdrawal commitment, alleging
Egyptian infractions of the agreement, but differences with Cairo were
straightened out.
Even as Israeli troops were engaged in the south, battling die-hard
Yamit settlers who resisted evacuation, sixty Israeli war planes struck
Beirut suburbs, killing twenty-five and wounding scores of others,
thus breaking the ceasefire that had been in effect since July. The U.S.,
concerned lest Israel launch a full scale invasion of Lebanon which
would endanger the Sinai evacuation, urged the PLO not to retaliate.
Toemphasize the great sacrifice the Israelis were making for peace,
American television and newspaper front-page photos depicted Jew
Struggling against Jew, as the Israeli army rooted the last of Yamit
settlers out of underground fortresses and a synagogue on April 24. After
blowing up every building in Yamit, the Israelis handed the last slice of
the Sinai, as scheduled, over to Egypt the following day. To assuage the
Opposition, Begin announced that he would introduce legislation in the
Knesset barring any further surrender of settlements or territory in any
Part of occupied Arab lands.
In place of legislation, because of Labor Party opposition, the
Prime Minister delivered an exceedingly tough statement at the opening
of the Parliamentary summer session on May 3, in which he referred to
Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as ‘‘western Eretz Israel,’”’ thus
Teviving the notion of his hero Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Zionist
Movement that its historical land included the east bank of the Jordan
River on which the Hashemite Kingdom is located. Begin served notice
740 POLITICS OR POLICY
that at the end of the transition period under autonomy, Israel would
raise its demands for ‘“‘sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza
district."” Meanwhile, he declared that “the government will act to
strengthen settlements, to expand and consolidate them.” His govern-
ment was determined to raise the population of Jewish settlements on
the West Bank from 25,000 to 100,000. In any future negotiations over
the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and its neighbors, Begin
added, ‘‘any proposal for the removal or evacuation of Jewish settlements
would be rejected.’’ Opposition leader Shimon Peres did not fail to try
and make political points by noting that Begin earlier had pledged never
to dismantle Israel Sinai settlements.
Regarding the autonomy talks, Begin insisted that sessions would
have to be held in Jerusalem, his capital city, as well as in Cairo and
Washington, despite the reluctance of his treaty partners to recognize
Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem.
Faced by an Israel determined to strengthen its hold on the occupied
West Bank and Gaza and to keep PLO forces subservient to Tel Aviv’s
omnipotent aerial power, ever-reinforced by new U.S. shipments, a
helpless PLO faced its darkest hour. Non-implemented, futile U.N.
resolutions censuring Israel or affirming the inalienable rights of the
Palestinians were of little avail. The Arab states in hopeless disarray,
with internecine rivalries never so bitterly fragmenting and the
continuing Iran-Iraqi war sapping their strength, seemed unable to use
their enormous wealth (slightly depleted by falling oil prices) to help.
The Arabs were incapable of uniting or disuniting around Saudi
Arabian Crown Prince Fahd’s eight-point peace plan. This called for
the return of territory captured by Israel in 1967, the establishment of a
Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital anda guarantee of the
right of all countries in the Middle East to live in peace, a tacit
recognition of Israel.
PLO chieftain Arafat stated that the Fahd plan contained positive
aspects and told an interviewer that the plan was “‘a good beginning.”
But it was attacked by some rejectionist Palestinian groups. The
November (1981) Arab summit in Fez, called to discuss the proposal,
adjourned after its very first session when it was apparent that important
absences, notably Syria’s, and wide disagreement made a consensus
impossible.
The European initiative, once a vibrant hope, was no longer even
on a back burner. The gradual return of Egypt under Mubarak to the
Arab fold could be predicted, but its immediate effect on the balance of
power in the area remained to be seen.
Reagan and Still Begin 741
Despite an occasional demonstration by the Peace Now movement,
the overwhelming majority of Israelis gave full support to Begin’s
policies, and some even voiced preference for the tougher line of Defense
Minister Sharon. They overwhelmingly approved of the new settlements
being activated on the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
The media could not avoid reporting the mounting violence in the
occupied territories and the aerial assaults on Lebanon. But the press
still cast its spotlight on Nazi genocide, and featured articles and endless
Holocaust television films absorbed the attention of America’s brain-
washed. Whereas American public opinion had improved, it remained
unled and inarticulate. Holocaustomania, in full bloom across the
United States, stultified effectual action. As novelist George Steiner
expressed it, “Any mancan say Auschwitz, and if he says it loud enough,
everyone has to cast their eyes down and listen. Like smashing a glass in
the middle of dinner.’’!®
Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes refused to speculate whether
the use of U.S.-made planes in the April Israeli strike at Lebanon
violated foreign military sales provision: “It serves no useful purpose at
a time like this to examine that question.” But he claimed that the
Administration was ‘“‘looking into every aspect of this action.”
In his syndicated column Pete Hamill was indeed looking at the
deeper implications of the tragedy:
With every new outrage, Begin separates the U.S. from the Arab world. We have
become his accomplices, partners in his unbridled violence, collaborators in his
racist assumptions about the inferiority of Arab lives. We do not have to condone
the terrorism of the PLO in order to oppose Begin. That is the trap. Begin wants
every proposition to become either or. If you oppose Begin’s policies, you
oppose Israel, and if you oppose Israel, you are an anti-Semite. Or so the Begin
reasoning goes.
Reagan's reaction to Begin’s fanatical policies has been limited and mild.
He slaps Begin on the wrist, then gives him more weapons that are used to kill
more children. Ina way, this is the most patronizing form of anti-Semitism. It is
time for the U.S. to start acting like a great nation and make its international
positions coherent. Reagan wouldn't tolerate Begin-like behavior in Central
America. He can’t condone it in the Middle East.!7
Reagan found himself, whether he liked it or not, forced to accept
“Begin-like behavior.” After the April (1982) raid on Beirut, vast
Pressures were exerted not to interfere. Reminding the President that
Congressional elections were approaching and the budget problem
remained unresolved, Chairman of the Presidents of major Jewish
Organizations Howard Squadron stated while a request from Jordan for
742 POLITICS OR POLICY
planes was under consideration: ‘There is a deep and growing concern
in the U.S. Jewish community at the direction of U.S. policy in the
Middle East.”’
Reagan’s most ardent supporters, the neo-conservatives based
around the magazine Commentary, pressed for an acceptance of this
Podhoretz precept:
The relentless assault on Israel in the U.N. and elsewhere is more than a matter
of calling the legitimacy of Israel into question. It represents a covert attack on
the political culture of the U.S. and the entire democratic world. In this
perspective the willingness to defend Israel (ideologically and politically no less
than through military aid) becomes a subtle measure of our willingness to
defend ourselves.!8
And there was little resistance from the White House to accepting this.
It is virtually impossible for any historian to provide a definitive
analysis of events that are daily so swiftly unfolding as he rushes copy for
this updated edition to the printer. Many questions remain to be
answered by time, some final judgments to be made independently of the
instantaneous coloration imparted by the media and vested interests.
Only one thing is reasonably certain: the U.S. will never ‘‘start acting
like a great nation” as long as Begin—or any successor—can instantane-
ously rally Jews in the U.S. behind him, regardless of American national
interests, with the call: “The unity of the Jewish people is a second line
defense for the State of Israel.’” And rally they did, with some very few
exceptions, on each and every occasion, including the ever-mounting
crisis in Lebanon.
The chips were down, and Jews were faced with the dilemma they
had so assiduously sought to avoid. If Jewish Americans permitted their
total transformation from a religious grouping into a political movement
dedicated to the interests of a foreign state and sanction the awesome
gross display of Zionist power in their name toward bringing successive
occupants of the White House to terms, it will exact a price that many
innocents— Americans as well as Middle Easterners—wil] have to bear.
It is certainly not inappropriate to inquire whether such an injustice is
consonant with the mission for which the claimed forebears of the
Zionists were allegedly made the Chosen of God.
XxIV. The Ultimate Dichotomy:
Israel Uber Alles?
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
—Theodore Roosevelt
In a controversial 1970 Commentary article, Robert Alter raised a most
basic question:
Does a Jewish State belong in an area where, even as late as 1947, the majority
of the population was Arab? How can Israel be imagined, even in the most
diffuse sense, as a continuation of the moral heritage of Judaism if its existence
depends upon a manifest historical injustice?
That Judaic heritage is clear and unmistakable and has been un-
wavering. Where Zionism is particularist and segregationalist, Judaism
has been universalist and integrationalist. Judaism, like its offspring
monotheistic faiths, Christianity and Islam, has always represented a
moral choice, a spiritual link between man and his Creator in whose
ethos there is little room for narrow chauvinism. Whereas Zionism
staked its claim to a land that had not belonged to Jews for 2,000 years,
Judaism’s power to survive has always depended on its being unrelated
to any particular geographic tract. The Jews were chosen by the Lord
neither to possess a specific piece of land nor to be favored over others
of his children. They were selected for the task of spreading the mes-
sage that there is one and only one God.
In exchanging their birthright for the “mess” of statehood, and
staking the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power poli-
tics, Jewish leaders surrendered to the noxious dualism of religion and
nationalism.
Fifty years ago these same Jews had vigorously opposed being
classified with Italians, Germans, Czechs, French, etc., on an ethnic
basis rather than with Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Muslims, etc., as
743
744 POLITICS OR POLICY
a religious community. But with the triumph of the Zionist revival in
Palestine, the ethnicity of the Jew elsewhere shifted; and without pro-
test the subtle transmutation from Jewish Americans, a religious
grouping, into American Jews, an ethnic-national entity, was accom-
plished.
To conceal the dual national attachment, the link with Israel was
passed off as a religious tie, the worship of Israelism increasingly
supplanting Judaism. It was much simpler to write a check to the UJA,
and pleasanter than to attend synagogue services. The new idolatry
had no time for immutable principles and universal values. Jews ac-
cepted situations they otherwise would have rejected, but now wel-
comed in the name of Israel.
Opposed to violence and war, Jews accepted Israel’s acts of mili-
tary might and aggression. Opposed to union of church and state, they
accep.ed such a unity wherever Israel was involved. Long dedicated to
integration into the body politic, they moved toward separateness and
segregation.! Judaistic tradition had placed its followers alongside
those who struggled against the limitation of human and civil rights.
In the name of Israelism, they sanctioned the suppression of Pales-
tumian Arab civil and human rights within Israel proper and in the
occupied territories. Expressed another way, Jews have come to lose
their own traditional universal, human ethos through their identifica-
tion with Israelism. Intellectual and staunch defender of Israel Arthur
Waskow noted pertinently: “And it’s not just politics the Jewish institu-
tions want to avoid; it's God, too. Try talking of God to a rabbi!—he’s
too busy trying to raise money for Israel or the synagogue mortgage. ”?
No Fourth of July was ever celebrated in the manner that Israel’s
Atlantic capital, New York City, exuberantly commemorated the state’s
twenty-fifth anniversary. The press, radio, and television joined to-
gether in proclaiming Israel “the hope of Jews all over the world.” In
three laudatory Sunday magazine articles,? ‘Israel at 25,” and in its
editorial entitled “Shalom” (the Daily News ended its own rapturous
editorial with this same word), the 7imes dropped all pretense to any
claim of being non-Zionist as it fervently extolled the twenty-fifth year
of the existence of the Zionist state as representing but ‘‘a small mile-
stone in 4,000 years of a people’s recorded history.’’4 A fashion show,
with a prestigious lineup of models drawn from filmdom, the theater,
the arts, politics, and society, sold out to purchasers of a $500 or more
Israel Bond. An elaborate Sunday parade featured high school bands
from the eastern seaboard, lured by a national band competition and
the opportunity to march on America’s most famed Fifth Avenue, and
——
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 745
floats from which little children waved hundreds of Israeli flags. In the
line of march, in front of each unit, the American and Israeli flags were
balanced, but behind the standard bearers there were hundreds of the
Star of David for every Stars and Stripes.
During Israel’s twenty-sixth anniversary parade the following
year, I talked to two Brooklyn teenagers who said they belonged to the
International Conference of Synagogue Youth. They would give me
no more than their initials—B.D.K. and G.W. One wore a “Jewish
Power” button, the other ‘‘Jewish Poverty: It’s No Myth.”” This helped
encourage bystanders to throw American dollars onto Israeli flags
being used as collection baskets.
Our tape-recorded interview proved most interesung:
“If Israel and the U.S. get into the war, which side will you be on?”
“This will never happen—it couldn't happen.”
“Do you consider yourself an American or a Jew?”
“Tam an American and a Jew.”
“But which do you consider first?”
“Iam a Jew before I am an American.”
“Do you have a dual loyalty? Some people insist that you do.”’
“No, but we do have strong connections with Israel as well as with the
U.S., and we have more connections with Israel because this is our
state.” (Italics added.)
“What do you mean? I thought the U.S. was your state?”
“We live in the U.S. We are proud, however, that Israel is our state—
Israel is our homeland, and our final goal is to settle there.”
“Why don’t you go there now?”
“We’re not ready to go.”
“Then why do you stay in the U.S. and use the U.S.?”
“We must have a country powerful and strong, and we want to
build up the U.S. because while we are here it can help Israel. We
are here because this is a powerful country and we want to use our
influence.”’
“Influence the U.S. in behalf of Israel?”
746 POLITICS OR POLICY
“Not only influence the U.S., but influence other American Jews, many
of whom we feel are not doing as much as they could.”
“What is vour feeling toward Israel?”
“Israel is ours. The U.S. is not our state. We are making it our home,
but a home is not a state.”’ (Ironically this lad, in reverse, used the
idenucal verbiage that anti-Zionists use against the Balfour Declara-
tion.)
“What happens when people say there are Jews here who are using the
U.S. and imply that it is ime you get out?”
“They would want us to get out—that is anu-Semitism.”
“But you have dual loyalties.”
“What’s wrong with that? Israel can help the U.S. and the U.S. can help
Israel. ... We don’t use the U.S. as a base. We’re supporting the US.,
we pay taxes. We don't want to emigrate right now. And don’t get the
idea we are living off the fat of their land and taking it away—that’s
bigotry, that sounds like anti-Semitism.”
“Well, maybe it is, but don’t you feed this anti-Semitism with your
ideas?”
“No. If the U.S. asked us to serve in the army and it didn’t involve
Israel, we would serve. But we can’t trust the U.S. completely to do
what we want. If the U.S. does not have a favorable policy to Israel,
it’s up to us to help build that, and we wouldn't be able to do for Israel what
is necessary if we weren't living in the U.S.” (Italics added.)
The behavior of Jewish oldsters was not distinguishable from that
of the youngsters. On the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial, when one
might logically expect words of concern for the welfare of the country
in which he and his fellow Jews were living, Chairman of the Miami
1976 Combined Jewish Appeal-Israel Emergency Fund Drive L. Jules
Arkin kicked off the effort with this prominently publicized state-
ment:
We are a community of 250,000 Jewish people, and our concern is the people of
Israel, the quality of their lives, their welfare, their ability to survive and grow in a time
of staggering econonuc pressure. What is happening at the United Nations is a clear
signal that the world is challenging democracy as we know it in America.
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 747
... As Jews, we must come together like a real family to make sure all Jews
can live with social justice and dignity. That is our responsibility in 1976.5
[Italics added.]
Adherence to Judaism was judged by financial support of the State
of Israel, as the sale of Israel Bonds and the raising of UJA funds in
synagogues on the highest Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur went forward. During the October war Jews were rallied to the
cause of Israel from the synagogue pulpit. A series of advertisements
called on Jewry to “Give a bond for Hanukkah,” implying that the
spirit of this holiday imposed on Jews everywhere the support of Israel.
There was no longer even a pretense of distinguishing between the
humanitarian and the propaganda dollar, as the UJA with 90 percent
of its funds going to Israel and the local Federations of Jewish Philan-
thropies ran joint fund-raising campaigns.
The “Rally for Humanity Against Arab Terror,” called in New
York City by the Conference of Presidents to protest the Arafat U.N.
appearance brought out a vast hysterical crowd, many coming in buses
from nearby states. Religious schools let their children off; New York-
ers came on their lunch hour; union members were given time off;
judges were said to have closed down their courts. Judge Alfred H.
Kleinman of the Criminal Court of New York expostulated, “‘It is very
difficult to sit in judgment of persons accused of crimes when we open
the doors of our country to international criminals.”’ The claimed-to-
be 100,000 protestants were harangued by Senator Javits, who de-
clared that the U.S. “must honor the refusal of Israel to negotiate with
the PLO.”’
On every occasion since Israel’s creation, American Jews reacted
to the continuing Middle East crisis as Israeli leaders conditioned them
to do from the very outset. There was not the slightest concern over
the dangers of dual loyalty. David Ben-Gurion was never afraid to
express most candidly his views about the role of American Jews in
helping to carry out the foreign policy goals of the State of Israel:
It was always my view that we have always to consider the imferests of Diaspora
Jewry—any Jewish community that was concerned. But there is one crucial
distinction—not what they think are their interests, but what we regarded as
their interests. If it was a case vital for Israel and the interests of the Jews
concerned were different, the vital interests of Israel came first—because Israel
is vital for world Jewry.6
An assistant Director General of Israel’s Foreign Office presented this
candid and persuasive rationale as the justification for exploiting the
Jewish duality:
748 POLITICS OR POLICY
The Almighty placed massive oil deposits under Arab soil and the Arab states
have exploited this good fortune for political ends during the past half century.
It is our good fortune that God placed six million Jews in America. And we
have no less a nght to benefit from their influence with the U.S. government
to help us survive and to prosper.”
Ben-Gurion often reiterated his inexorable view that “the State of
Israel is a part of the Middle East only in geography . . . from the
decisive standpoint of dynamism, creation, and growth, Israel is a part
of World Jewry.’’®
Writing about his first visit to the U.S. after his election, Ben-
Gurion noted that whenever Jews speak of ‘‘our country” they mean
Israel, and whatever the Israeli Ambassador says, they know he is
representing them.? When Zionist lobbyist I. L. Kenen was quoted as
saying, “Israeli diplomats are accredited not only to the U.S. govern-
ment but also in a sense to the American Jewish community,”’!® he was
only echoing the sentiments of Walter Eytan, who as Israeli’s Perma-
nent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office proclaimed, “It is a com-
monplace of our Foreign Service that every Envoy Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary has a dual function: “‘He is Minister Plenipo-
tentiary to the country in which he is accredited and Envoy Extraordi-
nary to its Jews.”!!
Moshe Sharett, who succeeded Ben-Gurion, proudly declaimed to
the World Jewish Congress:
From the standpoint of constitutional law and formal sovereignty, Israel
does not differ from any normal state in the world. It claims political loy-
alty only from its own nationals. But in a deep historic sense which, how-
ever, receives a most tangible expression both in long-term policy and in
day-to-day life, Israel is a common possession of the entire Jewish people,
that 1s to say of all the Jews in the world. Every Jew can claim a share in it.
... They can, as Jews, no longer imagine their own existence without it.
... Therefore, they must do everything they can—materially, politically,
whatever and whichever way is practical, effective and legitimate—to pre-
serve it, to strengthen it.!2
In denouncing the 1970 Rogers plan calling for Israeli withdrawal,
Prime Minister Meir called on Jews everywhere to help resist: “This is
not the border of the U.S.A. we are talking about but of the Jewish
people.” (Italics added.) Once again, the abnormality of Israel was
being proclaimed to rally the loyalty of nationals of other countries.
And when asked what boundaries Israel intended to accept, Meir re-
plied: ‘Israel is where Jews are. It is not a line on a map.”
When Ben-Gurion declared that Zionism demanded ‘‘an uncondi-
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 749
tional love of Israel, a complete solidarity with the state and its peo-
ple,’’!3 this was not just the conduct expected of those who by a
conscious act of dedication have pledged their allegiance to the State
of Israel. In the eyes of all Israeli Prime Ministers, from himself to
Begin, all Jews all over the world are implicitly Zionists, the task of the
ubiquitous Zionist apparatus being merely to make this fact explicit.
Despite other differences, Dr. Nahum Goldmann was in accord
with Ben-Gurion as to the duues and responsibilities of Diaspora Jewry
toward Israel. To the earlier blunt interdiction that ‘Jews have to
overcome the conscious or unconscious fear of so-called double loy-
alty,’"!4 Goldmann later added in 1959:
American Jews must have the courage to openly declare that they entertain a
double loyalty, one to the land in which they live and one to Israel. Jews should
not succumb to patriouc talk that they owe allegiance only to the land in which
they live . . . they should live not only as patriots of the country of their
domicile, but also as patriots of Israel.!5
Speaking to a conclave of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem
on February 3, 1975, Goldmann warned that “the honeymoon be-
tween Israel and the non-Jewish world has come to an end,” and boldly
declared:
At the ume of crisis for Israel when its policies are rejected by many countries
in which Jews live, conflict is bound to occur. The only solution is to acknowl-
edge the existence and fight for the recognition of double loyalties. The real
test of our solidarity with Israel will come when we support it against the views
of the States in which we live.!6
In many lectures across the country, Abba Eban, former Israeli
Foreign Minister, encouraged Jewish implementation of the Gold-
mann thesis. In declaring on the campus of William Patterson College
(Wayne, New Jersey) that ‘Israel could never be a normal state be-
cause its memories were not normal—with six million wiped out, cen-
turies of persecution,” Eban expostulated, ‘Israel could master the
burdens facing it, but not alone. Why should we? All we built—you and
/ built together in a common responsibility and common pride.
Whether the Jew will carry this burden is up to you. The answer is in
your hands.’"!?
Frenzied New York students who harassed President Pompidou
on his 1970 visit, the anti-Arafat mob outside the U.N. in 1974, and
the synchronized emotional March 1977 Jewish outpourings through
the media, featured by full-page ads of Elie Wiesel and the Au Revoir
750 POLITICS OR POLICY
to France Committee!® when Palestinian Abu Daoud, suspected of
masterminding the Munich Olympics affair, was released by the Gis-
card d’Estaing government, were all responses to leadership calls for
dual loyalty. And the American media served as a catalyst in stirring
hatred against America’s oldest ally.!9
One had to go back to the post-Hitler days of 1946, 1947, and
1948 to find a parallel to these outbursts of Jewish nationalist emotion-
alism. Then Organized Jewry moved as a cohesive unit in a violent
“Hate Britain” campaign. A concerted effort was made to mobilize
American public opinion behind an Israelist boycott of British goods,
Signs were plastered in stores throughout New York City as the Sons
of Liberty Boycott Committee was formed. From the pulpit and in
resolutions, support was given to this anti-British activity.
At the time, the recovery of Europe through the Marshall Plan was
the fundamental keystone of American bipartisan foreign policy, and
the heart of an envisoned reconstructed Europe was to be Britain,
Strong Communist parties in Italy and France were doing all in their
power to interfere with the operations of the plan, while the Russians
were creating obstacles by means of the air-block of Germany. In
practical effect, this was as much an attempt to sabotage U.S. foreign
policy as were any of the Communist efforts in Europe. While Uncle
Sam was pouring out hundreds of millions from the national coffers
to place her closest ally in a better financial position, there were many
Jews who dropped England from their travel plans so as not to leave
U.S. dollars there.
On another prominent occasion the Jewish duality revealed itself.
It was not easy to reach the decision that Germany should be rearmed
as part of the defense against Communism and integrated into the
Western European Community. The specter of a remilitarized Ger-
many was frightening enough in itself without adding to it Israeli
prejudices toward Hitler’s successors. Zionism injected the issue of the
special Jewish peril, even coupling the indemnification rights of Israel
against Germany. When the Knesset recessed as a protest against the
signing of the peace treaty between West Germany and the Western
Allies, no Jewish group stepped forward to disassociate itself from
what was publicly stated to be ‘‘the Jewish position.”
What American Jews would not see was that their acceptance of
Israel's abnormal nationalism, viewing them as inchoate Israeli citi-
zens, was linked to the inflexible Israeli policy of expansionism, the
principal obstacle to peace.
When Jews who were congressmen, rabbis, and leaders of large
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 751
organizations in the U.S. insisted that relationships between Israel and
France and/or England were their personal responsibility, little won-
der that the Arabs were so reticent to accept their neighbors as an
accomplished fact. Emotional blindness prevented Jews from seeing
the total incongruity of their demands that Arabs be prevented from
boycotting companies doing business with Israel while Zionists could
impede U.S. trade with France, Britain, Mexico, etc., because of differ-
ences between those countries and Israel.
In an infinite number of other ways, American Jews have betrayed
the pervading Jewish dichotomy. Moshe Brilhant, long-time stringer of
the New York Times in Israel, disclosed in December 1972 that more
than 11 percent of the investments in residences in Israel in 1971 was
made by foreign Jews, mostly Americans purchasing second homes.
The $45 million estimated to have been spent did not include the
substantial investments by those who have moved there, but merely
represented purchases by guilt-feeling Jews for remaining outside and
not sharing the fate of their coreligionists. This further flight of Ameri-
can dollars came at a time when the U.S. deficit balance of payments
continued to mount perilously.
More than 3,000 U.S. banks, including 300 of the largest, have
been influenced to buy Israel Bonds, a major prop in that state’s
struggle for financial viability. Because one of the directors of the
Pacific Bank of Nantucket, also the president of a large bank in Provi-
dence, Rhode Island, has been pressured to buy a considerable
amount of bonds, a small purchase was made even on this island forty
miles out in the Atlantic.
New York City’s Jewish-dominated Teachers Union put up $30
million for the purchase of Israel Bonds.?° Teachers’ pension funds in
major cities followed suit. And a New York State law, pushed through
by Majority Senate Leader Stanley Steingut, enabled savings banks,
savings and loan associations, and credit unions to invest up to 5
percent of their net worth in Israel Bonds. According to 1976 figures
of net worth, this could result in a total of more than a quarter of a
billion dollars, belonging to innocent depositors, being invested in
one of the world’s worst credit risks. (Similar legislation passed the
lower house of the Texas legislature but was bottled up in committee
in the upper house.)
Faced with defections, conversions, intermarriages, and other
flights from Judaism, Jewish religious leaders have been only too
happy to use the pulpit for advancing the dichotomy through calls to
“man the barricades” to meet the threats from outsiders. Any and all
752 POLITICS OR POLICY
Israeli crises are invariably presented as if they were the crises of Jews
all over the world, and as if they were members of an extra-territorial
entity, “the Jewish people.” Lacking a God with a face in its competi-
tion with Christianity, Jewish lay and rabbinical leadership increasingly
relied on the concept of Jewish peoplehood and naked tribal chauvin-
ism to keep its flock intact.
But there is no ‘Jewish people,” save in the sense of a religious
grouping, whose actions can justifiably be permitted to extend beyond
national sovereign lines, flaunting the verboten of dual loyalties. Rep-
resentatives of Israel have spoken many times at the U.N. in behalf of
the “Jewish people” and have seldom been challenged. Hungary’s
Permanent Representative Karoly Csatorday during a 1968 debate on
Jerusalem told the Security Council:
We thus categorically reject the attempt of the representative of Israel to speak
here on behalf of what he calls ‘the Jewish People.” Let us take only one
example, the Hungarian delegation alone, speaking here on behalf of the
Hungarian citizens of the Jewish faith, no one is entitled to abrogate this right
of ours. I would add that my delegation has no knowledge that any other
Government whatsoever has given authorization to the representative of Israel
to represent their citizens of the Jewish religion.
Four years earlier the U.S. government had made its position
regarding ‘the Jewish people’ concept very clear in a letter from
Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot to Rabbi Elmer Berger, in
which it was stated inter alia that the Department of State
. . . does not recognize a legal-political relationship based upon religious
identification of American citizens. It does not in any way discriminate among
American citizens upon the basis of religion. Accordingly, it should be clear
that the Department of State does not regard the “Jewish people” concept as
a concept of international law.?!
This fundamental legal principle has been included in the official U.S.
codification of international law,22 although it has never been invoked
by the American government or its representatives to challenge Zion-
ism’s nationality claims adherent in the separatist ‘‘Jewish people”
concept.
The concept of peoplehood?3—that amalgam of religion, nation,
race, culture, and heritage—brought the deep national consciousness
of being a Jew, in contrast to simply believing in Judaism, into a command
position. This nationalist pride commanded the spontaneous support
of even the most minimal Jews, causing many so-called “liberals” in
the West, as well as dedicated socialists among the first pioneers in
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 753
Palestine (many living in the collective kibbutz or cooperatuve moshav)
to look the other way and cast aside deeply held principles.
In “New, Instant Zionism” in the New York Times Magazine Febru-
arv 3, 1974, reprinted three weeks later in the Afiam: Herald, editor
Norman Podhoretz hailed the total conversion of Jews to Zionism, and
pointed to Jewish editors and other intellectuals who had ‘never
yielded to the claims of religion” and “felt contempt for nationalist or
chauvinist sentiments,” but who, with the body of American Jews, had
responded to Israel’s fate at the ume of the 1973 war “‘as though their
own lives, their own families, and their own homes were immediately
and imminently at stake.”
Podhoretz could indeed point exultantly to the “near dwindling
into invisibility” of organized anti-Zionism by way of the decline of the
American Council for Judaism.?4 Nevertheless, many Jews who were
members of no group sull subscribed to the principles of universalism
and integration but were too frightened to speak up and disclaim the
asserted Zionist link to all Jews. More important, there were Christians
whose resentment of the narrow, arrogant particularism expressed by
Podhoretz caused them to erupt in Letters to the Editor, as did Har-
vard’s Professor Martin Kilson:
Though one is accustomed to a certain grossness in the sensibilities of the
author of Making It, | was not quite prepared for the display in “‘Now, Instant
Zionism.” The nakedly crass and vulgar ethnic chauvinism surrounding “his
we-are-all-Zionists-now’ pronouncement to his fellow Jews is more than I
expected, even from Norman Podhoretz.
A decade ago I had thought that this pathological level of neo-ethnicity
in American life would remain restricted to separatist black militants, but it is
clear I was mistaken. Jews have now acquired the new ethnic chauvinism and,
alas, are outdoing all of us at it: as much as 99 percent are Zionists now,
Podhoretz gleefully informs us.
‘The most distressing feature of Mr. Podhoretz’s article is the revelation
that his new ethnic chauvinism has chipped away at his intellectual capacity for
objectivity, restraint, and common-sense—just as it has among separatist black
intellectuals. For example, in referring to the argument for joint Arab-Jewish
control of Israel, he places quotation marks around the term “‘binational,”’
suggesting that such a soluuon is intrinsically unacceptable. But I would have
thought common sense dictates just the opposite—namely, there is neither a
viable nor progressive solution to the claims for a Jewish presence in Israel
without some variant of binationalism and the separation of church (Judaism)
and state... .
I suspect, too, we can soon look forward to a new wave of ethnic chauvin-
ism among the Protestant majority—an event many Jews in their current
754 POLITICS OR POLICY
ethnocentric craze ironically welcome. But I would like to suggest to Norman
Podhoretz and his supporters that they think again. For a new Nativism among
Protestants (their variant of ethnic chauvinism) will have horrendous conse-
quences for all of us—Jew and non-Jew alike. Mr. Podhoretz’s celebration of
the new Jewish chauvinism is as politically dangerous as it is intellectually
revolting.25
Rabbi Jacob Neusner also raised his voice in opposition to Zionist-
Israeli absolutism:
There can be no “center of Judaism,” but where we find ourselves and live
Jewish lives. . . . How can American Jews focus their spiritual lives solely on
a land in which they do not live? The underlying problem which faces both
Israeli and American Jews, is understanding what the ambiguous adjective
“Jewish” is supposed to mean when the noun “Judaism” has been abandoned.
Conceding that supplying funds, encouragement, and support for
Israel seem to be the primary commitments of American Jews, the
Rabbi added, “One wonders whether one must be a Jew at all in order
to believe and practice in that form of Judaism. What is ‘being Jewish’
now supposed to mean?”
Even more pertinently, because he himself is an Israeli, Dr. Israel
Shahak proclaimed that undeviating devotion to the State of Israel was
“both immoral and against the mainstream of Jewish tradition”:
I am a Jew living in Israel, and consider myself a law-abiding citizen. I serve
in the army every year, in spite of being nearly forty years old. But I am not
“*devoted” to the State of Israel or to any other state or human organization!
I am devoted to my ideals. I believe in speaking the truth and in doing some-
thing for securing justice and equality for all human beings. I am devoted to
the Hebrew language and poetry, and I like to think that I follow in my small
way some of the values of our ancient prophets.
But to be devoted to the State? I can well imagine Amos or Isaiah splitting
their sides with laughter if somebody had demanded of them to be “devoted”
to the Kingdom of Israel or the Kingdom of Judah. “‘Hate evil and love good
and establish judgment in the gate,” says Amos (Chapter 5, verse 15), who
does not spare a word of devotion to the great, warlike and successful King-
dom of Israel of his times.
In fact this new doctrine preached as a Jewish duty, is nothing but Jewish
apostasy. All Jews used to believe, and say it three times a day, that a Jew
should be devoted to God, and God alone.?6 A small minority still believes it.
But it seems to me that the majority of my people has left God, and has substituted an idol
in its place, exactly as happened when they were so devoted to the Golden Calf in the desert
thal they gave away their gold to make ut. The name of this modern tdol is State of Israel.
We should understand a little more closely what forms this ‘‘devotion”’ of
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 755
Diaspora Jews to Israel take. The main form it takes is money—enormous sums
of money, which are given to the government of Israel and to Israel political
parties, without any control whatsoever. Two consequences follow: First, the
Israeli government has much greater power over its citizens than any other,
for a great part of its money does not come from Israeli citizens. Because of
this, any democratic attempt to change the government in Israel becomes most
difficult, if not impossible, for a great part of the power of the Israeli govern-
ment is not derived from any sources inside Israel: it is derived from the
pockets of Disapora Jews by means of their idolatrous ‘‘devotion” to the State
of Israel.
The second necessary consequence is that since as a matter of proven
experience, Diaspora Jews give more money when the danger of war is greater,
therefore the Israeli Government has a great financial interest in not making
peace: it would receive so much less ‘‘easy” money .. .
Ask a Jew in the Diaspora, who proclaims his devotion to the State of
Israel, who usually knows no Hebrew, is ignorant about Jewish culture and
history, participates only in some religious Jewish ceremonies which he does
not understand, to what exactly he is devoted; and he will answer that without
Israel, or strong Israel, he will not be able to carry his head high, that he will
feel low and insulted, or similar answers.
Nevertheless this situation where, for all practical purposes, the Diaspora
Jews think that they can buy our blood with their money and feel good and
devoted, cannot last. /t cannot last, for it has a corrupting effect on both the ger and
the receiver. As an Israeli, 1 would say that the Diaspora Jews are being corrupted more
than we. In the Middle East, it promotes a perpetual state of war, and outside promotes
anti-Semitism. 27 [Italics added. ]
When a Russian diplomat is attacked on the streets of New York,
or Soviet-American culturalists are bombed, who can claim any ratio-
nal let alone any national interest was served, least of all that of Israel?
Such an expression of nationalist affinity only highlights the aged
Jewish dichotomy of being both a nation and a religion. So long as the
U.S.-Israel honeymoon, consecrated by overweening domestic politi-
cal realities, continued happily, the purposeful intermixing of national-
ism with religion might be tolerated and even encouraged. But in time
another Dean Acheson in an autobiography may also expose the secret
ihat he opposed the creation of a Zionist state in the heart of the Arab
world because it “would vastly exacerbate the political problem and
not only imperil American, but all Western interests in the Middle
East.”’ And suddenly the once-bigoted libel, “These Jews are foreign-
ers—they don’t belong here,” may assume a reasonableness with the
realization that vital American interests have been sacrificed in the face
of indescribable pressures and financial power. If and when Americans
756 POLITICS OR POLICY
add up the inordinate price they have been paying so that a Golda Meir
or Menachem Begin might be the Prime Minister of a sovereign na-
tion-state, a dozen anti-Defamation Leagues will be unable to suppress
the ensuing storm.
It could no longer be claimed that the dichotomous nature of the
Jew, wherein he lived on for centuries under the discipline both of
the sovereign state in which he was physically located and of the
religio-political community to which he belonged, was rooted in cir-
cumstances beyond his control. In that past, prior to Jewish political
emancipation in the 18th century, religious and political ties were
necessarily intimately and politically linked. Today the duality stems
from his voluntary association with Israel. Even in the face of the deep
fear of being blackmailed by the anti-Semitic label, it is not likely that
Christian America will continue to permit, in the guise of religious
duty, the political problems of Israel to remain the political responsi-
bility of American Jews. Sooner or later it will be deemed totally
abhorrent that the policies and politics of a sovereign foreign state are
being underwritten by nationals of this country. Americans are bound
to discern the price that is already being paid for assuming that the
enemy of Israel is necessarily the enemy of the U.S. In an October 9,
1977 Miami Herald article, Arthur Miller admitted that American Jews
were confronted with a conflict of loyalties when their president pro-
poses policies that do not coincide with those favored by Israel.
In the U.S. a number of people may indeed achieve something of
a separate group identity merely by believing they belong together,
but American tolerance toward separation ceases when group thought
and group action run counter to the mores and interests of America.
In plain words, why should Jews be permitted the unique status of
being part of a worldwide Jewish nation with its center in Israel to
which they are bound by a system of rights and obligations, while freely
implanting this idea of Jewish nationhood throughout the U.S. in the
guise of religion?
As the American Jew sits around the Passover table and repeats
the ancient prayer, ‘“‘Next Year in Jerusalem,” he ought to consider
appropriate action to free metaphysical practices essential to worship-
ping God from his nationalist activities related to the foreign State of
Israel. The Middle East crisis might once more threaten to become
another Vietnam, and some of his exasperated fellow Americans might
then one day be asking him: “‘Why next year? Why not this year? There
are almost daily E] Al flights to Israel.”’
No other group in the U.S. dares don a garment of such duality.”8
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 757
The continuing conflict in Ireland exposed on what quicksand the
clichéd Zionist defense to the charge of dual loyalty rested. ‘Look how
the Irish display their special passions for Ireland,” Israelists argued.
But the very muted activity of Irish Americans has shown that there is
little analogy between the abnormal feelings/activities of Jewish
Americans toward Israel and the one-day exuberant enthusiasm for
Fire that shamrock-wearing Irishmen effect on St. Patrick’s Day. The
sentimental affecuion that Irish (or Italian, French, etc.) Americans
have for their country of origin offers no analogy to the feeling toward
Israel exhibited by American Jews. The Irish who are in the U.S. left
Ireland only in recent generations. While some Jews left Roman Pales-
tine two millenniums ago, centuries before the first Angles and Saxons
set foot in England, they have come to America not from Israel but
from every country in Europe.
Irish Americans have shown that they are not American Irish (they
are never referred to in this way, just as Jews are invariably called
American Jews) and that their deep, sentimental tie to the motherland
from which they had come (most Jews and even their remotest ances-
tors could not trace their way back to the land of Canaan) is kept within
bounds of permissive cultural pluralism. Not even an Eamon de Valera
would ever have dared demand from Irish Americans one one-hun-
dredth of the allegiance the Israeli government demands from Jewish
Americans as a matter of course, or claimed one one-hundredth of the
sovereignty over ‘Diaspora Irish” that the Israeli government has
exercised over Diaspora Jews. The resolute disavowal of IRA terrorism
by Senators Kennedy and Moynihan, Governor Carey, and other Irish
Americans provided an example of detachment from “motherland,”
which Jewish Americans unfortunately in no way have ever followed.
Whether cognizant of it or not, the average Jew has been made to
feel so much a part of Israel that he scarcely regards the abnormal
treatment accorded that country by the U.S. as anything more than a
most natural act, not as one extracted by massive pressures. He is
therefore unconscious of the dangers in permitting a foreign country
to become the special concern of a special group of Americans. This
has nothing to do with cultural pluralism, which has rarely been ques-
tioned. But under the universal system of nation states, any American
is precluded from being saddled with rights from, and with corollary
duties and obligations to, a foreign state, whether called religious,
humanitarian, communal, brotherly, or racial.29
The failure to appreciate that Israel must be regarded as much a
foreign state as Italy or Sweden has led Jews into pitfalls that others,
758 POLITICS OR POLICY
not afflicted with the aged duality, would more easily have seen. Dual
loyalties do not necessarily involve the conscious process of choice:
“This is in the interests of the U.S., that is in the interests of Israel, and
I choose thai.”’ Such is the rare case. For more common is the uncon-
scious choosing of that without any consideration being given to thts.
Whatever responsibility is taken for the security of the State of
Israel can only be assumed by the U.S. as a whole and not by Zionists
or any other segment of the population acting apart. The destiny of
those who call themselves Jews in the U.S. should depend on the
security of but one country. Their ‘‘to be or not to be” ought to be
inflexibly interwoven only with the fate of the U.S. Giving away some-
thing that belongs entirely to their country is wrong under any circum-
stances and can even be disastrous in moments of crisis. Those who
preach this doctrine of insecurity—‘“‘It can happen here as it has every-
where, and therefore let us guard well the State of Israel” —are sadly
hastening to bring about the very tragedy they imagine they are pre-
venting.
The U.S. differs from all other nations in that it is not based either
on common descent, centuries-old rootedness in a common ancestry
or on a religious unity. The universal idealism of the 18th-century
awakening gave America a very special ideology. As a substitute for
those elements the U.S. lacked, a steadfast devotion to the principle
of the melting pot was needed. It takes no superpatriot or chauvinist
to suggest that conflicting loyalties only vastly complicate the ends
sought. It is possible to experience different kinds of emotions. Sup-
port of the fullest participation of the U.S. in such international organi-
zations as the U.N. or its subsidiary agencies does not create any
problem of duality. The child has a different feeling toward his mother
than toward his father or brother. But this is certain: Just as you cannot
have two fathers, you cannot have two ‘“‘Uncle Sams.”
However much American Israelists belitthe the problem of dual
loyalues, attempting to dismiss the dichotomous phenomenon as a —
mere expression of determined unanimity toward the survival of Is-
rael, the herding of Jews together in support of Zionist goals and the
service of some in the Israeli armed forces3° have raised anew the
hazards of self-segregation, the dangers of arousing bigotry. The pe-
rennial Ziomist-Israeli answer to “‘Why are the Jews always per-
secuted?”’ invariably has attributed the enure blame to “them’’—the
other guys. They exclaim, ‘““We’re perfectly innocent—what have we
done to bring this on?” It never occurs to them that by thinking—and
living—in terms of ‘‘we” and “they,” the ‘‘goys”’ and the “‘kikes,” they
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 759
are bound to bring down upon themselves the natural reaction to
self-segregation and apartheid—and even more so when the combusti-
ble element of foreign entanglements has been added.
To hold that prejudice directed against them stems today solely
from their belief in Judaism—if they do believe—or from the simple
fact that they hold themselves out as Jews, indicates the extent of the
hypnosis under which Jews have allowed their leaders and organiza-
tions to place them. Jews disregard the vital, all-important fact that
their singular and abnormal relationship to a foreign state called Israel
has given validity to the centuries-old charge that they can never be-
come assimilated, “part and parcel,” into the country in which they are
living. Their partnership role, both through organic ties between the
State of Israel and the Jewish Agency and day-to-day organizational
activities advancing vital interests of the State of Israel, only confirms
the existence of a dual loyalty that in the end can bring not mere
prejudice and discrimination, but total disaster.
It was the trauma sparked vicariously by Nazi genocide that caused
Jews to be so totally blinded that they readily forsook their heritage of
tolerance in accepting the Zionist shadow for the Judaistic substance.
Dr. Arnold Toynbee expressed this painful reversal in these terms:
In a.p. 1948, the Jews knew from personal experience what they were doing
and it was their supreme tragedy that the lessons learned by them from their
encounter with Nazi German Gentiles should have been not to eschew but to
imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.
On the Day of Judgment the gravest crime standing to the German National
Socialist account might be not that they had exterminated a majority of West-
ern Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble.3!
It was not only the Nazis who caused Jews to stumble, but their
own intellectual lights to whom they turned for guidance, such as
Nobel Literature Prize winner Saul Bellow. In his eloquent outpouring
To Jerusalem and Back,? dealing with a 1975 visit to Jerusalem, Bellow
early informed his readers that he had been brought up in a Yiddish-
speaking family and had married out of the faith, thus making more
understandable both his idolatry of Zionist Israel and his hatred of
Arabs. Simplistically, he dismissed the French government’s attitude
in the 1973 war, and its recognition of Arafat and the PLO, as a revival
of French anti-Semitism going back to the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy
government.
Overflowing with references to the Warsaw Ghetto, the concen-
tration camps, and other Jewish tragedies, the Bellow recital depicted
760 POLITICS OR POLICY
Israeli novelist David Shahar pounding on the table literally shouting:
“The West doesn’t know the Arabs. They will not let us live.”” The
fundamental right of Jews gua Jews to exist has never been under
challenge in the Middle East conflict, save in the imagery of culusts like
Bellow, who cover up the long intrepid fight of progressive forces to
accord Jews as individuals equal and secure rights, and rewrite history
so as to prove that statehood can be the only safe repository for Jewish
rights.
Special Bellow disdain was reserved for George Steiner, author,
critic, and Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University, for his
charge that ‘‘Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their
inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model.33 This view-
point was further expanded by Steiner at the Sixth American-Israel
Dialogue in Jerusalem during the summer of 1968:
The existence of Israel is not founded on logic. It has no ordinary legitimacy.
There is neither in its establishment nor present scope any evident justice—
though there may be an utter need and wondrous fulfillment.
What irked Bellow most was Steiner’s universalist reminder to his
audience of the existence nearby of Palestinians in refugee camps and
shanty towns whose families for generations had lived in Jerusalem,
while in the room with him were Jews who were brought up in Vilna,
Hamburg, or Manchester. The critic pressed the painful question, “By
what right are we here, while others are dispossessed?”
The Nobel Prize winner claimed that Jews were “alone amongst
the peoples of the earth [who] had not established a natural right to
exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth.” Aside from the fact that
the land for more than nineteen centuries has been inhabited over-
whelmingly by Arabs, is Israel in fact the homeland of Herzl, Weiz-
mann, Ben-Gurion, Meir, Rabin, Begin, and Bellow, as they have un-
hesitatingly maintained?
Arthur Koestler answers this question with an emphatic ‘‘No.” In
his 1976 bestseller The Thirteenth Tribe, 34 the Author of Darkness at Noon,
Promise and Fulfillment, and The Roots of Coincidence dropped another
bombshell by proving that today’s Jews were, for the most part, de-
scendants of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism seven centuries
after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.p. and the dispersion of the
small original Judaic Palestine population by Roman Emperor Vespa-
sian and his son Titus.
The Khazars, a seminomadic Turko-Finnish people who settled in
what is now southern Russia between the Volga and the Don, spread
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 761
to the shores of the Black, Caspian, and Azov seas. Jews who had been
banished from Constantinople by Byzantine ruler Leo III5> found a
home among the pagan Khazars and then, in competition with Muslim
and Christian missionaries, won Khagan Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria,
over to the Judaic faith around 740 4.p.36 His nobles followed suit, and
somewhat later so did his people. Some details of these events are
contained in letters exchanged between Khagan (King) Joseph of Kha-
zaria and R. Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi-Foreign
Minister to Sultan Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain.37
When Khazaria fell to Mongols in the 13th century, its population
of “Jewish’’-convert Khazars fled northwest to become the progenitors
of Ashkenazim (Russian/German/Baltic/Polish/) Jewry. These Khazar
Jews greatly outnumbered racially Jewish Jews who had reached
Europe by other routes and at other periods of history. Therefore, the
great majority of Eastern European Jews are not Semitic Jews at all,
and as most Western European Jews came from East Europe, most of
them also are not Semitic Jews. Thus, maintains Koestler, the veins of
45 percent of Israelis (save only the Arab and the Sephardic Jews), plus
a big majority of Jews around the world, are utterly vacant of corpuscu-
lar links to the tribe of Moses and Solomon. This nullifies Zionism’s
strongest claim to Palestine/Israel, the author’s codicil to his fine book
not withstanding.38
The Koestler thesis, however startling, is in no wise a new one.
The genetic Khazar derivation of most Jews—only the Sephardic may
be accounted Hebrews by blood—has been long if not widely known.
Dunlap at Columbia, Bury in England, and Poliak at Tel Aviv Univer-
sity have researched this ‘‘cruelest of jokes” and won research accept-
ance over the past half-century. It remained for Koestler to popularize
Khazars as the thirteen tribe—‘‘lost” only to the memory of most Jews,
especially Zionist Jews. Naturally, the Times review of the Koestler
thesis by Fitzroy Maclean was squeezed into two unobtrusive columns
on page 4 of its Sunday book section.*9
What Price Israel?, published twenty-three years before the Koes-
tler work, pointed out that the lineal ancestors of Eastern and Western
European Jewry were these 8th-century Khazar converts, and noted
how this was being kept a dark secret because it tended to vitiate the
Principal prop of the Zionist claim to Israel:
For all that anthropologists know, Hitler’s ancestry might go back to one of
the ten Lost Tribes of Israel; while Weizmann might be only a descendant of
Khazar converts to Judaism who were in no anthropological respect related to
762 POLITICS OR POLICY
Palestine. The home to which Weizmann, Silver, Ben-Gurion and so many
other Ashkenazim Zionists have long yearned to return has most likely never
been theirs. “Here’s a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox”: in
anthropological fact, many Christians may have much more Hebrew-Israelite
blood in their veins than most of their Jewish neighbors.
Ironically enough, too, Volume IV of the Jewish Encyclopedia (as of the
time of research, 1952), because this publication spelled Khazars with a “C” —
instead of a “‘K”’, is titled ‘““Chazars to Dreyfus.”’ And it was the famed trial of
Captain Alfred Dreyfus, as interpreted by Theodore Herzl, that made the
modern Jewish Khazars of Russia, most of the intrepid Zionist leaders, forget
their descent from converts to Judaism and accept anti-Semitism as proof of
their Palestinian origin—the heartstone of their right to establish the State of
Israel.4°
Despite his legal weaseling about the Zionist claim to Palestine, a
furious Zionist onslaught was directed against Koestler for exposing
Israel’s Achilles’ heel and giving prominence to another upsetting
point: If the majority of Jews surviving the Hitler holocaust are of
Caucasian rather than Semitic origin, then ‘‘the term ‘anti-Semitism’
would become totally void of meaning, based on a misapprehension
shared both by the killers and their victims.” And without the hue and
cry, “anti-Semitism,” pray what happens to the Zionist movement?
Khazar conversion was not unique. There is additional history
that has not been hidden from public purview which also casts serious
doubts on the legitimacy of the effort to endow Jews with a common
ethnicity, namely that of the Hebrew nation of twelve tribes, the re-
maining two of which had inhabited the Holy Land at the time of Jesus
and were fully dispersed around the world with the destruction of the
Temple by the Romans. One must note that the Jewish Diaspora had
begun more than two centuries before this Jerusalem tragedy. We find,
according to Philo, that by 250 B.c. Alexandria, Egypt, contained by
far the largest number of Jews in the world, far outstripping Jerusalem.
By the tme of the Romans there already were more people of the
Judaic faith throughout the world than in the Holy Land. Judaism, then
the sole monotheistic religion in a pagan world, had made converts in
the Roman Empire and in many lands. The universal aims of the
second Isaiah found expression in great missionary activities.
Judaism became a tremendous proselytizing force in the pagan
world. Those who carried the religion of Yahweh to other parts of the
globe were hardly more than a drop in the ocean of foreign peoples
who had never possessed any racial, lingual, or cultural affinity with
Israel and nevertheless became meinbers of the Judaic monotheistic
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 763
faith. These converts included such diverse peoples as Yemenites and
Greeks, the Queen of Sheba, the people of Adiabene, the Hellenistic
state on the Tigris. Judean traders carried their faith eastward as far
as India and China. Conversions to Yahweh in Rome carried Judaism
through Italy into France, the Rhone Valley, and the Rhine Basin. Mass
conversions of Germanic tribes spread Judaism into Central and East-
ern Europe, particularly Poland and western Russia. Frederick Hertz
in Race and Civilization notes, ‘in the Middle Ages and in modern times,
notwithstanding all obstacles,’’*! there have been occasional conver-
sions in Slavic countries, which accounts for unmistakable Slavic facial
characteristics of Polish and Russian Jews. There were even conver-
sions in Hungary as late as 1229.42 Whole peoples of varying ethnic
strains became proselyte Judaists, especially during the two centuries
before the birth of Christ. Judeans migrated to the Arabian desert and
converted Semitic peoples in Yemen. Pagans as distant as those of the
Kerch Strait and the Crimea accepted Yahweh, the Hebrew God.43
The Hebrews then were indeed a light unto the other nations and
were spreading monotheism, the task given to them by God. Many
Romans, including members of the nobility, embraced the simple
teachings of Judaism, won by the appeal of what Jewish historians have
referred to as a “system of morals, anchored in the veneration of the
One and Holy God,” and the “purity of Judean home life.’’ For the
most part the proselytes accepted the idea of monotheism and the
moral law without the ceremonial precepts.*4
With the advent of Christianity, the parent faith ceased proselytiz-
ing. Monotheism was now carried to the pagan world by the disciples
of Jesus (and later by Islam). The Apostle Paul, born Saul of Tarsus,
removed the ceremonial law and freed those who were willing to
accept Christianity from the minute formalization of the ancient wor-
ship of Yahweh.
In a debate with Palestinian journalists on a June 1977 Public
Broadcasting System telecast of an interview show made outside the
walls of Jerusalem, editor of Davar Hannah Semer vehemently de-
claimed her 3,000-year right to Israel and the exclusion of the Pales-
unians.
But the ‘historic connection” upon which Zionists have staked
their claim that Palestine belongs to them—and to them alone—turns
out to be but a racial myth, which a further glance back into history
exposes. Twelve tribes started in Canaan thirty-five centuries ago; not
only did ten of them disappear, more than half of the other two never
returned from exile in Babylon. How can anyone claim descendancy
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764 POLITICS OR POLICY
directly from that relatively small community that inhabited the Hol
Land at the time of Abraham’s covenant with God? (And if there wa
such a covenant, Arabs are part of the seed of Abraham through
Hagar, who gave birth to a son, Ishmael.) Who can say for sure that
many Christian readers of this book might not in fact have a better
claim, which they do not choose to exercise, to go back “home”’ t
Palestine than Hannah Semer, Menachem Begin, or Golda Meir?
Queen Victoria herself belonged to an Israelite society that traced the
ancestry of its membership back to the lost tribes of Israel.
The descriptive name “Judaism” was never heard of by the He-
brews or Israelites; it appears only with Christianity. Flavius Josephus
was one of the first to use the name in his recital of the war with the
Romans‘? to connote a totality of beliefs, moral commandments, reli-
gious practices, and ceremonial institutions of Galilee that he believed
superior to rival Hellenism. When the word ‘‘Judaism”’ was born, there
was no longer a Hebrew-Israelite state. The people who embraced the
creed of Judaism were already a mixture of many nations, races, and
strains, and this diversification was rapidly growing.
This story and the authoritative Koestler evidence ought to per-
suade American non-Zionist Jews of the folly owing from the blind,
emotional support they have been giving the Israeli state. It should
make them pause before making further commitments, which can only
greatly endanger their status as Americans, and the security of other
Americans.
Those who would step forward today to advance the heritage of
Judaism and battle the mighty Zionist-Israelist array will have to do so
without the warmth and comfort that tribalism affords. They will be
forced to look beyond narrow confines and strive to impart perspective
from the larger, total picture. But they will have great figures who came
before them to light the road on which they must make their way. Like
many of God’s more fortunate human beings, anti-Zionist Jews have
had excellent forebears of whom they may justly be proud. The roots
of anti-Zionism go back to the very beginnings of Judaism.
The writings and preachments of the great Hebrew prophets
Amos, Jeremiah, Micah, Hosea, and the two Isaiahs, and Elijah (in
whose exalted number Jesus properly belongs), unfortunately were
never accorded the same position of honor and respect that Christian-
ity has accorded to the Apostles of Jesus—Paul, Peter, John, Luke,
Mark, and Matthew.
It was Jeremiah who spoke out to the Judaeans in the midst of their
Babylonian captivity in 586 B.c. with these words of advice:
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 765
Build ye houses and dwell in them and plant gardens and eat the fruit thereof;
take wives and beget sons and daughters. . . . And seek the peace of the city
whither I have caused ye to be carried away captives and pray unto the Lord
for that city, for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. [Jeremiah 29:5-7.]
These Hebrew prophets were not interested in the restoration of
political power. But they were passionately concerned with the injus-
tices of their day, and the remedy, they insisted, could be found only
in a universal God of mercy, justice, and righteousness, who de-
manded, above all, an undeviating code of moral values.
The second Isaiah, writing circa 536 B.c., endowed the burgeon-
ing faith with a vision of the Messianic coming. His ‘‘next year in
Jerusalem” referred to a Kingdom of God and was unrelated to any
particular nation or sovereignty. To this prophet, the mission of the
Judeans was to open blind eyes and to serve as a light to the Gentiles.
(Isaiah 42:6.) “For my House shall be called a House of prayer for all
people.” This recognition of the universality of man was echoed by the
prophet Amos when he thundered forth: Are ye not as children of the
Ethiopians unto me, O Children of Israel? (Amos 9:7.)
These preachments are in contrast to those of the unknown
psalmist from whose words “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand forget her cunning” (Psalms 137:5) has grown the seed of nation-
alist-segregationalist Zionism. The history of the peoples who came
after the Judeans and who became known only many generations later
as ‘‘Jews” represents a continuous struggle between conflicting ideolo-
gies: nation versus faith, chosen people versus universality, segrega-
tion versus integration.
Following the 1791 Edict of Emancipation by the French Chamber
of Deputies endowing Jewish citizens, for the first time, with full and
equal rights. Berr Isaac-Berr wrote a significant letter on September
28 of that year to his coreligionists (then numbering 60,000):
We must then, dear brethren, strongly bear this truth in our minds: that, tll
such a time as we work a change in our manner, our habits, in short, our whole
education, we cannot expect to be placed by the esteem of our fellow citizens
in any of those situations in which we can give signal proof of that glowing
patriotism so long cherished in our bosoms. We must divest ourselves entirely of
the narrow spint of corporation and congregation in all civil and political matters not
immediately connected with our spiritual laws. [Italics added. ]
In 1917 when Zionism, in its first bid for Palestine, pressed for the
promulgation of the Balfour Declaration, it was a most perspicacious
anti-Zionist Jew who spoke out courageously, but unfortunately his
766 POLITICS OR POLICY
government was not prepared to heed him. Edwin S. Montagu, Secre-
tary of State for India‘? in the Lloyd George World War I Cabinet,
would accept the declaration calling for a Jewish national home in
Palestine only conditionally as “a military expedient” (the Allied Pow-
ers were then losing World War I to the Central Powers), and only
after the wording of the policy statement had been rephrased. Mon-
tague informed his chief that he had “‘striven all his life to escape from
the ghetto,”’ to which he now faced possible relegation as a result of
the proposed policy paper.
Montagu did not wish to endanger the hard-won status of Jews as
an integrated religious community enjoying equal rights, privileges,
and obligations in countries in which they lived, and he deeply re-
sented the efforts of Zionist nationalists to persuade unwitting coreli-
gionists that they were an ethnic-racial group, one of superior stock
entitled to rule over Palestine. Believing that without a deep sense of
righteousness there was little left to Judaism, Montagu appreciated the
patent injustice in turning over control of a land to those who then
constituted but 7 percent of the population.
The British Cabinet records of 1915 to 1920, made public by the
British government only in 1970, contained voluminous references to
the Balfour Declaration, including three memoranda by this sole Jew-
ish Cabinet member that revealed his remarkable foresightedness.
Whereas today it is the critics of Zionism who are the ones labeled
anti-Semitic, Montagu in a memorandum circulated to other Cabinet
members pinned that very label on the sponsors of Zionism’s charter.
The document of August 23, 1917, titled ““The Anti-Semitism of the
Present Government” and marked “Secret” bears looking into:
I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense,
not by any means as quarreling with an anti-Semitic view, which may be held
by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by
rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is
deliberately anti-Semitic, but I wish to place on record my view that the policy
of His Majesty's Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying
ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world. . . .
The war has indeed justified patriotism as the prime motive of political
thought. It is in this atmosphere that the Government proposes to endorse the
formation of a new nation with a new home in Palestine. This nation will
presumably be formed of Jewish Russians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish
Roumanians, Jewish Bulgarians, and Jewish citizens of all nations—survivors
of relations of those who have fought or laid down their lives for the different
countries which I have mentioned, at a time when the three years that they
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 767
have lived through have united their outlook and thought more closely than
ever with the countries of which they are citizens. {Note the precise manner
in which Montague refers to Jewish Russians, etc., rather than Russian Jews,
etc.]
Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed,
untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish English-
man sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will
shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Pales-
tine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with
British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public
life in Great Britain or to be treated as an Englishman.
I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were
largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in
Russia. But at the very ume when these Jews have been acknowledged as
Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zion-
ism should be officially recognized by the British Government, and that Mr.
Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as
the ‘‘national home of the Jewish people.” I do not know what this involves,
but I assume that it means that Mohammedans and Christians are to make way
for the Jews, and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and
should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England
is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Moham-
medans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners. . . .
I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for
instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind
of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country
beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or lesser degree the same
religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor
are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a
Christian Frenchman are of the same nation—of the same race... .
... I certainly do not dissent from the view, commonly held, as I have
always understood by the Jews before Zionism was invented, that to bring the
Jews back to form a nation in the country from which they were dispersed
would require Divine leadership. I have never heard it suggested, even by their
most fervent admirers, that either Mr. Balfour or Lord Rothschild would prove
to be the Messiah. . . . [This was a view similarly held today by the Neturei Karta
in Jerusalem. }
I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have
had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our
public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but
as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be
almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organization as illegal and against the
national interest. . . .
I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews. It is quite true that
768 POLITICS OR POLICY
Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in modern Mo-
hammedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays a larger part
than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may have been in
Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion. I would
not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonization with those who
profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be
only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular
epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which
they are not enutled.
I am not in the least surprised that the non-Jews of England may welcome
this policy. I have always recognized the unpopularity, much greater than some
people think, of my community. We have obtained a far greater share of this
country’s goods and opportunities than we are numerically enutled to. We
reach, on the whole, maturity earlier, and therefore with people of our own
age we compete unfairly. Many of us have been exclusive in our friendships
and intolerant in our attitude, and I can easily understand that many a non-Jew
in England wants to get rid of us... .
I would say to Lord Rothschild that the Government should be prepared to do
everything in their power to obtain for Jews in Palestine complete liberty of settlement and
life on an equality with the habitants of that country who profess other religious behefs.
I would ask that the Government should go no further.4® [Italics added.]
Here in the 1917 words of Edwin Montagu, a Jewish Briton, is the
forerunner to the Arafat-PLO secular, binational state, enunciated at
the U.N. in November 1974, to which concept Israelist-Zionist leader-
ship adamantly refuses to even discuss.
On this side of the Atlantic, too, during this same period, virulent
opposition to Zionism manifested itself. The New York Times of March
5, 1919, featured a lengthy story on San Francisco Representative
Julius Kahn and his presentation of the views of thirty-one prominent
Jewish Americans in a petition to President Woodrow Wilson. Fearful
that the appeal of the Zionists (who only claimed to represent 150,000
of the then 3!% million Jewish populace) to the Paris Peace Conference
might be the opening wedge toward the creation of a Jewish state,
these presidential peutioners warned against any commitment “now
or in the future to Jewish territorial sovereignty in Palestine. This
demand,” these anti-Zionist Jews stated, “‘not only misinterpreted the
trend of the history of the Jews who ceased to be a nation 2,000 years
ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger
claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which
those human rights are not yet secure.”
The thirty signees of the petition, in addition to Congressman
Kahn, included such outstanding leaders of the Jewish community as
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 769
Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-Ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosen-
dale, ex-Attorney General of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of
Galveston, Texas; Cleveland’s E. M. Baker, President of the Stock
Exchange; R. H. Macy’s Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher
Adolph S. Ochs; Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco; and Professors
Edwin R. Seligman of Columbia and Morris Jastrow of the University
of Pennsylvania. Wilson brought the petition to the Peace Conference.
This broad-based leadership strongly rejected the Zionist project
of a ‘‘national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” They viewed
the concept with suspicion because they foresaw it might be applied
not only to Jews living in countries in which they were oppressed, but
to Jews universally. ‘“‘No Jew,” they wrote, “wherever he may live, can
consider himself free from the implications of such a grant.’’ Distin-
guishing, as their successors have never been able to do, between
“haven” and “state,” these leaders heartily approved of ‘‘aid in re-
deeming Palestine from the blight of centuries of Turkish misrule,”
while at the same time vigorously opposing “the Zionist project to
segregate Jews as a political unit and to reconstitute a section of such
in Palestine or elsewhere.”
Declaring the political segregation of Jews in Palestine or else-
where as “necessarily reactionary in its tendency, undemocratic in
spirit, and totally contrary to the practices of free government,” these
outspoken voices repudiated “every suspicion of a double allegiance,
which is necessarily implied in, and cannot by any logic be eliminated
from, the establishment of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine.”
Observing sagely that those who favor a restoration of such a Jewish
homeland in the Holy Land, “‘advocate it not for themselves, but for
others . . . those who act thus, and yet insist on their patriotic attach-
ment to the countries of which they are citizens, are self-deceived in
their profession of Zionism and under the spell of an emotional ro-
manticism or of a religious sentiment fostered through centuries of
gloom.”
Unlike Dr. Chaim Weizmann and other Zionists, these American
visionaries were very aware of the Arab presence in Palestine and of
the dangers of an ensuing struggle between the two groups:
It is not true that Palestine is the national home of the Jewish people, and of
no other people. . . . To subject the Jews to the possible recurrence of such
bitter and sanguinary conflicts, which would be inevitable, would be a crime
against the triumph of their whole past history and against the lofty and
world-embracing visions of their great prophets and leaders. . .. Whether the
770 POLITICS OR POLICY
Jews be regarded as a “‘race” or as a “religion,” it is contrary to democratic
principles for which the World War was waged to found a nation on either or
both of these bases... .
Before the Hitlerian emotionalism and vicarious guilt engulfed
them, there were Jewish leaders who did not flinch from expressing
themselves in this vein:
We object to the political segregation of the Jews because it is in error to
assume that the bond uniting them is of a national character. A Jewish State
involves fundamental limitations as to race and religion, else the term “‘Jew-
ish” means nothing. To unite Church and State, in any form, as under the old
Jewish hierarchy, would be a leap backward of 2000 years.
The great Jewish families of the Western world, whose Judaic
traditions made philanthropy the crowning justification of their
wealth, likewise totally rejected political Zionism. In a speech at the
Menorah Society Dinner in December 1917, Chief Judge Irving Leh-
man, brother of Governor Herbert H. Lehman, declared:
I cannot recognize that the Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in
which that word is recognized in political science, or that a national basis is
a possible concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the
Jews of other lands by our common faith, constituting our common inhen-
tance, cannot as American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a
nation, for nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in political
and civic matters we cannot recognize any other ties. We must therefore look
for the maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute
Judaism.49
In his autobiography, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., stated: “Zionism is
the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history. It is wrong in principle
and impossible of realization; it is unsound in its economics, fantastical
in its politics and sterile in its spiritual ideals. I speak as a Jew.”’5°
Neither he, Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald, or Felix Warburg
would have permitted all the Hitlers in the world to change their basic
philosophy. These men were not just non-Zionists, they were passion-
ate antinationalists. But their viewpoint was soon overridden through
new demographic factors and a different leadership.
The earliest Jewish settlers had no concern for group rights and
had disdain for even a segregated cultural existence. In 1897, when
Herzl’s Zionism was beginning to fascinate Europe, the Central Con-
ference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any
attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution stated: “Zion was
a precious possession of the past . . . as such it is a holy memory, but
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 77]
it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.’’5! In 1904 the
American Israelite noted, “There is not one solitary prominent native
Jewish-American who is an advocate of Zionism.’’5?
Between 1881 and 1924 the third wave of Jewish immigration
brought 24% million Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to set-
de in the larger eastern cities. Most of these new immigrants were
Orthodox and inclined toward Zionism. They had not only lived as
a separate nationality, but had voted as Jews for other Jews to rep-
resent them in governments. They mostly had spoken a language
other than their environment’s, and had lived in a mental ghetto to
“balance the physical ghetto around them.’’53 The Jews from these
countries had been a nation within a nation so that, when they
came to the U.S. as emancipated persons, the nation complex came
with them.
By sheer numbers these newcomers soon began to dominate their
American coreligionists, taking over some older organizations and
starting new groups of every variety. In 1918, with the creation of the
nationalist-minded American Jewish Congress, the hegemony of the
earliest Jewish settlers, the Sephardic and German Jews ended, and
Zionism made its entrance. The philanthropic-minded antinationalists
in the Jewish Agency, the official liaison between Palestine Jews and
Jewry in the Diaspora, were soon outvoted and either surrendered
their seats, to be filled by fervent Zionists, or were neutralized as
non-Zionists.
It is most unfortunate for everyone that descendants of those who
took an inspiring antinationalist stand should today be found either in
Zionist ranks or among the numerous fellow travelers, tongue-tied by
fear to speak up. But others have picked up the standard and have held
the universalist banner aloft. They know how both “‘to be ‘a Jew’ at
home and a man in the world,” as author Alan Taylor expressed it.
Denmark’s Chief Rabbi Marcus Melchior responded to the Ben-
Gurion call for ‘‘complete solidarity with the State of Israel” in this
manner:
We Danish Jews do not usually air our patriotism. Why on earth should we
shout “hurrah” more loudly than all the other Danes? But we take an opportu-
nity like this to state that no one, however big he may be or from wherever
he may come, has the right or is able to change even one jot of what for 150
years has been the status of Danish Jews under which there has been estab-
lished a relationship in Denmark of which we are all just as happy on the
Christian side as on the Jewish side.
If Premier Ben-Gurion really claimed that in order to be a Jew every
772 POLITICS OR POLICY
minute of one’s life, one has to live in Israel, then according to my view, two
questions arise. The first is whether to be a Jew every minute is of imperative
necessity and whether Jewishness and being a general human being did not
equate each other so completely that one at the same time could be Jewish and
a human being in other places than in the few square kilometers which form
the territory of Israel.54
It was Moshe Menuhin who dug up the old 1919 7imes clipping.
In his postscript, “Quo Vadis Zionist Israel?” to his book, The Decadence
of Judaism in Our Time, the father of the famed violinist, Yehudi Menu-
hin, wrote: ‘I am an integrated citizen of the United States. am a Jew
by my religion and by nothing else. Prophetic Judaism is my religion.”
An early advocate of Zionism, when he lived in Palestine, Moshe Menu-
hin has since waged a relentless crusade against the Zionists who, he
considers, “only use and abuse their religion to promote Jewish na-
tionalism, the new religion of so many subverted and brainwashed
Jewish people.”
However much courage it takes to oppose Zionism in the Dias-
pora, it requires much more to stand up and be counted inside Israel.
Dr. Judah Magnes, the first President of the Hebrew University, was
forced to end his days out of the country when he urged closer collabo-
ration and understanding between Jews and Arabs as a basis for the
“creation of a bilingual and biracial state in Palestine along lines simi-
lar to the Swiss Confederation, with Palestine participating as one of
several states in an Arab federation.”’55
With unparalleled fearlessness, Dr. Israel Shahak has followed in
Magnes’s footsteps through his solo fight against the ‘“‘grave social
discrimination visited upon any Israeli citizen every day of his life if his
mother is not a Jewess.’’5® And the living testimonials to the insepara-
ble chasm between Zionism and Judaism are those religious Jews of the
Neturei Karta who have been a continuing thorn in the side of the
Israeli Establishment as they live their daily lives in accordance with
the precepts of the Torah and persist in their refusal to recognize the
existence of the Israeli state under whose jurisdiction they are ruled,
because it was not Messiah-created. It is Israeli Jews who epitomize the
resistance of all who refuse to countenance: ‘Israel Uber Alles” (Israel
Above All).
While I have tried to interject myself and my own experiences into
this volume as little as possible, there are personal feelings that must
be expressed at this juncture. I believe that I am articulating the voices
of many, many Jews who wish to think American, but who will not
volunteer an expression of their innermost feelings, even though they
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 773
will cheer from the sidelines the expression of these deeply felt senti-
ments.
I cannot tolerate Israel turning me and others, who regard our-
selves as Americans of the Jewish faith, into second-class citizens in our
own country. For today my relations to the State of Israel are different
from that of Christian Americans—of John Jones, my neighbor. If I
wish to retain my religious affiliation, 1 am bound, whether I like it or
not, to help, assist, give, lend, etc., the foreign State of Israel in a
manner in which other American non-Jewish citizens do not have to
do.
I insist, if I wish to worship or identify with the Judaic God—and
that may be only for one minute a year—that I be able to do so without
going through the State of Israel or any other intermediary. Whether
a man be a good Jew or better still Judaist—a word I prefer as a
follower of Judaism—ought in no way be judged by his attitude toward
the State of Israel. I absolutely refuse to substitute fealty to a foreign
state for the worship of Yahweh, and I insist on the doctrine of separa-
tion of church and state for which progressive-minded peoples have
so long fought.
To add to my negative affirmations, as I declared twenty-eight
years ago when I first wrote in the Reader’s Digest, I refuse to be a
hyphenated American. I am neither an American-Jew nor a Jewish-
American. I am an American of the Jewish faith, and Israel’s flag is not,
has not, and never will be mine.
The final judgment as to whether Israelists and Zionists can be
considered good Americans should come from Woodrow Wilson who,
about sixty years ago, said:57
You cannot become true Americans if you think of yourselves in groups.
America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging
to a particular national group has not yet become an American, and the man
who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is not worthy to live under
the Stars and Stripes.
But as Eric Sevareid observed during the 1976 election campaign,
“The country is becoming the home of the ethnics—a country of
groups sharing hyphenated names and candidates wandering among
them promising what they'll do for their homelands across the sea.”’58
And the Jew, above all others, should realize that his future security
rests in his record as an individual, not as part of any group, let alone
one abnormally tied to a foreign state.
Various Jewish organizations in 1954 elaborately celebrated the
774 POLITICS OR POLICY
300th anniversary of the first communal settlement of the Jewish peo-
ple in the U.S. But Elias Legardo, who arrived aboard the Adigail in
Virginia in 1621,59 Solomon Franco, who arrived in Boston in 1649,
and Jacob Barsimson, who was already a resident of New Amsterdam
in 1654—the anniversary of whose arrival on American shores went
totally unobserved—might well have been puzzled at the significance
of the “Jewish people”’ and well might have queried: ‘“‘Didn’t we leave
all that behind in unemanicipated Europe?”
Imagine their even greater surprise if they could see how this term
“the Jewish people” is being used to further the ends of a foreign state.
They had made the hazardous journey across the ocean to escape
group segregation, to leave behind forever the idea that the rights of
a ‘‘Jew” depended upon his rights as part of a group rather than as an
individual. Like other immigrants then arriving, they had no intention
of transplanting any national allegiances, but to shake off the old for
a new one. Three centuries later some of their forebears who had
followed in their footsteps to this country were intent on transferring
to the new soil of America this outmoded and archaic concept that had
long since received a decent burial in most of Old Europe.
From Haym Solomon of the American Revolution through Judah
P. Benjamin, Secretary of State for the Confederacy, down to the
present, there have been many who have made vital contributions to
the American melting pot: Flexner, Einstein, Brandeis, Cardozo and
Frankfurter; Gershwin and Berlin; Pulitzer and Ochs; Louis Unter-
meyer, Fannie Hurst, and Edna Ferber; Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist,
Milstein; Horowitz, Rubinstein, and Serkin; George S. Kaufman, Moss
Hart, and Elmer Rice; the Guggenheims, Schiffs, Strauses, Lewisohns,
Warburgs, and Rosenwalds. Some of these were born here and others
were not, but the attainments of all these men and women were as
individual Americans and not as part of a separate people.
The Jew in America should have continued to struggle for integra-
tion, not segregation, and to seek to be judged for himself, if only
because ‘‘Jews are such a mass of contradictions and encompass such
extremes of human behavior that they are simply beyond the reach of
pat formulas, casual generalizations, or prophetic clichés.” The same
writer further pointed out:
They are both the ‘People of the Book” and the inventors of the strip tease.
They were pioneers of plutocracy and communism. They originated and lived
by the concept of the “Chosen People,” yet are presently the most vociferous
of anti-racists. They are the most God-fearing and God-hating, the most strait-
The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles? 775
laced and the most permissive, the most cosmopolitan and most narrow-
minded, the most cultivated and the most vulgar of peoples. Jewish sabras in
Israel fight like ten thousand Lawrences of Arabia, but in Germany their
brethren went like lambs to the slaughter. The same racial dynamics which has
sporadically propelled Jews to the top of the social heap has also cast them
down into the abyss. The penduluming, rags-to-riches swing of Jewish history
may lead to the fairyland castles of the Rothschilds, but it also leads to the gas
chambers of Auschwitz. When viewed objectively, the story of Jewish wander-
ings through ume is both fascinating and repulsive, ennobling and degrading
—in part comic, in great part tragic. The only last word that can be said about
Jews is that there is no last word.6
For Judaism as a religious faith, there have been and will be few
roblems in the U.S.—for Judaism as a nationalist commitment the
road ahead can only become thornier. The corresponding allegiances
to religion and to state, long before the heightening of emotions under
Carter and the impact of Sadat peace initiatives, have become so con-
fused that it would require the Hebrew wisdom of a Jesus for Jewry to
be able to apply to the present conflict the spirit of his answer to the
Pharisees: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Cae-
sar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21.)
If Jews could only be this wise, they would clearly discern that
peace can only be achieved through the binationalist thinking of Albert
Einstein, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and other universalists, which
was so succinctly stated in the conclusion of that remarkable 1919
document presented to President Wilson by the thirty-one sages:
As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a
“promised land” for the Jews may become a “land of promise” for all races
and creeds, safeguarded by the League of Nations. .. . We ask that Palestine
be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a demo-
cratic form of government, recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or
ethnic descent, and with adequate power to protect the country against op-
pression of any kind. We do not wish to see Palestine either now or at any ime
organized as a Jewish State.
Such a mandate from any number of Jews and Christians today
would enable President Carter, the Soviet Union, the Arabs, and the
Israelis to move, through a reconvened Geneva Conference or other-
wise, on a steady path toward true justice and lasting peace in the
Middle East.
XXV Conclusion: Toward Justice
and Then Peace
I shall no longer ask myself if this or that is expedient, but only
if it is right. I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish,
but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my
journey a star that will not play false to me. . . . a compass that will
not lie . . . 1 do it because I am no longer able to aspire to the
highest with one part of myself and deny it with another.
—Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country
With sacrifices by al’ parties, the impossible dream of peace in the
Middle East may yet be achieved before further disaster overruns the
area and the world. But this depends on the true intent of the Israelis
and the Arabs, and on banishment of the guile to which the Old
Testament refers: They speak peace to their neighbors, but mischief
is in their hearts. (Psalms 28:3.)
In the course of the Christmas Day luncheon during the 1977
historic visit of Menachem Begin to Ismailia, the Israeli leader de-
fended his refusal to grant sovereignty to the Palestinians of the West
Bank and Gaza with one of his customary history lectures, which traced
the persecution of Jews from Roman times through the holocaust and
included the Arab attack on the newly established state in 1948 and the
1973 “surprise strike.”’ Sadat’s only answer was: “‘No, no, let’s not start
all that again. That happened before November 19 and my trip to
Jerusalem.”
The Egyptian leader ought never have let the record stand as
Begin recited it and as the myth-informed world accepted it. Sadat
might have seized the opportunity to cite the “original sin,” the dis-
possession of the overwhelming majority of the indigenous Arab in-
habitants of Palestine, which made these innocents pick up the bill in
expiation for what Hitler and others had done to the Jews of Europe.
776
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 777
At the risk of displeasing a guest who was making his first visit to Egypt,
he also could have quoted Israeli humanist Rabbi Benjamin:
In the end, we must come out publicly with the truth: that we have no moral
right whatever to oppose the return of the Arabs to their land. . . . Unul we
have begun to redeem our sin against the Arab refugees, we have no right to
continue the in-gathering of the exiles. We have no right to settle in a land that
has been stolen from others while the owners of it are homeless and miserable.
We had no right to occupy the house of an Arab if we had not paid for
it at its value. The same goes for fields, gardens, stores, workshops. We had
no right to build a settlement and to realize the kind of Zionism with other
people's property. To do this is robbery. Political conquest cannot abolish
private property.!
During the thirty-year step-by-step occupation of Arab Palestine,
the demand of the dispossessed for their human and political rights
has never ceased. But in this period Golda Meir’s “‘What Palestinians?”’
had only given way to “Why the Palestinians?” Far more needed for
a lasting Middle East settlement than any Sadat Jerusalem pledge of
“no more war,” was the Israeli admission: ‘‘We have committed a
grave wrong to the Palestinians.” The failure to recognize even partial
guilt for the tragedy militates against hopes of a settlement. Until an
Israeli head of government makes this declaration, peace can never be
any more than illusory. For the crux of the bitter Middle East conflict,
the struggle between the Zionists of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine,
will have remained unresolved.
The long years of double-talk engendered by Hitler’s specter
concealed the true nature of the Zionist state and its purposefulness
in denying recognition to the Palestinians, who are an independent
people fully entitled to exercise the right of self-determination in their
own land. Their existence as an independent nation was provisionally
recognized by the League of Nations in the 1922 grant of the Palestine
mandate—long before there was any corresponding international rec-
ognition of a Zionist state. The same time as the U.N., successor to the
League, recommended establishment of the Zionist state, it sanctioned
establishment of a Palestinian state on Palestinian soil. Nothing has
occurred since 1947 in any way invalidating this title to a national state.
In population size, in sense of national identity, and in capacity for
self-government and independence, the Palestinians are fully as well
qualified for membership at the U.N. as many of the existing member
states, including Israel.
The rights of the Palestinian people to exist as an independent
778 POLITICS OR POLICY
national entity and the rights of the people of Israel to a secure exis-
tence are two sides of the same coin. As a man of the Bible who has
made the quest for human rights the keystone of his administration,
who better than President Carter could have led the way toward end-
ing the anguish of Palestinian exile and the hell of Israeli occupation?
If a sense of justice constitutes the basis for U.S. support of Israel, the
cake must slice in both directions. Justice must come for those who
have an equal, if not a superior, legal and moral claim to the same land
of Palestine. The right of the Palestinian people to statehood and of
all Palestinians to make their home in their own land ought no longer
be questioned.
Staunch American friends of Israel called for the end of the occu-
pation of the West Bank and Gaza for the benefit of the Israelis them-
selves:
It is corrupting to hold and govern another people by force. This is one of the
arguments mounted against slavery by Thomas Jefferson. Slavery not only
wronged the slave, it coarsened and brutalized the master.?
Highly respected Israeli journalist Boaz Evron points to the price
the occupation was causing his own people:
... Through the creation of a semi-colonial regime and the rise of a class of
small omnipotent despots who tyrannize a submissive population by using
weapons... the ruler is bound to develop all the loathsome traits of arrogance,
corruption and oblivion of the humanity of the ruled. The ruler may in time
transfer these conditions to his own people. . .. Oppression of the conquered
population will turn into interior terror against dissenters among Jews. This
is an unavoidable process, by which the poison and rot spread. Oppression has
no limits.
Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all failed in their quest for
the “just and lasting peace” envisaged in Resolution 242 by ignoring
Palestinian rights and adhering to the false premise that this goal could
best be achieved by keeping Israel unilaterally stronger than all her
neighbors combined. Israel has been so militarily endowed by the U.S.
for two decades, and yet the Arab-Israeli conflict continues.
Carter seemed to be seeking a more evenhanded approach during
the early months of his administration by becoming the first U.S.
President to talk of a ‘Palestinian homeland.” But he continually wav-
ered, as others before him had, in the face of Zionist pressure and
power. He abandoned the goal of an overall settlement for the dra-
matic Israeli-Egyptian version of Kissinger step-by-step diplomacy,
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 779
leading to the Begin-Dayan plan for the occupied West Bank, in which
PLO participation was totally ruled out and a mockery was made of
Palestinian rights. While sharply disagreeing with Begin over the set-
tlement issue and the necessity of some withdrawal from all occupied
territories, Carter’s negativeness toward Palestinian statehood for the
West Bank and Gaza persisted.
By what right does the U.S., Egypt, Israel, or any other party lay
down the rules for the self-determination of the Palestinian people and
decide whether they shall live in a Palestinian state, a Jordanian-Pales-
tinian federation, a unified Jordanian kingdom, a republic, or other-
wise? The overwhelming Palestinian sentiment against the Israeh plan
was expressed by Mayor Mohammed Hassan Milhem of the West Bank
town of Halhoul: ‘Our people should be given the right of self-deter-
mination and the full right of an independent state without being
under the patronage of anybody. We condemn any effort or attempt
to go around and try to create alternatives.4 As Dr. Walid Khalidi,
Palestinian professor of political studies at the American University in
Beirut stated to Anthony Lewis of the New York Times June 15, 1978,
“the cornerstone” of an acceptable solution is a sovereign state, not
one with ‘ersatz sovereignty” or an Indian reservation sprinkled with
“armed archeologists,” but ‘‘only a true state” that could give Pales-
tinians “‘a national anchorage.”
Palestinians of the West Bank became increasingly dejected and
angry as they remained unconsulted and negotiations stalled. From an
irate Christian in Ramallah came this comment: “Mondays, Wednes-
days, and Fridays Carter is for the Arabs. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and
Saturdays he’s for the Israelis, and on Sundays he goes to church.”
They are convinced ‘‘no one can force Israel to do anything.”’ As a
businessman told a Washington Post correspondent (January 15, 1978):
“We want the PLO—warts and all—to represent us.”” Termination of
occupation is the key demand.
Ambiguous promises of autonomy under alien supervision and
control in another Bantustan with the exercise of self-determination
after five years—and not positively then—is no answer to the Pales-
tinian claim to nationhood in a national state of their own. While there
could be no objection to a very brief, temporary, and transitional
period of international administration to help prepare the way for full
exercise by the Palestinians of their right of self-determination in an
orderly representative manner, this was a far cry from Israeli intent.
The number-one step on any peace agenda is for the U.S. to grant
immediate and forthright recognition to the PLO as the legitimate
780 POLITICS OR POLICY
representatives of the Palestinian people and to lend every possible
assistance to the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank
and in Gaza. Such action would be consonant with the inalienable right
of self-determination, inexorably proclaimed by all American states-
men. It is for the Palestinians—and the Palestinians alone—to choose
their own leaders and representatives. However militant and intracta-
ble they may be, there is little alternative to dealing with the effective
leaders of a people in revolt. U.N. General Assembly resolutions, the
Arab states at Rabat, and the 1976 West Bank elections all affirmed the
PLO leadership.
Such an act of recognition by the U.S. admittedly would breach
the once-secret Kissinger covenant given as an inducement to Israel
to enter into the second disengagement agreement. Not only has the
situation totally changed with the Sadat initiative, but Israel herself
violated her agreement with the U.S. by employing American weapons,
in particular the CBU-72 cluster bombs, during the 1978 invasion of
Lebanon, contravening the Arms Export Control Act and additional
pledges of use only in case of full-scale war (such as 1967 and 1973)
against well-entrenched emplacements.>
Recognition by the U.S. would place the Palestinian leadership
under a sense of obligation to Washington, which could be balanced
against any promissory notes that might be due to Moscow for assist-
ance rendered in achieving this essential goal. As Arnold Toynbee
expressed it some years ago: ‘“The question is whether the Arabs are
going to attain their acceptable objectives with the goodwill and assist-
ance of the West, or whether they are going to attain their objective,
in the teeth of Western opposition, thanks to Russian support... . The
way in which they will win will decide whether they join our or Russia’s
camp.’’® And this applies particularly to the Palestinians after their
long struggle.
As an excuse for its boycott of the PLO, the U.S. points to Begin’s
assertion that he would negouate anything but Israel’s destruction,
which he insists is the Palestinian aim. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad
told Arnaud de Borchgrave, senior foreign correspondent of Newsweek,
in January 1978: “Let Begin address himself to the PLO. Let him say
to the PLO executive committee: ‘I want to negotiate with you, but not
on the destruction of Israel,’ and let him hear their answer.”
Next in importance, Washington must persuade Israel through
Jewish-American leadership that the State of Israel must de-Zionize by
giving up its abnormal nationalism, which extends inchoate citizenship
to nationals of other countries because they share a common faith. It
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 781
has been Zionism, never Judaism, that has been the intruder in the area
and the harbinger of animosity between the two peoples of Palestine.
It was fear of this political ideology, striving for an exclusivist state, not
hatred or bias toward Jew qua Jew, that ushered in the awesome con-
flict. Arabs and Jews lived peacefully together for centuries before the
advent of Zionism, and they could do so in the future.
What we today know as anti-Semitism never existed in the Arab
world. Moses and Abraham, as well as Jesus, are recognized as proph-
ets in the Islamic faith, the Koran refers to Jews as “people of the
book,” and one of the holiest places in Islam is the Rock of Jerusalem
where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is difficult
for the seeds of bigotry to grow in such an atmosphere. The Jews had
originally been brought to Babylon (now Iraq) by Nebuchadnezzar
after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah. It was there that the
Babylonian Talmud had been written and the captives had found the
“peace of the city” prophesized for them by Jeremiah. It was in the
ensuing great Islamic empires that they served as counselors and ad-
visers to sultans and pashas, gaining civic prestige and financial posi-
tion while enjoying for centuries economic and religious freedom. In
Iraq there had been Jewish finance ministers in various Cabinets, and
125,000 Jews who attended some sixty synagogues.”
The situation was the same in Egypt, where the Jews had lived for
millennia side by side with the followers of Islam. Some of them were
descendants of ancient Hebrews whom Moses left behind in his exo-
dus. Others had fled to Egypt following the first destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 250 B.c. Jews
gained sanctuary in Egypt from Christian persecutions in Spain and
Portugal in the 15th century, from Soviet excesses at the time of the
Russian Revolution, and from Hitler’s racial persecutions in the 1940s.
And the invasion of Egypt by Israel on October 29, 1956, calculatingly
brought an end to this Egyptian sanctuary for the Jews of the world,
some of whom I had encountered in the Great Synagogue in the
middle of Cairo, when as a World War II GI I attended the Rosh
Hashanah services.
As one Oriental Jew expressed it: ‘We sang together and wept
together. It was only after Zionism and Israel appeared on the scene
that this human structure collapsed. . . ."" Today the Jewish community
in Iraq numbers less than 1,000 and is even smaller than that in Egypt.
It was Zionism that brought an end to peaceful coexistence; a well-
organized Zionist campaign led by agents sent into the country pro-
duced the trouble between Jews and Muslims, resulting in a most
782 POLITICS OR POLICY
reluctant Jewish exodus despite the opposition of Iraq’s chief rabbi,
Sassoon Kheddoury.®
The holocaust has caused a total misreading of history and has
blocked out the reality of the long, intimate relationship under which
Jews and Judaism thrived in the Arab-Muslim world. Almost totally
ignored by the U.S. media was the magnanimous act of Yasir Arafat
in sending food and water to nearly 150 Jewish Lebanese trapped in
a Beirut synagogue during the Lebanese civil war. Wadi Abu Jamil, the
Beirut neighborhood that housed many of the city’s 1,500 Jews, had
been a no-man’s land between the warring Christians and Muslims.
Acting on a request from attorney Salim al Maghrebi, who heads the
Jewish community there, the PLO rushed in the necessary aid. Magh-
rebi was quoted as saying: ‘“The Lebanese Jews are grateful to Mr.
Arafat. We have no need of any outside protection because no one has
touched a hair on our heads. We reject Israeli reports that the commu-
nity is in any danger. We want no outside protectors, Israeli or other-
wise. We simply plan to go on living as we always have, as Lebanese.’
After sending in food for those in need, the Palestinian commandos
became the guardians of this community during the remainder of the
strife.
Jews, Muslims, and with Christians all have an equally deep
spiritual and emotional attachment to Jerusalem and can share a Holy
City that is internationalized. This would be consonant with the 1947
U.N. partition plan, and depoliticizing this most sacred of cities would
return it to the three monotheistic faiths to whom it justly belongs.
Five years before Begin came to power, Guardian correspondent
David Hirst refuted Zionism’s unique claim to Jerusalem:
They cannot challenge the Arab claim to Jerusalem by the only criterion which
would count in modern law—centuries of continuous residence and ownership
of the land; so they have to erect another one in its place, the intensity of the
sentimental attachment, the strength of the mystic bond which binds them to
it. The world is asked to have a sense of history and to appreciate what it means
to the Jews to return to the Holy City from which they were expelled 1900
years ago. It is asked to find no undue presumption in the recent assertion of
Ben-Gurion that “Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital for 3000 years since
King David.’’!0
For their part, the Arabs must prove that their record of tolerance
toward Jews is not just past history and that they sincerely intend to
implement present words regarding coexistence in the area on an
equal basis with Jews. By not making a mere shibboleth of the deep
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 783
abyss between Judaism and Zionism, they can do much to overcome
the deep-seated recent mistrust that has grown up between two Se-
mitic ‘‘cousins.”” There are many Israelis who would respond positively
to a resumption of fraternal relations with Arabs.
What hopes there are for a more reasonable Israeli attitude rest
in the hands of Israel’s youth and future generations. Many young
Sabras (the native-born were given this name because their resilience
makes them resemble the cactus fruit—tough on the outside, sweet on
the inside) are not afflicted with the Masada complex. What desire they
may have for a ‘‘Greater Israel’ stems not from support of worldwide
Jewish nationalism but from overbearing pride in their country, which
would constitute 10 menace to their neighbors. Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion openly admitted that the Eichmann trial had been used
not only to win world sympathy for the new state but to indoctrinate
his youngsters with an understanding of the true meaning of Hitler
and the holocaust. But this new generation of Israelis never developed
any love of Zionism and, in fact, holds the deepest disdain for nonim-
migrating Jews living outside. Israeli youth deeply resent the price
exacted for their insecure living in Israel: the inordinate taxes, ram-
pant inflation, and the ever-present threat of an Arab attack. They
cannot help feel the increasing hostility of an outside world in which
their only real friend and ally, aside from the U.S., is South Africa, with
its blatant racism and apartheid, and with whom military-economic ties
have vastly escalated.
The desire for peace was expressed in the gigantic April !, 1978,
rally outside Jerusalem's City Hall when more than 30,000 Israelis
responded to a call by 300 military reservists and university students,
who had sent a letter to Prime Minister Begin criticizing the govern-
ment’s conduct of negotiations. Huge placards, “Better Peace in Israel
than a Greater Israel,” supplied the keynote for the demonstration.
The pessimistic realism of the youthful strata of Israel is reflected in
the ever-increasing exodus from their country, including the more
than 2,000 Israeli taxi drivers on the streets of New York City.
An independent U.S. policy based on the development of a sound
framework of evenhanded political relationships with all Middle East
countries is a prime necessity. This alone can serve vital U.S. interests
as well as the world community's desire for peace and stability in the
region. Israel, as President Eisenhower required her to do after the
1956 aggression, must be made by Washington to give up the occupa-
tion of all Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian territories, save for minor
border rectifications, in accordance with the most reasonable interpre-
784 POLITICS OR POLICY
tation of Resolution 242. The long-extant U.S. guarantee of the terri-
torial integrity of all nations of the Middle East, flouted since the 1967
war, should be replaced by a U.S.-U.S.S.R. security pledge, under U.N.
auspices, to Israel, to the new Palestinian entity, and to the other Arab
states.
There is little prospect of Middle East peace, and certainly no
hope of ending the dangerous and escalating arms race without the
cooperation of the Kremlin. Between 1973 and 1976 $20 billion in
armaments were poured into the area; $11 billion from the U.S., $6
billion from the U.S.S.R., and $3 billion from Britain and France. (On
his March 1978 visit to Washington, Israel’s Defense Minister Weiz-
mann sought a long-range arms commitment in excess of $12 billion.)
It is not in the cards for military establishments to be long in posses-
sion of such great arsenals without finding some good excuse to use
them. Israel’s nuclear capability, which the Arab countries were con-
stantly striving to match, has added to the dangers. Washington must
both find means other than the sale of instrumentalities of death to
overcome a portion of its huge deficit balance of payments stemming
from oil imports and abandon the anomalous use of armaments, such
as the $4.8 billion jet sale to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel, as the way
to peace.
As for Israel, a genuine peace with its neighbors should prove
more satisfactory than an amorphous U.S. commitment to its security.
So long as the Israelis felt they could rely on Washington’s security
commitment—expressed or implied—they could always reply to a de-
mand for concessions: “‘We cannot give that territory back. It endan-
gers our security.”
Whatever commitment may have been given was certainly in-
tended by the American people for the people of Israel, not for an
Israeli state bent on expansionism, be it by conquest or ideology. No
commitment covering Israel as well as its conquests has ever been
constitutionally ratified. No President, let alone any number of mem-
bers of Congress, ever had the right to guarantee the Zionist policy of
bringing in Jews from all over the world, the ‘‘ingathering of the
exiles’’ as it is called, or the concomitant establishment of settlements
in the occupied territories. Why should it still be considered blasphe-
mous to call for clarification and redefinition by Washington of the
exact nature of the extant U.S. security commitment to Israel?
These recommended drastic U.S. foreign policy steps might be
accompanied by important internal measures. The entire question of
the Middle East must be taken out of the domestic political arena, a
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 785
goal for which James Forrestal gave his life, and made part of the
bipartisan foreign policy Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg first en-
visaged. Nothing but national harm has been wrought by the continual
Republican sniping, led by National Committee Chairman William
Brock and Senator Howard Baker, to which ex-President Ford lent a
conspicuous hand by addressing a New York meeting of the National
Council of Young Israel in April 1978 and assailing the Carter adminis-
tration for insisting on significant Israeli territorial concessions. His
1976 running mate, Senator Robert J. Dole, made it known that he did
not intend to “fade away”; he began addressing Zionist rallies, includ-
ing a large gathering in Jerusalem where he exhorted the Israelis not
to give up an inch of territory. Sull maintaining his popularity among
Conservative Republicans, Ronald Reagan, who always had been
“gung-ho” for Israel, did a weekly column for the Jewish Press of Brook-
lyn and took intermittent pokes at the Carter administration for not
doing enough for Israel.
Bipartisanship could be realized, and the sordid campaigning for
votes over this issue best brought to an end, through the elimination
of the Electoral College system and the popular election of the Presi-
dent and Vice President. This would drastically reduce the reliance of
any President, or nominee for that office, on the so-called ‘Jewish
vote,” the wooing of which has so plagued the development of policy
in the national interest. Such direct elections of the Chief Executive
would drastically curtail the ability of Zionism and other special inter-
est groups to gain preferential treatment for themselves and for their
friends abroad. Several Presidents, including Carter, have submitted
legislation in this direction, but all have encountered overwhelming
obstacles to date.!!
Everyone has played domestic politics with the Arab-Israeli con-
flict—Republicans, Democrats, and the politicians of other Western
countries—and have brought only more chaos to the scene. The Arab
countries competed with one another in being more anti-Israel, the
Israeli political parties vied as to degree of anti-Arab sentiment. At a
critical stage in April during the 1978 Middle East negotiations, Sena-
tor Howard Baker appeared on “Face the Nation” to make political
capital of Carter’s position by strongly defending Begin against the
charge of intransigency. In a bid to return to power, former Canadian
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker visited Israel, planted 750 trees in
behalf of Canadian Jews, and criticized the Trudeau government for
not moving its embassy to Jerusalem in recognition of the ‘‘true capital
of Israel.”
786 POLITICS OR POLICY
Next in importance is removal of the word “anti-Semitism” from
political and public discussion of the Middle East problem. This throt-
ding label is totally irrelevant to the debate over the rights of two
Semitic-speaking peoples. A free and open expression of opinion is
needed so that Americans may understand why their President can
rarely say “no” to Israel, why their representatives in Washington are
not serving the totality of American interests, why the media is afraid
to report the news fairly, and why their sons may one day be forced
to fight in a new, more horrible Vietnam. The Great Middle East
Debate, totally untethered and uninhibited, must be permitted to go
forward to avoid the overwhelming catastrophe that otherwise lies
ahead. And just as judges disqualify themselves in cases where they
cannot be impartial because of a conflict of interests, so likewise should
the many media commentators whose Zionism pervades their outpour-
ings to millions.
What is required is that all Americans face the Middle East crisis
courageously and participate in helping to find a solution. All fear of
speaking out must be banished. To tell the truth as he sees it, a George
Ball ought not have to be abjectly apologetic, as in his Foreign Affairs
article, ‘‘How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself!”’!? Nor should a com-
petent political-economic observer be forced to employ a pseudonym,
to turn to Vanity Fair publishers, and then have to resort to the title
“Goldstein Explains How Jews Control American Policy Toward Is-
rael”!5 in order to set forth the thesis that international Zionism has
played on “latent racism and pathological anti-Communism’” to
achieve its ends in the U.S. The author tellingly puts these words in
the mouth of his Mr. Goldstein:
It really upsets us to see that the Palestinians have been as nationalistic as Jews.
We have a mandate from God and Americans to be so. I never read in any Bible
about God's having given a similar mandate to the Palestinians. God, are they
unreasonable bastards! Can you imagine Americans being like that? If Israel
annexes New York State because it is mostly Jewish owned, Gentiles in Amer-
ica will never become as unreasonable as the Palestinians and fight the Jews.
Well, it’s only a hypothetical situation anyway. Why would Israel want only
New York State when it has all the United States?'4
The potent American business community, which has a tremen-
dous stake in the region but has displayed abysmal cowardice to date
on this issue, must join the struggle for justice. U.S. companies have
not only refrained from anything but superficial involvement in the
contest for American public opinion, but have failed to protect even
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 787
their own selfish interests. Large, powerful corporations have coun-
tenanced the distortion and embellishment of the actual Arab eco-
nomic boycott of Israel into a ‘“‘shadow boycott’’!5 so as to give all the
appearances of an Arab “‘anti-Semitic’”’ campaign. This helped spur the
passage by Congress of antiboycott legislation handcuffing vital U.S.
trade in the area.
It is difficult to esumate how many billions of dollars of trade and
hundreds of thousands of jobs may be lost due to adoption of the
Stevenson-Rosenthal bill and companion enactments designed to cur-
tail Arab economic warfare against companies giving economic and
financial assistance to Israel. As pointed out in the 1976 testimony
before the House Committee on International Relations by repre-
sentatives of the Associated General Contractors of America,!® part of
what was at stake was more than $200 billion in construction programs
expected over the following five years, of which the American market
ought to have captured at least 15 percent or $30 billion. (By April
1978 far more of the top 400 American contracting firms were doing
business in Saudi Arabia than in any other foreign country.)
Conceivably, as Congressman Robert H. Michel (Rep.-Ill.)
warned the House during the 1977 debate over the pending legisla-
tion, the U.S. could lose “$16 billion in outstanding service and con-
struction contracts in Saudi Arabia alone this coming year plus another
$4 billion a year in sales of direct civilian exports, and $9 billion in
military goods and services.”!7 As many as half a million jobs could be
lost if all eighteen Arab countries were taken into account, according
to the study of MIT Professor Richard D. Robinson, cited by Congress-
man Michel.!8
The long, tedious, complex, and confusing regulations now re-
quired for Middle East traders by the Department of Commerce under
the new legislation have imposed a frightening, restrictive burden,
particularly on smaller business firms. For many it is better not to
attempt to do any business rather than to record and justify not only
transactions but motivations in order to protect themselves against
unfounded charges and heavy penalties for compliance with the Arab
boycott. As the U.S. deficit trade balance dangerously mounts, detri-
mentally affecting the American people and economy, serious thought
should be given to repealing the crippling antiboycott legislation. The
Zionist legislators who convinced their colleagues that American con-
tractors and major business suppliers to the Middle East would sull win
their share of petrodollars because the U.S. is the ‘‘only country”
supplying “what the Arab countries need’’!9 unfortunately have been
788 POLITICS OR POLICY
proven wrong. The fantastic rise in U.S.-Arab trade since 1973 is
beginning to reverse itself, and West European and Japanese competi-
tors are speedily replacing their American counterparts.
In the past the U.S. has employed economic sanctions and/or
boycotts against the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cam-
bodia, North Korea, and Rhodesia. Not to be forgotten was the Zionist
1946 boycott of Britain, nor their more recent acts of economic war-
fare: boycotting 970 Japanese companies that preferred to do business
with twenty Arab countries rather than with Israel, boycotting Mexico
in 1976 for her vote on the U.N. resolution equating Zionism with
racism, and France for releasing Palestinian Abu Daoud.
A heavy price has already been exacted for the failure to heed the
warning of John F. Kennedy against American partisanship in the
Arab-Israeli conflict. As Americans continue to view the fast-moving
Middle East scene through Israeli spectacles and to judge Palestinian
rights according to the terrorist syndrome, the extent to which the
security of every American is linked to the attainment of stability in the
Middle East has been very much kept from public purview.
Infinitely more necessary than the much-discussed normalization
of relations between Israel and the Arab states is the normalization of
U.S.-Israeli relations. An end must be put to the unique relationship,
unparalleled between two sovereign nations, that has been an alba-
tross around the U.S. neck in its execution of foreign policy, not to
mention an incredible burden on the American taxpayer. For example,
the Israeli government’s 1974-75 budget totaled $8.6 billion, the larg-
est item of which was $3.8 billion—44 percent—for defense. ‘This was
almost as much as had been spent during the October war, the bulk
of which was covered by the special $2.2 billion U.S. military aid bill
enacted to cover the cost of the arms airlift.
From the very outset, Uncle Sam had come to the rescue in crucial
moments in Israel's history. No loan was more vital than the first $135
million Export-Import Bank loan granted by President Truman in
1949 when the new state faced instant bankruptcy. But no help had
been better timed than the gigantic flow of U.S. arms in the midst of
the 1973 war. The huge Galaxy transports droning in over ‘Tel Aviv’s
shorefront every hour during the last two weeks of the conflict, deliver-
ing forty-four tons of armaments, were a visible demonstration of the
extraordinary American-Israeli relauonship.
In testifying against the special aid bill, Senator James Abourezk
stated: “It is ludicrous that this Congress should be asked to permit
the Administration an additional $1.2 billion over and above the $1
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 789
billion costs of the Israeli supply effort for undisclosed ‘impondera-
bles.’ ” Another view of this extraordinary aid bill for Israel came from
an American teaching at the University of Beirut:
$1.5 billion is being planned as capital budget for New York City with its 11
million population, and now $2.2 billion military aid is given for a country of
2.5 million. On the basis of that arithmetic, I think it would be much cheaper
all the way around to transfer all Israelis to New York City. The United States
would be about a couple millions ahead, and they would live within “safe and
secure” borders!
Originally only $1 billion had been declared an outright grant, but
when President Nixon was in Moscow?® he exercised the discretion
under the legislation to sign an authorization converting a half-billion
of the remaining amount to an additional grant. This was done at the
request of Israeli Defense Minister Shimon Peres, then on a visit to
Washington seeking an additional $7.5 billion for the ensuing five
years, almost all in grants rather than “loans” because of Israel’s
“flagging economy,” according to the New York Times.
Israel's per capita arms expenditure for 1974 was more than 24%
times that of any other nation.?! Her expenditure amounted to more
than $1,110 per person, the nearest comparable per capita figure
being that of Russia’s $428, with a yearly expenditure of $119 billion.
The U.S. expenditure was $91 billion, per capita only $390. On an
absolute dollar basis, only ten other nations spent more for military
might than Israel.?? The armament expenditures by nine Arab states
(the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Iraq, Syria,
Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) totaled some $6 billion for a population
of 71.1 million. Those nine countries spent $84 per capita, 8 percent
of the Israeli per capita expenditure.
In the ten years ending in 1974, the Israeli armaments figure
reached a staggering $15.48 billion, most from government or private
sources in the U.S. The Zionist state was expending 34.60 percent of
its G.N.P. on the military, compared to 6 percent by the U.S. Israel’s
growing war industry, responsible for its Kfir fighters and Chariot
tanks, was backed by U.S. investments and U.S.-Israeli technology. In
order to keep its aircraft industry viable, Israel coproduced a portion
of the F-16s received from the Pentagon and in 1978 was seeking
authority to manufacture components of U.S. weapons that it did not
wish to acquire, such as subassemblies of Gruman A-6 tactical bomb-
ers.23 But Israel continued to draw on American advanced armaments
and supplies—and billions.
790 POLITICS OR POLICY
Half of the development budget of $1.6 billion in 1974 was cov-
ered by the sale of Israel Bonds abroad, additional sums from Jewry
in the Diaspora being necessary to cover other foreign loans. Various
health, education, and social welfare programs were financed in this
critical postwar year by roughly $1 billion the government received in
other donations, primarily from United Jewish Appeal and Jewish wel-
fare funds—all tax deductible to the donor.
While a handful of objectors fearfully?4 expressed objections to
the dollar drain for Israeli Bonds, the purchase of large amounts of
Israel Bonds continued to come from the most curious sources.
In May 1973 Teamsters President Frank E. Fitzsimmons received
the Israel Silver Anniversary Award for his efforts in the investment of
$26 million of Teamster pension and health and welfare funds in Israel
bonds. According to news reports, present and participating in the
praise of the Teamster leader was Secretary of the U.S. Treasury
George Shultz. Fitzsimmons is an Irishman, but the dinner for 2,500
Teamsters and Teamster employees was declared his ““Bar Mitzvah”
by Herbert Stein, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic
Advisers. A telegram from President Nixon was read to the diners. Not
only did it not seem strange for trust funds of American organized
labor to be invested in a foreign nation, but two of the administration’s
top economic advisers, who were otherwise expressing public concern
over inflation and the credit crunch, apparently gave their approval.
Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz, substituting for Foreign Minis-
ter Abba Eban, presented the medal and stated that the Teamsters’
investment had made it possible for Israel to ‘‘not only support war,
but to launch peace.”” What the members of the International Brother-
hood of Teamsters certainly did not appreciate was that this pension
fund management, which had brought them $26 million of Israel 54%
percent Bonds due in twenty years, could have bought at the same time
the exact number of U.S. bonds, which would have yielded a return of
6.9 percent for each of the next twenty years. The difference of 1.40
percent annual return on $26 million is $364,000, or $7.28 million
over twenty years—the amount the pension funds lost because their
management had chosen the foreign country of Israel over the U.S.
American taxpayers continue to pay the piper for Israel on many
fronts. Under pressure from Speaker Stanley Steingut and Assembly-
man Irwin J. Landes, the Board of Regents of the State of New York
appropriated $225,000 as a grant to the Sachler School of Medicine
in Tel Aviv to pay the tuition for forty New Yorkers to study medicine
there, and to put ten Israeli students through medical college in the
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 791
U.S. at no cost.25 The plain fact is that tax-free, tax-deductible monies
given as charitable dollars are simply a gift to the Israeli national
budget. When sums needed for various services by an Israeli govern-
ment agency are provided through American charity, other monies are
freed to help meet that portion of the Israeli defense budget for which
there have not been grants or loans. Instead of listing these under
charitable contributions, they ought to be listed under the category,
“Taxes Paid to Foreign Governments.” The IRS provides that only
those contributions that are wholly (not holy) humanitarian, charita-
ble, or educational are deductible to the donor. U.S. tax-deductible
funds given for humanitarian purposes have gone into the purchase of
jets and the manufacture of napalm bombs to subdue the Palestinians
or to defray the expenses of Moshe Dayan rallies against efforts to win
increased Israeli flexibility.
The U.S. has been Israel’s largest trading partner, and private
investments of American business have played a major factor in the
Israeli post-1967-war economic boom. U.S. investments approach an
annual average of 55 percent of the total foreign investments in the
Israeli economy.
It is significant that Americans in their relations with Israel lag
behind other national groups in only one area—immigration. In 1973,
for example, only 4,393 Americans moved to Israel, while over 35,000
Soviets immigrated there. Of the 1.5 million who came to Israel be-
tween 1948 and 1974, only 30,000 Americans remained. The Israelis
resent their dependence on both the U.S. and American Jews who only
visit but do not settle in Israel. Despite the continuous urging by
Zionist leaders to emigrate, American Jews draw the line here. They
will give money and all else, but to send Jews other than themselves
to Israel. The contributing nonimmigrating American has frequently
been the butt of sarcastic jokes. A manager of Jerusalem’s King David
Hotel used to carry a few bills in his pocket so that, whenever a visiting
American complained of Israel’s shortcomings, he could thrust the
note into his hands and say, ‘‘We’re even.’’?6
The box score on the capital that has poured into the tiny Mediter-
ranean state from its benefactors, the U.S. government and the Ameri-
can people, scarcely constitutes a joke. It is staggering: $42 billion or
$10,700 per Israeli citizen. (See table on next page.)
Contributions from West Germany to Israel by way of reparations,
restitutions, and loans reached an additional figure of $4.314 billion,
which were only made possible by the U.S. forgiveness of $2 billion in
reparations from Germany. In every way possible, Hitler has done
792 POLITICS OR POLICY
U.S. AID TO ISRAEL (IN MILLIONS)?27
SOURCE FISCAL YEARS
1948-1975 1976-1977 1978-1981 1948-198]
U.S Government Assistance $6,562.3 $4,525.0 $10,531.9 $21,619.2
(Military & Economic)
Private Institutions 3,363.0 31,013.0 1,987.0 6,363.0
Private Individuals 12.301.0 1578.0 4] 935.0 4,814.0
Israel Bonds* 22.611.0 5546.0 1,619.2 4,776.2
Loans (commercial) 2,060.0 6940.0 5480.0 2,780.0
Investments 1,410.0 7139.0 7157.0 1,706.0
‘VOTALs $18.307.3 $7,041.0 $16,710.1 Tt $42,058.4
(or $10,700 per Israeli citizen)
1. This figure represents the minimal U.S. 75% of all private individual transfers worldwide.
2. This figure represents the minimal U.S. 75% of total Israel Bond purchases worldwide.
3. Principally UJA. According to the Library of Congress research, a spokesman stated these sums
represented pledges not yet fully collected or transmitted.
4. Figures supplied by Russell Mishcloff, Near East Bureau A.I1.
5. According to a spokesman, the U.S. purchases represented 85% of total worldwide sales, which
figures were set forth in the New York Times, January 9, 1978.
6. Figures not available ... this represents a minimal based on the average of investments during
the 1948-1975 period, which is exceedingly low.
7. Israel Central Bureau, Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, Supplement May 1978 and May 1982.
*Not subject to the Interest Equalization Tax as are other foreign securities.
tThis is exclusive of $1.24 billion given to UNRWA, the agency that provides Palestinian refugees
with a bare minimum of subsistence. And the closure of the Suez Canal cost the U.S. and the
Free World an estimated $3.4 billion annually from 1967 to 1975.
more than his share for the State of Israel.
This accounting does not of course, include other vital benefits to
Israel given on a scale proportional to her share in financial and mili-
tary aid, as Harvard’s Nadav Safran pointed out:
Hundreds of American technicians and Israeli trainees who have been ex-
changed; dozens of Israeli cultural, educauonal and philanthropic instituuons
who enjoyed American assistance from counterpart funds. Likewise, the Israeli
public has been able to buy American cultural and educational material payable
in Israeli currency at the official rate. In short, Israel has been given the status of
a most favored nation, and not only in the technical sense in which the word is
used in international trade. . . . There is scarcely one important educational,
cultural, social or philanthropic institution in [srael which is not supported to
some degree by Jewish-American, as well as US Governmentaid. .. .28
The majority of Israel’s doctors, professors, scientists, and other
professionals receive part of their training, if not most, in the U.S. At
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, sixty-one of the ninety-three visit-
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 793
ing professors in 1976 were from the U.S., and some 1,400 American
undergraduates attended courses in 1974, the largest of about fifty
national groups.
Not only did the American taxpayer carry the financial burden of
the 1973 war, but statistics prove that the U.S. emerged the only loser.
The Arabs gained new confidence and self-respect from their surpris-
ing near-victory. The Israelis took consolation in the fact that by virtue
of the American arms lift they managed to pull off a military comeback,
almost wiping out the Egyptian Third Corps. General Ira C. Eaker,
who commanded Allied Air Forces in the Mediterranean in World War
II, pertinently noted that the 1973 war:
... cost this country at least $4 billion. It used up scarce reserves of weapons
and supphies and lost the critical Arab oil. General Motors, during the em-
bargo, laid off 65,000 workers and put 5,700 more on temporary furlough, and
the entire U.S. economy was affected inasmuch as this move had repercussions
on GM's 13,000 dealers and 45,000 suppliers. There was hardly a company
or person in the U.S. who did not suffer in some way from the shortage of
materials, rising costs or even unemployment stemming from the embargo.
Completely forgotten, too, was the cost to the United States and Europe of the
closing of the Canal from 1967 to 1975, well over $10 billion.29
Losses to the U.S. from its Middle East foreign policy cannot be
calculated in dollars alone. There has been a vast nonmonetary price
paid for the government’s inordinate support of Israel, although the
Zumwalt-Keegan-Churba school of thought vociferously argues that
the U.S. pays a very small price for having the Zionist state perform
as our Middle East watchdog, preventing the area from going Commu-
nist. Retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt remained Israel’s great champion
in military circles; in a 1977 speech at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the
former Chief of Naval Operations advocated annexing Israel and send-
ing a large U.S. force to be stationed permanently to defend that
country if necessary. General George Keegan stated in an interview
that “for every dollar of support this country has given Israel, we have
gotten a thousand dollars worth of benefits in return—access to equip-
ment, access to documents, etc., which prepare us to cope with the
Soviet forces and equipment around the world. The data is of incalcu-
lable value.”’3° And Joseph Churba played the same tune whenever and
wherever he could.
Such reasoning is a gross perversion of the truth. The gravest
dangers to U.S. interests in the Middle East have arisen from creation
of the Israeli state, forcing certain Arab countries to turn to the Soviet
794 POLITICS OR POLICY
Union for help against demonstrated Zionist expansionism.
The many warnings that the creation of a Zionist state in the
heart of an Arab world against the will of the majority would bring
the Soviet Union into the area were totally ignored. Russia, which
had striven for warm water ports and an ‘“‘open sesame’”’ to the re-
gion as far back as Peter and Catherine the Great, only needed one
big opportunity. And when America’s “Israel-First”” stance and the
Arabs’ ‘‘Not-at-all”” policy gave Moscow that big chance, Israelists
and anti-Communist pundits alike cried out with a perfectly straight
face: “Communism is threatening us through the Arabs. We must
give Israel all-out support, military and otherwise, to save the area
and U.S. interests.”
This kind of ludicrous reasoning has not only prevailed but has
rarely been prominently challenged until the appearance of the article
on the Arab-Israeli military halance, “How Much Is Too Much?” in the
October 1977 issue of Armed Forces Journal. Written by Anthony H.
Cordesman, former civilian assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense
Robert Ellsworth and Secretary of the Defense Intelligence Board, the
article claimed that “Israel has become a militaristic state whose mili-
tary buildup has gone far beyond the requirements of defense.” On
the other hand, he wrote, the Arabs ‘‘still lack effective air training and
command, control and communications systems,” and their “‘vast
amounts of air defense weaponry” have not been organized into an
effective system. They still “cannot train effectively for armored ma-
neuver warfare,” and their aircraft generally lacks modern air-to-air
missles.
With the emergence of the Likud Begin government, Cordesman
contended:
The U.S. may no longer be supplying an Israel whose military struggle would
lead to Israeli willingness to compromise for peace. It may now find itself
aiding a country which may use its military strength to take permanent control
of former Arab territory in direct opposition to U.S. policy, and be locked into
an indefinite cold war with the Arabs. At worst, the U.S. may find itself tied
to an ally which will use military force in a pre-emptive attempt to settle the
PLO problem, or to destroy Arab military forces while they are weak.®!
The article cited the advice of several of Begin’s senior advisers
to provoke Syria into war (which Israel nearly accomplished five
months later during the March invasion of South Lebanon, but Presi-
dent Assad exercised the greatest restraint, out of respect for Israel’s
military might) “as an excuse to destroy its improving forces before
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 795
they became threatening’’?? and to launch “attacks in support of Leba-
nese Christians against the PLO.”
Before Cordesman could even prove how remarkably accurate a
crystal ball he possessed, the Anti-Defamation League charged that he
had used classified information gained during his employment in the
Defense Department and that the article contained an anti-Israel and
anti-Jewish slant; the League called for a Pentagon investigation. Most
of the five-page ADL press statement contained attempted refutations
by Keegan and Churba of the Cordesman allegation that “new Israeli
attitudes threaten the strategic interests of the U.S. and its allies,”
which could lead to war, oil embargo, and inestimable damage to the
dollar and the world monetary system.
What particularly inflamed the Zionists was the article’s careful
documentation, invaluable military statistical charts, and refutation of
the large Israeli military requirements for assistance called for by their
““Matmon B” plan. Cordesman claimed that the U.S. has never taken
into account the ‘‘qualitative differences between Israeli and Arab
forces and has chosen instead to set aid requirements based on the
U.S. view of the future strength of Arab confrontation forces or the
threat.”” The charts, he maintained, proved that planned US. aid ex-
ceeded ‘‘far beyond the limit necessary to assure Israel’s security” and
created an Israel ‘‘which has all of the capabilities necessary to wage
offensive warfare.”
The ADL was so exercised by publication of the article that, in
addition to their demand for a Defense Department investigation,
which resulted in an ambiguous refutation of the premise on which the
protest was based, they harassed the editors of Armed Forces Journal into
accepting a lengthy rebuttal by Churba, in which ‘‘none of the data are
referenced,’’33 and flooded the magazine with letters.
Prior to Sadat’s peace initiative, other sources confirmed Israeli
preparations, in the event of the failure of Carter’s efforts, for a “war
of annihilation” against the Egyptian and Syrian armies before the Big
Powers could intervene to bring about a cease-fire as in 1973. Israel
by the end of 1977 had already “stockpiled enough weapons, ammuni-
tion, and fuel to fight a three-front conventional war for thirty days
before needing fresh supplies from the U.S., according to estimated
American arms exports.34 The idea was to destroy the Arabs militarily
for seven to twelve years, thus getting through the period when Arab
oil and money could be used to squeeze concessions from Israel.
Through its existing eighteen-month, $2 billion military pipeline of
new equipment, Israel was said by American officials to be in a position
796 POLITICS OR POLICY
to do what it wanted. Ona scale of 100 equaling their military capabili-
ties in 1973, Israel in October 1977 stood at 160, Syria at 100, and
Egypt at 80 to 90.55
The basic American fear of Communism and the danger of the
U.S.S.R. making further inroads into the Middle East has been fully
exploited by Israel and her friends. U.S. policy makers, wittingly or
unwittingly, have turned their backs on the best possible ally against
any Communist threat, namely the strong theism of Islam. Deep Mus-
lim spirituality is rooted in natural repugnance of a totalitarianism that
wipes out religion. If the strengthening of anti-Communism is deemed
to be a primary aim of U.S. foreign policy, then U.S. behavior in the
Middle East has certainly been totally counterproductive.
Close American ties to the Free World have invariably been subor-
dinated to concern for Israel. At the critical moment of the Hungarian
uprising, which coincided with the 1956 Suez war, U.S. hands were tied
by “Israel First.’’ With the exception of Portugal, relations with our
NATO allies were strained almost to the breaking point during the
1973 airlift by their refusal to allow landing rights for U.S. planes
carrying arms to Israel. When the oil embargo was imposed, the subse-
quent energy problems and differences over the solution further mired
relations with Europe, and with Japan as well.
Since the early 1960s when the U.S. prodded West Germany to
serve as an arms supply depot for Israel, differences between Bonn and
Washington have intensified, the chasm widened by denunciatory full-
page New York Times ads charging “the bell of danger was tolling in
Germany for the third time in this century.’’36 Many of the problems
between Washington and the France of de Gaulle, Pompidou, and
D’Estaing stemmed from America’s deep obsession over Israel. The
whipped-up hysteria after the sale of jets to Libya and the Abu Daoud
affair, scarcely served American national interests.
The campaigns of Zionism against India and Japan, complicated
American relations as did Israel’s harmful tourist boycott of Mexico.
The list could go on and on. There is scarcely a country with whom
U.S. relations have not been adversely affected over Israel. The U.S.
no longer had French-U.S. relations; it had French-U.S.-Israeli rela-
tions. And at the U.N. America virtually isolated itself, frequently
standing alone in defense of Israeli actions and policies. By 1978 this
fact further complicated the brand-new problems Washington was
encountering in the East African region known as the Horn, caused by
the Somali-Ethiopian strife in which Israel was sending U.S.-made
weapons to Ethiopia, who was being backed by the Soviet Union and
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 797
Cuba, against assistance being given to the former by the U.S., Egypt,
and Saudi Arabia.
Little wonder that by September 1977 President Carter was cau-
tioning: ‘Dozens of other foreign policy matters have suffered to some
degree because I’ve expended so much effort on this issue. If our
efforts fail this year, it will be difficult for us to continue to devote that
much time and effort to the Mideast.’’37
There are many other reasons dictating that the U.S. sever the
unique umbilical cord attaching it to the Zionist state and alienting
invaluable Arab connections. Propagandists and idealists summarily
dismiss any consideration given by Washington to her relationship
with Saudi Arabia as purely an immoral and commercial interest. But
more objective Americans cannot help feeling how ungrateful the
Israelis must be to think that the U.S. will be a continuing source of
infinite remittances and of policies winning enemies and losing friends
for itself so as to keep the Israelis alive in the style and territory to
which they have grown accustomed. There is a growing realization that
we need Arab friendship, too!
If Israel is to be made an exception to our first President’s admoni-
tion against “favored nations,” U.S. national interests cry out for an
equally special relationship with the Saudis (or other oil-rich Arabs),
however Washington may have committed itself to the security of the
Israelis. The U.S. 1977 trade deficit was $23.5 billion, and oil imports
amounted to $41.5 billion. The trade deficit of $4.5 billion for the
month of February 1978 was the worst in U.S. history. In its 1977
report the CIA revealed that worldwide oil demands were likely to
outstrip the supply within five to ten years. The U.S., already importing
1.2 million barrels of oil daily from Saudi Arabia, was hoping to double
these imports by 1980.
The Arab oil-rich states have a minimum of $34 billion in our
largest banking institutions—Bank of America, Chase, First National,
and Morgan Guaranty. The Saudis, helping to alleviate the world
energy crisis, have been producing far more oil than their revenue
needs, and hence piling up surpluses of investments in the U.S. In the
heated dispute over the advisability of such investments, Chairman
Howard G. Blauvelt of Continental Oil Company noted:
Resistance to Arab investments in the U.S. is understandable, but misquoted.
There already are thousands of businesses in the U.S. owned or controlled by
foreigners with an estimated book value of more than $40 billion. On the other
hand, the book value of American investments overseas is now more than $100
798 POLITICS OR POLICY
bilhon. For example, some economists have projected a short-fall of $650
billion investment capital in the U.S. alone over the next ten years, a gap which
OPEC investments in this country can in small part help close.38
The Saudis likewise have been the restraining force in OPEC on
price increases, and in 1976 when other OPEC nations decided on a
10 percent increase, they refused (along with the United Arab Emi-
rates) to raise prices. The condition behind forgoing this increase was,
as Zaki Yamani expressed it, some “forward movement toward peace,”
the achievement of which would not preclude the use of American
pressure on Israel. The Saudis were worried, of course, about the
rising inflationary costs for the purchase of their imports, which they
claimed did not match any comparable rise in oil prices. There was an
admitted reluctance on both sides, the Saudis and the U.S., to exacer-
bate the differences that already exist. As Carter warned in late May
1977, failure to act quickly could “mean disaster not only for the
Middle East, but for the international political and economic order as
well.” The Saudis wanted peace, no break in their financial and com-
mercial ties with the U.S., and certainly not another war. However,
when pressed, they have not hesitated—without specifying the use of
the oil boycott as a weapon—to talk of using “every effort or every
capability towards achieving peace,” as phrased by Foreign Minister
Prince Saud bin Faisal on the CBS show ‘‘Face the Nation” in May
1977.
The Saudis and other Gulf states certainly have not forgotten the
contingency Pentagon plans for an invasion of Arab oil fields. They
must also realize that in the event of another embargo, their accounts
would be frozen in this country. Weakened by the death of King Faisal,
the new Riyadh government has since been striving to unite the Arab
world as a means of avoiding another ravaging conflict, if for no other
reason than to protect its own economic well-being.
If the Sadat initiative should lead not to a general settlement but
only to another Israel-Egyptian separate agreement, area unrest is
bound to mount as the PLO and the Palestinians press for their rights.
In a fifth war Israel is almost certain to emerge victorious. Aside from
the bloodletting and the risk of the possible use of nonconventional
weapons, what then? A just, lasting peace would be further away than
ever, and additional rounds inevitable until justice was done.
The growing financial power of the Arabs, and the decreasing
technological gap between them and their enemy, must eventually
bring them victory. The Arabs can afford to lose another round or two
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 799
—the Israelis cannot afford to lose one. In addition, the support for
Israel in the international community has been rapidly vanishing. In-
deed, from the outset this was greatly exaggerated and always minimal.
The alleged historical connection of the Jewish people did sway the
U.N. General Assembly in November 1947, only two years after Hit-
ler’s downfall. But Rabbi Silver’s brilliant rhetoric in his call for ‘‘the
reconstitution of our national home’’3? would fall totally flat today,
parucularly after the Koestler disclosure that the “home” for which the
Zionist has yeained had never indeed been theirs.
The world never did give its approval to the Palestine partition
plan in 1947. There were then only fifty-seven member nations in the
U.N.; thirty-three, or 58 percent, of these voted favorably for the
resolution while thirteen were opposed, ten abstained, and one was
absent. There are now 152 members, and a vote on the same resolu-
tion would scarcely gain ten supporters. As far as world public opinion
is concerned, today there would be little objection to returning to the
1948 borders provided there were ironclad international guarantees
safeguarding the lives of the Israeli people.
What about the U.S.? Does Israel enjoy the deep-seated support
among Americans that Zionists claim? The polls show that Americans
strongly favor Israel over the Arabs, but there is an even more over-
whelming sentiment against any commitment to Israel involving mih-
tary forces, and a growing reluctance to provide further military and
financial support.
According to an opinion poll conducted for Time magazine by
Yankelovich, Skelly, and White (March 1975), Americans by two-
to-one opposed sending arms to either Israel or the Arabs; 41 percent
favored a cutback while 37 percent backed continued support, and
only 8 percent favored an increase. An NBC poll January 31, 1975,
showed 78 percent opposing and only 13 percent approving a U.S.
guarantee of Israel’s security. The February 1975 issue of U'S News &
World Report ran opinion research figures showing 57 percent opposi-
tion to U.S. military aid to Israel with 27 percent in favor. A January
1976 survey by NBC reported that less than one in five would back a
move to send troops to Israel. And the Foreign Policy Association
survey, ‘Great Decisions ’76,” approved the right of Palestinian Arabs
to an independent state by 66 percent to 19 percent. Even in heavily
Jewish populated New York City, a Daily News opinion poll in late
March 1978 registered by 44 to 42 percent disapproval of sending
more planes to Israel, while 52 percent opted against selling arms or
aircraft to any Middle East country.
800 POLITICS OR POLICY
The Gallup Poll found that Israel was losing considerable ground.
While the sympathies of 46 percent of a 1500-person sample in the
previous October before the Sadat initiative had been with Israel, this
had shrunk to 33 percent in its latest survey of 654 people, according
to Newsweek, February 27, 1978. Compared to a year ago, 42 percent
of those questioned stated they were more sympathetic to Egypt and
20 percent less, while 27 percent admitted to be more sympathetic to
Israel and 34 percent less.
Bias has placed the shoe on the wrong foot. As if they had commit-
ted the original grievance and were the party at fault, it is the PLO from
whom Israel and the U.S. demand recognition of “the right of Israel
to exist’”’ as a prior condition for participation in a process aimed to
produce a mutually acceptable definition of Israel’s permanent fron-
ters. Itis as if a thief, who has stolen property, refused to return it unul
his existence as an American citizen was recognized and his great-
great-grandfather’s residency in the house he had just robbed had
been confirmed.
As academician and member of the Palestine National Council Dr,
Fayez Sayegh expressed it:
The right of a state to exist cannot be divorced from its location and frontiers.
France has a right to exist: but does it have a right to exist on Algerian soil?
Will those who exhort the PLO to “recognize the right of Israel to exist’’ be
good enough to tell the PLO just where that “right” is supposed to be exer-
cised? And are they prepared to guarantee that Israel itself will accept that
territorial stipulation?4°
Hardly. Zionist expansionist aspirations are limitless. Even during the
Sadat-Begin negotiations, the cabinet voted to expand the existing
settlements in Sinai by putting more acreage under cultivation and
moving in more settlers to Jewish communities near the Rafah salient
and Sharm el Sheikh.
Furthermore, the requirement of recognition should be one of
mutuality. Yet Carter never has demanded that Israel recognize the
right to existence of an independent Palestinian state, let alone ever
considered Israel's lack of compliance with that hypothetical demand
a barrier to U.S. recognition of Israel. Is it not more reasonable to
consider mutual recognition an end result of a settlement rather than
an a prion condition for participation in the negotiating process?
The Western world and the Christian conscience has been asked
to accept Israel’s existence unreservedly and to force the Palestinians
to do likewise. ““You cannot turn the clock back” is the stock argument
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 801
advanced against righting past wrongs. But it is not a question of
turning the clock back; it is a question of winding the clock up properly
so that it will work. The Hitler tragedy moved the world in 1948 to turn
the clock back 2,000 years by establishing in the heart of the Middle
East a Jewish state where none had existed since 70 a.p. Can it be
wrong to try to correct a grievous error, thirty years later, if this will
be beneficial to all peoples concerned?
In the face of the total dependence of Israel for its viability and
existence, no U.S. President should hesitate to apply all the necessary
leverage at his command, both to reach a just settlement and to resist
efforts to disrupt U.S. relations with Arab countries. It would not be
unreasonable for Carter to remind Zionists and Israelists in this coun-
try that rarely has a people so deeply in debt exacted conditions for
reasonable behavior from its patron and banker, as has the arrogant-
minded Zionist leadership, supported by a fear-ridden, Masada-com-
plexed Israeli people. To hear the words of Senators Javits and Jack-
son, one would imagine the shoe was on the other foot and the U.S.
was deep in debt to Israel.
Any close, objective study of the history of the conflict should
inspire the President to say to the Israelis, as one writer has put it:
For the U.S. to have aided and abetted the dispossession of the greater part
of the Palestinian population is an act of barbarism. For American Jews to
continue to edge the U.S. into the Middle East imbroglio where America has
everything to lose and nothing to gain is an act of sheer ingratitude to the
nation which has given them more wealth, freedom and power than any other
in the long curve of their history. Americans have more constructive and more
moral things to do than to expend their money, their arms and perhaps their
lives on a racial dream that is not even their own.*!
Although the Arab’s congenital incapacity for collaboration constantly
plagues himself and his friends alike, the many Arab minuses do not
add up to a Zionist plus in terms of the American national interest.
If necessary, Carter can carry out the recommendations made to
President Truman in 1949 by the State Department when the Israelis
balked at returning territories won by conquest, and refused to do the
just thing for the new refugees they had created.*? By action that every
one of his predecessors would have liked to have carried out but lacked
the intestinal fortitude to accomplish, the man from Georgia could
make the greatest contribution toward geniune peace in the Middle
East.
Any solution of the differences between the Arabs and the Israelis
802 POLITICS OR POLICY
must be based not only on the resolutions of the U.N. that created
Israel, but on the universal demand for a just settlement of a problem
that had its origins in the Western world. To justify the right of the
West to gain expiation of the crimes of Hitler at the expense of the
Arab world remains unconscionable. Justice for Palestine, in the words
of Professor Toynbee, “requires vindication of people’s rights and the
righting of wrongs and the least possible suffering of the least possible
number of people.’’43
It has been Zionism and its philosophy, not the particular leader-
ship in power, that has molded Israeli intransigency and inflexibility.
The fall of Begin (alleged by the Israeli Establishment in March 1978
to be Carter’s aim) would not solve the basic problem.
Golda Meir indicated a mentality quite incapable of winning the
correct Arab response to peace: ‘‘After we have signed peace treaties
with our neighbors and agreed on the borders, the nature of the State
of Israel will be Jewish with a large Jewish majority so that we don’t
have to get up every morning afraid to ask, ‘Who was born last night
—was it a Jew or an Arab?’ ’44 The entreating Arab phone call for
which she and other Israeli leaders waited for six years never was
made. Instead, in October 1973 came the Egyptian and Syrian armies.
Opposition leader Shimon Peres attacked his successor for inflexi-
bility on the issue of settlements during the peace talks with Sadat. But
as Defense Minister in April 1976, he planned “‘to develop a vast area
of two million dunum (about 800 square miles).”’ He proposed to set
up “110 settlements in the future in the Ratah-Beersheba-Kadesh
Barnea triangle.’’45 Before Ezer Weizman wrested an agreement from
Begin by threatening to resign unless further settlements were sus-
pended until after the March 1978 talks in Washington, the Israeli
Defense Minister himself had his own plans for setting up two large
Jewish urban centers in the West Bank that would plant 100,000 Israe-
lis in the disputed region within two years.*® Directly after the Israelis
failed in May to upset the Carter jet plane package deal, Weizman
proposed that six controversial Israeli settlements on the occupied
West Bank be expanded into solid urban centers—a move hardly cal-
culated to clear the atmosphere for a resumption of the stalled peace
negotiations. While General Sharon emphasized in his plan the neces-
sity of setting up a wedge of Jewish settlements extending from the
Golan down to Sharm el-Sheikh, the two generals differed only as to
detail and timing. UJA funds were to make the settlements possible.
(The cost of existing settlements in all the occupied territories, made
possible through UJA tax-deducuible funds, was estimated by Time
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 803
magazine of June 19, 1978, at $2 billion, the fifty-one West Bank
communities having alone received half of this amount.)
To enlarge their settlements, the Israelis moved in 1978 to confis-
cate further West Bank property owned by Arabs abroad. Bethlehem
Mayor Elias Freij was informed in April that 80,000 acres around his
town owned by Arabs living in the U.S., Canada, and Latun America
would be handed over to the Israeli “custodian of absentee property,”
which since 1967 has controlled all property owned by persons resid-
ing in Arab countrics.47 Anthony Lewis of the New York Times reported
from Ramallah that as many as 11,000 houses were involved, including
many owned by Arab-Americans. West Bank Palestinians, he noted,
viewed this latest action as further humiliation designed to make them
get out and to ease the way for a permanent Israeli hold on the terri-
tory. A surgeon told the reporter: “By hook or crook they want us to
leave the country.’"48
The hour for truth has almost passed us. History will someday
certainly record that it was far from heretical to have declared that
there was neither a need for a state for the ‘Jewish people,” and
certainly little justification for establishing such a state in its present
locale.*9 Meanwhile, there is little sense in further meaningless talks
about Israel’s legitimate right to exist unless we define precisely what
Israel we are talking about. A normal Israel propagating Israeli nation-
alism in behalf of the people living within its borders could gain coexis-
tence with a Palestinian state and all other Arab nations in the exact
same manner in which Arabs and Jews lived together side by side for
centuries before the advent of Zionism. But an abnormal Israel
promulgating worldwide Jewish nationalism means only perpetual
warfare. More than physical boundaries, the limitless nationality base
of the present Israeli state obstructs all hope of a peaceful tomorrow
and underlies much of Arab fear. The “‘lebensraum”’ the Zionist state
requires for its ingatherees poses a perpetual threat of limitless expan-
sion.
Contrary to what most people believe, neither the Israeli occupa-
tion of Arab territory nor even the settlements are the most serious
obstacle to a solution. These are merely manifestations of an ideology
that constitutes the greatest hazard to peace. Israel’s abnormality com-
menced with its self-promulgation on May 15, 1948, as the state not
of Israeli people living in the territory, but of the ‘Jewish people”
everywhere. The Law of Return provided a built-in expansionism that
no boundaries, however they may be drawn at Geneva or elsewhere,
can ever control. No sanction can be found for this kind of an exclusi-
804 POLITICS OR POLICY
vist, racist state upon which the present Israeli leadership insists under
the pretext of security. The representatives of the thirty-three nations
who in 1947 recommended Israel’s creation were moved totally by
humanitarian considerations in giving approval to a small refugee
state. They never contemplated a nation with an ever-expanding na-
tionalism depriving the indigenous populace of its rights as well as
spilling over into the territory of its neighbors. Under the boundaries
drawn up, the Jewish state was to have had a 42 percent Arab minority,
and there was no guarantee whatsoever that the original Jewish major-
ity was to be maintained in the face of the far higher Arab birthrate.
The international organization thus provided the basis for a binational
Arab-Israeli state, which was to be joined in economic union with an
Arab Palestinian state and the holy city of Jerusalem internationalized.
Is the sovereignty of the Israeli state so sacrosanct that the mere
suggestion of its dimunition to fit the original U.N. concept is automat-
ically verboten? Who can deny that the real concern of Americans and
of the international community is and has always been for the lives of
the people of Israel rather than for the size or form of the entity in
which they live. Whether it is called “‘dismantling”’ or ‘‘remantling” of
the state, what 1s so destructive about Jewish Israelis sharing a whole
country with the original Palestinian Arab inhabitants? This is the way
one can reconcile the vast number of Jewish settlements imposed upon
the Arab-occupied territories. This is how the “original sin” may be
righted. And this is the only way, rather than through armed might or
guileful encouragement of Christian forces in furthering the partition
of Lebanon, to obtain the security about which there has been so much
loose talk.
As Israeli Hebrew University professor Avigdor Levontin ex-
pressed it:
A secure border—to the extent that such a thing exists in our world—is not
a “natural” boundary, like a mountain range or a river. That is an anachronis-
tic conception. Nor is it a border mentioned in signed documents. A border
is secure when those living on the other side do not have sufficient motivation
to infringe on it. No matter how banal this may be, we have to remind ourselves
that the roots of security are in the minds of men and that is where the source
of insecurity also lies. We have fallen into a vicious circle: since there is no trust
in the Arabs’ desire for peace, people emphasize the need for “security”
apparently for a substitute, and even say that one really couldn’t rely on the
peace agreement with the Arabs even if they agreed to it since it wouldn’t be
a “true peace... .”
I would go on to say about the term “‘secure’’ borders that it has to face
ed
Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace 805
not only the test of reasonableness, but also the test of the inherent integrity
of the concept itself. The term ceases to be honest one when you expand
settlements up to the new border so that in order to make the new line
“secure” you need still another strip of some tens of kilometers, and in that
way things are liable to continue in what may perhaps be described as a salami
method in reverse.5°
The Zionist movement should not be permitted to exploit indefi-
nitely the holocaust, its ultimate and final weapon, so as to obstruct the
final hope of assuring true justice and real security for all peoples of
the area, of ending the dangerous duality for American and other
Diaspora Jews, and of removing the number-one threat to world peace.
Last Word
These words are being written as Israeli bombs from American planes
are again raining death and destruction on Beirut, its environs and south
Lebanon. Begin timed the combined air, land and sea invasion to
coincide with Reagan’s economic summit meeting at Versailles with his
six industrial partners and his European tour.
Calling ita reprisal raid against the PLO for the near-fatal shooting
in London of Israeli Ambassador to the U.K. Shlomo Argov, the media
(most particularly CBS Newsradio 88) indulged in its customary
slanting by giving scant attention to either the fact that the assailants
were Jordanian, Iraqi and Syrian or that the PLO had denied respon-
sibility from the very outset. Ignored or underplayed by all the media
was Margaret Thatcher's announcement that a hit list found on the
assailants included the name of the head of the London PLO office.
Anticipating (or knowing) the worst, the President immediately
ordered the evacuation from Beirut of half of American diplomatic
personnel and dispatched a letter to Begin with Ambassador Habib
urging moderation.
After the Security Council twice had called for a cease-fire and
withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, which Israel ignored, a third
resolution demanded that Israel and the Palestinians halt hostilities in
six hours and said, if they did not, the Council would ‘“‘consider practical
ways and means” to enforce this proposal approved by the fourteen
other Council members.
In his unprecedented speech in Whitehall before a joint session of
both houses of Parliament, Reagan echoed Israel’s point of view in
placing the blame for Middle East war on the ‘“‘scourge of terrorism,”
which, he indicated, had to be ‘‘stamped out .”” He refused to view the
conflict in its fullest perspective.
The administration's behavior was further evidence of what one
Middle East writer has called Washington’s permanent ‘“‘calculated non-
settlement” policy of not really making an honest effort to resolve the
806
LAST WORD 807
problem, but simply ‘“‘maneuvering to protect our interests in Middle
East oil and to assure the well-being of Israel.”
Only such a non-policy could account for the near-fatal collapse of
the Palestine autonomy talks, the war in Lebanon, the unrest on the
West Bank and the nonsensical inconsistencies in the U.S. treatment of
Iran. Aid was being given to Iranian exiles battling the Ayatollah while
Israel was permitted in 1981 and 1982 to ship U.S. arms to assist the
Khomeini regime in its war with Iran. “Tango November,” a chartered
Argentinian CL 44, carried 360 tons of tank spare parts and ammunition
to Iran before the plane mysteriously crashed in Soviet Armenia. (Israel
also sent arms to Argentina during the Falkland Islands war.)
Washington gave covert approval to Israel’s support of Teheran in
the long Iraqi-Iranian war and to Tel Aviv’s goal of downing the
Sadaam Hussein regime until] Washington became alarmed lest an
impending Iraqi defeat endanger other ‘“‘moderate”’ friendly Arab Gulf
regimes.
Public opinion has been swinging toward recognition of Pales-
tinian rights, some polls indicating that a majority, including a fair
sampling of Jews, even favor the establishment of a Palestinian state.
But most sentiment for justice for the indigenous people of Palestine
still remains very muted with the few illustrious exceptions.
Visiting the U.N. for sixty-two minutes as a high-light of his
two-day visit to New York City in October 1979, Pope John Paul II told
assembled diplomats:
Any attempt made to settle the conflict would have no value if it did not truly
represent the first step of a general, overall peace in the area. Peace, being
necessarily based on equitable recognition of the rights of all, cannot fail to
include a consideration and just settlement of the Palestinian question.
The subsequent summer, scarcely noted amidst the heat and the
national political campaign, was L’Osservatore Romano’s major review
of the “history and contemporary reality of Jerusalem” whose ‘unique-
ness requires for all three religions a level of parity without any of them
feeling subordinate with regard to the others.”’ The voice of the Vatican
emphasized that all three religions must be “partners in deciding their
own future.... We cannot reduce the question to mere free access to the
holy places .... The significance of Jerusalem surpasses the interests of a
single state.” The viewpoint concluded that what was required was an
“appropriate juridicial safeguard that does not derive from the will of
only one of the parties interested.”
Of course, a George Ball in a Foreign Affairs article or a Zbigniew
808 LAST WORD
Brzezinski speaking to a small group of Washington reporters might
urge the U.S. to start dealing with “the reality of the PLO.” But foreign
policy molders will not stick their chins out lest they be called anti-
Semitic. John Doe, spellbound by myth-information, still bows to the
Jewish-Zionist connectors. In the absence of respectable American
leadership galvinating this sentiment into a broad-based popular
movement, there is not likely to be any change in U.S. policy,
particularly in the light of the continuing terrorist PLO image. Who is
strong enough to remove the gun ever-pointed at the White House by the
combined hands of supine politicians, the controlled media and the
Zionist lobby?
With the April 25 Israeli turn-over to Egypt of the last portion of the
Sinai, U.S. ground-combat troops for the first time became involved in
Middle East peace efforts since Lebanon in 1958. Eight-hundred
paratroops from the 82nd Airborne Division became the heart of the
2,500 eleven-nation force patrolling the buffer zone between Israel and
Egypt following the Sinai evacuation and 400 at Eitam Airbase
headquarters in nothern Sinai as part of the peacekeeping force, MFO.
These soldiers were ready to be used as part of the U.S. Rapid
Deployment Force to intervene anywhere in the Gulf area wherever
needed.
The U.S. military presence in the Middle East has dangerously
expanded from the 200 technicians monitoring surveillance stations in
the Sinai’s Mitla and Gidi passes. Without a miraculous breakthrough,
the tragedy of nuclear war could envelope this area and the world as the
arms race continues to dangerously escalate.
The June 6 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which fell on the 15th
anniversary of the 1967 war, brought new dangers and new horrors
alike—not only the most extensive bombing of Beirut, Tyre and Sidon,
but the total destruction of small towns, villages and refugee camps. The
Israeli Army systematically blew up and bulldozed Palestinian homes
that survived the battle, completely leveling the camp at Ain el-Halweh
in the same manner as it had fifteen years earlier the Golan Heights
capital, Quneitra.
Forty-thousand Palestinians and Lebanese were killed or wounded
and upwards of 600,000 people were left homeless. The Israelis,
supported by the Phalangist militia of Beshir Geymayel, laid siege to
west Beirut, the last Palestinian stronghold, which was subjected to both
unmerciful and mock air raids to force an unconditional PLO surrender.
The Israelis were still proclaiming ‘‘Peace for Galilee”’ as their sole
war goal—the freeing of northern villages from the constant threat of
LAST WORD 809
Palestinian guns. ‘‘We do not want an inch of territory” intonated both
Begin and Sharon who in the quick conquest of Lebanon had once more
demonstrated his military acumen.
In the midst of the on-going genocide in Lebanon, Reagan received
Begin in the Oval Office at the White House. In refusing to rebuke the
Israeli leader, the President overruled the advice of Vice President
George Bush, Defense Secretary Weinberger, National Security Advisor
William Clark and other White House aides, and sided with Secretary of
State Haig, whose resignation he accepted a few days later. With his
shameful surrender Reagan was contradicting Begin’s angry response to
Washington’s suspension of the strategic cooperation agreement: ‘“‘No,
we are the banana republic. We are your vassal state!”
At a nationally televised press conference, the President claimed
‘‘we were not warned or notified of the invasion that was going to take
place.’’ Despite this denial, there was little doubt that Israel’s uncon-
scionable use of miliary power, as in the 1967 war, had been carried out
with the aid and abetment of Washington and the media, under a cover
of gross deceit that beguiled American public opinion and guaranteed
support for the continued ruthless suppression of Palestinian rights.
But it remained to be seen whether, out of the crushing military defeat,
the political and diplomatic struggle for an independent Palestinian
state would be advanced.
At Senate confirmation hearings Secretary of State-designate George
P. Shultz stated: ‘““The crisis in Lebanon makes painfully clear a central
reality of the Middle East: the legitimate needs and problems of the
Palestinian people must be addressed and resolved—urgently and in all
their dimensions.’’ At the time the Israelis were heightening their
repression and moving toward annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The sad and tragic realities of the Middle East conflict were further
exposed at a top-secret summit held by Brezhnev, Reagan and Begin
with the Lord. The Soviet leader asked God: “Do you think there will
ever be detente between the Soviet Union and the United States?”’ The
Lord replied, ‘‘Yes, but not in your lifetime.”
Then Reagan queried: ‘Do you think it will ever be possible for the
U.S. to achieve a balanced budget and at the same time maintain a
defense establishment strong engough to contain the threat of com-
munism?” The Lord’s response was “Yes, but not in your lifetime.”
Begin then put this final question to God: ‘Do you think there will
ever be peace between Arabs and Israelis?”’ To this the Lord answered:
“Yes, but not in my lifetime.”
Alfred M. Lilienthal
New York, July 14, 1982
Notes
Bibliographical Note: FR is used in the References as an abbreviation for
Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, cited by year and volume.
These volumes are publications of the Department of State, and contain diplo-
matic correspondence, cables, memorandums, reports of conversations, etc.
Usually, they are published twenty-five years after the events to which they
pertain. The U. S. Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. may issue
several in any given year. All bear the title Foreign Relations of the United States,
Diplomatic Papers.
Chapter I: Sixty-seven Words: One Man’s Dream, Another’s Nightmare
1. H. G. Wells, Outhne of History (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
2. Their literature indicated real nationalist thinking: “Sleepest thou, O our nation?
What hast thou been doing until 1882. Sleep and dream the false dream of assimilation.”
Walter Lacqueur, The /srael-Arab Reader (New York, Bantam, 1943), p. 3.
3. The Sultan was willing to receive Jewish emigrants in all his Asian provinces save
Palestine, provided they became Ottoman subjects, accepted military service, and set-
tled ‘‘in a disbursed manner, five families here and five families there.”
4. See Theodor Herzl, ‘“Tagebiicher” (Tel Aviv, 1934) and Nevil Barbour, Palestine:
Star or Crescent? (New York: Odyssey Press, 1947).
5. Herzl was also interested in the possibility of a Jewish colony in the neighborhood
of El Arish on the Egyptian-Palestine fronuer. (This village figured importantly in the
1956 warfare between Egypt and Israel.) But Lord Cromer, the British High Commis-
sioner in Cairo, scotched this proposal. Later, during the World War II period, a Jewish
state or colony in vastly underpopulated Libya was advocated but the idea died quickly.
6. Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl (New York: Doubleday, 1974). This fascinating
book was well displayed in the book windows of Jerusalem during the spring and
summer following its publication.
7. Alex Bein, Theodor Herzl (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1941), p. 89.
8. Quoted by Barbour, op. cit., p. 56, based on N. M. Gelber, Hatshart Balfour
Vatoldoteha (The Balfour Declaration and Its Coming Into Being) in Hebrew (Jerusalem,
1939) p. 190.
9. From Memorandum of Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish
Association, published in the London Times, May 24, 1917.
10. As David Lloyd George relates in The Truth About the Peace Treaties (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1938), pp. 1133-34, Edwin Montagu said he had “‘striven all his life to
escape from the Ghetto,” and the Cabinet minister therefore would not accept the
original wording of the Balfour Declaration.
81]
812 NOTES
11. At the insistence of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who was active
in Zionist circles, the original draft referring to “the Jewish race” was softened to “the
Jewish people.”
12. Albert M. Hyamson, Palestine: A Policy (London: Methuen, 1942), p. 110.
13. Arab historian George Antonius called McMahon’s reply ‘“‘a curious example of
official evasiveness.” The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939), p. 45.
14. Letter of Professor William Yale to the author, August 14, 1957. Yale was
military observer at General Allenby’s headquarters of the Egyptian Expeditionary
Force. Expert on Arab affairs to the Paris Peace Conference and adviser to the King-
Crane Commission, Yale served both the Department of State and the U.N. as a special-
ist on the Middle East. Later he taught history at the Universities of New Hampshire and
Boston and in 1958 authored The Near East, part of the University of Michigan’s fifteen-
volume History of the Modern World.
15. Dr. Fayez Sayegh first released the documents in the bimonthly magazine Hiwar,
January-February 1964 (Beirut, Lebanon). The article was quoted at length in articles
of April 17, 1964, and May 6, 1964, in the London Times.
16. The Memorandum and the Appendix were both prepared in 1919 by the
Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office for use by the British Delegation
to the Paris Peace Conference. In Section IV the Memorandum states: ‘With regard to
Palestine, His Majesty’s Government are committed by Sir Henry McMahon's letter to
the Sherif [Sharif] on October 24, 1915, to its inclusion in the boundaries of Arab
independence.” ‘The Appendix declares: ““The whole of Palestine, within the limits set
out in the body of the Memorandum, lies within the limits which H.M.G. have pledged
themselves to Sherif Hussein that they will recognize and uphold the independence of
the Arabs."" On both documents appears the legend: “This Document is the Property
of His Britannic Majesty’s Government.” Along with several others, these two docu-
ments are part of the Hestermann Papers, a prized portion of the Middle East Collection
of the Hoover Instituuon on War, Revolution and Peace, founded originally as the
depository for the papers of President Herbert Hoover, situated at Stanford University,
Stanford, California.
17. The Century, July 1920.
18. 4l Sharg, January 23, 1917, as noted in George Antonius, Arab Awakening (Phila-
delphia: Lippincott, 1939), p. 208.
19. David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, op. at.. pp. 1131-41.
20. Arab fears were further allayed by leaflets dropped by British planes over
Palestine early in 1917 addressed to ‘Arab officers and soldiers in the Turkish Army”
assuring them that the British were fighting for ‘the freedom of Arabs generally.”
21. Philip P. Graves, Palestine, The Land of Three Faiths (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion
Press, 1976). This is a reprint of the 1923 edition published in New York by G. H. Doran,
pp. 5-6.
22. Appended to the agreement was this proviso: ‘‘Provided the Arabs obtain their
independence as demanded in my Memorandum dated the fourth of January, 1919, to
the Foreign Office of the Government of Great Britain, I shall concur in the above
aructes. But if the slightest modification or departure were to be made, I shall not then
be bound by a single word of the present Agreement, which shall be deemed void and
of no account or validity, and I shall not be answerable in any way whatsoever." An-
tontus, op. al, p. 439.
23. Ihid.. p. 440-41.
24. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 275.
25. Emanuel Neumann, The Amencan Zionist, February 5, 1953, The British Govern-
ment did feel some gratitude to Weizmann for his process of developing TNT, vital in
the manufacture of cordite needed in the war effort.
26. Royal Commission Report of July 1937. British Command Paper 5479.
27. According to Professor William E. Yale, who had been sent by the State Depart-
NOTES 813
ment to the Middle East to gather information concerning “the Arab situation,” the
famed T. E. Lawrence indicated that Britain was “supporting the Zionists for the help
it was thought they could be to us in Russia and because they brought America into the
war.” Lawrence stated: ““The Arabs had great faith in the U.S. and they believed in
America’s political honesty.” Report 18 of March 11, 1918, Document 763.7211/1741,
Diplomatic Branch (NNFD) National Archives and Records Service.
28. J. W. V. Temperley, [story of the Peace Conference, IV, p. 170.
99, Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, Vol. 326, col. 23330. Weizmann
himself describes an interview with Lord Robert (later Viscount) Cecil of Chelwood, the
Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in which the Zionist leader stressed the
point that a “Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England, in particular in respect
to the Suez Canal.’ Chaim Weizmann, 7nal and Eror (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1949) p. 192.
30. Lloyd George, op. at, p. 1137.
31. Curzun went on to state: “If this is Zionism, there is no reason why we should
not all be Zionists, and I would gladly give my allegiance to such a policy, all the more
that it appears to be recommended by considerations of the highest expediency and to
be urgently demanded as a check or counterblast to the scarcely concealed sinister
designs of the Germans.”
32. Briush Command Paper No. 1700, 4 Survey of Palestine, 1945-1946, Vol. 1, pp.
87-90.
33. Lbid.
34. H.L., June 27, 1923: O.R., Col. 676. This was a negation of the suggestion that
Weizmann made in his statement to the Council of Ten at the Peace Conference,
February 1919, that Palestine was destined to become “‘as Jewish as England ts English.”’
35. Albert M. Hyamson, Palestine: 4 Policy (London: Methuen, 1942), footnote p.
12:
36. Before the Council of the League of Nations, See Charles H. Levermore, Third
Year Book of the League of Nations (1922), p. 137.
37. Hvamson, op. cit, p. 110.
38. Weizmann, op. ail., p. 261
39. In April before the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, Weizmann said, ““The
Jews could work for one or two generations under British protection endeavoring to
develop the land as far as possible and counting upon a time when a just Tribunal would
give the rest of Palestine to which they have a historical claim.’ Barbour, op. ai., p. 214.
40. Barbour, op. cit, footnote p. 118.
41. Paul Goodman, ed., Chaim Weizmann: A Tribute on His Seventieth Birthday (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1945), p. 199.
42. Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harper, 1949),
p. 100.
43. Bert de Vries, The Reformed Journal (Grand Rapids, Mich.), ““His Land and
History,” April, 1971.
44. J. N. Jeffries, Palestine. the Reality (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1976), pp.
177-78.
Chapter II: America Picks Up the Torch
1. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, the Paris Peace Conference,
1919, XI. 150-55.
2. For the best and fullest exposition on the King-Crane Commission, see Harry N.
Howard, The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East (Beirut:
Khavat's, 1963).
3. lbid., p. 350.
4. Briush Command Paper No. 5479.
814 NOTES
5. Nevil Barbour, Palestine: Star or Crescent? (New York: Odyssey Press, 1947), fo
note p. 240.
6. British Command Paper No. 6019.
7. “The Palestine Mandate,” The Fortnightly (London), December 1944: reprin
in Middle East Perspective (New York), April 1970.
8. FR: 1943, The Near East and Afnca, Vol. 1V (Washington, D.C.: 1964), pp. 776—
9. For a full discussion of the refugee problem, see Morris L. Ernst, So Far So G
(New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 170-77.
10. Ibid., p. 176.
11. FR: 1942, Vol. IV, pp. 538-44.
12. FR: 1945, Vol. VII, p. 699.
13. FR. 1943, Vol. 1V, p. 798. See enclosure to letter of July 19, 1943, from Cor
Hull to President Roosevelt.
14. /é:d, p. 809. Memorandum of Colonel Harold B. Hoskins of August 31, 194
15. FR: 1944, Vol. V, p. 588. Telegram 56, March 21, 1944.
16. FR: 1945, Vol. VIII, p. 679.
17. Ibid., pp. 680-82.
18. /bid., pp. 688-89. One of the suggestions made by Rabbi Stephen Wise and
Nahum Goldmann in their lengthy meeting with Acting Secretary of State Joseph
Grew was that the Department appoint an officer who might specialize exclusively
Jewish interests abroad. Grew rejected the proposal, replying that existing Departme:
officers had a ‘good grasp of the Jewish and Palestine question.”
19. /bid., pp. 2-3.
20. Ibid., p. 702.
21. For a full first-hand account of the meeting, see William A. Eddy, F.D.R. Meei
Jén Saud (New York: American Friends of the Middle East, 1954); also John S. Keatin
“Mission to Mecca: A Postscript,” U.S. Naval Proceedings, Vol. 104, No. 902 (April 1978
22. FR: 1945, The Near East and Afnca, Vol. VIII (Washington, D.C.: 1969), p. 69
23. Ibid, p. 689.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid, pp. 694-95.
26. The FDR message to King Ibn Saud was dated April 5 but was not actuall
transmitted unul April 10, two days before his death in Warm Springs, Georgia.
27. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). ;
28. Richard H. S. Crossman, 4 Nation Reborn (New York: Atheneum, 1960), p. |
29. Lash, op. at, p. 214.
30. FR. 1943, Vol. IV, p. 809.
31. Ina similar vein Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, at the World Conference
on Zionism and Racism held in Tripoli on July 24-27, 1976, suggested that the Jews wh
have come into Israel be resettled in the lands from which they were driven or entice
in Europe and Arab countries. He offered to take back the Libyan Jews and called o
the leaders of other Arab countries to accept back those who had left their ancestra
homes under the impact of Zionism’s ingathering campaign.
32. ‘Roosevelt, in his appointment of Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury,
with the important part played in his administration by Sidney Hillman and other Jews
showed that he had no prejudice against Jews. Yet in the matter of Israel, FDR ha
earned no laurels.” The Jewish Press (Omaha), December 29, 1972.
33. Dr. Emanuel Neumann, writing in The Amencan Zionist, February 5, 1953.
34. /bid.
35. FR: 1945, Vol. VIII, pp. 704-5.
36. lbid., p. 705.
NOTES 815
Chapter II: The Creation of Israel Revisited
1. The Amencan Zionist, February 5, 1953.
2. FR: 1945, Vol. VU, p. 707.
3. Ibid... pp. 708-9.
4. Ibd., p. 709.
5. Henderson, on whom the Zionist leader was calling, had invited Wilson and the
Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon Merriam, to be present during the
call, and asked Wilson to act as the officer reporting the conversation.
6. FR: 1945, Vol. VIEL, p. 714.
7. lbid., pp. 716-17.
8. Ibid., p. 722.
9. FR: 1945, Vol. VII, pp. 725-26. Moose reported that extreme nationalists
looked to the Soviet Union for help against Zionism and that the Kremlin’s “secret
weapon has been its ability to maintain silence while retaining full liberty of
action.
10. Jord, pp. 727-33. In this memorandum Ambassador Henderson predicted the
probability of the Arab oil embargo that followed twenty-eight years later.
11. Jbid.
12. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the U.S. Government and His
Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom (Washington, D.C.: Department of State,
1946).
13. FR: 1945, Vol. VII, pp. 749-50.
14. The British referred to this as the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry.
15. FR: 1945, Vol. VIII, pp. 771-79.
16. /bid., p. 771.
17. Ibid.
18. fbid., pp. 777-78.
19. Ibid, p. 775.
20. Eugene Meyer was married to a Christian, as was his daughter, which left him
doubly open to Jewish guilt feelings, leading to submission to Zionism.
21. FR: 1945, Vol. VIL, p. 795. For Niles’s role in advancing Israel's interests while
still in the White House, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, hat Price Israel?, (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1953), pp. 94-95.
22. Ibid., p. 780: ‘I had to see Eugene Meyer. Then when I walked out of the White
House, Dave Niles asked me what the news about Palestine was. That made me mad,
that fellow stopping me when I was se busy.”
23. Ibid, p. 814.
24. Ibid, p. 819.
25. Ibid., pp. 828-29. Cable November 20, 1945, from Cairo, where Minister Eddy
sent his message to the Secretary of State. He told Emir Faisal that “consultation would
be meaningless if the results were predetermined, but that my personal understanding
is that it assures full consideration of Arab opinion and local conditions.”
26. Ibid., p. 829.
27. London Times, November 15, 1945.
28. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and
His Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom (Washington, D.C.: Department of State,
1946), preface.
29. Crossman was said by his Prime Minister to have been chosen ‘‘because he was
a man of common sense and integrity who had not committed himself in any way on the
Palestine question.’ Within no time after his service on the committee, he committed
himself to Zionism and emerged as one of its leading advocates.
30. Three of the signers of these unanimous recommendations later became the
most ardent Christian supporters of Jev'ish nationalism. Bartley Crum, R. H. S. Cross-
816 NOTES
man, and James G. McDonald reversed their position completely, even before Israel
became a political reality.
31. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, op. cit, Recommendation No. 3, p. 4.
32. Ibid.
33. Henry F. Grady, Dean of the College of Commerce of the University of Califor-
nia, who because of exceptional knowledge and abilities was called in from time to time
by the State Department to carry out special missions, and Herbert Morrison, one of the
leaders of the British Labor Party and later Foreign Minister.
34. Telegram, Fitzpatrick to Truman, August 2, 1946. Official File 204 Miscella-
neous, Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library.
35. In fiscal year 1942 only 10 percent of the quotas were used; 5 percent in 1943;
6 percent in 1944; 7 percent in 1945.
36. Speech of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver before the 49th Annual Convention of the
Zionist Organization of America, New York Times, October 27, 1946.
37. Viddish Bulletin, Free Jewish Club, May 19, 1950. Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, who
had served in 1946 as Adviser on Jewish Affairs to the U.S. High Commissioner in
Germany, lied to President Truman in an October 11, 1946, meeting when he said that
90 percent of the displaced Jews sull in European displaced persons camps wanted to
go only to Palestine. Opinion voiced by these unfortunates indicated they preferred to
go to the U.S. or elsewhere.
38. H. C. Hansard, Parhamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Vol. 433 (London: His Maj-
esty’s Stationary Office, 1948).
39. Official File 204, Truman Papers, Harry S. Truman Library.
40. Margaret Truman, Harry S$. Truman (New York: Morrow, 1973).
41. The Arabs missed an opportunity for achieving a unitary Palesune at the U.N.
in 1947 when the minority report supported by India, Yugoslavia, and Iran, which called
for a single state with a federal structure rather than the partiioning of Palestine,
inspired litte enthusiasm. Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia was willing to meet with U.S.
Secretary of State George Marshall to discuss a possible reconciliation with the majority,
but the meeting never took place.
42. Harry S. Truman, Aemouirs, Vol. I, Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday,
1958), p. 225.
43. Margaret Truman, op. at., p. 385.
44. New York Daily News, December 31, 1972.
45. Binghamton (N.Y.) Press, December 13, 1972.
46. Near East Report (Washington, D.C.), December 20, 1972.
47. Walter Millis, ed., Forrestal Dianes (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 346.
48. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 169.
49. Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Prestdency of Harry 8. Truman, 1945-
1948 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 330.
50. Forrestal Dianes, op. cit., pp. 346-47.
51. /bid., p. 346.
52. fbid.
53. Donovan, op. cit., p. 331
54. United Nations, Official Records of the 2nd Session of the General Assembly (Lake
Success. 1947), Plenary Meetings, II, p. 1312.
55. FR: 1947, The Near East and Africa Vol. V (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Prinung Office, 1971), p. 1321 for message to Cairo; FR: 1948, Vol. V, p. 571, footnote
3, for message to Jeddah.
56. FR: 1947, The Near East and Africa, Vol. V (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1971).
57. Ibid., p. 1309.
58. Washington Post, December 29, 1976. The headline of this story was backed up
by the Jersey Journal of December 29: ‘“Truman Disobeyed on Israel."
NOTES 817
59. Margaret Truman, op. cit., p. 387.
60. /bid., p. 388.
61. Identified as White 4 and marked “‘urgent and secret,” according to the copy
in the George M. Elsey Papers in the Harry S. Truman Library at Independence, Mo.
FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 637, footnote 1. Elsey was assistant to Special Counsel to
the President Clark Clifford.
62. Ibid, pp. 637-40.
63. Ibid., p. 640.
64. Ibid, p. 645.
65. Ibid, pp. 679-85.
66. /bd., p. 697. Tel. 116 from Marshall to Austin.
67. .Jid., editorial note, pp. 748-49.
68. Telegram of February 22, Truman to Marshall: “Your working draft of recom-
mended basic position for the Security Council discussion received. I approve in princi-
ple this basic position.” /bid., p. 645.
69. There was an exchange of correspondence between former Secretary of State
Dean Rusk, who is now Professor of International Law at the University of Georgia Law
School, and the author. After reading this chapter, Rusk sent his letter of July 27, 1977,
which appears on pp. 95-96. After a telephone conversation in September 1977 and
receipt of a Xeroxed copy of this chapter, former Undersecretary of State Robert A.
Lovett in a letter of October 3, 1977, wrote: ‘You are correct in relying heavily on the
documentation as issued by the State Department in FRUS, Vol. 5, Part 2, and avoiding
the myths that are being offered for a number of reasons.” Lovett referred to the Robert
Donovan book on Truman, “Conflict and Crises,’” as a “‘readable and fair-minded
account of the extraordinary confusion which was in large part compounded by political
pressures and the muluplicity of agencies trying to get into the act.”’ Interviews of April
14, 1977, and of March 1, 1978, and an exchange of letters in that period with Loy
Henderson, former Director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, further
confirmed the loyalty of State Department officers to the President. As Henderson
expressed it, “As I look back, I realize at times I have made errors either in judgment
or in action. More criticism has been aimed at me for what I did during my three years
as Director of NEA than what I did in all of my other years in service [nearly forty]. I
can take criticism for bad judgment, for poor performance, and for inadequacy. But
attacks on my motives, charges of disloyalty and lack of honor, leave scars that are slow
to heal.”” Henderson letter of March 13, 1977, to author.
70. Washington Post, December 29, 1976.
71. FR: 1947, Vol. V., pp. 1153-58. In the transmittal of his memorandum, Hender-
son assured Secretary Marshall that despite the views expressed, “the staff of my office
is endeavoring loyally to carry out the decision [the majority partition report]... and
will continue to endeavor to execute the decision in a manner which will minimize as
far as possible the damage to our relations and interests in the Near Middle East” (p.
1158, footnote 1).
72. Letter of Loy H. Henderson to author, July 29, 1977.
73. Amencan Jewish Histoncal Quarterly, December 1968, pp. 215-16.
74, John Snetsinger, Truman, The Jewish Vote and the Creation of Israel (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1974) p. 88.
75. Set forth in a memorandum of March 22 from Secretary Marshall to State
Department Counselor Charles Bohlen. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 750, footnote 3.
76. Ibid, p. 746.
77. Harry S. Truman, Years of Tral and Hope, op. cit., p. 163.
78. Donovan, op. at., p. 377. See the Papers of Eban A. Ayers, Box 12, Vice-
Presidency folder, Diary Note of March 20, 1948, Harry S. Truman Library, Indepen-
dence, Mo.
79. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, Vol. 11 (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1939), p. 722.
818 NOTES
80. From the Austin statement to the Security Council, March 2, 1948. Reported
FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, pp. 675-76.
81. Clifford’s handwritten notes of May 4 outline the background of Ambassador
Austin’s March 19 speech setting forth the trusteeship proposal. Clifford admitted that
“Austin and Rusk were not instructed to delay the speech until final vote in Security
Council.”” Clifford Papers, Harry Truman Library, Independence, Mo. Quoted FR:
1948, Vol. V, Part 2, editorial note, p. 746.
82. FR: 1948, The Near East and Africa, Vol. 5, Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: 1976), p.
729. Dean Rusk on March 17 reported from the U.N. the impasse in seeking to conciliate
the irreconcilable differences between the Jewish Agency and the Arab Higher Commit-
tee, and Ambassador Austin’s view of the urgent necessity of bringing about both a
cease-fire and the establishment of a ‘temporary trusteeship for Palestine under the
Trusteeship Council of the U.N.” (p. 736).
83. [bid., Telegram 309 of March 17, New York, to the Secretary of State, ‘‘EYEs
ONLY FOR MCCLINTOCK FROM RUSK.”
84. FR: 1948, Voi. V, Part 2, p. 657.
85. /bid., pp. 637-41. Top-secret message to the President of February 21.
86. Snetsinger, op. cit., p. 82.
87. Forrestal Dianes, op. cit., p. 346.
88. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, pp. 666-75.
89. This report was concurred in by the intelligence agencies of the Department of
State, Army, Navy, and Air Force on February 19. /b:d, p. 666, footnote 1.
90. Forrestal Dianes, op. at., p. 387.
91. See, for example, memorandum of September 22, 1947, from Director of the
Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs Loy Henderson to the Secretary of State, FR:
1947, Vol. V, pp. 1153-58. Henderson claimed that his views were “also those of nearly
every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department of State who had worked to
any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”
92. Harry S. Truman, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 163.
93. The U.S. objection to an international police force because it would mean Soviet
military presence in the area similarly underlay Washington’s calling a military alert
during the October 1973 war.
94. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 767. Telegram 550 of U.S. Ambassador Walter
Bedeil Smith in the Soviet Union to Secretary Marshall, March 26, 1948.
95. Ibid., pp. 741-42. Top-secret telegram 144 of March 18, Thorp (Acting Secre-
tary of State) to Austin. According to a marginal notation by Charles Bohlen, this
paragraph had been cleared by phone with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.
96. /bid., footnote 1, p. 760. Lovett in a marginal notation indicated that “the White
House does not approve” of a U.S. commitment “to contribute armed forces along with
other U.N. members, if troops become necessary.”
97. This vague language followed Clifford's reluctance to supply the President with
a direct answer to Ambassador Austin’s direct question as to whether the U.S. would
contribute armed forces to maintain truce and trusteeship. The undated Clifford memo-
randum to the President (as set forth in the Clifford Papers, FR, 1948, Vol. V, Part 2,
pp. 760-61), emphasized that the purpose of the trusteeship was only “to obtain a
peaceful implementation of the U.N. decision for the partition.”’ Clifford wished to make
certain that U.S. action would be viewed in no way other than as “the preservation of
the peace in aid of partition.”
98. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 759.
99. /bid., pp. 759-60.
100. A check with the State Department Archives indicated that the research had
been done by two “young men” including Harold P. Luks, to whom thanks were ex-
tended by Clifford in the revised version of his paper, ‘Recognizing Israel: The 1948
Story,” published by 4Amencan Heritage, April 1977. (Luks also coauthored with Editor
NOTES 819
Emeritus I.L. Kenen an article for the Israel lobby’s Near East Report, August 2, 1978.)
The magazine also carried a lengthy exclusive interview with Clifford by Contributing
Editor Bernard A. Weisberger.
101. Clark M. Clifford paper, ‘*Factors Influencing President Truman's Decision to
Support Partition and Recognize the State of Israel,” presented to the American Histori-
cal Association, December 28, 1976.
102. In an Amencan Hentage reprint copyrighted by the American Jewish Historical
Society, Jessup and Ross were correctly substituted for Henderson and Wadsworth. An
editor’s note explained that “the senior officer” was identihed in FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part
2 on page 967 (actually page 965) as Dean Rusk.
103. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 967.
104. /bid.. note 3, p. 750.
105. This is the same limited choice that the Zionist propagandists had incessantly
placed before American Jews and the public in general during the 1947 U.N. battle over
partition.
106. New York Times, February 11 and 16, 1948.
107. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, editorial note, p. 906.
108. Snetsinger, op. cit, pp. 103-4.
109. Lowenthal! sent another memorandum the same day; one each on May 8, 9,
and 11; and two on May 12. Clifford Papers, Truman Library, Independence, Mo. When
Lowenthal could not reach Clifford, he worked through his assistant, George M. Elsey.
110. Only two days before his appointment, the General in a speech before the
Jewish Welfare Board declared that he unmistakably favored parution.
111. Congressman F. D. Roosevelt, Jr., warned Forrestal of loss of funds unless the
Democrats took a strong, aggressive pro-Israel stand.
112. From notes of George M. Elsey, FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 976.
113. (bid.
114. Patrick Anderson, The President's Men, White House Assistants of Harry $. Truman,
Duight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-
day, 1968), pp. 118-19.
115. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 976.
116. Anderson, op. ail.
117. Memorandum of conversation by Secretary of State George Marshall. FR:
1948, Vol. V, Part 2, pp. 972-76, at page 975.
V18. /bid.
119. These are the words used by Clifford in his December 28, 1976, address at the
American Historical Association meeting in Washington.
120. /bid.
12t. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 960.
122. According to the memorandum of May 13 by Legal Adviser Ernest A. Gross,
“the deciding criteria which have in the past been employed in granting or witholding
of recognition are: (a) de facto control of the territory and machinery of State, including
the maintenance of public order; (b) the ability and willingness of a government to
discharge its international obligations; (c) general acquiesence of the people of a country
in the government in power.” FR: 1948, Vol. V, pp. 964-65. Naturally after the creation
of a new state such as Israel, it required some time to ascertain whether these criteria
were being met by the government in power. A prerequisite for all criteria was receipt
of the request for recognition from the government uself.
123. Chaim Weizmann, 7ral and Error (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p.
477.
124. Snetsinger, op. cit. Snetsinger in his version, p. 109, declares this was done by
telephone. But in 1952 George Elsey, assistant to Clark Clifford, informed this writer
in an interview that Epstein had come to the White House in person.
125. According to the undated George M. Elsey notes on the May 12 White House
820 NOTES
meeting, “Clifford spent the afternoon getting arrangements made, including arrange
ment that Epstein would send in the request to the U.S. Government for recognition,’
George M. Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mo.
126. Dan Kurzman, Genesis 1948 (New York: World Publishing Co., 1970), p. 252.
127. Ibid.
128. In one Zionist account Niles claimed credit for calling Epstein, but naturall
it was to his own interest to magnify his role. According to another story, the President
only notified his aide late in the afternoon of the impending recognition, telling him h
was the first to whom the good tidings had been relayed.
129. In a later communication to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been incessantly
spurring her husband's successor to support partition and then to recognize the Israeli
state, President Truman told a different story: “Since there was a vacuum in Palestin
and since the Russians were anxious to be the first to recognize the new state, General
Marshall, Secretary Lovett, Dean Rusk, and myself worked the matter out and decided
the proper thing to do was to recognize the Jewish Government.” Harry S. Truman,
op. at. According to the widow of Weizmann, in her book The /mposstble Takes Longer: The
Memoirs of Vera Weizmann as told to David Tutaev (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967), p.
233, ““The President told Marshall and Lovett during their discussion the day before,
‘Pm the boss here, and I'll make the decisions.’ ”
130. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, pp. 1005-7. Memorandum of conversation by Under-
secretary of State Robert Lovett. Clifford in his December 28, 1976, American Historical
Association speech, alleged that “Lovett was the moving force that changed the White
House position. . . ."’ I beheve he persuaded Marshall to alter his opinion despite the
implacable opposition of the NEA to the very end.” Both Lovett's attitude at the May
14 luncheon with Clifford and his later recollection contradicts this. In a letter of
October 3, 1977, to the author, Lovett writes: “That doesn’t coincide with the facts as
I know them. I was not the ‘moving force’ but one of a number of advisers consulted
by the Secretary.”
131. Letter of Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, Director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Institute
for Historical Research. to the author, February 10, 1978.
132. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, p. 1007.
133. Despite continuous Zionist pressures, Truman held off with de jure recogni-
tion unul Israel held elections and the government became permanent on January 31,
1949.
134. Vera Weizmann, op. cit, p. 234.
135. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, editorial note, p. 993.
136. /bid., p. 1015, footnote 2. In her letter to Secretary Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt
stated she “would not have wanted the recognition done without the knowledge of our
representative at the U.N.” In response, Secretary Marshall wrote on May 18, “All I can
sav is that Ambassador Austin was advised shortly before the recognition was to be made
public, but unfortunately he was not present with the Delegation at the ume the public
announcement became known and Mr. Sayre had not been advised of the situation by
Mr. Austin. We were aware of the unfortunate effect on our situation with the ULN.,
which is much to be regretted. ore than this, | am not free to say." (Italics added.)
137. FR: 1948, Vol. V, Part 2, editorial note, p. 993.
138. Margaret Truman, op. cit., p. 387.
139. Jewish Telegraphic Agency daily news bulletin, December 27, 1972, in which
Acheson referred to Truman’s deep feeling of “moral and emotional” obligation to the
Jewish refugees.
140. Jewish Telegraphic Agency story in The Jewish Press (Brooklyn), December 29, 1972.
141. hid.
142. Maurice Bisgyer, Challenge and Encounter (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967),
p. 195.
143. Edward E. Grusd, B'nai B'nth: The Story of a Covenant (New York: Appleton-
NOTES 821
Century, 1966), p. 244. In a message in June 1965 to the B'nai B'rith Convention in Tel
Aviv, former President Truman stated: “It is a fact of history that Eddie Jacobson’s
contribuuon was of decisive importance.” /b:d., p. 245
144. In his \Vemoirs the President referred to “Eddie Jacobson who had never been
a Zionist,” but “was deeply moved by the sufferings of the Jewish people.” Like his
daughter, President lruman was confused semantically.
145. Snetsinger, op. cit., p. 76.
146. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1966), p. 217.
147. Memorandum, Jacobson to Dr. Josef Cohn. April 1, 1952, Weizmann Archives,
Harry S. fruman Library, Independence, Mo.
148. Merle Miller, op. cif, pp. 217-18. Loy Henderson in his letter of July 29, 1977,
to the author wrote: “I have doubt that the President told anyone in the State Depart-
ment in advance that he was to receive Dr. Weizmann. I am confident that none of us
in the Department who at the ume was working on the Palesune problem had any idea
that Weizmann was in Washington, that he was planning to talk to the President, or that
the President was likely to change his mind with regard to the policies relating to
Palestine.
149. Memorandum Jacobson to Cohn, op. cit.
150. Maller, op. cit, p. 218.
I51. did, p. 216.
152. Ibid, p. 216.
153. Miller, op. cit, pp. 216-7. This reference to other matters that might preoccupy
a President was repeated in the warning that President Carter issued in early fall 1977
that he was giving an undue amount of ume to the Middle East while neglecting other
important problems.
154. Harry S. Truman, op. cit, p. 130.
155. U.S. Foreign Policy, Compilation of Studies Prepared Under the Direction of Committee
on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Pursuant to S Res 335, 851h Congress and S
Resolution 31 and S Res. 250, 86th Congress, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1960), Study No. 13 of June 9, 1960, pp. 1308-9.
156. FR: 1949, The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, Vol. V1 (Washington, D.C.:
1971), p. 1074.
157. /bid., pp. 1104-5.
158. /bid., p. 1107.
159, /bid., p. 1110. An adaptation of this 1949 State Department proposal could
have been most useful in U.S. efforts to overcome the intransigency of Israel under the
leadership of Begin to yield all Arab territories, including the West Bank.
160. McDonald, Vy Musson to Israel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), p. 184.
161. William Eddy, FDR Meets Jon Saud (New York: American Friends of the Middle
East, 1954), p. 37.
162. FR. 1948, Vol. V. pp. 665-66.
163. /bid. Marshall told the press that “this comment could not be made public”
because “we had enough troubles already.” /a:d., footnote 1.
164. Alfred Steinberg, “Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man,” Saturday Evening Post (Decem-
ber 24, 1949).
165. When Myron C. Taylor, personal representative of the President at the Vau-
can, warned of the possible dangers in antagonizing King Ibn Saud, a David Niles
memorandum to President Truman cited ‘‘considerable help” given by the Jews to the
Alhes and none from the Arabs. Donovan, op. at, p. 316.
166. Acheson, op. at. p. 176.
167. Donovan, op. cit., p. 319.
168. /bid.
169. Margaret Truman, op. at, pp. 384-85.
170. Memorandum, Truman to Niles, May 13, 1947, File of President's Secretary:
822 NOTES
Palestine, 1945-1947 folder, Box 184. Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Mis-
sour.
171. Letter of Secretary Dean Rusk to the author, July 27, 1977.
172. Arnold Toynbee, 4 Study of History, Vol. VIII (London: Oxford University
Press, 1954), p. 308.
173. Frances Williams, . Prime Minister Remembers (London: Heinemann, 1961), p.
181.
174. Ibid.
175. Almost up to the October 1973 War and the ensuing Arab oil embargo.
176. Tided, influenual Jewish Zionists in Britain have been successful, for example,
in arranging a joint benefit for the Jewish National Fund and for the pet charity of Prince
Phillip, the Royal Consort, which was protested by a few voices. In 1973 there were some
objections to the gift by Israel and acceptance by Her Majesty of a forest in Israel as a
commemorative gift to the Royal Family, but the pro-Arab bloc still did not pack enough
of a wallop, save to kick up a slight storm in the press.
177. For the political storm created in a by-election in which 7,000 votes in White-
chapel plagued the Labor Party following the introduction of the 1939 Passfield White
Paper limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine, see Allan Bullock, The Life and Times
of Ernest Bevin, Vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 455-56.
178. H. C. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Vol. 347 (London: His
Majesty's Stationary Office, 1939), Column 1967.
Chapter IV: Inside Israel
1. Without essential military assistance from Israel, Idi Amin would never have
successfully executed his military coup and come to power. Israeli military advisers,
including General Chaim Bar-Lev, guided the irascible African leader in the move that
overthrew Milton Abote, his predecessor. Israel trained Ugandan troops, and the closest
economic tes existed between the two countries until the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when
powerful Arab forces persuaded Amin to shift loyalties. The thorough knowledge of
Uganda and its military establishment is what made possible the swift, paralyzing, and
spectacular Israeli commando raid at Entebbe Airport in July 1976.
2. Moynihan declared the resolution to be ‘‘symbolic amnesty—and more—to the
murderers of the six million European Jews” and added that “the abomination of
anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.’ The Moynihan-
Herzog combine could not halt a series of continuing condemnations of Zionism: the
International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico (July 1975), the Organization of
African Unity in Kampala (July 1975), and the Non-Aligned Conference in Lima (August
1975).
3. Only Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor dared write: ‘Very few
countries in the U.N. are in a position to accuse anyone else of racism. Offhand, I can’t
think of any ethnic group entirely free of the notion of its own superiority. But the
Israelis will not be free of it either until or unless the Arabs in the occupied territories
are free and the Arabs inside Israel can enjoy all the rights belonging to any citizen.”
November 13, 1975.
4. Gary V. Smith, ed., Ziontsm: The Dream and the Reality (New York: Harper & Row,
1974), p. 212. Ben-Gurion quote was also used by I. F. Stone in New York Review of Books,
August 3, 1967.
5. R. Patai, Ed., The Complete Dianes of Theodor Herzl (New York: Herzl Press, 1960),
Vol. 1, p. 88.
6. Jerusalem Post, July 20, 1976.
7. Revised Standard Version (RSV), Leviticus 19:34.
8. William Zuckerman, Jewish Newsletter (New York), October 16, 1961.
9, Joseph Badi, ed., Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel (New York: Twayne Publish-
ers, 1961), p. 10.
NOTES 823
10. Israel Government Year Book 1952 (Jerusalem: Government Prinung Press), p. 29.
11. dsrael Government Year Book 1953-54 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press), p.
57.
12. London Times, February 22, 1962.
13. Joseph Raya resigned as Greek Catholic Archbishop in September 1974 follow-
ing a break both with his superior, Patriarch Maximos V, and with the Vatican. After his
unsuccessful campaign in behalf of the villagers of Baram and Ikrit, he faced great
pressures. Soon the Archbishop was most vocal in pronunciations of loyaity to Israel and
even vociferous in denunciation of fellow Archbishop Hillarion Capucci, who was con-
victed by the Israeli High Court of smuggling weapons to Palesunian commandos and
sentenced to twelve years. Raya’s stand made him persona non grata with other Arab
churchmen.
14. Yediot Akaronot, July 14, 1972.
15. New York Times, August 29, 1977.
16. Jord.
17. London Tunes, February 22, 1962.
18. Christian Saence Monitor, October 5, 1961.
19. Ner (Jerusalem, Ihud Association), January-February 1962.
20. Quoted in Ner, August 1962.
21. Cooperauves, differentiated from kibbutzim, which are collective settlements.
22. Ner, July-August 1962.
23. John Hope Simpson, Palestine Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Develop-
ment, Command 3686, (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, October 1930).
24. Quoted by Noam Chomsky, “An Exception to the Rules,” /nquiry (San Fran-
cisco, April 17, 1978).
25. U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 1968.
26. Report of U.N. Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human
Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, December 1970.
27, Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel (Cleveland and New York: World Publish-
ing Co., 1956), p. 354.
28. London Times, July 27, 1967.
29. Alfred M. Lilienthal, There Goes the Middle East (New York: Devin-Adair, 1958),
p. 49.
30. Sabri Jiyris, The -Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 208.
31. Jewish Newsletter, September 18, 1961.
32. New York Times, September 23, 196).
33. 4/-Hamishmar, September 7, 1976, as translated in Swasia weekly news digest in
Washington, D.C., October 15, 1976. This Hebrew-language paper was published by
Israel's Mapai party, aligned in 1973 with the Labor party as part of the Rabin coalition
government.
34. Swasta, ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Israel Shahak, ‘The Racist Nature of Zionism and of the Zionist State of Israel,”
Pi-Ha-Aton (weekly student paper, Hebrew University, Jerusalem), November 5, 1975.
37. Confirmed by the negative opinion handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court
in the 1969 case of Professo. George Tamarim, The court refused to permit Tamarim
to change his nationality designation from Jew to Israeli on his identity card.
38. For further details of this and other riots, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Other Side
of the Com (New York: Devin-Adair, 1965).
39. Time, June 21, 1971.
40. Le Monde, October 15, 1971.
41. Earlier the Jewish reform movement agreed “not to perform black conversions
as it would cause U.S. blacks to flood Israel.” Maariv, June 4, 1973.
42. Jewish Journal, January 28, 1977.
43. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Feminist Goes to Israel,” A/s Magazine, October 1977.
824 NOTES
44. Jeunsh Journal, April 19, 1974.
45. Haolam Hazeh, Israeli weekly news magazine, December 25, 1974.
46. The Scotsman, April 26, 1977 (Edinburgh, Scotland).
47. Wilfred A. Beling, ed., The Middle East: Quest for an Amencan Policy (Albany, Stat
University of New York Press, 1973), p. 160.
48. Malcolm Kerr, “The Middle East Conflict,” Foreign Policy, October 1968, p. 47
49. Published in the Israeli weekly Ha olam Hazeh, as reported in the London 1
June 25, 1969.
50. Haaretz, March 25, 1975.
51. Commentary magazine (New York), September 1976.
52. Moshe Dayan, “A Soldier Reflects on Peace Hopes,” Middle East Reader (Ne
York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 417.
53. At least three other non-Cabinet generals played key roles in the Begin Estab-
lishment: Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Chaim Herzog, Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi
Shlomo Goren, and Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahal.
54. From the eulogy delivered at the funeral of Roy Rotenberg, a member of the
Nahal-Oz kibbutz as quoted by Uri Avnery, Jsraed Without Zionism (New York: Collier
Books, 1971), pp. 153-54.
Chapter V: What Palestinians?
1. Davar, January 24, 1969.
2. Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.
3. Golda Meir, June 15, 1969.
4. Amos Elon, The Israels. Founders and Sons (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p.
272. (Originally published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971).
5. Ibid, p. 196.
6. Ibid.. p. 146.
7. Ibid., p. 206.
8. Published in Jerusalem, November—December 1974, Vol. 17, No. 9.
9. Dr. Julius Morgenstern, ts a Mighty Stream (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1949), p. 525,
10. Quoted by Hans Kohn, “Zion and the Jewish National Idea,” Palestine: A Search
for Truth, Alan Taylor and Richard Tetlie, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press,
1970), p. 68.
11. Ner Jerusalem, fhud Association), September-October 1953.
12. Joseph Weitz, My Diary and Letters to the Children (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1965-1973),
6 vols., in Hebrew.
13. From a diary entry made in 1940, reiterated as still valid in Davar, September
29, 1967. Quoted by Noam Chomsky, “‘Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs: Reflections
in a National Conflict,” Holy Cross Quarterly, Summer 1972, p. 9.
14. Joseph B. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman. The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story—The Early
Years (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), p. 104.
15. Ehezer Schweid, ‘‘New Ideological Directions After the Six Day War,” Dispersion
and Unity, No. 10 (1970), p. 48.
16. Jewish Newsletter (published in New York), February 9, 1959.
17. The minority report was presented by representatives of India, Yugoslavia, and
Iran. While Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal was willing to meet with Secretary of State
George Marshall to discuss a possible reccnciliation with the majority report, the meet-
ing never took place.
18. The figure 254 dead was the number declared by International Red Cross
representative Jacques de Reynier, who was at the scene. Thirty-five of the women killed
were pregnant.
19. This was the observation of David Shaltiel, Jerusalem's Haganah commander.
NOTES 825
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1972), p. 272.
20. Harry Levin, Jerusalem Embattled (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950), p. 57.
21. New York Times, April 12, 1948.
22. John Kimche, Seven Fallen Pillars (New York: Praeger, 1953), p. 217.
23. William R. Polk, David M. Stamler, and Edmund Asfour, Backdrop to Tragedy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), citing New Judea, p. 291.
24. Collins and Lapierre, op. at., p. 275.
25, lbid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Polk, Stamler, and Asfour, op. cit, p. 291.
29. Ibid.
30. Jacques de Reynier, 4 /érusalem un Drapeau Flottait Sur La Ligne de Feu (Neuchatel:
La Bacconnierre, 1950), p. 213.
31. Collins and Lapierre, op. at., p. 279. According to the account of Harry Levin,
once Middle East correspondent of the Daily Herald and then Israeli chargé d'affaires
in Australia, “the muchtar of Deir Yassin, his womenfolk and children were in one
truck.” Levin, op. at, p. 57.
32. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977).
33. Ibid., p. 295.
34. Collins and Lapierre, op. cit, p. 279.
35. Bertha Spoftord Vester, Our Jerusalem: in American Family in the Holy City (188 1-
1969} (New York: Doubleday, 1950). The more controversial portions of the manuscript
submitted by Mrs. Vester were deleted by the publisher.
36. Polk, Stamler, and Asfour, op. at, p. 291.
37. The Christan Century, March 16, 1949.
38. Kimche, op. cit., p. 228.
39. Don Peretz, /srael and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, 1).C.: The Middle East
Institute, 1958), p. 6.
40. Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment, Palestine 1917-1949 (London: Macmil-
lan, 1949), p. 160.
41. James G. McDonald, Afy Missvon to Israel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951),
p. 176.
42. Fred V. Winnett, “Why the West Should Stop Supporting Israel,” \acleans
Magazine, January 18, 1958.
43. The Spectator (London), May 12, 1961.
44. Maxime Rodinson, /srael and the Arabs (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 50.
45. Jewish Newsletter, February 9, 1959.
46. Menachem Begin, The Revolt: The Story of the Irgun (New York: Henry Schuman,
1951), pp. 164-65. The Revolt was translated from Hebrew for the American edition in
1951 by the same Shmuel Katz who became Begin's personal representative to the U.S.
in June 1977, and who had been a member of the Command of the Irgun. The revised
1976 edition published in California carried an introduction by the Jewish Defense
League's Rabbi Meir Kahane. But after his election in 1977 another edition was put on
the market by Nash Publishing and a paperback by Dell. Kahane’s introduction was
dropped for a short foreword by former Jewish Chronicle (London) editor Ivan Green-
berg. The New York Post serialized the book in July 1977.
47. Twenty-eight years later in an article in the May/June 1976 issue of The American
Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Center of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem expressed concern with the failure to understand “the major significance of
terrorist groups and guerrilla tactics in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty in the 1940's.
Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when
it was.”
826 NOTES
48. London Times, April 23, 1948.
49. Jon and David Kimche, 4 Clash of Destinies, The Arab-Jewish War and the Founding
of the State of Israel (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1960), p. 160.
50. First published in mimeographed form, February 15, 1973, by Dr. Israel Shahak
in Jerusalem; smuggled out of Israel and printed in London and Washington in 1975,
51. Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
52. U.N. Document A/8089, Annex VI, p. 6.
53. Amos Kenan, /srael—A Wasted Victory, translated by Miriam Shimoni (Tel Aviv:
Amikam, 1970).
54. Quoted in Michael Adams, “Signposts to Destruction,” published by the Coun-
cil for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (London, 1976).
55. Haaretz, October 3, 1975.
56. lbid.
57. The former Jordanian Cabinet Minister and Ambassador indicated that “in the
present confusing circumstances, I find it impossible to talk to journalists as I used to
in the past.” New York Tumes, January 29, 1974.
58. Siah magazine (Jerusalem), January 1975, pp. 17-18.
59. London Times, June 1, 1974.
60. /bid.
61. New York Times, February 11, 1975.
62. The author has visited Israel many times. The travels referred to were in 1973
and 1974.
63. Manchester Guardian Weekly, January 26, 1968.
64. Le Nouvel Observateur, July 3, 1972; Christian Science Monitor, December 21, 1972.
65. Cited by Rev. L. Humphrey Walz, Report to the UN. Committee to Investigate Israek
Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Terntones, October 10,
1977, p. 3.
66. Ibid., p. 5.
67. Amnon Kapeliouk, New Outlook, November-December 1968.
68. Those expelled were: Ab dal-Jawad Saleh, Mayor of El-Bireh; Jeryis Uda,
teacher, of El-Birch; Jamil Hussein Uda, of Ramallah; Dr. Walid Kamhawi, gynecologist,
of Nablus; Hussein Jarub, of Nablus; Arrabi Musa, of Nablus; Shaker Muhammad Abu
Khajla, of Nablus; and Abdul-Mohsen Abu Meizer, lawyer, member of the Superior
Mushm Council, of Jerusalem (presently member of the PLO Executive Committee).
69. Dr. Walid Kamhawi writing in Middle East International (London), July 1974.
70. Mayor Saleh was part of the delegation that accompanied PLO Chieftain Yasir
Arafat when he came to the United Nations to present the case of the Palestinians in
November 1974.
71. Felicia Langer, With My Own Eyes: Israel and the Occupied Ternitones 1967-1973
(London: Ithaca Press, 1975), pp. 62-3.
72. Ann Lesch. American Friends Service Committee Report No. 35, “Deportations
from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1967-1976," April 1977.
73. Langer, op. at., pp. 62-63.
74. For nearly a year (1974-75), Mr. and Mrs. Fhomas Noreuil of Chicago endeav-
ored in five letters to Senator Edward Kennedy and in correspondence with other
Judiciary Subcommittee and staff members to obtain a copy of the so-called De Haan
staff report. This had been compiled by three staff members after a fact-finding mission
to the Middle East to review the ‘situation of the Palestinian refugees, the effects of the
October 1973 war on civilians, and to find ways of enhancing peace negotiations.”
Senator Kennedy finally answered their request and refused to release the report. When
Senator James Abourezk intervened on behalf of the Noreuils, he was told that the
report was made for the staff only and would not be released to the public. It was said
to contain “sensitive” information.
75. U.N. Document E/CN4/1016/Addendum 2, February 11, 1970.
NOTES 827
76. International Committee of Red Cross, report of December 5, 1968.
77. Le Monde, November 27, 1969.
78. London Sunday Times, November 23, 1969. Foreign Editor of the London 7imes
E. C. Hodgkin also reported ‘‘grim and severe repression, multiplying acts of resistance
and deportations,” London Times, October 28, 1969.
79. The Economist, March 21, 1970.
80. U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, U.N.
Document A/8089, Annex VI, p. 5.
81. 4/ Fajer (Jerusalem paper), January 16, 1974.
82. “Report on Israeli Methods of Torture,” Amnesty International, April 12, 1970.
83. The charge of a “torture camp” at Sarafand was first heard in August 1969
tesumony before the U.N. Commission to Investigate the ‘Treatment of Arabs under
Israel Occupation. Thirty witnesses appeared at an Amman hearing, a report of which
was carried by the London Times August 20, 1969. Bedouin witnesses before the same
committee in Cairo the next day charged Israeli soldiers with the use of violence and
repression to force residents of the peninsula to abandon their homes and flee across
the Suez Canal. Vew York Tomes, August 21, 1969.
84. Eric Moonman, MP and Chairman of the Zionist Federation, told the Jewish
Chronicle in London that the letter received from Harold Evans, London Sunday Times
editor, explaining why the Israeli answer had not appeared in the same issue as the
“Insight” report, was unacceptable. [he Zionists were taking their grievance to the Press
Council and otherwise exerting pressure on the Sunday Times.
85. Chrishan Science Monitor, March 1, 1977.
86. The very hospital Jordan’s Queen Alia was about to visit when her plane crashed
in 1977.
87. Austin Daily Herald (Austin, Minnesota, population 25, 074), October 27, 1977.
88. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, February 3, 1978. Report submitted to
the Committee on International Relations U.S. House of Representatives and Commit-
tee on Foreign Relations U.S. Senate by the Department of State (Washington: US.
Government Printing Office, 1978).
89. Comparative Survey of Freedom (New York: Freedom House, 1978), p. 9.
90. lhe progressive attitude taken by some of the new Jewish setlers on the West
Bank must have come as a shock to more hawkish elements. In the words of the wife
of a rabbi living in Qiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement outside the large Arab town of
Hebron, “We, Jews, have always lived together in this land with other nations. We were
never here alone. God said to go and live in Israel. I see no other reason why we can’t
live with the Arabs peacefully in Hebron.” Here was another Jewish call for binauonal-
ism for which the Zionist Establishment, and its supporters in the U.S., completely and
utterly refuse any consideration, using the ever-present fear of the holocaust to justify
their intransigence.
91. Michael Adams, “Signposts to Destruction: Israel Settlements in the Occupied
Territories” (London: Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding,
1976).
92. New York Times, November 13, 1975.
93. Ma arw, September 26, 1971.
94. Ha'aretz, September 16, 1971.
95. New York Times, December 26, 1972.
96. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (New York: Quadrangle/New
York Times Book Co., 1975), p. 205.
97. Walz, op. at, p. 7
98. Haaretz, September 3, 1973.
99. Washington Post, September 14, 1973.
100. Five years later, Israeli youth in rallying against Begin plans for new settle-
ments expressed an entirely different viewpoint. See p. 754.
828 NOTES
101. Jerusalem Post, February 18, 1975.
102. Ha aretz, May 9, 1974.
103. New York magazine, June 14, 1976, p. 46.
104. New York Times, September 6, 1977.
105. /éid., September 27, 1977.
106. In U.S. News & World Report, November 18, 1974, Arafat was described as
“fighting against Briush and French forces that invaded Egypt in 1956.” The writer
somehow omitted any reference to the fact that Israel also was a part of this invasion,
107. For fuller details see articles in the London Guardian, May 14, 1976, a special
supplement compiled by Louis Eaks, editor of the monthly journal Free Palestine.
108. New York Times, January 26, 1975.
109. Time magazine, November 11, 1974.
110. Alistair Cooke, Six Men (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 180.
Chapter VI: The Jewish Connection: Numbers Don’t Count
1. To the nonobservers, the majority of Jews, these have become holidays rather
than Holy Days—a day, of course, to stay home from work and go to a ball game or a
movie.
2. Advertisements in the [Wall Street Journal from groups wishing to oppose U.S.
policy in the Middle East or criticize Israel were increasingly rejected after 1974, and
the editorial policy in the paper’s “Review and Outlook” became more blatantly pro-
Zionist. On March 16, 1978, “The Use of Force" depicted Israel's invasion of Lebanon
as “operating with some restraint . . . [her] response seems preferable to past retalia-
tions. ... The Israelis seem to be observing strict territorial guidelines.” “We have come
a long way,”’ says the Journal gloatingly, ‘‘since 1974 when PLO leader Yasir Arafat got
a fawning reception at the U.N.,” and the Israeli action undoubtedly will curb the
Palestinians’ ‘independence of action . . . for stable peace to come, something like the
present raids has to take place.” In a May 17, 1978, post-mortem on the arms sale
package, the Journal denied “the vote was any sort of mandate for Carter Mideast
stralegy,’’ and predicted there would be no “general erosion of support for Israel.”
3. UJA advertisement, New York Times, May 15, 1961, covering seven-eighths of page
13.
4. The five-page memorandum, ‘Tasks Confronting B'nai B'rith,” described as of
“the most sensitive nature,” discussed the wide range of Washington activities that B'nai
B'rith was undertaking after the “heavy losses suffered by Israel in men and equipment
... Since itis Our duty Lo maintain pressures to secure the greatest possible U.S. support
for Israel's needs.”
5. The American Zionist Council report noted that “in one recent week, for exam-
ple, we were forced to research and prepare communications in reply to three extremely
inimical arucles appearing in the Columbia University (Quarterly) Forum, Cosmopolitan
magazine, and Editor and Publisher; all three were handled with dispatch, and it is hoped
the replies will shortly appear. In anv case, the publications are alerted to the fact that
we are prepared (o answer any unwarranted attacks of this kind. In an average month
about twenty-five letters to newspapers and magazines are written or sent, either directly
from the Nauonal Office or thr. sugh our Field Offices or by our community contacts after
consultation with our National Office. . . .””
6. The Zionist Council report claimed “that in 1969 2,240 engagements were made
through the Speakers Bureau; this does not mean 2,240 speakers, but rather 2,240
engagements. In addition to our own roster of speakers, we utilized speakers engaged
by commercial bureaus (booking them in those cities to which they are traveling for their
own bureaus, or in a city en route), as well as speakers based in the local communities,
1n order to save on transportation costs. When we send speakers out, we don't send them
for a single appearance. Our speakers average from four to seven appearances in a single
NOTES 829
day. In a typical community, a speaker may talk to a Rotary Club, a World Affairs
Council, a church group, a high school assembly or college group, a women’s club, a
TV or radio appearance, a background session with a local editor or commentator, etc.
(We believe the speaker should do p.r. work in addition to making public appearances,
and many of them are capable of doing this type of job.) Speakers often remain in a
community for several days.”
7. The commission, under the chairmanship of Dr. Judah Nadich, was made up of
important rabbis, representing all levels of religious opinion. Strangely enough most of
them were Reform or Conservative, and the chairman was secking more Orthodox
representatives.
8. The committee consists primarily of professional producers and writers under
the iniual leadership of a professional public relations woman.
9. Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 120-21.
10. Robert St. John, The Boss (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).
11. Harry Golden, The Israelis (New York: Putnam, 1971).
12. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Sons and Founders (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-
ston, 1971).
13. Gerold Frank, The Deed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
14. Ina March 2, 1978, editorial, “Egypt’s Ungrateful Friends,” the NWashinton Star
attacked the PLO and called on the Palestinians to take another look at their “official”
leadership. In a May 5, 1978, editorial, ‘Planes and Oil,” the Svar called for defeat of
the plane deal since “to the extent that the U.S. is put in the position of being a
supplicant for ‘enlightened’ oil production policies in Riyadh, we mortgage future free-
dom of action, politically and diplomaucally.”
15. Parade, June 26, 1977.
16. The Ziomst Connection represents the first publication of an anu-Zionist (and
pro-Palestinian) book by a major American publishing house.
17, New York Post, October 24, 1977. Cindy Adams, wife of Joey, in her October 28,
1977, column in Our Town, reprinted the Redgrave misquotation and claimed, “Co-
lumbia, who produced her current film Judia, is in deep shock.’ Producer Richard Roth
and scriptwriter Alvin Sargent, according to Soho Weekly News of October 27, 1977,
refused to attend a screening in Los Angeles of the PLO documentary.
18. Show Business, October 20, 1977. The vendetta against Redgrave was still being
carried on months later. In an open letter of July 26, 1978 in larety, Israeli-born Equity
President Theodore Bikel attacked the actress for her “insensitivity and pronounce-
ments,” charging her with “distorting history and pretending that there is a difference
between those Jew-haters who destroyed Jerusalem 2000 years ago and those who seek
to destroy it now.”” And Publisher Leo Shull of Show Business in a lengthy front-page
diatribe, August 3, 1978, assailed Bikel for being too kind to Redgrave.
19. New York Times, March 5, 1978.
20. Between the Lines (bimonthly newsletter, Princeton, N.J.), Charles A. Wells, ed.,
December 1, 1973.
21. New York Times, May 31, 1975.
22. Sacramento Bee, November 7, 1976.
23. William Attwood, Looé, ‘‘Position of the Jews in America Today," November 29,
1955.
24. New York Times, July 10, 1977.
25. /bid.. June 26, 1974.
26. On the same wavelength in praising New York City investment in Israeli securi-
ties were long-time avid supporter of Israel, former City Council President Paul O’Dw-
yer, a Trustee of the City’s Pension Board, and Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Yosef
Tekoah. They both hailed the investment as “‘a significant contribution in support of
democracy.”
27. In November 1969 the President of the Zionist Organization of America ap-
830 NOTES
pealed to American Jews to support President Nixon and criticized Reform Jewish
leaders for urging an ‘immediate cease-fire” in the Vietnam War.
28. New York Times, January 24, 1971, ‘“The Complex Past of Meir Kahane.”
29. The first sentence of the New York Times article of November 10, 1976, on
Churba’s resignation said he was “stripped of his special security clearance because he
talked to a New York Times reporter.’’ Three paragraphs tater, an Air Force spokesman
was quoted as saying that when Churba took the post, he was told he would be unable
to speak publicly.
30. Sisco had been a student at the University of Chicago of Professor Hans Mor-
genthau, long-ume Zionist. On October 10, 1976, he was guest speaker at Technion’s
Annual Dinner Dance in the Grand Ballroom of New York's Hotel Pierre.
31. Jerusalem Post, August 2, 1977.
32. Joseph Churba, The Politics of Defeat: America’s Decline in the Middle East (New York:
Cyrco Press, 1977).
33. Book World, October 30, 1977. Mark Bruzonsky is an associate editor of World
View magazine.
34. Lihlenthal has never allowed himself to be used by the Zionist movement.
35. The late Admiral Strauss was an inveterate anu-Zionist.
36. The economic coordinator was born of Jewish parents and is a member of the
nondenominational Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, whose minister, Reverend
Duncan Littlefair, happens to be one of the most fanatical Christian Zionists in the U.S,
See Middle East Perspective, June-July 1971.
37. A protest to Exxon, one of the sponsors of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report and
widely publicized as a key member of the so-called pro-Arab “‘oil lobby,” was rejected.
Leonard in August 1978, was serving as deputy U.S. Representative to the U.N. and as
U.S. Ambassador on the Security Council.
Chapter VII: Whose Congress?: Thwarting the National Interest
1. In all, U.S. Presidents have been elected twelve times with an actual minority of
the votes: 1824, 1844, 1848, 1856, 1860, 1876, 1880, 1884, 1888, 1892, 1912, and 1916.
2. As quoted by David S. Broder, “Congressional Whims in Foreign Policy,’ Wash-
ington Post, April 26, 1978.
3. House Resolution 163 on March 19, 1975, changed the name of the House
Foreign Aflairs Committee to the House International Affairs Committee.
4. In seeking the Democratic nomination for John Tower’s seat in the Senate, Texas
Congressman Bob Krueger sent out a form letter of November 2, 1977, itemizing
seventeen votes vilally concerning Israel since March 1975 and boasting that on each
and every occasion he had voted for all requests of funding to Israel, in favor of the
resoluuon condemning the U.N.’s anti-Zionism resolution, and in support of the $20
million appropriation for resettlement of Jewish refugees from the U.S.S.R. His record
certainly entitled Krueger to a seat in the Israeli Knesset, if not in the U.S. Senate.
5. New York Post, February 10, 1970.
6. General Ira C. Eaker, Strategic Review, Winter 1974 issue (U. S. Strategic Institute,
Washington, D.C.).
7. H.R. 17123, Tide V, Section 501.
8. See p. 59-60.
9. George D. Aiken, Arken. Senate Diary, January 1972 through January 1975 (Brat-
tleboro, Vt.: Stephen Greene Press, 1976), pp. 170-71. In his diaries Aiken showed an
optimism in March 1973 as to the possibilities of developing better understanding
between the Arabs and the Israelis, which events did not bear out; six months later the
1973 October war occurred.
10. New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 23, 1975.
11. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations has been con-
NOTES 831
stantly used in pressuring Congress on behalf of Israel. Although six of the original
nineteen parlicipating organizations were chartered for religious or fraternal purposes,
their leaders did not hesitate to represent American Jews on such foreign policy issues
as the sale of arms to Israel, withholding arms from the Arabs, a security pact between
the U.S. and Israel, barring of the United Arab Republic from a seat in the U.N. Security
Council. etc. Since December 29, 1953, this lobby, now combining thirty-three Zionist
and non-Zionist groups, has engaged in a conunued, carefully planned campaign. Half
of the Conference's budget was subsidized by the Jewish Agency through tax-free UJA
funds. See “Activiues of Nondiplomatic Representatives of Foreign Principals in the
United States,” Hearmy Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Part
IX, May 23, 1963, Part XII. August 1, 1963 (Washington, U.S. Government Prinung
Office, 1963), p. 1757.
12, The usual Zionist names came from both parties and included such stalwarts
as Case of New Jersey, Church of Idaho, Jackson of Washington, Javits of New York,
Mondale of Minnesota, Ribicoff of Connecticut and Scott of Pennsylvania.
13. dviation Week & Space Technology, December 13, 1976.
14. Near East Report, March 23, 1977.
15. Letter of Senator Hubert H. Humphrey to Dr. C. W. Fairbanks of St. Paul,
Minnesota, dated October 5, 1976.
16. Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1974.
17. Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 93rd Congress,
First Session, on S. 2692 and H.R. 11088, December 13, 1973, p. 128.
18. Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott, The Power Peddlers / How Lobbyists
Mold America’s Foreign Policy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 282. This was an
increase from $250,000 in 1973.
19. New York Times, August 8, 1975.
20. lid.
21. The document had been classified by Adolph Dubs, Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State.
22. Eventually, after looking in the Soviet Union, Jordan did purchase the U.S.
systems—with Saudi money.
23. New York Times, August 8, 1975.
24. When Carl Marcy, former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee and editor of Foreign 4dffairs Newsletter, contemplated devoting an issue to the
lobby, which he felt had been ignored in press analysis, “he was promptly persuaded
otherwise by friends who warned him of economic consequences.”’ Marcy’s conclusion:
“The subject of Arab-Israeli relations is so fraught with emotions that it cannot be
discussed rationally,’’ even in the world’s oldest democracy. ‘This desperate fear has
stymied even the merest thought of any probe of the Israel lobby.
25. Norman F. Dacey, Chairman of the American Palestine Committee; Rabbi Elmer
Berger, President of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism; and Dr. Alfred M. Lilen-
thal, Chairman of Middle East Perspective.
26. Bryen, who was an aide to New Jersey's Senator Clifford Case and was assigned
to matters dealing with the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Middle East
affairs, was accused by North Dakota businessman Michael Saba of “improperly offering
advice and classified material” to the Israelis regarding Saudi Arabian military bases. A
conversation between Bryen and Israeli officials at Washington’s Madison Hotel was
overheard from a nearby table by Saba, who took notes. Bryen was given a long “leave
of absence.”’ Newark Star-Ledger, April 2, 1978.
27. Stephen WD. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p.
255.
28. Cleveland Jewish News, January 24, 1975.
29. Robert Keatley, ‘Potent Persuaders,”” Wall Street journal, July 5, 1977.
30. Ibid.
832 NOTES
31. Jot.
32. Ibid.
33. See “Activities of Nondiplomatic Representatives of Foreign Principals in the
United States,” Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Part 1X of May
23, 1963, and Part XII of August 1, 1963 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1963).
34. Congressional Quarterly, July 1976, p. 1509.
35. New York Post, May 16, 1977.
36. Leo Mindlin, editor of the Jewish Flondian (Miami Beach), June 26, 1959.
37. $1.2 million in contributions to Senator Muskie included large givers Arnold
Picker, Vice President of United Artists Corporation; Matthew Lifflander, former Presi-
dent of Uniworld Corporation; Lionel Pincus, President of E. M. Warburg & Company;
Norman Redstone, theater chain owner; Milton P. Semer, lobbyist and lawyer; Mr. and
Mrs. Fred Morgan, Hudson Rewew.
38. $500,000 in contributions to Senator McGovern included gifts from Henry L.
Kimmelman, New York and Virgin Islands real estate owner; James Kerr, President of
Avco Industries; Robert J. Bernstein, President of Random House; Carol Weil Haussa-
men; Max Palevsky.
39. $750,000 was given to Senator Bayh by contributors including Milton Gilbert,
Gilbert Carrier Corporation, and Richard Adler, Broadway producer. After spending
some $500,000, Bayh withdrew, allegedly because of his wife’s health.
40. Prominent among the givers of $250,000 to Senator Harold Hughes were Eli
Sagon, New York Girl Coat, Inc.; Robert S. Pirie, Boston attorney; Joseph Rosenfield,
department store magnate. Subsequently the lowa Senator abandoned the race.
41. New York Times, May 7, 1971.
42. Congressional Record, 95th Congress, Second Session, June 16, 1970, p. S. 9078.
43. Congressional Record, 95th Congress, Second Session, June 2, 1970, p. S. 8122.
44. Rocky Mountain News, March 27, 1977.
45. Rocky Mountain News, March 24, 1977.
46. Washington Post, October 24, 1977.
47. Congressional Record, 86th Congress, Second Session, April 29, 1960, p. $.8979.
Chapter VIII: Slanting the Myth-Information
1. The demographic makeup of Israel has shifted drastically since founding of the
state in 1948 from an overwhelming European to Oriental (Middle East and Arab)
composition, and in the future the country will be even more preponderantly non-
European. However, the cultural and political patterns are sull dominated by Israel's
European bloc.
2. Edmund Ghareeb, ‘“The American Media and the Palestine Problem,” Journal of
Palestine Studies, Vol. V, Nos. | and 2, Autumn 1975-Winter 1976. (Published jointly by
the Insutute of Palestine Studies and Kuwait University, Washington, D.C.).
3. New York Times, August |1, 1977.
4. Atthe Century Club in November 1972, where Tom Wicker had taken the author
for lunch.
5. Ghareeb, op. cit.
6. Lbid.
7. Ayad Al-Qazzaz, “Stereotypes and Images of the Arab in America,” Study for
California State University, 1974; published in Middle East Perspective, January 1975.
8. CBS Special on Saudi Arabia, March 28, 1975.
9. There is a daily average of 106 column inches of international news. Studies
indicate that the adult reader takes in approximately 12 column inches, devoting about 2
1/3 minutes to this reading, most of which Professor Ayad al-Qazzaz describes as
“political tn nature and by-and-large of an exotic and immoral nature.” Al-Qazzaz, op. ctl.
NOTES 833
10. A study examined eighteen textbooks taught in Ohio elementary schools. Of the
202 pictures appearing in these books, 82 were connected with different phases of
bedouin life, such as oases, date picking, camels, and camel caravans, 22 depicted the
primitive aspects of Arab farm life and farming, 36 showed Arab city life, but only 7 of
those were of modern cities. Al-Qazzaz, op. at.
11. A paper, “Television's Distorted Image of the Arab,” covering partial monitor-
ing during 1974-76 by Dr. Jack G. Shaheen, Associate Professor of Mass Communica-
tions at Southern Illinois University, was delivered at the Annual Conference of the Arab
American University Graduates at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, October 2,
1976.
12. Jbid.
13. A good example was ‘‘Cannon,” May 27, 1976.
14. “The Six Million Dollar Man,” ABC, March 21, 1976.
15. ‘Medical Center,” NBC, June 28, 1976.
16, “Weekend,” NBC, January 3, 1976.
17. “To Tell the Truth,” a syndicated Goodson-Todman production, June 11,
18. NBC's ‘Mystery Theater,” “McCloud,” January 11, 1976, and “‘Columbo,”’ May
16, 1976.
19.1,BC’s “The Little Drummer Boy” has been telecast for several years during the
Christmas season.
20. The Anu-Defamation League has been most successful in persuading television
stations to present their views as a public service in many parts of the country.
21. Letter dated July 26, 1977, from William B. Ray, Chief of Complaints and
Compliance Division, to Harriet Karchmer, American Council on the Middle East.
22. J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Greenwood, 1950).
23. Time magazine, November 25, 1974.
24. A further example of the media’s refusal to discuss the question of Zionism vs.
Judaism was the lengthy article filed from Cairo by H. D. S. Greenway (August 15, 1977).
Normally the Washington Post's regular correspondent in Israel, Greenway had switched
with his alter ego in Cairo for two weeks. The article was riddled with anti-Israeli,
anticolonial phrases attributed to Nasser, as well as the assertion that Israel “never
originally intended to keep the spoils of war.” Not one word about Egyptian attitudes
toward Zionism and anti-Zionism found its way into print.
25. Other stations have done likewise. In early 1969 a minister and a priest—both
total unknowns—returned from Israel. From early morning to late evening, WCBS News-
radio 88 and Channel 2 in New York City prominently featured their defense of Israel
and their criticism of the U.N. censure for the attack on the Beirut Airport. Returnees
from the Arab world, however knowledgeable, are never given such an opportunity.
26. With all due respect to Mehdi’s sincerity, he usually played right into Zionist
hands. As one Zionist once remarked, “If we didn’t have a Mehdi, we would have to
create him.” Mehdi speaks with a decided accent, and no matter how calmly he might
state his case, viewers can never relate to him as they might to the Zionist leaders who
were on the program, or to the numerous Israelis—particularly Abba Eban, who over
the years has been given an enormous amount of TV exposure. The former Foreign
Minister of Israel has few peers in his command of the English language and his gift for
oratory. What CBS did on this program has been the constant practice of the other major
networks, that is, present the Middle East problem solely in terms of two positions: the
Israel-U.S.-Zionist and the Arab positions, while the third point of view, that of the
American national interest as represented by pro-Arab Christians (non-Arab Americans)
and anu-Zionist Jews is scarcely ever aired.
27. This result was in line with polls, including that of the Foreign Policy Association
in June 1976, which indicated very strong public opinion against further arming of
Israel. This is detailed in the concluding chapter.
834 NOTES
28. Other constant manipulations of the news have similarly given the American
public myth-information. WCBS Newsradio 88 financial expert Ray Brady exhibited
much glee in predicting that new Mexican oil discoveries would relieve the U.S. energy
crunch and “send the Arabs back into the desert.’’ There was no retraction by Braay
when Mexico announced it was going to sell its oil at OPEC prices, and that Cuba and
Latin American countries, not the U.S., would receive special treatment in the dispensa-
tion of the new oil. Later, Brady broadcast that “the Arabs were not only raising oil
prices, but that Morocco, Libya, and Syria were responsible for the new high sugar
prices... .
29. Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott, The Power Peddlers / How Lobbyists
Mold Amenca's Foreign Policy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 321. Wallace was
not the only one to be swamped by the Zionist machine. In April 1974 National Geographic
carried an article, “Damascus, Syria's Uneasy Eden,” by Robert Azzi. Under an inde-
scribable barrage of pressure and threats, in its November issue for the first ime in its
eighty-six years of publishing, the magazine was forced to tell its readers that the small
Syrian Jewish community has been existing since 1948 under “‘harsh conditions.” For
this purpose, the Vational Geographic instituted a new monthly column.
30. Canshan Science Monitor, March 19, 1976. Reporter Arthur Unger allowed his
bias to show through at the end of his article on the Wallace controversy: ‘But most
observers in the news gathering profession—Mike Wallace included—will probably
agree that there is a certain unreliability inherent in man-in-the-street, or at-home,
interviews audited by Ministry of Information personnel in a totalitarian state. The
danger ts that what sets out to be a clarification of truth may turn out to be an oversim-
plication of truth.”
31. Vowe, *“The Review of Arab Affairs,” London, October 20, 1977. Parliament
Member Mayhew announced that any claimant not satisfied could take him to court and,
if he lost, he would ‘“‘pay up."’ One Zionist produced a genocidal threat attributed to the
first Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, but which was an apparently
deliberate mistranslation. Mayhew forced this Israelist to go into the High Court of
Justice and apologize.
32. In my opening remarks I said: ‘First, I would like to point out that I am not
talking from an Arab perspective but an American one. ... Americans have been stirred
up on this issue because there is an American interest in the boycott. There are jobs at
stake. And this anuboycott legislation is likely to affect the average American business-
man, taking away maybe 100,000 jobs involving eventually twenty to twenty-five million
dollars worth of dollars that would flow to the U.S. from the purchase of goods.”
33. The Arab League has observer status at the U.N., and its Ambassador and other
staff members receive their diplomatic status from being attached to one of the twenty-
one Arab League members, all of whom are fully accredited to the U.N. save the PLO,
which has observer status.
34. The week before my appearance on ‘Firing Line,”” 71’ Guide asked my office to
rush over a bio, a record of past television appearances, and any other relevant material
on my views. Within half an hour of the request, the material was sent by messenger.
When 71’ Guide appeared containing the programs for Saturday, November 29, all it had
was “Channel 13, Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., Firing Line.”’ A call to Miss Herma Rosenthal of
TV Gude brought an astonishing response: ‘Oh, we wanted that not for the current issue
but only in case the program was shown at a later date elsewhere.” It was shown around
the country, but the material was never used. The New York Times and the Post did even
better in their Saturday TV/Radio column. Their listing ran: ‘Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., Firing
Line: The Zionist Vote.” If anything, the subject ought to have been “The Anti-Zionist
Vote.” What they would not put in print was the real subject: “The U.N. Resolution
Equating Zionism with ‘Racism and Racial Discrimination.’ ”
35. Chippewa Herald Telegram, April 30, 1969.
36. Independent Press Telegram, March 4, 1969.
NOTES 835
37. Aside from the New York Times, the Washington Post has been the most blatant
and consistent purveyor of myth-information regarding the Middle East. It was this
paper which, six weeks after General George Brown had made a controversial statement
with regard to Jewish ownership of banks and media, had reporter Michael Getler dig
up the incident and present it as a front-page national news story. It was this same Post
that in January 1976 purposely sabotaged a Middle East Perspectwe full-page ad so that,
under cover of a newspaper strike making normal supervision by advertisers difficult,
what ought to have read ‘Zionism Is Racism and Anti-Zionism Is Not Anu-Semitism”
in fact appeared, ‘‘Zionism Is Racism and Zionism Is not Anti-Semitism.’ More about
this incident in a later book with other personal anecdotes.
38. Sunday News, Ridgewood N.J., ‘New Policies in Middle East Should Aim at
Peace,” September 1, 1968. Gregg ran for Congress that fall on the Republican ucket,
was defeated, and in 1969 became a registered Democrat.
39. The community’s influence over the University of Utah, for example, was power-
ful enough to discourage sponsorship for a lecture appearance at the University. Arab
students finally managed to sponsor the lecture after other groups mysteriously with-
drew their offers. ] subsequently learned that the fifty Jewish families had provided a gift
of $425,000 for teaching of the Hebrew language at the Center, as well as for classes
in Jewish history (interlaced with Zionism), whereas courses given on Islam and Arab
history avoided discussion of the Arab political position for fear that the slightest drift
into politics would spell the elimination of both courses from the curriculum and of
funds to the University.
40. Salt Lake Tribune, October 28, 1973.
41. Deseret News, Jim Fiebig column October 26, 1973.
42. Broadcasting magazine, January 14, 1974.
43. While the wealthy Arab countries certainly have the means of bringing hundreds
of writers, commentators, and news analysts to their countries, they do not believe in
such public relations efforts, although the marked change in attitude toward the Arab-
Israeli conflict as a result of seeing for oneself has been brought to their attention. In
the spring of 1974 Editorial Page Editor Pat Murphy of the Phoenix Arizona Republic
spent two weeks traveling thousands of miles to visit seldom-seen areas of Saudi Arabia,
and in a series of articles attempted to overcome false impressions held by his readers
about this important Arab country. Murphy wrote: ‘‘By default or design, Americans
have shaped a distorted impression of this oil kingdom.”
44. Sacramento Bee, May 30, 1976.
45. Lbid.
46. When it comes to coverage of the Middle East, distinctions between liberal and
conservative have little meaning. Conservative publications were at one time more
inclined to give space to anti-Zionist, pro-Arab positions (see Afuman Events, 1953-60),
even as citadels of liberalism turned their back on the Voltairian credo, “] may disagree
with you, but I will defend with my life your right to speak.”’ After the Soviet military
infiltration of the United Arab Republic under Nasser, conservative publications veered
sharply to the Israeli camp, whose staunch antii-Communism provided a mutuality of
interest. Human Events, National Review, and other like-minded magazines today almost
invariably support the Israeli position, both because of its ‘‘anti-Communism” and also
because they wish to compensate for the soupcon of anti-Semitism they may be harbor-
Ing.
47. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), p. 296.
48. Richard Reeves, .{ Ford, Not a Lincoln, 1975; Old Faces of 1976, 1976, Convention,
1977 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
49. The release read: ‘‘save Our Israel” is sponsoring a demonstration in solidarity
with the Arab refugees at the Lebanese Consul, 76th Street and Fifth, on Wednesday,
January Ist, at 1:30 p.m. Demonstrators will demand repatriation for Arab refugees
incited to flee from their homes in '48 by Arab leaders. They will demand an end to the
836 NOTES
deliberate perpetuation of the refugee problem by the Arab States. They also note that
a ‘Palesunian people’ do not exist. The absurd Arab myth that the Jews came in and
usurped Arabs from their homes and land must be countered by historical fact. Arab
refugees were created by Arab leaders in order to be exploited as a weapon against the
State of Israel.”
50. The New York Rewew of Books, March 9, 1978.
51. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1972).
52. Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell, // /srael Lost the War (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1969).
53. For the distortion of President Nasser’s remarks before the six-day war, see p.
552-53. This was the most widely exploited slanted quote of all.
54. September 13, 1968, letter of McCloskey to Look magazine.
55. James Michener, The Drifters (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 180.
56. Look, August 8, 1967.
57. The responsibility for this rested with Editor Eugene Lyons, an escapist Jew who
refused to have the Digest give any more attention to the subject of Jews and Zionism
lest the spotlight on this call attention to himself.
58. Reader's Digest Almanac (1972), p. 623.
59. In December 1977 David Holden was mysteriously murdered shortly after he
arrived in Cairo to cover the Begin-Sadat summit meeting in Ismailia.
60. Life, November 22, 1968.
61. Amencan Jewish World (Minneapolis, Minn.), November 29, 1968.
Chapter IX: Numero Uno: The New York Times
1. Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1977, syndicated by King Features.
2. The writer has had to queue up for over forty-five minutes outside The Hub
during the summer at Nantucket to get the Sunday 7imes so he can read the paper and
angrily tear out examples of slanting.
3. New York Times, April 23, 1968.
4. This is a technique employed by the Times to editorialize on many issues, includ-
ing national ones, to denigrate the views of opposing groups and individuals.
5. Ibid., March 23, 1968.
6. New York Times, November 9, 1976; Christian Science Momtor, November 9, 1976.
7. When Israeli military attaché Colonel Yosef Alon was murdered (or assassinated)
in his home in suburban Maryland, the same picture of the bereaved family used earlier
in the week was blown up for the “Week in Review” and used again as a three-column
photo lead for the article. New York Times, July 2 and July 8, 1973.
8. May 7, 1971.
9. New York Times, November 10, 1977.
10. lod, November 13, 1977.
LL. Jéid., April 20, 1977.
12. /bid., February 15, 1978. The use of the word “Christian” was most misleading
inasmuch as many Maronite Catholics, virtually all Greek and Syrian Orthodox, Greek
Catholics, among other Christian denominations, were siding with the Palestinians—
Muslims—leftist Lebanese.
13. The text of the pertinent portions of the Nasser 1970 May Day appeal follows:
“LT address all this to President Nixon, for this is a crucial moment and the conse-
quences are very dangerous.
“IT say to President Nixon that there is a forthcoming decisive moment in Arab-
American relations. There will be either rupture forever, or there will be another serious
and defined beginning.
NOTES 837
“Despite the facts that there are no diplomatic relations between our two countries,
there is nothing that stops us from addressing one another in a last appeal for peace
in the Middle East.
“We want President Nixon to ask Israel just two questions. The answer, if he
receives any, will place at his disposal the whole truth. We want him to ask them:
“First, are they prepared to withdraw from all the Arab territories in accordance
with the Security Council resoluuon and the United Nations principles?
“Secondly, are they aware that there is a people that were born free and master of
themselves, namely, the people of Palestine, and that this people has rights, pointed out
in the Security Council resolution, the United Nations’ resolutions and the principles
of its Charter—the principles that men have believed in and struggled for?
“Their answer has been clear to us from the beginning. They are not prepared to
withdraw; they are not prepared to use the word ‘withdrawal’ even for mere consump-
tion in the face of world opinion. This is what the Prime Minister of Israel said a few
days ago, because they seek expansion. They are against the rights of the people of
Palestine; they even deny that there is a people called the people of Palestine.
“President Nixon should have a look at what is going on in Israel itself in order to
see the picture in its true perspective. There are many voices, even in Israel itself, which
have begun to warn against the difficult and dangerous road along which the military
ruling clique in Israel is drifting and to which it wants to drag the whole of the Middle
East and perhaps others bigger than the Middle East.
“This is the appeal I make to U.S. President Nixon.”
14. Time, May 7, 1973.
15. Purely by accident, an attractive member of the Dominican delegation to the
U.N. poured out her heart to the author over a cup of tea in the Delegates’ Lounge and
revealed the extent of the Zionist pressures brought to bear on her country.
16. New York Times, October 15, 1974.
17. Ibid, February 7, 1970.
18. /bid.. October 5, 1974.
19. [bid.. December 1, 1974.
20. /bid., June 26, 1973. American architect Arthur Kutcher also assailed the sac-
rifice ‘‘of the city’s visual and spiritual character,” and wrote protesting in a critical book:
“The matchless, delicate, poignant landscape is utterly without defense and 1s being
bulldozed randomly throughout its length and breadth.” New Jerusalem: Planning and
Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975).
21. Ibid, November 25, 1976.
22. Ibid, June 26, 1974.
23. Rolling Stone magazine, November 15, 1977.
24. Ibid Also New York Post, October 24, 1977.
25. Newsweek, January 9, 1978.
26. New York Times, November 6, 1977,
27. Newsweek, January 9, 1978.
28. Washington Star, March 23, 1978.
29. Colonel Mua’mmar Qaddafi of Libya on his 1973 harmonious and otherwise
successful visit to Paris had baldly asked President Pompidou if he could buy a nuclear
bomb and was told that such ‘‘were not for sale.”
30. New York Times, August 23, 1974.
31. Ibid, July 22, 1976.
32. Monroe H. Freedman, Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, and Alan M.
Dershowitz, who teaches law at Harvard and has been a fervent supporter of Israel
through contributions to the New York Times and appearances on National Educational
Television. On June 15 the Times did publish a long letter, “On the Israelis’ Trial of Sami
Esmail" by John Masterson and Barbara Thibeault, cochairpersons of the National
Committee to Defend the Human Rights of Sami Esmail.
838 NOTES
33. The Los Angeles Times in its editorial called the occupation among ‘the most
benevolent, humane and progressive in history. Israel has interfered only nominally with
the life of the area.”’
34. Aziza E. Wilson survey, “Stands on the Arab-Israel Conflict: Letters to the
Editor and Op-Ed Articles Published by The New York Times” (Letters: January through
December 1975; January through June 1976; January through September 1977. Articles:
January through September 1977), prepared for AMfiddle East Perspective.
35. For example, New York Times letter “Wrong PLO Contact” by Hadassah Presi-
dent Bernice S. ‘Tanenbaum, dated December 20 and appearing January 4, was a lengthy
reply to Op-Ed piece of December 16, while “Middle East Abnormality” was the answer
to a short letter dated December 23 and appearing January 6 from Abdelwahab M.
Elmissiri, Office of the League of Arab States. Also, January 16 pro-Israeli letter by S.
Godick as opposed to that of B. Ferencz.
36. New York Times, April 13, 1977, pro-Israel letter by G. S. Jeremias as opposed
to that of Gay Mize on the same date.
37. New York Times, January 4 and January 6, 1977 letters by B. S. Tanenbaum and
by Abdelwahab Elmissiri.
38. New York Times, July 5, 1977, letters: M. T. Mehdi and M. B. Schub.
39. New York Times, letters of January 16 and 18 and of February 28, 1977.
40. Aziza E. Wilson survey, op. cit. Code for muluple-letter days, January through
September 1977: | pro-Israel; 2 pro-Arab; 3 neutral.
— two days
1 — one day
3 — one day
— four days
! — one day
2 1 —_ one day
one day
1 1 — two days
— three days
— one day
— two days
— three days
41. New York Times, September 2, 1977. A. V. Martin’s letter is an example: “Obvi-
ously Recognition of the PLO Is Not Open to Negotiations.” Also March 26, 1977, F.
Badr’s letter.
42. Another New York Tomes method is to give prominent position by itself to a
pro-Israel letter, as on November 10, 1977, to the very strong letter of District Attorney
Carl A. Vergari, which attacked a Times ad by the Arab Information Center, without any
indication that the ad in its entirety consisted of quotations supporuve of the charge of
terrorization of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel, from Amnesty
International, International Fact Finding Delegation of National Lawyers Guild, Israeli
League for Human and Civil Rights, Sunday Times of London, and the Swiss League for
Human Rights.
43. New York Times, January 16, 1977.
44. New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1971.
45. Albert Einstein: Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950),
p. 263.
46. New York Post, March 13, 1955. The New York World-Telegram on his death April
18, 1956, referred te him as “‘an ardent Zionist.” Among a full page of pictures in the
Scrnipps-Howard paper was one showing the late professor buying the 200,000th State
of Israel bond.
47. Teddy Kollek with Amos Kollek, For Jerusalem (New York: Random House,
1978).
—“QON=—=WOOWONNN—|———
|
WNNNM—— eee ee
NOTES 839
48. Eitan Haber, The Legend and the Man (New York: Delacorte, 1978).
49. New York Times, October 27, 1946.
50. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969).
51. Ibid. p. 92.
52. While the Times’ owners would vehemently deny any Zionist afhliation, the
record clearly bears out the newspaper's Israelist, if not Zionist, orientation.
53. Time, “The Kingdom and the Cabbage,” August 15, 1977.
54. For example, see James Markham’s piece in the 7imes of August 27, 1977, and
several Flora Lewis articles the following fall.
55. The Minneapolis Tnbune, May 19, 1977, had this to say about Begin:
“You call me a terrorist, but I call myself a freedom fighter.’ These words, or words
like them, have been spoken by Palestinian terrorists for years in defiance of world
disapproval of terrorism.
“But this specific quote is not from a Palestinian terrorist, but from a man whom
Tuesday's election placed first in line to become Israel's next prime minister. Menachem
Begin founded the Irgun terrorists in pre-Israel Palestine; the group's atrocities against
Arabs were justified, in Begin’s eyes, by the struggle to achieve a Jewish homeland.
“President Carter has spoken of the need for a Palestinian homeland. But 29 years
after the creation of Israel, the Palestinians still have no homeland.
“And if one of them says, ‘You call me a terrorist, but I call myself a freedom
fighter,’ what will Begin say in response? That the end justified the means for his Irgun
terrorists, but doesn’t for the Palestunians?”’
56. As a balance to an article excerpung a July 31, 1946, pro-Zionist speech in the
House of Lords by Lord Victor Rothschild, the 7imes ran on its December 6, 1977,
Op-Ed page a picture of rescue workers at the King David Hotel after the bombing, with
this sized capuon:
Rescue workers at the King David Hotel. Jerusalem, in July 1946 after the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi. then
headed by Menahem Begin. blew up a wing, killing 91 persons and injuring 46. The hotel was headquarters of
the British Secretariat for Palestine Mr. Begin, now Prime Minister. is currently on an official visit to Britain.
57. Village Vowe, June 6, 1977.
58. Human Events, July 23, 1977.
59. Ranan Lurie was the Israeli journalist who interviewed Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff George S. Brown and “exposed” his statement calling Israel a “military
burden.”
60. New York Times, May 19, 1977.
61. /bid, Sunday, July 24, 1977, by correspondent Marvine Howe.
62. Ibid, June 7, 1977.
63. fbid.
64. “Give Vision a Chance in the Middle East,” New York Times, June 29, 1977.
65. New York Times, June 21, 1977.
66. Ibid, June 22, 1977.
67. /bid., June 27, 1977.
68. /bid., July 18, 1977.
69. Ibid., July 17, 1977.
70. Jerusalem Post, June 21, 1977.
71. Chicago Daily News, December 8, 1948.
72. The Coffin-La Farge-Lazaron letter was attacked from his pulpit by Rabbi
Emanuel Neumann, who then held the post of official U.N. observer for the Central
Conference of American Rabbis, as “‘only another attempt to sabotage the progress of
Palestine Jew . . . in direct succession to the other anu-Jewish monuments of the last
several years organized by Lazaron.”’ Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1954), p 107.
73, New York Times, August 11, 1977.
74. Ibid., September 9, 1976.
75. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 29, 1977.
840 NOTES
76. New York Times, December 21, 1977.
77. Philip E. Davies, letter to editor, New York Times, January 7, 1978.
78. New York Times, February 10, 1978.
79. Ibd., March 16, 1978. On March 24 the editorial page, in the face of unsuccess-
ful Carter-Begin talks, pushed its viewpoint further: ‘‘What Carter should seek is return
of captured territory to all who grant Israel recognition, genuine security, and real
peace. It is not too much to ask.”
80. The Chief Justice said that ‘the large media conglomerates” had amassed “vast
wealth and power” and that there was ‘‘no basis for saying”’ that their leaders ‘‘are more
or less sensitive to the views and desires of minority shareholders” than are other
corporation ofhicials. New York Times, April 28, 1978. In an editorial the following week,
the Times answered Justice Burger by warning against ‘venturing down a tricky theoreti-
cal path . . . and rushing to embrace indiscrimmate solutions.”’ New York Times, May 7,
1978.
Chapter X: Terror: The Double Standard
1, After Munich, correspondent John Law, who had by then reported for nineteen
years from the area, indicated that the Palestinian terrorists were striving lo win “‘atten-
uon” to their problem, even though “they realize they lose world sympathy by acts of
terror. They are bitter and very desperate men who feel they have a real cause, and
nothing to lose. They are in many instances college-educated men. These are people
who believe that what they are doing is right, even though it is vicious.” U.S. News &
World Report, September 18, 1972.
2. Janis Terry and Gordon Mendenhall, Journal of Palestine Studies, ‘1973 U.S. Cover-
age on the Middle East,” Vol. IV, No. 1, Autumn 1974.
3. Washington Post, April 12, 1973.
4. “Open Letter to Chrisuans in the West" signed by sixty-six American clergymen
serving as missionaries and pastors in Lebanon for the United Presbyterian Church in
the USA, United Church Board of World Ministries, Reformed Church of America, Near
East Baptist Mission, Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church, Community
Church of Beirut, Mennonite Board of Missions, and L’Action Chretienne en Orient.
Reprinted in Middle East Perspective, October 1968.
5. For a full, temized report of the Zionist record on the use of violence and
terrorism from 1939 through September 1974, see U.N. General Assembly Document
No. A/9801, October 11, 1974.
6. Morning Journal, November 27, 1950.
7. The Stern Gang was organized in 1939 by Abraham Stern, one of the Irgun’s
commanding officers, who left the parent organization to build up his own group of
250-300 more extreme fanatics. Stern, said to have written Hebrew poetry between acts
of violence, was killed in 1942 by Palestine police.
8. Stanton Griffis, Lying in State (New York: Doubleday, 1952), p. 213.
9. Yediot Aharonot, February 28, 1977. This second volume of the Ben-Gurion series
appeared in the U.S. as a 1977 Signet book.
10. Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian editor and novelist, and his sixteen-year-old niece
were killed on July 8, 1972, when a bomb planted by Israeli agents exploded in his car.
Emile Khayyat, a Rif Bank employee in Beirut, was seriously injured on July 18, 1972,
by a letter bomb; intellectual Dr. Anis Sayegh was blinded the next day, and Bassam
Sherif, a young Palestinian writer, was seriously maimed a week later by lewer bombs
in Beirut. Two Import-Export Bank employees were later seriously wounded, also by
a letter bomb (October 26, 1972). In the famed raid in which the Israeli assassins were
landed from sea craft, PLO leaders Yusuf Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser (one
of Palestine’s foremost poets) were gunned down in their Beirut apartments on April
10, 1973. Four Lebanese civilians, three Syrians, and an Italian were also killed, and
NOTES 841
twenty-nine Lebanese were wounded in the course of this operation, for which Israel
was unanimously condemned by the Security Council.
1}. Los Angeles accountant Mohammed Shaath and child badly injured by a bomb
placed by agents in his home (September 14, 1972).
12. Noel Zuaiter, Palestinian scholar and PLO representative, gunned down by the
Mossad (Israel’s CIA) at his apartment entrance (October 16, 1972).
13. Mustafa Awad Zaid blinded and paralyzed by a letter bomb (October 25, 1972).
14. Omar Suffan, Representative of the Red Crescent, lost his fingers when a letter
bomb exploded (November 29, 1972).
15. Palestinian student leader lost his arm with the explosion of a letter bomb,
allegedly the work of the Mossad (November 30, 1972).
16. When an electronically detonated bomb, allegedly installed by the Mossad,
exploded in his Paris home, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Hamshani lost a leg and died
a month later (january 8, 1973). Iraqi political science professor Dr. Bassel Kubaissy was
gunned down on a Paris street (April 6, 1973). Algerian poet and friend of the Palestini-
ans, Mohammed Boudaisu, was killed by the explosion of a bomb in his car.
17. Palestinian Hussein Abul Kheir was killed in his hotel room in Cyprus.
18. Ahmed Bouchiki was gunned down by Israeli agents in Oslo.
19. See Tume magazine, July 14, 1975, for specifics on the June I! raid directed
against key members in the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(the Hawatmeh group), and of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palesune (the
Habash group).
20. Chaim Weizmann, Tral and Error (New York: Harper Bros., 1949), pp. 437-38.
21. Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Report to the United States Government and
Is Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom (Department of State, 1946), Recommenda-
tons No. 10, p. 12.
22. Gerold Frank, The Deed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963) pp. 307-8.
23. In remarks to the press on August 3, 1970, President Nixon lamented ‘‘the
tendency of some to glamorize those identified with crime.”” New York Times, August 4,
1970. The day before the presidential remark was reported in the 7imes, there appeared
on page 2 a photo and a profile of Menachem Begin in which the Israeli was described
as an ‘Israeli hawk,” whose ‘admirers felt that his exploits had a Robin Hood quality.”
24. For a thirty-eight-page account of the Lavon Affair and the Cairo spy trial, see
Howard M. Sachar, From the Ends of the Earth: The Peoples of Israel (New York: World,
1964).
25. Eh Ben-Hanan, Our Man in Damascus: The Story of Elie Cohen, Israel's Greatest Spy
(New York: Crown, 1969).
26. Joshua Tadmor, The Silent Warnors (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
27. The letters, according to a William Sherman story in the New York Daily News
of October 11, also contained a message signed by the Black September movement. A
third bomb addressed to another Hadassah executive, because she had moved, wound
up in the Fordham Post Office and badly injured a clerk when it exploded. While the
envelope was totally destroyed, the “terror note” was miraculously found intact on top
of a file eight feet from where the bomb exploded. The postal station had been vandal-
ized on the night between the explosion and the discovery of the note two days later.
A carrier was quoted, “‘It is possible that the note had been planted by vandals.”
28. Wolfgang Lotz, The Champagne Spy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), p. 174.
29. Boston Globe, September 7, 1972. p. 1.
30. New York Post, February 23, 1973.
31, New York Daily News, February 23, 1973.
32. New York Times, September 7, 1972.
33. February 23, 1973 New York Post’s editorial was scarcely believable: “Sometime
before 2:00 p.m. local time yesterday, a Libyan commercial airliner due in Cairo with 112
persons apparently flew past the Egyptian capital for some reason and within a few
842 NOTES
minutes was over the Suez Canal—an Israeli military position. No pretense is being
made that the airliner was armed or that it engaged in any menacing maneuvers; tf may
even have been off course. [Italics added; this was an established fact hours before the
editorial was written.] Yet it was set upon by some of the most sophisticated warplanes
now flying, and if not actually shot down, forced to make a catastrophic crash landing.”
34. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).
35. National Review, “Dirty Tricks and All,"’ October 26, 1973.
36. New York Times, “Terror in Khartoum,” March 4, 1973.
37. The Times referred to the “airspace of Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory.”” The
Chrisnan Science Monitor dectared, “Sinai is not Israel . . . the deed carries the appearance
of defiance of world opinion and the interest of other peoples and nations.”
38. New York Daily News, February 23, 1973.
39. In Boston, at special funeral services in the chapel of the Associated Synagogues
of Massachusetts on Fremont Street, attended by Governor Francis W. Sargent, the
“mourners” were harangued by Mayor Kevin H. White and others who denounced the
Arab terrorists to the cheers of those in attendance, according to the September 7, 1972,
Boston Globe account, ‘‘A Time to Mourn and a ‘Time for Anger,” featured by a four-
column, six-inch-deep picture of the mourners.
40. Neu lork Times, September 7, 1972.
41. Washington Post, September 7, 1972.
42. In December 1974 Mr. and Mrs. Berger were again used as props, brought from
Cleveland to New York for radio-television appearances to remind the American public
of the Munich incident just after the U.N. had heard Yasir Arafat and was about to take
decisive action regarding the PLO.
43. New York Times, February 24, 1973.
44. In a June 2, 1977, editorial, “Red Carpets and Blood Stains,” the New York Post
hit at the “lavish official welcome” given King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia of Spain
on their visit to Washington, pointing to the “reported steadily mounting evidence that
arrests and torture of politcal prisoners in post-Franco Spain are again as common as
they were under the Caudillo at his worst.” Also quoted at length was the charge of the
Internauional League for Human Rights that torture of political prisoners was taking
place in India, and similar allegations of such acts in Chile. But this editorial writer failed
to mention one word about the illegal arrests and torture inflicted upon the Palestinians
under the Israeli occupation, substantiated, even before the London Sunday Times
exposé, by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, the U.N. Special Committee to
Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Peoples of the Occupied
Territories, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and
the Swiss League for Human Rights.
45, The Chrishan Science Monitor, at that ime the notable press exception to the
caliber of reportage, carried the Pierpoint commentary in full on March 9, 1973.
46. This brings back memories of the kind of protest that was raised during the
summer of 1971 on the faraway island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, with the appearance
of a single anti-Zionist letter in the local /nguirer and Mirror, and the sudden inundation
of Zionist supporters in the middle of summer at a meeting held in the Unitarian Church
there.
47. The Nahal is an Israeli paramilitary organization from which recruits are taken
for paratroop corps or other military service.
48. London Times, May 18, 1974.
49. New York Post, May 17, 1974. The European press joined in: ‘Monstrous coward-
ice that nothing could justify,” cried Figaro. ‘‘Revolting means used to block the way to
peace,” wrote Les Echos. Even before the facts were all in, London's Daily Telegraph on
May 16 bitterly condemned the Palestinians in an editorial, “Murderers of Children.”
50. Judith Coburn, “Israel’s Ugly Litthe War,” New Times, March 7, 1975.
51. New York Times, editorial, June 22, 1974.
52. Much of the detail regarding the comparative coverage of the attack on southern
NOTES 843
Lebanon comes from the fine pen of Alexander Cockburn’s ‘Press Clips” in The Village
foie, March 27, 1978.
53. New York Times, March 14, 1978.
54. New York Post, March 15, 1978.
55. New York Times. March 19, 1978.
56. Washington Post, March 18, 1978.
57. New York Times, March 18, 1978.
58. Tune magazine, March 27, 1978.
59. Washington Post, November 10, 1977.
60. Thomas Kiernan, The -trabs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 8.
GL. Jerusalem Post Weekly, May 14, 1974.
62. Irene Beeson, Guardian, July 22, 1974.
63. George Petersen, “The Town That Used to Be,” Nation Review (Australia), July
29, 1974.
64. Stewart West, “The Destruction of Quneitra,” Scoop magazine (Australia), July
24, 1974. West has since been elected to Parliament.
65. New York Tomes, August 26, 1976.
66. Meir Kahane, The Story of the Jewish Defense League (Philadelphia: Chilton Book
Co., 1975).
67, New York Times, June 8, 1975.
68. Bombs have been thrown at Mehdi's residence, employces have been beaten
and stabbed. In the fall of 1974, when the Jewish Defense League was particularly on
the rampage due to Yasir Arafat's imminent arrival at the U.N., a peaceful demonstration
by Medhi and nine other people had to be guarded, according to then U.S. Ambassador
to the U.N, John A. Scali, by 150 New York City policemen.
69. During the lecture two young men first pelted me with eggs and then, mounting
the platform, hit me in the head with gloved hands. I was taken to the hospital for
treatment of minor head injuries. Metromedia Channel 5 news that night interviewed
a JDL official who declared that “the attackers did not do a good job, because he
[Lihenthal] deserved a lot more.”
70. New York Times, June 4, 1974.
71. Beirut Daily Star, October 15, 1972.
72, New York Times, October 31, 1974, shortly before Arafat's speech at the U.N.
73. “Verrorists’ Techniques Improve and So Do Efforts to Block Them,” New York
Times, July 23, 1974.
74. The attack by the splinter Palestinian group, Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, General Command, timed to coincide with the visit of President Nixon to
the area, was directed against the border kibbutz of Shamir, eleven miles from Kiryat
Shemona, which previously had been attacked. In a battle with the kibbutz residents,
four fedayeen slew three women before being killed themselves.
75. Winston Churchill, History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1 (London: Cassell,
1956), p. 21.
76. Parade, January 18, 1976.
77. Ibid, October 3, 1976. The article abounded with Israeli expressions of peace
and hostile Arab responses. Peace, concluded the writer, could be advanced through a
student exchange between Cairo and Tel Aviv.
78. Ibid., February 6, 1977. This same Sadat picture with a rose in his hand was used
as a full-page Parade advertisement in the New York Times on November 29, 1977, after
the Egyptian leader’s visit to Jerusalem.
79. Ibid., “This is the West Bank—The Hottest Piece of Real Estate in the Middle
East,” February 19, 1978. The writer details the emotional and political Israeli reasoning
for keeping this territory through an interview with the 21-year-old settler he sympa-
thetically presented in his 1976 article on the same subject. Inquiry at the magazine
revealed that Michaelson was “Jewish, but non-practising.”
80. Congressional Record, 93rd Congress, Second Session June 21, 1974, p. S. 20500.
844 NOTES
Chapter XI: Exploiting Anti-Semitism
1. Jewish Newsletter, (New York), January 9, 1961.
2. Newsweek, March 1, 1971.
3. A confidential memo (December 26, 1967) from Joseph Sklover to B'nai B'rith
President William Wexler, impounded in the U.S. District Court in Washington in the
Joftes case, states that the Jewish organization provided $557 toward the trip to Israel
of New York Times writer Irving Spiegel.
4. Rabbi Solomon Bernards of the ADL distributed on June 26 and July 20, 1967,
Israel Information Services pamphlets carrying the official Tel Aviv version of the
six-day war.
5. Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).
6. Ibid, pp. 120-21.
7. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem! (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1972), p. 271.
8. Presbyterran Life, July 1, 1967, p. 27.
9. Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The Troublemakers (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1952); Cross-Currents (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956); Some of My Best
Friends (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1962); Danger on the Right (New York: Random
House, 1964); Report on the John Birch Society (New York: Random House, 1966); The
Radical Right: Report on the John Burch Society and its Alles (New York: Random House,
1967).
10. New York Times, March 6, 1974.
V1. New York Post, March 8, 1974.
12. Desmond Stewart quotes Herzl’s reference to anti-Semitism in this metaphor:
{as] “steam power which is generated by boiling water in a tea kettle and then lifts the
hd."" Theodor Herzl (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 217.
13. M. Lowenthal, ed., The Dianes of Theodor Herzl (New York: Grosset & Dunlap,
1962), p. 7.
14. Richard H. S. Crossman, 4 Nation Reborn (New York: Atheneum, 1960), p. 21.
15. Ibid
16. The Spectator magazine (London), June 27, 1960.
17. Statement of October 27, 1947, quoted in Council News (New York: American
Council for Judaism), December 1956, and in Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), p. 52.
18. New York Times, July 24, 1958.
19. National Jeursh Post and Opinion, November 6, 1959.
20. Blackfriars Magazine, Monthly Review (London: Blackfriars Publications, January
1957). Charles Solomon wrote: ‘When to proclaim oneself a Jew may mean hardship,
even death, the indomitable spirit of man—or perhaps his sheer obstinacy—asserts
iself.... But when to be a Jew is merely inconvenient, it is difficult to maintain this mood
of high resolve.”
21. Amidst the euphoria immediately following the Sadat visit to Jerusalem and the
invitation to Begin to come to Cairo, this same rabbi and same organization eighteen
months later warmly welcomed Egyptian Ambassador Ashraf Ghorbal at a New York
meeting on December 6, 1977, at which the Hanukkah candles were lit. All smiles,
Ghorbal assured his former detractors, now exuberant admirers, that there would be
only peace, no more war between Israelis and Egyptians.
22. Washington Post, April 21, 1975. Argentina with its 400,000 Jews has in the past
three years become a focal point of Zionist propaganda activity. See Morton M. Rosen-
thal, “Argenunian Jews in Danger,” Anti-Defamation League Bulletin, November 1976,
New York.
23. Quoted by Gay Valese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World, 1969), p.
270.
NOTES 845
24. New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1971.
25. New York Times, January 14, 1961, p. 6, “Lichtenberger Hails Rector in Scars-
dale’; January 16, p. 24, “Rector Is Praised for Stand on Bias”; January 24, p. 1,
“Scarsdale Golf Club Reverses Guest Rules.”
26. Daily Princetonian, February 24, 1964, carried President Robert F. Goheen’s
letter. The biting letter of student Paul J. Ponomarenko, class of 1966, appeared on
February 20, and there were other letters on the 21st and 24th. Most unusual was the
frank and remarkable perception of Frank C. Strasburger, class of 1967, who decried
“the continual carping, which serves only to remind people of what they already know.
_.. Jews may find persecution if they look for it (and they do look for it), but those Jews
who assume their equality (that they are neither lesser nor greater than those of other
faiths), find that they need not assert it.”’
27. New York Times, February 26, 1964.
28. The lengthy New York Times evaluation of the man and poet boldly referred to
Pound as a ‘‘persistent anti-Semite,” while the New York Post more conservatively re-
ported “the charge that he was an anti-Semite.”’
29. Neu York Times, July 16, 1972.
30. Boston Globe, November 7, 1971.
31. New York Times, August 9, 1973.
32. Jeunsh Currents, March 31, 1974. The international edition of the Jerusalem Post
of March 28, 1972, carried an article by drama critic Mendel Kohansky calling ‘The
Merchant of Venice” an anti-Semitic play, even in its contemporary Hebrew rendition
in Jerusalem.
33. Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson. A Legend in Her Time (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1973), p. 322.
34. lbid., p. 327.
35. Ibid., p. 326.
36. Ibid., p. 323.
37. Jewish Newsletter (New York), April 6, 1951.
Chapter XII: The Blitz
1. Walter Millis, ed., Forrestal Dianes (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 363.
2. Ibid.
3. Arnold A. Rogow, James Forrestal: A Study of Personality, Politics and Policy (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), p. 187.
4. Ibid.
5. James G. McDonald, Ay Mission to Israel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951),
p. 17.
6. When Israeli Deputy Premier Yigal Allon declared in 1969, ‘Our late victory, as
the previous ones, was mainly thanks to our quality of superiority,”’ he was uttering the
equivalent of President de Gaulle’s “‘an elite people sure of itself and dominating.” But
when Allon said this, it was an appropriate expression of pride.
7, New York Times, December 3, 1967.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. New York Times, February 7, 1972.
11. July 11, 1969.
12. Recruits from this same college were promoting the NBC “Holocaust” miniser-
ies of April 1978 and were photographed distributing circulars in the New York Post, April
19, 1978.
13. New York Times, September 30, 1973.
14. Ibid.
15. Newsweek, October 15, 1973. In a tedious propaganda account replete with
846 NOTES
pictures of weeping Soviet Jewish women and children as well as an ‘‘adamant”' Kreisky,
Wisconsin University historian George L. Mosse was quoted as contending that the
incident proved how “unreconstructedly anti-Semitic Austria remains.”
16. Hugh McCullum, “Freedom of the Press” (editorial), Canadian Churchman, June
1973.
17. Ibid
18. The New York Times, January 15, 1977, broke the story on its front page: “U.S.
Officials Expressing Concern About Rising Israeli Arms Exports.”’ Apparently, since the
October 1973 war, Israel had increased its military exports five-fold and was supplying
certain countries with American jet engines and other sophisticated military equipment
in contravention of American law. Such action if committed by other countries would
instantaneously bar further military aid to them, but in the instance of Israel only raised
a question from the media.
19. Middle East Perspective, January 1973.
20. Including the Toronto Star, April 17, 1972.
21. Arab American University Graduates Convention, October 19-21, 1973.
22. The tidle of the Novak article, “lhe New Anti-Semitism.” had its antecedents
in the New York Times Magazine article of January 3, 1971, by Professor Seymour M.
Lipset, upon which Forster and Epstein also drew for the name of their 1974 book.
23. Federal Judge Marvin Frankel gave Bergman an initial light four months sen-
tence, and he was placed, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, in the ‘country club” prison. The
Judge no doubt had been deeply moved by the Bergman plea that he would atone for
his sinfulness by “giving courses on the holocaust to educate the uninformed.”
24. The lecture was delivered before some 150 persons at the Duke University Law
School forum in Durham, North Carolina, on October 10, 1974. The story by Michael
Getler broke on November 13 in the HWashington Post, and on the next day nationally just
as Arafat was addressing the U.N.
25. Marvin and Bernard Kalb, //enry Aissinger (Boston-Toronto: Litle, Brown,
1974), pp. 473-78. This book is discussed at length in Chapter XXI.
26. Wechsler also accused Brown’s hostility and the atmosphere at the U.N. of
killing ‘serious reflection and even reappraisal of past positions. Both tend to viliate
thoughtful debate—both here and within Isracl—about difficult alternatives.” Again, the
pot was calling the kettle black. New York Post, November 20, 1974.
27. San Francisco Examiner, November 3, 1974; UPI, November 4, 1974.
28. New York Times, October 19, 1976.
29. Quoted by Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trou, /fou Lobbyists Mold
America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 317.
30. Lbid.
31. New York Post, January 15, 1975.
32. CBS (radio), “Spectrum,” September 10, 1973.
33. Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 313.
34. Evening Standard (London), July 29, 1969. The pressures against Mrs. McKay
became so great that she was denied renomination by her party and did not return to
Parliament.
35. Boston Jewish Advocate, December 28, 1972.
36. Search for Peace in the Middle East (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Com-
mittee, 1970), reprint Fawcett, 1971.
37. Village Vowe, March 7, 1977.
38. Ibid.
39. Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1971).
40. Letter of Walter J. Minton to Justin Finger, national director, Department of
Fact Finding, ADL, July 19, 1971, quoted in Forster and Epstein, op. ait., p. 103. Accord-
ing to Publishers Weekly, September 1, 1971, Minton placed the matter with his attorneys
for possible action.
NOTES 847
41. Letter Seymour Graubard to Bob R. Dorsey, August 15, 1975; Dorsey reply
August 24, 1975,
42. Donald Weadon, speaking at St. Mary's College in California, April 16, 1970.
43. Dr. Israel Shahak, “What Price Totalitarianism?” Middle East Perspective, October
1977.
Chapter XIII: The Holocaust: Stoking the Fires
1. According to Lucy Dawidowicz in The War gains! the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1975; Bantam, 1976), the word “holocaust” comes through
the Greek from the Hebrew word “olah,” hterally meaning “what is brought up,” but
signifying in biblical texts a “burnt offering.” When used in connection with Nazi
genocide, it brings to mind pagan sacrifices to placate angry gods.
2. London Daily Express, November 27 through December 2, 1972.
3. New York Daily News, November 27 through December 2, 1972.
4. Charles Dana Gibson, The Ordeal of Convoy (New York: South Street Museum,
1973).
5. Ladislas Farago, The Aftermath (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). On the
same subject, see William Stephenson, The Bormann Brotherhood (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
6. Neu York Times Magazine, January 14, 1973.
7. Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died (New York: Ace Publishing, 1967).
8. Dawidowicz. op. cif. The book was glowingly reviewed on the front page of the
Sunday Times Book Review of April 20, 1975, with a terrorizing photo.
9. Mvron S. Kaufmann, The Coming Destruction of Israel: Will the U.S. Tolerate Russian
Intervention in the Middle East? (New York: New America Library, 1970).
10. Richard Chernoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littel, /f /sraef Lost the War (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1969).
11. El Wiesel, One Generation After (New York: Random House, 1970).
12. Originally published by Hill and Wang, New York, 1960.
13. Ehud Avrie, Open the Gates (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961). This was picked up by
the ADL, making a new edition possible.
14. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (New York: Quadrangle, 1971).
15. Yuri Suhl, They Fought Back (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967). Another ADL
book edited, then translated by the author and placed in paperback.
16. Libertanan, Vol. 5, No. 3, May-June 1976,
17. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Jewish Presence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1977).
18. New York Times Book Review, July 24, 1977, by Edward Rothstein, described as
a ‘free-lance critic who writes on a variety of cultural topics.”’
19. New York Times, July 25, 1977,
20. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt Book Review, New York Times, October 12, 1976.
21. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
22. Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books,
1977).
23. Howard Blum, Wanted: The Search for Nazis in America (New York: Quadrangle/
New York Times, 1971).
24. Wanted: The Search for Naus in America, New York Post, February 14-18, 1977.
25. Jack Hoffenherg, 17 Ben-Gurion (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977).
26. New York Times, April 7, 1977.
27. Alvin Rosenfeld, The Plot to Destroy Israel (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977).
This book indicted President Sadat, too, and contended he sought only nonbelligerency,
nota real peace. This book was published in the spring before the Sadat peace iniuative.
28. Gerald S. Strober, Amencan Jews: Community in Crisis (New Yotk: Doubleday,
1974).
848 NOTES
29. New York Times, December 28, 1974.
30. Cynthia Ozick, “All the World Wants the Jews Dead,” Esquire, November 1974.
31. Alfred Kazin, ‘What Do We Do Now?” Adantic Monthly, April 1974.
32. New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1974.
33. Norman Podhoretz, ‘Abandonment of Israel.” Commentary, July 1976. That
December the magazine published twenty letters from readers, including Congressman
Edward I. Koch and Clare Boothe Luce, all but one of which expressed overwhelming
agreement with the article.
34. New York Magazine, December 23, 1974.
35. New York Times Magazine, July 24, 1977. See also Michael Selzer, “The Murder-
ous Mind—A First Look at the Psychological Drawings of Adolf Eichmann,” New York
Times Magazine, November 27, 1977, in which a political scientist analyzes the doodlings
of the Nazi leader in attempting to prove pathological sadomasochism.
36. New York Times, April 8, 1978.
37. Making his debut in Rosebud was none other than former New York Mayor John
Lindsay, who in playing the role ofa U.S. Senator, father of one of the girls, had difficulty
with his few lines and did not seem to know what to do with his hands. After viewing
the politician turned actor, one TV commentator noted, “A star was not born tonight.”
38. New York Times, December 23, 1976.
39, Judith Crist review of Vr. Alen in the New York Post, November 9, 1977. Months
after the film had been first shown in Boston, the Globe of June 28, 1978, carried a
two-column article by Steven Erlanger, ‘“The Real Terror of a ‘Mr. Klein,’ which also
discussed the value of NBC's miniseries “Holocaust” in educating “60 percent of Ameri-
cans about the persecution and murder of Adolf Hider.”
40. Noting on April 30, 1973, that hundreds of persons, including former inmates
of Dachau, assembled at the Nazi death camps site to mark the day, the 7imes also carried
at the bottom of the same page this headline: “Italian Neo-Fascists Are Linked to a
Synagogue Fire in Padua” (p. 3, column 1).
41. Seven PBS stations rejected this episode of “Black Perspective on the News,”
which was shown by the other stations in the network sometime after September 30,
1977, when it was sent out nauonally.
42. New York Times, September 29, 1969.
43. Ibid, July 25, 1969. Also see “Freeing of Man East Germany Called Ex-SS
Officer,” New York Times, June 24, 1977.
44. Jewish Currents, April 1977.
45. New York Times, March 14, 1977.
46. Wolfgang Lotz, The Champagne Spy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972).
47. Ibid., p. 106. Just how false a picture Lotz drew of Egypuan feelings toward Jews
was revealed in an interview of Nasser with a British journalist: “I have never been
anti-Semitic on a personal level. It is very dificult for a thinking Egyptian to be so. We
have so many basic links—after all, Moses himself was an Egyptian. My feelings and
actions against Israel later were inspired solely by the Israelis’ actions as a state.” Robert
Stephens, Nasser: 4 Political Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 436-37.
48. When in New York on a book promouon trip in 1972, author Lotz admitted in
a telephone interview with the author that “most Egyptians were not anu-Semites nor
even anti-Jewish. They were great admirers of the Germans and their achievements.”
Editor Mohamed Heikal and others questioned in Cairo denied the Lotz charge as to
the use of the Protocols at the trial of the spy.
49. Quoted in New York Times, January 7, 1968.
50. Meir during her visits abroad had developed a good relationship with Willy
Brandt, but had stated in an interview that she was ‘‘unable to set foot on German soil.”
Brandt angrily retorted, but the quarrel was healed, and only the October war and then
the fall of her government prevented the Meir visit.
51. New York Times, December 16, 1975.
NOTES 849
52. New York Times, Sunday, March 19, 1978. The article was written by Hans
Knight, columnist for Discover, the Sunday magazine of the Philadelphia Bulletin. In a
letter of April 6, Knight noted that the news-peg for the article was the fortieth anniver-
sary of the Anschluss, although it appeared a week later, and that he had written a similar
piece for the Bulletin ten years previously.
53. Vanety, June 15, 1977.
54. New York Times, April 18, 1978.
55. New York Post, April 18, 1978.
56. New York Times, April 18, 1978.
57. Near East Report, April 19, 1978.
58. New York Times, April 14, 1978. NBC admitted that a former Nazi officer had
been paid as a technical consultant for the series, as he had been for work on the film
The Odessa File.
59. Ibid. “Art Versus Mammon,” April 20, 1978.
60. /bid.. April 16, 1978. The implausible situations about a gentile woman who
is forced to sleep with an SS guard in order to be able to smuggle letters to her im-
prisoned Jewish husband led some to call the series ‘‘Mr. and Mrs. Miniver Go
to Auschwitz.”
61. As far back as 1962, Kay Gardella was writing favorable commentary in the New
York Daily News for Zionist propaganda television films as she did that year on April 23
(late edition) and April 24 for the thirty-minute historical documentary ‘‘Years of Des-
uny,” prepared by the Jewish National Fund and presented as a public service over
Channel 11 in New York and elsewhere around the country. Few films have had as many
half-truths, innuendos, distortions, and slantings as this presentation, which Ms. Gar-
della hailed as a ‘‘splendid history of the rebirth of Israel and of the life of the prophet
of the Jewish state, Theodor Herzl.”
62. New York Post, April 20, 1978.
63. In 1977 the Warsaw Ghetto commemoration had only received a three-column
picture and no story on page 35 of the New York Times of April 18. On April 20 the Vew
York Times devoted a full-page column to Israel Shenker’s ‘‘Holocaust Survivors Remem-
ber.”’
64. Ata purchase price of $175 or rental of $10, a twelve-minute color film ‘‘ex-
plains why Masada has come to symbolize resistance against oppression for Jews the
world over.”’
65. A twenty-five-minute black-and-white film study cleared for TV on the attitudes
and motivations behind anti-Semitism, prepared by Dr. Melvin Tumin, professor of
sociology and anthropology at Princeton University, for adult and secondary school
levels.
66. New York Times, October 7, 1977.
67. Ibid, October 8, 1977.
68. /bid., September 18, 1977.
69. Milton Meltzer, The Jews of the Holocaust (New York: Harper & Row, 1976; Dell,
1977). In us Children’s Catalogue for spring 1978, the Book-Of-The-Month Club listed
the Meltzer book for “ages 12 and up.”’ The tile was slightly altered to Never to Forget:
The Jews of the Holocaust.
70. New York Times, May 2, 1976.
71. Bestseller, The Diary of inne Frank, translated into many languages and printed
in multifold editions, may be a fraud. It was sold as the actual diary of a young Jewish
girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp after two years of abuse and horror. Any
informed literary inspection of this book would have shown it could not possibly have
been the work of a teenager. Writer Meyer Levin won a suit in the New York Supreme
Court against Ouwo Frank, Anne’s father, for $50,000 as an “honorarium for his work”
on the diary.
72. According to a telephone conversation with Raintree editor Russ Bennett in
850 NOTES
August 1978, the publication of the Wiesenthal series had only been in the talking stage,
but somehow the publicity had been leaked to the press.
73. lid, November 5, 1972.
74. Ibid., November 28, 1976. The article was written by Ralph Blumenthal, de-
scribed as a Times reporter ‘who has followed the cases of war-crimes subjects in this
country.’ The very day the Times and the rest of the media were playing up this ‘‘old-hat””
story, they were totally blacking out the important press conference of Israeli Jewess
lawyer and civil rights defender Felicia Langer, where she produced irrefutable evidence
of the Israeli government's ruthless suppression and persecution of Palestinian Arabs
in the occupied areas. This was eight months before the startling page-one revelations
of torture in the Sunday London 7imes.
75. See New York Times, April 18, 1978, for a quarter-page advertisement asking
funds for the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies and featuring George
Santayana’s ‘“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."” Wie-
senthal waged war in Austria against Bruno Kreisky, accusing the Austrian Chancellor
of condoning anti-Semitism to advance his political career.
76. Compare this Meir show of arrogance with the tone of her conversation with
Pope Paul, pp. 506-7.
77. New York Review of Books, March 6, 1975.
78. Spender refers to spending much of his ume in Israel with ‘‘Arabists.”” The
substitution of that word for “Arabs” helped serve as a subtle warning to his readers
to expect that his views might have been colored by this fact, and hence that he was not
as pro-Israel as otherwise might be expected.
79. The Agudath Israel has since changed its view considerably and is a member
of the Begin ruling coalition.
80. Ben Hecht, Perfidy (New York: Julian Messner, 1961).
81. Reviewing the Hecht book in the September 1962 issue of Freeland (published
in New York City by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization), Michael
Astour noted: “If any of his [Hecht’s] statements are erroneous, the Zionist leaders can
easily defend their honor in the normal manner. They are not doing this. . . . They are
silent.” According to Faris Glubb (writing as Faris Yahya) in Zionist Relations with Naz
Germany (Beirut: Palestine Research Center, 1978), the Eichmann trial provided the
Israeli government with the opportunity ‘of burying once again all the unpleasant things
which the Kastner case had brought to light” (p. 70). Witnesses who might have spoken
up on the affair were not called by prosecutor Gideon Hausner (pp. 70-71). This small
but excellently researched book is replete with recitals of close Zionist-Nazi ues.
82. Rabbi Moshe Schonfeld, The Holocaust Victims (Brooklyn: Neturei Karta, 1977).
Much of the Schonfeld study was based on material of Rabbi Michael Ben Weisseman,
published in Hebrew in the untranslated Ain Ha Metzar (From the Depths).
83. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
84. In an October 25, 1977, letter to the Vew York Times, Yehuda Bauer, professor
of Holocaust Studies and Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explained why the murder of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar
in Kiev was far worse than that of hundreds of thousands of gypsies, Asiatics, Commu-
nists, and others whom the Nazis liquidated. There are “gradations of evil,” the writer
insisted, and what happened to “an endless list was evil, but not holocaust.” The
professor was commenting on an earlier announcement that the Soviet Union was
constructing a monument on the site of Babi Yar to commemorate its victims. By some
twist of convoluted logic, the writer makes tne holocaust the sole property of the Jews.
Chapter XIV: Christians in Bondage
1. Some 10 percent of the Palestinian Arabs are Christian. In the entire Middle East,
Arab Chrisuans number five million. There are an additional one to two million scat-
NOTES 851
tered throughout the world. Sometimes figures as high as eleven mitlion are used by
those who include Christians of all ages and degrees of loyalty in the Arab and non-Arab
Middle East.
2. Supporting Herzl’s thesis that Zionism could expect support from anu-Semites
anxious to be rid of Jews were Polish anti-Semites in the interwar period. See Celia S.
Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977).
3, New ork Times, November 1, 1977.
4. Ibid. November 15, 1977.
5. For a detailed study of Christian movements emphasizing prophecy, see Calvin
Keene’s “Prophecy and Modern Israel,” Quaker Life, December 1972.
6. Hal Lindsey with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Zondervan, 1970).
7. The prophecies are contained, among other places, in Genesis 17 and 35,
Deuteronomy 30:1-5, and Ezekiel 11:17. The Ezekiel passage reads: ‘“Thus says the
Lord God, I will gather you from among the peoples and assemble you out of the
countries wherein you are scattered, and J will give you the land of Israel.”
8. Letter of Mr. J. Calvin Keene to the author, June 5, 1976. See also Keene, op cit.
9. A letter written to .dmenca (June 7, 1975) by six Arab Christians in response to
the Jersild article stated: ‘“‘We have observed that, while American Jews almost solidly
support Israel simply because it is Jewish, American Christians do not support us, or
even understand our position, and in many cases are unaware of our very existence
.. we find this tendency of American correligionists to ignore our legitimate rights and
disregard our deep-felt sense of moral grievance not only scandalous but incomprehen-
sible.”
10. Bert DeVries, The Reformed Journal (Grand Rapids, Mich.), ‘ ‘His Land’ and
History,’’ April 1971 and ‘* ‘His Land’ and Prophecy,’ November 1971.
11, New York Post, December 8, 1977. Out of fear of further angering American Jews,
who were still angry over the sale of jets to Egypt, Ruth Carter Stapleton, the President's
sister, canceled her appearance at a scheduled Long Island convention of a Hebrew-
Christian group, B'nai Yeshua. The group was engaged in converting Jews.
12. The words appear in the Episcopal hymn book and commonly in Protestant
hymnals. The words come from John of Damascus, circa 750 a.p., and the usual tune
is from Arthur S. Sullivan.
13. Oesterreicher’s Zionist chauvinism has been so extreme that he was bitterly
criticized in a Catholic publication by Jewtsh writer Dr. Norton Mezvinsky, associate
professor of history, Central Connecticut State College, for his ‘‘crude, unsophisucated,
and misleading approach to some of the crucial problems and facts underlying the
Arab-Israeli conflict.”’ Letters to the Editor, The Commonweal, September 25, 1970.
14. Newark Star-Ledger, May 15, 1977.
15. Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centunes of Anti-Semitism
(New York: Macmillan, 1965).
16. New York Times, June 30, 1974.
17. In his book Honor the Promise—Amenca’s Commitment to Israel (New York: Double-
day, 1977), Congressman and Roman Catholic priest Robert F. Drinan followed the
Oesterreicher-Flannery line. Two weeks before publication, the iam: Herald of October
9, 1977, carried a three-quarter-page feature by Drinan with bold headlines addressed
to Christians. After visiting Israel as “guest of the government,” according to an edito-
rial introductory footnote to his April 9, 1963, article in dmerica, Father Drinan wrote:
“In January 1963, Israel’s Ministry of Religious Affairs organized a course for Muslims
aspiring to the clergy.” Islam, of course, has no clergy!
18. Link (New York: Americans for Middle East Understanding), October, 1972.
Another Ryan, the Reverend Joseph L., from Beirut, has been on the US. lecture circuit
for several years expounding the claims of the Palestinians.
852 NOTES
19. May 9, 1970 in most Beirut papers.
20. Dr. John Sutton served as executive director of the educational group, Ameri-
cans for Middle East Understanding, which published the newsletter, Link, directed
principally at educating church people.
21. New York Times, July 19, 1969.
22. After a battle of many months for control of the American Council for Judaism,
Berger ‘‘resigned” from the organization he had spearheaded and organized American
Jewish Alternatives to Zionism. This new, smaller group was more anti-Zionist and
openly criucal of Israeli policies than the ACJ had ever been.
23. For similar cowardice on the part of the Church of England, see Michael Adams
and Christopher Mayhew, Publish It Not (London: Longman, 1975).
24. The ministers were from Unitarian Universalist, Protestant Episcopal, United
Presbyterian, Catholic, Society of Friends, Antiochan, Orthodox, and United Church of
Christ Churches. The statement appeared in the Church Herald, official organ of the
Reformed Church in America, the oldest Protestant denomination on the North Ameri-
can continent (with a conunuous ministry since 1628).
25. New York Times, January 20, 1962.
26. Ybd., August 27, 1972
27. Catholic News, November 15, 1973.
28. /bid., November 29, 1973.
29. New York Times, December 11, 1974.
30. lbid., December 13, 1974.
31. Dr. Sam P. Colby, monograph, ‘The Growth and Development of Christian
Church Institutions in the State of Israel’ (Jerusalem: Israel Economist, 1975).
32. Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1968).
33. Washington Post, January 13, 1978.
34. Washington Post, January 13, 1978.
35. Washington Star, March 18, 1978. Widespread opposition in Jewish and Christian
circles was revealed in the Chnstian Science Monitor, April 26, 1978.
36. This is the publication that in its 1954 annual book issue voted What Price Israel?
ohe of the six best books of that year.
37. America, April 27, 1974.
38. Cardinal Shehan, the Archbishop of Balumore in 1969, made public a docu-
ment, allegedly with the approval of the Vatican Secretariat, recommending among
other things that Catholics should recognize the significance of the State of Israel for
the Jews. The document was subsequently no/ approved by the Holy See.
39. New York Times, January 20, 1973.
40. The charges contained in the play were strongly refuted in a lengthy letter to
the editor of the New York Times by Cardinal Spellman.
41. Saul Friedlaender, Pius X// and the Third Reich (New York: Knopf, 1966). Fried-
lacnder owed his life to the fact that he was sheltered during World War II in a Catholic
convent in France.
42. See Peter Hoffmann, The German Resistance (Cambridge, Mass.: M.IV. Press,
1977).
43. Pinchas E. Lapide, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967),
pp. 214-15.
44. (Washington Post, December 10, 1972.
Chapter XV: Soviet Jewry: Blackmail and Barter
1. Vhe ‘Free Anatoly Shcharansky’’ November 8, 1977, New York Times ad carried
signatures of such Zionist stalwarts as Senator Daniel P. Moymihan, New York Mayor-
elect Edward Koch, Father Edward Flannery, Rev. Michael Harrington, Elie Wiesel, M.P.
Winston Churchill, Saul Bellow, Paddy Chayefsky, Professors Seymour Lipset (Stan-
Se ad
NOTES 853
ford) and Dershowitz (Harvard) as well as a large number of prominent English and
American actors, including Glenda Jackson, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Trevor How-
ard. Emlyn Williams, Terry Thomas, and Claudette Colbert.
2. Asked about this incident, Alan Rocoff, National Jewish Defense League College
Director, stated: “I have no information about that. However, as in the past, the JDL
applauds such actions as helping to emphasize the conditions we're protesting against.”
3, Books such as Spiritual Genocide—Soviet Outrage and Anti-Semitism: Political Weapon
appeared describing in graphic terms the special harassments and cultural strangulation
said to be meted out to Jews in the Soviet Union and in its Eastern European satellites.
4. Some Zionists have alleged that greater harassment is exerted against Jews
because they, alone among Soviet nationalities, have no officially designated territorial
enuty of their own—the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan being described as
a fraudulent facade. However, one might reasonably ask just how much protection the
Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic affords the Lithuanian people, when hundreds of
thousands of Lithuanians are deported from its territory and colonization by Russian
setllers is promoted.
5. Perhaps the epitome of the Zionist “concern” about Soviet persecuuon in general
was the reported statement of Golda Meir that dissident Soviet Jews should devote full
attention to remedying the grievances of their own group and avoid diffusing their
efforts by seeking to ameliorate the problems of non-Jews.
6. This figure is hard to establish because many of Jewish background do not wish
to idenufy themselves as such.
7. Estumate of Theodore Shabad in the New York Times, March 3, 1965, at the ime
he served as the Moscow correspondent. The figure for Jewish religiosity may be even
lower now.
8. Members of the original Soviet leadership were largely Jewish—Trotsky, Kame-
nev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, among others.
9. William M. Mandel, Russia Reexamined (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), revised
edition.
10. Paul Wohl, “Soviet Jews in Search of Their Image,” /ssues (American Council
for Judaism, New York), Summer 1968.
11. dssues (American Council for Judaism, New York), Autumn 1967.
12. Congress Biweekly, February 5, 1968.
13. Jeursh Post and Opinion, February 2, 1968.
14. In January 1953 six Jews among nine physicians were indicted and charged with
being in league not only with American and British agents but with Zionist spies. The
U.S.S.R. shortly thereafter broke off relations with Israel. After Stalin's death on March
5. 1953, these charges were dropped.
15. Once freed, the Panovs touched base most momentarily in Israel and proceeded
to Europe and the U.S. to exploit their dancing careers, which had blossomed under the
spotlight of the enormous global publicity. When the dancers made their belated New
York City debut with the Berlin Opera Ballet, the three-quarter-page New York Times July
2, 1978, article (with picture) carried forward Israel's propaganda war against the Soviet
Union.
16. This New York Times article of October 23, 1973, covered the views of Professor
Hans Morgenthau, which had appeared in a piece in New Leader magazine.
17, New York Times, September 2, 1973.
18. /bid., September 24, 1973.
19. Spain, of course, had never been submissive to Zionist pressures—it does not
even have diplomatic relations with Israel. President Charles de Gaulle had shifted
French policy in a pro-Arab direction since the termination of the Algerian war. Probably
the European countries most susceptible to Zionist pressure were West Germany, be-
cause of the Nazi stigma, and Holland, the homeland of The Diary of Anne Frank.
20. “Scoop” received some singular Zionist plaudits for his efforts when he was
854 NOTES
named “Man of the Year for 1974" by the Judaic Heritage Society, which went so far
as to strike a commemorative medal in his honor, available at $32 im “gold on sterling”
and $25 in “solid sterling silver.”
21. New York Times, March 8, 1978.
22. Charles A. Vanik is a Czech-American Republican House member from Ohio’s
22nd District.
23. Stephen D. Isaacs, Jews and American Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p.
254.
24. In his letter to Senator Jackson, Secretary Kissinger had stated that he has
been “assured that harassment of would-be Soviet emigrants would cease, and he
assumed emigration could therefore rise.” On his part, the Senator declared that he
would regard 60,000 emigrants, almost a 90 percent rise over 1973, as a test of So-
viet compliance.
25. The release by ‘lass of the Gromyko denunciation, in the form of a letter, was
timed as a counterpart to the public demand of Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy
that Israel curtail further immigration.
26. When Ford declared that he wished to work with Congress to chminate the
problems that precipitated the Soviet action, the presidential aspirant from the State of
Washington snapped back, ‘“This unfortunate reaction suggests that we should reward
the egregious Soviet breach of good faith with increased largesse and a weakening of
our insistence that they move toward freer emigration.”
27. The extent to which Meir and other Israeli leaders, who are principally ag-
nosuics in their personal religious habits. are sincerely interested in how many He-
brew houses of worship exist in the Soviet Union—or anywhere else—remains an
unanswered question.
28. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the House
International Relations Committee, September 27, 1977, p. 78. In an interview with
Marilyn Berger, this expert on Soviet affairs was even more blunt: ‘We have pressed for
increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, and the result is that we neither have
the trade agreement which we could have had with that country, nor have we achieved
an increase in the number of Jews coming abroad. On the contrary, it has declined. I
don’t quite understand this policy on our part. I don’t think that it is entirely thought
through.” New York Times Magazine, May 7, 1978.
29. New York Times, January 22, 1978.
30. /bid., January 30, 1977.
31. One American Zionist spokesman reportedly stated that if the Soviet Jews did
not want to go to Israel, then “let them rot in Russia.’
32. The Jewish Journal of November 19, 1976, bared the internal friction between
forces fed by Chairman of the International Committee on Soviet Jewish Emigration
Max Fisher, the Jewish fund-raiser for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and Zionist groups
aligned to the Israeli government, which favored cutoff of U.S. funds to needy emigrants
not proceeding to or exiting from Israel. World Zionist Organization new chief, Leon
Dulzin, stated that “Russian Jews who choose not to go to Israel are morally inferior and
neither need nor deserve the help of Jewish people.” Quoted by Special Interest Report
(New York: American Council for Judaism), May 1978.
33. For more details on the Klausner Report see Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price
Israel? (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), pp. 194-96. This report and the decision of the
Committee of Eight followed the same racist line of the 1976 Koenig Report, in which
the Israeli Sub-Minister of Interior for the Galilee District proposed a plan to force out
the Arab population so as to prevent it from becoming a majority. See p. 124.
34. Those Soviet Jews who reemigrated from Israel were no longer regarded by the
US. Justice Department as refugees from racial or political persecution and have found
it dificult to obtain U.S. visas. Facing harsh conditions, they rely for financial support
upon Roman Catholic organizations.
35. San Francisco Examiner, March 21, 1976.
NOTES 855
36, One letter-writer protested: “If Mr. Javits and Mr. Jackson who are sponsoring
this bill wish to be so generous, let them pay from their own pockets and not from that
of the taxpayers. People who pay taxes have the nght to know where their money and
why their money is going.”
Chapter XVI: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years
1. The events of 1955-57 are skillfully and reliably detailed in Kennett Love's Suez:
The Twice Fought War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969). Well known for his reliable and
impartial reporung as New York Times correspondent in the Middle East from 1953 to
1956, the author failed to ingratiate himself with the cable desk back in New York. His
book also gave a brief picture of the June 1967 six-day war, for which, noted the author,
“the 1956 war served as a rehearsal."” The Russian arms deal, the Anderson secret
mission, the Aswan Dam renege, the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, the
abortive Canal Users Association, and the British-French-Israeli conspiracy all excitingly
unfold in meticulous detail. The Love book might well be read in conjunction with Miles
Copeland's The Game of Nations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), since they both
cover CIA activiues in Egypt under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt, particularly the
story relating to the Russian arms deal and the thwarted Dulles ultimatum delivered to
President Nasser bv George Allen. Both authors fail to give an assessment, however, of
this ubiquitous organization's Middle East activities, or to mention even a word about
its role played on the U.S. domestic scene in helping to keep the American public
ignomimously uninformed.
2. Love, op. ait, p. 3.
3. This revelation was made in a BBC/2 television interview twenty years later by
General Hugh Stockwell, the overall commander of the joint land forces that captured
Port Said on November 6, 1956. Only on October 26, three days before the Sinai
campaign, did Stockwell learn from French commander General André Beaufre “that
the Israelis were in on the act,”
4. Paul Johnson, The Suez War (New York: Greenberg, 1957), pp. 115-16.
5. Michael Ionides, Divide and Lose (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960), p. 165.
6. Ibid, p. 168.
7. Herut, September 9, 1960.
8. Jewish Newsletter, November 28, 1960.
9. New York Times, August 26, 1960.
10. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper Bros., 1956), p. 4.
V1. Jewish Chronicle, April 28, 1961.
12. New York Herald Tribune, December 9, 1959. Almost eighteen years later, Egypt's
Anwar el-Sadat broke with tradition and flew to Israel to recognize the Zionist state and,
for the moment, end the state of Egyptian-Israeli hostility.
13. [bid.. May 22, 1963.
14. lonides, op. ait, pp. 249-50.
15. U.S. Foreign Policy: Compilation of Studies. Prepared under the Direction of Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, Pursuant to S. Res. 335, 85th Congress, and
S. Res. 250, 86th Congress (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), Study
No. 13, June 9, 1960, p. 1312.
16. Complete text of this important John F. Kennedy letter: ‘Dear Alfred: I ap-
preciated having the benefit of your comments upon my talk to the Liberal Party and
the Zionist Organization. I wholly agree with you that American partisanship in the
Arab-Israeli conflict 1s dangerous both to the United States and the Free World. My
program merely calls for using the power of the President to bring the parties them-
selves to an agreement. For too tong a time, this dispute has been a bitter cause of
friction between the Arab nations and Israel. | would hope that both would be friends
of the United States. Your sobering analysis of my speeches is provocative of additional
thought. [signed] John.”
856 NOTES
17. Congressional Record, 88th Congress, First Session, December 23, 1963, p. S_
7818.
18. /did.
19. See Alfred M. Lilienthal, HWhat Price Israel? (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954), pp,
70, 83, 93-95, for role played by David K. Niles in the creation of Isract.
20. Robert Stephens, Nasser (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 411-31,
21. Saul Bellow “Reflections,” The New Yorker, July 12, 1976. Part of LBJ's solicitude
for Israel stemmed, according to his brother Sam Houston Johnson, from pohucal
advice given to him by his old Aunt Jessie, who wrote to her nephew: “I want you to
tell Lyndon something else for me. Tell him to stick with the Jews and never do anything
against them. Now they're God's chosen people, you know. Says so right in the Bible,
and don’t you ever doubt it. The best thing Harry Truman ever did was to create the
State of Israel . .. why, when he did that, Sam Houston, whether he figured on it or not,
he had that next election right in the bag. Tom Dewey didn't have no more chance than
a pig in a dog race.”’ Sam Houston Johnson, Vy Brother Lyndon (New York: Cowles, 1969,
1970), p. 132
22. Copeland, op. at
23. Stephens, op. cit., p. 454.
24. Menuoned in speech of Gamal Abdel Nasser on the anniversary of the Revolu-
tion, July 23, 1967. Briush Broadcasung Co., SWB NE/523/A/1-17.
25. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, The Cairo Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1973),
p. 245.
26. Ibid., p. 240.
27. Wilham P. Quandt, Decade of Decisions: Amerwan Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli
Confiet, 1967-1976 (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), p. 50.
28. Ibid, p. 54.
29. U Thant came in for a great deal of criticism for withdrawing the U.N. troops, but
under the terms of the U.N. arrangement with Nasser, once Cairo had requested the
United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to leave, the Secretary-General had hule
opuon other than to delay and refer the matter to the General Assembly, which he
deemed unwise. It had never been Nasser’s original intent to close the Gulf of Aqaba to
shipping. He had asked U Thant to stay in Gaza and Sharm-el Sheikh, but the Secretary-
General insisted that either all the troops be kept or all withdrawn. When the Secretary-
General raised the possibility of stationing UNEF on the [sracli side of the line (since 1957
this force had been on the Egyptian side), the Israeli U.N. representative replied that this
would be “entirely unacceptable to his Government,” reaffirming the position Israel had
taken ever since the establishment of the peace-keeping force in 1956.
30. Time magazine, June 2, 1967.
31. According to the Statistical Abstract of israel, 1967, the “relative importance of
Eilat to the total number of ships arriving at the four other principal Israeli ports (Haifa,
Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Ashdod) was 2.20%, 2.46%, 2.75%, and 2.91% for the years 1966,
1965, 1964, and 1963 respectively; while the percentage of net tonnage registered at
Eilat to the net tonnage registered at the other four ports was 1.90%, 2.48%, 1.71%,
and 1.55% for the same years respectively.”
32. Stephens, op. at, p. 491.
33. Aubrey Hodes, “Dialogue with Ishmael: Israel's Future in the Middle East’ (New York:
Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), p. 93.
34. Le Monde, February 28, 1968.
35. Jbid., June 3, 1972, article by Israeli intellectual Amnon Kapeliouk.
36. Ma‘anv, April 4, 1972.
37. Le Monde, June 3, 1972.
38. Maanv, April 4, 1972.
39. Haaretz, March 29, 1972.
40. Le Monde, June 3. 1972.
NOTES 857
41. Quoted by Noam Chomsky, ‘“‘An Exception to the Rules,” /nguiry (San Fran-
cisco, Calif., April 17, 1978). This was in the MIT professor’s review of Michael Walzer’s
Just and Unyust Wars.
42. Quoted by George Heitmann, Survey (London), October 1969.
Chapter XVII: The Attack on Liberty
1. Technical Research Ship Special Communications System.
2. In warning of the need for restraint in the Pueblo affair, Senator Fulbright recalled
that “our friends, the Israelis, shot a similar ship of ours almost out of the water at great
loss of life. We didn’t threaten them with atom bombs. I understand it is agreed infor-
mally to sell them more planes.” This account in the first ediuon of the New York Post
of February 5, 1968, was ‘‘yanked out” of later editions and appeared nowhere else in
the New York or Eastern press.
3. Richard K. Smith, “The Violation of Liberty,’ U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol.
104, No. 904, June 1978.
4. Time, July 7, 1967.
5. Smith, op. at.
6. Joseph C. Lenuni of Oxon Hill, Maryland, letter to the editor, Washington Star,
October 4, 1977.
7. Board of Inquiry ‘‘Record of Proceedings on the Attack on the USS Liberty,’ June
6, 1967, held in London June 10, 1967, and then continued on board the Liberty at Malta
through June 16. Its top-secret findings were pronounced on June 18, 1967, and the
documents were declassified June 21, 1976.
8. Ibid, p. 41.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, p. 166.
11. James Kilpatrick, “‘June 8, at 1400 Hours,” National Review, September 5, 1967.
12. Ibid.
13. Three of these, all generals, were in the Menachem Begin Cabinet of 1977:
Moshe Dayan as Foreign Minister, Ezer Weizman as Minister of Defense, and Meir Amit
as Minister of Communications.
14, Board of Inquiry ‘Record of Proceedings,” op. at., pp. 63-64.
15. New York Times, June 10, 1967, commented upon this editorially.
16. Board of Inquiry “Record of Proceedings,” op. at., Finding of Facts 19.
17. Messages, Department of Defense, National Military Command Center, Mes-
sage Center, June 13, 1967.
18. Zeev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974),
pp. 159-60.
19. Words of Counsel to Board of Inquiry Captain Ward Boston, Board of Inquiry,
“Record of Proceedings,” p. 159.
20. Board of Inquiry, ‘Record of Proceedings,” p. 93.
21. Jbid., Findings of Fact 1, p. 161.
22. Ibid, Appendix VI.
23. Ibid, Findings of Fact 6.
24. /bid., Findings of Fact 33.
25. “The Israeli attitude toward the Liberty incident was one of studied indiffer-
ence,” according to Richard Smith's “The Violation of Liberty,“ op. at. In vivid contrast
to the incident in which the U.S.S. Panay was sunk in 1937, when only three men were
killed, individual Japanese called on the U.S. embassy in Tokyo to express personal
regrets, Japanese schoolchildren collected money for the survivors and next of kin, and
the government within five months of the incident remitted its monetary compensation.
26. Letter of August 30, 1976, from Admiral David M. Cooney to Ehot Sharp,
Secretary of American Council on the Middle East (ACME).
858 NOTES
27. Haaretz, July 23, 1968.
28. Airgram, July 23, 1968, U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv to Department of State.
29. Anthony Pearson, “Conspiracy of Silence,” Penthouse, June 1976,
30. Letters of American Palestine Committee Chairman Norman Dacey to Admiral
Turner and the White House, demanding release of documentation allegedly refuting
the previously released CIA document that incriminated Moshe Dayan, have been ig-
nored,
31. P. Fellwock (writing under the pseudonym of W. Peck), Ramparts, August 1972,
32. For further details of the Defense Deparument’s lid that was ughtly placed on
the Liberty incident, see Herald of Freedom, July 28, 1967 (Zarephath, N_J.), reprinted in
the Congressional Record, Vol. 113, No. 147, September 19, 1967.
33. Richard Nolte actually never had an opportunity to present his credentials as
Ambassador. The 1967 war began before he could be received by President Nasser, and
then the U.A.R. broke relations with the U.S.
Chapter XVIII: Oil on Troubled Waters: The Nixon Years
!. This suggestion had first been advanced by Senator Javits who, while campaign-
ing for reelection at resort hotels in Sullivan County (the area known as the “Borscht
Belt”), had called on President Johnson to deliver seventy-five Phantoms immediately
to Israel. Surangely, the New York Times derided the Nixon proposal to up the military
scales permanently in Israel's favor as a “new, dangerous, open-ended and ultimately
self-defeating commitment.” The long, bitter feud between the 7imes and Richard Nixon
had begun, At this juncture, apparently it was more important lo the newspaper to try
to defeat the Republican nominee than bow to Tel Aviv's immediate wishes.
2. Full-page New York Times advertisement by Friends of Aliddle East Perspective,
January 20, 1969.
3. Not only was the media describing the Rabat Arab Summit as a war meeting, but
such staunch Israelists as writer Paddy Chayefsky were openly predicting that “the Arabs
were again planning to drive us Jews into the sea.”
4. Because his brother, Chase Bank president David Rockefeller, was in the group
that allegedly advised President Nixon to alter his Middle East course, New York Gover-
nor Nelson Rockefeller quickly disassociated himself from any connection with the call
for change. From the outset, Nixon himself was most cynical about the Rogers iniuauve.
As he wrote in his A/emons, “1 knew that the Rogers Plan could never be implemented,
but I believed that it was important to let the Arab world know that the United States
did not automatically dismiss its case regarding the occupied territories or rule out a
compromise settlement of the conflicting claims. With the Rogers Plan on the record,
1 thought it would be easier for the Arab leaders to propose reopening relations with
the United States without coming under attack from the hawks and pro-Soviet elements
in their own countries.” Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset
& Dunlap, 1978), p. 479.
5. Jane’s World Auvraft, March 20. 1970.
6. The New York Times on page 3, April 2, 1970, reported the Israeli claim that the
children (ages seven to thirteen) had been undergoing prearmy taining. It was not until
the fourth day after the incident that the Zines’ readers were told the truth, and then
it was tucked away on page 9 under the ambiguous headline: “No Arms Evident in
Egyptian Town/Site Reportedly Bombed by Israelis Housed School.” [Emphasis added.]
7. For other aspects of this telecast, see pp. 285-86.
8. This suggests that Israel, if she had been forced to enter a conflict within Jordan,
already had its eves focused on certain territories such as the West Bank, whose occu-
pancy would be made possible through the participation of ground forces.
9. The revelation early in 1977 that the Jordanian monarch had been annually
receiving $1 million since 1957 from the CIA caused quite a stir and confirmed the
NOTES 859
closest U.S.-Israel relations. Hussein declared that he had not personally benefited from
the funds, which were directed to worthwhile development projects. Close CIA ues with
successive Isracli Prime Ministers were also subsequently revealed. When newly desig-
nated Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to the US. in July 1977, he gave President
Carter a lengthy document recounting the details of Israel's involvement during the
1970 Jordan-Syria crisis, and of other intelligence operations allegedly carried out by
Israelis on behalf of the U.S. government. While the media carried litde of the story,
Israel had been receiving $80 million yearly from the CIA, much of which had been used
for underwriting Israel's aid program designed to win black African support.
10. For details, see Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1969). Nixon himself showed a lack of understanding of the Egyptian leader’s
motivauions as he ascribed to Nasser “a blind intolerance of the Jews.” Nixon, op. cit,
. 249.
11. President Nixon's presence induced Tito not to attend. Nixon did not even send
Secretary Rogers, Welfare Secretary Eliot Richardson represented the U.S. But the
NATO Sixth Fleet naval maneuvers were canceled.
12. It was the first time that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had lined up on the Palestinian
issue with the rejectionist Arab bloc, and Libya had voted with the conservatives. Sayegh
expressed their thinking: “While some elements and features make wt unthinkable for
us to vote against it [the resolution], other positions make it impossible for us to vote
for 1."
13. Witham P. Rogers, ““A Lasting Peace in the Middle East: An American View.”
Address before the 1969 Galaxy Conference on Adult Education at Washington, D.C.,
on December 9.
14. U.N. Office of Public Information, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1971, Vol. 25,
New York, 1974, p. 168.
15. Subsequently Secretary-General U Vhant reported that the talks under Ambas-
sador Jarring’s auspices had lapsed. Jarring resumed his post as Sweden’s Ambassador
to the U.S.S.R. on March 25. Although he returned to headquarters from May 5 to 12
and from September 21 to October 27, and held certain consultations elsewhere, the
Ambassador found himself faced with the same deadlock, and with no possibility of
actively pursuing his mission. learbook of the United Nations, 1971, op. at, p. 169.
16. When he visited Moscow in 1974, the Massachusetts Senator did not hesitate
to ask for increased emigration of Soviet Jews in his meeting with Leonid Brezhnev.
17. The agreement signed in Bengazi (Libya) by President Anwar el-Sadat, Libyan
Chief of State Colonel Mua’mmar Qaddafi, and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad called
for a council made up of the Presidents of the three countries with a federal President
to be chosen by a majority vote in a national assembly for federal legislation. According
to Sadat. the union was to have ‘one president, one flag, one anthem, and one federal
capital.”” Less than seven vears later Egypuan air forces were attacking Tobruk, the old
royalist capital. in another and most serious of the border conflicts between Egypt and
Libya.
18. Jewish Press, November 13, 1970.
19. Evans and Novak, Mashington Star Syndicate, April 12, 1971.
20. Georges Friedmann, translated by Eric Mosbacher, The End of the Jewish People
(New York: Doubleday, 1967).
21. UPI article datelined ‘Tel Aviv. August 17, 1972.
22. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “A Proposal for Our Time,” Reader's Digest, June 1968.
23. This diplomatic rumination was quickly explained away by the State Depart-
ment lest it unduly jeopardize U.S. relations with the Soviet Umon. But this remark
might be said to have initiated the strange Sadat-Kissinger honeymoon that was to
follow.
24. For example, during the first Suez crisis this same company, fearful of antago-
nizing certain of its prominent stockholders, resorted to an elaborate subterfuge in
860 NOTES
order to contribute the paltry sum of $300 to the work of an anti-Zionist organization.
25. New York Times, “The U.S. Stake in Middle East Peace,” June 21, 1973.
26. Chicago Daily News, August 16, 1973.
27. Some years previously, House Foreign Affairs Committee member Mrs. Francis
P. Bolton of Cleveland, Ohio, had shown some concern for loss of U.S. prestige in the
oil-laden Middle East and had promptly been taken to task by Zionist Organization of
America President Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver: “Madame, apparently oil, not blood,
courses through your veins.”
28. Near East Report editor I. L. Kenen gloatingly inferred a Miller retraction because
the oil executive in his second fetter had not again referred to his call for “‘more positive
support of Arab efforts toward peace in the Middle East’’—as if any conclusion could
be drawn from the fact that everything that appeared in the first letter of the SOCAL
Chairman was not repeated in the second.
29. MIF Professor M. A. Adelman. who earlier had called the Arab oil threat ‘a
bogus” in Foreign Policy, No. 9, Winter 1972/73 (New York: Foreign Policy Association),
contended in an Op-Ed piece, “There Is No Energy Crisis,” in the New York Times of
April 21, 1973, that it was only a “‘pinch” manufactured by the oil companies to increase
their profits. For another attack on the oil companies, see John M. Lee, “Backfire for
the Oil Men,” New York Times, July 29, 1974.
30. An article, ““Vhe Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here,” in the Spring 1974
issue of Foreign Affairs by James E. Akins, who had been State Department Director of
the Office of Fuels and Energy, and consultant to the White House on oil problems
before his appointment as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, maintained that country’s
reserves exceeded the 150 billion barrels previously estimated. He declared: “With the
possible exception of Croesus, the world will never have seen anything quite like the
wealth which ts flowing and will continue to flow into the Arabian Gulf.” Fuel experts
projected the cumulative earnings of the Gulf States between 1973 and 1980 at more
than $210 billion.
31. This supported the previous Yamani warning that Saudi Arabia would not
“significantly expand its production unless Washington changes its pro-Israel stance.”
Washington Post, April 19, 1973.
32. Congressional Record, 97th Congress, First Session, September 5, 1973, p. S.
15900.
33. Congressional Record, 97th Congress, First Session, May 21, 1973, p. S. 16263.
34. This same congressman was later indicted and jailed for accepting a bribe in
the ‘Tongsun Park South Korean case.
35. It was at this press conference that President Nixon referred to the U.S. using
its influence with “the various Arab states and a non-Arab state like Egypt.” The White
House later admitted this gross error. Could this have been a Freudian slip of things
to come, which only made sense in terms of continued U.S. efforts after the first disen-
gagement to separate Egypt from the other Arab countries?
36. Nixon press conference, September 6, 1973.
37. The nationalization had been announced on the fourth anniversary of the
Libyan Revolution and was followed the next day by a price increase of more than one
dollar for the standard 42-gallon barrel.
38. The intrepid Libyan leader never stopped trying. But such Qaddafi maneuvers
as the civilian march on Cairo to catapult his Egyptian ally into a precipitate unification
failed. Even a gradualist approach to union was doomed to die in the post-Suez disen-
gagement world. Sadat and Qaddafi's views were worlds apart, and the incessant war of
words between the two in 1974, 1975, and 1976 erupted into the bitter border clashes
of 1977. Diplomatic relations were totally disrupted in November 1977 after Sadat’s
heralded November visit to Jerusalem.
39. Near East Report, August 27, 1975, reached the desk of every member of Con-
gress with the lead story drawing the parallel between alleged current efforts of the oil
2
NOTES 861
industry to alter U.S. policy and its 1948 pressures on the Truman administration to
reverse the U.S. partition decision. Revived was one of the greatest of all Middle East
myths, which had figured monumentally in the early debate on the Palestine question
in the 1940s. Oil companies, whose closet skeletons reeked of depletion allowances and
tax advantages, had always been lamentably half-hearted and pathetic in protesting U.S.
pro-Israel moves despite their tremendous personal stakes in the area, and in its opposi-
tion to partition. Phey had been—and were still—so subject to Zionist blackmail that
they totally refused to play the game even though they had been fully given the name.
See also Alfred M. Lihenthal, The Other Side of the Coin (New York: Devin Adair, 1965),
pp. 199-203.
40. Most of the three-hour NBC September 4, 1973, energy program on which King
Faisal briefly appeared was devoted to the thesis that the search for alternate energy
sources was the answer to the growing shortages.
41. Former Undersecretary of State George W. Ball stated that the failure of Wash-
ington “to compel an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territory made the October
war inevitable.”” New York Times, March 24, 1974.
Chapter XIX: War Again
1. A few imaginative scenarists have insisted that Kissinger was aware of the Arab
plans to launch a surprise attack and push the Israelis back, which for purposes of later
bargaining with Israel is what he was supposed to have wanted. The fact that the Arabs’
goal was a limited rather than total war against Israel, aimed to recover occupied lands
rather than destruction of the enemy, could explain Sadat's military strategy of stopping
to consolidate his gains rather than pushing on to the Gidi and Mitla passes, which were
thirty-five miles from the Canal and might then have fallen to his forces. But the inumate
Kissinger-Sadat relauonship did not commence unul after the war, although there is
some evidence of an earlier intelligence interchange.
2. Pacem in Terns dinner, October 9, 1973.
3. Marvin and Bernard Kalb, Aussinger (Boston- Toronto: Little Brown, 1974), p. 469.
4. lbid., p. 472.
5. Ibid., p. 475. Apparently President Nixon took the Dinitz threat most seriously.
He told Kissinger: “Goddamn it. use every one [plane] we have. Tell them to send
everything that can fly.” The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap,
1978), p. 927.
6. Washington Post, Marilyn Berger story, February 9, 1974.
7. The absence of the definitive article “the” before “occupied territones”’ in the
English version (but not in the French and Spanish versions) of Resolution 242 of
November 22, 1967, has been used by the Israelis to yustify their contention that they
do not have to fully withdraw. But the preamble to the resolution as well as the U.N.
Charter itself, as George Ball pointed out in Foreign Affairs (April 1977), bars the ‘‘inad-
missibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” Israel continually pointed to the arucle
as indicating U.N. intent that she was not obliged to relinquish all of the occupied
territories. Since the resolution did not call for withdrawal from “‘part” of the territories
or ‘‘some”’ of the territories, but called for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from
territories occupied in recent conflict,” the intent was perfectly clear that the withdrawal
was to be from all occupied territories without exception, save minor mutually agreed
border rectifications.
8. Kissinger was furious over the attitude of our Western allies when they dared
think of their own interests and refused to adopt Washington's “Israel-First”” policy.
9, Nixon personally defended the alert at the same press conference at which he
vigorously attacked the media for biased Watergate reportage. A radio interview in
which I was participating while lecturing in Salt Lake City was interrupted to permit
listening to the President's remarks.
862 NOTES
10. Resolution by the Ministers of Petroleum of member states of the Organizatio
of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting in Kuwait October 17. 1973.
1}. As Faisal told Kissinger in Riyadh on November 8, 1973, ‘‘It was very painful
for me to have been forced to take this action against our American friends.” Edward
R. F. Sheehan, 7he Arabs, Israels, and Kissinger (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976),
p. 72.
12. David Hirst. “‘Israel—A Wasting US Asset?”, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Sep-
tember 15, 1973.
13. New York Times, November 16, 1973.
14. Statement by Thomas R. Stauffer, Lecturer on Economics and Research Associ-
ate in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, before the Federal Energy Adminis-
tration Hearings on “Project Independence,” Boston, Massachusetts, August 29, 1974,
Stauffer stated: ‘“Vhe proposal for ‘Project Independence,’ irrespective of whether desir.
able or practicable in the long run, is irrelevant for the crucial five vears to come. Indeed,
false emphasis upon the long-run, as implied in even the less naive versions of ‘Project
Independence,’ could be harmful or even dangerous if it diverts our attention from the
more immediate perils.”
15. According to a New York Times Washington story of September 29, 1974,
“The Defense Department, which had supplied Isracl with 1,000 tanks fast fall, is
running into unexpected difficulues in expanding production to replenish the de-
pleted tank inventorics of the United States Army.” The Pentagon had wanted to
more than double the production of the M-60 tank, in large measure to offset the
transfer of a large number of the Army’s latest tank to Israel. Because of the combi-
nauon of economic, environmental, and safety reasons, the Defense Department was
finding industry either unwilling or unable to expand production to meet its goals.
Domestic foundries could not be found to handle the huge castings that make up
the turrets and holds of the tank. Secretary Schlesinger publicly questioned in mid-
September whether American industry was capable of living up to its traditional role
as “the arsenal of democracy.”
16. The Israelis resisted moving back to the original October 22 cease-fire lines, as
called for by the second Security Council resolution of early morning October 24, using
the excuse thal it was impossible to delineate exactly where the armies had been on the
day of the first cease-fire. While the Egvypuans were being pictured in the U.S. media
as intransigent and the Israelis as generous for allowing supply trucks with medicine and
food to get through to Suez, the Jerusalem Post printed a map showing where the armies
actually stood on the 22nd, and also one three days later to show their delighted readers
the great advance made in the encirclement of the Egypuian Uhird Army.
17. Figures based on a hist released in late October 1974 by the Israel Defense
Ministry, plus ten missing.
Chapter XX: The Ford Interlude
1. In St. Louis in 1970 Congressman Ford said: “Israel should not withdraw from
a single inch of occupied territory unless there is a real peace treaty and creditable
evidence that the Arabs will normalize relauons.”’ Near East Report, August 14, 1974.
2. Speech at the Annual Conference of the American-Isracli Public Affairs Commit-
tee nm Washington, April 24, 1969. Near East Report, August 14, 1974.
3. As Vice-President, Spiro Agnew appeared at many Jewish functions to bring the
greetings of President Nixon and performed as other politicians were obliged to do untl
his resignauion. Two and a half years later, in his first television appearance promoung
his novel, The Canfield Deciston, Agnew told Barbara Walters on NBC's ‘“Today" show
that “Zionist influences are dragging the U.S. into a rather disorganized approach to the
Middle East problem. . . . 1 do think the media are sympathetic to the Zionist cause.”
Washington Post, May 12, 1976. In New York Times Op-Ed pieces his speechwriter, William
NOTES 863
Safire, called him a “*bigow” (May 24, 1976) and his press secretary, Victor Gold, accused
him of selling out (May 28, 1976). The Zionist blitz had struck again.
4. When asked by avid Zionist correspondent Rev. Lester Kinsolving, known as “the
most notorious baiter in the Nixon press room.” about a 1972 statement in which he
called it unreasonable to preserve the fiction that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel,
the President replied: ““Vhat particular proposal ought to stand aside. We must come
up with some answers between Israel and the Arab nations in order to achieve a peace
that's both fair and durable.”
5. Jordan's Zaid Rifai served as both Prime Minister and Forergn Minister.
6. On the CBS radio’s Newsfeed, a “Vel Aviv Report” by Bruno Wasserthiel quoted
“an Isracli newspaper” as the source for reports of alleged Syrian and Egyptain viola-
tions of the disengagement agreements, of Russian arms flow to Syria, and of possible
use of Arab oil to purchase new shipments of planes and armaments to be used against
Israel. WINS “Religion” commentator Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum interwove plugs for
Israel's position and abstract references to biblical Israel while never failmg to push the
persecution theme. A call to the CBS offices in New York could elicit ne further details
as to the source of these reports. The American people were being prepared for some
possible drasuc new Israeli move.
7. Business Week, January 13, 1975.
8. Professor David C. McClelland, former Chairman of Howard University’s Social
Relations Department, in the January 1975 issue of Psychology Today. ‘‘Wars,” he de-
clared, “stem from certain motivation patterns within a nation: The need for power and
the need for affiliation. But to run the great risk involved in a Middle East war, the
country must be mouvationally prepared to act violently and self-righteously on behalf
of the oppressed—in this case Israel.”
9. Commentary magazine, January 1975.
10. According to the author’s conversation at the U.N. with Foreign Minister Omar
Saqqaf, shortly before his sudden death in New York, the Arabs had in readiness
elaborate emergency plans for the destruction of oil facilities in the event of an external
attack, which would result in an oil flow shutdown of from six to seven months. This
was known to the U.S. and no doubt helped put the brakes on the war party.
11. New York magazine, October 8, 1974.
12. The original Israeli request was for $1.5 billion in military credits for three years
and $2.5 billion in military purchases over the same period. At that ume a Pentagon
spokesman called an arms expenditure of $4 billion annually by a country with a gross
national product of less than $10 billion “‘totally ridiculous.”
13. After careful examination by alienists and psychologists in Saudi Arabia, assas-
sin Prince Faisal Ibn Musaed Ibn Abdul Aziz was declared to be sane and in complete
control of all of his faculties ‘tat the me of the murder.’ He was put to death in June
1975 in Riyadh. But this did not end the speculation that surrounded this politically
important event. A. A. Milne’s ‘who killed Cock Robin?” was revived. Hypotheses
advanced had implicated CIA, Soviet, Israeli, and even Arab agents. Was the assassin
a committed leftist, taking upon himself the cleansing of the country from monarchial
rule? Was he still obsessed by the very unfortunate death of his brother, a fanatical
conservative who, like some Saudis of the strict Wahabi orthodox sect, believed televi-
sion represented a criminal deviation from the preachments of the Koran, and joined
an armed attack on the Saudi television station in which he was killed? Was he avenging
this brother, or was he the tool of some foreign power?
14. The accord, initialed in Cairo and Jerusalem on September 2, was signed on the
23rd by Israeli and Egyptian representatives in Geneva, without any U.S. or Soviet
presence.
15. Jerusalem Post, Septembe: 2, 1975.
16. New York Times, September 6, 1975.
17. New York Post, “Limit Sought on Arming the Israelis,” April 13, 1976.
864 NOTES
18. Saed Marei’s son was married to Anwar Sadat's daughter; Marei, in key positions
during the Nasser regime, claimed that Kissinger had misled the Egyptians during the
disengagement negotiations by not telling them he had promised that Washington
would give sympathetic consideration to supplying Israel with the Pershing missiles,
(New York Times, September 27, 1975.) Marei’s distrust of the Israelis was further
strengthened by the September announcement, after the disengagement agreement,
that the Israeli government would build a new kibbutz on occupied Egyptian soil south
of Gaza in the Sinai, hardly indicating an intention of returning lands taken in 1967,
19. Secretary of Energy Schlesinger, on ‘Meet the Press,”’ admitted that the Persh.
ing missiles Israel sought would not be available until at least 1979, but other Israet
requests were being met.
20. Department of State Selected Documents No. 4, “U.S. Policy in the Middle East:
November 1974-February 1976,” Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of Media Services
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1976).
21. The PLO called a press conference on January 23 at the U.N. As the debate on
Palestine was nearing its last stages and a Palestinian statement could be expected, there
was a Capacity turnout to hear PLO Observer Chief Dr. Zehdi L. Yerzi introduce the
author of this book as editor of Aiddle East Perspective. Vhe conunued, ruthless campaign
to crush the expresston of anti-Zionism and support of the PLO, both in the U.S. and
in Israel, was detailed, including the astonishing case of Rabbi Hirsch. There was a total
media blackout, as there had been to documented accounts of torture administered to
Palestinians in Israel. Nine months later, Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer’s recital to a
sparsely attended Biltmore Hotel press conference of the Arab-American University
Graduates also drew a blank. It was not unul the first-page story m the London Sunday
Times (June 19, 1977) that anything on this subject was allowed to appear in the Western
media.
22. The veto enjoyed by permanent members of the Security Council does not apply
to procedural questions, only to substantive issues.
23. While Moynihan was setting forth his views on the inviolability of Security
Council Resolution 242 and 338, the cyes of other U.N. delegates were focused on
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the guest gallery. If she had come to hear the accustomed
vitriolic rhetoric for which this U.S. diplomat was renowned, the widow of President
Kennedy must have been disappointed. The Ambassador was unusually moderate and
mild-mannered, and the famed pyrotechnics were absent on this occasion (January 12,
1976).
24. Washington Post, May 27, 1977.
25. The administration had budgeted Israel $225 million for the interim period.
26. After his strong statement against Israeli settlements in occupied territories,
Scranton told a Chicago Sun-Times columnist that he personally might support “some
permanent Israeli settlements.” “Something along the line of the Allon Plan makes
sense’’ were his words as he tried to backtrack, with Ford's primary race against Reagan
at its height, from his rebukes to Israel at earlier Security Counctl meetings.
27. Party Chairman Robert Strauss was Jewish with strong Zionist connections, and
one of Carter's closest foreign policy advisers had been Columbia Law School Professor
Richard Gardner, who was more zealously Zionist after marrying an Italian Catholic.
(Gardner was later appointed Ambassador to Italy by President Carter.)
28. Scepttc magazine (Santa Barbara, Calif., March-April 1976).
29. New York Times, October 19, 1976.
30. When I entered the polling booth and reached for the lever to record my choice,
T was still angered by last-minute blatant Ford advertisements appealing to Jewish voters
to remember all the military aid given to Israel by his administration. But reason tem-
pered emotionalism, as I recalled how it has always been the Democratic party of
Presidents {'ruman and Johnson, of Senators Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson,
that has been the Zionist stronghold, and I pulled the lever for the loser as the lesser
NOTES 865
of two evils. Had other resentful New York voters, anti-Zionists or pro-Arabs, followed
my example and not cast a spite vote for Carter, or for independent candidate Eugene
McCarthy, the final result might have been different.
Chapter XXI: Exit Henry Kissinger?
I. Kissinger’s childhood was characterized by brightness, but not the brilliance
which was later to shine through. Marvin and Bernard Kalb, Henry Kissinger (Boston-
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 33.
2. Ibid., p. 188.
3. Ibid. This is one of the infinite number of pro-Zionist biases of the Kalb biogra-
phy, which particularly shows through in gross oversimplification of the events leading
up to the 1967 war: ‘Nasser tried to block the Israeli port of Elath after evicting the U.N.
supervisors in the Sinai” (p. 187). In writing about the Israeli air onslaught in January
1970, the Kalbs referred to ‘‘a series of lightning attacks against missile sites and other
military targets deep in the Egyptian heartland, bombing the outskirts of Cairo,” but said
nothing about the nonmilitary targets struck, including the factory at Abu Zabal and the
school at Bahr el Bakr. In referring to Soviet help in supplying Nasser with military and
economic aid and in keeping him in business, the Kalbs never mentioned the similar role
of the CIA in earlier maintaining Nasser in power so as to serve as an example of stability
to other Arab regimes in the area (see Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations, New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1969). Nasser had so successfully played East off against West that
both superpowers at one point were assisting him to stay in power,
4. U.S. support for evenhandedness never remotely approached the definiteness of
these words: “It is high time that the U.S. stopped acting as Israel's attorney in the
Middle East,” a remark attributed by the Kalbs to ‘‘one of Nixon, Rogers, Richardson,
Laird, Helms.’ Kalb and Kalb, op. at, p. 188.
5. Henry A. Kissinger, ‘A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich, and the Resto-
ration of Peace, 1812-1822,” Harvard University, 1957.
6. Kalb and Kalb, op. at, p. 47. Note how Kissinger’s behavior in the Soviet Jewry
affair and the Jackson Amendment, marked by total deceit, so well fits this yardstick for
*“statesmanship.”
7. Ibid. Few can accuse Kissinger of not practicing what he earlier preached.
8. /bid., p. 191.
9. Ibid, p. 192.
10. Two days later the Mashington Post (June 28) picked up this word “expel,” which
Kissinger had used again the following day, and built a first-page story around the
endeavor by “high administration officials” to ‘expel the Russians from the Middle
East.” The White House quietly had to let the Soviets and Egyptians know that this was
a ‘mistake’ of Henry’s—"‘inadvertent, completely inadvertent.” Two years later, Sadat
picked up these signals from San Clemente and threw out the Soviet military advisers.
11. During the fall of 1972, a few weeks before the presidential election, Kissinger
and Rabin did appear publicly in the presidential box (without Nixon) at the Kennedy
Center for a performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in celebra-
tion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Israeli independence. According to the Kalb
biographers, ‘“‘No one in the concert hall missed this public display of the special
Israeli-American relationship.” Kalb and Kalb, op. at, pp. 208-9.
12. bid., p. 487.
13. Ghassan Tuéni, nz Nahar, March 19, 1974. This theme was picked up and
expanded in ‘‘After October: Military Conflict and Political Change in the Middle East,”
Journal of Palestine Studies (Beirut), Vol. II] No. 4, Summer 1974.
14. As brought out in the investigation of the CIA, in 1975 Kissinger armed the
Kurd rebels in northern Iraq with millions of dollars of weapons to fight the Iraqis and
to help Iran in its dispute with its Soviet-supported neighbor. This ploy, enthusiastically
866 NOTES
endorsed editorially by the New York Times, turned out to be a miserable failure when
the Iranians and Iraqis reached an agreement to settle their border dispute, mostly
centering on the Shatt-al Arab River, and the Iranians ceased support of the Kurds,
virtually ending their rebellion.
15. During Sadat's crackdown on political opposition in the late spring of 1978,
Heikal, who had been writing most critically of the Egyptian president, was barred from
continuing to do so.
16. Washington Post, February 9, 1974.
17. This was at the ume that the first Phantoms negouated by the previous Johnson
administration were delivered, and the Special Committee of the U.N. had brought to
light evidence substantiating the Arab charge of the harsh, inhumane rule in the occu-
pied territories.
18. New York magazine, December 24, 1973.
19. Washington Post, op. at.
20. Ibid.
21. His speech of November 3 before the World Jewish Congress could not have
been more nationalist had a doctrinaire Zionist written it: “All Jews have seen too much
suffering and too many people killed to be able to abandon their own judgment as to
what is necessary for peace and survival."’ New York Times, November 4, 1977.
22. These words came from the acid pen of columnist Mary McGrory, who wrote
as Kissinger departed that “the torch of American foreign policy has passed from the
most imperial and theatrical secretary of state in history to a calm, gray-haired profes-
sional who apparently expects to be treated like an ordinary mortal, not a super-celebrity
or a sovereign power.” New York Post, February 1, 1977. In The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1978), the former President is less than worshipful of
his Secretary of State. He refers early in 1973 to the Kissinger reluctance “to get going
on the Mideast... . Henry has constantly put off moving on it each time, suggesting that
the political problems were too difficult. ... He agreed that the problem with the Israelis
in Israel was not nearly as difficult as with the Jewish community here... . The Mideast
he just doesn’t want to bite, | am sure because of the enormous pressures he’s going
to get from the Jewish groups in this country.” (pp. 786-87).
23. Quoted by Harold H. Saunders in his testimony before the House International
Affairs Committee. Department of State Documents No. 4, “U.S. Policy in the Middle
East: November 1974-February 1976,” p. 62. Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of Media
Services (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1976).
24. Edward R. F. Sheehan, The Arabs, Israel and Kissinger (New York: Reader's Digest
Press, 1976), p. 192.
25. Ibid.
26. Jerusalem Post, August 24, 1975.
27. Sheehan, op. cit., p. 173.
28. From November 3 Kissinger speech in Washington before the World Jewish
Congress, Jewish Journal, November 11, 1977.
29. Sheehan, of. ait., p. 203.
30. Both President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin publicly referred to Secretary
Kissinger during their Jerusalem-Ismailia meetings. When the talks broke down in
January 1978, Sadat is said to have approached Kissinger “requesting him to act as
secret intermediary between Egypt and Israel,’’ which role he declined. Arab Report and
Memo (Zurich, 4n Nahar), February 6, 1978.
Chapter XXII: Enter Carter—and Then Begin
1. Omaha Mayor Edward Zorinsky, the first Nebraska Democratic Senator elected
since 1934, was the fifth Jew to join Javits, Ribicoff, Metzenbaum, and Richard Stone in
the upper house.
NOTES 867
2. See p. 602.
3. Robert L. Turner, (1 Never Lie To You: Jimmy Carter in His Own Words (New York:
Ballanune Books, t976).
4. Evans and Novak syndicated column, Dallas Times Herald, January 19, 1977.
5. Presidential Documents, Jimmy Carter, 1977, Volume XIII, No. 12, Clinton
‘Town Meeung, March 16, 1977. The question had been posed by Rev. Richard Harding.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid, No. 20, May 20, 1977.
8. Resolutions 2535B (XXIV Session), December 10, 1969; 2672 (XXV Session),
December 8, 1970; 2792D (XXVI Session). December 6, 1971; 2963E (XXVII Session),
December 13, 1972; 3089D (XVIII Session), December 7, 1973; 3236 (XXIX Session),
November 22, 1974; 3376 (XXX Session), November 10, 1975; 31/20 (XXXI Session),
November 24, 1976: 32/40 (XXXII Session), December 2, 1977.
9, Department of State, Ofhce of Media Sources, June 17, 1977 (San Francisco).
10. New York Times, June 28, 1977.
VV. Tone, July 18, 1977.
12. Ibid., September 5, 1977.
13. Ibid.. August 1, 1977, pointed out that there are at least twelve Hebrons and
six Bethlehems in the U.S.
14. Ata subsequent press conference Carter admitted this had been an oversight
on his part.
15. Time interview, August 8, 1977.
16. Washington Post, July 28, 1977.
17. New York Times, August 27,1977, Later nan October 9 7imes dispatch Markham
took a further poke at the PIO as “the Palesunian commandos whose disdain of Leba-
non’s tattered sovereignty helped provoke the Lebanese war.”
18. Sharon, according to an Evans and Novak column in the Washington Post of July
15, 1977, had advised a U.S. Senator ten days prior to the Begin visit not to let worry
over Arab oil affect U.S. peace plans for the area, stating that Isracl itself was in a
posiuon to “handle” the oil question if the need ever arose.
19. In a leuer to the New York Times, February 12, 1978, Lord Caradon answered
a very emouonal Times advertisement of February 3, which denied the Palestinians the
right to self-determination: “I give my testimony from my long experience in the Middle
East and frequent recent visits that the Palestinians crave a home of their own—small
though i would be—in which they can make their own decisions and elect their own
leaders and run their own government and regain their self-respect. I also give my
tesumony that they dearly want to live in peace with all their neighbors.”
20. UPI. September 12, 1977,
21. October 5, 1977,
22. Time, September 19, 1977.
23. Lbid., October 3, 1977.
24. Lbid.
25. New York Post editorial, October 2, 1977.
26. New York Times editorial, October 3. 1977.
27. According to New Vork Post columnist Sidney Zion’s account of the long bargam-
ing session, Carter asked Davan where he was going next. Davan indicated he was
leaving for Chicago to speak to Jewish leaders, and Carter said, “Do me a favor. Don’t
attack me.” That even a Zionist writer could impute such a request to the President of
the U.S. reflects the power of the Israclist apparatus and the arrogance of its supporters.
New York Post, November 1, 1977.
28. Commentary magazine, November 1977.
29. New York Tunes, November 1, 1977.
30. /bid., October 30, 1977. The article began on page one and continued over onto
three-quarters of page 34.
868 NOTES
31. Ibid, October 27, 1977.
32. Jbid., November 3, 1977.
33. New York Post, March 30, 1977.
34. James Alsop, “An Open Letter to an Israeli Friend,’ New York Times Magazine,
December 14, 1975.
35. “Egypt's Forces Reported Weak,’ New York Times, November 20, 1977.
36. Extracted from Menachem Begin statement beamed by Israeli radio and televi-
sion networks to neighboring Arab countries. New York Times, November 12, 1977.
37. Ibid., November 27, 1977.
38. Ibid, December 29, 1977.
39. Ibid., November 20, 1977.
40. Ibid, December 6, 1977.
41. Jerusalem Post, December 6, 1977.
42, New York Times, December 21, 1977.
43. New York Post, December 28 and 29, 1977.
44. New York Times, January 20, 1978.
45. Ibid, February 10, 1977.
46. /bid., February 14, 1977.
47. Silt-a-Dahar, Tel Kharis, and Tapuach, all in the neighborhood of Nablus, the
largest Arab city on the West Bank.
48. New York Times, February 27, 1978.
49. ‘Arab Report and Memo,” An Nahar, Beirut, February 6, 1978, Vol. 2, No. 6.
50. The utle of Hedrick Smith’s article in the New York Times, November 6, 1977.
51. Washington Post, October 26, 1977.
52. New York Times, November 2, 1977.
53. Quoted by Mark A. Bruzonsky, ‘Middle East Policy: Carter's Year of Decision,”
Dissent (New York), Winter 1977.
54. New York Times, January 2, 1978. Front-page subhead, “Hussein /fints at a
Failure in Teheran” (italics added). Correspondent James IT. Wooten from New Delhi
in paragraph 3, page 1, wrote: “King Hussein indicated that Mr. Carter had failed to
persuade him to join Middle East negotiations,” and on page 3 a long Flora Lewis story
from ‘Teheran in its first sentence stated: “King Hussein made it clear today that Presi-
dent Carter had failed . . .”’ etc.
55. Letters to the Editor of January 2, 1978, included a two-column bold-head
contribuuon from Associate Director of the American Jewish Congress (4’% inches in
width) with an opposing single-column light-type-headed letter from Ted Swedenburg
of Middle East Resource Center (two inches in width and 20 percent less in length).
56. In the Sunday 7imes “Week in Review” of January 1, 1978, Flora Lewis writing
from Cairo: “. .. With the exception of the Palestinians themselves, emotional satisfac-
tion ts what the Arabs have always wanted most from Israel. But the Israelis no longer
equate emouons so easily with the hard facts of life.” [Syria wants back their territories,
too.| “. . . and war broke out again—with an Israeli first strike in response to dire
provocation— in 1967.” {Italics added. The statements of the four Israeli generals, see
pages 557-59, refute this Lewis fairy tale.] “. . . The 1973 war, launched by Egypt
...” [not mentioned was that Egypt attacked on Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory]
“... the PLO, which never renounced the goal of eliminating the Jewish state. . . .
{ There is an Israeli state, no Palestinian state and the PLO covenant called for a secular
binational Palesumian state for Arabs and Jews to replace the Zionist state of Israel.) In
her piece of January 3, 1978, from Teheran, Lewis by sentence structure attributed
words to King Hussein which the Jordanian ruler did not utter: “Despite the recent
belligerent statements of Yasir Arafat, leader of the PLO, the King said he was convinced
that ‘the overwhelming majority of Palestinians seek a life of dignity under conditions
of peace.’ ”
57. The Times January 2, 1977, editorial, “‘Peace and the Palestinian Entity,” mis-
NOTES 869
represented Sadat's primary objections to Carter's television interview of December 28,
which were not directed solely against the Palestinian entity (referred to as the “so-called
Palestinian entity”) being joined to ‘‘either Israel or Jordan,” but more importantly to
the failure to give the Palestinians the right of self-determination. At the same time the
editorial found an excuse for the Begin cover-over, ‘everything is negotiable but the
destruction of Israel,”’ and asked for “credible assurances that self-determination for the
Palestinians—which ultimately might mean an independent state—would not jeopardize
the security of Israel."’ An earlier editorial of November 6 had strenuously defended the
right of the Zionist lobby, ‘dedicated not for narrow profit or group interest, but for
their humanity, indeed sanity” to take any and all steps to prevent ‘American betrayal
of Israel.’’ he right to exercise multiple loyalties was also stoutly defended in this Times
editorial.
58. New York Times, February 19-21, 1978.
59. Anthony Lewis, “Looking at Reality,” New ork Times, February 23, 1978, subse-
quent Lewis columns March 6 and March 27, 1978. The new Lewis outlook was also
expressed in a series of articles during the columnist’s April-May trip to the area,
particularly his May 4 article in which he stated that “‘most Palestinians seem to regard
the PLO as their collective voice.”
60. New York Times, March 12, 1978, Sunday editorial. In his Times column the same
day, Tom Wicker also warned that the attitude of White House liaison aide Mark Siege!
and of Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler implied that ‘‘some Jews think the only ‘square
deal’ for Israel is to give Israel what it wants,” and that anyone who differed with Israeli
policy lacked “support for the survival of Israel.” This latter tactic paralleled the
1947-48 Zionist accusation that those who did not go along with the partion plan and
the creation of the State of Israel wished ‘to drive the Jews into the sea.”
61. Tune, March 27, 1978.
62. Boston Globe, March 15, 1978, in its headlines across the front page called it a
“Retaliatory ‘Purifying’ Act.’ As the Sadat peace euphoria gradually evaporated, the
near-paranoia of New York Post editorial page editor James A. Wechsler became increas-
ingly apparent in editorials either bemoaning the “lost dream,” assailing PLO “‘terror-
ism,”’ or eventually tearing apart “‘undemocratic’’ Sadat, and in the publication of end-
less pro-Zionist, anti-Arab diatribes in the letters column. All this tied into the Murdoch
paper's screaming yellow journalism in the selling and reselling of Israel.
63. New York Post, March 25, 1978.
64. Time, March 27, 1978.
65. Quoted by James Reston in the Vew York Times, March 19, 1978.
66. New York Post, March 23, 1978.
67. [bid., March 24, 1978.
68. The details of the uprising in the occupied West Bank, Gaza strip, and East
Jerusalem were first reported in the New York Times on March 30, 1978, tucked away in
a page 12 story under the misleading caption: “‘Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon Kills Hope
on West Bank for End of Occupation.”
69. Confirmed by 7ime magazine's Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff (Time, April
3, 1978).
70. See Chapter V, p. 173.
71. According to New York magazine of April 24, 1978, the Connecticut Senator told
the Hall Street Journal that ‘‘the official leaders were simply self-appointed spokesmen
who try to give the impression they speak for the Jews . . . they do a great disservice to
the U.S., to Israel, and to the Jewish community.”
72. Quoted by Sol Stern, ‘Menachem Begin vs. the Jewish Lobby,” New York
magazine, April 24, 1978.
73. Time. May 15, 1978.
74. New York Times, May 9, 1978.
75. Chnsttan Saence Monitor, May 22, 1978.
870 NOTES
76. General Saad el Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez (San Francisco: Ameri
Mideast Research, 1980).
77. Fayez Sayegh, Camp David and Palestine (New York: Americans for Middle Ea
Understanding, 1978), p. 16.
78. Newsweek, December 1}, 1978. On his trip to the Middle East shortly after
Reagan election, although neither the President-elect nor the State Department woul
hold him out as representing them, the former Secretary kept insisting that his vie
actually represented those of the incoming Administration.
79. To show how strong they were, the Zionists even threatened civil rights lead
District of Columbia delegate Walter D. Fauntleroy with defeat by the Marylan
legislature of his District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment unless he publicly
rescinded his openly avowed support of the PLO.
80. For attitude of Zionist groups toward Electoral College reform, see infra, p. 874
footnote 11,
81. See supra, p. 236.
Chapter XXIII: Reagan and Suill Begin
1. See supra, p. 260.
2. See footnote 26, p. 831.
3. U.S. weaponry has flown steadily from Tel Aviv to north and south Lebanon.
4. This fulfilled the goal of Moshe Dayan, which Prime Minister Moshe Sharett had
rejected in 1954. See Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A Study on Moshe Sharett’s
Personal Diary. (Belmont: AAUG, 1980), p. 28.
5. New York Times, June 9, 1981. “When Prime Minister Begin cries out that he is
‘not afraid of any reaction by the world,’ he embraces the code of his weakest enemies, the
code of terror. He justifies aggression by his profound sense of victimhood. And he
assumes that even commitment to allies—like those governing the use of American
weapons—can be twisted to suit any purpose.... Israel’s ever-widening definition of
self-defense is illusory.... It argues for unrelenting attack in pursuit of an unsustainable
superiority.”
6. In his lengthy, documented presentation to the Security Council, Iraq Foreign
Minister Saadoun Hammadi quoted directly from pp. 329-332 of this book as to Israel's
nuclear capacity and the White House cover-up.
7. New York Times, August 18, 1981.
8. New York Times, October 4, 1981.
9. Mary McGrory column, Washington Post, October 29, 1981.
10. New York Times, October 2, 198}.
11. The AWACS were not to be delivered until ‘85, and Saudi crews were to continue
training through '90. In fact, Israel was far more concerned about the enhancements being
supplied for the sixty F-15’s sold to Riyadh in 1978 than they were about the ultra-
sophisticated planes. Military correspondents raised questions about the effectiveness of
the AWACS and its threat to Israel. Two F-106 fighters in a demonstration had come
within 150 feet of the AWACS “undetected by the airplane's highly-touted sensors,”
according to the Chicago Tribune (James Coates, September 20, 1981). The highly-
publicized debate over the AWACS to a great measure was ‘much ado about nothing.”
12. At the outset of the Palestine question in 1947, when the fate of the U.N. parution
resolution hung in balance, forthright action, such as was manifested in behalf of the
AWACS sale, might have netted a different result. See Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Other Side
of the Coin (New York: Devin-Adair, 1965), p. 201 etc.
13, David Hirst and Irene Beeson, Sadat (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 15.
14. New York Times, October 7, 1981.
15. New York Times, August 16, 1981.
16. George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1980), p. 114.
17. Rocky Mountain News, (Denver), May 2, 1982.
18. Norman Podhoretz, New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1982.
NOTES 871
Chapter XXIV: The Ultimate Dichotomy: Israel Uber Alles?
1. “And what is happening today is that for the first ume in American history,
American Jews feel secure enough in their Jewishness and their Americanism to chal-
lenge major aspects of this country’s foreign policy with regard to both the Middle East
and the Soviet Union.” Stephen D. Isaacs, Jews and Amencan Politics (New York: Double-
dav. 1974), pp. 244-45.
2. New York Times, January 27. 1974, nm review of the Eugene Borowitz book, The
Mask Jews Wear.
3. New York Times Magazine, Mav 6, 1973.
4. New York Times, Mav 7, 1973.
5. Miami Herald, January 5, 1976. The story appeared in five columns on the first
page of Section 2 and continued with photos on an inside page.
6. Michael Brecher, The Foreign Policy System of Israel (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1972), p. 232 and footnote 4.
7. Ibid, p. 503, footnote 3.
8. David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (New York: Philosophical Library,
1954), p. 489.
9. David Ben-Gurion, “Jewish Survival,” /srael Government Year Book, 1953-54, p. 35.
10.While this expression of dual loyalites caused Kenen no concern, the duality on
the part of Jews and Greeks worried Mike Mansfield enough to cause the Senate Majority
Leader to comment on NBC's “Meet the Press,” July 27, 1975. This was prominently
reported in the Jerusalem Post. July 29, 1975.
11. Walter Eytan, The First Ten Years: 4 Diplomatic Listory of Israel (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1958), pp. 192-93.
12. World Jewish Congress, Stockholm, August 1959.
13. Action Committee, World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, April 25, 1950.
I+. Zionist Ideological Conference, Jerusalem, Spring 1957.
15. Jewish Daily Forward, January 9, 1959
16. In the lengthy New York Times two-column account of Goldmann’s remarks, this
was buried away at the very end, 104 lines into the story.
17. Abba Eban speech, ‘Prospects for Peace in the Middle East,’ William Patterson
College (Wayne, N.J.), November 20, 1974.
18. Advertsing blasts against France by the Au Revoir Committee carried the
signatures of such “foreign policy experts” as Buddy Hackett, Jerry Suller, and Anna
Meara (the famed Suller & Meara), Abbe Lane, Jack Carter, Herschel Bernardi, Paddy
Chavefsky, Jan Sterling, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and former Anu-Defamauion
League head Dore Schary, whose fine non-Italian hand could be seen in the composition
of the ad and of the committee. Some of these with such disunguished additions as Rich-
ard Burton, Colleen Dewhurst, Estelle Parsons, and Beverly Sills jommed a more perma-
nent organization, Writers and Arusts for Peace in the Middle East, which crusades
for a setdement on Zionist terms and ran full-page ads in the New York Times and Wash-
mgton Post under the heading of “REMEMBER,” attacking the PLO for its terrorism.
19. The press, television, and radio had hkewise built anu-French hatred in its
coverage of the 1970 purchase by Libya of I 14 French Mirages, which Zionists alleged
would be transferred to Egypt for use against Israel.
20. Ata 1968 Waldorf Astoria dinner honoring Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol,
UJA Chairman Edward Ginsberg exhorted his listeners to renew their commitment to
Isracl by more gifts and more Bond purchases, “as the greatest insurance for ow future
as Jews as well as for the future of Israel” (italics added). Vew York Times, January 12,
1968.
21. April 20, 1964, letter from Talbot to Berger quoted in “A Letter from an
American Rabbi to an Arab Ambassador,” full-page advertisement, New York Times,
November 23, 1975.
872 NOTES
22. Marjorie M. Whiteman, editor, Digest of International Law (U.S. Governmen
Prinung Office, 1967), Vol. 8, pp. 34-35.
23. Everyone in Israel is required to carry a “‘leumi” card, signifying ‘‘peoplehood’
or “nation.” Interestingly, the “leumi’’ corresponds to the “volk” card carried by Ger.
mans, also to identify them as members of a particular volk who believed in myths aboy
a common ancestry, origin, and fatherland. These legends imparted a sense of superior.
ity over other “‘volk” groups, expressed fear of contamination by associating with them,
and fed basic Nazi dogma.
24. The Zionist infiltration of the American Council for Judaism, going back several
years, finally succeeded following the 1967 war in ousting Rabbi Elmer Berger and i
totally neutralizing the organization thenceforth. Mcuthing an occasional mild criticism
of Zionism, the Council has placed any censure of Israel on the verboten list. While
keeping the Zionists from entering the front door, they left the back ajar to Israelists,
despite warnings from Berger, Moshe Menuhin, and other staunch anti-Zionists.
25. New York Times, March 24, 1974.
26. “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy might.”
Deuteronomy 6:5.
27. Letter, Israel Shahak, ‘‘A Jewish Duty or Jewish Apostasy?’, London Times,
January 27, 1973.
28. A classic example of an open avowal of dual loyalty was brought to public
attention during the Sacramento hearings in March 1975 on the confirmation of Arnold
Sternberg as California State Director of Housing and Development. Opposed by a
group of Arab-Americans because he had served with the Haganah, Jewish underground
forces during the Briush mandate, and had participated in driving Palestinian Arabs
from their homes, Sternberg stated, as reported in the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin of
May 9, “If forced to choose in a crisis, there is no question about it—my choice lies with
my people—the Jewish people.” Although an Israel-Firster by his own words, he was
confirmed by the State Senate to his post.
29. The saddling of special rights as well as duties and obligations on Jews in
the Diaspora is, among other things, a negation of the protective guarantee set forth in
the Balfour Declaration.
30. In a 54 decision in the case of Afroyim vs. Rusk, the Supreme Court decided
that Americans could be deprived of their American citizenship only on personal renun-
ciation, thus permitting military service by private American citizens in foreign armed
forces. This encouraged enthusiastic young American Jews to volunteer in the Israeli
armed forces before and during the 1973 war, despite the statement of the U.S. Mission
to the U.N. declaring its strong opposition to such service as “contrary to the foreign
policy interests of the U.S. and because it risks involvement by American citizens in
hostilities with countries with which we are at peace.”
31. Arnold Toynbee, .4 Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1954),
Vol. VIII, pp. 290-91.
32. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (New York: Viking Press, 1976). In comment-
ing on the book, Noam Chomsky stated that Bellow is a “propagandist’s delight. He has
produced a catalogue of ‘What Every Good American Should Believe,’ as compiled by
the Israeli Information Ministry. Everything is predictable. No cliché is missing . . .
Bellow has an engaging ability to skim the surface of ideas and a craftsman’s talent for
capturing a chance encounter or an odd circumstance. Beyond that, his account of what
he has seen and heard is a disaster." Noam Chomsky, The New drab (New Delhi, India),
November 1977.
33. George Steiner, The Listener magazine (London: British Broadcasting Corp.),
September 18, 1975.
34. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Hentage (New
York: Random House, 1976).
35. Constantine VI, the son of Leo IfI, married the Khazar Princess Irene.
NOTES 873
36. For details see Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1953), pp. 220-22.
37. This correspondence (circa 936-950 a.p.) was first published in 1577 to prove
that Jews still had a country of their own—namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria. Judah
Halevi knew of the letters even in 1140, and their authenticity has since been verified.
38. Author Koestler strains to conclude that the “Khazar” point does not dilute the
Zionist legal claim to Palestine. He insists that the U.N. 1947 resolution decided de jure
Israel's right to exist, which is now a fact that cannot be undone, except by genocide.
Yet the Zionists themselves, plus their U.S. backers, were so fearful that the U.N. was
not legally competent to confer sovereignty upon Jews even in part of the Holy Land,
that they mercilessly pressured the U.N. Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, November
1947, to vote down by the narrowest margin Arab demands for a ruling on this question
from the International Court of Justice. Jurists worldwide, including some Jews, who
have studied the legality of the right of the U.N. to give portions of Palestine to the
Zionist Jewish Agency, are largely in accord that no such authority existed.
39. New York Times, August 29, 1976.
40. Lihenthal, op. cit., p. 223.
41. Friedrich Hertz, Race and Crilization (London: Kegan Paul, ‘Trench, Trubner &
Co., Ltd., 1928), p. 134.
42, Wilham Z. Ripley, Races of Europe (New York: Appleton, 1898), p. 392.
43. Max C. Margolis and Alexander Marx, -f //istory of Jewish People (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1927), p. 525.
44. A small number, called “proselytes of righteousness,” accepted the iniuiatory
rites of Judaism as well as other laws and customs.
45, Flavius Josephus, /isfory of the Jewish War, written in both Hebrew and Greek,
in seven volumes.
46. Berr Isaac-Berr, “Lettre d'un citoyen, 1791," Transactions of Parisian Sanhedrin,
M. Diogene ‘Tama, ed. (London: Charles ‘Taylor, 1807).
47. The Secretary of State for India had jurisdiction over British colonial interests
m the Near and Middle East as well.
48. Edwin Montagu, Cabinet No. 2A/24, August 13, 1917. Montagu felt that no
matter what safeguarding rights might be provided in the declaration, “the civil rights
of Jews as nationals in the countries in which they lived might be endangered.” He asked,
“How could he, for example, be able to negotiate with the peoples of India on behalf
of His Majesty’s Government, if the world had just been told that the Government
regarded his national home as being in Turkish territory.” David Lloyd George, Wemozrs
of the Peace Conference (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972), Vol. H, p. 733.
49. Originally published in Menorah Journal, February 1918, reprinted in \enorah
Journal, Autumn 1950, pp. 116-18.
50. Henry Morgenthau, Sr., di/ in @ Lifetime (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.,
1921/1922), p. 385.
51. Naomi Wiener Cohen, The Reaction of Reform Judaism to Political Zionism (1897-
1922) (Philadelphia: Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, June 1951),
p. 365.
52. lbid., p. 368.
53. Solomon Grayzel, 4 History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1947).
54. /ssues, American Council for Judaism (New York), October 1962. At the com-
memoration in Bagdad of the 20th anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, the
author was told by a Danish journalist that Rabbi Melchior’s son and successor is a
Ziomst.
55. Judah Magnes, ‘Problems of Today,” 7he Call (New York), July 3, 1942.
56. Israel Shahak, ‘The Racist Nature of Zionism and the Zionist State of Israel,”
Middle East Perspective, April and May 1976.
874 NOTES
57. Address in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915, Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. IE
Part 1 (New York: Harper Bros., 1925).
58. New York Post, October 14, 1976.
59. Anita Libman Lebeson, Pilgrim People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950),
62. ;
60. Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (Cape Canaveral, Fla.. Howard
Allen, 1972), pp. 191-92.
Chapter XXV: Conclusion: Toward Justice and Then Peace
t. NER, summer issue, 1955 (Jerusalem: Ihud Association).
2. Gary Wills, syndicated columnist, The Dispatch (Bayonne, NJ.), February 18,
1978. |
3. Yediot Aharonot, May 14, 1976. Uri Avneri, former Knesset member and editor of
the Tel Aviv weekly magazine Ha olam Hazeh, has stated: “The occupation is an unmiti-
gated disaster for Israel. he fact that the Palestinians remain without their dignity poses
a greater danger to Israeli security than any long-range benefit Israel could have from
the military side of things.” Zime, June 19, 1978. Also Harold R. Piety, “Israel's Trouble
on the West Bank,” Journal Herald (Dayton, Ohio), May 21, 1976. He referred to the
“corrosive relationship brutalizing the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”’
4. New York Times, January 5, 1978.
5. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance admitted that Israel “may have" violated
American law limiting use of these weapons to legitimate self-defense. New York Times,
April 6, 1978. [Italics added. |
6. Arnold J. Toynbee, “The West and the Arabs,” Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook,
1959.
7. When Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela visited Baghdad in 1170 a.v., he found ten
rabbinical schools and 238 synagogues in the land. ‘The Chief Rabbi, he wrote, was held
in highest esteem, being regarded as a descendant of David. Philip Hiui, The crabs
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956), p. 178.
8. For Zionist tactics employed to stampede Iraqi Jews into flight, see Alfred M.
Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin (New York: Devin-Adair, 1965), pp. 37-38,
9. See Paul Martin's story in the London Jimes, November 4, 1975.
10. Manchester Guardian Weekly, April 27, 1972.
It. That the entrenched Zionists, as well as other special interest groups, will
continue to resist pending Electoral College reform legislation, sponsored by forty-
two Senate members and being pushed by Senator Birch Bayh (Dem.-Ind.) as Chair-
man of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Constitutional Amendments, was indicated
in a lengthy March 23, 1978, Washington Star article, *“Vhe Electoral College: An An-
tique that Works.” by coeditor and columnist Edwin M. Yoder, Jr. The writer's princi-
pal defense of the outmoded and sometimes undemocratic Electoral College system
rests in the words of Lord Falkland, once quoted by John F. Kennedy during a Senate
debate on the subject: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to
change.”’ Under the Bayh amendment, the Electoral College would be eliminated and
the presidential and vice-presidenual candidates who jointly received the most votes in
all states combined would be elected. If no ucket received 40 percent or more of the
vote, a run-off between the top two would take place. Judah Shapiro, head of the
Labor-Zionist Alliance, told a meeting of the group's National Council at New York's
Biltmore Hotel: “President Carter's proposal to eliminate the Electoral College could
strip the country’s Jews of their political influence and hurt the liberal community.”
She noted that “in states with a substantial Jewish population, the Jewish vote can help
deliver the states through the Electoral College.” Caristran Science Monitor, March 28,
1977.
12. Foreign Affairs, April 1977. An April 4. 1976, London Times editorial was afraid
NOTES 875
to criticize Israeli leadership for the turmoil then going on in the occupied West Bank
in Israel proper, preferring to place the blame on the “‘indulgence”’ of friends of Israel,
“which has encouraged self-righteousness in Israel,” and to attribute the “heady dream
of a ‘Greater Israel’”’ to “‘extremist groups.’ Thirteen months later, Menachem Begin
was elected with this slogan as Prime Minister.
13. Timothy R. Attwood, Goldstein Explains How Jews Control Amencan Policy Toward
Israel (New York: Vantage Press, 1976).
14. Attwood, op. cit., p. 69.
15. For a full study, see Nelson T. Joyner, Jr., drab Boycott/int-Boycott—The Effects
on U.S. Business (McLean, Virginia: Rockville Consulting Group, Inc., December 1976).
16, The Associated General Contractors of America is a national trade association
representing 8,000 general contracting construction firms and an associate membership
of some 17,500 subcontractors. The association, based in Washington, is responsible for
60 percent of the total annual U.S. contract construction and about one-third of all
international construction undertaken by American firms.
17. Remarks by Congressman Robert H. Michel (Rep.-I!l.), Congressional Record,
95th Congress, First Session, April 20, 1977, p. H.3274.
18. After the study had appeared in a two-page advertisement in the JWall Street
Journal placed by Dresser Industries, Professor Robinson was told by an active Zionist
member of the faculty that had the piece been written prior to his appointment as a
tenured professor, he would never have received the appointment. In his letter to the
author, September 5, 1977, the professor adds: ‘Given his position at MIT, I believe
he could have made good on that threat. One wonders what sort of message comes
through to junior members of the faculty when such a statement is made.”
19. Senator Abraham Ribicoff's contention as related in “Squelch the Boycott and
Cut Petrodollar Income,” the syndicated Evans and Novak column, September 13, 1976.
20. New York Times, July 1, 1974.
21. World Mibtary Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1966-1975, U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency (Washington, D.C : U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977).
22. In addition to the two superpowers, these were China, Iran, Japan, Italy, Cze-
chosolovakia, France, the U.K., and Poland.
23. Southside News (Orlando, Florida), March 16, 1978.
24. One objector wrote the author requesting anonymity, “not because of the
persecuuion we have suffered ourselves, but because of that extended to our children
and other family members. The children, in particular, have children of their own or are
in various stages of education. Their parents cannot afford to have business opportuni-
ues withheld. Isn’t all of this sickening? I know that you will heed my request and not
mention my name.”
25. When Board of Regents member Mrs. Genevieve Klein opposed this giveaway
of taxpayer funds, Stanley Steingut, Jr., Democratic leader in the New York State Assem-
bly, wrote to Warren Anderson, Republican leader in the State Senate, calling Mrs. Klein
‘an anathema to my people.” Her refusal to admit that Israel was the fifty-first state of
the Union was an important factor in her defeat for reelection by the legislature.
26. New York Times, June 16, 1974.
27. Clyde R. Mark, Foreign Assistance to the State of Israel: A Compilation of Basic
Data, Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division, Congressional Research Service,
Library of Congress, September 28, 1976; L’.S. Overseas Loans and Grants and Assistance
from International Organizations, Bureau for Program and Policy Coordination, A.1.D.,
March 1982.
28. Nadav Safran, The U.S. and Israel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963),
p. 278. What Safran wrote at that ime is even much more true today. In his arucle “The
U.S. and Israel: Conflicts of Interest,” /ssues (New York: American Council for Judaism,
Summer 1964), Dr. Harry Howard, formerly of the U.S. Department of State, pointed
out that the U.S. had given $877.7 million in economic and military aid to Israel between
1946 and 1962. This was a per capita rate of $39.70, the highest in the U.S. foreign
assistance program.
876 NOTES
29. General Ira C. Eaker, Strategic Review (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Strategic Inst
tute, Winter 1974).
30. Wolf Blitzer interview of General George Keegan, “The Arab Plan to Destr¢
Israel,” Jerusalem Post, August 9, 1977; reprinted in Near East Report, August 10, 197
31. Armed Forces Journal International, October 1977. ‘
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., December 1977. See p. 21 for editor’s comments on the Churba piec
“Weighing the Middle East Balance on a Different Set of Scales,” which appeared in th
issue. The same issue also described the “grilling” to which Cordesman’s former sec
tary was subjected in the course of the investigation by the over-conscientious agent
of the Defense Department, who forced the opening of a safe containing old Cordesmay
papers and messed up the combination.
34. Jim Hoagland, “War of Annihilation,” Jashington Post, October 26, 1977.
35. Ibid.
36. New York Times, February 18, 1965.
37. Time, September 19, 1977.
38. Howard W. Blauvelt speech, Town Hall, Los Angeles, California, February 1
1975.
39. “The historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” first appeared
in the preamble of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine and was incessantly
repeated by fervent Zionist supporte.s during the 1947 U.N. debate as the ‘‘reconstitut-
ing of our national home.”
40. Dr. Fayez A. Sayegh, ““The Mideast’s Other Side: What the Palestinians Want,”
Boston Globe, July 24, 1977.
41. Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed (Cape Canaveral, Fla.: Howard Allen, 1972), -
p. 493.
42. See p. 92.
43. Arnold Toynbee, “The West and the Arabs,” Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook,
1959.
44. The Times (London), October 23, 1972.
45. Jerusalem Post, April 19, 1976.
46. New York Post, March 9, 1978.
47. New York Times, May 24, 1978.
48. Ibid, May 25, 1978.
49. The Kurds, with close to 342 million people scattered through East Turkey,
Soviet Armenia, Northeast Iraq and Northwest Iran in a contiguous area of 74,000
square miles (Israel covered 8,050 in 1951 with a population of 1.8 million) that could
be carved out for them with little displacement, have never been accorded a state of their
own.
50. Avigdor Levontin, “The Possible Instead of the Ideal,” New Outlook (Tel Aviv),
June-July-August 1969.
Index
“A.M. America” (TV program), 482
A & W International Company, 231
Aaron, David, 681
Abd al-Rahman, Sultan, 761
Abdel-Karim, Omar, 179-180
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, see Ibn Saud, King
Abdullah, King, 15, 20, 25, 47, 50, 157
Abend, Dr. Martin, 221, 258
Abigail (ship), 774
Abourezek, James, 202, 267-269, 398-399,
422, 788-789
Abraham (patriarch), 10, 192, 683, 703,
764, 781
Abrams, Morris, 277
Abr (boat), 60
Absentee Property Law, 115
Abu Rudeis oil fields, 638, 643
Abzug, Bella, 445
Academy Awards, 224
“Accent On” (TV program), 287
Acheson, Dean, 51, 64-65, 87, 100, 755
Ackerman, Henry, 213
Achon (publication), 287
Action Committee, 281, 395
Adams, Cindy, 224
Adams, Henry Brooks, 29
Adams, Joey, 223
Adams, John Quincy, 240
Adams, Michael, 161, 168, 187
Adelphi College, 234
Adenauer, Konrad, 472
Adler, Frank J.. 87, 88-89
Adolf Hitler (Toland), 463
Advisory Council (Jerusalem Committee),
328
“Advocates, The” (TV program), 583
Adwan, Kamal, 361
Aerbel, Dan, 330
Aeroflot Airlines, 514
Aftermath, The (Farago), 462
Agadath Israel of Amcrica, 483
Agence France Presse, 382-383
Agnew, Spiro, 632
Agnon, S. Y., 142
Agricultural Lands Consolidation Law,
116
Agricultural Settlement Law, 117
Agronsky, Martin, 280
Agudat Israel party, 135, 191, 504
Aiello, Steven R., 480
Aiken, George D., 250-251
Ain El Helweh refugee camp, 386
Akabet Jabeer refugee camp, 106-107
Al-Ahram (newspaper), 188, 333, 671-672
Al-Aqsa mosque, 166, 167, 487, 696
Albertson, Jack, 222
Alessandrini, Federico, 505
Alexandria Protocol, 39
Al Fajr (newspaper), 169
Al Fatah, 168, 200, 371, 584, 708
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 220
Al-Hamishmar (newspaper), 129, 557
Allen, Richard, 725
Allenby Bndge, 108, 121, 169, 175, 577
Allende, Salvador, 346
Alhance Review, 132
Allon, Yigal, 131, 142, 189, 568, 592, 638,
646, 661, 682, 700-701
Al-Mersad (newspaper), 105
Aloni, Mrs. Shulamit, 189, 504
Al Saiga, 200
Alsop, Joseph, 264
Alter, Robert, 743
Al-Thawra, 728
Altman family, 213
Altneuland (Herzl), 12
Amer, Field Marshall Abdel Hakim, 556
Amerada Hess Corporation, 251
America (carrier), 575
Amenca (publication), 489, 504, 512
American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
415, 416
American Association for the United Na-
uons, 237, 287
American Broadcasting Company (ABC),
221, 226, 230, 272, 273, 277, 384, 287,
288, 300, 313, 475, 477, 683, 697
ort Christian Action Committee,
488
American Civil Liberties Union, 469
American Committee for a Lasting Peace,
243
American Council for Judaism, 63, 317,
753
877
878
American Council on the Middle East
(ACME), 574
American Federation of Teachers, 478
American Friends of the Alliance Israelite
and Université, 132
American Friends Service Committee Re-
port of 1977, 173, 452-453
American Historical Associauon, 69
American Historical Society, 79
American Hoechst Corporation, 231
American Humanist Society, 485
American Institute of Public Opinion Readership
Survey, The, 274
American Israelite, 771
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), 235, 252-257, 266, 269, 430,
521, 631, 680, 710, 711
American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism,
313
American Jewish Committee, 63, 224,
227, 233, 252, 274-275, 277, 287, 337-
338, 346, 414, 417, 424, 448, 469, 492,
497, 500, 504, 625, 685
American Jewish Congress, 61, 282, 346,
412, 445, 771
Amencan Jeunsh Historical Quarterly, 73
Amencan Jewish World, The, 312
American Jewish Year Book, 502
sas rte Jews: Community in Crisis (Strober),
464
American Labor party, 80
American League for a Free Palestine, 50,
58, 344, 350
Amencan Mercury, The, 499
American Nazi party, 468
Ameresn Palestine Committee, 34-35,
4
American Professors for Peace in the Mid-
dle East, 499, 696
American Seal Cap Corporation, 231
American Securities Corporation, 231
American Students for Justice in Palestine,
292
American Technion Society, 331
American University (Beirut), 779
American University (Cairo), 583
Amencan Volunteers and Israel's War of Inde-
pendence (Heckelman), 298
Amencan Zonist, The, 46
American Zionist Council, 210-211
American Zionist Federation, 294, 603
Amenca’s Dechne im _ the Middle East
(Churba), 343
Amin, Idi, 103
Amit, Meir, 144, 554-555, 568
lg Morris, 250-261, 266-267, 525,
10
Amman Committee of Expelled Palesuni-
ans, 170-171
Ammar, Abu, 200
Amnesty International, 177, 185
Amorites (ancient), 10
Amory, Cleveland, 308
Amos (prophet), 417, 764
Anatomy of Nazsm, The, 481
Anderson, Jack, 263
Anderson, John, 721, 723
Angleton, James, 567, 568
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on
Palestine, 51-55, 62, 308, 341, 363
Anglo-Arab Conferences (1946-1947), 59
Anglo-Jewish Association, 14
Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of
Anti-Semitism, The (Flannery), 496
Anker, Irving, 480
An Nahar (newspaper), 632, 670, 704
Annenberg, Walter, 219
Anu-Defamation League, 3, 220, 224,
225, 257, 261, 267, 276, 279, 288, 405—
410, 418, 424, 426, 434, 435, 438, 439,
440, 446, 449, 450, 452, 454-455, 456,
457, 468, 469, 477, 478, 479, 481, 492.
502, 542, 602, 625, 795
Anti-Semitism in America (motion picture),
480
“Anti-Semitism of the Present Govern-
ment, The’ (Montagu), 766-768
“Appendix of Previous Commitments of
His Mayesty’s Government in the Mid-
dle East,” 16
Arab American University Graduates Con-
vention, 443
Arab Bureau, 17
Arabian American Oil
(Aramco), 600, 606
Arab Information Center, 452
Arab-Israel! War of 1948, 91, 106, 108,
V11, 112, 115, 142, 166, 198, 272
Arab-Israel War of 1956, 28, 272, 428,
537, 547
Arab-Israel War of 1967, 106, 121, 142,
144, 162, 174-175, 177, 187, 191, 198,
272, 316, 406, 435, 438, 452, 463, 516,
530, 550, 559, 560, 578, 585, 612, 622,
647, 740, 808, 809
Arab-Israel War of 1973, 12, 170, 191, 216,
221, 272, 273, 290, 299, 326, 328-329, 463,
614-630, 634, 639, 734, 735, 759, 793
Arab League, 39, 53, 274, 281, 288, 588, 689,
715, 726
Arab Legion, 303
Arab Liberation Front, 200
Arab summit (November 1981), 740
Arabs, The (Kiernan), 389
Arabs in Israel, The (Jiryis), 503
Arafat, Yasir, 199-202, 223, 226, 266, 277,
296, 318, 333, 346, 412, 446, 453, 584, 587,
611, 638, 640, 681, 688, 708, 716, 717, 719,
740, 747, 749, 759, 768, 782
Arbuderbladet (newspaper), 177
Arendt, Hannah, 352, 422, 463, 484-485
Argov, Shlomo, 806
Arieli, Eliyahu, 155-156
Arkin, L. Jules, 746-747
Armed Forces Journal, 794
Armerding, Hudson, 487
Armour, Norman, 7]
Arms Export Control Act (U.S.), 731, 780
Arthur, Chester A., 656
Arthur, William B., 305
Company
Arvey, Jacob, 80
Ashdod refinery, 140
Ashkelon prison, 178
Assad, Hafez al-, 1, 201, 347, 390, 610, 618,
628, 629, 638, 648, 649, 672, 682, 698, 714,
780, 794-795
Associated General Contractors of Amer-
ica, 787
Associated Press (AP), 225-226, 314, 362,
379, 389, 505, 506, 603
Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 738
Aswan Dam, 364
Ater, Moshe, 107
Athens Airport. 599
Atherton, Alfred L., 699, 713
Atkinson, Bert M., 565-566
Atlantic Monthly, 464
Atlas (publication), 310-311
Atomic Energy Agency (European Eco-
nomic Committee), 330
Atomic Energy Commission, 235, 331
Auuyah, Safiyeh, 154
Attlee, Clement, 48-49, 50, 60, 96-97
Auger, Wes, 488
Au Revoir to France Committee, 749-750
Auschwitz, 413, 477, 481, 509, 741
Austin, Warren, 69, 70-72, 73-75, 77, 86—
87, 93-94
Auto-Emancipation (Pinsker), 11
Avner, Gershon, 436
Avnery, Uri, 117, 177. 189
AWACGS, 731, 732, 733, 734
Axelman, Joseph B., 292
Axelson, Kenneth, 236
Aydelotte, Dr. Frank, 54
Azar, Shmuel, 323
Ba‘ath party, 200, 716
Bab el-Maghraba_ district
162-164
Babylonians, 149
Back, Philip, 257
Baddawi refugee camp, 362
Bader-Meinhof Gang, 396
Badillo. Herman, 244
Badran, Mudar, 728
Baeck, Rabbi Leo, 342
Baker, E.M., 769
Baker, Howard, 657, 694, 711, 785
Baker, Russell, 315
Baldwin, Joseph C., 58, 59
Balfour, Arthur, 13, 15, 18, 23, 74
Balfour Declaration, 13, 14-15, 18-28, 31,
33, 34, 74, 109, 148, 149, 435, 765, 766
Ball, George, 807
Bancroft, Anne, 223
Bank of America, 797
Bank of Israel, 139
Barak, Michael, 360
Bar-Lev, Chaim, 113, 558, 592
Bar-Lev Line, 614
Baroody, ae 250
Bar Porath, Yoram, 113
(Jerusalem),
879
Barreu, George, 87
Barret, Mark T., 561
“Barry Gray Show” (radio), 279
Barsimson, Jacob, 774
Bartlett, Dewev F., 606-607
Baruch, Bernard M., 43, 235, 423
Bar Zohar, Dr. Michael, 360
Basel Congress of 1897, 104
Basha, Mrs. Ratibe El-, 174-175
Basra Petroleum Company, 622
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 415
Baum, Father Gregory, 441
Bayh, Birch, 241, 260, 262, 263, 591, 606, 722
Bea, Cardinal Augustin, 494, 509
Beacon Press, 306-307
Beame, Abraham, 230, 244, 245, 385
Beauvoir, Simone de, 474
Becher, Kurt, 484
Becket, Thomas a, 555
Beeson, Irene, 390-391
Begin, Menachem, 9-10, 19, 59, 106, 114,
131, 135, 138, 143-144, 151, 153, 154, 156,
157, 183, 190, 191, 192, 208, 225, 237, 261,
279, 343, 344, 345, 346-352, 355, 363, 388,
396, 398, 404, 467, 470, 474, 475, 504, 540,
585, 636, 651, 683-688, 691-692, 696-704,
706-708, 710, 713, 714, 715, 716, 718, 719,
720, 724, 725, 727, 729, 730, 731, 732, 733,
737, 739, 740, 741, 742, 749, 756, 760, 764,
776, 779, 780, 783, 794, 800, 802, 806, 809
Begin, Mrs. Menachem, 347
Behind the Silken Curtain (Crum), 363
Beilin, Dina, 525
Beirut Airport, 361-362
Beirut Conference on Refugees, 491
Bell, J. Bowyer, 155
Bellmon, Henry, 265
Bellow, Saul, 343, 550, 759-760
Belt, Guillermo, 87
Ben, Dr. Peter, 115
Ben Bella, Ahmed, 547
Benedict XV, Pope. 511
Ben-Elissar, Eliahu, 700
Ben-Gurion, David, 34, 48, 90, 93, 105, 108,
109, 110, 131, 132, 142, 148, 157, 200, 277,
298, 307, 340-341, 360, 362, 365, 370, 404,
419, 426-427, 536, 537, 544, 545, 546, 547,
747, 748-749, 759, 762, 771-772, 783
Ben-Hamu, Tamara, 385
Ben-Hanan, Eh, 366
Ben Israel, Asiel, 135
Benjamin, Judah P., 774
Benoit, Rev. Marie, 511
Bentov, Mordecai, 557
Berg, Gertrude, 417-418
Bergen-Belsen, 472, 473
Berger, David, 379
Berger, Rabbi Elmer, 313, 396, 422, 500,
501-502, 752
Berger, Marilyn, 672-673, 676
Bergman, Bernard, 444
Bergson, Peter, 346
Berle, Adolph, 66
880 INDEX
Berlin, Irving, 774
Berman, Jay, 260
Bernadotte, Count Folke, 156-157,
360, 398, 422
Bernhard, Prince, 140
Bernstein, Leonard, 166
Bernstein, Nahum, 407
Bernstein, Rabbi Philip, 256
Berrigan, Father Daniel, 422, 443-444
Bethesda Naval Hospital, 424
Bethlehem University, 174
Betzouri, Eliahu, 362, 363
Bevin, Ernest, 52, 53-54, 58, 59
Biaggi, Mario, 245
Bianca Commerciale Italiana, 230
Bickerton, Ian J., 73
Biltmore Declaration, 38, 55
BILU (society), 11
Bingham, Jonathan B., 175, 258, 260, 658,
680
Binghamton Press, 63
Bir Gafgafa Airport, 378
Bir Zeit College, 172, 719, 737
Birnbaum, Stephen, 465
Birth of fsrael, The (Garcia-Granados), 363
Bishara, Abdulla, 717
Bisharat, Mary, 294-295
Bismarck, Otto von, 666, 667, 760
Black, Eh M., 231
Blackfnars Magazine, 412
Black Jewish Americans, 135
“Black Perspective” (TV program), 468
Black September, 367, 368, 369, 380, 396,
466, 599
Black Thursday (motion picture), 466
Blaine, james G., 239
Blanchard, Paul, 306, 403
Blau, Rabbi Amram, 136
Blaustein, face: 63
Blauvelt, Howard G., 797-798
Blitzer, Wolf, 343
Blood of Israel, The: The Massacre of the Israeli
Athletes, 395
Bloom, Sol, 37, 38, 80
Bluhdorn, Charles, 230-231
Blum, Howard, 464
Blumberg, David M., 232
Blumenthal, W. Michael, 236, 244, 704
B'nai B'rith, 84, 209, 213, 232, 236, 263,
405-406, 407, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441,
453, 455, 492, 512, 513, 524, 527, 541,
542, 548, 578, 704
B'nai B'nth. The Story of a Covenant (Grusd),
88
B'nei Israel, 132-133
Board of Deputies of British Jews, 14
Bohlen, Charles, 71, 79
Bolero Shop (Virgin Islands), 216
Bolshoi Ballet, 394, 520, 521
Bolshoi Opera Company, 394
Boneh, Solel, 503
Bonifas, Arthur G., 561
Bomifas family, 561
Bookbinder, Hyman, 233, 252, 448, 68
Book of the Month Club, 220
Book of Mormon, 293-294
Boone, Pat, 487
Boone, Richard, 222
Booth, Dr. John N., 279-280, 290, 29).
292, 306, 405, 422, 437, 438-443, 493.
499
Borchgrave, Arnaud de, 716, 780
Borg, C. Arthur, 236
Bormann, Martin, 461-462, 470
Boss, The (St. John), 214
Boston, Ward, 566
Boston Globe, 293, 416
Boumedienne, Houari, 587, 698
Bourguiba, Habib, 280-281, 619
Bourguiba, Habib, Jr., 280-281
Bouree:White: Margaret, 478
Bowry El Barajneh refugee camp, 386
Boysoglebski, Wladslaw, 379
Branch, Jim, 283-284
Brandeis, Louis, 43, 235, 774
Brandeis College, 69
Brandt, Willi, 472, 719
Breira (organization), 453
Brelis, Dean, 389
Breslin, Jimmy, 388
Brezhnev, Leonid, 521-522, 523, 524,
595, 621, 809
“Bridget Loves Bernie’ (TV series), 418
Brilliant, Moshe, 114, 751
Brinkley, David, 553
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC),
223, 272, 362-363, 385, 392-393
British-Jewish Conjoint Committee, 14
British Overseas Airways Corporation
(BOAC), 585
British Palestine Committee, 13
British Petroleum Corporation, 601
British White Paper, 48
Broadcasting (magazine), 294
Brock, William, 694, 711, 785
Bromfield, Louis, 352
Bronfman, Edgar M., 227, 230
Brookings Institute, 237, 680
Brooklyn Jewish Press, 413
Brooks, Harvey, 415
Broom, William W., 290
Brown, George S., 225, 234, 422, 445-
448, 449, 451, 496, 626-627, 693, 731
Brown, Harold, 236
Brown, Jerry, 651, 652, 710
Brussels Conference on Soviet Jewry
(1976), 527-528
Bruzonsky, Mark, 235
Bryen, Stephen, 260, 725
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 655-656, 680-681,
685, 706, 711-712, 716, 807-808
Buber, Martin, 152, 775
Buchenwald, 470, 479
Buckley, James, 248
Buckley, William F., Jr., 246, 288-289,
477, 502, 532, 706
Buckley's Bookstore (Toronto), 436
Buddha, 438
Budeiri, Misbah, 201
Buffalo Evening News, 329
Bulan, Khagan, 761
Bull, Odd, 118-119
Bullitt, William, 65
Bumpers, Dale, 256, 448
Burdette, Winston, 280
Burger, Warren E., 272, 356
Burns, Arthur, 243
Burns, E. L. M., 536
Burrows, Millar, 422
Burt, Bishop John H., 492
Bury, J. B., 761
Bush, George, 809
Bushinsky, Jay, 272
Business Week (magazine), 438, 637
Butz, Arthur, 710
Byrd, Dr. Harry C., 352
Byrnes, James, 50, 52, 53, 59, 64, 100
Byroade, Henry A., 364, 422
Cadet School, 143
Caesar, Julius, 591
Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw), 357
Cairo Conference, 670
Catro Documents, The (Heikal), 553
Cairo University, 199
Caldecot, Lord Chancellor Vincent, 33
Calvin College, 490
Cambridge University, 760
Camp David, 703, 713, 714, 715, 716, 718,
719, 720, 721, 736
Canaanites, 10, 149
Canadian Churchman (publication), 437
Canadian Jewish News, 436
Canby, Vincent, 222-223, 224, 467
“Cannon” (TV program), 275
“Canto 52"' (Pound), 416
Capek, Dr. Norbert, 477
Caporetto, Battle of, 21
Capper, Arthur, 352
Capucci, Archbishop Hilarion, 502-503
Caradon, Lord, 689
Cardozo, Benjamin, 235, 774
Carey, Hugh, 244, 757
Carlsgaard, Rev. M. F., 291
Carnegie Endowment, 287
Carnegie Foundation, 237
Carolina Israelite (newspaper), 219
Caron, Leslie, 288
Carter, Billy, 721
Carter, Jimmy, 4, 79, 191, 205, 208, 234, 236,
259, 261, 267, 332, 347, 348-349, 371, 474,
475, 487, 492, 651-663, 664, 678, 679-683,
686, 688-694, 695, 700, 702, 704-712, 713,
714, 716, 718, 720, 721, 722, 723, 733, 734,
775, 778-779, 785, 795, 797, 798, 801, 802
Carter, Lilhan, 227
Carter Committee for President, 652
Case, Clifford P., 248, 258, 260, 658
“Case of the Missing Arab Refugees,
INDEX 881
The,” 304
Cass, Peggy, 275
Castlereagh, Lord, 666
Catherine the Great, 794
Catholic Near East Welfare Association,
496
Catholic News, 502
Catling, Richard C., 156
Ceausescu, Nicolae, 690
Celler, Emmanuel, 277
Central Conference of American Rabbis,
500, 770-771
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 77,
316, 330-331, 332, 361, 364, 406, 423,
525, 553, 567, 575, 576, 587, 616, 728, 797
Chamberlain, Joseph, 11, 12, 673
Chamoun, Camille, 648 713, 726
Champagne Spy, The (Lotz), 370, 470-471
Chancellor, John, 640, 697
Channing, William Ellery, 5
Chaplin, Ralph, 561
Chapman, Oscar, 81
Chase Manhattan Bank, 237, 797
Chavez, Cesar, 231
Chayefsky, Paddy, 225
Chernoff, Richard, 462
Chicago Daily News, 350, 602
Chicago Tribune, 257, 553
Child of the Century (Hecht), 44
abe eae 157
Chippewa Herald Telegram, 290
Chofshi, Nathan, 130
Chomsky, Noam, 483
Chotiner, Murray, 235
Chou En-lai, 319
Christ, Betty, 267
Chnstan Century (publication), 453
euseny and Cnsis (publication), 434,
4
Chnstian Science Monitor, 114, 164-165,
168, 169-170, 181, 183-184, 313, 317,
324, 329, 381, 431, 451-452, 591-592,
606, 614
Churba, Joseph, 233-235, 343, 723, 793, 795
Church, Frank, 241, 248, 527, 651, 652
Church of the Annunciation (Nazareth),
503
Churchill, Winston, 21-23, 33, 39, 40-41,
44, 47, 48-49, 362-363, 397, 443, 447,
486, 673
Churchill White Paper, 22
Citizens Rights party, 504
City University of New York, 482
Claremont-Pomona Institute, 499
Clark, Ramsey, 243
Clark, William, 730, 809
Clash of Destines, A (Kimche), 158
Clay, Lucius, 77
Clements, William, 616
Cleopatra (cargo ship), 269
Cleveland, Grover, 239
Clifford, Clark, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77-86, 93
Clore. Sir Charles, 217, 230
882 INDEX
Coastal States Gas Company, 230
Cockburn, Alexander, 346, 454
Coffin, Rev. Dr. William Sloane, 350-351,
422, 478
Cohen, Benjamin V., 84, 94
Cohen, Elie, 366, 367
Cohen, Geula, 191
Cohen, Jack S., 292
Cohen, Leo, 362-363
Cohen, Scott, 260
Cohen, William S., 733
Cohn, Harry, 222
Colby, William, 620
Coles Bookstores, 436
College of Marin (California), 456
Collin, Frank, 469
Collins, Larry, 154, 298, 301, 303
Colonial Penn Group of New York, 251
Colonization Department (Jewish
Agency), 151
Columbia Arusts, 394
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS),
195-196, 220, 221, 226, 248, 255-256,
281-283, 289, 318, 349, 357, 376, 380,
381, 449-450. 468, 481, 682, 693, 697,
798
CBS Newsradio 88, 705, 806
Columbia Pictures, 222
Columbia University, 234, 278, 407, 475,
495
Combined Jewish Appeal-Israel Emer-
gency Fund Drive, 746-747
Coming Destruction of Israel: Will the U.S. Tol-
erate Russian Intervention in the Middle
East, The (Kaufmann), 462
Commentary (magazine), 219, 414, 464,
637, 673, 693, 736, 742, 743
Commitment, The (mouon picture), 467
Committee of Eight, 530
Commonweal (publication); 444
Communist party (Canada), 518
Communist party (France), 750
Communist party (Israel), 334
Communist party (Italy), 750
Communist party (U.S.), 496
Community Church (New York City), 437
Comparative Survey of Freedom (Free-
dom House), 186
Concordia University, 454
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, 430, 432, 455, 522, 524,
527, 542, 581, 624, 639, 659, 685
Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO), 353
Congressional Quarterly, 256, 262
Congress of Vienna, 666
Connelly, Matthew J., 73, 81, 89
Connolly, John, 721, 722, 723
Conran, James, 332
Conservative party (England), 227
Consolidated Foods Corporation, 230
Consultant Research Associates, 233
Conte, Silvio O., 240
Conte di Savoia (ship), 509
Conunental Oil Company (Conoco), 60
601, 797-798 v
Conunental Telephone Corporation oj
Virginia, 251 :
Cooley, John, 313, 324. 452, 606 ‘
Cooney, David M., 572
Copeland, Miles, 375, 551
Corbeu, Robert J.. 253 f
Cordesman, Anthony H., 794, 795 '
Cosby, Bill, 476 :
Costandi, Violet, 197
Council on Foreign Relations, 664
Council of Four (San Remo Peace Confer:
ence), 20
Council of Jewish Federation and Welfare
Funds, 491, 522
Council of Ven, 30
Council of Trade Unions (Cairo), 552-553
Countdown in the Holy Land (Velie), 308
Cousins, Norman, 297
Covenant of the League of Nations, 32
Covenant of Peace Award (Synagogue
Council of America), 227
Cowan. Fred, 468
Coward-McCann Company, 304
Cozzi, Luigi, 501
Cracow ghetto, 470
Crane, Charles R., 30-32
Cranston, Alan, 262, 606, 728
Crash of ‘79 (Erdman), 702
Cronkite, Walter, 349, 376, 553, 697
Cross and the Flag, The (Smith), 441, 499
Crossing of the Suez, The (el-Shazli), 713
Crossman, Richard H. S., 41, 43, 54, 55,
411, 418
Crossroads to Israel (Sykes), 120
Crum, Bartley C., 54-55, 363, 424
Cry, The Beloved Country (Paton), 776
Csatorday, Karoly, 752
Cultivation of Wastelands ordinance, 116
Culver, John, 260
Cummings, Nathan, 230
Cummings, Ted, 725
Curzon, Lord, 22
Cushing, Cardinal Richard, 494, 505
Dacev, Norman, 574
Dachau, 470, 472, 477
Dahlberg, Dr. E. T., 492
Daily Princetonian, 444
Daily Worker, 344
Daley, Richard, 429
Damascus Protocol, 16
Daoud, Abu, 339, 750, 788, 796
Dark Is Light Enough, The (Fry), 679
Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 760-761
Dassa, Robert, 365
Dassault Aircraft Company, 582
Davar (publication), 146, 151, 763
David, King, 150
David (ship), 565
Davies, Richard T., 518, 519
Davis, Dr. John, 305
Davis, Kenneth, 261
Davis, Leon, 251
Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 462, 463, 484
Davan. Moshe, 9-10, 116, 131, 142, 143,
144, 158, 159, 177, 188, 214, 289, 313,
329, 354, 365, 366, 372-373, 376, 377,
383, 385-386, 472, 568, 570, 574, 575,
578, 595, 598, 612, 614, 627, 641, 689,
690, 691, 692. 693. 700-701, 703, 711,
713, 779, 791
Dayan, Yael, 193, 214
Dayton Journal Herald, 312
Deak, Istvan, 518
Debré, Michel, 426
Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, The (Menu-
hin), 772
Declaration to the Seven of 1918, 18
Decter, Moshe, 517-518
Deed, The (Frank), 214, 363
De Gasperi, Alcide, 508
De Gaulle, Charles, 408, 422, 424-428,
429, 553, 578
Deir Yassin massacre, 153-157, 279, 298,
299, 303, 349, 350, 353, 360, 398
Delon, Alain, 467
Deming, Angus, 297
Democratic Convention (1968), 429
Democratic Movement for Change, 144,
347, 689
Democratic National Committee, 716
Denver Post, 265, 294
Deputy, The (Hochhuth), 507, 510
Dershowitz, Allan, 285-286
Derwinski, Edward J., 259
Deseret News, 294
De Sica, Vittorio, 465
Destruction of European Jews, The, 463
Detroit Free Press, 358, 442-443
Deuel, Walter, 350
Development Corporation of Israel, 263
Devonshire, Duke of, 23, 227
DeVries, Bert, 26-27, 490
Dewey, Thomas E., 38, 59, 60, 250
Dial Press, 220
Diamond Jubilee Convention (Zionist Or-
ganization of America), 598
Dianes (Herzl), 105, 151
Diaspora Jews, 2, 106, 110, 131, 139, 142,
143, 187, 411, 530, 555, 747, 749, 755, 762,
77\, 790, 805
Dickinson, Angie, 273
Diefenbaker, John, 785
Dillon Reed Company, 230
Dimona nuclear reactor, 552
ral ge ee 332
Diniz, Simcha, 230, 616, 626, 639, 691,
790
“Direcuons” (TV program), 277
Disengagement II, 716
Dishon, Daniel, 629
Dispersion and Unity (publication), 151-152
Dissent (publication), 673
INDEX 883
Dobrynin, Anatoly F., 580, 619
Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak), 404
Dole, Robert J., 657, 785
Dolinay, Bishop Thomas V., 477
Dome of the Rock, 739
Domestic Council, 347
Dorsey, Bob R., 455
Doty, Robert, 500-501
Doubleday & Company, 275, 553
Douglas, Paul, 545
Dow Jones & Company, 208
Downey, Thomas, 261-262
Downs, Hugh, 221
Dragunsky, David, 515
Dreyfus, Alfred, 12, 762
Dreyfus Affair, 431, 759
Drifters, The (Michener), 307
Drinan, Robert, 255
Drummond, William, 189
Drummond, Sir William, 724
Dryfoos, Marion Sulzberger, 225
Dryfoos, Orville, 345
Duckett, Carl, 331
Duke, David, 468
Duke University, 225, 445, 446
Dulles, John Foster, 322, 535, 536, 538,
541, 549, 624, 655
Dunlop, D.M., 761
Dunsmore, Barry, 313
Dutch Masters, 231
Dwight D. Eisenhower Institute for His-
torical Research, 86
Dymshyts, Benyamin, 515
Eagleton, Tom, 711
Eaker, Ira C., 248, 793
East-West Belgrade Conference on
Human Rights, 237
Eban, Abba, 131, 258, 278, 289, 322, 395,
407, 408, 427, 470, 472, 550, 553, 554,
579, 591, 595, 612, 624, 669, 749, 790
Eckardt, A. Roy, 499
Eckenberg, Martin, 369
Eckhardt, Dr. Roy, 495
Economic Club, 636, 646
Economist, The (publication), 176-177
Eddy, Paul, 178-179
Eddy, William, 41, 53, 671
Edelsberg, Herman, 209, 512
Eden, Anthony, 537, 538
Edict of Emancipation (1791), 765
Edmonson, Madeleine, 298
Egyptian Military Academy, 199
Egyptians (ancient), 149
Enrlich, Simha, 138, 695
Eichmann, Adolph, 364, 472, 481, 484,
504
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 463, 484-
485
Ewhmann Tnal, 481
Eilat-Ashkelon trans-Israel pipeline, 636
Eilberg, Joshua, 482
Eilts, Hermann, 699
884 INDEX
Ein-el-Helweh refugee camp, 362
Einstein, Albert, 152, 340-343, 352, 478,
774, 775
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 535-540, 549, 577,
579, 596, 627, 664, 725, 783
Eizenstat, Stuart E., 236, 347, 651, 685, 704,
722
Eklund, Dr. Sigvard, 728
E! Al Airlines, 222, 373, 756
Elath, Eliahu, 84
Elath (ship), 632
Elazar, David, 377, 614
Eldad-Scheib, Dr. Israel, 360
Eleanor and Franklin (Lash), 43
Electoral College (U.S.), 239, 663, 722
Eliav, Arie, 189, 301
Elijah (prophet), 764
Eliot, T. S., 416
Ehzalde, Ambassador Manuel, 66
Elkins, Michael, 272, 301
Ellsberg, Daniel, 595
Ellsworth, Robert, 794
Elman, Mischa, 774
Elon, Amos, 147-148, 214
El Producto, 231
El Quseir (troopship), 570, 571
Elsey, George, 82
Emergency Aid Regulations, 108
Emergency Defense Regulations, 117
Emerson-Thoreau medal, 415, 416
ee the Jewish People, The (Friedmann),
5
Endowment for the Humanities, 474
“Energy Crisis, The—an American White
Paper” (TV program), 606
Ennes, James é. 563
Ennis, Bruce, 469
Entebbe Airport rescue, 205, 309-310,
330, 655
Epstein, Benjamin, 279, 405, 408-410,
434-435, 437, 449, 450
Epstein, Ehahu, 84, 85, 94
Epstein, Sidney, 219
Erdman, Paul, 702
Erhard, Ludwig, 472
Erlich, Simcha, 717
Ernst, Morris, 35-36, 235, 422
Erskine, Emmanuel Alexander, 707
Eshkol, Levi, 146, 317, 426, 546, 552, 556,
578
Esmail, Sami, 336
Esquire (magazine), 219, 464
Estaing, Giscard d’, 644, 750
Esther, Queen, 96
Ethridge, Willie Snow, 422
Euripides, 46
Fucpes” Conference on Soviet Jewry,
52
European Economic Committee, 330
Evan, Kathleen, 393
Evangelical Free Church of America, 487
Evans, Harry, 487
Evans, Rowland, 189, 277, 410, 413, 446—
447, 449, 592-593, 644, 681
Evron, Boaz, 778
Evron, Ephraim “Eppy,”’ 567-68
Ewing, Oscar, 81
Executive Committee (Amnesty Interna
tional), 177
Exodus (motion picture), 221-222, 223
Exodus (ship), 38
Exodus (Uris), 221-222, 307, 308
Export-Import Bank, 521, 526, 788
Exxon Corporation, 604, 622
Eytan, Walter, 748
Ezekiel, 417
Fabian, Larry L., 237
“Face the Nation” (TV program), 256,
280-281, 312-313, 448, 785, 798
Fackenheim, Emil, 436, 442
Fahd, Crown Prince, (King), 682, 684, 740
Fahmy, Ismail, 690
Fahy, Msgr. Thomas, 495
Fairness Doctrine (Federal Communica-
uons Commission), 276-277, 280, 287
Faisal, Emir, 53
Faisal, King, 15, 17, 19, 20, 31, 245, 274,
299, 522, 539, 554, 579, 580, 597, 604,
605, 607, 608, 609, 623, 625, 634, 636,
638, 640, 670, 674, 678, 798
Falastin (newspaper), 342
Falkland Islands war, 807
Farago, Ladislas, 461-462
Farber, Barry, 221
Farewell Address (Washington), 533
Farouk, King, 67, 551, 585
Farrell, Wilham E., 350, 388
Fascell, Dante, 243
Fatah, see Al Fatah
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
331-332, 406
Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), 276-277, 279, 280, 282
Federations of Jewish Philanthropies, 747
Federenko, Nicolai, 425
Feinstein, Dennis, 368-369
Feldman, Myer, 236, 546, 549-550
Felker, Clay S., 299
Fellows, Laurence, 123
Ferber, Edna, 774
Feron, James, 319, 552
Fiebig, Jim, 294
Firestone, Harvey, 66
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 66
“Firing Line” (TV program), 288-289
First Amendment, 356
First National Bank, 797
First National Bank of Chicago, 232
First 25 Years, The: Dayan’s Israel, 223
First Unitarian Church, 442
Fischer, Dean, 728
Fisher, Max, 226, 593-594, 631, 639, 650,
658, 669, 725
Fisher, Roger, 285-286
Fisher, Dr. Sidney, 214
Fitzpatrick, Paul, 55
Fitzsimmons, Frank E., 790
Flanders, Ralph, 422
Flannery, Rev. Edward H., 496
Flatto-Sharon, Shmuel, 140-141, 479
Fleischer, Mort, 467
Fleischmann, Kurt, 655
Flexner, Simon, 774
Flinker, David, 359
Flynn, Ed, 80
Folger-Shakespeare Library, 415
Fonda, Jane, 223
Ford, Gerald, 204, 236, 250, 258, 266, 330,
332, 445, 447, 448, 525, 630, 631-633, 664,
675, 679, 709, 722, 734, 778, 785
Ford, Steven, 661
Ford Foundation, 237
Foreign Affairs (publication), 189, 284, 551,
786, 807
Foreign Broadcasting Information Ser-
vice, 552-553
Foreign Ministers Islamic Conference, 726
Foreign Policy Research Institute, 725
Foreign Relations of the United States, 69, 79,
82-83
Forged in Fury (Elkins), 301
For Jerusalem, 343
Forrest, Rev. A. C., 422, 435-437, 441,
499
Forrestal, James, 64, 76, 78, 100, 422-
424, 785
Forrestal Diaries, 423
Forster, Arnold, 276, 279, 408-410, 434-
435, 437, 439-440, 449, 450
Fortas, Abe, 235
Foster-Grant Corporation, 23}
Fourteen Points, 29
Fourth of July Movement, 233
Fox, Wilham, 222
Franco, Solomon, 774
Frank, Anne, 478, 481
Frank, Gerold, 214, 363
Frank, Dr. Philip, 341-342
Frank, Waldo, 307
Frankfurter, Felix, 235, 774
Franklin, Benjamin, 470
Freedman, Milton, 235
Freedom House, 186
Freedom party (Austria), 432
“Free the Soviet Jewry”? movement, 225
Freij, Elias, 803
French Connecnon, The (motion picture),
231
French Information Service, 425
Friedlaender, Saul, 507
Friedlander, Henry, 481
Friedman, Milton, 346
Friedman, Saul, 233
Friedman, Tuviah, 482
Friedmann, Georges, 593
“Friends of Israel’ Committee (Great
Britain), 227
Fromer, Seymour, 228
INDEX 885
Frost, Robert, 416
Fry, Christopher, 679
Fulbright, J. William, 237, 248, 249, 250,
255-257, 267, 269-270, 281, 318, 398,
410, 422, 447-448, 607, 624
Fuller, Buckminster, 328
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 454, 464
Gaglione, Anthony, 287
Ganal party, 470, 585
Gailam, Rashid Ali al-, 538
Galili, Yisrael, 194-195, 595
Gallagher, Nancy, 292
Gallico, Paul, 222
Gamasy, Mohammed el-, 695
Game of Nations, The (Copeland), 375, 551
Gandhi, Mahatma, 206, 438
Gandhi Peace Award, 444
Gannett News Service, 643
pole cease e, 363
Gardella, Kay, 47 Bs
Garden of the Finzt-Continis, The (motion pic-
ture), 465-466
Garfinkel, Henry, 220
Garfinkle, Mimi, 220
Garment, Leonard, 235, 236
Garth, David, 226
Gavish, Yeshayer, 558
Gazzara, Ben, 288
Gelb, Arthur, 345
General Federation of Jewish Labor in
Palestine (Histadrut), 116, 117
General Motors Corporation, 793
General Syrian Congress, 31
Genesis (Kurzman), 298
Geneva Conference, 336, 467, 487, 627,
629, 691, 775
Geneva Convention, 119, 170, 186, 589,
649, 693
Gepner, Benjamin, 370
German-American Committee of Greater
Philadelphia, 480
German-Polish treaty (1970), 472
Gershwin, George, 774
Geymayel, Beshir, 808
Geymayel, Pierre, 648, 713
Ghani-Salamebh, Omar Abdul, 183-184
Ghilan, Maxim, 141
Ghorbal, Ashraf, 412-413
Giacumakis, George, Jr., 487-488
Gibson, Charles Dana, 462
Gibson, William, 223
Gilbert, Sir William, 103, 631
Gillette, Guy, 50
Gilligan, John J., 379
Gilman, Peter, 178-179
Gilmour, Ian, 120-121, 411
Ginsburg family, 214
Givli, Abraham, 365
Glamour (magazine), 219
Glaser, Milton, 299
Glubb, Sir John, 306
886 INDEX
Godfrey, Msgr. William, 511
Goebbels, Joseph, 499
Goerke, Dr. Paul, 370
Goheen, Dr. Robert F., 414
Gold, Eugene, 385
Gold, Herbert, 395
Golda (Gibson), 223
Goldberg, Arthur J., 235, 237, 243, 497,
567, 574, 655
Goldberg, Hannah, 367
Goldberg, Sherwood, 725
Golden, George H., 569
Golden, Harry, 214
Goldenson, Leonard, 221, 230
Goldman, Frank, 84, 88
Goldmann, Dr. Nahum, 7, 47, 48, 148,
408, 412, 418, 520, 709, 749
Goldman Sachs & Company, 228
Goldwyn, Samuel, 222
Golub, Stanley, 251
Goodell, Charles, 277
Goodman, Alan, 739
Goodman, Julian, 221
Goodwin, Richard, 226
Gordon, Kermit, 237
Gordon, Milton M., 227
Goren, Rabbi Shlomo, 227, 434
Gorkin, Jesse, 220
Gossick, Lee V., 331
Gottfried, Arthur, 223
Goulding, Philip G., 566
Grady report, 64
Graham, Billy, 488, 489, 490, 492
Graham, Katherine, 219, 297
Graham. Rev. Robert, 510
Grant, Bob, 221
Graubard, Seymour, 288, 405, 408-410,
455
Gravel, Mike, 263, 307, 711
Graves, Philip, 19
Gray, Barry, 221, 408
Greater Israel Movement, 190
Greater New York Committee for Israel
Bonds, 717
Greek Orthodox Church, 390
Green, Gerald, 476, 478
Greenbaum, Yitzhak, 484
Greenfield, James, 345
Greenheld, Meg, 447
Greenspan, Alan, 235
Greenwald, Malkiel, 483-484
Gregg, Charles S., 292-293
Grew, Joseph C., 45, 47
Grey, Lord, 23, 24
Grifhn. Merv, 276
Griffis, Stanton, 360
Gromyko, Andrei, 526, 552, 638
Gross, Ernest A., 83
Grosset & Dunlap, 220
Grossman, Mel, 260
Gruber, Ruth, 214
Gruenther, Alfred, 76
Gruner, Dov, 60
Grusd, Edward E., 88, 89
Guardian Weekly, 168
Guggenheim, Charles, 226
Guggenheim family, 774
Guildersleeve, Virginia, 422
Guiringuad, Louis de, 650
Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitsyn), 526
Gulf Oil Corporation, 455
Gulf and Western Corporation, 220, 230
Gullen, George E., Jr., 442
Gunther, John, 308
Gupte, Pranay, 337, 345-346, 693
Gur, Mordechai, 383, 645
Gurney, Edward J., 260
Gurney, Sir Henry, 156
Gush Emunim movement, 190-192, 394-
395, 713
Gustav V, King, 360
#1M.S. Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan),
103, 631
Haaland, Arne, 177
Ha-am, Ahad, 14-15, 24, 150, 174
Ha aretz (newspaper), 112, 115, 116, 142,
143, 161, 183, 189, 190, 366, 374, 376,
383, 572
Habash, George, 200, 201, 619, 688, 708
Habib, Philip, 689, 729, 806
Hacohen, David, 568
Hadassah, 212, 367, 368, 369
Hadassah (magazime), 274
Haddad, Saad, 707, 713, 726
Hafez, Amin el-, 366, 667
Haganah, 52, 63. 155-156, 299, 303, 308,
359, 360, 371, 406, 411
Hahaiyim Girls College, 240
Haifa Refineries, 140
Haifa Technion School, 159
Haig, Alexander, 617, 620, 725, 726, 729,
730, 731, 732, 809
Hakim, Eliahu, 362, 363
Haldeman, H. R., 496
Halevi, Judah, 675
Halifax, Lord, 51, 52, 53, 510
Hallemann, Dr. Isaak, 473
Halpern, Seymour, 242
Halprin, Iser, 370
Halprin, Rose, 367
Hamdallah, Wahid, 738
Hamid, Sultan Abdul, 11
Hamill, Peter, 378, 385, 444-445, 446, 447,
740
Hamilton, Lee, 255
Hammadi, Saadoun, 730
Hammarskjold, Dag, 422
Hammer and Sickle (Eliev), 301
Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 213, 721
Hamon, Leo, 431
Handelman, Jay, 215
Hanna, Richard T., 607
Hannah House (London), 217
Hardison, O. D., 415
Hardy, Thomas, 535
Harman, Avraham, 569
Harper & Row, 481
Harriman, Averell, 632
Harrington, Rev. Donald S., 437-439, 444
Harris, Fred, 262, 263
Harris, Louis, 226
Harris, William, 43
Harrison, Benjamin, 240
Harrison, Earl G., 50, 51
Harris poll, 225-226, 356
Harry $. Truman Librarv, 73, 88
Hart, Moss, 774
Harvard University, 343, 404, 415, 422,
664, 666
Hashomer Hazair, 192
Hassan, King, 690
Hatfield, Mark, 265
Hauser, Rita E., 673, 690, 722
Hausner, Gideon, 472, 504
Hawatmeh, Nayef, 200, 384
Hayes, Rutherford B., 240
Hays, Arthur Garfield, 422
Hebrew Committee for National Libera-
uion, 58
Hebrew language, 109, 122, 131, 185,
390, 473, 517, 661, 677
Hebrew Nation of Israelites, 135
Hebrew Union College, 495
Hebrew University, 126, 127, 150, 228, 317,
341-342, 412, 458, 736, 772, 792-793
Hecht, Ben, 44, 58, 60, 483, 484
Heckelman, A. J., 298
Heifetz, Jascha, 774
Heikal, Mohamed Hassanein, 188, 333,
553, 671-672, 674, 735
Heinz Company, 230
Heiskell, Andrew, 225
Hellman, Lillian, 224
Helms, Richard, 330, 331, 567
Helou, Charles, 579
en European Security Conference,
5
Mendelson: Loy W., 47-50, 71-73, 79, 90,
5
Hendricks, Joe, 352
Henried, Paul, 465
Henry Garfinkel Corporation National
Services, 220
Henry II, King, 555
Henry IV (Shakespeare), 314
Hentrich, Father Guglielmo, S. J., 509
Herly, Jean, 382, 385
Herman, George, 280-281
Herndon, Terry, 478
Herrmann, Klaus, 454
Hertz, Frederick, 763
Hertzberg, Rabbi Arthur, 445, 491-492
Hertzberg family, 213
Herut (publication), 540
Herut party, 106, 413
Herzl, Theodor, 11-13, 26, 104, 105, 147,
151, 201, 209, 223, 298, 303, 410-411,
418, 541, 674, 760, 762, 770
INDEX 887
Herz! Press, 275
ree: Chaim, 103, 287, 557-558, 650,
4
Hess, Leon, 251
Hess, Moses, 11
Heydrich, Reinhold, 475
Hickerson, John, 71
Hilldring, John, 81, 94
Hillel, Shlomo, 132, 454
Hilmy, Amin, 288
Himmler, Heinrich, 484
Hindiyeh family, 164
Hirsch, Baron Maurice de, |}
Hirsch, Rabbi Moshe, 647
Hirschmann, Ira, 304-305
Hirst, David, 782
Hish, Jamil, 154
His Land (film), 488
History of the English Speaking Peoples
Char chithy 397 aaa et
Hitler, Adolf, 32-33, 35, 40, 50, 96, 104,
106, 147, 150, 152, 175, 193, 194, 267,
285, 304, 421, 434, 458, 461, 467, 468,
473, 477, 480, 482. 507, 509. 510, 51),
512, 555, 692, 702, 733, 750, 776, 777, 781,
783, 791-792
Hittites, 149
Hoax of the 20th Century, The (Butz), 710
Hochhuth, Rolf, 507, 510
Hocking, William Ernest, 422
Hod, Mordechai, 377-378, 558-559
Hodder and Stoughton (publishers), 306
Hodes, Aubrey, 555-556
Hodgson, Dr. Percy, 456-457
Hoeck, Jerry, 252
Hogarth, D. G., 17, 18-19, 33
Holden, David, 311
Holmes, John Haynes, 437
Holocaust, 121, 403, 409, 412, 414, 415, 430,
431, 459, 460-485, 486, 710, 733, 741, 776,
782, 783
“Holocaust, a Study of Genocide, The”’
(curriculum), 480
“Holocaust” (TV series), 474-478, 712
Holocaust Victims, The (Schonfeld), 484
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 220
Holtzman, Elizabeth, 482
Hook, Sidney, 352
Hoover, Herbert, 662
Hoover, J. Edgar, 406
Hope, Bob, 222, 230
Hopkins, Harry, 94
Horowitz, Vladimir, 774
Horthy, Miklés, 509
Hosea (prophet), 764
Hoskins, Harold B., 37
House and Garden (magazine), 219
Hovovei Zion (Lovers of Zion), 11
Howard University, 725
Howe, Irving, 673
Howe, Marvine, 323, 388-389
Hughes, Harold, 246, 264
Hull, Cordell, 36
888 INDEX
Human Events (publication), 218, 346
Hummelsine, Carlisle, 72
Humphrey, Hubert H., 216, 231, 246—
O47, 248, 254, 255, 260, 261, 262, 263,
545, 554, 577, 578, 581, 632, 652, 654,
655, 711
Humphrey, Mrs. Hubert H., 711
Huntley, Chet, 553
Hurewitz, J. C., 69, 278, 495
Hurley, Patrick J., 35
Hurok, Sol, 394, 520
Hurst, Fannie, 774
Hussein, Ahmed, 536
Hussein, Saddam, 728, 729, 807
Hussein, King, 15-19, 20, 33, 47, 259, 304,
317, 334, 347, 505, 544, 554, 568-569, 583,
584, 585-586, 587, 610, 649, 682, 698, 716
Husseini, Abdul Khader, 303
Hussein-McMahon Agreement, 20, 23
Hutcheson, Joseph C., 54
Hyatt House, 166
Hyde Park Memorial Library, 44
Hyman, Lester S., 653
Ibn Abdul Aziz, Prince Sultan, 597
Ibn Saud, King, 17, 37, 38, 39, 40-41, 42,
44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 60, 67, 245, 544, 602,
606
Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, 761
Idris, King, 580
Uf Israel Lost the War (Littel), 303-304, 462
Igud Leiluf Hanoar, 240
thud Brotherhood, 150
“Impossible, The’’ (Zavad), 204
Impossible Takes Longer, The (Weizmann),
86
Independence (carrier), 586
Independent’ Board for
Home Missions, 488
Independent Press Telegram, 290, 291
Information Center (League of Arab
States), 274
“In Our Time” (TV program), 465
Institute on Central Europe (Columbia
University), 518
Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusa-
lem, 487
Institute on Human Relations, 337-338
Institute for Jewish Policy Planning & Re-
search, 23
Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies, 494-
495
Institute for Mediterranean Affairs, 237
Intelligence Bureau (U.S. Department of
State), 614
Inter-Credit Trust of Liechtenstein, 140
Inter Harvest Company, 231
Internauonal Association of Conservative
Rabbis, 474
International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), 728
International Civil Aviation Organizauon,
376
Presbyterian
International Committee of the Re
Cross, 392
International Conference of Synago;
Youth, 745 i
International Council (B'nai B'rith), 2:
513
International Council of
Churches, 488
International Court of Justice, 373
International Credit Bank of Geneva, 140
International Energy Agency, 643
International Herald Tribune, 219
International Latex Corporation, 23]
International Liberators Conference, 733
International Music Council, 166
International Press Institute, 274, 289
International Red Cross, 155, 156, 176,
178, 298, 335
Introducing Unitananism (Booth), 440
Iran-Iraqi war, 740, 807
Iraq Petroleum Pipeline, 60
{raqi Revoluuion of 1958, 539
Irgun Zvai Leumi, 52, 58-59, 60, 153-158,
183, 190, 279, 308, 344, 346, 349, 350-
351, 352, 359, 360, 371, 396, 397-398,
411
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 757
Irving, Clifford, 338
Irvington Library, 214
Isaac (patriarch), 703
Isaac-Berr, Berr, 765
Isaacs, Stephen D., 260, 525
Isacson, Leo, 80
Isaiah (prophet), 764, 765
Islambuli, Khalid Ahmad al-, 734
Islamic Higher Council, 371
Israel: 4 Family Portrait (TV series), 467
“Israel: A Search for Faith’’ (Michener),
286-287
Israel and the Arabs (Rodinson), 157
Israel Corporation, 140
Israel Government Year Book 1952, 109
Christian
Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian
Peace, 453 a
Israeli League for Human and Civil
Rights, 127, 159, 185, 392, 434
“Israeli Methods of Torture’’ (Amnesty
International), 177-178
Israelis: Founders and Sons (Elon), 147-148,
214
Israelis, The (Goiden), 214
Israel and Palestine (newsletter), 141
Israel Public Council for Soviet Jews, 527
“Israel in Siege’’ (Amory), 308-309
Israel's Survival Is a Holy Thing, 214
Issues (publication), 517-518
“Issues and Answers” (I'V program), 683
Jaaban, Sheikh al-, 354
Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 13, 24, 151, 739
Jabotinsky Revisionist movement, 190
“Jaccuse” (Zola), 12
Jackson, Henry M. (“Scoop”), 246, 249-
252, 254, 260, 263, 432, 524, 525, 526,
632, 643, 644, 651, 653, 725
Jackson, The Rev. Jesse, 717
Jackson-Vanik Amendment, 250, 252,
525, 528
Jacob (patriarch), 703
Jacobs, Paul, 320
Jacobson, Eddie, 87-90, 94
Jadot, Archbishop Jean, 502
Jalazoun refugee camp, 720
Jamal Pasha, 13, 17
Jamali, Dr. Fadhil, 49
James, Lynn, 297
Jamil, Sherif Nasser ben, 584
Jane's World Aircraft, 582
Janho, Abdel-Nour Khalil, 355
Japanese Red Army, 396
Jarring, Gunnar V., 578, 585, 588, 590,
591, 594, 595-596, 610
Jassem, Latif Nusayyef, 729
Jastrow, Morris, 769
Javits, Jacob, 61, 230, 237, 243, 248, 250,
254, 260, 261, 267, 277, 445, 525, 535, 679,
685, 686, 712, 747
Jefferson, Thomas, 5, 778
Jeffries, J. N., 27
Jennings, Peter, 273, 313
Jepsen, Roger W., 733
Jeremiah (prophet), 417, 764-765, 781
Jersild, Paul, 489
“Jerusalem: The Sacred City” (Gunther),
308
Jerusalem Embattled (Levin), 153
Jerusalem peace talks (1978), 404
Jerusalem Post, 106, 107, 115, 190, 295,
299, 323, 333, 343, 383, 470, 629, 64 1-
642, 677, 700, 718, 736
Jessup, Philip C., 79, 86, 87
Jesus, 10, 417-418, 493-494, 762, 764, 775
Jesus Christ Superstar (mouon picture), 416-
417
Jeursh Advocate, 451
Jewish Agency, 9, 25, 34, 55, 56, 59, 60,
63, 75, 78, 81, 84, 116, 117, 124, 148,
151, 154-155, 156, 157, 209, 263, 308.
359, 362-363, 484, 485, 509, 759, 771
Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, 500
Jewish Chronicle, 582
Jewish Community Councils, 56, 453
Jewish Corps (World War I, 13
Jeunsh Cunents (magazine), 418, 470
Jewish Defense League (JDL), 220, 233,
394-395, 453-454, 482, 513, 519, 520,
651, 723
Jewish Eastern Company, 12
Jewish Educational Insutute (New Jersey),
653, 680
Jewish Federation of Cleveland, 264
Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los
Angeles, 602
Jewish Historical Society, 69
Jewish Institute of Religion, 495
Jewish Labor Committee, 479
INDEX 889
Jewish Men’s Club, 213
Jewish Morning Journal, 359
Jewish National Fund (JNF), 117, 127,
128, 161, 175, 208, 262, 264, 655
Jewish News, 602
Jewtsh Newsletter, 109, 404, 419, 420, 541
Jewish Observer, 483
Jewish Presence, The, 463
Jewish Press, 651, 724, 785
Jewish Stake in Vietnam, The (Churba and
Kahane), 233-2534
Jewish Telegraph Agency, 87, 249, 413,
549, 722
Jewish War Veterans, 56, 445, 602
Jewish Week (newspaper), 413, 453, 518
Jewison, Norman, 417
Jews and American Politics (Isaacs), 260-261,
525
Jiryis, Sabri, 503
Joftes, Saul E., 209, 406
John (apostle), 764
John Birch Society, 218
John F. Kennedy (carrier), 620
John Morrell & Company, 231
John Paul II, Pope, 807
Johnson, James, 265, 337
Johnson, Dr. Joseph E., 237
Johnson, Lady Bird, 335, 549
Johnson, Lyndon B., 79, 233, 245, 329,
330, 331, 335, 545, 548-555, 558, 559,
567, 574, 575, 578, 579, 594, 614, 631,
632, 778
John XXIII, Pope, 508, 510
Joint Distribuuon Committee, 508
Jordan, Hamilton, 236, 685, 699
Jordan-Israel Mixed Armistice Commis-
sion, 543
Jordan River, 10, 20, 107, 108, 120, 173,
175, 189, 366, 550, 552, 683
Jorgensen, Bill, 278
Joseph of Khazaria, 761
Josephus, 764
Journal of the Liberal Minstry, The, 306, 443
Joyce, James, 416
Judah I.. Magnes Memorial Museum of
Berkeley, 228
“Judaism, Zionism and Israel’ (Hert-
zberg), 491-492
Judas, 417
Judenrat, 463
Judenstaat, Der (Herz}), 12-13
Juha (mouon picture), 223
Jungers, Frank, 606
Kaas. Msgr. Ludwig, 509
Kaddish, 192
Kaddoumi, Farouk, 690
Kadum Camp, 190. 687
Kahane, Rabbi Meir, 233-234, 281, 394-
395, 513, 651, 719, 723, 724, 739
Kahn, Julius, 768, 769
Kahn, Louis I., 328
Kahn, Peter J., 446
890 INDEX
Kalb, Bernard, 446
Kalb, Marvin, 273-274, 349-350, 446
Kamal, Mohamed. 181
Kamel, Mohammed Ibrahim, 702, 713
Kamhawi, Dr. Walid, 171
Kampner, L. H., 769
Kanafani, Ghassan, 370, 371
Kansas City Star, 213-214
Kaplan, Philip, 256-257
Kaplan, Rabbi Jacob, 426
Kaplow, Herbert, 277
Karim, Abdul, 544
Karl, Max, 251
Kastner, Rudolf, 483-484
Katz, Julius M., 236
Katz, Robert, 507
Katz, Shmuel, 348
Katzir, Ephraim, 329, 503
Kaufman, George S., 774
Kaufmann, Myron S., 462
Kayser-Roth, 231, 662
Kazin, Alfred, 464, 466
Keedick's Lecture Bureau, 456
Keegan, George J., 234, 235, 793, 795
Keene, Dr. J. Calvin, 298, 488
Kellani, Hissam, 325
Kelley, Kevin, 416-417
Kelly, Patricio, 412-413
Kempsell, Rev. George French, Jr., 414
Kenan, Amos, 160-161, 189
Kenen, I. L., 63, 87, 252, 254, 256, 257-
258, 269, 631, 748
Kennan, George, 76, 528, 676
Kennedy, Edward, !76, 237, 264, 590, 652,
720, 721, 722, 757
Kennedy, John F., 235, 253, 273, 352,
541-546, 548, 549, 552, 653, 788
Kennedy, Joseph, 540
Kennedy, Robert, 242-243
Kennedy, Rose, 227
Kenner, W. Hugh, 415
Kenton Corporation, 231
Kerby, William F., 208
Keren Havesod, 116
Keren Kayemet, 116
Kerr, Malcolm, 141-142
Kerrish, Grace, 290
KETC-TV, 276
Kfar Etzion kibbutz, 303
Khalde Airport, 578
Khalef, Kareem, 738
Khalid, King, 711, 739
Khalidi, Dr. Walid, 779
Khalil, Naaneh, 154
Khan, Sir Muhammed Zafrullah, 67
Khashram family, 164
Khatib, Yusuf el-, 737
Khazar Jews, 760-762
Kheddoury, Rabbi Sassoon, 782
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 717, 807
Khouri, Michael, 370
Khoury, Rev. Ilya, 200
Khruschev, Nikita, 321-322, 516, 544
Kiblan, Malea, 185
Kidd, I. C., 565-566, 571, 572
Kidder, Peabody & Company, 338
Kiernan, Thomas, 389
Killearn, Lord, 48
Kilpatrick, James, 566
Kilson, Martin L., 415-416, 753-754
Kimche, David, 158
Kimche, Jon, 156, 158, 298
Kimmelman, Henry, 216
King, Alan, 225
King, Dr. Henry C., 30-32
King, John F., 589
King, Martin Luther, 694
King-Crane Commission, 30-32
King David Hotel, 58, 153, 279, 346-347,
350, 359, 363, 687
Kingdom and the Power, The (Talese), 344
King Hussein Hospital, 179-180, 184
Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 725, 730
Kirov Ballet, 521
Kissinger, Henry, 190, 204, 232, 235, 236,
244, 272, 274, 326-327, 332, 349, 390,
446, 473, 522, 525, 526, 594, 597, 608,
610, 611, 612, 614, 615-621, 626-628,
629, 633, 634, 636-641, 643, 646, 649,
655-656, 658, 664-678, 680, 682, 687,
696, 699-700, 701, 709, 716, 717, 778
Kissinger, Mrs. Nancy, 675
Kitchener, Lord, 15
Klausner Memorandum of 1946, 124, 530
Klein, Edward, 462
Klein, Mark, 292
Kleinman, Alfred H., 747
Kleinwachter, Dr. Hans, 370
Klutznick, Philip M., 413, 542-543, 680
Koch, Edward, 224, 245, 445, 692-693, 728,
735
Koenig, Israel, 124
Koestler, Arthur, 156, 298, 760-761, 762, 764
Kogan, Leonid, 520
Kohn, Howard, 330
Kollek, Amos, 343
Kollek, Teddy, 165, 167, 227, 247, 276,
297, 328, 343, 355
Kopf, Maxim, 419
Koran, 149, 192, 781
Korey, Dr. William, 513
Korn, David, 725
Kornblum, Rabbi Usher, 498
Korovin, Evgueny A., 49
Kosygin, Alexei, 319, 321, 516, 550, 575,
61
Koven, Ronald, 272
Kraft, Joseph, 226, 340
Kraft, Michael, 260
Kreisky, Bruno, 422, 431-434, 719
Krim, Arthur, 226, 236
Kuhn Loeb & Company, 140, 228
Ku Klux Klan, 468
Kupcinet, Irving, 221
Kurzman, Dan, 298
Kutub, Fawzi el, 302-303
Labor party (Israel), 9, 122, 135, 139, 141,
347, 349, 433, 470, 558, 635, 638, 739
Labour party (Great Britain), 58, 96, 451
Lacombe, Lucien (mouon picture), 466
Lacquer, Walter, 307
Ladies Home Journal (magazine). 219
Laemmle, Carl, 222
La Farge, Father John, 350-351, 512
Laghi, Pio, 502
Lagziel, Rachel. 385
Laird, Melvin, 368
Lakeland, Albert A. (‘Pete’), 260
Lancaster Ledger-Gazette, 573
Lance, Bert, 691
Land Acquisition Act. 111, 115
Landes, David, 673
Landes. Irwin J., 790
Landis. James, 39
Landrieu, Moon, 214-215
Langer, Felicia, 172, 174, 178, 181, 334
Lansing, Robert, 29-30
Lansky, Mever, 110, 454
Lansky (Messick), 454
Lape, Bob, 288
Lapide, Pinchas E., 512
Lapierre, Dominque,
303
Lapp, Paul W., 253
Larkin, Carl, 571
Larsen, Leonard, 265
Lasker, Mary, 236
Lasky, Jesse, 222
Last Days of Hitler, The (Yrevor-Roper),
462
Las Vegas Sun, 219
Late Great Planet Earth, The, 488
Latin American Jewish Congress, 527
Lauff, Bernard J., 565-566
Lavon, Pinhas, 365
Lavon Affair, 323, 364, 365, 366, 544, 567,
575
Law, John, 313
Law of Return, 109-110, 122, 135, 142,
187, 297, 803-804
Lawrence, T. E., 20
Lazard Fréres & Company, 228
Lazaron, Rabbi Morris, 350-351
L’Chaim (TV program), 467
League of Nations, 23, 30, 109, 775, 777
League of Women Voters, 451-452
Leary, Dr. Timothy, 421
Lebanese civil war, 31, 193, 201, 205, 323-324,
361, 579, 659, 661, 707, 725, 782
Leeds family, 214
Legardo, Elias, 774
Lehigh University, 495
Lehman, Herbert H., 56, 60, 61, 235, 770
Lehman, Irvin, 770
Lehman Brothers, 228
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, 463
Lehnert, Mother Pasquahina. 508, 509
Leiber, Father Robert, S.J., 508, 509
Lend-Lease, 524
154, 298, 301,
INDEX 891
Leningrad tals (1971), 513
Leonard, James, 237, 287
Leo III, Emperor, 761
Lerner, Joseph H., 495
Lerner, Max, 226, 385, 697-698
Lerner family, 213, 214
Lerner Shops, 231
Lesch, Ann, 173
Lett, Rebecca, 712
Lettvin, Jerome Y., 415
Leventhal, Paul L.., 330
Levi, Edward, 236, 260
Levin, Bernard, 520-521
Levin, Harry, 153, 298
Levine, Mel, 260
Levinger, Rabbi Moshe, 190, 192
Levonun, Avigdor, 804-805
Levy, Gustave, 669
Levy, Victor, 365
Levy’s Rye Bread, 226
Lewis, Anthony, 315, 779, 803
Lewis, Flora, 353-354
Lewis, Sinclair, 420
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 307
Lewisohn family, 774
Liberal party (New York State), 439
Libertanan (magazine), 463
Liberty (ship), 561-576
Lie, Trygve, 59
Eye tmsgarine); 289, 312, 455-456, 478,
479
Likud party, 9, 135, 190, 346-347, 504,
636, 643, 651, 683, 794
Lilienthal, David E., 235
Lincoln, Abraham, 544
Lindbergh, Charles, 445
Lindsay, John V., 245-247, 367-368, 394,
430, 606, 692
Linen, James, 237
Linowitz, Sol, 716
Lippmann, Walter, 226, 546
Lipset, Seymour M., 469, 693
Lipshutz, Robert J., 236, 347, 651, 704,
712
“Listen, Hans" (radio broadcast), 419
Littel, Robert, 462
Littell, Dr. Franklin H., 480-481, 499
“Liddle Drummer Boy, The” (TV pro-
gram), 275
Little Rock (carrier), 564
Litton Industries, 220
Liverwright Publishers, 220
Lloyd George, David, 21, 74, 766
Lod Airport, 647
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 540, 549
Lomax, Louis, 457
London Agreement (1919), 19
London Conference of 1939, 33
London Daily Express, 461
London Evening Standard, 450
London Jewish Chronicle, 543
London Observer, 183, 529
London Sunday Times, 176, 178, 186, 311,
892
335, 337
London Times, 111, 114, 120, 158, 173,
179-183, 335, 367, 384, 386, 520-521,
539, 556-557, 567
Long, Hamilton A., 621
Longshoremen’s International Associa-
tion, 269
Look (magazine), 304, 305
Lords of the Press (Seldes), 314
Los Angeles Music Center, 224
Los Angeles Power Company, 607
Los Angeles Times, 189, 219, 255, 277, 336,
441, 464, 521
Low, Wolfgang, 365, 370, 470-471
Love, John A., 604, 624
Love, Kennett, 313, 501
Lovett, Robert, 66-68, 71, 72, 82, 83,
85-86
Lowenstein, Allard, 335
Lowenstein, Brother Joseph, 174
Lowenthal, Max, 81, 82, 94
Lowery, The Rev. Joseph, 717
Luce, Clare Boothe, 208
Lufthansa Airlines, 372
Luke (apostle), 764
Lupino, Ida, 465
Lurie, Ranan, 448
Lutwak, Edward, 723
Lydda Airport massacre, 370
Lyle Stewart Inc., 220
Lyndon Baines Johnson Forest, 335
INDEX
Maale Adumim (West Bank seulement),
687
Ma’alot affair, 381-389, 397, 398
Ma‘anv (newspaper), 128-129, 162, 194-
195, 370-371, 376, 433, 558, 593, 628,
689, 729
Ma’aruf, Muhammad, 127-128
Maas, Richard, 432, 504
MacArthur, Douglas, 91
McCain, John S., 565-566, 572
McCarthy, Joseph, 496
McCarthy, Leo, 227
McCartney, James, 273
McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 436
McClintock, Robert, 72, 81
McCloskey, Robert J., 305
McCormack, John, 249
McCrory Variety Stores, 231
Bae lag G., 54-55, 93, 94, 307,
424
MacDonald’s Restaurants, 231
Macopad White Paper of 1939, 33-34,
McGee, Frank, 606
McGee, Gale W., 241, 246, 248, 262, 263
McGonagle, William L., 562, 563-565,
572
McGovern, George S., 248, 262, 264,
265-266, 333, 521, 524, 663
McGrath, Howard, 81, 423
McGraw-Hill, 275, 408
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 614
McIntyre, Carl, 488
McKay, Margaret, 422, 450-451
McLaughlin, Bill, 195-196
Maclean, Fitzroy, 761
McHenry, Donald, 721
McLean, John G., 600-601
McLeod, Dr. Bruce, 437
McLoughlin, John E., 495
McMahon, Sir Henry, 16, 18, 33
Macmillan & Company, 220
McNamara, Robert, 331
McNeese State College, 457
“MacNeil/Lehrer Report” (TV program),
234, 237, 287, 28
Macy, R. H., 769
Mademoiselle (magazine), 219
Maghrebi, Muhammad al-, 165
Maglione, Cardinal Luigi, 510, 511
Magnes, Dr. Judah L., 150, 152, 228, 342,
412, 772, 775
Maikovskis, Boleslaus, 482
Maimonides, Moses, 363, 675
Maitland, F. W., 9
Makarios, Archbishop, 636
Malamud, Phyllis, 297
Malle, Louis, 466
Malstead, Roger, 292
Malta News, 567
Manatt, Charles, 227
Manchester Guardian, 13, 161, 187, 390-
391, 413, 567, 782
Mansfield, Mike, 643
Mapai party, 110-111
Marari, Ishak Ali el-, 176
Marchar (publication), 412
Marchi, John, 245
Marcus, Yoel, 143
Marei, Saed, 644
Mark (apostle), 764
Markham, James, 688
Marks & Spencer, 216-217
Marlowe, Christopher, 415
Marshall, George, 64, 69, 71-79, 82-83,
85-87, 93-95, 100
Marshall Foundation, 86
Marshall Plan, 69, 750
Martin, H. H., 417
Marzouk, Dr. Moshe, 323
Masada Memorial, 143
Masaryk, Jan, 49
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), 415, 499
Massigli, Ranier, 430
Matthew (apostle), 764
Mauthausen, 474-475
Maxwell, Rev. Raymond E., 160
Maxwell Air Force Base, 234
Mayer, Louis B., 222
Mayhew, Christopher, 284, 554
Maynes, Charles, Jr., 287
Mays, Wendell, 222
Mead, James, 60, 95
Meany, George, 252
“Medical Center” (TV program), 275
“Meet the Press’ ( program), 553,
605-606, 687
Mehdi, Dr. Mohamed, 281, 287, 395-396
Mein Kampf (Hitler), 480, 688
Meir, Golda, 105, 112, 113, 131-134, 136,
146, 187, 188, 223, 246, 257, 266, 289,
297, 300, 302, 318-319, 322, 329, 349,
365, 380, 385, 430, 432-433, 451, 470,
472, 483, 505, 506-507, 516, 527-528,
536, 553, 580-581, 585, 586, 591, 593-
595, 598-599, 614, 616, 627, 628, 634,
641, 642, 653, 669, 687, 695, 748, 756, 760,
764, 777, 802
Melchior, Rabbi Marcus, 771-772
Melloy, Francis, 649
Meltzer, Milton, 481
Memoirs (Truman), 62, 77, 91
“Memorandum on British Commitments
to King Hussein,” 16
Menager, Bishop Jacques Eugene Louis,
193
Mennonite Central Committee, 496-497
Menuhin, Moshe, 5, 318, 422, 772
Menuhin, Yehudi, 166, 772
Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare),
418
Meron, Hannah, 222
Merrifield, Father Donald P., 504-505
Messick, Hank, 454
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 222, 365
Metromedia, 272, 457
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 245, 247,
606
Metropolitan Synagogue (New York), 439
Metternich, Prince, 620, 666, 667
Metzenbaum, Howard M., 663, 679
Meyer, Eugene, 52, 219
Miami Herald, 753, 756
Micah (prophet), 764
Michaelson, George, 397
Michel, Robert H., 787
Michener, James, 286-287, 307
“Midday Live” (TV program), 417
Middle East: Quest for an Amencan Policy, The,
141
Middle East Institute of Columbia Univer
sity, 495
Middle East International, 161
Middle East Perspective, 213, 214-215, 304.
375, 438, 444, 452, 457, 458
Middle East Resources Center, 174
Middleton, Drew, 696
Midianites, 10
Milhem, Mohammed Hassan, 719, 779
Military Draft Act, 136
Miller, Arthur, 756
Miller, Rabbi Israel, 518, 659
Miller, Merle, 90
Miller, Ouo N., 601-602, 613
Milman, Seymour, 352
Milson, Menachem, 736, 738
INDEX 898
Milstein, Nathan, 774
Minter. Thomas, 478
Minton, Walter J., 454
Mispsick, Steven, 292
Mit Brennender Sorge (encyclical), 507-508
Mitterand, Francois, 425
Miztah Congregation, 344
Mobil Oil Corporation, 601, 622, 734
Moheiddin, Zahkaria, 554
Mohsen, Zuhair, 200
Moiseyev Ballet, 300, 520
Mollet, Guy, 537
Molly (musical play), 417
Mondale, Walter “Fritz,” 262, 448, 654-
655, 657, 679, 681, 684, 685, 695, 711,
712
Monde, Le, 176, 425, 430, 557, 558,
559
Montagu, Edwin S., 14, 766-768
Montefiore, Sir Moses, 11
Moorer, Thomas, 620
Moose, James, 37, 49
Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, 797
Morgenstern, Dr. Julian, 149
Morgenthau, Henry, 43, 769, 770
Morgenthau, Mrs. Henry, 43
Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 62, 235
Moriarty, Michael, 478
Morin, Relman, 362
Mormons, 293-294
Morning Telegraph, The, 219
Morrison, Rev. George, 437
Morrison-Grady Plan, 55, 94, 95
Morse, Arthur, 462
Morse, Wayne, 264
Moses (prophet), 404, 761, 781
Moskowitz, Dr. Irving, 291
Moskowitz, Joel, 291
Moss, Senator Frank, 262
Mossad (secret police}, 330, 332, 361, 728,
732
Mouton Picture Association of America,
230
Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery, 326
Moyne, Lord, 214, 359
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 103, 264, 287,
647-648, 649, 658, 679, 757
Mr. Klem (mouon picture), 467
Mrozek, John, 267
Ms (magazine), 136
Mianes, Argoub, 113
Mubarak, Hosni, 734-735, 740
Muhammad (prophet), 166, 305, 615
Muhassal, Father George, 390
Munich Olympics, 368, 371-373, 379-
380, 383, 750
Murdoch, Iris, 320
Murdoch, Rupert, 219, 299
Murray, General Sir Archibald, 17
Murray, Philip, 353
Murray, Wallace, 42
Music Corporation of America, 220, 464
Muskie, Edmund, 246, 250, 262, 263, 264,
894 INDEX
655
Muslim Brotherhood, 735
Mussolini, Benito, 509
Muzio, Giovanni, 503
My Mission to Israel (McDonald), 424
Nabativeh refugee camp, 362, 697
Nabulsi family, 125
Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, 362
Nayar, Mohammed Yusuf, S61
Napoleon I, 271
Nasir, Dr. Hanna, [72-173
Nasir, Kamal, 173
Nasir. Musa, 173
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 144, 198, 201, 214,
218, 242, 277, 278, 281, 283-286, 289,
291, 305, 311, 319, 321-322, 324, 364,
370, 412, 470, 536-538, 540, 544, 546,
547, 550, 552-555, 559, 560, 568. 578,
582-585, 587, 631, 640, 735
Nasser, Kamal. 169, 361
Nathan, Robert, 65, 66, 235, 406
Nathanson, Philip, 365
National Association of
487
National Broadcasting Company (NBC),
220-221, 226, 272, 275, 279, 300, 398,
418, 468, 474, 475, 477, 478, 606, 607,
611, 640, 687, 697, 710, 712
National Cathedral, 435
National Committee of Arab Local Council
Chairmen, 737
Nauional Committee of Orthodox Jewish
Communiues, 136
National Committee to Re-elect the Presi-
dent, 593
National Conference on Soviet Jewry, 432,
494, 521-522, 524, 527
National Council of Churches, 160, 478,
491-492, 496
National Council for the Social Studies in
Washington, 477
National Council of Young Israel, 61, 407,
785
National Education Association, 478
National Educational Television, 285-
287, 468, 583
Nationality Law of 1952, 109-111
National Jewish Monthly, 274
National Lawyers Guild, 184-185
National News Council, 282
National Observer, 643
National Press Club, 637, 703
Nauional Religious party, 135, 634-635,
636, 638, 736
National Review, 218, 375, 392, 502
National Review Bulletin, 69t-692
National Security Agency, 575
National Security Council, 76, 619-620,
681, 725, 732, 734
Nattiv, Rabbi Elisha, 441
Nazi party, 419, 460, 463. 465, 470, 475,
477, 482, 499, 509, 538, 759
Evangelicals,
Near East Ecumenical Bureau, 390
Near East Report, 63, 249, 252, 256, 266,
338, 343, 449, 476, 631
Nebel, Long John, 221
Nebuchadnezzar, King, 781
Neiman, Walter, 440
Nelson, Howard, 358
Nenni, Pietro, 508
Ner (publication), 116
Nessel, Jack, 299
Neturei Karta, 104, 136-137, 647, 772
Neumann, Rabbi Emanuel, 44
Neusner, Rabbi Jacob, 754
Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust
(Meltzer), 481
New Anti-Semitsm, The (Forster and Ep-
stein), 279, 408-410, 435
New Deal, 235
Newhouse, Samuel, 219
Newhouse newspaper chain, 225
New Jersey Education Association, 479
Newman, Barbara, 330
New Outlook, The (publicauon), 148, 171,
555-556
Newsday (magazine), 219
Newsweek (magazine), 4. 219, 225, 263,
297-299, 331, 332, 405, 438, 448, 567,
780, 800
New York (magazine), 299, 464-465, 637,
673
New York City Board of Education, 479,
480
New York City Teachers Union, 751
New York Daily News, 63, 316, 374, 378,
388, 389, 461, 476, 652, 744, 779
Neu Yorker, The (magazine), 219, 242
New York Herald Tribune, 219
New York Jewish Press, 274
New York Post, 78, 219, 224, 225, 244, 249,
281, 283, 287, 328, 336, 342, 346-347,
366, 374, 385, 388, 410, 419, 447, 478,
514, 521, 522, 691, 694. 697-698, 701,
707, 708
New York Rewew of Books, 219, 301, 483
Neu York Times, The, 59-60, 87, 103, 122,
132, 133, 165, 173, 184, 187, 188, 192,
202, 219, 222-223, 224, 225-296, 231,
234, 243, 244, 249, 249, 253, 258, 259,
260, 264, 273, 277, 278, 287. 299, 303,
304. 305, 313, 314-356, 358, 362, 365,
366, 368, 369, 370, 373, 375, 376, 378-
380, 387-388, 389, 395, 396, 397, 398,
409, 413, 414, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466
468, 469, 472473, 474, 475, 476, 479,
480, 481, 482, 487, 500-501, 503, 506,
521, 522, 523, 529, 545, 546, 552, 553,
561, 580, 581, 586, 600. 601, 602, 603,
611, 625, 641, 643, 660, 662, 673, 676,
687, 688, 690, 691, 696, 705, 706, 728, 733,
735, 744, 751, 753, 768, 769, 779, 789, 796,
803
New York Times Company, 315
New York Times Service, 653
Neyer, Joseph, 496
NGIG Investment Corporation, 251
Nicholas HI, Czar, 11
Night (Wiesel), 463
Niles. David K., 52, 65, 80, 81, 82, 94, 95,
235, 236
Nimo, Marcelle, 365
Nixon, Richard, 3, 219, 230, 233, 235, 236,
245, 249, 263, 324, 332, 368, 380-381, 429,
432, 496, 518, 522-524, 538, 539, 541, 542,
577-613, 617-621, 623, 628-630, 631,
641, 642, 650, 655, 658, 659, 662, 666-669,
673, 734, 778, 789, 790
Nobell, Byron, 299
Noguchi, Isamu, 328
Nokrashy, Mahmoud, 47, 50
Nola, Alfonso di, 501
Nolte, Richard, 575
Nordau, Max, 147
North Adantic ‘Treaty Organization
(NATO), 337, 371-372, 547, 621, 626,
636, 644, 676, 796
North Carolina Anvil, 445
Northwestern University, 710
Norton Company (W.W,), 309
Norton Simon Company, 230
Notre Dame University, 683
Nouvel Observateur, Le, 169, 311
Novak, Robert, 189, 277, 410, 413, 446-
447, 449, 592-593, 644, 681
Novak, Michael, 444
Novitski, Joseph, 461-462
Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corpo-
ration (NUMEC), 330
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, 333,
582
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC),
331
Nuremberg trial, 478, 482
Nuseibeh, Anwar, 162
Nussbaum, Rabbi Max, 498
Oakes, John B., 327, 354-355
Oberammergau Passion Play, 417
Obey, David, 261
Ochs, Adolph S., 314, 343, 345, 769, 774
O'Connor, Herbert R., 352
O'Connor, John J., 476
Odeh, Daoud, 610
Odeh, Josef, 181
Odeh, Rasmiah, 181
Odessa File (motion picture), 466
O'Dwyer, William, 61
Oesterreicher, Msgr. John M., 494-495,
496
Ofer, Avraham, 139
Ofra (West Bank settlement), 687
Ogilvie, Richard B., 379
O Jerusalem! (Collins and Lapierre), 154,
156, 301, 302
Olan, Rabbi Levi A., 500
Olivier, Laurence, 418
Olmert, Ehud, 191
INDEX 895
Olson, Arnold T., 487
Olympics Committee, 372
Olympic Village (Munich), 371-373, 379
Omar, Abu, 286
Onassis, Jackie, 263
One Generation After (Wiesel), 463
O'Neill, Thomas P., 710
“Open bridge” policy, 108
“Open fences” policy, 108
Open the Gates, 463
Operation Babylon, 726, 729
Operation Eichmann (motion picture), 467
Ophuls, Marcel, 466
Orfila, Aleyandro, 412
Organization of African Unity, 103, 590
Organization of Petroleum Exporun
ountries (OPEC), 464, 607, 609, 610,
637, 670, 702, 711, 721, 798
Orkin, John, 368
Osborne, Sir Francis Godolphin D'Arcy,
511
Osipov Balalaika Orchestra, 393-394
Osirak, 726, 729
Osservatore Romano, 301, 807
OT (magazine), 558
“Other Exodus, The” (Childers), 157
Ottoman Empire, 10, 17-18, 27, 310
Our Crowd (Birmingham), 426
Our Man in Damascus (Ben-Hanan), 366
Our Town (publication), 224
Out of My Later Years (Einstein), 341
Overseas Private Investment Corporation,
521
Owens, Henry, 680
Owens, Jesse, 378
Oxtoby, Dr. Willard, 407
Oz, Amos, 162
Ozick, Cynthia, 464
Pachachi, Dr. Nadim, 609-610
Pacific Bank of Nantucket, 751
Packwood, Senator Robert, 262
Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza, 605-606,
640, 717, 726
Palestine: The Land of the Three Faiths
(Graves), 19
Palestine: The Reality (Jeffries), 27
ras Arab Higher Committee, 75-76,
15
Palestine Architects’ Organization, 200
Palestine Artisans’ Organization, 200
Palestine Artists’ Organization, 200
Palestine Council, 551
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association
(P.1.C.A.), 34
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
126, 144, 169, 171, 173, 197, 199-205,
223, 224, 226, 277, 313, 326-327, 333,
336, 346, 347, 349, 353, 354-355, 361,
371, 396, 397, 412, 446, 447, 453, 454,
464, 466, 599, 618-619, 635-638, 645,
646, 647, 648, 649, 651, 652-653, 658,
670, 672, 680, 686-689, 691-695, 697-
896 INDEX
699, 701, 702, 705-709, 716, 717, 719, 723,
724, 725, 726, 730, 734, 735, 736, 739, 740,
741, 747, 759, 768, 779~780, 782, 794, 795,
798, 800, 806, 808
PLO Research Center, 200
Palestine Lawyers’ Organization, 200
Palestine Medical Organization, 200
Palestine National Council (PNC), 199,
800
Palestine National Front, 200
Palestine Orphans Trust, 200
Palestine Popular Front, 370
Palestine Red Crescent, 199-200
Palestine Research Center, 200
Palestine Students’ Organization, 200
Palestine Teachers’ Organization, 200
Palestine Women’s Organization, 200
Palestine Writers’ Organization, 200
Palestine Youth Organization, 200
Palestinian Covenant of 1968, 130
Palestinian Research Institute, 371
“Palestinians, The” (CBS program), 195-
196
Paley, William, 220
Palmach, 308
Palmieri, Victor, 286
Panama Canal Treaty (U.S.), 691
Pan-Arab Protocol, 39
Panov, Galina, 520
Panov, Valery, 520, 521
Parade (newspaper magazine), 220, 397
Paramount Pictures, 222, 230
Pans Match, 567
Paris Peace Conference (World War I), 20,
23, 29, 59
Pasternak, Boris, 404
Paton, Alan, 776
Patna (ship), 359
Patterson, Robert, 246
Patridge, Robert, 294
Pauker, Anna, 416
Paul (apostle), 763, 764
Paul Revere Society, 457
Paul VI, Pope, 199, 503, 505, 579
Payot, Denis, 186
Peace Now movement, 718, 741
aro Anthony, 567, 568, 572, 573,
574
Pearson, Drew, 65-66,
540
PEC Israel Economic Company, 231
Peel Commission, 33
Peerce, Jan, 479
Peled, Matityahu, 189, 453, 557
Pentagon Papers, 307, 316, 595, 641
Penthouse (magazine), 567, 573
Percy, Charles, 260, 266, 712
Peres, Shimon, 131, 141, 192, 312-313,
329, 334, 365, 366, 383, 568, 630, 638,
644, 661, 688, 713, 729, 740, 789, 802
Peretz, Don, 156
Perfidy (Hecht), 483
Perle, Richard, 260, 525
284-285, 424,
Perén, Juan, 462
Perry, Robert P., 584
Petain, Henri Philippe, 508
Peter (apostle), 764
Peter the Great, 794
Petersen, George, 392
Peterson, Peter G., 611
Pfeffer, Leo, 412
Philadelphia Inquirer, 219, 232, 354
Philistines, 10, 149
Phillips, Wendell, 421
Phillips, William, 54
Philo, 762
Phoenicians, 10
Picot, Charles Frangois-Georges, 17
Pierpoint, Robert, 380, 381
Pie X11 Avant UHistoire (Roche), 508
Piety, Harold, 312
P: Ha-Aton (newspaper), 126
Pike, Bishop James A., 492
Pinsker, Leo, 11
Piusburgh Theological Seminary, 253
Pius XI, Pope, 507, 512
Pius XII, Pope, 507-512
Plain Speaking (Miller), 90
Plain Truth (Armstrong), 488
Plaut, Rabbi W. Gunther, 435-436
Pledge, The (Stater), 214, 406
Plot to Destroy Israel, The, 464
Plumbat Affair, The, 332
Pocket Books, 230
Podell, Bertram, 246, 430
Podhoretz, Norman, 414, 464, 673, 742, 753
Poe, Edgar Allan, 460
Pogrebin, Letty Cottin, 136
Pogue, Dr. Forrest, 86
Poliak, A.N., 761
Political Action Committee for Palestine,
Politics of Defeat, The: America’s Decline in the
Middle East (Churba), 235
Polsky, Viktor, 521
Pompidou, Georges, 245, 246, 422, 428-
431, 505, 644, 749
Pompidou, Madame Georges, 429
Ponti, Carlo, 507
Pontifical Mission for Palestine, 496
Pontius Pilate, 417
Pope, Alexander, 577
Popular Democratic Front for the Libera-
uon of Palestine (PDFLP), 200, 381-
389, 645
Popular Front for the Liberation of Pales-
tine (PFLP), 195, 200, 201, 336, 619,
655, 688
Popular Front for the Liberation of Pales-
tine—General Command, 200
Poseidon Adventure (motion picture), 222
Potsdam Conference, 47, 48-49
Pound, Ezra, 414-416
Pound Era, The (Pound), 415
Povich, Shirley, 378-379
Preminger, Otto, 223, 466
|
|
Presbyterian Life (publication), 407
Present at the Creation: My Years at the State
Department (Acheson), 64
Present Tense (publication), 275
Prime Minister Remembers, 1 (Attlee), 96-97
Princeton University, 341, 414
“Principles of Government: No Arab, No
Jewish State” (Anglo-American Com-
mittee of Inquiry on Palestine), 55
Prins, Vivian, 369
Pro Deo University, 500, 501
Profiles in Courage (Kennedy), 253, 542
Promise and Fulfillment (Koestler), 760-761
Proper Bostonians, The (Amory), 308
Proskauer, Joseph, 63, 65
Protestant Student Movement of Ger-
many, 454
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 425, 471, 501
Proxmire, William, 445
Psychopathic God, The: Adolf Hitler, 463
Public Affairs Committee (Zionist Organi-
zation of America), 288-289
Publishers Weekly, 463-464
Pueblo (ship), 562
Pulitzer, Joseph, 774
Pulitzer family, 219
Qaddafi, Mua'mmar, 201, 316, 321, 347,
397, 587, 592, 610, 644, 698, 721, 735
Qasas, Hamdi, 168
Qawasmeh, Fahd, 719
QB 11] (mouon picture), 288
QB I'll (Uris), 477
Quakers, 452-453
Quesada, Ricardo, 325
uincy (ship), 40, 51
uneitra atrocities, 389-393
Raanan, Uri, 723
Rabat Conference (1974), 672
Rabat summit meeting (1969), 583
Rabb, Maxwell, 236, 540, 550, 723
Rabbinical Council of America, 408, 659
Rabin, Yitzhak, 124, 131, 135, 138, 190~
191, 244, 278, 348, 385, 397, 448, 472-
473, 530, 552, 557, 595, 634, 635, 636,
639, 641, 642, 645, 646, 655, 657, 659,
661, 662, 667, 668, 669, 681-682, 688,
760
Rabin, Mrs. Yitzhak, 141, 473
Rabinovitz, Rubin, 320
Rabinowitz, Yeshoshua, 642
Race and Ciwilization (Hertz), 763
Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 220
Radio Tel Aviv, 517
Rafed refugee camp, 362
Rafshoon, Gerald, 651
Rahman, Abdul, 637
Raizon, Colin, 368
Rakah party, 122 _
Ramaan, Mordechai, 155
Ranaan, Uri, 209
Random House, 220
INDEX 897
Rankel, Sol, 292
Rapid American Company, 231
Rappaport, Nathan, 460
Rashaya-al Wadi refugee camp, 362
Rashish, Myer, 725
Ras Sudar oil fields, 643
Rava, Archbishop Joseph. 112
Reader's Digest, 308-310, 596, 773
Reader's Digest Almanac, 309
Reader’s Digest Association, 286
Reagan, Ronald, 4, 346, 650, 654, 656, 657,
658, 723, 724, 725, 728, 729, 730, 731, 732,
733, 734, 735, 737, 741, 742, 785, 806, 809
Reasoner, Harry, 272
“Record, The: Holocaust in History,
1933-1945” (Anu-Defamation League),
476-477
Redgrave, Vanessa, 223-224
Red Star Over Bethlehem (Hirschmann),
304
Reeves, Richard, 299, 464
Reilly, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, 572
Reinhold, Robert, 415
Remez, Aharon, 556-557
Repnsal (motion picture), 507
Reston, James, 59-60, 315, 319
Revolt, The. The Story of the Irgun (Begin),
157, 343
Reynier, Jacques de, 155, 156
Ribicoff, Abraham, 235, 250, 254, 260,
261, 525, 658, 709, 710-711, 712
Rice, Elmer, 774
Richards, Renée, 273
Richter, Roger, 728
Ridgeway, James, 346, 454
Ridgewood Sunday News, 292
Riebenfeld, Paul, 288-289
Riesman, Dr. David, 404
Riklis, Meshulam, 231
Rimbaud, Arthur, 415
Rizzuto, Phil, 227
Roberts, Oral, 488
Robinson, Marilvn, 272
Robinson, Richard D., 787
Roche, Msgr. G., 508
Rockefeller, David, 230, 237
Rockefeller, Nelson, 236, 243, 521, 545,
633
Rockwell, George Lincoln, 468
Rocky Mountain News, 268-269
Rodgers, Richard, 213, 721
Rodinson, Maxime, 157
Rogers, William P., 212, 265, 318, 322,
368, 580, 581, 585, 589, 591, 592, 593-
594, 598, 655, 666, 668
Rogers Plan, 585, 677, 748
Rohan, Michael, 487
Rolling Stone (magazine), 330-331
Roman Catholic Church, 475, 493, 500,
502, 503, 504-512
Rome and Jerusalem (Hess), 11
Romulo, Carlos, 66
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 32, 35-45,
898 INDEX
46, 47, 48-49, 51, 62, 69, 94, 235, 423,
509, 544, 587, 692
Roosevelt. Mrs. Franklin D., 43, 61, 65,
87, 94, 95, 363
Roosevelt, Sara, 43
Roosevelt, Theodore, 611, 743
Roots of Coincidence, The (Koestler),
760-761
Roots na Moving Stream (Adler), 88-89
Rosebud (motion picture), 466
Rosen, Pinhas, 115
Rosenbaum, Tibor, 139-140
Rosenberg, Hannah, 367
Rosenberg, Samuel, 235
Rosendale, Simon W., 769
Rosenman, Samuel, 94
Rosenne, Meir, 700
Rosenthal, Abe, 345, 346, 413, 414
Rosenthal, Benjamin S., 254, 255, 518,
658, 680
Rosenwald, Julius, 770
Rosenwald family, 774
Rosovsky, Henry, 673
Ross, Charles, 86
Ross, Jack, 79
Ross, Steve, 236
Rossignori, Countess Elizabeth, 507
Rostow, Eugene, 69, 327, 567, 568, 569,
574
Rostow, Walt. 567, 574, 655
Rotary Club, 215, 457
Roth, Richard, 225
Rothberg, Samuel, 140
Rothschild, Baron Edmund de, 140,
230
Rothschild, Baron Lionel. 11, 15
Rothschild family, 416, 428
Rothstein, Rafael, 297, 366, 367
Rouleau, Eric, 305, 559
Roxas, Manuel, 66
Roy, Gil Carl Al, 495496
Royal Fusileers, 13
Rubbuh, Yasser Abed, 383-384
Rubinstein, Amnon, 113
Rubinstein, Artur, 166, 774
Rubinstein, Martin, 221
Rusk, Dean, 67, 71, 72, 75, 79, 86-87, 92,
95, 331, 553, 575
Russell, Bertrand, 204
Russian Revolution, 781
Rutgers University, 496
Ryan, Archbishop Joseph T., 496
Saath, Nebil, 108
Sabbagh, Hasib, 196-197
Sacher, Henry, 69
Sachler School of Medicine, 790-791
Sacramento Bee, 294, 295
Sadat, 736
Sadat, Anwar el-, 1, 19, 188, 198, 295,
318, 325, 343, 347, 404, 413, 552, 590-
592, 593, 595-598, 609, 610, 612, 613,
617-619, 629-630, 633, 637-640, 642,
644-646, 649, 667, 670, 671, 677 677,
678, 681-682, 693, 696-703, 709, 713, 714,
715, 716, 718, 719, 720, 721, 729, 734,
735-736, 775, 795, 800
Sadat, Madame Jihan, 645
Safire, William, 226, 728
Safran, Nadav, 307, 343, 792
Said, Nuri es-, 538-539
St. Andrew's College, 442
St. John, Jeffrey, 450
St. John, Robert, 214
St. Lawrence University, 298, 488
St. Lows (ship), 467
St Louis Post-Dispatch, 219
Sakharov, Andrei, 522, 524
Salant, Richard, 22]
Saleh, Abd al-Jawad, 171-172
Salisbury, Harrison E., 343
Salomon Brothers, 228
SALT disarmament talks, 531, 622, 644,
655
Salt Lake Tnbune, 293, 294
Salzburg Conference on a Non-Nuclear
Future, 330
Samuel, Sir Herbert, 25
Sanders, Edward, 602, 680
Sanders, Marion K., 419
San Francisco Examiner, 318, 531
San Francisco Jewish Community Rela-
tions Council, 603
San Remo Peace Conference, 20
Sara Lee Company, 230
Saratoga (carrier), 586
Sarkis, Ehas, 648
Sarnoff, David, 220
Sarnoff. Robert, 220
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 317, 441
Saturday Evening Post, The, 299-300
Saturday Review, 297
Saud bin Faisal, Prince, 658, 711, 726, 798
Saudi Higher Petroleum Council, 605
Saunders, Harold H., 646-647
Saxbe, William, 496
Sayegh, Anis, 371
Sayegh, Dr. Fayez, 16, 287, 588, 711, 715
Sayre, Francis B., 87, 422
Sayre, Francis B., Jr., 434-435
coon A., 325, 600
Scarsdale Gold Club, 414
Schachter, Rabbi Herschel, 581
Schary, Dore, 224, 405
Scheer, Robert, 464
Scheersberg (ship), 330
Schenk, Joseph, 222
Schenk, Faye, 212
Schenley Industries, 231
Scheuer, James, 288
Schiff, Dorothy, 219, 342
Schiff, Jacob, 219, 770
Schiff, Zeev, 570
Schiff family, 774
Schindler, Rabbi Alexander M., 277, 347-
348, 685, 686, 691, 706, 709, 710
|
|
Schlesinger, James, 236, 332, 616, 620,
626, 639-640, 644, 654
Sch6nau Castle transit facilities, 431
Schonfeld, Rabbi Moshe, 484
Schulberg, Stuart, 221
Schweid, Eliezer, 151-152
Schweiker, Richard S., 260, 685
Scope (newspaper), 393
Scout, C. P., 13
Scou, Hugh, 241, 261, 380-381
Scout, William, 279
Scott Amendment, 241
Scowcroft, Brent, 620
Scranton, William, 577, 633, 649-650,
654, 666, 690
Schreiber, Manfred, 372
Seafarers’ International Union, 269
Seagram Corporation, 230
Seaman, Bill, 272
“Search for Peace in the Middle East”
(American Friends Service Committee),
452
Secret List of Heinnch Roehm, The (Barak),
360
Seidman, L. William, 235
Seldes, George, 314
Seligman, Edwin R., 769
Semer, Hannah, 763, 764
Semple, Robert, 345
Serkin, Rudolph, 774
Serot, André Pierre, 360
Seton Hail University, 494-495
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence), 20
Seventeen (magazine), 219
17 Ben-Gurion, 464
Severeid, Eric, 449-450, 773
Sévres, Treaty of, 428
Shaab (newspaper), 172
Shaarez Zedek Hospital, 244
Shabath, Ibrahim, 105
Shahak, Dr. Israel, 126-129, 130, 159,
178, 184, 422, 434, 458-459, 499, 754-755,
772
Shahar, David, 760
Shaheen, Jack G., 275
Shaheen family, 165
Shaka, Bassam, 720, 738
Shakespeare, William, 314, 415
Shaltiel, David, 153-156
Shapiro, Zalman M., 331, 332
Sharett, Moshe, 93, 156-157, 536, 748
Sharia (Muslim courts), 170
Sharon, Ariel, 144, 189, 191, 614, 618, 689,
697, 714, 719, 737, 741, 802, 809
Sharp, Ehot, 574
Shau refugee camp, 168
Shaw, George Bernard, 357
Shawa, Rashid al-, 167-168, 178
Shazli, Saad Eddin el-, 713
Shcharansky, Anatoly, 525
Shearer, Lloyd, 220
Sheean, Vincent, 422
Sheehan, Edward, 553, 697
INDEX 899
Shehab, Fouad, 544
Shehan, Lawrence, 505
Shemesh, Kochavi, 132
Shenuda III, Pope, 735
Shereshevsky, Dr. Shimeon, 116
Sherman, Benjamin D., 298
Sherman, Harry, 220
Sherman, Bishop Jonathan, 492
ship Beth (Israeli Security Service), 174,
179
Shipiro, Yaacov, 108
Show Business (publication), 224
Shrum, Robert, 651
Shukairy, Ahmed, 568
Shulman, Avis, 209
Shultz, George P., 790, 809
Shute, Nevil, 345
Sicherman, Dr. Harvey, 725
Siegal, Allan, 345
Siegal, Stanley, 272-273
Siegel, Joel, 467
Siegel, Dr. Mark, 236, 706
Siegel, Richard D., 260
Siegman, Rabbi Henry, 277, 413
Silent Warnors, The (Yadmor), 366
Silliphant, Surling, 222
Silver, Rabbi Abba Hillel, 37-38, 40, 47,
63, 95, 104-105, 158, 540, 762, 799
Silverman, Fred, 221
Silverman, Ira, 232, 233
Simon, William E., 226-227, 636
Simon and Schuster, 220, 230, 301, 304,
462
Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust
Studies, 482
Simpson, Sir fohn Hope, 34
Singer, Rabbi Richard E., 401
Sira, Rudolpho, 462
Sirhan, Sirhan, 242-243
Sinica, Judge John, 338
Sisco, Joseph J., 234, 584, 611, 655
Six Day War, see Arab-Israel War of 1967
“Six Million Dollar Man, The” (TV pro-
gram), 275
“Sixty Minutes” (TV program), 281-283,
318, 468, 477, 481, 485. 682, 693
Skokie march, 468, 469
Skouras, Spyros, 67
Slater, Leonard, 214, 406
Sloss, M. C., 769
Smilansky, Moshe, 150
Smith, Gerald L. K., 410, 435, 441
Smith, Hedrick, 345
Smith, Howard K., 422
Smith, Richard K., 563
Smith, Terence, 122, 173, 328, 334, 345,
432
Smith, W. L., 571
Snetsinger, John, 73, 84
Snow, Peter, 392-393
Socialist International, 433
Socrates, 458
Soha Weekly News, 224
900 INDEX
Sokolow, Nahum, 19
Solh, Takieddin, 630
Solomon, Anthony M., 236
Solomon, Haym, 774
Solomon, King, 76!
Solomon, William R., 251
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 524
Sonneborn, Rudolf G., 212, 406
Sonneborn Institute, 406
Sons of Liberty Boycott Committee, 750
Sorensen, Theodore, 549
Sorrow and the Pity, The (motion picture),
466
Souki, Samir, 362
Source, The (Michener), 307
Soustelle, Jacques, 428
South End (newspaper), 442-443
Southerland, Daniel, 181
Southern California Council for Soviet
Jewry, 602, 603
Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
N17
Southern Illinois University, 275
Soviet Academy of Sciences, 522
Soviet-American trade agreement of
1972, 526
Soviet Jewry Action Committee, 514
Spanel, A. N., 231
Spanel International, Ltd., 231
Speakes, Larry, 730-731, 741
Special Emergency UJA Fund, 139
Spectator, The (magazine), 411
“Spectrum” (radio program), 450
Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 505, 509
Spender, Stephen, 483
Spiegel, Der, 329, 473
Spiegel, Daniel L., 260, 261
Spiegel, Irving, 444
Spivak, Lawrence, 221
Spokane (Washington) Central
Club, 213
Springer, Axel, 472
Squadron, Howard, 741
Stalin, Joseph, 40, 47, 49, 513
Standard Oit of California, 601-602
Star, the Cross, and the Swastika, The (Cozzi),
501
Stauffer, Thomas R., 626
Stein, Eleanor, 292
Stein, Herbert, 235, 790
Stein, Jacob D., 432, 624
Stein and Day (publisher), 306
Steiner, George, 741, 760
Steingut, Stanley, 751, 790
Stephens, Robert, 550
Stern, Abraham, 362, 398
Stern College, 430
Stern Gang, 52, 60, 153, 154, 156, 191,
308, 360, 369-370, 371, 397-398
Stern (publication), 311
Stettimus, Edward R., Jr., 38, 39, 45, 65
Stevens, Robert, 552, 554-555
Stevenson, Adlai, 537, 539, 540
Lions
Stevenson, Adlai, III, 576, 680, 711
Stewart, Desmond, 12
Stimson, Henry L., 36-37
Stone, I. F., 136, 301, 483
Stone, Richard, 685, 686
Story of the Jeursh Defense League, The (Ka-
hane), 395
Story of My Life (Dayan), 223
Strategic Air Command (SAC), 620
Stratton, William G., 56, 57
Straus, Jesse I., 769
Straus, Peter, 279, 280
Straus family, 774
Strauss, Lewis H., 235
Strauss, Robert S., 237, 704, 709, 716
Streicher, Julius, 499
Strober, Gerald S., 464
Sirupgie for Palestine, The (Hurewitz), 278
Study of History, A (Toynbee), 3
Suall, Irwin, 469
Suez Canal Company, 536
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 103, 631
Sulzberger, Arthur Hays, 343-344, 345
Sulzberger, Arthur O., 315, 345
Sulzberger, C. L., 226, 305, 315, 362
Sulzberger family, 219
Susskind, David, 221, 426, 482
Sutton, Rev. John, 498
Swissair, 585
Swiss League for Human Rights, 185-186
Swope, Herbert Bayard, 66
Sykes, Christopher, 120
Sykes, Sir Mark, 17
Sykes-Picot Agreement, 17-18
Symington, Stuart, 241, 250
Synagogue Council of America, 227, 233,
O78. 413, 490-492, 502, 579, 664, 671
Szulc, Tad, 299
Tabas, Kamal Amin, 366
Tadmor, Joshua, 366
Taft, Robert A., 60, 250, 663
Talbot, Phillips, 752
Talese, Gay, 344
Talleyrand, Prince de, 664
Talmadge, Herman, 252
Talmon, Ya'cov, 194-195
Tami, 730
Tamimi, Sheik Rajab Bayyoud, 719
Tamraz, Roger, 338
Tammuz 17, 726
Tanenbaum, Rabbi Marc, 417, 490-492,
493, 497, 499. 502, 503-504
Tanner, Henry, 426
Tapia, Viscount de, 359
Tardini, Msgr. Domencio, 510-511
Tanki, Abdullah, 609
Tass (Soviet press agency), 521
Taweel, Raymonda, 173, 708-709
Tawil, Ibrahim, 738
Taylor, Alan, 761
Taylor, Elizabeth, 208
Taylor, Myron C., 509
Tekoah, Yosef, 149-150, 325
Tel Aviv University, 761
Tell, Abdullah, 303
Temple Congregation Ben Jehuda (Kan-
sas City), $7
Temple Emanu-El, 479
Temple Shalom, 441
Temple University, 480-481
Teplitz, Rabbi Saul, 277
Terzi, Zehdi, 717
Thalberg, Irving, 222
Thant, U, 553, 588
Thatcher, Margaret, 806
There Goes the Middle East, 121
They Fought Back, 463
Thieu, Nguyen Van, 334
Thimmesch, Nick, 255
Third Reich in Perspective, The, 481
Thirteenth Tribe, The (Koestler), 760-761
Thomas, Norman, 4, 422
Thompson, Dorothy, 418-420, 422
Thorp, Willard L., 71
Three Popes and the Jews (Lapide), 512
Tiede, Tom, 260
Time (magazine), 133, 138, 173-174, 204,
214, 219, 225, 237, 278-279, 296-297,
313, 329, 447, 463, 479, 519-520, 685,
690, 723, 734, 799, 802-803
Tirpitz, Alfred von, 406
Tisserant, Cardinal Eugene, 508
Tito, Marshal, 588
Titus, Emperor, 760
Tleme, 730
To Jerusalem and Back (Bellow), 760
“Today” (TV program), 221, 279
Todd, Mike, 208
Toland, John, 463
Toledano, Shmuel, 113
Tolschus, Otto, 477
Tomb of the Patriarchs, 192
Topping, Seymour, 345
Toronto Globe and Mail, 436, 442
Toronto Telegram, 517-518
“To Tell the Truth” (TV program), 275
Toth, Joe, 572
Toth, Stephen, 563-564, 572
Touhy, William, 277
Tournier, Paul, 101
Toynbee, Dr. Arnold, 3, 96, 291, 422, 759,
780
Tozer, Derrick, 115
Trans-World Airlines (TWA), 585
Treaty of Fnendship and Cooperation
with the Soviet Union (Egypt-U.S.S.R.),
649
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 462
Trifa, Bishop Valerian D., 482
Triumph Company, 217
TRSSCOMS (radio device), 562
TRT Telecommunications Company, 231
Trudeau, Pierre, 785
True (magazine), 405
Truman, Harry, 45, 46-100, 250, 350, 354,
INDEX 901
422, 423, 425, 435, 535, 542, 550, 594, 631,
653, 733, 788
Truman, Margaret, 62, 63, 69-70, 77, 87-
88, 369-37
Truman, The Jewish Vote and the Creation of
Israel (Snetsinger), 73
Tsemel, Lea, 181, 183
Tshombe, Moise, 551
Tuchman, Barbara, 69
Tucker, Robert W., 637, 723
Tuéni, Ghassan, 670
Tunney, John V., 260, 603
Tuqan, Fadwa, 146
Turner, Stansfield, 575
TI’ Guide, 219, 276, 287, 475
Twain, Mark, 239
20th Century Fox, 222
Twenty-One Hours at Munich (TV film), 380
Tydings, Senator Millard, 262
Udall, Morris, 332, 651
Unger, Raphi, 299
Unholy Land, The (Forrest), 436
Union of American Hebrew Congrega-
tions, 685
Union News Company, 220
Unitarian Church, 439, 443
Unitarian Universalist Ministers Associa-
uon, 306, 443
United Arusts, 222
United Church of Canada, 437, 442
United Church Observer, 435-437, 438, 44},
499
United Farm Workers, 231
United Fruit Company, 231
United Hebrew Congregation, 495
United Jewish Appeal (UJA), 61, 92, 140,
207, 209, 214, B16, 257, 263, 276, 287,
294, 300, 453, 467, 484, 531, 543, 549,
592, 630, 632, 703, 744, 747, 790, 802-803
United Jewish Council, 293
United Nations, 2, 49, 59-62, 65-69, 78-79,
82, 90-92, 97, 103-104, 111, 118-119, 130,
152, 153, 156-157, 160, 163, 173, 176, 188,
191, 193, 198, 226, 229, 250, 253, 256, 264,
266, 278-279, 287, 289-291, 325, 326, 362,
368, 387, 391, 404, 408, 411, 446, 447, 488,
494, 514, 526, 535, 539, 543, 545, 569, 596,
599-600, 611-612, 620, 627, 636, 645-647,
649-650, 651, 674, 676-677, 679, 681, 683,
691, 708, 717, 725, 738, 742, 746, 747, 749,
ee 758, 777, 780, 782, 788, 799, 802, 804,
80
United Nations Association of the U.S.,
237, 644
United Nations Charter, 693
United Nations Commission on the Status
of Women, 450
United Nations Committee on Exercise of
Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian
People, 684
United Nations
Economic and Social
902 INDEX
Council, 542
United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
166, 327, 328, 491
United Nations Human Rights Commis-
sion, 186, 335, 673
United Nations International Children’s
Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 327, 328
United Nations International Forces in
Lebanon (UNIFIL), 726
United Nations Non-Governmental Orga-
nization Committee, 407
United Nations Palestine Commission, 75
United Nations Relicf and Works Agency
(UNRWA), 107, 120, 193, 198, 304-305
United Nations Resolution, 193, 242, 277,
338, 339, 340, 425, 516, 583, 589, 614, 618,
619, 620, 641, 647, 688-689, 706, 707,717,
719, 720-721, 726, 739, 740, 778, 784, 806
United Nations Security Council, 70, 71,
73-75, 78, 149-150, 163, 312, 408, 543, 553,
561, 579, 583, 598, 599, 600, 611,612,618,
620, 630, 633, 641, 646, 647, 650, 654, 683,
707, 715, 717, 720, 721, 730, 737, 738, 739,
752, 806
United Nations Special Committee on
Human Rights, 177
United Nations Special Committee to In-
vestigate Israeli Practices Affecting the
Human Rights of the Population of the
Occupied Territories, 186, 589, 684
United Nations Truce Supervision Orga-
nization, 536
United Press International (UPI), 225-
226, 303, 314, 362. 379, 505, 523, 574
United States Bishop's Office for Catholic-
Jewish Relations, 496
United States Committee for Refugees,
49)
United States Department of Commerce,
787
United States Holocaust Memorial Council,
733
United States Immigration and Naturali-
zation Service, 482
United States Information Service Library,
307-308, 364
United States-Israeli Memorandum of Un-
derstanding, 737
United States Naval Supply Depot (Ha-
wail), 406
US News and World Report, 119, 219, 313,
652-653, 799
United States Rapid Deployment Force,
732, 808
United States Steel Company, 230
United States Supreme Court, 235, 406
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
500
Universal Pictures, 222, 417
Universalist Ministers Associauion, 500
University of Beirut, 789
University of California at Los Angeles,
292
University of California at Santa Barbara,
415
University Lodge (B'nai B'rith), 454
University of Maryland, 352
University of Toronto, 436, 441
Unruh, Jesse, 227
Untermeyer, Louis, 774
Uris, Leon, 221-222, 288, 307, 308, 477
Users Association, 536
Uzan, Aharon, 129
Valera, Eamon de, 757
Van Anda, Carr, 345
Vance, Cyrus, 353, 354, 681, 683, 685, 688,
689, 690, 692, 694, 699, 703, 704, 713, 716,
726
Vandenberg, Arthur H., 785
Van Dusen, Henry, 422
Van Horne, Harriet, 447, 463
Vanity Fair (publishers), 786
Van Nostrand Reinhold (publishers), 220
Van Zile, Carrie, 288
Vanety (publication), 225
Vatican II. 493, 497, 501, 502, 504-505
Velasco, José, 461-462
Velie, Lester, 308
Verdi, Giuseppe, 479
Versailles Treaty, 30, 108
Vespasian, Emperor, 760
Vietnam War, 233, 267
Viking Press, 220
Village Voice, 346, 445, 454
Village Leagues, 736, 737
Villons du Bal, Les (motion picture), 466
Vladivostok Summit, 637
Vocational School of the Underprivileged,
240
Vogue (magazine), 219
Volhische Beobachter (newspaper), 499
Von Hoffman, Nicholas, 315
Voyage of the Damned, The (motion picture),
467
WABC.-TV, 467
Wadsworth, George, 79
Wagner, Robert F., 38, 66, 94-95
Wagner, Robert F., Jr., 245, 606, 692
Wailing Wall, 166-167
Waldheim, Kurt, 390, 611-612, 694, 698
Walinsky, Adam, 226
Wallace, George, 246
Wallace, Henry, 80, 95
Wallace, Mike, 221, 281-283, 318, 477,
693
Wall Street Journal, 208, 231, 458, 600
Walters, Barbara, 221, 300, 697
Walters, James, 120-121
Walzer, Michael, 673
Wanderer (publication), 477
Wanted: The Search for Nazis in Amenca
(Blum), 464
War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, The (Da-
widowicz), 462
Warburg, Felix, 770
Warburg, Sir Sigmund, 140
Warburg family, 774
Ward, Artemus, 3-4
Warner, John, 208, 222
Warner Bros., 222
Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit, 414
Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 460, 472, 479,
759
Washington, George, 533
Washington Cathedral, 434, 435
Washington National Press Club, 722
Washington Post, 52, 219, 225-226, 261,
272, 292, 324, 331, 336, 358, 368-369,
373, 378-379, 388, 434, 445, 447, 477,
505, 512, 546, 600, 602, 650, 672-673,
688, 779
Washington Star, 136, 219
Waskow, Arthur, 744
Wasserman, Lew, 464
Watergate, 4, 267. 422
Waterside Workers Federation of Aus-
tralia, 393
Watkins, David, 183
Waxman, Chaim I., 496
Wayne State University, 442-443
Wazzan, Shafik al-, 736
WCBS (radio station), 630
Wechsler, James, 249, 388, 410, 447
WEEI-TV, 357
“Weekend” (TV program), 275
Weicker, Lowell P., Jr.. 711-712
Weinberger, Casper, 236, 730, 809
Weinstein, Jack, 394
Weisenfeld, Jack, 488
Weisgal, Meyer, 419
Weiss, Rudolf, 465
Weissman, Rozanne, 478
Weizaecker, Ernst von, 511
Weizman, Ezer, 144, 349, 558, 559, 568, 705,
708, 713, 719, 784, 802
Weizmann, Dr. Chaim, 13-14, 19, 21, 23,
24, 25, 26, 37, 44, 74, 80, 83, 84, 88, 89,
90, 131, 157. 187, 200, 341, 342, 411,
484, 760, 762, 769, 784
Weizmann, Vera, 86
Weizmann Institute, 240, 341-342
Wellesley College, 653
Wells, H. G., 10
West, Stewart, 393
Westminster College, 318, 447
Wexler, Dr. William, 430
What Price Israel? (Lilienthal), 308, 456,
761-762
Wheelus Air Base, 580
Whelan, Grover, 246
While Six Million Died (Morse), 462
White, Theodore, 226
Whitman, Samuel, 291
“Who's Who” (TV program), 481
Wicker, Tom, 378
Wiesel, Elie, 366, 395, 463, 464, 476, 477-
INDEX 903
478, 479, 482, 749
Wiesenthal, Simon, 481-482
Wilhelm I], Kaiser. 11
Wilkins, Fraser, 81
Wiliam Jewell College, 213
William Patterson College, 395, 749
Williams, Senator Harrison A., Jr., 262
Williamsburg (ship), 70
Willkie, Wendell, 654
Wilson, Evan, 47-48
Wilson, Malcolm, 244
Wilson, Woodrow, 20, 29, 30, 81, 246,
435, 544, 768, 773, 775
Winchell, Walter, 410, 424
WINS (radio station), 224, 630
Winters, Shelley, 222
Wise, Rabbi Stephen, 37-38, 40, 41, 47,
49, 63, 90, 484
With Aly Own Eyes (Langer), 174
WMCA (radio station), 279-280, 374-
375, 408
WNET-TV, 288, 465, 467, 469
WNEW-TY, 417
Wohlberg, Dr. Gerald W., 451
Wolf, Rabbi Arnold, 686
Wolf, Thomas H., 277
Wolf family, 213
Wolff, Lester L.. 175. 430
Wolfowitz, Paul, 725
Wolfson, Sir Isaac, 140
Wolper, David, 249
Wolsteuer, Charles, 251
Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Vir-
ginia, 456
Women’s Training Center of Ramallah,
737
Women's Wear Daily, 223
Woodward, Joanne, 520
World Affairs Council of Northern Cali-
fornia, 684
World Bank, 536
World Conference of Christians for Pales-
tine, 497
World Council of Churches, 491-492, 497
World Court, 572
World Federation of the Bergen-Belsen
Associations, 477
World Jewish Congress, 413, 527, 694,
748, 749
World War I, 13, 15-16, 17, 26, 27, 668, 766
World War II, 104, 117, 124, 310, 422, 425,
460, 462, 508-509, 515, 524, 617, 781
World Zionist Congress of 1951, 105
World Zionist Organization, 25, 37, 88,
104, 109, 124, 527
Worthington, Peter, 517-518
WOR.-TV, 467
WPIX-TV, 300
be (radio station), 320, 438, 439, 440,
479
WRFM (radio station), 283-284
Wright-Compton Resolution, 37, 56
Wynn, Wilton, 313
904 INDEX
Yaacov, Eli Ben, 386
Yadin, Yigal, 144, 347, 689
Yad Vashem Memorial, 460-461, 472,
483, 677, 696
Yale, William, 16, 422
Yalta Conference, 40, 49
Yamant, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki, 281, 604—
605, 606, 625-626
Yankelovich, Daniel, 226
Yariv, Aharon, 361, 568, 635
Vedtot Aharonot (newspaper), 112, 113,
299
Yegar, Moshe, 498-499
Yehuda, Ben, 147
Yelin-Mor, Nathan, 360
Yeshiva University, 268, 430
Yiddish language, 516, 517
Yoder, Edwin, Jr., 219
eee War, see Arab-Israel War of
1973
Yorty, Sam, 247-248
Yost, Charles, 284, 551, 552, 554, 589
Younes, Mahmoud, 536
Young, Andrew, 227, 694-695, 716-717
Young Labor Association, 392
Zablocki, Clement J., 254-255
Zalaznich, Sheldon, 299
Zaler, Arnold, 267
Zayad, Tawfig, 204
Zeitler, Yehoshva, 360
Zelden, Paul, 279-280
Zimbalist, Efrem, 774
Zim Navigation Lines, 140
Zinder, Harry, 84
Zionist Idea, The (Hertzberg), 492
Zionist Organization of America, 21, 57,
158, 255, 264, 288-289, 331, 375, 453,
495, 541, 598, 634
Zola, Emile, 12, 431
Zolli, Rabbi Israel, 508
Zuckerman, William, 419, 541
Zukor, Adolph, 222
Zumwalt, Elmo R.., Jr., 232, 793
Zur Nathan kibbutz, 192
EE
About the Book
Speaking with a moral authority few Christians can command, author-
historian Alfred Lilienthal gives the background of the forces that have
already brought four wars to the turbulent Middle East since the creation of
the state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world and the displacement of the
Palestinians. He points out how the politicalization of the Jewish people,
confusing ‘“‘home”’ with “‘state’’ and “‘religion” with ‘nationalism,’ under-
lies the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Behind the increasing involvement of the United States he finds the
meticulous organization of Zionism reaching into the White House,
mobilizing public opinion, exercising control over Congress, repressing
opposition through anti-Semitic labeling, and exerting inordinate influence
over the media of information. This has resulted in the subordination of
foreign policy to the domestic quest for votes, endangering American
national interests and world peace. Dr. Lilienthal is a forceful advocate of
the proposition that Israeli nationalism can find a modus vivendi with the
Palestinians through the de-Zionization of Israel and the establishment of a
secular, binational Palestinian State. This provocative, timely book presents
arguments that cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with human rights,
the increasing U.S. dependence on Arab oil, and the dangers of nuclear
confrontation. With few exceptions, all important Americans from all strata
of life enter the story.
About the Author
Dr. Lilienthal, a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia Law School,
served with the Department of State and had a tour of Army duty in the
Middle East during World War IT. His article ‘‘Israel’s Flag is Not Mine” in
the Reader’s Digest broughta response from all parts of the world. His 1953
book What Price Israel? forecast the tensions and chaos soon to strike the
area. There Goes the Middle East and The Other Side of the Coin followed.
Dr. Lilienthal has annually toured the Middle East, returning from
war-torn Beirut in July 1978. He has lectured on college campuses and
before women’s groups and service clubs in forty states and abroad. His
documentary film, ‘Phe Turbulent Middle East,” has been widely shown.
He has been a frequent guest on radio and television talk shows and news
programs.
Author of many magazine and newspaper articles and contributor to
three anthologies, since 1968 he has published and edited the monthly
newsletter Middle East Perspective and is an accredited correspondent at
the United Nations. No living American writer has put more words into
print on this strategic area than this author.
THE ZIONIST CONNECTION II
What Price Peace?
“This book will command wide attention
and give rise to considerable controversy.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“The Zionist Connection is a valuable
book for the points it makes und the
questions it raises.”
—Baltimore Sun
“A timely and provocative study of the
competing claims of Israeli Zionists and
Arab Palestinians to a homeland... an
extensive and authoritative presentation...”
—Anmerican Library Assoc., Booklist
“He should be read by everyone concerned
with the status of world peace regardless of
any inherent antipathy to his viewpoint
Since principles opposing Lilienthal’s in-
sights have left our Middle East foreign
policy in wreckage for 30 years, his views at
least deserve the attention of serious
readers.”
—El Paso Times
“Alfred Lilienthal is as knowledgeable as
anyone alive about the Middle East and its
problems ....Thig is a provocative book and
provides another dimension to a problem
that defies a peaceful solution.”
—Toronto Sun
“An amassment of facts that tell against
Israel and the Zionists...a readable book for
those who have at heart one of the central
issues of our times.”
—National Catholic Register
“A highly controversial volume which
must not be ignored. It should be studied by
all who seek enlightenment concerning the
Middle East, and especially by government
officials, Congressmen, and Senators.”
—The Annals of The American Academy
“Lilienthal’s sincerity of purpose,
scholarliness and objective treatment of a
subject that really causes frequently un-
necessary but invariably false labeling and
analyses, permeate every chapter. I am
prepared to acclaim this book enthusias-
tically.”
—General Albert C. Wedemeyer
“A well-documented study that contains
much information that is important and
generally unknown in the United States
Particularly valuable in his discussioi of the
distorting filter through which the .sraeli-
Arab conflict passes and the policy conse-
quences of these very serious misrepresen-
tations.”
—Noam Chomsky
“A prodigious performance. It covers the
story of Zionism in Palestine from every
angle. The amount of research included ts
amazing, and authority is quoted for every
statement. No viewpoint is overlooked. It
should be read by every responsible citizenin
the Western democracies.”
—Sir John Glubb
(Glubb Pasha)
“This latest Lilienthal book should be on
the night table of every American who is
alarmed by: the loss of integrity in the U.S.
and justifiably concerned with the welfare of
his country.”
— Moshe Menuhin
“Fascinating and deeply disturbing
reading.”
—Quaker Life
“This book by a@ scholarly and prolific
writer is an indispensable source of detail
about the central issues in the Middle East.”
—Events (London Weekly)
“For Alfred Lilienthal, who has devoted
his life to the anti-Zionist cause, this is the
culminating masterwork.”
—Foreign Affairs
ISBN: 0-930244-04-4
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