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The History of US-Israel Relations

The History of US-Israel Relations

Part One

How the “special relationship” was created

Alison Weir is Executive Director If Americans Knew and President of theCouncil for the National Interest. She is available to give presentations on this topic and can be reached at contact@ ifamericansknew.orgor inform@ cnionline.org. Part Two of this article will be published in the coming months.

Alison Weir
September 2011

While many people are led to believe that US support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests (an analysis that benefits Israel and is particularly promoted by Israel partisans and former partisans), the facts don’t support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. experts opposed Israel and its founding movement. They were simply outmaneuvered and eventually replaced.

Like many American policies, U.S. Middle East policies are driven by a special interest lobby. However, the Israel Lobby, as it is called today in the U.S.[1], consists of vastly more than what most people envision by the word “lobby.”

It is considerably more powerful, far more pervasive, and consistently more deceptive than any other. And even though the movement for Israel has been operating in the U.S. for over a hundred years, most Americans are completely unaware of this movement and its attendant ideology – a measure of its unique power over public knowledge.

The success of this movement to achieve its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering. It has also been at almost unimaginable cost.

It has led to massive tragedy in the Middle East: a hundred year war of violence and loss; sacred land soaked in sorrow.

What is less widely known is how profoundly damaging this movement has been to the United States itself.

It has targeted every sector of American society for manipulation; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and almost catastrophically costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; determined which candidates may be contenders for the U.S. presidency; promoted bigotry toward an entire population, religion and culture; caused Americans to be exposed to escalating risk; and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause) to foment irrational fears that are enabling the dismemberment of some of our nation’s most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.

All this for a nation that today has reached a peak population of a little over seven million people; smaller than New Jersey.[2]

The beginnings

The Israel Lobby is just the tip of an older and far larger iceberg known as “political Zionism,” an international movement that began in the late 1800s with the goal of creating a Jewish state somewhere in the world. In 1897 this movement, led by a European journalist named Theodore Herzl[3], coalesced in the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basle, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing approximately 120 groups the first year; 900 the next.[4]

While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, and Texas,[5] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 95 percent Muslim and Christian, who owned 99 percent of the land.[6] As numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show, these non-Jews were simply going to be pushed out – financially, if possible; by the sword if necessary.[7]

The Board of Deputies of American Israelites

In the U.S. Zionism largely began in the 1880s, although an earlier project with both a domestic and international focus called “The Board of Delegates of American Israelites” was organized in 1861, which coalesced to block an effort by the Union during the Civil War to prepare a constitutional amendment declaring America a Christian nation.[8]

In 1870 the group organized protest rallies around the country and lobbied Congress to take action against reported Romanian pogroms that had killed “thousands” of Jews. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that such reports might be exaggerated, but under pressure from “Israeliete” board, the Senate ordered the committee to take up the matter with the State Department. Eventually, it turned out the total killed had been zero.[9]

In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state began popping up around the country. Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade.[10] What was to become the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[11]

Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basle, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in almost every American city with a large Jewish population.[12]

By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.[13] Between December 1897 and the summer of 1898 numerous Zionist societies were founded in the East and the Midwest. In 1898 the first annual conference of American Zionists convened in New York on, ironically, the 4th of July, where they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ).[14]

Turkey ambassadorship: “quasi-Jewish domain”

In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, establishing a precedent that every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed for the next 30 years. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents recognized the importance of the Turkish embassy for Jewish Americans:

“...especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government. During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain.”[15]

By 1910 the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen. Even in its infancy, when it was still considered relatively weak, Zionism was becoming a movement to which Congressmen, particularly in the eastern cities, began to listen.[16]

It continued to expand, and by 1914 several additional Zionist groups had cropped up. The religious Mizrachi faction was formed in 1903, the Labor party in 1905 and Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, in 1912. And this was just the beginning.[17]

A Zionist official writing in 1912 proudly proclaimed “the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies.”[18]

The State Department Objects

The State Department – not dependent on votes and campaign donations, and charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity – were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. In memo after memo, year after year, U.S. diplomatic and military experts pointed out that Zionism was counter to both U.S. interests and principles.[19]

Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, when the Zionist Literary Society approached President Taft for an endorsement, Knox turned them down flat, noting that “problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.”[20]

While Zionists suffered one small setback in 1912, they garnered a far more significant victory in the same year; one that was to have enormous consequences both internationally and in the United States and that was part of a pattern of influence that continues through today.

Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the “Parushim”

In 1912 prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis, who was to go on to become a Supreme Court Justice, became a Zionist. Within two years he became head of the international Zionist Central Office, which had moved to America from Germany a little while before.[21]

While Brandeis is an unusually well-known Supreme Court Justice, very few Americans are aware of his significant and clandestine role in World War I, of his connection to Palestine, and of his actions that provide a kernel of factual basis for claims made decades later by antiwar activists called “anti-Semitic” for suggesting them.

Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work on the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Author Peter Grose writes:

“Brandeis created an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society. As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath 'to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims.'”[22]

At the secret initiation ceremony, the new member was told:

"You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation."[23]

‘We must work silently, through education and infection’

An early recruiter explained: “An organization which has the aims we have must be anonymous, must work silently, and through education and infection rather than through force and noise.” He wrote that to work openly would be "suicidal" for their objective.

Grose reports their methodology:

“The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause long before official government planners had come up with anything. For example, as early as November 1915, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a former declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.”[24]

Brandeis was a close personal friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this position to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.

In 1916 President Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Although Brandeis officially resigned from all his private clubs and affiliations, including his leadership of Zionism, behind the scenes he continued this Zionist work, receiving daily reports in his Supreme Court chambers and issuing orders to his loyal lieutenants.[25]

When the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) was reorganized in 1918, Brandeis was listed as its “honorary president.” However, he was more than just “honorary.”

As historian Donald Neff writes, “Through his lieutenants, he remained the power behind the throne.” One of these lieutenants was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another particularly well-regarded justice, and another whose Zionist activities have largely gone unnoted.[26]

Zionist membership expanded dramatically during World War I, despite the efforts of some Jewish anti-Zionists, who called the movement a “foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.”[27]

World War I & the Balfour Declaration

Zionists played a role in America’s entry into World War I. Whether this was a major role, as Zionists claimed and British leaders believed, or a minor one, is unclear.

What is clear, however, is that: (1) The Zionist role, whether large or small, in the American entry into Britain’s side in the “Great War” was a significant factor in world history,[28] and (2) this fact has been almost completely covered up in U.S. history classes.

From the very beginning of their movement, Zionists realized that if they were to succeed in their goal of creating a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited by non-Jews, they needed Great Power backing. They tried the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine at the time, but were turned down (although they were told that Jews could settle throughout other parts of the Ottoman empire and become Turkish citizens).[29]

They then turned to Britain, which was also initially less than enthusiastic. Famous English Arabists such as Gertrude Bell pointed out that Palestine was Arab and that Jerusalem was sacred to all three major monotheistic faiths.

Future Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon similarly stated that Palestine was already inhabited by half a million Arabs who would “not be content to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the latter.”[30]

However, once the British were embroiled in World War I, and particularly during 1916, a disastrous year for the Allies, Zionists were able to play a winning card. They promised the British government that Zionists in the U.S. would push America to enter the war on the side of the British, if the British promised them they would support a Jewish home in Palestine afterward.[31]

This pledge helped push Britain to support Zionism and resulted in the famous “Balfour Declaration,” a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild (which, while signed by British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, was actually written by secret Zionist Leopold Amery[32]).

In this declaration Britain promised to “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to “use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” It then qualified this somewhat by stating: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The “non-Jewish communities” were 90 percent of Palestine’s population at that time.

While this was a less than ringing endorsement of Zionism, Zionists considered it a major breakthrough as it cracked open a door that they would later force wider and wider open.

These Balfour-WWI negotiations are referred to in various documents. For example, Samuel Landman, a leader of the Zionist-revisionists and secretary of the world Zionist organization, described them in a 1935 article in World Jewry:

“After an understanding had been arrived at between Sir Mark Sykes and [Zionists] Weizmann and Sokolow, it was resolved to send a secret message to Justice Brandeis that the British Cabinet would help the Jews to gain Palestine in return for active Jewish sympathy and for support in the USA for the Allied cause, so as to bring about a radical pro-Ally tendency in the United States."[33]

British Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet in 1923, reminded his colleagues:

“The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world... and it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists...did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.”[34]

Former British Prime Minister Lloyd George similarly referred to this deal, telling a British commission in 1935:

“Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”

American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, writes of Balfour:

“The pledge was given to the Jews largely for the purpose of enlisting Jewish support in the war and of forestalling a similar promise by the Central Powers.”[35]

In 1917 President Wilson, who had been voted into office by Americans who believed his promises that he would keep them out of the war, changed course and plunged the U.S. into a tragic and pointless European conflict in which hundreds of thousands were killed and injured.[36] Over 1,200 American citizens who opposed the war despite the rousing song about “Over There” were rounded up and imprisoned, some for years.[37]

Paris Peace Conference 1919: Zionists defeat Christian leaders’ calls for self-determination

The influence of Brandeis and other Zionists in the U.S. had enabled Zionists to form an alliance with Britain, one of the world’s great powers, a remarkable achievement for a non-state group and a measure of Zionists’ immense power. As historian Kolsky states, the Zionist movement was now “an important force in international politics.”[38]

After the war was over, American Zionists sent a delegation to Paris to join with other Jewish organizations at the conference, particularly the World Zionist Organization, to lobby for a Jewish “home”[39] in Palestine and to push for Balfour wording to be incorporated in the peace accords.[40] They were strengthened by the fact that the American delegation to the Peace Conference also contained a number of highly placed Zionists.

Zionists were opposed in Paris by American Christian leaders from Mideast churches and colleges, a group that consistently supported Palestinian rights to self-determination through the years. Despite their efforts, joined by numerous prominent Christian leaders – including two of the most celebrated pastors of their day – they were, as a a pro-Israel author notes, “simply outgunned.”[41]

The most prominent American in the Middle East at the time, Dr. Howard Bliss, President of Beirut’s Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), traveled to Paris to urge forming a commission to determine what the people of the Mideast wanted for themselves, a suggestion that was embraced by the U.S. diplomatic staff in Paris.[42]

Princeton’s Professor Philip Brown asserted that Zionism would be disastrous for both Arabs and Jews and went to Paris to lobby against it.[43]

William Westermann, director of the State Department’s Western Asia Division, similarly opposed the Zionist position, writing that "[it] impinges upon the rights and the desires of most of the Arab population of Palestine.” He and other US diplomats felt that Arab claims were much more in line with Wilson’s principles of self-determination and circulated Arab material.[44]

President Wilson decided to send a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation in person. After spending six weeks in the area interviewing both Jews and Palestinians, the commission, known as the King-Crane commission41, recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.[45]

The commissioners stated that the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine could be accomplished only with “the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” pointing out that to subject the Palestinians “to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle [of self-determination] and of the peoples’ rights...”[46]

They went on to point out that “the well-being and development” of the people in the region formed “a sacred trust, that the people of the region should become completely free, and that the national government should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.”[47]

The report also noted:

“...the places which are most sacred to Christians–those having to do with Jesus–and which are also sacred to Moslems, are not only not sacred to Jews, but abhorrent to them. It is simply impossible, under these circumstances, for Moslems and Christians to feel satisfied to have these places in Jewish hands.”[48]

Zionists through Brandeis dominated the situation, however, and managed to have the report suppressed until years after the Peace Accords were enacted. As a pro-Israel historian noted,“ with the burial of the King-Crane Report, a major obstacle in the Zionist path disappeared.”47 [49] The US delegation was forced to follow Zionist directives.48 [50]

Claiming “Polish anti-Semitism” to promote Zionism: Brandeis and Frankfurter vs U.S. diplomat

Long before Hitler, Zionists were pushing alleged European “anti-Semitism” as a way to procure support for their movement. In 1919 a brilliant young diplomat named Hugh Gibson was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to Poland. After he arrived in Poland, he began to report that there were far fewer anti-Semitic incidents than being alleged. He wrote his mother: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.”[51]

His dispatches came to the attention of Brandeis and his protégé (and future supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, who demanded a meeting with Gibson. Gibson later wrote of their accusations:

“I had [Brandeis and Frankfurter claimed] done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said...that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work.... They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”[52]

Frankfurter hinted that if Gibson continued these reports, Zionists would block his confirmation by the Senate.

Gibson was outraged and sent a 21-page letter to the State Department. In it he shared his suspicions that this was part of “a conscienceless and cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad that they must turn to Zionism for relief.”

In 1923 another American diplomat in Poland, Vice Consul Monroe Kline, confirmed Gibson’s analysis:

“It is common knowledge that Zionists are continually and constantly spreading propaganda, through their agencies over the entire world, of political and religious persecution,” adding “The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way.”[53]

By 1922 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S. and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million.52 [54] The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 only one New York Yiddish newspaper failed to qualify as Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927.[55]

Zionists and Nazis

Using “anti-Semitism” to promote the Zionist agenda continued during the rise of Hitler, when Zionists sabotaged refugee efforts and at times collaborated with Nazis in their quest to convince the world of the necessity of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.[56]

Journalist Erskine B. Childers, son of a former Irish Prime Minister, wrote:

“One of the most massively important features of the entire Palestine struggle was that Zionism deliberately arranged that the plight of the wretched survivors of Hitlerism should be a ‘moral argument’ which the West had to accept. This was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP [displaced persons] camps. It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle – it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.”[57]

When FDR made several efforts to provide havens for Nazi refugees, Zionists opposed these projects because they did not include Palestine. Morris Ernst, FDR’s international envoy for refugees, wrote:

“...active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration in order to undermine political Zionism... Zionist friends of mine opposed it.”[58]

Ernst wrote that he found the same fanatical reaction among all Jewish groups and their leaders, who, he found, were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.[59]

FDR finally gave up, telling Ernst: “We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.”[60]

Fabricating “anti-Semitism” in Iraq

While Zionists wished a massive “in-gathering of Jews,” most Iraqi Jews wanted nothing to do with it, Iraq’s Chief Rabbi stating: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism. Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1,000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation.”[61]

Zionism, worked to change that. Author and former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland reports:

"In an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in the synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel... most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population."[62]

Similarly, Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author who later lived in Israel and the U.S., writes:

“Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it.”[63]

The modern Israel Lobby is born

The immediate precursor to today’s lobby began in the early 1940s under the leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, originally from Lithuania. He created the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which by 1943 had acquired a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread.

In addition to this money, Zionists had become influential in creating the United Jewish Appeal in 1939, giving them access to the organization’s gargantuan financial resources: $14 million in 1941, $150 million by 1948.[64]

With their extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, they launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.”[65] [66]

AZEC instructed activists to “make direct contact with your local Congressman or Senator” and to go after union members, wives and parents of servicemen, Jewish war veterans. They were provided with form letters to use and schedules of anti-zionist lecture tours to oppose and disrupt.

When Silver disliked a British move in 1945 that would be harmful to Zionists, AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements – the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches.[67]

Zionist action groups were organized at the grassroots level with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. Books, articles and academic studies were funded by AZEC; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. They targeted college presidents and deans and managed to get more than 150 to sign one of their petitions.[68]

As Rabbi Elmer Berger describes in his memoirs, there was a “ubiquitous propaganda campaign reaching just about every point of political leverage in the country.”[69]

In its 48th Annual Report the Zionist Organization of America bragged of the “immensity of our operations and their diversity. We reach into every department of American life...”[70]

Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding. Among other things, people were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured.[71]

When Berger and a colleague from the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism opposed a Zionist resolution in Congress, Emanuel Celler, a New York Democrat who was to serve in Congress for almost 50 years, told them: “They ought to take you b...s out and shoot you.”

Jacob Javits, another well-known Congressman, this one a Republican, told Zionist women: “We’ll fight to death and make a Jewish State in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.”[72]

When Jewish schools didn’t sufficiently promote the Zionist cause, Zionists would infiltrate their boards of directors. When this didn’t work, they would start their own pro-Zionist schools.[73]

In 1943-44 the ZOA distributed over a million leaflets and pamphlets to public libraries, chaplains, community centers, educators, ministers, writers and “others who might further the Zionist cause.”[74]

Zionist monthly sales of books totaled between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout 1944-45. Books by non-Jewish authors were subsidized by the Zionists and promoted jointly with commercial publishers, some making the nation’s best seller lists.[75]

Christian support is actively pushed

Silver and other Zionists played a significant role in creating Christian support for Zionism, a project Brandeis encouraged.[76] Secret Zionist funds, eventually reaching $150,000 in 1946, were used to revive an elitest Protestant group, the American Palestine Committee. Silver’s headquarters issued a directive:

“In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediate organized.”[77]

As an historian notes, their operations “were hardly autonomous. Zionist headquarters thought nothing of place newspaper advertisements on the clergymen’s behalf without bothering to consult them in advance, until one of the committee’s leaders meekly asked at least for prior notice before public statements were made in their name.”[78]

AZEC formed another group among clergymen, the Christian Council on Palestine. An internal AZEC memo stated that the aim of both groups was to “crystallize the sympathy of Christian America for our cause.”[79]

By the end of the World War II the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee boasted a membership of 6,500 public figures, including senators, congressmen, cabinet members, governors, state officers, mayors, jurists, clergymen, educators, writers, publishing, civic and industrial leaders.

Historian Richard Stevens points out that Christian support was largely gained by exploiting their wish to help people in need. The Zionists proclaimed “the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,” thus linking the refugee problem with Palestine as allegedly the only solution.[80]

Steven explains:

“The reason for this was clear. For while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favor of the Zionist cause through the refugee problems.”[81]

Few if any of these Christian supporters had any idea of the nature of Zionism and that the creation of the Jewish state would entail a massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of the non-Jews who made up the large majority of Palestine’s population, creating a new and much longer lasting refugee problem.

Nor did they learn that during and after Israel’s founding 1947-49 war, Zionist forces attacked a number of Christian sites. Author Donald Neff reports: [82]

“...after the capture by Jewish forces of Jaffa on May 13, 1948, two days before Israel’s birth, there was desecration of Christian churches. Father Deleque, a Catholic priest, reported:

“‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ He added that Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, ‘but their deeds do not correspond to their words.’

“On May 31, 1948, a group of Christian leaders comprising the Christian Union of Palestine publicly complained that Jewish forces had used 10 Christian churches and humanitarian institutions in Jerusalem as military bases and otherwise desecrated them. They added that a total of 14 churches had suffered shell damage, which killed three priests and made casualties of more than 100 women and children.

“The group’s statement said Arab forces had abided by their promise to respect Christian institutions, but that the Jews had forcefully occupied Christian structures and been indiscriminate in shelling churches.

“It said, among other charges, that ‘many children were killed or wounded’ by Jewish shells on the Convent of Orthodox Copts on May 19, 23 and 24; that eight refugees were killed and about 120 wounded at the Orthodox Armenian Convent at some unstated date; and that Father Pierre Somi, secretary to the Bishop, had been killed and two wounded at the Orthodox Syrian Church of St. Mark on May 16.”[83]

After Zionist soldiers invaded and looted a convent in Tiberias, the U.S. Consulate sent a bitter dispatch back to the State Department complaining of “the Jewish attitude in Jerusalem towards Christian institutions.’”[84]

State Department & Pentagon opposition

State Department and Pentagon analysts consistently opposed Zionism, considering it deeply harmful to US interests and counter to fundamental American principles. The view of American career Foreign Service Officer Evan M. Wilson, who had served as Minister-Consul General in Jerusalem, was typical:

“I came to the conclusion that for our government to advocate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine against the will of the majority of the inhabitants of that country (the Arabs) would be a mistake that would have an adverse effect upon world peace and upon U.S. interests.”[85]

Loy Henderson, director of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, was one of a many career American diplomats who frequently wrote of this. In a memo to Secretary of State James Byrnes after World War II, Henderson stated:

“....support by the Government of the United States of a policy favoring the settling up of a Jewish State in Palestine would be contrary to the wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants with respect to their form of government. Furthermore, it would have a strongly adverse effect upon American interests throughout the Near and Middle East....

He went on to emphasize:

“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the war.”[86]

When Zionists began a campaign to push a partition plan through the UN, in which 55 percent of Palestine would be given to a Jewish state, even though Jews represented only 30 percent of the inhabitants and owned only about 6 percent of the land,[87] Henderson strenuously recommended against supporting their proposal.

He stated that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and emphasized that it was “not based on any principle.” He went on to write:

“...[partition] would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future....[proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race...”[88]

Henderson noted that this was a fundamental violation of American principles, stating: “We have hitherto always held that in our foreign relations American citizens, regardless of race or religion, are entitled to uniform treatment.”[89]

On Nov 24th Loy Henderson circulated yet another anti-partition memorandum:

“I feel it again to be my duty to point out that it seems to me and all the members of my Office acquainted with the Middle East that the policy which we are following in New York at the present time is contrary to the interests of the United States and will eventually involve us in international difficulties of so grave a character that the reaction throughout the world, as well as in this country, will be very strong...”[90]

Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and threatening his family. They tried to pressure the State Department to, as one analyst described it,

“...play with him the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests were transferred to theatres of diplomatic activity where the Middle East was not an issue.”[91]

In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then officially under India). (In recent years, virtually every State Department country desk has typically been directed by a Zionist.)

Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He emphasized that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”[92]

He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.

In 1947 the CIA’s “Review of the World Situation as It Relates to the Security of the United States” reported that Zionist leadership, “exploiting widespread humanitarian sympathy” with Jews, was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East."[93]

George F. Kennan, the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, issued a top secret document entitled “Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with Respect to Palestine” on January 19, 1947 that outlined the enormous damage done to the US by the partition plan.

He cautioned that “important U.S. oil concessions and air base rights” could be lost through US support for partition and warned that the USSR stood to gain by the partition plan.

Kennan pointed out that because of Zionist-induced sponsorship of partition:

“U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has suffered a severe blow and US strategic interests in the Mediterranean and Near East have been seriously prejudiced. Our vital interests in those areas will continue to be adversely affected to the extent that we continue to support partition....”[94]

Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America's top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War” and who headed up a 1946 commission to try to come up with a solution for Palestine, later wrote about the power of the Zionist lobby in countering their efforts:

“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experienced had ended..... I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty”...... “in the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”[95]

Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.[96]

Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was another who strenuously opposed what he felt was a potentially disastrous Zionist agenda. Acheson biographer Robert Beisner writes that Acheson’s sympathies “were with Marshall and the Department professionals” and reports that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Author John Mulhall reports Acheson's strong opinion:

“...to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State... would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”[97]

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal also tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose the Zionists. He was outraged that Truman’s Mideast policy was based on what he called “squalid political purposes,” asserting that “United States policy should be based on United States national interests and not on domestic political considerations.”[98]

Forrestal represented the general Pentagon view when he said “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., a young Congressman, warned that the democratic party would lose if an anti-partition plan were proposed, Forrestal responded: “I think it is about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States.”[99]

Zionists attacked Forrestal, who had been a WWI Naval aviator, venomously, and Berger recalls that Forrestal became “the favorite whipping boy of the Zionist-dominated press.”

Zionist Walter Winchell and pro-Soviet Drew Pearson (Forrestal also opposed Stalin) launched vicious personal attacks.[100] At odds with Truman on a number of issues, in 1949 Forrestal was hospitalized in the National Naval Medical Center with a diagnosis of severe depression, where it was reported that he committed suicide. His brother, a businessman, did not believe this cause of death. A number of authors and analysts question this conclusion.[101]

The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, was yet another high level official who warned against the partition plan:

“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter–a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN’s own charter.” [102]

Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a sadly accurate prediction.

A report by the National Security Council warned that the Palestine turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the United States. A CIA report stressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and its oil resources.[103]

An earlier State Department legal memo had noted with displeasure Zionist actions “to deplete the national wealth by contribution of funds or investment of funds in foreign countries.”[104]

Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s nephew and a legendary intelligence agent, was another who was deeply disturbed by events, noting:

“The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palesine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests... Only when the national interests of the United States, in their highest terms, take precedence over all other considerations, can a logical, farseeing foreign policy be evolved. No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes...”[105]

He went on:

“The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict. It is to be hoped that American Zionists and non-Zionists alike will come to grips with the realities of the problem.”

When Eleanor Roosevelt, who was heavily influenced by Zionists,[106] and others on an the “American Association for the United Nations” decided to allot funds for pro-partition ads in the New York Times, Kermit’s wife tried to prevent the disbursement. As usual when one tried to oppose Zionists, she failed.[107]

An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted beforehand what actually came to pass:

“...the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN...In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”[108]

American Vice Consul William J. Porter, predicted, with deadly accuracy, that there would be no Arab State in Palestine.[109]

Pro-Israel agenda dominates US policies

In 1949 US Consul Burdett reported that Israeli officials were openly bragging about the power of the Jewish American community to influence US policy. He reported: “Israel eventually intends to obtain all of Palestine....”[110]

American Ambassador Lewis W. Douglas tried to convince Truman not to accede to Zionist wishes, arguing: “...no public office, however great its prestige, is worth gambling with the vital interests of the US.”[111]

Opposing such analysts was Truman’s political advisor, Clark Clifford, who believed that the Jewish vote and contributions were essential to winning the upcoming presidential election. Truman’s opponent, Dewey, took similar stands for similar reasons.

Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious to see electoral considerations taking precedence over policies that were in the national interest. He condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would cause “[t]he great dignity of the office of President [to be] be seriously diminished.”

Marshall wrote that the counsel offered by 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, I would vote against the President...”

Truman wrote in his memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.” There were now about a million dues-paying Zionists in the U.S.[112]

Then, as now, in addition to unending pressure there was financial compensation, Truman reportedly receiving a suitcase full of money from Zionists while on his train campaign around the country.[113]

Personal influences

One person key in such Zionist financial connections to Truman was Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy businessman who was later to play a similar role with Kennedy and Johnson.

While many Americans at the time and since have been aware of Truman’s come-from-behind win over Dewey, few people know about the critical role of Feinberg and the Zionist lobby in financing Truman’s victory.

An individual inside the US government who worked to influence policy was David K. Niles, executive assistant first to FDR and then to Truman. Niles, according to author Alfred Lilienthal, was “a member of a select group of confidential advisers with an often-quoted passion for anonymity. Niles... though occasionally publicized as Mr. Truman’s Mystery Man, remained totally unknown to the public.”[114]

Behind the scenes

was regularly briefed by the head of the Washington Office of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

When it was discovered that top secret information was being passed on to the Israeli government, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Omar Bradley told Truman he would have to choose between Bradley and Niles. Not long after, Niles resigned and went on a visit to Israel.[115]

Another who helped influence Truman was his old Kansas City friend and business partner, Eddie Jacobson, active in B’nai B’rith and “a passionate believer in Jewish nationalism,” who was able to procure Zionist access to the President at key times.[116] Truman credited Jacobson with making a contribution of “decisive importance.”[117]

Evan M Wilson, a longtime diplomat who had been U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, later wrote that Truman had been largely motivated by “domestic political considerations.”[118] At least one of Truman’s key policy speeches had been drafted primarily by the Washington representative of the Jewish Agency.[119]

Acting Secretary of State James E. Webb in a dispatch to Secretary of State Acheson noted the obvious: “Past record suggests Israel has had more influence with US than has US with Israel.”[120]

Pushing through the UN Partition Plan

Just as Zionists had succeeded in pushing U.S. support of the partition strategy over the objections of US experts, they managed to push it through the UN using an orchestrated campaign of bribes and threats.

Robert Nathan, who had worked for the government and was particularly active in the Jewish Agency, wrote afterward, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any countries that did not vote the right way. Another Zionist proudly described their activities:

“Every clue was meticulously checked and pursued. Not the smallest or the remotest of nations, but was contacted and wooed. Nothing was left to chance.”[121]

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress). David Niles organized similar pressure on Liberia; Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia. Bernard Baruch told France they would lose U.S. aid if they voted against partition. Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.[122]

Before the vote the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land...” He went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”[123]

Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the delegate was forced to vote in favor of partition.

Even the U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged at supporting partition that the State Department director of U.N. affairs was sent to New York to “prevent the U.S. delegation from resigning en masse.”[124]

33 massacres later, Israel comes into existence

The passing of the partition resolution in November 1947 trigged the violence that State Department and Pentagon analysts had predicted and for which Zionists had been preparing. There were at least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages,[125] half of them before a single Arab army joined the conflict. Zionist forces were better equipped and had more men under arms than their opponents[126] and by the end of Israel’s “War of Independence” over 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were ruthlessly expelled. Zionists had succeeded in the first half of their goal: Israel, the self-described Jewish State, had come into existence.[127]

Descriptions of the massacres, by both Palestinians and Israelis, are nightmarish. An Israeli eyewitness reported that at the village of al-Dawayima:

“The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead....One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her.”[128]

One woman testified that a man shot her nine-month-pregnant sister and then cut her stomach open with a butcher knife.[129]

Swiss Red Cross representative Jacques de Reynier was one of the first to arrive at the massacre of the small, neutral Palestinian village, Deir Yassin in April 1948 (before a single Arab army had joined the conflict). Author George Ball (who had been undersecretary of state under Johnson and Kennedy, and ambassador to the United Nations) writes that the representative “found 150 bodies thrown into a cistern and another 40 to 50 at one side. He counted in all 254 dead, including 145 women, of whom 35 were pregnant.”[130]

The attackers reportedly lined up families – men, women, grandparents and children, even infants – and shot them.

An eyewitness and future colonel in the Israeli military later wrote of the Irgun and Stern members:

“They didn’t know how to fight, but as murderers they were pretty good.”[131]

Reynier wrote in his diary that when he arrived members of the Zionist underground militia known as the Irgun,[132] were still entering houses with guns and knives. He saw one young Jewish woman carrying a blood-covered dagger, saw another stab an old couple at the doorway of their home. Reynier wrote that the scene reminded him of S.S. troops he had seen in Athens.

Richard Catling, British assistant inspector general for the criminal division, reported:

“There is... no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested.”[133]

The attack was perpetrated by two Zionist militias (whose heads, Menachem Begin and Ytzakh Shamir, were later to become Prime Ministers of Israel) and was coordinated with the main Zionist forces, whose elite unit participated in part of the operation.[134]

Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun who later became Prime Minister of Israel, sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:

“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”[135]

Approximately six months later, Begin (who had also publicly taken credit for a number of other terrorist acts, including blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had killed 91 people) came on a tour of America. The tour’s sponsors included such prominent Americans as playwright Ben Hecht, a fervent Zionist who applauded Irgun violence[cxxvi], and eventually included 11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressmen, 17 Justices, and numerous other public officials.

As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee remarked:

“Put any petition with the name Jew on it before a candidate in an election year, and you can get anyone to sign anything.”[136]

The State Department, fully aware of his violent activities in Palestine, tried to reject Begin’s visa but was overruled by Truman.[137]

Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?” Begin proclaimed, “In the Middle East? In all the world!”[138]

Terrorists set up U.S. front groups

The Irgun had been operating in the U.S. since the 1930s. As one of their leaders later wrote, “It was in Europe of those days that the idea of transferring the focal point of our activity to the United States was born, and it was from there that we left on a mission that lasted far longer than originally planned...”[139]

The “we” referred to a small group known as the Irgun Delegation that operated in the U.S. from the late 1930s until 1948 and that formed a half dozen front organizations for what they themselves called “a military operation” and that largely consisted of propaganda aimed at the American public.[140]

Two of the leaders were Yitshaq Ben-Ami (father of the founder of today’s J-Street) and “Peter Bergson,” the pseudonym of the senior Irgun officer working outside Palestine, Hillel Kook. The group is often called the Bergson Group.[141]

Among their numerous activities they lobbied Congress and the White House, organized a march on Washington, D.C. of 500 Rabbis, placed full-page ads in newspapers around the U.S., and produced a pageant “We Will Never Die!” celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization, written by Ben Hecht, directed by Moss Hart, featuring music by Kurt Weil, and starring Edward G. Robinson.

Forty thousand attended its New York performances. It then went on to play in most of America’s largest cities.[142]

While the various organizations created by the Irgun Delegation frequently pushed for rescuing European Jews, one of the major demands was for the creation of a “Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.” This was a goal that Revisionist Zionists had sought even before the Nazi holocaust had begun and is believed to have had a mixed agenda. Author William Rubinstein writes:

“It is rather difficult to believe that Bergson’s implausible proposal did not have far more to do with creating the nucleus of a Jewish Palestinian force, to be used against the British and the Arabs, than with saving Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.”[143]

Critics point out that the delegation did not manage to rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust.[144]

Bergson-Kook’s uncle was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, originally from Eastern Europe, who became the “Chief Rabbi of Palestine,” worked toward the Balfour Declaration in Britain, and most importantly, devised an ideology that merged a kabalistic version of religious Judaism (the Cabbala holds that every non-Jew is an embodiment of Satan) with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues today.[145]

Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated:

“The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews... is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”[146]

In addition to spanning the Jewish religious-secular continuum, the Delegation spanned the political spectrum, its historian Judith Baumel writing that it “evinced many of the unique characteristics of Eastern European protofascism” while also forming partnerships with communists and Jews who belonged to left-wing American groups.

All of this was hidden from view, however, as the “Bergson Boys” aimed for the American man in the street, using tantalizing slogans, illustrated advertisements, and “seductive curiosity-whetting gimmicks.” As Baumel notes, the Irgun Delegation’s primary triumph was to understand “the power of Madison Avenue.”[147]

Another terrorist front group, the Political Action Committee for Palestine, was formed by Rabbi Baruch Korf, who indirectly admitted that the financing of terrorism was among its activities.

In 1948 Korf published a large advertisement in the New York Post calling a State Department policy against enforcing partition “pure and simple anti-Semitism... plain everyday anti-Semitism, incorporated in the hearts and minds of those who govern free America.”[148]

Author Grant Smith, filing numerous Freedom of Information Requests, has uncovered information on numerous such illegal Zionist activities. The Truman administration, with Feinberg as a major campaign donor, failed to act on CIA reports about Feinberg and Zionist illicit arms trafficking from the US.[149]

Among these was the “Sonnenberg Institute,” named after its founder, Rudolf G. Sonneborn, scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family from Baltimore.[150]

Sonnenberg had first met Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1919 when Sonneborn, at the behest of family friend Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, had traveled to the Versailles peace conference as secretary of a Zionist delegation and afterward gone on a tour of Palestine.[151]

In 1945 Sonnenberg and Ben Gurion hosted a meeting of 17 well-connected guests at Sonnenberg’s Manhattan penthouse. They came from Los Angeles, Toronto, Miami, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Newark, New Haven and New York. One was a rabbi, five were lawyers, the others were highly successful businessmen.

The purpose, Ben Gurion explained, was to create a secret underground organization that would be the American arm of the Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, the Haganah. The organization was to have a representative in at least 35-40 industry groups, and in one month alone there were meetings in Memphis, Ohio, New Jersey, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Washington DC, and 40 more were scheduled.[152]

Their objective was to raise money and support “for purposes which could not be publicized or even fully disclosed.” A variety of front groups were created for military arms and equipment smuggling of everything from machine guns to B-17s.[153]

US authorities tried to stop what were not only illegal but also extremely damaging activities.

In 1948 the Director of Central Intelligence, Rear Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter, filed a top-secret report with the Secretary of Defense about the Zionist arms trafficking. He warned:

“U.S. National security is unfavorably affected by these developments and it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the ‘implements of war.’”[154]

Author Grant Smith reports that under Truman “the role of Feinberg and Haganah operative groups active in arms trafficking within the US, like the terrorist charges, would only be lightly investigated and seldom prosecuted.”

Infiltrating displaced person’s camps in Europe to funnel people to Palestine

A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated Europe’s displaced person’s camps to orchestrate a clandestine operation to funnel people to Palestine.

When it turned out that only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a Zionist report by Rabbi Klaussner concluded that “the people must be forced to go to Palestine.”

Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that numerous means were employed, including confiscation of food rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights; in one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.”[155]

The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well-organized and well-funded operation behind this (including $25 million from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) was hidden from view.

A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy credited with the buildup for the Normany invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, publicly noted that many of the refugees were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their travels.

Morgan commented:

“The Jews seem to have an organized plan for becoming a world force, a weak force numerically, but one which will have a generating power for getting what they want.”

He was attacked viciously by the press and others; comedian Eddie Cantor took out a New York Times ad saying, “I thought Hitler was dead.”

The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgans allegation of ‘ secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine’ is... fanatically untrue.”

Morgan was forced to apologize, despite, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan’s analysis of the situation was quite correct.”[156]

The Sieff group: Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration

Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.

The Sieff group was, as historian Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis’s Parushim.”

While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel through official Washington during the last years of FDR’s presidency and the critical first years of Truman’s.

Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan, in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman. Grose reports:

“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.”[157]

When State Department and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, were about to issue a “reverse Balfour” declaration on July 27, 1943 calling on these activities to cease, the Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David Niles, Bernard Baruch, et al took emergency, and successful, action to block it.[158]

Palestinian refugees

By 1949 as a result of Israel’s “War of Independence” and its campaign to cleanse the land of as many non-Jews as possible,[159] there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:

“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster. .....Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or no food.”[160]

The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million. U.S. Diplomats in Cairo and Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of Arab countries inundated by desperate, starving Palestinian refugees were stretched almost to the breaking point.

The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated $11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.”[161]

During this time, the report noted, “...the total direct relief offered...by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.”[162]

Meanwhile, Israel had acquired properties worth at least $480 million in 1947 dollars; one estimate put the figure at $35 billion in 1990 dollars.[163]

Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:

“In the process of 'Judaizing' Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion.

"The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.”[164]

Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes. His main representative working on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.

Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:

“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife...”[165]

The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters George C. McGhee delivered the message to the Israeli ambassador and later described his response:

“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with this move, that he would stop it... Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from the White House that the President wished to dissociated himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan.” [166]

Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-47, was the subject of an oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. As he stated when this was completed:

“The material I gave Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature--one almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.”[167]

Zionist influence in the media

As historian Richard Stevens notes, Zionists early on learned to exploit the essential nature of the American political system: that policies can be made and un-made through force of public opinion and pressure. Procuring influence in the media, both paid and unpaid, has been a key component of their success.[168]

From early on, the Zionist narrative largely dominated news coverage of the region. A study of four leading newspapers’ 1917 coverage showed that editorial opinion almost universally favored the Zionist position. Author Kathleen Christison notes that “editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news’.” Other studies showed the same situation for the 1920s. Christison writes:

"The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.”[169]

At one point when the State Department was trying to convince Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return, Secretary of State Marshall wrote:

“The leaders of Israel would make a grave miscalculation if they thought callous treatment of this tragic issue could pass unnoted by world opinion.”[170]

Marshall underestimated the ability of Zionists to minimize the amount of information on this from reaching Americans. A State Department study in March 1949 found the American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.”[171]

As author Alfred Lilienthal explained in 1953:

“The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.”[172]

When the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Milton Mayer that criticized Jewish nationalism (and carried two other articles giving opposing views), Zionists organized what was probably the worst attack on the Post in its long history.

The magazine was inundated with vitriolic mail, subscriptions cancelled, and advertising withdrawn. The Post learned its lesson, later refusing to publish an article that would have again exposed it to such an onslaught, even though the editor acknowledged that the rejected piece was a “good and eloquent article.”[173]

This was typical in a campaign in which Zionists exploited sympathy for victimized Jews, and when this did not sufficiently skew reporting about Palestine, they used financial pressure. Lilienthal writes:

“If ‘voluntary’ compliance was not ‘understanding’ enough, there was always the matter of Jewish advertising and circulation. The threat of economic recriminations from Jewish advertisers, combined with the fact that the fatal label of ‘Anti-Semite’ would be pinned on any editor stepping out of line, assured fullest press cooperation.”[174]

Author Christison records that from the moment partition was voted by the UN, “the press played a critical role in building a framework for thinking that would endure for decades.” She writes that shortly before May 15, 1948, the scheduled beginning of the Jewish State, a total of 24 U.S., British, and Australian reporters converged on Palestine.

“Virtually all reporting was from the Jewish perspective. The journals the Nation and the New Republic both showed what one scholar calls ‘an overt emotional partiality’ toward the Jews. No item published in either journal was sympathetic to the Arabs, and no correspondent was stationed in Arab areas of Palestine, although some reporters lived with, and sometimes fought alongside, Jewish settlers.”[175]

Bookstores were inundated with books espousing the Zionist point of view to enthusiastic press reviews. Conversely, the few books published that dared to provide a different perspective were given scathing reviews, when they were reviewed at all.[176]

When Professor Millar Burrows of the Yale School of Divinity, a distinguished scholar and archaeologist, wrote Palestine Is Our Business, the American Zionist Council distributed a publication labeling his book “an anti-Semitic opus.”

In fact, Professor Burrows’ life history showed the opposite. He had been one of the organizers and Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism and had long been active in the interfaith movement in New Haven.[177]

When the eminent dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, a highly distinguished personage with impeccable credentials as a humanitarian, wrote that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes, a campaign was begun against her as a Christian “anti-Semite.”[178]

Gildersleeve, who had been instrumental in drafting the Preamble to the U.N. Charter and had taken a leading role in creating the U.N. Human Rights Commission, later devoted herself to working for human rights in the Middle East. She testified before Congressional committees and lobbied President Truman, to no avail. In her memoir, she attributed such failures to "the Zionist control of the media of communication."[179]

Dorothy Thompson, played by Katharine Hepburn & Lauren Bacall

America’s most famous female journalist of the time also attempted valiantly, but unsuccessfully, to tell Americans about Palestinian refugees.

According to the Britannica encyclopedia, Dorothy Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.”[180]

Her column was in newspapers all over the country, her radio program listened to by tens of millions of Americans, she had been married to one of America’s most famous novelists, graced the cover of Time magazine, been profiled by America’s top magazines and was so well-known that “Woman of the Year,” a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on Thompson.[181]

She had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then after the war had visited the region in person. She began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight[182], and condemned Jewish terrorism.

Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.” She wrote of this organized attack:

“...when letter after letter is couched in almost identical phraseology I do not think the authors have been gifted with telepathy.”[183]

She was dropped by the New York Post, whose editor Ted Thackry, and his wife, Dorothy Schiff, were said by other Post editors to be close to the Irgun and Menachem Begin. Begin, the Irgunists, the Stern Gang and other Zionists organizations had what was termed “inordinate access” to the Post’s editorial board.[184]

(Dorothy Schiff, granddaughter of financier Jacob Schiff and owner of the Post, later divorced Thackry and married Rudolf Sonneborn.[185])

Thompson’s mail was filled with ferocious accusations that she was “anti-Semitic.” One such correspondent told her that her “filthy incitements to porgroms” would not be tolerated by New York’s Jews.[186]

Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.

In the coming decades other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, lives and careers destroyed; history distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.

Very few people know this history. The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, even those who focus on the Middle East. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.

George Orwell once wrote: “'Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'.”[187]

Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and save the future.

~

Please see footnotes below for additional information.

Works Cited

Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. Print.

"Balfour Declaration Author Was a Secret Jew, Says Prof." JWeekly (Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco) Jan 15 (1999). Print. Accessed athttp://www.jweekly.com/article/full/9929/balfour-declaration-author-was-a-secret-jew-says-prof/

Ball, George W., and Douglas B. Ball. The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Print.

Barrett, Mary. "In Memoriam: A Respectful Dissenter: CIA's Wilbur Crane Eveland." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (1990). Print.

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. The "Bergson Boys" and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005. Print.

Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

Berger, Elmer. Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978. Print.

Brownfeld, Allan. C. "Book Review: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (2000): 105-06. Print.

Canfield, Joseph M. The Incredible Scofield and His Book. Vallecito, CA: Ross House, 2004. Print.

Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. First Paperback Printing ed. Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000. Print.

Curtiss, Richard H., and Janet McMahon. Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997. Print.

Davidson, Lawrence. America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Gainesville (Fla.): University of Florida, 2001. Print.

Davis, John Herbert. The Evasive Peace: a Study of the Zionist-Arab Problem. First American ed. [N.Y.]: New World, 1970. Print.

"Dorothy Thompson." Encylopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/592960/Dorothy-Thompson>.

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Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East. London: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print.

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Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.

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John, Robert, and Sami Hadawi. The Palestine Diary 1914-1945 Britain's Involvement (Vol. I). Reprint of Third Ed. Charleston: BookSurge, 2006. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee. Print.

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Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Print.

Khalidi, Walid. "The Palestine Problem: An Overview." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print.

Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews against Zionism: the American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Print.

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Maisel, Louis Sandy, Ira N. Forman, Donald Altschiller, and Charles Walker Bassett. Jews in American Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print.

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McKinzie, Richard D. "Truman Library - Edwin M. Wright Oral History Interview." Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Truman Library, July 26, 1974. Web. July 2011. <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm>.

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"Truman Library - Edwin M. Wright Oral History Interview." Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Web. July 2011. <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm>.

Uni, Assaf. "Hans Herzl's Wish Comes True - 76 Years Later." Ha'aretz [Israel] 19 Sept. 2006. Print. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hans-herzl-s-wish-comes-true-76-years-later-1.197621

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---

End Notes

[1] In Israel it is typically called “the Jewish lobby,” perhaps reflective of the fact that today virtually all the mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S., both religious and secular – the ADL, Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Relations Councils, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Studies departments, etc – advocate for Israel. However, such unanimity was only created after years of strenuous and sometimes secretive effort, and even now, JJ Goldberg’s contention, made in his informative book Jewish Power, is may not be too far off the mark: “...the broader population of Americans Jews... are almost entirely unaware of the work being done in their name.”

Goldberg, Jonathan J. Jewish Power: inside the American Jewish Establishment. Reading, Mass. [u.a.: Addison-Wesley, 1996. Print. 7.

http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=636&print=true

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html [accessed July 21, 2011]

[3] . Herzl’s seminal book The Jewish State is online at: http://fliiby.com/file/239266/f8rd51benn.html

“Herzl devoted all his time to this movement, eventually dying at the age of 44 leaving his family penniless. An article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that his daughter Pauline suffered from emotional problems from youth and eventually died of morphine addiction. His son Hans converted to Christianity in 1924, at which time he was abandoned by the Jewish community and denounced publicly. He committed suicide following his sister’s death. A book about Herzl’s children was written in the 1940s but was suppressed by the World Zionist Organization, which decided to bury Pauline and Hans in Bordeaux, despite their wish to be buried beside their father in Austria, “probably to avoid tarnishing Herzl's image.”

– Uni, Assaf. "Hans Herzl's Wish Comes True - 76 Years Later." Ha'aretz [Israel] 19 Sept. 2006. Print.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hans-herzl-s-wish-comes-true-76-years-later-1.197621

[4] Christison, Kathleen. Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy. First Paperback Printing ed. Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000. Print.

Davis, John Herbert. The Evasive Peace: a Study of the Zionist-Arab Problem. First American ed. [N.Y.]: New World, 1970. Print. 1.

It was first just called the Zionist Organization; its name officially changed to the WZO in 1960. Most people use the two names interchangeably.

According to the WZO website, today the organization “consists of the following bodies:

The World Zionist Unions, international Zionist federations; and international organizations that define themselves as Zionist, such as WIZO, Hadassah, Bnai-Brith, Maccabi, the International Sephardic Federation, the three streams of world Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), delegation from the CIS – Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union), the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), and more.”

http://www.en.wzo.org.il/home/P102.jsp?arc=109068

[5] Mulhall, John W., CSP. America and the Founding of Israel: an Investigation of the Morality of America's Role. Los Angeles: Deshon, 1995. Print. 47, 51-52.

[6] Khalidi, Walid. "The Palestine Problem: An Overview." Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print. Online at http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.palestine-studies.org%2Fenakba%2Fhistory%2FKhalidi%2C%2520Walid_The%2520Palestine%2520Problem.pdf&ei=NungTvyWJIOdiAL2v9D_Dg&usg=AFQjCNGyYU86-Jf9T5qsvLiPl43bNIlHWQ

The best resources on the pre-Israel population are:

Abu-Sitta, Salman H. Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966. London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. Print.

McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print.

Khalidi, Walid. All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992. Print.

A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, by the British Mandatory Commission, 1946. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991. Two volumes. Print.

Supplement to Survey of Palestine Notes Compiled for the Information of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. Washington, D.C.: Inst. of Palestine Studies, 1991. Print.

[7] Nur, Masalha. Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of "transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Fourth ed. Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001. Print.

[8] Goldberg, 97

[9] Goldberg, 98-99

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/lazarus.html

[11] Sarna, Jonathan D., Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosovsky. The Jews of Boston. New Haven, London : Yale University Press, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 2005. 252.

Online at

http://books.google.com/books?id=sz5UJ1Lh21IC&lpg=PP1&dq=The%20Jews%20of%20Boston%20%20By%20Scott-Martin%20Kosofsky&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=The%20Jews%20of%20Boston%20%20By%20Scott-Martin%20Kosofsky&f=false

Encyclopaedia Britannica; online at http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1355322/Israel-flag-of

[12] Kolsky, Thomas A. Jews against Zionism: the American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. Print. 24.

[13] Kolsky, 24.

[14] In a 1918 reorganization the FAZ renamed itself the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Kolsky, 26.

[15] Dalin, David G. “At the Summit: Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews.” Jews in American Politics. Editors: Maisel Louis Sandy, Ira N. Forman, Donald Altschiller, and Charles Walker Bassett. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print. 32-34.

(The appointee was Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned Macy’s Department Store and whom TR later named to his cabinet. Dalin reports a humorous incident that occurred at a dinner years later for Straus and Roosevelt:

“In his remarks, Roosevelt had stated that Straus had been appointed on the basis of merit and ability alone; the fact that he was Jewish had played no part in Roosevelt’s decision to appoint him. A few minutes later, in introducing Straus, [another speaker, the Jewish financier and philothropist Jacob] Schiff, who was a bit deaf and had evidently not heard Roosevelt’s remarks, recounted how Roosevelt had sought his advice as to who would be the most suitable and eminent Jewish leader to appoint to his cabinet.”

[16] Neff, Donald. Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Reprint Edition. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002. 8.

Neff, the author of five books on Israel, was Jerusalem Bureau Chief and then a Senior Editor for Time magazine.

[17] Kolsky, 25.

[18] Stevens, Richard P. American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970. New York: Pageant, 1962. Print. 20

[19] Neff, 9.

[20] Neff, 10.

[21] Neff, 10. Christison, 28. John, Robert, and Sami Hadawi. The Palestine Diary 1914-1945 Britain's Involvement (Vol. I). Reprint of Third Ed. Charleston: BookSurge, 2006. Introduction by Arnold Toynbee. Print. 59.

[22] Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print. 53.

The Menorah Society was also a secretive Zionist organization. An essay from the time states that the Menorah Society “camouflaged its Zionism by organizing itself as a purely nonpartisan body so as to obtain a larger membership.” The writer reports that “practically all the leaders and active workers in the Menorah organization are Zionists... the thing of which the Menorah boasts now...is its little list of prize conversions to Zionism. – Kosofsky, 256.

[23] Schmidt, Sarah. "The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65.Dec (1975): 121-39. Print.121. Online at

http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/news/israellobby/item/1217-the-parushim-a-secret-episode-in-american-zionist-history

Schmidt writes: "The image that emerges of the Parushim is that of a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way."

[24] Grose, p. 54.

American professor Horace Kallen was a major mover and the original founder of the Parushim.

Powerful journalist Walter Lippmann and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter were among those recruited by Brandeis to work for Zionism.

-- Gurock, Jeffrey S. American Zionism Mission and Politics. London: Routledge, 1998. Read online at:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vX3osAh0jf4C&lpg=RA1-PA29&ots=u6aX4a0B5Z&dq=parushim%20brandeis&pg=RA1-PA29#v=onepage&q=parushim%20brandeis&f=false

[25] Neff, Pillars, p. 12.

Brandeis also “played a decisive role in planning Wilson’e economic program, and particularly in formulating the Federal Reserve.”

-- Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993. Print. 93

[26] Neff 12; John & Hadawi, p. 59-60.

Felix Frankfurter’s work on behalf of Zionism spanned many years. FDR was to appoint him to the Supreme Court in 1939, and even before this time he used his “access to the president to bring Zionist issues to his attention and urge his intercession on behalf of the Zionist cause. – Christison, 47

[27] Kolsky, 25, 32.

[28] Britannica Encyclopaedia: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/50162/Balfour-Declaration

[29] Mulhall, 50.

http://www.politicalforum.com/ethnic-religious-conflicts/164679-sultan-abdul-hamid-zionist-colonization-palestine.html

[30] Mulhall p. 66. This was a sadly deft prognosis, writing of Jerusalem in the early 1960s, the American Consul General in Jerusalem found: “I think I can safely make the general comment that in present-day Israel... the Arabs are very much of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’” for the dominant Israelis – Wilson, Evan M. Jerusalem, Key to Peace. Washington: Middle East Institute, 1970. 33.

[31] John, p 68-70: “The British government was advised that ‘previous overtures to American Jewry to support the Allies had received no attention was because the approach had been to the wrong people. It was to the Zionist Jews that the British and French governments should address their parleys.’ Sir Mark Sykes was particularly weighed down by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had promised that the British would support Arab independence, insisting that it was impossible to offer Palestine to the Jews. He was told that Brandeis had just become a Supreme Court Justice, and that he had President Wilson’s ear. This began the negotiations with the Zionists.

[32] "Balfour Declaration Author Was a Secret Jew, Says Prof." JWeekly (Jewish Bulletin of San Francisco) Jan 15 (1999). Print.

Accessed at http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/9929/balfour-declaration-author-was-a-secret-jew-says-prof/

Rubinstein, William D. "The Secret of Leopold Amery." History Today 49. Feb (1999). Print.

Online at http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/news/israellobby/item/1205-balfour-declaration-author-was-a-secret-jew-says-prof

Amery, who had kept his Jewish roots secret, worked for Zionism in a number of ways. A pro-Israel writer reports: “As assistant military secretary to the Secretary of State for War, Amery played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Jewish Legion, consisting of three battalions of Jewish soldiers who served, under Britain’s aegis, in Palestine during the First World War and were the forerunners of the IDF. ‘I seem to have had my finger in the pie, not only of the Balfour Declaration, but of the genesis of the present Israeli Army’, he notes proudly.

“As Dominions Secretary (1925-29) he had responsibility for the Palestine Mandate, robustly supporting the growth and development of the Yishuv – Weizman recalled Amery’s “unstinting encouragement and support” and that Amery “realized the importance of a Jewish Palestine in the British imperial scheme of things more than anyone else. He also had much insight into the intrinsic fineness of the Zionist movement”. In 1937, shortly after testifying before the Peel Commission on the future of Palestine, Amery helped to organise a dinner in tribute to the wartime Jewish Legion at which his friend Jabotinsky was guest of honour. Amery became an increasingly vociferous critic of the British government’s dilution of its commitments to the Jews of Palestine in order to appease the Arabs, and fulminated in the Commons against the notorious White Paper of 1939, which set at 75,000 the maximum number of Jews to be admitted to Palestine over the ensuing five years. ‘I have rarely risen with a greater sense of indignation and shame or made a speech which I am more content to look back upon’, he remembered. And he became an arch-critic of Chamberlain and Appeasement.”

[33] World Jewry, March 1, 1935, cited by John, p. 72.

[34] Davidson, Lawrence, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 11-12.

[35] Wilson, Evan M. Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1979. Print. p. xv.

Moshe Menuhin, scion of a distinguished Jewish family that moved to Palestine during the early days of Zionism (and father of the renowned musicians), also writes about this aspect. In addition, he states that the oft-repeated claim that the British rewarded Weizman for his “discovery of TNT” was false, quoting Weizmann’s autobiographyTrial and Error, p. 271:

“For some unfathomable reason they always billed me as the inventor of TNT. It was in vain that I systematically and repeatedly denied any connection with, or interest in, TNT. No discouragement could put them off.” – Menuhin, Moshe. The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969. Print. 73-74.

[36] Deaths and injuries were 364,800:

http://www.taphilo.com/history/war-deaths.shtml [accessed July 21, 2011]

[37] Wilson’s Alien and Sedition acts resulted in the jailing 1,200 American citizens:

“Walter C. Matthey of Iowa was sentenced to a year in jail for applauding an anticonscription speech. Walter Heynacher of South Dakota was sentenced to five years in Leavenworth for telling a younger man that ‘it was foolishness to send our boys over there to get killed by the thousands, all for the sake of wall Street.’...Abraham Sugarman of Sibley County, Minnesota, was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth for arguing that the draft was unconstitutional and remaking, ‘This is supposed to be a free country. Like Hell it is.’” – Kauffman, Bill. Ain't My America: the Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-imperialism. New York: Metropolitan, 2008. Print. 74.

The song “Over There” was written by George M. Cohan, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for it in 1940, when America was about to join another world war:

http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/cohan.htm

[38] Kolsky 12.

[39] While this subterfuge was used in the beginning years, the goal was to create a state, as Felix Frankfurter wrote: “ ‘I need not tell you that the phrase, ‘that Palestine be established as a Jewish Home’ was a phrase of purposeful ambiguity.” [John, p. 118]. In the Zionists’ Memorandum to the Peace Conference they stated that Palestine “shall be placed under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will ensure the establishment therein of the Jewish national home and ultimately render possible the creation of an autonomous Jewish commonwealth. [John, p. 125]

[40] John, p. 115

[41] Merkley, Paul Charles. Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2001. Print. 6.

Harry Emerson Fosdick - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/131christians/pastorsandpreachers/fosdick.html

Henry Sloane Coffin

http://www.pres-outlook.com/reports-a-resources/presbyterian-heritage-articles/1683-pastor-educator-ecumenist-henry-sloan-coffin-1877-1954.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,722722-1,00.html

http://archive.jta.org/article/1949/01/26/3017334/protestant-church-leader-warns-against-political-zionism-says-judaism-is-a-religion

[42] Mulhall, 76-77; John, 129; Davidson, 20.

[43] Mulhall, p 77

[44] Mulhall p. 77

[45] Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: Palestine between 1914-1979. New-York: Caravan, 1979. Print. 17-18.

[46] Mulhall, p. 79.

[47] Mulhall, 78.

[48] Grose, 88.

[49] Melvin Urofsky, cited in Mulhall, 80

[50] Mulhall, p. 80.

[51] Neff, p. 20. Grose, 94-95.

[52] Pillars, p. 20, Grose, 94-95.

[53] Pillars, 20

[54] Neff, p. 17. Tivnan, p. 30

[55] Stevens, Richard P., American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy 1942-1947. New York: Pageant Press. Inc. Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970, p. 20.

[56] The article “Denying Nazi-Zionist collusion: The Sacramento Bee, Darrell Steinberg, and Islamophobia” refers to the various books that described this:http://ifamericansknew.org/media/sacbee.html

This was well known in the State Department. For example, State Dept. Near East expert Harry N. Howard states: “...there was discussion of liberalizing American immigration laws in this period. The Zionists opposed that liberalization on the ground that this would not be a solution as far as they were concerned. They wanted a political, not necessarily a humanitarian, solution --that is, they wanted a state.” - Oral History Interview with Harry N. Howard, Truman Library, Washington, D.C., June 5, 1973:

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/howardhn.htm [accessed July 2011]

[57] Hadawi, 38: Citation: The Spectator (London) Magazine, 22 July 1960.

[58] Mulhall, 109.

[59] Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? 50th Anniversary ed. Haverford, PA: Infinity.com, 2004. Print. 27. Citing So Far So Good, by Morris L. Ernst (New York: Harper, 1948), pp. 170-177.

[60] Mulhall, P. 109.

[61] Lilienthal, 151.

[62] Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East. London: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print. 48.

For more on Eveland see Barrett, Mary. "In Memoriam: A Respectful Dissenter: CIA's Wilbur Crane Eveland." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (1990). 28.

http://washreport.net/component/content/article/125/1077-in-memoriam-wilbur-crane-eveland.html

[63] Naeim, Gilad. "The Jews of Iraq." The Link April-May (1998). Print. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-giladi.html

[64] Berger, Elmer. Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978. 9. Christison, 73.

[65] Neff, 23.

[66] Tivnan, Edward. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Print. 24.

[67] Tivnan, 24

[68] Neff, 23.

[69] Berger, 11.

[70] Stevens, 101.

[71] Berger, 16-17.

[72] Lilienthal, 63.

[73] Stevens, 24.

[74] Stevens, 22.

[75] Lilienthal

[76] Urofsky, Melvin Irving. We Are One: American Jewry and Israel. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978. Print. 37.

[77] Neff, 23-24.

[78] Grose, 173.

[79] Neff, 23.

[80] Stevens, 28.

[81] Researchers may wish to explore an interesting though speculative discussion about what may be an earlier effort by Zionists to influence Christians. Many years before AZEC targeted Christians, an annotated version of the bible known as the Scofield Reference Bible had been published, which pushed what was a previously somewhat fringe “dispensationalist” theology calling for the Jewish “return” to Palestine.

Some analysts have raised questions about Scofield and how and why the Oxford University Press published his book. Scofield, who had been something of a shyster and criminal and had abandoned his first wife and children, mysteriously became a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. Biographer Joseph Canfield (The Incredible Scofield and His book) comments:

“The admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.”

Canfield suggests that Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer, who was also a member of the Lotus Club, may have played a role in Scofield’s project, writing that “Scofield’s theology was most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.”

Prof. David W. Lutz, in “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” writes: “Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

Irish journalist Maidhc O Cathail ("Zionism's Un-Christian Bible") suggests

“Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine ‘this peer among scalawags’ ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible.”

[82] Neff, Donald. Fifty Years of Israel. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 2000. Print. 200. Available online at: http://ifamericansknew.org/history/rel-christians.html

[83] Neff, Fifty years, 200.

[84]

[85] Wilson, Decision. xiii-xiv.

[86] Neff, 31.

http://ifamericansknew.org/history/maps.html

Abu-Sitta, Salman H. The Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966 (2010 Edition). London: Palestine Land Society, 2010. http://www.plands.org/atlas/index.html

McCarthy, Justin. The Population of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Israel was also getting much richer land: “85 percent of all the citrus lands, almost all the industries, the deep water port and the railway, most of the coastline, practically all the water resources,” according to U.S. diplomat Henry F. Grady, Adventures in Diplomacy, p. 170. An unpublished manuscript in the Truman Museum can be viewed at:http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/documents/index.php?documentdate=0000-00-00&documentid=4-7&studycollectionid=ROI&pagenumber=1

To learn more about Grady see The memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady:

From the Great War to the Cold War, by Henry Francis Grady, John T. McNay, 2009, University of Missouri Press.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7BKTLX0mppoC&hl=en

In 1984 a book was published by Harper & Row entitled From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. The author is given as Joan Peters. The book’s “Acknowledgements” section lists historians Bernard Lewis, Philip M. Hauser, Martin Gilbert, and Walter Laqueur as having assisted in the project.

This book, making the astounding claim that there were virtually no indigenous Palestinians, that Arabs had largely come only after Zionists’ wonderful entrepreneurial skills provided them jobs, was given rave reviews by Barbara Tuchman, Theodore H. White, Elie Wiesel, Lucy Dawidowicz Arthur J. Goldberg (former Supreme Court Justice and U.S. ambassador to the UN), Saul Bellow, and virtually every major book review section in the U.S.: New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, National Review, New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Los Angles Times, etc.

However the book was shown to be fraudulent when researcher Norman Finkelstein investigated its footnotes and found them to be less than honest; book reviewers in Britain and Israel called the book “preposterous” and a “web of deceit.” Harper & Row eventually stopped publishing the book, but it can still be found in bookstores, now published by something called “JKAP Publications” located in Chicago. “Historian” BarbaraTuchman continued to claim that the Palestinian people were a “fairy tale.”

Astoundingly, Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz seems to have appropriated, without attribution, Peters’ material in his 2003 book, The Case for Israel, published by John Wiley & Sons.

For more information see Norman G. Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, and his article “Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial,” in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens. Pp. 33-69. This article is online at: http://books.google.com/books?id=wELzivMr_-cC&lpg=PA33&ots=Jlazbe_jBG&dq=Disinformation%20and%20the%20Palestine%20Question%3A%20The%20Not-So-Strange%20Case%20of%20Joan%20Peters's%20From%20Time%20Immemorial&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false

[88] Neff, Pillars, 46.

[89] Neff, p. 47.

[90] Neff 49.

[91] Berger, 21.

Berger writes that in a personal conversation with him, Henderson had said:

“I hope you and your associates will persevere. And my reason for wishing this is perhaps less related to what I consider American interests in the Middle East than what I fear I see on the domestic scene. The United states is a great power. Somehow it will surmount even its most foolish policy errors in the Middle East. But in the process there is a great danger of creating divisiveness and anti-Semitism among our own people. And if this danger materializes to a serious extent, we have seen in Germany and in Europe that the ability of a nation to survive the consequences is in serious question.”

[92] Neff, 46. Wilson, Decision,117.

[93] Green, Stephen. Taking Sides, America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel. Brattleboro: Amana, 1988. Print. p. 20.

[94] Neff, 57.

Grady, Henry F. Adventures in Diplomacy, p. 170. Unpublished manuscript in the Truman Library, which can be viewed at:http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/documents/index.php?documentdate=0000-00-00&documentid=4-7&studycollectionid=ROI&pagenumber=1

Grady, Henry Francis, and John T. McNay. The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady: from the Great War to the Cold War. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2009. Print.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7BKTLX0mppoC&hl=en

[96] Grady, Adventures,166.

[97] Mulhall. P.130.

Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. accessed at:

http://books.google.com/books?id=8LcEOW7hnWMC&lpg=PT201&ots=e1BncQBmI9&dq=dean%20acheson%20on%20palestine&pg=PT201#v=onepage&q=dean%20acheson%20on%20palestine&f=false

[98] Neff, Pillars, 29.

Author John Snetsinger writes: “Truman’s Palelstine-Israel policy offers an extraordinary example of foreign policy conducted in line with short-range political expediency rather than long-range national goals.” Snetsinger, John. Truman, the Jewish Vote, and the Creation of Israël. Stanford Calif.: Stanford Univ., 1974. Print. 140.

[99] Lilienthal, p. 75.

[100] Lilienthal, p. 75.

http://www.dcdave.com/article4/030528.html

[102] Neff, pp. 42-43.

[103] Lilienthal, p. 60.

[104] Grose, 100.

[105] Ball, George W., and Douglas B. Ball. The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Print. 22. Some examples:

Edwin Mr. Wright, a State Department expert on the Middle East who was assisting the U.N./U.S. delegation as a staff member, reports that Eleanor Roosevelt, who was on the U.N. delegation, received a letter telling her that Wright was “anti-Semitic and in Arab pay.” – p. 43.

“Rabbi Stephen Wise, the pre-eminent spokesman for American Zionism, and his daughter Justine Polier, were personal friends of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt with as much access to the White House as anyone.” - William J. vanden Heuvel, "America, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust." Keynote address of the fifth annual Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture, Oct. 17, 1996 at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

http://newdeal.feri.org/feri/wvh.htm [accessed July 22, 2011]

Lilienthal, p. 62: Eleanor Roosevelt, convinced by Zionists of their cause, had strongly opposed Loy Henderson. When Henderson had warned, accurately, that partition would provoke violence, Eleanor responded:

“Come now, come, Mr. Henderson, I think you’re exaggerating the dangers. You are too pessimistic....I’m confident that when a Jewish state is once set up, the Arabs will see the light; they will quiet down; and Palestine will no longer be a problem.” (Neff, Pillars, 64) (Wilson, 116)

There is no evidence that Eleanor ever acknowledged her error.

[106] Neff, Pillars, 64. Wilson, 116.

[107] Neff, 64.

[108] Neff, p. 65, citation: “Draft Memorandum by the Director of the Office of United Nations Affairs (Rusk) to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett),” Secret, Washington May 4, 1948, FRUS 1948, pp. 894-95.

[109] Wilson, p. 131

[110] Neff, Pillars, 96.

[111] Neff, Pillars, p. 90. Citation: “The Ambassador to the United Kingdom (Douglas) to the Secretary of State,” Top Secret, NIACT, US Urgent, London, October 14, 1948–3 pm., FRUS 1948, pp. 1474-76.

[112] Neff, Pillars, p. 50

[113] Gore Vidal wrote: “Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.'” --Foreword, Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years. London [etc].: Pluto, 1997. Print. pp. vii-viii

Online at:

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html#vidal

[114] Lilienthal, pp.71-72.

Snetsinger provides considerable information on Niles' close relationship with Zionists and quotes his memos on their behalf. 35-31, etc.

[115] Lilienthal, pp. 72-73.

Stephen Green, in Taking Sides, pp. 53-54, describes a May 1948 investigation into “someone in the Pentagon” who was making files available to the pre-Israeli military known as the Haganah. Evidence pointed to Lt. Col. Elliot A. Niles. “According to the agent report on the investigation,” Green writes, “Niles was ‘an ardent Zionist, formerly a high official of the B’nai B’rith, and lately in charge of veterans liaison for the Veterans Administration.’” Investigators concluded that Niles and another person had photostated files and sent them to the Haganah. “This particular report” Green writes, “was adjudged by its author to be rated A-2, i.e., A for ‘source completely reliable,’ and 2 for ‘information probably true.’”

[116] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 72.

[117] Christison, 69

[118] Wilson, Decision, 149.

Wilson served in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1937-67, many of those years involved with Palestine. Upon retirement he was given the Department of State’s Superior Honor Award.

[119] Wilson, 98.

[120] Neff, Pillars, 96.

[121] Lilienthal, 47, citation: Emanuel Newmann, in American Zionist, February 5, 1953.

[122] Wilson, 125-127. Mulhall, pp.140-145. Bitter Harvest: Palestine 1914-1979, by Sami Hadawi, Caravan Books, 1979, 72-73. Stevens, 178-182.

[123] 118. Lilienthal, pp. 47-49

[124] Lilienthal, Alfred M. The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978. Print. p. 87.

[125] Al Abbasiyya (4 May ‘48), Abu Shusha (14 May ‘48), Ayn az Zaytun (2 May ‘48), Balad ash Sheikh (25 April ‘48), Bayt Daras (11 May ‘48), Beer Sheba (21 Oct ‘48), Burayr (12 May ‘48), Al Dawayima (29 Oct ‘48), Deir Yassin (9 April ‘48), Eilaboun (29 Oct ‘48), Haifa (21 April ‘48), Hawsha (15 April ‘48), Husayniyya (21 April ‘48), Ijzim (24 July ‘48), Isdud (28 Oct ‘48), Jish (29 Oct ‘48), Al Kabri (21 May ‘48), Al Khisas (18 Dec ‘48), Khubbayza (12 May ‘48), Lydda (10 July ‘48), Majd al Kurum (29 October ‘48), Mannsurat al Khayt (18 Jan ‘48), Khirbet, Nasir ad Din (12 April ‘48), Qazaza (9 July ‘48), Qisarya (15 Feb ‘48), Sa’sa (30 Oct ‘48), Safsaf (29 Oct ‘48), Saliha (30 Oct ‘48), Arab al Samniyya (30 Oct ‘48), Al Tantoura (21 May ‘48), Al Tira (16 July ‘48), Al Wa’ra al-Sawda (18 April ‘48), Wadi ‘Ara (27 Feb ‘48).

http://ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-qumsiyeh.html

[126] Christison, p. 81.

Numerous other histories of this period also report on this. See Stephen Green, Taking Sides, 47-75, for a discussion of troop strengths, armaments, and Zionist efforts, largely successful, to distort the facts on these in the press and in various books, including O Jerusalem, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre,” still widely marketed.

[127] There are numerous excellent books on this period. Three of the finest are: Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: Palestine 1914-1979; Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948; and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

[128] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.

[129] Mulhall, p. 153.

Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a number of others wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning this and other actions by Begin and his group. The letter, which was published December 4, 1948, provides considerable information on the situation:

http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study_res/einstein/nyt_orig.html

[130] The Passionate Attachment, America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, pp. 28-29.

[131] McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” McGowan, Daniel A., and Marc H. Ellis. Remembering Deir Yassin: the Future of Israel and Palestine. New York: Olive Branch, 1998. Print. 35-46.

Israeli military historian Col Pa’il, who was then a member of the Haganah, was there as an observer to evaluate the fighting ability of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

[132] Irgun Zevai Leumi, normally just called the Irgun. While this is often portrayed as a small, rogue element within the Zionist underground, it’s interesting to note that it had units in 23 countries worldwide (including in the U.S.), engaged in fund-raising, recruiting, hiring, training, purchasing, and shipping operations.” Green, p. 47.

[133] Mulhall, 153.

See also Sheila Cassidy, “Assault and Massacre.” Remembering Deir Yassin. Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis. 47-49.

From the same book see also Pat McDonnel Twair, “The Surviving Children of Deir Yassin” 50-51.

Survivor testimonies can be read at

http://www.deiryassin.org/survivors.html [accessed July 21, 2011]

e.g.: Ms. Haleem Eid stated: "A man [shot] a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife."

[134] Menachem Begin, who became prime minister in 1977, was head of the Irgun; Yitzhak Shamir, who was elected Prime Minister in 1983, was a head of the Stern Gang. Neither was at Deir Yassin personally. The attack was coordinated ahead of time with the Haganah, which thereby broke an agreement that had been made with the mayor of Deir Yassin in which both sides had agreed that neither would fire against the other. The Haganah’s Palmach unit took part in the attack, but reportedly left before the worst of the massacre.

–McGowan, Daniel. “A Jewish Eye-Witness: An interview with Meir Pa’il.” Remembering Deir Yassin, 35-46.

[135] Ball, p. 29.

Author Kathleen Christison notes that when Begin became Prime Minister, for the U.S. media “it became generally unacceptable to use the word [terrorist] with respect to either Begin or his successor Yitzhak Shamir, whose pre-state underground organization, the Stern Gang, had also committed acts of terrorism.” – Perceptions of Palestine, 172

Shamir had approved the pre-Israel assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish Count who had helped rescue thousands of Jews from the Nazis. He had also ordered the assassination of a top British official, Lord Moyne.

See Kati Marton's book on the assassination of Bernadotte, A Death in Jerusalem. In 1991 some of the assassins regaled the audience of a live TV broadcast with details about how they killed Benadotte "to the appreciative laughter" of the studio audience (Marton, 257). Shamir was the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. His adopted name "Shamir" in Hebrew "means either a particularly hard rock or, according to legend, a tiny worm that broke up rocks for the construction of the Temple." (Marton 102)

[136] Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 79

[137] In response to the bombing of the King David Hotel, Hecht wrote: “Every time you let go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” - Lilienthal, What Price Israel? 33.

The bombing killed 41 Palestinians, 28 British, and 17 Jews. - Neff, Pillars, 40.

[138] Howe, Russell Warren. “Fighting the ‘Soldiers of Occupation’ From WWII to the Intifada.” Curtiss, Richard H., and Janet McMahon. Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997. Print. 38-39.

[139] Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. The "Bergson Boys" and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005. Print. 1. The speaker is Alexander Rafaeli.

Online at http://books.google.com/books?id=_8gNHXHBh-8C&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false [accessed July 2011]

[140] Baumel, 1.

[141] The group was close to Jabotinsky and included his nephew

Baumel, p.8.

Medoff, Rafael. "The Bergson Group vs. The Holocaust – and Jewish Leaders vs. Bergson." The Jewish Press June 6 (2007).

http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/21747 [accessed July 2011].

Among the groups they formed were “American League for a Free Palestine,” “Hebrew Committee for National Liberation,” and “the Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry", often with a dual message: demanding the rescue of European Jews and the opening up of Palestine to Jewish immigration. Most Zionist and anti-Zionist organizations opposed the Bergson group, but it managed to enlist a number of prominent Americans, from Ben Hecht to Eleanor Roosevelt.

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3819418/The-Bergson-Group-America-and.html [accessed July 23, 2011]

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states:

“Bergson's primary assignment in the United States was to mobilize support for the IZL and for the creation of Jewish military units, and, later to gather support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Bergson set out to accomplish these tasks by creating a series of interlocking organizations, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the American League for a Free Palestine, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation. Supporters of these organizations included Harry Truman, Dorothy Parker, Herbert Hoover, Will Rogers, Jr., Labor leader William Green, U.S. Solicitor General Fowler Harper, and U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes.”

-- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Peter Bergson.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007041. Accessed July, 2011:

[142] Rubinstein, William D. The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. 97.

[143] Rubinstein, Myth, 98.

[144] Baumel, p. 261. See also Rubinstein, Myth, 98.

[145] "Time Line for Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook (1865-1935)." Rabbi Kook on Weekly Torah Portion (Parsha), Jewish Holidays and Psalms (Tehillim). Web. July 2011.http://www.ravkooktorah.org/timeline.htm.

Shahak, Israël, and Norton Mezvinsky. Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London: Pluto, 1999. Print. ix, xiii, 55-69.

Professors Shahak and Mezvinski emphasize the writings in English intentionally obscure many facts. “The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according to the Cabbala is every non-Jew, has been minimized or not mentioned by authors who have not written about the Cabbala in Hebrew.” (p. 58)

“According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”

Dr. Israel Shahak, was a holocaust survivor and, until his death in 2001, a highly regarded Israeli professor of biochemistry; Dr. Norton Mezvinsky was a professor of history (now retired) who in 2002 was named by the Connecticut State University Board of Trustees an official "Connecticut State University Professor...a signal honor, reserved for faculty members who fulfill the highest ideals of outstanding teaching, scholarly achievement and public service."

Another book on this subject matter is Shahak, Israel. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years. London [etc]: Pluto, 1997. Print., which can be read at:

http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html

[146] Shahak & Mezvinsky, ix.

Brownfeld, Allan. C. "Book Review: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs March (2000): 105-06. Print.

[147] Baumel, 258-259.

[148] Stevens, 192.

[149] Smith, Grant F. Declassified Deceptions: the Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007. Print. 34.

"The Israel Lobby Archive." Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy: http://irmep.org/ILA/default.asp

Ball, p. 24: “This weapons smuggling and other Zionist preparations for war were well-known to British and American analysts, who knew from the beginning that the Arabs would be certain losers in a war with Zionists, whose well-trained and armed combatants would outnumber the Arabs’ similar combatants by at least four to one. Analysts were also aware that the Zionists planned to expand beyond the partition allotment.”

[150] Slater, Leonard, The Pledge, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. P. 21-23.

[151] Slater, p. 94-123.

[152] Slater, p. 124.

Smith, Grant. Chapter 4.

[153] Smith, Grant, p. 63.

[154] Smith, 37.

[155] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 148-150.

[156] Grose, 207-210

[157] Grose,177

[158] Grose, 178-182.

[159] For details, see The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, and Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, by Rosemarie M. Esber

[160] Neff, Pillars, p. 68.

[161] Neff, Pillars, p. 69. Transjordan’s entire government budget at the time was only $5 million.

[162] Neff, Pillars, p. 69.

[163] Neff, Pillars, p. 72.

[164] Strindberg, Anders. "Forgotten Christians." American Conservative May 24 (2004). Print. Online at:

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2004/may/24/00013/

[165] Neff, Pillars, p. 75.

[166] Neff, Pillars, pp. 76-77. Citation: George McGhee, Envoy to the Middle World: Adventures in Diplomacy (New York: Harper & Row), 1983) p. 37.

[167] Oral History Interview by Richard D. McKinzie for the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum with Edwin M. Wright. General staff G-2 Middle East specialist, Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, advisor on intelligence 1950-55. The interview was conducted in Wooster, Ohio on July 26, 1974. On April 3, 1977 Wright added a letter and footnotes to the interview.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm [Accessed July 21, 2011]

[168] Stevens, p. 207.

[169] Christison, p. 40

[170] Neff, Pillars, 67.

[171] Neff, Pillars, 73.

[172] Lilienthal, Price, p. 94.

[173] Lilienthal, Price, 103.

[174] Lilienthal, Price, 94

[175] Christison, 81.

[176] Lilienthal, p. 97.

[177] Lilienthal, pp. 97-98

[178] Berger, pp. 35-38.

Dean Gildersleeve, a Protestant Christian, had been the only woman member of the U.S. UN delegation in San Francisco. For more information on her see:http://www.vgif.org/a_vg.shtml

[179] Gildersleeve, Virginia Crocheron. Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Print. p. 412.

[180] "Dorothy Thompson." Encylopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/592960/Dorothy-Thompson.

[181] The information from this section comes largely from American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson, by Peter Kurth; Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in her Time, by Marion K Sanders; Personal History, by Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy & Red (Dorothy Thompson & Sinclair Lewis), by Vincent Sheean.

[182] “Sands of Sorrow” by Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, 1950. View online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ6lIsl-pHU Also available at

http://www.archive.org/details/sands_of_sorrow

[183] Kurth, 384

[184] Kurth, 384.

“The Press: Free Speech for the Boss,” Time, Nov. 17, 1958. Online at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810661,00.html

[186] Kurth, 383.

[187] Nineten Eighty-Four, by George Orwell.

Interestingly, a biographer states: “In his last years, unlike several of his comrades around Tribune, Orwell had little sympathy with Zionism and opposed the creation of the state of Israel, as attested by his friend and Tribune colleague Tosco Fyvel in his book George Orwell: A Personal Memoir.”

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/george-orwell-biography.htm

Another discussion is here:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEMQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fevenements.univ-lille3.fr%2Fcolloque-george-orwell%2Fabstracts%2Fsamedi-09h30.pdf&ei=u23iTsTwCoa0iQK-namrBg&usg=AFQjCNGs2NsZynbhnxbS57VNJc-d3-mmiQ