AGAINST OUR BETTER JUDGMENT
The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel
By Alison Weir
of the American Federation of Zionists, and Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s*
Chapter One: How the U.S. "Special Relationship" with Israel came about
While many people are led to believe that U.S. support for Israel is driven by the American establishment and U.S. national interests, the facts don't support this theory. The reality is that for decades U.S. foreign policy and defense experts opposed supporting the creation of Israel. They then similarly opposed the massive American funding and diplomatic support that sustained the forcibly established state and that provided a blank check for its aggressive expansion. 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 in the word "lobby." It is considerably more powerful and pervasive than other lobbies. Components of it, both individuals and groups, have worked underground, secretly and even illegally, throughout its history, as documented by scholars and participants.
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 influence over public knowledge. What is even less widely known is how profoundly damaging this movement has been to the United States itself.
The success of this movement in achieving its goals, partly due to the hidden nature of much of its activity, has been staggering, and it has come at an 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.
It has targeted virtually every significant sector of American society; worked to involve Americans in tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly costly wars; dominated Congress for decades; increasingly determined which candidates could become serious contenders for the U.S. presidency; and promoted bigotry and violence against those they consider to be enemies of Israel.
It has promoted policies that have exposed Americans to growing danger, and then exaggerated this danger (while disguising its cause), fueling actions that destroy some of our nation's most fundamental freedoms and cherished principles.[2]
All this for a population that is considerably smaller than the population of New Jersey.[3]
Chapter Two - The beginnings
The Israel Lobby in the U.S. 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 Theodor Herzl[4], coalesced in the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, which established the World Zionist Organization, representing 117 groups the first year; 900 the next.[5]
While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and Texas,[6] they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of their proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 93-96 percent Muslims and Christians[7], who owned 99 percent of the land.[8]
After the Zionist Congress, Vienna's rabbis sent two of their number to explore Palestine as a possible Jewish state. These rabbis recognized the obstacle that Palestinians presented to the plan, writing home: "The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man."[9] Still, Zionists ultimately pushed forward. Numerous Zionist diary entries, letters, and other documents show that they decided to push out these non-Jews – financially, if possible; violently if necessary.[10]
Political Zionism in the U.S.
The importance of the United States to this movement was recognized from early on. One of the founders of political Zionism, Max Nordau, wrote a few years after the Basel conference, "Zionism's only hope is the Jews of America."[11]
At that time, however, the large majority of Jewish Americans were not Zionists. In fact, many actively opposed Zionism. In the coming years, however, Zionists were to woo them assiduously with every means at hand; the extent to which Nordau's hope was eventually realized is indicated by the statement by a prominent author of Jewish history, Naomi Cohen, who wrote in 2003, "but for the financial support and political pressure of American Jews... Israel might not have been born in 1948."[12] To this might be added Zionists' success in influencing American politicians, the media, and much of the general public.
In the 1880s groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state had begun popping up around the United States.[13] Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade.[14] A precursor to the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.[15]
In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed a Jewish ambassador to Turkey, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, which at that time controlled Palestine, because of Palestine's importance to Zionists. Jewish historian David G. Dalin reports that presidents considered the Turkish embassy important to "the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate."[16]
Every president, both Republican and Democrat, followed this precedent for the next 30 years. "During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain," writes Dalin. [17]
By the early 1890s organizations promoting Zionism existed in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.[18] Reports from the Zionist World Congress in Basel, which four Americans had attended, gave this movement a major stimulus, galvanizing Zionist activities in American cities that had large Jewish populations.[19]
In 1897-98 Zionists founded numerous additional societies throughout the East and the Midwest. In 1898 they converged in a first annual conference of American Zionists, held in New York on July 4th. There they formed the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ).[20]
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 and represented only a tiny fraction of the American Jewish population, Zionism was becoming a movement to which "Congressmen, particularly in the eastern cities, began to listen."[21]
The movement continued to expand. By 1914 several additional Zionist groups had formed, including Hadassah, the women's Zionist organization.[22] By 1918 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S., and by 1948 this had grown to almost a million. [23]
From early on Zionists actively pushed their agenda in the media. One Zionist organizer proudly proclaimed in 1912 "the zealous and incessant propaganda which is carried on by countless societies." The Yiddish press from a very early period espoused the Zionist cause. By 1923 every New York Yiddish newspaper except one was Zionist. Yiddish dailies reached 535,000 families in 1927.[24]
While Zionists were making major inroads in influencing Congress and the media, State Department officials were less enamored with Zionists, who they felt were trying to use the American government for a project damaging to the United States. Unlike politicians, State Department officials were not dependent on votes and campaign donations. They were charged with recommending and implementing policies beneficial to all Americans, not just one tiny sliver working on behalf of a foreign entity. [25]
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.
Secretary of State Philander Knox was perhaps the first in the pattern of State Department officials rejecting Zionist advances. In 1912, the Zionist Literary Society approached the Taft administration 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."[26]
Despite that small setback in 1912, Zionists 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.
Go to Chapter Three: Louis Brandeis, Zionism, and the "Parushim"
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[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, Hillels, etc – advocate for Israel. For a list see http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/introlobby.htmlBenjamin Ginsberg, in the anthology Jews in American Politics, notes that the "greatest triumph of American Jewish organizations during the postwar period" was to secure recognition of the state of Israel over the objections of the U.S. State and Defense Departments and then to successfully urge the U.S. government to provide Israel with billions of dollars over the subsequent decades. Benjamin Ginsberg, "Identity and Politics: Dilemmas of Jewish Leadership in America" in Jews in American Politics, ed. Louis Sandy Maisel et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 9-10.
However, until World War II and Nazi atrocities against Jews, the majority of Jewish Americans did not support Zionism. From its beginnings in Germany, Reform Judaism had rejected Jewish nationalism, and in the U.S. the Reform movement embraced universalism. Historian Rafael Medoff writes that an 1885 proclamation specifically "denounced the concept of a Jewish return to the land of Zion." Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 26.
In 1897 the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution that stated, "We affirm that the object of Judaism is not political nor national, but spiritual, and addresses itself to the continuous growth of peace, justice and love in the human race, to a messianic time when all men will recognize that they form 'one great brotherhood' for the establishment of God's kingdom on earth." Naomi Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 1897-1948 (Hanover: Brandeis UP, 2003), 43.
Today's unanimity was only created after years of strenuous and sometimes secretive (see Murphy, Sanua, Schmidt, and Smith) efforts to overcome the objections of anti-Zionist Jewish individuals and organizations, and even now, J.J. Goldberg's contention, made in his informative book Jewish Power, may hold considerable truth: "…the broader population of American Jews… are almost entirely unaware of the work being done in their name." J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 7.
Many people feel this is a profoundly unfortunate situation, believing, as Israel professor Yosef Grodzinsky writes: "...the State of Israel and its actions actually put world Jewry at risk." Yosef Grodzinsky and Chris Spannos, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust," Znet, June 7, 2005, http://www.zcommunications.org/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust-by-yosef-grodzinsky.html.
[2] See, for example: Tom Stephens, "Civil Liberties After September 11," CounterPunch, July 11, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/11/civil-liberties-after-september-11/.
"Report - A Call to Courage: Reclaiming Our Liberties Ten Years After 9/11," American Civil Liberties Union, September 7, 2011, https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/acalltocourage.pdf.
[3] New Jersey's population is 8,864,590.
"State&County QuickFacts: New Jersey," United States Census Bureau, accessed January 1, 2014, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html.
Israel's population is 7,707,042 (July 2013 est). Of this, approximately 5,826,523 are Jewish citizens.
"The World Factbook: Israel," Central Intelligence Agency, accessed January 1, 2014, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/is.html.
Israel's area is 20,770 square kilometers – smaller than all but four of the states in the United States (CIA, World Factbook).
"US States (plus Washington D.C.): Area and Ranking," Enchanted Learning, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.shtml.
More on Israel's population growth:
"Population Statistics: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," ProCon.org, September 17, 2010, http://israelipalestinian.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=636.
[4] Herzl is considered the founder of political Zionism and is often referred to as "the father of Israel." His seminal book The Jewish State (1896) is online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25282.
"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."
Assaf Uni, "Hans Herzl's Wish Comes True - 76 Years Later," Ha'aretz, September 19 2006. Online at http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/hans-herzl-s-wish-comes-true-76-years-later-1.197621.
[5] Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, 1st ed. (Berkeley, Calif: University of California, 2000), 22.
John Herbert Davis, The Evasive Peace: a Study of the Zionist/Arab Problem, 1st American ed. (New York: New World Press, 1970), 1.
It was first called the Zionist Organization; its name officially changed to the World Zionist Organization (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."
"Mission Statement," World Zionist Organization, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.wzo.org.il/Mission-Statement.
[6] John W. Mulhall, CSP, America and the Founding of Israel: an Investigation of the Morality of America's Role (Los Angeles: Deshon, 1995), 47-52.
"...the Galveston Immigration Scheme (GIS) brought 10,000 Jews to Texas between 1906 and 1914; ITO [Jewish Territorial Organization] ran GIS from 1907 until GIS ended at the start of World War I." (Mulhall, America, 52)
[7] Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 37. See table 2.18, "The Population of Palestine by Religion, 1870 to 1946."
Walid Khalidi, "The Palestine Problem: An Overview," Journal of Palestine Studies 21.1 (1991): 5-16. Print. Online at http://www.palestine-studies.com/enakba/history/Khalidi%20Walid_The%20Palestine%20Problem.pdf.
Khalidi discusses the Zionist plans and cites a Jewish population of seven percent in 1897, but McCarthy provides fully documented and explained numbers that indicate a Jewish population of four percent.
Additional resources on the pre-Israel population are:
• Salman H. Abu-Sitta, Atlas of Palestine, 1917-1966 (London: Palestine Land Society, 2010).
• Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
• British Mandatory Commission, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991).
• Supplement to Survey of Palestine Notes Compiled for the Information of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991).
[8] Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948, Vol. 2 (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), xxii.
[9] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 3.
[10] Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, 4th ed (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2001), 10-13.
An example of the fanaticism to be found within some segments of the movement is represented by a statement by Dr. Israel Eldad:
"Israel is the Jews land… It was never the Arabs land, even when virtually all of its inhabitants were Arab. Israel belongs to four million Russian Jews despite the fact that they were not born here. It is the land of nine million other Jews throughout the world, even if they have no present plans to live in it." Edwin M. Wright, The Great Zionist Cover-up: A Study and Interpretation (Cleveland: Northeast Ohio Committee on Middle East Understanding, 1975), 1. Wright cites the Times of Israel, August 19, 1969, for the quote.
Eldad was a strategist for a pre-state underground militia who later became a lecturer at several Israeli universities, authored a number of books, and in 1988, was awarded Israel's Bialik Prize for his contributions to Israeli thought.
Another example is described by Israeli Uri Avneri, who quotes a song that was being sung while he was growing up in Palestine: (cited by Wright, Zionist Cover-up, 9)
"We have returned, Young and Powerful
We have returned, We the Mighty
To conquer our Homeland, In a storm of War,
To redeem our land, with a lofty hand,
With blood and fire, Judea fell
With blood and fire, Judea shall rise."
Noted Israeli scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, writes: "There are stories of how early Zionist leaders were unaware of the existence of a native population in Palestine: they thought the land was uninhabited and were shocked to discover the Arabs. It is hard to believe such stories…" He goes on to write: "Looking at the writings of Zionist leaders and intellectuals at the turn of the century, we discover that the presence of natives was not only known but recognized immediately as both a moral issue and a practical question."
Beit-Hallahmi quotes a number of such writings from the late 1800s on. He reports that the leading Hebrew periodical of its time, Hashiloah, "During the first decade of the twentieth century… published scores of articles dealing with the Arab national movement (using this exact term!)…" Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch, 1993), 72-77. He gives several quotes demonstrating this knowledge.
[11] Dr. Max Nordau was a close associate of Theodor Herzl. This statement is quoted in the Maccabaean, Vol. 7 (1904). (Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 1)
[12] Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 1.
She continued: "Indeed, the American Jewish investment in the development and preservation of the Jewish state has continued to the present day."
According to the Jewish Women's archive, Cohen was a "prolific author and noted educator and academic [who] has achieved prominence as a historian of the United States and Jewish Americans." She was on the faculties of Hunter College of the City University of New York, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Upon her retirement in 1996 she moved to Israel. Tamar Kaplan Appel, "Naomi W. Cohen," Jewish Women's Archive, accessed January 1, 2014, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/cohen-naomi-w.
[13] An earlier project with both a domestic and international focus, "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.
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 the "Israelite" 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. (Goldberg, Jewish Power, 97-99)
In their book on foreign lobbying in Washington, The Power Peddlers, authors Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott write that the American Jewish Committee's history of Jewish lobbying on behalf of both American and foreign Jews began in the mid-nineteenth century. They write, "The first lobby link with Palestine came in 1881, when Jewish American groups wrote to General Lewis Wallace," the author of Ben Hur and then U.S. minister to the Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine, to intercede on behalf of American Jews who had retired to Jerusalem and were allegedly being harassed. Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott, The Power Peddlers: How Lobbyists Mold America's Foreign Policy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 284, 285.
[14] Diane Lichtenstein, "Emma Lazarus," Jewish Virtual Library, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/lazarus.html.
Historian Jonathan Sarna calls her "the foremost advocate (to that time) of what would become known as American Zionism" aimed at "establishment of a free Jewish state."
Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 139-40.
[15]Jonathan D. Sarna, Ellen Smith, and Scott-Martin Kosofsky, eds, The Jews of Boston (New Haven: Yale UP, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, 2005), 252. Online at http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Jews_Of_Boston.html?id=sz5UJ1Lh21IC.
"Israel, flag of," Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1355322/Israel-flag-of.
[16] David G. Dalin, "At the Summit: Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews," in Jews in American Politics, ed. Louis Sandy Maisel et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 31-3
[17] Dalin, "At the Summit," 31-32.
The appointee was Oscar Straus, whose brothers owned Macy's Department Store and whom Theodore Roosevelt 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 philanthropist 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."
The 30-year pattern ended in 1917 when Turkey broke off diplomatic relations after the U.S. declared war on Germany; after the war Turkey no longer controlled Palestine.
[18] Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: the American Council for Judaism, 1942-1948 (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990), 24.
[19] Kolsky, Jews against Zionism, 24.
[20] Kolsky, Jews against Zionism, 24.
In a 1918 reorganization the FAZ renamed itself the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). (Kolsky, Jews against Zionism, 26)
[21] Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, Reprint ed. (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002), 8.
[22] Kolsky, Jews against Zionism, 25.
[23] Neff, Pillars, 17; Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 30.
[24] Richard P. Stevens, American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy 1942-1947, Reprinted by the Institute for Palestine Studies, 1970 (New York: Pageant Press: 1962), 20.
[25] Neff, Pillars, 9.
[26] Neff, Pillars, 10.
* Photo Source: Library of Congress
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/history.html