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Chapter 43
The revolution, having spread into the half of Europe held clear for it by the Western Allies, did one more thing: in the manner of a serpent striking, it thrust out a tongue that reached to the southern shores of Europe, across the Mediterranean and into the tiny land called Palestine. The money, equipment, escort and convoy were provided by the West, but the revolution supplied the two indispensable constituents of the Zionist State: the people to invade it and the arms which made its conquest certain.
The West connived, but the Zionist state in the last analysis was the creation of the revolution, which in this manner fulfilled the Levitical doctrine of "the return". These incursions into Europe and into Arabia were the sole "territorial gains" reaped from the Second War, in the early stages of which the Western "premier-dictators" for a second time had publicly renounced all thought of territorial gain. The result of these two developments was to leave, in bisected Europe and bisected Palestine, two permanent detonation points of new war, which at any moment could be set off by any who might think to further their ambitions by a third war.
The reader will recall that in the years preceding the Second War Zionism was in collapse in Palestine; and that the British Parliament in 1939, having been forced by twenty years of experience to realize that the "Jewish National Home" was impossible to realize, had decided to abandon the unworkable "Mandate" and to withdraw after ensuring the parliamentary representation of all parties in the land, Arab, Jews and others. The reader then beheld the change which came about when Mr. Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940 and privately informed Dr. Weizmann (according to Dr. Weizmann's account, which has not been challenged) that he "quite agreed" with the Zionist ambition "after the war . . . to build up a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine".
Mr. Churchill always expressed great respect for parliamentary government but in this case, as a wartime potentate, he privily and arbitrarily overrode a policy approved, after full debate, by the House of Commons. After that, the reader followed Dr. Weizmann in his journeys to America and saw how Mr. Churchill's efforts "to arm the Jews" (in which he was opposed by the responsible administrators on the spot) received support from there under the "pressure" of Dr. Weizmann and his associates.
That was the point at which the reader last saw the Zionist state in gestation. Throughout 1944, as Mr. Churchill records in his war memoirs, he continued to press the Zionist ambition. "It is well known I am determined not to break the pledges of the British Government to the Zionists expressed in the Balfour Declaration, as modified by my subsequent statement at the Colonial Office in 1921. No change can be made in policy without full discussion in Cabinet" (June 29, 1944). The policy had been changed after full discussion in Cabinet and
Parliament, in 1939. Here Mr. Churchill simply ignored that major decision on policy and reverted to the earlier one, echoing the strange words of another Colonial Secretary (Mr. Leopold Amery, earlier quoted) that this policy could not change.
Again, "There is no doubt that this" (the treatment of Jews in Hungary) "is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world . . . all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved . . . Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death" (July 11, 1944). Here Mr. Churchill, like President Roosevelt and Mr. Eden, implicitly links the execution of captives solely with their crimes against Jews, thus relegating all other sufferers to the oblivion in to which, in fact, they fell. Incidentally, the reader saw in the last chapter that Jews were among the tormentors, as well as among the victims.
To continue: "I am anxious to reply promptly to Dr. Weizmann's request for the formation of a Jewish fighting force put forward in his letter of July 4" (July 12, 1944). "I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Central Europe and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction in the United States. I believe it is the wish of the Jews them selves to fight the Germans everywhere. It is with the Germans they have their quarrel" (July 26, 1944). If Mr. Churchill, as stated by Dr. Weizmann, had agreed to the building up "of a state of three or four million Jews in Palestine", he must have known that the Zionists had a much larger quarrel with the population of Arabia, and that any "Jewish fighting force" would be more likely to fall on these innocent third parties than on the Germans.
Mr. Churchill's last recorded allusion (as wartime prime minister) came after the fighting in Europe ended: "The whole question of Palestine must be settled at the peace table. . . I do not think we should take the responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place while the Americans sit back and criticise. Have you ever addressed yourselves to the idea that we should ask them to take it over? . . . I am not aware of the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task. Somebody else should have their turn now" (July 6, 1945).
This passage (considered together with President Roosevelt's jocular remark to Stalin, that the only concession he might offer King Ibn Saoud would be "to give him the six million Jews in the United States") reveal the private thoughts of these premier-dictators who so docilely did the bidding of Zion. Mr. Churchill wished he could shift the insoluble problem to the American back; Mr. Roosevelt would gladly have shifted it on to some other back. In this matter the great men, as an unwary remark in each case shows, behaved like the comedian who cannot by any exertion divest himself of the gluey flypaper. Mr. Churchill, in this inter-
office memorandum, ws not aware "of the slightest advantage that has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task". But in public, when Zion was listening, he continued (and to the moment of writing this book continues) to applaud the Zionist adventure in a boundless manner which aroused the curiosity even of Jewish critics (as will be seen).
At the time when Mr. Churchill dictated this last memorandum his words about "settling the question of Palestine at the peace table" were so irrelevant that he might have had humorous intent in using them. The issue was closed, for the Zionists had arms, the men to use these arms were to be smuggled through Europe from the revolutionary area by the West (as shown in the last chapter), and both major political parties in England and America were ready to applaud any act of aggression, invasion or persecution the transmigrants committed with the arms they had obtained.
This was particularly evident in the case of the Socialist party in England, which at that time was still the country chiefly involved in the fate of Palestine. The Labour party (as it called itself) in England presented itself as the champion of the poor, defenceless and oppressed; it had been born and bred in the promise of old-age pensions, unemployment relief, free medicine and the care and relief of the destitute, poor or humble generally. As the war drew towards its end this party at long last saw before it the prospect of office with a substantial majority. Like the Conservative party (and both parties in America) it apparently calculated that victory was even at this stage not quite certain and that it could be ensured by placating Zion. Thus is placed at the head of its foreign policy the aim to drive from a little country far away some people who were poorer" more friendless and longer oppressed than even the British worker in the worst days of the Industrial Revolution. In 1944 its leader, Mr. Clement Attlee, proclaimed the new, crowning tenet of British Socialism: "Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out" (of Palestine) "as the Jews move in. Let them be handsomely compensated for their land, and their settlement elsewhere be carefully organized and generously financed" (twelve years later nearly a million of these people, encouraged to move out by bombs, still languished in the neighbour Arab countries of Palestine; and the British Socialist Party, at every new turn of events, was more clamant than ever for their further chastisement).
The British Socialists, when they made this statement, knew that the Zionists, under cover of the war against Germany, had amassed arms for the conquest of Palestine by force. General Wavell, the commander in the Middle East, had long before informed Mr. Churchill that "left to themselves, the Jews would beat the Arabs" who had no source of arms-supply). General Wavell's view about the Zionist scheme was that of all responsible administrators on the spot, and for that reason he was disliked by Dr. Weizmann. The reader has already seen, as far back as the First War, that Dr. Weizmann's displeasure was dangerous even to high personages and it may have played a part in General Wavell's removal from the
Middle East command to India. The official British History of the War in the Middle East describes General Wavell as "one of the great commanders in military history" and says tiredness, caused by his great responsibilities, was aggravated by the feeling that he did not enjoy the full confidence of Mr. Churchill, who bombarded his Middle East commander with "irritating" and "needless" telegrams about "matters of detail". By his relegation General Wavell may have been another victim of Zionism, and British military prowess have suffered accordingly in the war; this cannot be established but it is a reasonable surmise.
In 1944 assassination again appeared in the story. Lord Moyne, as Colonial Secretary, was the Cabinet minister then responsible for Palestine, the post earlier held by Lord Lloyd (who had been rudely rebuked by Mr. Churchill for tardiness in "arming the Jews" and had died in 1941). Lord Moyne was the friend of all men, and sympathetic to Judaism, but he shared the view of all his responsible predecessors, that the Zionist enterprise in Palestine would end disastrously. For that reason, and having sympathy for suffering mankind in general, he was inclined to revive the idea of providing land in Uganda for any Jews who truly needed to find a new home somewhere.
This humane notion brought him the mortal hatred of the Zionists, who would not brook any diversion of thought from the target of their ambition, Palestine. In 1943 Lord Moyne modified his view, according to Mr. Churchill, who suggested that Dr. Weizmann should go to Cairo, meet Lord Moyne there and satisfy himself of the improvement. Before any meeting could come about Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo (November 1944) by two Zionists from Palestine, one more peacemaker thus being removed from a path strewn with the bones of earlier pacifiers. This event for a moment disturbed the flow of Mr. Churchill's memoranda to his colleagues about "arming the Jews", and the responsible men in Palestine once again urgently recommended that Zionist immigration thither be suspended. Mr. Churchill's reply (November 17, 1944) was that this would "simply play into the hands of the extremists", whereon the extremists were left unhindered in their further plans and their tribe increased.
As the Second War approached its end in Europe Mr. Churchill's hopes of some spectacular transaction which would happily integrate the Chazars in Arabia faded. If his suggestion (that Ibn Saoud be made "lord of the Middle East, provided he settles with you", i.e. Dr. Weizmann) was ever conveyed by Dr. Weizmann to President Roosevelt, an episode of 1944 may have been the result of it. An American, Colonel Hoskins, ("President Roosevelt's personal representative in the Middle East"; Dr. Weizmann) then visited the Arab leader. Colonel Hoskins, like all qualified men, had no faith in the plan to set up a Zionist state but was in favour of helping Jews to go to Palestine (if any so wished) in agreement with the Arabs. He found that King Ibn Saoud held himself to have been grossly insulted by Dr. Weizmann of whom he spoke "in the angriest and
most contemptuous manner, asserting that I" (Dr. Weizmann), "had tried to bribe him with twenty million pounds to sell out Palestine to the Jews"; and he indignantly rejected any suggestion of a deal on such terms. Therewith all prospect of any "settlement" vanished and Colonel Hoskins also passed from the story, another good man defeated in his attempt to solve the insoluble problem posed by Mr. Balfour.
Thus, as the war entered its last months, only two alternatives remained. The British Government, abandoning the decision of 1939, could struggle on, trying to hold the scales impartially between the native inhabitants and their besiegers from Russia; or it could throw up "the Mandate" and withdraw, whereupon the Zionists would expel the native inhabitants with arms procured from the European and African theatres of war.
This second great moment in the Palestinian drama approached. Mr. Roosevelt had been told by Dr. Weizmann that the Zionist s "could not rest the case on the consent of the Arabs" but had remained non-committal. Mr. Churchill, according to Dr. Weizmann, had committed himself, in private, and in 1944 Dr. Weizmann grew impatient to have from Mr. Churchill a public committal in the form of an amended Balfour Declaration which would award territory (in place of the meaningless phrase, "a national home") to Zion (in 1949 he was still very angry that Mr. Churchill, on the "pretext" that the war must first be finished, refrained from making this final public capitulation).
Like Macbeth, Dr. Weizmann's "top-line politicians" flinched and shrunk as the moment for the deed approached. Neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt would openly command their soldiers to do it and the Zionists furiously cried "Infirm of purpose!" Then Mr. Roosevelt went to Yalta, wearing the visage of doomed despair which the news-reel pictures recorded, arranged for the bisection of Europe, and at the end briefly informed Mr. Churchill (who was "flabbergasted" and "greatly disturbed" by the news, according to Mr. Hopkins) that he was going to meet King Ibn Saoud on board the U.S. cruiser Quincy.
What followed remains deeply mysterious. Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Mr. Churchill had any right to bestow Arab land on the lobbyists who beleaguered them in Washington and London; nevertheless, what was demanded of them was, in appearance, so small in comparison with what had just been done at Yalta, that Mr. Roosevelt's submission and same harsh ultimatum to King Ibn Saoud would have surprised none. Instead, he suddenly stepped out of the part he had played for many years and spoke as a statesman; after that he died.
He left Yalta on February 11, 1945, and spent February 12, 13 and 14 aboard the Quincy, receiving King Ibn Saoud during this time. He asked the king "to admit some more Jews into Palestine" and received the blunt answer, "No". Ibn Saoud said that "there was a Palestine army of Jews all armed to the teeth and. . . they did not seem to be fighting the Germans but were aiming at the Arabs". On February 28 Mr. Roosevelt returned to Washington. On March 28 Ibn Saoud
reiterated by letter his verbal warning (since confirmed by events) of the consequences which would follow from American support of the Zionists. On April 5 President Roosevelt replied reaffirming his own pledge verbally given to Ibn Saoud that:
"I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government which might prove hostile to the Arab people". On April 12 he died. This pledge would never have become known but for the action of an American statesman, Secretary of State James G. Byrnes, who published it six months later (October 18, 1945) in a vain attempt to deter Mr. Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, from taking the very "action hostile to the Arabs" which President Roosevelt swore he would never commit.
Mr. Roosevelt's pledge was virtually a deathbed one, and another of history's great unanswered questions is, did he mean it? If by any chance he did, then once more death intervened as the ally of Zionism. His intimate Mr. Harry Hopkins (who was present at the meeting and drafted a memorandum about it) sneered at the suggestion that it might have been sincerely intended, saying that President Roosevelt was "wholly committed publicly and privately and by conviction" to the Zionists (this memorandum record s Mr. Roosevelt's statement that he had learned more from Ibn Saoud about Palestine in five minutes than he had previously learned in a lifetime; out of this, again, grew the famous anecdote that Ibn Saoud said, "W e have known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn"). However, Mr. Hopkins may conceivably not be a trustworthy witness on this one occasion, for immediately after the meeting he, the president's shadow, mysteriously broke with Mr. Roosevelt, whom he never saw again! Mr. Hopkins shut himself in his cabin and three days later, at Algiers, went ashore, "sending word" through an intermediary that he would return to America by another route. The breach was as sudden as that between Mr. Wilson and Mr. House.
What is clear is that the last few weeks and days of Mr. Roosevelt's life were overshadowed by the controversy of Zion, not by American or European questions. Had he lived, and his pledge to Ibn Saoud become known, Zionism, which so powerfully helped to make and maintain him president for twelve years, would have become his bitter enemy. He died. (The pledge was categorical; it continued, "no decision will be taken with regard to the basic situation in Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews"; this was direct repudiation of Dr. Weizmann, who had told him, "we could not rest the case on Arab consent").
Thus, cloaked in a last-moment mystery, Mr. Roosevelt too passed from the story. A parting glimpse of the throng which had gathered round him during his twelve-year reign is given by the senior White House correspondent, Mr. Merriman Smith; this description of a wake shows that the carousing of Yalta accompanied the president even to his grave:
"Most of the people on the train were members of the Roosevelt staff. Before the train was out of sight of the crepe-hung Hyde Park depot, they started what turned out to be a post-funeral wake. Liquor flowed in every compartment and drawing-room. The shades were drawn through out the train and from the outside it looked like any train bearing mourners home. But behind those curtains, the Roosevelt staff had what they thought was a good time. Their Boss would have approved. . . I saw one of the top New Dealers hurl a tray of empty glasses into a toilet and shout in mock bravado, 'Down the hatch, we won't need you any more'. Porters and club stewards bustled up and down the corridors with gurgling, sloshing trays. If you hadn't known the people in the drawing room, you would have thought they were on their way home from a football game. Some of the people were using whisky as an antidote for worry over their jobs. . . I could hear an alcoholic chorus of Auld Lang Syne. . ."
Such were the trappings of statesmanship, during those last days when "the boys" toiled towards another "victory", when the Communist armies seized half of Europe, and the Zionists from Russia were convoyed by the West towards the invasion of Palestine.
In this question of Palestine, Mr. Roosevelt was liberated from his dilemma by death. Mr. Churchill was left to face his. He had courted Zionist favour from the days of the 1906 election. He had been a member of the British Government in 1917, of which another member (Mr. Leopold Amery, quoted in a Zionist paper in 1952) said, "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state. . . We envisaged not a divided Palestine, which exists only west of the Jordan".
Mr. Churchill never publicly stated any such intention (indeed, he denied it), but if it was his view this means that even the Zionist state set up after the Second World War by no means fulfils the intention of those who made the Balfour Declaration, and that further conquests of Arab lands have yet to be made by war.
The governing word in the passage quoted is "if"; "if the Jews could become a majority. . ." By 1945 three decades of Arab revolt had shown that the Zionists never would become a majority" unless the Arabs were driven out of their native land by arms. The question that remained was, who was to drive them out? Mr. Roosevelt had sworn not to. Dr. Weizmann, ever quick to cry "I stay here on my bond", liked to claim that Mr. Churchill was committed as far as Dr. Weizmann wanted him to go.
Even Mr. Churchill could not do this deed. He, too, then was liberated from his dilemma; not by death, but by electoral defeat. His memoirs express wounded pride at this rebuff; "All our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs".
It was not as simple as that. The future historian has to work from such
material, but the living participant knows better, and I was in England and saw the election when Mr. Churchill was "dismissed". In truth the British electorate could hardly have been expected to see in the outcome of the war (of which Mr. Churchill is the bitterest critic) cause for a vote of thanksgiving to Mr. Churchill, but there were other reasons for his defeat than mere disillusionment.
As in American elections, so in this British one of 1945 the power to "deliver the vote" was shown. Mr. Churchill had gone far in "arming the Jews" and in privately committing himself to Zionism, but not far enough for Dr. Weizmann. In England at the mid-century control of the press was virtually complete, in this question; Zionist propaganda at the election turned solidly against Mr. Churchill and \Vas waged in behalf of the Socialists, who had given the requisite promise of support for "hostile action" against the Arabs ("The Arabs should be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in . . . "). The block of Jewish Members of Parliament swung over in a body to the Socialist party (and was strongest in the left wing of it, where the Communists lurked). With high elation the Zionists saw the discomfiture of their "champion" of 1906, 1917 and 1939. Dr. Weizmann says that the Socialist victory (and Mr. Churchill's "dismissal") "delighted all liberal elements". This was the requital for Mr. Churchill's fort y years of support for Zionism; he had not actually ordered British troops to clear Palestine of Arabs and, for a while, was an enemy.
Thus Mr. Churchill was at least reprieved from the task of deciding what to do about Palestine and should not have been so grieved as he depicts himself, when he was dismissed soon after "victory". The British Socialists, at last provided with a great majority in parliament, then found at once that they were expected by forcible measures to "encourage the Arabs to move out". When they too shrank from the assassin's deed the cries of "betrayal" fell about their ears like hailstones. Dr. Weizmann's narrative grows frantic with indignation at this point; the Socialist government, he says, "within three months of taking office repudiated the pledge so often and clearly, even vehemently, repeated to the Jewish people". During fort y years Lord Curzon seems to have been the only leading politician caught up in this affair to realize that even the most casual word of sympathy, uttered to Dr. Weizmann, would later be held up as "a pledge", solemnly given and infamously broken.
Among the victorious Socialists a worthy party-man, one Mr. Hall, inherited the Colonial Office from Lord Lloyd, Lord Moyne and others dead or defamed, and was barely in it when a deputation from the World Zionist Congress arrived:
"I must say the attitude adopted by the members of the deputation was different from anything which I have ever experienced. It was not a request for the consideration by His Majesty's Government of the decisions of the Zionist conference, but a demand that His Majesty's Government should do what the Zionist Organization desired them to do". Ten years later an American ex-president, Mr. Truman, recalled similar visits during his presidency in similar
terms of innocent surprise; in 1945 the thing had been going on since 1906 without disturbing Mr. Hall's political slumbers. Soon after this he was ousted from the Colonial Office, his suitability for a peerage suddenly being realized.
The Socialist government of 1945, which in domestic affairs must have been nearly the worst that a war-weary country, in need of reinvigoration, could have received, in foreign affairs did its country one service. It saved, of honour, what could be saved. Under pressure from the four corners of the world it refused to play the assassin's part in Palestine; if it did not protect the Arabs, and by that time it probably could not protect them, at least it did not destroy them for the Zionist taskmaster. .
This achievement was the sole work of a Mr. Ernest Bevin, in my estimation the greatest man produced in British political life during this century. According to report, King George VI, the most unobtrusive of monarchs, urged the incoming Socialist prime minister, Mr. Attlee, to make his best and strongest man Foreign Secretary, because the state of the world so clearly demanded this. Mr. Attlee thereon revised a list already drafted, expunging the name of some worthy "liberal" who might have involved his country in the coming pogrom of Arabs, and inserting that of Mr. Bevin.
By 1945 Palestine was clearly too big an issue for Colonial Secretaries to handle; it was, and will long remain, the major preoccupation of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries, Presidents and Secretaries of State in England and America, because it is the most inflammable source of new wars. In 1945, as soon as "victory" was won, it was seen to dominate and pervert the politics of all nation-states. Without awe, Ernest Bevin, the farm lad from Somerset and the dockers' idol, took up the bomb and sought to remove the fuse. Had he received support from one leading man in any Western country he might have saved the day. They all fell on him like wolves; there was something of the camp-meeting and of revivalist hysteria in the abandon of their surrender to Zionism.
He was a robust man, with the beef and air of the West Country in his bones and muscle and its fearless tradition in his blood, but even he was physically broken within a few years by the fury of unremitting defamation. He was not spiritually daunted. He realized that he had to do with an enterprise essentially conspiratorial, a conspiracy of which the revolution and Zionism were linked parts, and he may be unique among politicians of this century in that he used a word ("conspiracy") which has a dictionary meaning plainly applicable to this case. He bluntly told Dr. Weizmann that he would not be coerced or coaxed into any action' contrary to Britain's undertakings. Dr. Weizmann had not experienced any such instruction, at that high level, since 1904, and his indignation, surging outward from him through the Zionist organizations of the world, produced the sustained abuse of Mr. Bevin which then followed.
Mr. Churchill, had he remained prime minister, would apparently have used British arms to enforce the partition of Palestine. That seems to be the
inescapable inference from his memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff Committee (January 25, 1944), in which he said "the Jews, left to themselves, would beat the Arabs; there cannot therefore be any great danger in our joining hands with the Jews to enforce the kind of proposals about partition which are set forth. ." The reader may see how greatly circumstances alter cases. The bisection of Europe was for Mr. Churchill "a hideous partition, which cannot last". Partition in Palestine was worthy to be enforced by "joining hands with the Jews".
Mr. Bevin would have no truck with such schemes. Under his guidance the Socialist government announced that it "would not accept the view that the Jews should be driven out of Europe or that they should not be permitted to live again in these" (European) "countries without discrimination, contributing their ability and talent towards rebuilding the prosperity of Europe". "
The words show that this man understood the nature of Zionist chauvinism, the problem posed by it and the only solution. They depict what will inevitably happen one day, but that day has been put back to some time after another ruinous era in Palestine, which will probably involve the world. He was either the first British politician fully to comprehend the matter, or the first to act with the courage of his knowledge.
The Socialist government of 1945 was driven, by responsible office, to do what all responsible governments before it had equally been forced to do: to send out one more commission of enquiry (which could but repeat the reports of all earlier commissions) and in the meantime to regulate Zionist immigration and to safeguard the interest of the native Arabs, in accordance with the pledges of the original Balfour Declaration.
Dr. Weizmann considered this "a reversion to the old, shifty double emphasis on the obligation towards the Arabs of Palestine" and the Zionist power went to work to destroy Mr. Bevin, on whose head, for the next two years, a worldwide campaign was turned. It was concentric, synchronised and of tremendous force. First, the Conservative party was sent into action. The Socialists had defeated them by capitulations to Zionism, which brought them the help of the controlled press. The Conservatives, being out of office, played this trump card against the Socialists, and in turn made their capitulations to Zion. This was at once made clear: the party proclaimed that it would combat the domestic and support the foreign policy of the Socialists, but from the moment of the Socialist declaration about Palestine it made one exception to the second rule; it began a sustained attack on the Socialist government's policy about Palestine, which meant, on Mr. Bevin.
At that point Mr. Churchill, safe in opposition, demeaned himself by accusing Mr. Bevin of "anti-Jewish feelings", a shot taken from the locker of the Anti-Defamation League (which added a new epithet, "Bevinism", to its catalogue of smearwords). No such traducement of a political adversary ever came from Mr. Bevin, Mr. Churchill's outstanding colleague during the long war years.
Thus Mr. Bevin, at the post of greatest danger, received the full support of the opposition party in all matters of foreign policy save one, Palestine. He might yet have saved the day but for the intervention of the new American president, Mr. Harry S. Truman, with whose automatic elevation (on the death of the incumbent) from the Vice-Presidency the story of the 20th Century resumed the aspect of Greek tragedy (or of a comedy of errors). Mr. Truman involved his country up to the neck in the Palestinian embroglio at the very moment when in England, at long last, a man had arisen who was able and staunch enough to liquidate the disastrous venture.
Unless a man has that genius which needs no basis in acquired knowledge, a small town in the Middle West and Kansas City are poor places for learning about world affairs. Mr. Truman, when the presidency was thrust upon him, had two major disqualifications for the office. One was native remoteness from world politics, and the other was too dose acquaintance with ward politics, of which he had seen much. In Kansas City he had watched the machine at work; he knew about patronage, ward bosses and stuffed ballot-boxes. He had received the impression that politics were business, and essentially simple in the basic rules, which allowed no room for high-falutin' ideas.
A middle-sized, hale, broadly-smiling man who was to sign the order for an act of destruction unprecedented in the history of the West, he strode briskly on to the stage of great events. He decided at Potsdam that "Uncle Joe" was "a nice guy" and there completed Mr. Roosevelt's territorial rearrangements in Europe and Asia. He arranged for the atom-bombing of defenceless Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No comparable series of acts ever fell to the lot of a once-bankrupt haberdasher precipitated into the office of a "premier-dictator". Then he turned his gaze on domestic affairs and the next Congressional and presidential elections. In these, he knew (and said), the Zionist-controlled vote was decisive..
While Mr. Bevin strove to undo the tangle, Mr. Truman undid Mr. Bevin's efforts. He demanded that a hundred thousand Jews be admitted immediately to Palestine, and he arranged for the first partisan commission of enquiry to go to Palestine. This was' the only means by which any commission could ever be expected to produce a report favourable to the Zionist scheme. Two of its four American members were avowed Zionists; the one British member was Zionist propagandist and a left-wing enemy of Mr. Bevin. This "Anglo-American Commission" went to Palestine, where Dr. Weizmann (for perhaps the tenth time in some thirty years) was the chief personage heard. It recommended (though "cautiously") the admission of one hundred thousand "displaced persons" (the term was presumably meant to mislead the public masses and was at the moment of some importance; no truly displaced persons wanted to go to Palestine).
Therewith the fat of the next war was in the fire, and an American president publicly supported "hostile action" against the Arabs, for il was that. The next
Zionist Congress (at Geneva in 1946) joyfully recorded this new "pledge" (Mr. Truman's "suggestion" and the partisan commission's "cautious recommendations"). This was a characteristic Zionist Congress, being composed chiefly of Jews from Palestine (who had already migrated there) and from America (who had no intention of going there); the herded-mass, to be transported thither, was not represented. Dr. Weizmann's description of the decisions taken are of great significance.
He says the congress "had a special character" and showed "a tendency to rely on methods. . . referred to by different names: 'resistance', 'defence', 'activism'. " Despite these "shades of meaning" (he says) "one feature was common to all of them: the conviction of the need for fighting against British authority in Palestine, or anywhere else, for that matter".
Dr. Weizmann's guarded remarks must be considered in the context of his whole book and of the entire history of Zionism. What he means is that the Zionist World Congress at Geneva in 1946 decided to resume the method of terror and assassination which had proved effective in Russia in the germinating stage of the two-headed conspiracy. The congress knew this to be the method "referred to by different names" during its discussions, for it had already been resumed in the assassination of Lord Moyne and many terrorist exploits in Palestine. The prompting impulse for the Congress's decision (which in fact it was) came from the American president's recommendation that a hundred thousand people should be forcibly injected into Palestine. The Zionists took that to be another "pledge", committing America to approval of anything they might do, and they were right.
Dr. Weizmann knew exactly what was at stake and in his old age shrank from the prospect that reopened before him: reversion to the worship of Moloch, the god of blood. He had seen so much blood shed in the name of revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, the two causes which had dominated his parental home and home town in the Pale. In his youth he had exulted in the riots and revolutions and had found the assassinations a natural part of the process; in his maturity he had rejoiced in the ruin of Russia despite the decades of bloodshed which ensued, For fifty-five years he had cried havoc and unloosed dogs of war. Almost unknown to the masses embroiled in two wars, he had, become one of the most powerful men in the world. Beginning in 1906, when he first wheedled Mr. Balfour, he had gradually risen until his word in the lobbies was law, when he could command audience of monarchs and obedience of presidents and prime ministers. Now, when the enterprise he had so long schemed for was on the brink of consummation, he recoiled from the bloodstained prospect that opened immeasurably before him; blood, and more blood, and at the end. . . what? Dr. Weizmann remembered Sabbatai Zevi.
He was against "truckling to the demoralizing forces in the movement", the cryptic phrase he uses to cover those referred to by Mr. Churchill as "the
extremists", and by the administrators on the spot as "the terrorists". This meant that he had changed as his end approached, for without terrorism Zionism would never have established itself at all and if, in 1946, his Zionist state was to be achieved, this could only be done by violence. Thus at the last Dr. Weizmann realized the futility of his half-century of "pressure behind the scenes" and no doubt saw the inevitable fiasco that lay ahead, after the Zionist state had been born in terror. Psychologically, this was a moment of great interest in the story. Perhaps men grow wise in their old age; they tire of the violent words and deeds which seemed to solve all problems in their conspiratorial youth, and this revulsion may have overtaken Chaim Weizmann. If t did, it was too late to alter anything. The machine he had built had to continue, of its own momentum, to its own destruction and that of any in its path. The remaining future of Zionism was in the hands of "the demoralizing forces in the movement", and he had put it there.
He was denied a vote of confidence and was not re-elected president of the World Zionist Organization. Fort y years after Herzl, he was cast aside as he had cast Herzl aside, and for the same essential reason. He and his Chazars from Russia had overthrown Herzl because Herzl wanted to accept Uganda, which meant renouncing Palestine. He was overthrown because he feared to re-embark on the policy of terror and assassination, and that also meant renouncing Palestine.
The note of despair sounded even earlier, in his allusion s to Lord Moyne's murder: "Palestine Jewry will . . . cut out, root and branch, this evil from its midst. . . this utterly un-Jewish phenomenon". These words were addressed to Western ears and were specious; political murder was not "an utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" in the Talmudic areas of Russia where Dr. Weizmann spent his revolutionary and conspiratorial youth, as he well knew, and a series of similar deeds stained the past. Indeed, when he spoke to a Zionist audience he candidly admitted that political murder was not an "utterly un-Jewish phenomenon" but the opposite: "What was the terror in Palestine but the old evil in a new and horrible guise".
This "old evil", rising from its Talmudic bottle to confront Dr. Weizmann at Geneva in 1946, apparently accounts for the note of premonition which runs through the last pages of his book of 1949 (when the Zionist state had been set up by terror). The Moyne murder, he then forebodingly said, "illumines the abyss into which terrorism leads". Thus in his last days Dr. Weizmann saw whither his indefatigable journey had led: to an abyss! He lived to see it receive a first batch of nearly a million victims. From the moment of his deposition effective control passed into the hands of "the terrorists", as he calls them, and his belated cry of "Back!" fell on empty air. The "activists" (as they prefer to call themselves) were left with power to ignite a third world conflict when they pleased. Dr. Weizmann survived to play a determining part in the next stage of the venture but never
again had true power in Zionism.
From 1946 the terrorists took command. They set to work to drive the British from Palestine first, and knew they could not fail in the state of affairs which had been brought about during the Second War. If the British defended either themselves or the semitic Arabs the cry of "anti-semitism" would rise until the politicians in Washington turned on the British; then, when the British left, the. terrorist s would drive out the Arabs.
The terror had been going on for many years, the Moyne murder being only one incident in it; indeed, one of the harassed Colonial Secretaries, Mr. Oliver Stanley, in 1944 told the House of Commons that it had sensibly impeded "the British war effort", or in other words, prolonged the war (he is a trustworthy witness, for he was hailed by the Zionist s at his death as "a staunch friend"). In 1946 and 1947, after the Geneva Congress, it was intensified, hundreds of British soldiers being ambushed, shot while asleep, blown up and the like. The terror was deliberately given the visible appearance of "the old evil" when two British sergeants were slowly done to death in an orchard and left hanging there. The choice of this Levitical form of butchery ("hanging on a tree", the death "accursed of God") signified that these things were done under the Judaic Law.
The British government, daunted by the fury of the American and British press, under common constraint, feared to protect its officials and soldiers, and one British soldier wrote to The Times: "What use has the army for the government's sympathy? It does not avenge those who are murdered, nor does it prevent any further killings. Are we no longer a nation with sufficient courage to enforce law and order where it is our responsibility to do so?"
This was the case. The great Western governments had fallen, under "irresistible pressure", into a nerveless captivity, and Britain and America had ceased, anyway for the time, to be sovereign nations. At length the British government, in despair, referred the problem of Palestine to the new organization in New York called "the United Nations" (which had as little right to dispose of Palestine as the League of Nations before it).
Delegates from Haiti, Liberia, Honduras and other parts of "the free world" thronged to Lake Success, a forlorn, suburban pond outside New York. There was an hissing in the world at this time and from the parent UNO bodies called COBSRA, UNRRA, UNESCO uncoiled. On this particular day something called UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) rendered to UNO its report recommending "the partition of Palestine".
Dr. Weizmann (though deposed by the Zionist Organization for his warnings against terrorism) was once more the chief authority heard by UNSCOP in Jerusalem, and then quickly returned to New York where, in October and November of 1947, he dominated the hidden scene as lobbyist supreme. "Irresistible pressure" operated with relentless force. The delegates whom the
public masses saw on the moving-picture screens were puppets; the great play was all behind the curtain and in that, Chesterton's "real world", of which the multitude saw nothing, two great operations were in progress, by means of which the fate of Palestine was settled far from the debating halls of the United Nations. First, hundred s of thousands of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe were being smuggled across Western Europe to invade Palestine. Second, the approach of an American presidential election was being used by the Zionists as a means to set the rival parties there bidding against each other for Zionist support, and thus to ensure that the decisive American vote in the United Nations would be cast for the invasion.
In each case, and as in the preceding three decades, men arose who strove to disentangle their countries from its consequences. The secret convoying of the Eastern Jews across Western Europe was revealed by a British general, Sir Frederick Morgan (to whose work in planning the invasion of Normandy General Eisenhower's book pays tribute). When the fighting ended General Morgan was lent by the British War Office to "UNRRA", the offspring-body of the United Nations which was supposed to "relieve and rehabilitate" the sufferers from the war. General Morgan was put in charge of the most hapless of these (the "displaced persons") and found that "UNRRA", which cost the American and British taxpayer much money, was being used as an umbrella to cover the mass-movement of Jews from the eastern area to Palestine. These people were not "displaced persons". Their native countries had been "liberated" by the Red Armies and they were able to live in them, their welfare ensured by the special law against "anti-semitism" which all these communized countries received from their Communist overlord. They had not been "driven from Germany", where they had never lived. In fact, these were, once more, the Ostjuden, the Chazars, being driven by their Talmudic masters to a new land for a conspiratorial purpose.
In this way a new war was being cooked over the embers of the dying one and General Morgan twice (in January and August 1946) publicly stated that "a secret organization existed to further a mass movement of Jews from Europe, a second Exodus". Senator Herbert Lehman, a prominent Zionist who was Director General of UNRRA, said this warning was b "anti-semitic" and demanded General Morgan's resignation. He relented when General Morgan disclaimed "anti-semitic" intent, but when the general repeated his warning eight months later he was summarily dismissed by the new Director General, a Zionist sympathizer and former Mayor of New York, Mr. Fiorello La Guardia, known to New Yorkers as The Little Flower. Mr. La Guardia then appointed a Mr. Myer Cohen in General Morgan's place. The British government hastened to punish General Morgan by retiring the celebrated invasion-planner, stating (falsely) that this was at his request.
Two independent bodies of high status confirmed General Morgan's
information; in the servient condition of the press their disclosures received little publicity. A Select Committee on Estimates of tile British Rouse of Commons reported (November 1946) that "very large numbers of Jews, almost amounting to a second Exodus, have been migrating from Eastern Europe to the American zones of Germany and Austria with the intention in the majority of cases of finally making their way to Palestine. It is clear that it is a highly organized movement, with ample funds and great influence behind it, but the Subcommittee were unable to obtain any real evidence who are the real instigators". A War Investigating Committee sent to Europe by the United States Senate said that "heavy migration of Jews from Eastern Europe into the American zone of Germany is part of a carefully organized plan financed by special groups in the United States".
The picture, once again, is of a conspiracy supported by the Western governments, in this case the American one in particular. The "organization" in America disposed of American and British public funds lavishly, and effected the mass-transfer of population under the cloak of war-relief. Its leaders were able summarily to dismiss high officials, publicly-paid, who exposed what went on, and the British government supported this action. Although by that time (1946-1947) the perfidy of the revolutionary state was supposed to have been realized by the Western politicians (so that "cold war" was waged with it), the three governments of Washington, London and Moscow acted in perfect accord in this one matter. The "exodus" came from Russia and from the part of Europe abandoned by the West to the revolution. No man may leave the Soviet state without permission, most rarely granted, but in this one case the Iron Curtain opened to release a mass of people, just large enough to ensure immediate war and permanent unrest in the Near East. Just as smoothly, thirty years before, the frontiers and ports of Germany (an enemy), England (an ally) and America (a neutral) had opened to allow the revolutionaries to go to Russia. On both occasions, at this supreme level of policy, the super-national one, there were no allies, enemies or neutrals; all governments did the bidding of the supreme power.
One of the British Colonial Secretaries earliest involved in Zionism and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Mr. Leopold Amery, had said: "We thought when we issued the Balfour Declaration that if the Jews could become a majority in Palestine they would form a Jewish state". In 1946-1948, at last, this thought was being realized, in the only way possible: by the mass-transplantation of Eastern Jews to Palestine. Only one thing still was needed: to obtain from "the United Nations" some act of mock-legalization for the invasion about to occur. To ensure that, the capitulation of the American president was necessary; and the way to bring that about was to threaten his party-advisers with the loss of the approaching presidential election, which lay a year ahead.
A third war was in truth being hatched, in the thinning fog of the second war, by this clandestine movement of population, and in America (after the dismissal
of General Morgan in Europe) the two men whose offices made them directly responsible tried to nip the peril in the bud. One was General Marshall, whose interventions in the question of invading Europe and later in that of China have been shown by their consequences to have been most ill-omened. In the question of Palestine he showed prudence. In 1947 he was Secretary of State and was thus chiefly responsible, under the president, for foreign policy. He strove to ward off his country's involvement in the Palestinian fiasco and, as in all such cases, his relegation soon followed.
The other man was Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. He was a successful banker, brought in to government in wartime for his executive ability; he was wealthy and only the impulse to serve his country can have moved him to take office. He foresaw disastrous consequences from involveqlent and died believing he had utterly failed in his effort to avert it. Of all the men concerned during two generations, he alone left a diary which fully exposes the methods by which Zion controls and manipulates governors and governments.
Mr. Truman went further than even President Roosevelt 'in taking foreign policy and national security out of the province of the responsible ministers, and in acting contrary to their counsel under the pressure applied through electoral advisers. The story is made complete by Mr. Forrestal's Diary, Mr. Truman's own memoirs, and Dr. Weizmann's book.
The struggle behind the scenes for control over the American president, and therewith of the Republic itself, lasted from the autumn of 1947 to the spring of 1948, that is, from the United Nations debate about the partition of Palestine to the proclamation of the Zionist state after its forcible seizure.
Dates are important. In November 1947 the Zionists wanted the "partition" vote and in May 1948 they wanted recognition of their invasion. The presidential election was due in November 1948, and the essential preliminary to it, the nomination contests, in June and July 1948. The party-manager s instructed Mr. Truman that re-election was in the Zionist gift; the opposition candidate received similar advice from his party-managers. Thus "the election campaign to ok on the nature of an auction, each candidate being constantly under pressure from his organizers to outbid the other in 'supporting the invasion of Palestine. In these circumstances the successful candidate could only feel that election was a reward for "supporting partition" in November 1947 and "granting recognition" in May 1948; nothing could more clearly illustrate the vast change which the mass-immigration of Eastern Jews, in the period following the Civil War, had brought about in the affairs of the American Republic. Mr. Forrestal left a full account of the chief moves in this fateful, hidden contest.
The time-bomb planted by Mr. Balfour thirty years earlier reached its explosion-moment when the British government in 1947 announced that it would withdraw from Palestine if other powers made impartial administration there impossible; this was the reply to President Truman's proposal that 100,000
"displaced persons" be allowed to enter Palestine immediately. Mr. Truman's responsible adviser s at once informed the American government of the consequences which would flow from a British withdrawal. General Marshall told the American Cabinet that such a British withdrawal "would be. followed by a bloody struggle between the Arabs and Jews" (August 8, 1947), and his Under Secretary of State, Mr. Robert Lovett, pointed to the danger of "solidifying sentiment among all the Arabian and Mohammedan peoples" against the United States (August 15, 1947).
This warning was at once answered by the voice of party-politics. At a Cabinet lunch Mr. Robert Hannegan (Postmaster General, but previously national chairman of the President's party, the Democratic Party) urged the President to "make a statement of policy on Palestine" demanding "the admission of 150,000 Zionists". Thus the party-man's counsel was that President Truman should respond to the British warning by increasing his bid for Zionist electoral support, from 100,000 to 150,000 persons. Mr. Hannegan said this new demand "would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee" and, as proof of what he promised, added that the earlier demand (related to 100,000 immigrants) had produced the result that "very large sums were obtained from Jewish contributors and they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the President did on Palestine".
Thus the issue from the outset was presented to the President in the plainest terms of national interest on the one hand and party-contributions, party-votes and party-success on the other. It was argued throughout the months that followed and finally determined on that basis, without any gloss.
Mr. Forrestal's alarm became acute. He held that if state policy and national security (his province) were to be subordinated to vote-buying the country would pass under Zionist control and earlier (in 1946) had asked the President if Palestine could not be "taken out of politics". Mr. Truman at that time had "agreed about the principle" but evinced the feeling "that not much will come of such an attempt, that political manoeuvring is inevitable, politics and our government being what they are". .
In September 1947, Mr. Forrestal spurred by his misgivings, laboured tirelessly to have Palestine "taken out of politics". His idea was that both contending parties must contain a majority of people who could be brought to agree, in the paramount national interest, that major foreign issues be set above dispute, so that Palestine could not be used for huckstering at election-time. He found only disdain for this idea among the men of "practical politics".
Deeply disturbed by Mr. Hannegan's above-quoted remarks of September 4, Mr. Forrestal at a Cabinet lunch on September 29, 1947 openly asked President Truman "whether it would not be possible to lift the Jewish-Palestine question out of politics". Mr. Truman said "it was worth trying to do, although he was obviously sceptical". At the next Cabinet lunch (October 6) the party-boss
rebuked the responsible Cabinet officer:
"Mr. Hannegan brought up the question of Palestine. He said many people who had contributed to. the Democratic campaign were pressing hard for assurances from the administration of definitive support for the Jewish position in Palestine".
Mr. Forrestal foresaw Mr. Truman's capitulation and his alarm increased. He saw the Democratic party-manager, Mr. J. Howard McGrath (November 6, 1947) and again could make no headway. Mr. McGrath said, "There were two or three pivotal states which could not be carried without the support of people who were deeply interested in the Palestine question". Mr. Forrestal made no impression with his rejoinder, "I said I would rather lose those states in a national election than run the risks which I felt might develop in our handling of the Palestine question".
The next day he again received support from General Marshall, who told the Cabinet that the Middle East was "another tinder box", and Mr. Forrestal then "repeated my suggestion . . . that a serious attempt be made to lift the Palestine question out of American partisan politics . . . Domestic politics ceased at the Atlantic Ocean and no question was more charged with danger to our security than this particular one" (November 7, 1947).
The "partition" vote was by this time near and Mr. Forrestal made another appeal to. Mr. McGrath , the Democratic party-manager, showing him a secret report on Palestine provided by the governmental intelligence agency. Mr. McGrath brushed this aside, saying Jewish sources were responsible for a substantial part of the contributions to the Democratic National Committee and many of these contributions were made "with a distinct idea on the part of the givers that they will have an opportunity to express their views and have them seriously considered on such questions as the present Palestine question. There was a feeling among the Jews that the United States was not doing what it should to solicit votes in the United Nations General Assembly in favour of the Palestine partition, and beyond this the Jews would expect the United States to do its utmost to implement the partition decision if it is voted by the United Nations through force if necessary '. "
This quotation reveals the process of progressively raising the bid for Zionist funds and the Zionist vote which went on behind the scenes. At the start only United States support for the partition proposal had been "expected". Within a few weeks this "expectation" had risen to the demand that the United States should "solicit" the votes of other countries in support of partition and should use American troops to enforce partition, and the party-manager was quite accustomed to such notions (if American troops in the 1950's or 1960's find them selves in the Near East, any of them who have read Mr. Forrestal's Diaries should know how they came to be there). Mr. Forrestal must have acted from a sense of duty, not of hope, when he implored Mr. McGrath "to give a lot of
thought to this matter because it involved not merely the Arabs of the Middle East, but also might involve the whole Moslem world with its four hundred millions of people: Egypt, North Africa, India and Afghanistan".
While Mr. Forrestal fought this losing battle behind the curtained windows of the White House and of party-headquarters, Dr. Weizmann, in Washington, New York and Lake Success was indefatigably organizing "the vote" on partition. He was having his difficulties, but was rescued from them at this culminant moment when he found "a welcome and striking change" among some of those "wealthy Jews" who formerly had opposed Zionism. At this belated stage in his narrative he first mentions Mr. Bernard Baruch, saying that Mr. Baruch had formerly been "an oppositionist Jew", one of the "rich and powerful Jews who were against the idea of the Jewish National Home, but they did not know very much about the subject".
One can only speculate about the exact composition and nature of the "Jewish International" which Dr. Kastein described as having come into existence around the start of this century. It is permissable, in the light of all that has happened in these fifty years, to envisage it as a permanent, high directorate, spread over all nation-state boundaries, the membership of which probably changes only when gaps are left by death. If that is its nature, a reasonable further inference would be that Dr. Weizmann was a very high functionary, perhaps the highest functionary, subordinate to it, but that undoubtedly there was a body superior to him. In that case, I would judge that its four most important members, in the United States at that period, would have been Mr. Bernard Baruch, first, and Senator Herbert Lehman, Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior and Justice Felix Frankfurter, next. If there were a doubt, it would previously have attached to Mr. Baruch, who had never publicly associated himself with "leftist" causes or with Zionism. His great crony, Mr. Winston Churchill, quoted Mr. Baruch's "negative view" about Zionism to Dr. Weizmann, who in consequence (as he says) "took great care not to touch on the Jewish problem" when he earlier met Mr. Baruch in America.
Nevertheless, at this decisive moment Mr. Baruch suddenly "changed a great deal" (Dr. Weizmann) and his support, added to the Zionist "pressure" that was being exerted on American politics, was determining. Dr. Weizmann, as he hurried round the lobbies at Lake Success, learned that the American delegation was opposed to the partition of Palestine. Thereon he enlisted the "particularly helpful" support of Mr. Baruch (until then, for forty years or more, regarded as an opponent of Zionism even by such intimates as Mr. Winston Churchill!), and also of the junior Mr. Henry Morgenthau (whose name attaches to the plan of "blind vengeance" adopted by Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill at Ottawa in 1944).
Mr. Baruch presumably did not hold Dr. Weizmann in the awe which seems to have seized the Western politicians at the Zionist leader's approach. Therefore
his sudden support of Zionism must denote either an abrupt conversion or the revelation of a feeling earlier concealed; in either case, his intervention was decisive as will be seen.
Dr. Weizmann was well supported by the other powerful Jews in the Democratic Party. Senator Lehman was head of UNRRA when it was used to smuggle the Eastern Jews across Europe to Palestine, and had demanded General Morgan's resignation for publicly calling attention to this mass-movement of people; his part in the drama was already plain. Mr. Justice Frankfurter was equally busy; Mr. Forrestal was told by Mr. Loy Henderson (in charge of Middle Eastern Affairs in the State Department) that "very great pressure had been put on him as well as Mr. Lovett to get active American solicitation for United Nations votes for the Palestine partition; he said Felix Frankfurter and Justice Murphy had both sent messages to the Philippines delegate strongly urging his vote" (this is the same Mr. Frankfurter who called on Mr. House at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris "to talk about the Jews in Palestine"; he was also the devoted instructor of Mr. Alger Hiss at the Harvard Law School).
Having such support, Dr. Weizmann was a besieging general backed by superior armies when he called on the citadel's commander, President Truman, on November 19, 1947, to demand that the United States support the partition of Palestine, and furthermore, that the Negev district (to which Dr. Weizmann attached "great importance") be included in the Zionist territory.
Mr. Truman's discipline was exemplary: "he promised me that he would communicate at once with the American delegation" (Dr. Weizmann). Out at Lake Success the chief American delegate, Mr. Herschel Johnson, as he was about to inform the Zionist representative of the American decision to vote against the inclusion of the Negev, was called to the telephone and received, through President Truman, Dr. Weizmann's orders. With that the deed was done and on November 29, 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended (Zionist propaganda always says "decided") that "independent Arab and Jewish states, and the specific international régime for the City of Jerusalem" should come into existence after termination of the British "Mandate" on August l, 1948.
The vote was 31 against 13 with 10 abstentions. The manner in which the American vote was procured has been shown. As to some of the other votes, Under Secretary Robert Lovett said at the next Cabinet lunch (December l, 1947) that "he had never in his life been subject to so much pressure as he had been in the last three days". The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which had a concession in Liberia, reported (he said) that it had been asked by telephone to instruct its representative in Liberia "to bring pressure on the Liberian Government to vote in favour of partition ". (Mr. Loy Henderson's account of the "great pressure" used to get American "solicitation" of the votes of small countries has already been quoted). Thus was the "vote" of "the United
Nations" produced in the most explosive issue of this century's world affairs.
At the Cabinet lunch immediately after this "vote" Mr. Forrestal returned to the attack: "I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists' pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine. . . The decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country". He then discussed the question (December 3, 1947) with Mr. James F. Byrnes, who had ceased to be Secretary of State earlier in the year (his relegation was foreseeable; it was he who disclosed President Roosevelt's pledge to Ibn Saoud).
Mr. Byrnes said President Truman's actions had placed the British Government "in a most difficult position" and added that Mr. David K. Niles and Judge Samuel Rosenman "were chiefly responsible" for it. Both these men had been brought into the White House among the "Palace Guard" with which Mr. Roosevelt surrounded himself; Mr. Niles (of Russian-Jewish descent) was the "adviser on Jewish affairs" and Judge Rosenman had helped write presidential speeches. These men (said Mr. Byrnes) told Mr. Truman "that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position on Palestine, and had insisted that unless the President anticipated this moment New York State would be lost to the Democrats".
Here Mr. Byrnes gave another glimpse of the behind-the-scenes auction. The two candidates for the highest office in the United States (Mr. Thomas Dewey was the prospective nominee of the other party," the Republican) in these portrayals look like children, incited against each other by the offer of a dangling bag of sweets. Mr. Truman, by doing the Zionist bidding in the matter of partition, had by no means ensured the Democrats of the prize, for the election was still a year distant and during that time the Zionists were to demand more and more, and the Republican party to bid higher and higher for the dangling reward.
Mr. Forrestal, in desperation, now tried to convince the Republican Mr. Dewey: "I said the Palestine matter was a matter of the deepest concern to me in terms of the security of the nation, and asked, once more, if the parties could not agree to take this question out of their electoral campaigning". Governor (of New York State) Dewey's response was much the same as President Truman's: "It was a difficult matter to get results because of the intemperate attitude of the Jewish people who had taken Palestine as the emotional symbol, because the Democratic party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish vote". Thereon Mr. Dewey continued to try and outdo the Democratic politicians in his bid for "the Jewish vote" (and to his own surprise nevertheless lost the election).
Mr. Forrestal next tried to strengthen the hand of the State Department, in its resistance to the President, by a memorandum (January 21, 1948) in which he analyzed the dangers to American national security flowing from this
entanglement: "It is doubtful if there is any segment of our foreign relations of greater importance or of greater danger. . . to the security of the United States than our relations in the Middle East". He warned against doing "permanent injury to our relations with the Moslem world" and "a stumble in to war". He said he had found "some small encouragement" among individual Republicans for his proposal to take the question "out of party-politics", but among the Democrats had met a feeling "that a substantial part of the Democratic funds come from Zionist sources inclined to ask in return for a lien upon this part of our national policy".
The last nine words are explicit and are literally correct. The Zionists demanded the submission of American state policy and offered in return a four year tenure of the presidency to the highest bidder. Whether they were in truth able to deliver what they offered has never been tested; the party-managers took them at their word and the candidates of both parties put on the sackcloth of submission before they were nominated, knowing (or believing) that they would not even achieve nomination unless they wore it.
Mr. Forrestal urged the Secretary of State (General Marshall) to remonstrate with the President, pointing out that a large body of Jews "hold the view that the present zeal of the Zionists can have most dangerous consequences, not merely in their divisive effects in American life, but in the long run on the position of Jews throughout the the world".
Under-Secretary Lovett, on reading Mr. Forrestal's memorandum, produced one already prepared by the Planning Staff of the State Department. This informed the President that the partition plan was "not workable" (exactly as British governments had been warned by their colonial administrators that "the Mandate" was "not workable"); that the United States was not committed to support it if it could not be effected without force; that it was against American interest to supply arms to the Zionists while refusing them to the Arabs; that the United States should not take on itself to enforce the "recommendation" of partition and should try to secure withdrawal of the partition proposal.
Mr. Lovett added, "the use of the United Nations by others as a propaganda platform is complicating our conduct of foreign relations" and said the State Department was "seriously embarrassed and handicapped by the activities of Niles at the White House in going directly to the President on matters involving Palestine". On that very day, the Under-Secretary complained, he had once more been under "pressure"; Mr. Niles had telephoned from the White House "expressing the hope that the embargo on the sales of arms to the Zionists would be lifted".
At that point Mr. Forrestal evidently became an acute annoyance to the powers behind the White House and his elimination was decided. First he received a visit from Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt junior. Whatever the father's deathbed pledge not to take "hostile action against the Arabs", the son (a New
York politician, with presidential hopes) was an extreme Zionist partisan. Mr. Forrestal pointedly said, "I thought the methods that had been used by people outside of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely on scandal". He records (as if with surprise) that his visitor "made no threats" in response to this, and he then explained his proposal to "lift the question out of politics" by agreement between the parties.
Mr. Roosevelt, his father's son, replied that "this was impossible, that the nation was too far committed, and that, furthermore, the Democratic Party would be bound to lose and the Republicans to gain by such an agreement". Mr. Forrestal answered that "failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California;" (the "pivotal states" earlier mentioned by party-manager McGrath) "I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States".
No comment by Mr. Roosevelt is recorded, but he was a harbinger of ill for Mr. Forrestal because on this same day (February 3, 1948) came the intervention of Mr. Bernard Baruch. Mr. Baruch, earlier an opponent of Zionism, was now so zealous in the cause that he advised Mr. Forrestal "not to be active in this matter. . . I was already identified, to a degree that was not in my own interests, with opposition to the United Nations policy on Palestine".
Ominous words for Mr. Forrestal! The annals here record for the first time a specific intervention by Mr. Baruch in high affairs, and its nature. His counsel was that Mr. Forrestal, a Cabinet officer, consider his own interest, which was endangered; until that time Mr. Forrestal as a responsible Cabinet officer had considered only the interest of his country. Mr. Forrestal does not say whether he saw in this advice anything threatening; his allusion to Mr. Roosevelt on the same day shows that the thought of "threats" was in his mind.
He then gave way to the fear which in the end cowed nearly all men who strove against the thrall of Zion. Four days later (February 7, 1948) he drew up a last paper on the subject which he never submitted to the President, but which contains something of historical importance. He said that on February 6 "Eisenhower told me that effective United States participation in a Palestine police force would involve about one division with appropriate supporting units". At that time, therefore, General Eisenhower (then Chief of Staff) was drafting plans for the potential engagement of American troops in Palestine. Mr. Forrestal put away this last memorandum. On February 12 and 18 he made two final appeals to General Marshall to contend with the President and the party-managers and at that point his efforts ceased.
His desisting availed him nothing for within a twelvemonth he was literally hounded to death. His end needs to be described here, before the armed seizure of Palestine is recorded; it is the classic case of persecution by defamation, leading
to death.
I first went to America early in 1949 and was perplexed by the venom of the attacks, in the press and radio, on one Mr. James Forrestal, Secretary for Defence. I knew nothing of him but his name, and the part he played in this affair (as above recorded) was then entirely unknown to the public. Nevertheless they read or heard daily that he was insane, a coward who had left his wife to be attacked by a burglar, a tax defaulter, and all manner of other things. By chance I met a friend of his who told me that he had been so reduced by this persecution that those near to him were gravely alarmed. A few weeks later he threw himself from a high window, leaving in his room some copied verses from Greek tragedy which ended with the refrain" "Woe, woe! will be the cry . . ."
American libel laws are liberal and differ from state to state, and litigation is long. Even a successful action may not bring redress. Hardly any limit is in practice set to what may be said about a man singled out for defamation; the slanders are printed in the language that incites mob-passions and when broadcast are uttered in rabid accents that recalled to me the voices of primitive African tribespeople in moments of catalepsy. Among Mr. Forrestal's effects was found a scrapbook full of these attacks, and towards the end he could not listen to the radio. The refuse of calumny was emptied on his head and at the end two broadcasters joined for the kill. One of them announced (January 9, 1949) that President Truman would "accept Forrestal's resignation within a week" (and followed this with some slander about shares in the German Dye Trust). On January 11 the second broadcaster told the millions that President Truman would by that time have accepted Mr. Forrestal's resignation, had not the first broadcaster anticipated the event (the jewel-robbery story was added to this). A few weeks earlier President Truman had told the Press that he had asked Mr. Forrestal not to resign; on March 1 he sent for Mr. Forrestal and demanded his immediate resignation, without explanation, to be effective from May 1. Mr. Forrestal committed suicide on May 21. At the funeral ceremony Mr. Truman described him as "a victim of the war"!
(In parentheses, at that time another man was being hounded to the same death, which he escaped, later in the same year, only by the failure of his suicide attempt. His persecution came from the same defamationist source, though his offence was in the other field, Communism. Mr. Whittaker Chambers sinned by his efforts to expose Communist infiltration of the American Government. I was in America at the time of his ordeal, which is described in his book; this contains the striking example, to which I earlier alluded, of the Talmudic practice of "cursing by an angry, fixed look" (the Jewish Encyclopaedia). Literal Talmudists would presumably see in Mr. Chambers's suicide attempt, and in the ill-health which subsequently afflicted him, a token of the literal efficacy of "the Law" in this respect).
After Mr. Forrestal's retreat into silence, at the warning of Mr . Baruch, the
responsible men at the State Department continued their struggle, headed by General Marshall. (All this while, in England, Mr. Bevin was carrying on his lonely fight against the Conservative opposition and against the mass of his own party alike). At one point, for the first time since 1917, the responsible Cabinet officers and officials in both countries seemed to have won the day.
This was in March 1948. Violence in Palestine had so greatly increased after the United Nations' "recommendation" for the country' s bisection that the Security Council grew alarmed and beat a retreat. Even President Truman was shaken and his representative in the Security Council announced the reversal of American policy, proposing (March 19, 1948) that the partition proposal be suspended, that a truce be arranged, and that the end of the "Mandate" be followed by a "Trusteeship" (this was in effect the proposal of the State Department memorandum of January).
At the last moment the idea of "the Jewish state" thus seemed about to collapse. The post-war return to reason was beginning (that process which Mr. Lloyd George, thirty years before, had warningly called the "thaw") and if the coup now failed only a third world war could provide another opportunity. The "Trusteeship" would be the "Mandate" in a new form, but with the United States as the country chiefly involved, and in another ten or twenty years America, foreseeably, would find the "Trusteeship" as "unworkable", under Zionist pressure, as the British had found the "Mandate".
It was then or never, and the Zionists struck at once. They presented the "United Nations" with the accomplished fact by bisecting Palestine themselves. The terrorist deed by means of which this was accomplished was the result of the policy adopted at the World Zionist Congress of 1946, where "the demoralizing forces in the movement" (Dr. Weizmann's words) had recommended methods of "Resistance. . . defence. . . activism", and Dr. Weizmann, who knew what was meant, had been deposed for objecting to them.
Dr. Weizmann then had called "the terror in Palestine" the "old evil in a new and horrible guise". April 9, 1948 showed what he meant, and in particular why he called it the old evil. On that day the "activists", the terror-and-assassination group of Zionism, "utterly destroyed" an Arab village in exact and literal fulfilment of "the Law" laid down in Deuteronomy (which, the reader will recall, is the basic Judaic law but was itself an amendment of the original Mosaic law of the Israelites).
This was the most significant day in the entire story of Zionism. To the Arabs (who knew the Torah and "had known for two thousand years what you have fought two world wars to learn") it meant that the savage Law of Judah, devised by the Levites between 700 and 400 BC., was to be resurrected and imposed on them in full force and violence, with the support of the Christian West and of Communized Russia alike. The symbolic massacre, they knew, was intended to show what would happen to all of them if they stayed. Thereon almost the entire
Arab population of Palestine fled into the neighbouring Arab states.
The massacre at Deir Yasin was briefty reported in the West, for instance Time magazine of New York said:
"Jewish terrorists of the Stem Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi stormed the village of Deir Yasin and butchered everyone in sight. The corpses of 250 Arabs, mostly women and small children, were later found tossed into wells".
At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 Dr. Weizmann had declared, "The Bible is our mandate", and the words sounded good to Western ears. This event showed what they meant, and the same words were repeated by the Zionist leaders in Palestine thirty years after Dr. Weizmann used them. The massacre at Deir Yasin was an act of "observance" of the ancient "statutes and commandments", including the relevant passage in Deuteronomy, "When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out. . . seven nations greater and mightier than thou . . . then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them", and the related passage, "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them". There are seven Arab states today, and each of them has its share of the fugitives of 1948, who for eight years now have been a living reminder to them of the common future fate with which Zionism threatens them under the ancient Law.
The passive condonation of this deed by Jewry as a whole showed more clearly than anything else the change which Zionism had wrought in the Jewish mind in a few years. Writing in 1933 (only fifteen years before Deir Yasin), Mr. Bernard J. Brown quoted the above passage from Deuteronomy as the reason for Arab fears, and added, "Of course, the uncultured Arabs do not understand that the modem Jew does not take his bible literally, and that he is a kind and charitable person and would not be so cruel to his fellow-man, but he suspects that if the Jews bottom their claim to Palestine on the strength of the historic rights to that land, they can only do so on the authority of the Bible, and the Arab refuses to reject any part of it". The Arabs were right and Mr. Brown was wrong; this enlightened Western Jew could not conceive, in 1933, that Zionism meant a full return to the superstition of antiquity in its most barbaric form.
Probably Deir Yasin remained an isolated incident only because its meaning was so clear that the Arabs left the country. Mr. Arthur Koestler is definite about this cause-and-effect. He was in Palestine and says the Arab civilian population, after Deir Yasin, at once fled from Haifa, Tiberia, Jaffa and all other cities and then from the entire country, so that "by May 14 all had gone save for a few thousand". All impartial authorities agree about the intention and effect of Deir Yasin, and from April 9, 1948 no doubt remained about the governing force of the ancient Judaic Law on all future acts and ambitions of Zion. Deir Yasin explains the fear of the surviving Arab states today as fully as it explains the flight of the Palestinean Arabs.
(to be cont. in Part 2)
http://iamthewitness.com/books/Douglas.Reed/The.Controversy.of.Zion/