Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (12 page)

Almost all of the Jews who took the Haskala route to salvation and settled in Western Europe and North America, including some who became prominent in public life, were not merely without enthusiasm for Zionism, they became strongly anti-Zionist. As we shall see, Zionism would not have secured enough Jewish support to succeed with its Palestine project but for the Nazi Holocaust.

The founding father of Zionism was Theodore Herzl, a Hungarian- born Jew who worked as a journalist and playwright in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He convened the first Congress of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) at Basel in Switzerland in 1897. When it ended the public statement of Zionism’s mission was declared to be the striving “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” But what Herzl wrote in his diary on 3 September, the day of the publication of Zionism’s official mission statement, was a much more explicit expression of purpose. In part the diary entry for that day read: “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basle I founded the Jewish state.”
¹

The entry for 3 September continued: “Perhaps in five years, and certainly in 50, everyone will know it ... At Basel, then, I created this abstraction which, as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people.”
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Because of the implications of the Zionist enterprise for all concerned—including world Jewry and Judaism itself—it was appropriate that Zionism’s first World Congress took place in a gambling casino.

In the year before the first Zionist Congress Herzl had written and published
Der Judenstaat
, (
The Jewish State
). It had opened with these words: “The Jews who will it shall have a state of their own.” But with the coming into being of political Zionism as a movement with institutions to make it happen, Herzl was among the first to appreciate the need for dropping the word state from all public policy statements and, in effect, telling a tactical lie about real intentions.

Herzl’s diaries were not made public until 1960 when they were published in book form,
Completed Diaries
. As we shall see in Chapter Six, there were entries in them which prove he was aware from the beginning that the Arabs of Palestine would have to be dispossessed of their land and their rights if Zionism was to prevail.

The Zionist claim to Palestine, a claim made long before Hitler’s arrival on the world stage and the Nazi holocaust, was based on the “historical connection” of the Jews to that land. The first formal presentation of the claim was made in a WZO memorandum to the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I. It called upon the victorious Allied Powers “to recognise the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of the Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home.” What, actually, was the “historical connection” which, according to Zionism, gave the Jews of the world “historic title” to Palestine? It is possible to answer that question with one sentence. The first Jewish occupation of Palestine was only an episode, a relatively short one at that, in the long history of an Arab land that was constantly occupied by foreign powers, of which the ancient Hebrews were only one of many.

But though it is an accurate and honest summary, the one sentence is not enough to do justice to either the intensity of the spiritual attachment of Jews to Palestine or the flame of anger that burns in every Arab heart.
This flame is there and burning ever more brightly because of Zionism’s use and abuse of the spiritual attachment of the Jews to Palestine to achieve its political objective by terrorism and institutional military means.

In the Western world the Arab–Israeli conflict is perceived as a struggle between two peoples with an equal claim to the same land. As we shall now see, the notion of there being two equal claims to the same land does not bear serious examination.

The earliest known inhabitants of Palestine were the Canaanites. They gave the country its first name—“the land of Canaan” as in the Bible. The Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land in 3000 BC, some 1,800 years before the first Hebrew occupation. The Canaanites had an advanced civilisation for their time and lived in cities. They founded Jerusalem which was to become the capital of Palestine. Although they were of one race with a common civilisation and the same language, Arabic, the Canaanites did not possess a unified political structure. Canaan was divided into city states which were ruled by princes or kings.

In about 1730 BC Hebrew tribes from Chaldea (modern Southern Iraq) migrated to Canaan but they did not establish themselves. They passed through Canaan and ended up in Egypt where they lived under the rule of the Pharaohs for several centuries.

In about 1200 BC there were two penetrations of Canaan, one by the Hebrews, the other by the Philistines. The Hebrew penetration took place over about 200 years and did not lead to the displacement of the original inhabitants. The Hebrews (the Israelites to be) settled in mainly unoccupied regions. Throughout this lengthy settling in period they did not have a kingdom or a central government. They lived as tribes, 12, and were ruled by Judges.

Initially the Philistines occupied the southern coast of Canaan and the maritime plain to a point north of Japho (Jaffa). They were known as the “People of the Sea”. It is believed they came from Illyria, having passed through Crete on their way to Canaan. (Illyria was the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula, which, from about the 10th century BC, was inhabited by an Indo-European people). The Philistines gave the land of Canaan its new name, “Philistia”, from which Palestine was derived. The ambition of the Philistines was to conquer all of Palestine and they were constantly at war with the Hebrews.

By about 1020 BC the Hebrews realised that if they continued to operate on a tribal basis, they would not be able to withstand the mounting attacks of the Philistines. If they were not to be defeated the Hebrews needed to be co-ordinated. Out of that realisation came the appointment of Saul as the first King of Israel. In reality Saul was a king more in title than substance. His capital at Globeah was a simple, rustic fortress. (There was not a “dom” to put on the end of king). Saul’s main responsibility was to co-ordinate the military actions of the Israelite tribes.

Saul was a tragic hero. He was mentally unstable if not actually mad and, at a point, he openly declared his intention to slay David, the young harp player who would succeed him and establish the first real Jewish kingdom in Palestine. Under Saul’s leadership the Israelites were never strong enough to deliver a knockout blow to the Philistines, but they did prevent the Philistines from dominating all of Palestine.

David became king in about 1000 BC when Saul was killed in battle with the Philistines at Mount Gilboa. David did much more than co-ordinate the military actions of the Israelite tribes. He united them under his rule. His first capital was at Hebron, to the south of Jerusalem. In probably 1006 BC he captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites, a Canaanite subgroup. David ruled from there until his death in 972 BC. His son, Solomon, ruled for forty years and built the Jewish Temple.

After Solomon’s death in 932 BC the Israelite tribes revolted and the kingdom established by David, which never encompassed all of Palestine, split into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. The two Jewish kingdoms were continually at odds with each other and at war with their neighbours. Disaster was beckoning.

In 721 BC the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians and its people were carried into oblivion. The Kingdom of Israel was extinct and on the territory where it had been there were four Assyrian provinces.

The Kingdom of Judah survived for a while but it was a precarious existence. Its capital, Jerusalem, was frequently besieged, captured and sacked. For long periods Judah paid tribute to Assyria, Egypt and Babylon. It became a vassal state. In 705 BC, when it failed to pay the tribute, the Assyrians occupied Judah. They gave most of its territory to the Philistines, leaving the king of Judah only his capital, Jerusalem. In 587 BC the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, including the Jewish Temple, and carried the Jews into captivity.

A vivid impression of what that meant was given by Georges Friedmann in
The End of the Jewish People
. The twelve tribes were deported to Babylonia, mainly, and also to the Caucasus and Armenia “and disappeared; and with them the Jewish people in the plenitude of their existence as a simultaneously ethnic, national and religious community also disappeared forever.”
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The events of 587 BC marked the end of institutional Jewish rule in Palestine until Israel’s second coming in 1948, more than twenty-five centuries later. But it was not the end of a Jewish presence in Palestine. In 538 BC the Babylonians lost Palestine to the Persians and they allowed Jews to return.

Two centuries later, in 332 BC, Alexander the Great took Palestine from the Persians. The Greeks had the country for a century and a half but, before their time was up, they were confronted by a Jewish revolt led by the Maccabees. They were a priestly family of Jews who took the lead in challenging laws that made the practice of Judaism impossible. After the Selucid (Greek puppet) ruler desecrated the Temple and rededicated it to Zeus, the Jews resorted to guerrilla warfare, led first by Mattathias Maccabee and then by his son, Judas. In 164 BC Judas liberated Jerusalem and had the Temple reconsecrated; an event which Jews celebrate in the festival of Hanukka.

But Maccabean independence in Jerusalem and some other parts of Palestine did not last long. In 124 BC Jerusalem was besieged by Antiochus Sidetes, the King of Syria. The siege was raised only after the payment of a tribute.

Then, in 63 BC, the Romans captured Palestine and it became, as Judea, a province of the Roman Empire. The Romans put an end to the rule of the Maccabees.

It was during the Roman occupation that the carpenter’s son who became the Christ of Christianty was born. From that time, Bethlehem where Mary was said to have delivered him, Nazareth and Galilee where he lived, and Jerusalem where he was crucified, became Christianity’s holiest places, and Palestine became the Holy Land of Christendom.

The Jews revolted against the Romans in AD 66 to 70 and again in AD 132 to 135. During the first revolt Titus destroyed Jerusalem including the Temple. In the second (Bar Kochba) revolt most Jews still in Palestine were killed or dispersed to the far corners of the Roman Empire. In 135 AD Hadrian built a new city of Jerusalem, which he named Aelia Capitolina, and none of the very few Jews who remained in Palestine were allowed to live in it.

From the above it can be seen that the life span of the one united Jewish nation of David and Solomon was not more than seventy years; and, as Dr. Julian Morgenstern pointed out in
As a Mighty Stream
, there were only two brief simultaneous periods of life in each of the two separate Jewish kingdoms, neither lasting more than fifty years, when there was any indication of Jewish national strength and glory.

There are two particular statements which put Zionism’s claim to Palestine into its true historical context.

One was in the text of the report of the King-Crane Commission appointed in 1919 by President Wilson to consult the Arabs of Palestine. “The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a right to Palestine based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.”
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The other was made by Lord Sydenham in the House of Lords during a debate on Palestine in 1922. He said: “Palestine is not the original home of the Jews. It was acquired by them after conquest, and they have never occupied the whole of it, which they now openly demand. They have no more valid claim to Palestine than the descendants of the ancient Romans have on this country.”
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Any objective review of the real history of the Jews must take account of the fact that, when the Zionists were making their claim to Palestine on the basis of “historical connection”, very few of the Jews of the world outside Palestine, and not more than about 10,000 of them in Palestine, were the descendants of the ancient Hebrews who occupied and, as Israelites, ruled much of Palestine for a brief period.

Put another way, of the total number of Jews in the world outside Palestine, only a few were of Palestinian origin: the vast majority were the descendants of Jews who were Jews by conversion to Judaism in the many lands of which they were citizens, conversions which took place long after the first Jewish presence in Palestine was all but extinguished. In short few if any incoming Zionist Jews were descendants of the original Israelites; most had no genealogical/historical connection to the land.

So far as I am aware, the best short explanation of this fact of Jewish history was given by Joseph Reinach, a French politician of Jewish origin. In 1919 for
Journal des Debats
he wrote the following:

The Jews of Palestinian origin constitute an insignificant minority. Like Christians and Muslims, the Jews have engaged with great zeal in the conversion of people to their faith. Before the Christian era the Jews had converted to the monotheistic religion of Moses other Semites, Greeks, Egyptians and Romans in large numbers. Later, Jewish proselytism was not less active in Asia, in the whole of North Africa, in Italy, in Spain and in Gaul. Converted Romans and Gauls no doubt predominated in the Jewish communities mentioned in the chronicles of Gregoire de Tours. There were many converted Iberians among the Jews who were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand the Catholic and who spread to Italy, France, the East and Smyrna. The great majority of Russian, Polish and Galician Jews (the provider, in time, of what might be called political Zionism’s hardcore) descend from the Khazars, a Tartar people of Southern Russia who were converted in a body to Judaism at the time of Charlemagne.
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