Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (27 page)

By using the word “acquiescence” President Wilson was as good as saying: “I did not want to support Britain’s position but I had to do so because I needed British support for the creation of the League of Nations.”

A clue to President Wilson’s real but publicly unstated position on Zionism was in a remark he made to some of the Peace Commissioners in Paris on 22 May. He said he had never been able to see by what right Britain gave Palestine away to anyone. Since it was not anyone but the Zionists to whom Britain was intending to give at least a part of Palestine, the President’s meaning was not open to misinterpretation. The clear implication was that President Wilson did not believe the Zionist claim to Palestine deserved to be taken seriously; and would be the cause of big trouble if it was.

The conclusion invited by the President’s carefully worded statement was that the report to which he had been required to make a response was a deliberate misrepresentation of his position, for the purpose of committing him, so far as the public perception was concerned, to an agenda for Palestine that was not his own.

As we shall see in Chapter Eight, there was to be opposition in Britain to the idea of incorporating the Balfour Declaration into the British Mandate for Palestine. My guess is that the Zionists saw this opposition coming and concluded that Britain might not implement the Balfour Declaration. And that, I believe, is why the Zionists and some of their supporters in the media conspired to produce the report that was intended to commit President Wilson and so America to their agenda. If the British were going to let them down, their cause would be a lost one if they could not assert that President Wilson supported it.

The gain the Zionists expected to make from having the freedom to assert that President Wilson was on their side (and by implication against the 30 prominent Jewish American petitioners who had urged him to say “No” to Zionism) had to do with numbers.

At the time even the Zionists themselves were not claiming to have the support of more than 150,000 Jewish Americans out of a total 3.5 million Jews in America. Which probably meant, at the time, that the prominent anti-Zionists who signed the petition to President Wilson were speaking for the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans. But with the freedom to assert that President Wilson was in favour of their enterprise, the Zionists could be certain that the number of Jewish American recruits to their cause would grow. And growth in numbers meant political momentum. The more Jewish Americans endorsed Zionism, the greater Zionism’s ability to influence the political process with votes and campaign funds would become.

Despite his expressed acquiescence in the position of the British government with regard to the future of Palestine, President Wilson was not reconciled to the idea of doing an injustice to the Arabs. And he did, in fact, take a major initiative that was designed to prevent injustice being done.

After his Mount Vernon speech, the Arabs proposed that the Allies send a commission of inquiry to ascertain the wishes of the people of Syria including Palestine (and also Iraq). President Wilson supported this suggestion but Britain said “No” (having previously promised the Arabs they would be consulted): and, with the assistance of a French “Non” to consulting the Arabs, the idea of an Allied commission died a quick and unnatural death.

Then, after the attempt to manoeuvre him into becoming an unquestioning standard bearer for the Zionist cause, President Wilson decided to appoint and send an American commission of inquiry. My guess is that President Wilson was privately outraged by Balfour’s memorandum which asserted that the victorious Allied Powers, not just Britain, were committed to Zionism “right or wrong”.

The principals of the American commission were Dr. Henry C. King, President of Oberlin College and Charles R. Crane, an industrialist. The King-Crane Commission spent six weeks on location listening and taking evidence.

Then an astonishing thing happened.

The substance of the report of the Commission’s findings was kept secret, suppressed, for more than two years—until Britain and France had got what they wanted from carving up the Turkish Empire. What they wanted and what they got in July 1922 was endorsement by the League of Nations of their Mandates to rule in place of the Turks.

When, late in December 1922, former President Wilson gave permission for the King-Crane Commission’s report to be published, it was obvious why Britain-and-Zionism (and France) had opposed the idea of an Allied inquiry into what should happen in the Middle East if right was to be allowed to prevail over might. The report said:

No British officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme (of unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine) could be carried out except by force of arms... only a greatly reduced Zionist programme should be attempted ... and then only very gradually initiated.
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King and Crane noted with remarkable frankness that they had been predisposed to Zionism at the start of their inquiry; but, they said, reality on the ground in Palestine had caused them to call for a serious modification of the Zionist programme of unlimited immigration. “The actual facts in Palestine coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians” had driven them to new recommendations.

Their main recommendation was that Syria should not be the subject of three or even two Mandates. There should be only one Mandate for it including Palestine, with Lebanon having autonomy within that framework. In short the King-Crane Commission report endorsed, before it was too late, the programme of the first Arab Parliament.

On the subject of the Balfour Declaration, King and Crane wrote this: “A national home is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”

King and Crane also noted that, during their investigation, no Jewish representative had ever attempted to conceal “the ultimate goal of completely dispossessing the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of land purchases.”

The anti-Zionist feeling of the Arab people of the liberated Turkish provinces was, King and Crane reported, “intense and not to be lightly flouted.” Nine-tenths of the inhabitants were against the entire Zionist programme. “To subject the people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the Wilsonian principle (of self-determination) and of the peoples’ rights...”

King and Crane also found a way to indicate their considered view that America would be foolish to throw away or even put at risk the good will of the Arabs. They made their point by noting that the victorious colonial powers, Britain and France, were in “great disfavour” with the Arabs. That was on the one hand. On the other was that 60 per cent of the Arabs petitioned by the Commission had indicated that America was their first choice as the Mandatory power. Neither Britain nor France had been the first preference of more than 15 per cent of those petitioned. America, King and Crane wrote, had earned its popularity among the Arabs through her unselfish record untainted by territorial or imperialist ambitions, the philanthropic and educational institutions she had set up and her past record of good treatment of backward areas. America’s decision to allow Cuba and the Philippines to move toward freedom were cited as examples.

The conclusion invited, it seems to me, is that the report of the King-Crane Commission was suppressed because of its recommendation that Jewish immigration to Palestine should be restricted, and to prevent informed and honest debate in America about the wisdom of supporting Zionism right or wrong. If such a debate had been allowed to happen the Middle East might not have been set on the road to catastrophe.

How could the suppression of such an important document have happened on President Wilson’s watch? The truth is simple and sad.

By September 1919 the stress and strain of the burden President Wilson was bearing for America and the world was beginning to take its toll on his health. In that month he undertook a punishing coast-to-coast programme of major speeches and interviews to try to sell to his own people the need for the Treaty of Versailles to be ratified by Congress. This treaty not only imposed the settlement terms on defeated Germany; it also included, was prefaced by, the Covenant of the League of Nations. America’s political and military establishments were deeply divided about whether or not to ratify the treaty. Failure to ratify would mean that America would not become a member of the League of Nations. So President Wilson had a big fight on his hands. And that’s why he was campaigning across the country.

In Colorado on 25 September he was compelled to give up his tour. He returned to Washington in a state of complete exhaustion. Then, on 2 October, he suffered a thrombosis, a stroke, that impaired his control over the left side of his body.

During the weeks in which President Wilson was isolated from men and affairs, foreign policy was directed and a Cabinet meeting was conducted by Secretary of State Lansing. Behind closed doors Lansing expressed the view that the President, because of his illness, was not competent enough to tend to business. It was during this period that the decision to suppress the report of the King-Crane Commission was taken, no doubt in collusion with Britain-and-Zionism.

The suppression of the report was the green light for Britain and France to put the finishing touches to their plan to carve up the Syrian part of the Turkish empire for themselves, (“Up yours gentlemen”, was effectively their message to King and Crane and President Wilson). It was also the green light for Britain to tell the Zionists, unchallenged about their real intentions in Palestine and the terrifying implications of them, not to worry about President Wilson’s opposition to (or, at the very least, grave doubts about) their enterprise.

When President Wilson had regained something of his physical health and his mind was nervously active again, the first thing he did was to demand Lansing’s resignation. It became effective on 13 February 1920. But the damage had been done. The President was now a prisoner of an agenda for the Middle East that was not his own. The San Remo announcement of the British and French
fait accompli
was less than three months away. The time for open and honest debate about Zionism and support for it right or wrong had been and gone—while President Wilson was incapacitated by his stroke.

It is only in retrospect that the true historical significance of the anti-Zionist petition to President Wilson can be fully appreciated. It was both the first and the last major initiative by prominent Jewish Americans to have Zionism—“the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history”—stopped in its tracks.

After his own reflections on that matter and the absence of even significant Jewish American criticism of Israel’s behaviour, Lilienthal, in 1978, wrote the following: “It is most unfortunate for everyone that the descendants of those who took an inspiring anti-nationalist (anti-Zionist) stand should today be found either in Zionist ranks or among the numerous fellow travellers, tongue-tied by fear to speak up.”
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What happened to the moral principles? They were crushed in the emotional turmoil generated by the Nazi holocaust. And after that, silence on the part of almost all diaspora Jews was guaranteed by belief in the myth that poor little Israel lived each and every day of its life in danger of annihilation.

A cause of great sadness for me as events unfolded, especially after Begin came to power in Israel in 1977, was knowledge that some prominent Jewish Englishmen and Jewish Americans of advancing years, men I respected and admired, were being tortured by their recognition of the fact that they could and should have done more to prevent the Zionisation of their assimilated communities.

As it happened Woodrow Wilson got virtually nothing of the real substance of what he wanted for mankind. Congress did not give him the majority needed for ratification of the Treaty of Versailles.

The minor consequence was that America formally ended its involvement in World War I with separate peace treaties of its own initially with Austria, then Germany, then Hungary, and subsequently with Turkey and the new states of Eastern and Central Europe.

The major consequence was that America excluded itself from the League of Nations when it came into existence in January 1920 with its headquarters in Geneva. So far as the Middle East was concerned, that reduced the world body to being more or less a tool of British and French imperialism. The opposite of what President Wilson had intended.

The belief that Britain and France were intending to use the League of Nations as a cover to advance their colonial ambitions was one of the reasons why some in Congress voted against ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and thus to exclude America from the world body. Others did so for the opposite reason—because they objected to the way in which being a member of the world body would place limits on America’s freedom to act in its own self-interest. The actual difference between these American opponents of the League of Nations and the British was not so great. Whereas some Americans in Congress were saying, in effect, “We don’t wish to be part of a world body that will restrict our freedom to do what we want in the world”, the British were saying, in effect, “Neither do we, but we are not intending to take our obligations to the League of Nations all that seriously and, anyway, we’ll be calling the shots.”