Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (7 page)

That was what Zionists and their supporters everywhere wanted to hear. And it, the myth, was promoted and became the justification for everything Israel did after the Likud’s Sharon defeated Barak and became prime minister.

It is not to their credit that so many American and European reporters who ought to have known better bought the myth; but buy it they did. Some, Americans in particular, were so committed to supporting the Zionist state right or wrong that peddling the myth was the most natural thing to do. But in other cases the buying of the myth was the result of lazy journalism. What happened when journalists were not lazy was illustrated by a remarkable article in the
New York Times
of 18 May 2002. The writer was Nicholas D. Kristof. Under the headline “Arafat and the myth of Camp David”, his opening two paragraphs were the following.

So does Yasser Arafat really want peace? In several columns I have sneered at the Palestinian leader and reiterated the common view that he had rejected very generous peace proposals proffered by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. That is a nearly universal understanding in the West, expressed by everybody from Henry Kissinger to the cocktail party set.

But, prompted by various readers, I’ve been investigating more closely and interviewing key players. This is what I found...

Kristof’s conclusion was that “the common view in the West that Arafat flatly rejected a reasonable peace deal, and that it is thus pointless to attempt a reasonable strategy of negotiation (with Arafat), is a myth.”

On the day Rabin shook hands with Arafat, Sharon vowed that he would destroy the Oslo peace process. When he became prime minister after Barak and Clinton’s mishandling of the peace process, Sharon set about demonstrating that he was a man of his word. On the Israeli side reality was in the grave with Rabin.

And Arafat’s credibility with the majority of his people was plunging. For more than two decades he had been telling them that his policy of politics and compromise would get results—a small Palestinian state with Arab East Jerusalem its capital. And that, it seemed, was nonsense.

As Sharon’s attempt to break the will of the Palestinians to insist on more than crumbs from Zionism’s table unfolded, I found myself returning again and again to page 220 of Harkabi’s uniquely informed, prophetic and seminal book. “Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also by Jews throughout the world. In the struggle against anti-Semitism, the frontline begins in Israel.”

What Harkabi had feared could happen was happening. Israel’s “misconduct” was awakening the sleeping giant of anti-Semitism. Predictably, hardcore Zionists—in America especially—insisted that the almost universal criticism of Israel’s behaviour was itself the product of anti-Semitism. That was the usual Zionist propaganda nonsense and, as ever, an attempt to silence criticism of Israel; but there was something that could not be denied. The possibility of a new and virulent wave of anti-Semitism being provoked by Israel’s behaviour at some point in a foreseeable future was a real one.

And I found myself wondering why it was that the Jews of the world, all but a very tiny minority of them, and many of whom are not political Zionists, were failing to respond to Harkabi’s call for them to become involved in catastrophe prevention, by exerting themselves to convince Israel to change its thinking and its ways.

Why, why, why were they failing to respond?

The answer, I believed, was in my shorthand phrase—the Jewish predicament. The key to understanding the nature of it is in a short, uncluttered sentence in the Preface of Brenner’s book. “Zionism thrives on the fears that Jews have of another holocaust.”

Though I am a Gentile, I have been engaging with Jews for nearly 40 years; and on the basis of this experience I know that Brenner is right. Deep down almost every Jew (including my accountant who has been one of my best friends for 40 years) does live with the fear that there could be, one day, another great turning against Jews. This is one half of the Jewish predicament.

The other half is the suppressed awareness that the Zionist state, because of its arrogance of power, could become, I think already has become, “a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.”

When you put the two halves of the predicament together, you have a logic, unspeakable by almost all Jews in public, that goes something like this: “We Jews of the world know we ought to be speaking out and exerting our influence to cause Israel to change its policies, but we dare not. Why not? Because there might come a day when we will need Israel as our refuge of last resort. For that reason we cannot even think of saying or doing anything that might give comfort to Israel’s enemies and put our ultimate insurance policy at risk.”

Now to the political significance of the Jewish predicament.

For many years I believed that America held the key to peace in the Middle East. Only an American President supported by enough members of Congress had the clout to oblige Israel to be serious about making peace. (That is, peace on terms almost all Palestinians could accept even though it would satisfy only their minimum demands and needs for justice). But my research for this book led me to quite a different conclusion in two parts.

The first was that from the moment in 1919 when President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke, and with the main exception of the eight years of President Eisenhower’s two terms, America was incapable of being even-handed in the Middle East because its democracy is for sale to lobby groups representing vested interests of all kinds, of which the Zionist lobby is one of the most powerful. This is part of the depressing truth invited by the record of what actually happened, progressively, after President Wilson tried and failed to prevent the doing of a terrible injustice to the Arabs of Palestine.

To those readers who may think I am preparing the ground to blame the Zionist lobby in America for the fact that the Middle East is a complete catastrophe waiting for its time to happen, I say—not so. Hear me out.

It is the case that at critical moments the Zionist lobby was, and is, more the maker of U.S policy for resolving (or not) the conflict in and over Palestine than American Presidents and their administrations. But that is not my main point. It is that American politicians, including their Presidents, always had a choice. They did not have to do the bidding of the Zionist lobby. They chose to do it to serve their own short-term interests.

Put another way, I do not blame the Zionist lobby for exercising its awesome influence. The Zionists were and are only playing the Game of Nations, ruthlessly to be sure, by The System’s own rules. I blame most of all an American decision-making process which, because of the way election campaigns are funded and conducted, was, and still is, so open to abuse and manipulation by powerful vested interests as to be in some very important respects undemocratic.

During lecture and debating tours across America, I found myself saying on public platforms that the Zionist lobby had hi-jacked what passes for democracy; but I always added that it could not have happened without the complicity of America’s pork-barrel politicians, Democrats especially.

For those unfamiliar with the term “pork-barrel” it was explained by the late Alistair Cooke in a BBC
Letter From America
on 26 December 2003. The term was derived, he said, from “a practice common in the South in the years before the Civil War.” Slave owners would put out salt pork in big barrels at a certain time of an announced day and “the slaves would rush to the barrels to grab what they could.” The pork was both a reward for the slaves and an inducement to make them more content than they otherwise might have been to do the master’s bidding.

With the passage of time “pork” became the word used to describe the something that an elected politician did for his constituents to guarantee they would continue to vote for him. In general terms, the “something” is a sum of money which an elected politician persuades the House Appropriations Commitee to make available for a constituency project. But in the Arab-Israeli context of American politics, pork as in pork-barrel has a quite specific meaning. In this context, it’s the politician’s promise to vote for Israel right or wrong in exchange for campaign funds and votes.

In 1917 Britain played the Zionist card for reasons of empire. In America it was due to considerations of domestic politics that allowed the Zionist tail to wag the American dog—on President Truman’s watch especially. For eight years after that President Eisenhower sought to contain Zionism and its child; but, with the main exceptions of Kennedy and Carter, he was followed by presidents who, in addition to their fear of offending the Zionist lobby, saw merit in doing what Britain had done—using Zionism as a means to an end. In Britain’s case it was to maintain an empire. In America’s case it was to create one.

The second part of my conclusion was that the Jews of the world have most of the influence needed to persuade Israel to change course before it is, finally, too late for us all. And there are two ways in which this influence could be exercised. One would be for them to press arguments of their own on Israel, behind closed doors if necessary. The other would be for Jewish Americans to let the president know that they wished him to use the leverage he has to require Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. In my analysis, which I know is shared by some leading Israeli and other Jewish critics of Zionism, it is, in fact, Jewish Americans who hold the master key to peace or not in the Middle East. Why? Because the bottomline reality in America is this… No president is ever going to confront the Zionist lobby unless and until he knows that a clear and evident majority of Jewish Americans wish him to do so, in order to best protect the best interests of all Americans.

A uniquely informed perspective on the significance of the influence of Jewish Americans was given by William Fulbright. In an address to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on 2 November 1974, the (by then) ex-Senator and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this (emphasis added):
“Israel’s supporters in the U.S., by underwriting intransigence, are encouraging Israel on a course which must lead toward her destruction—and just possibly ours, too.”
⁷

The previous year Senator Fulbright had made himself Public Enemy Number One in Zionism’s eyes by daring to say in public, during an appearance on CBS’s
Face The Nation
, that Israel and its uncritical friends in America controlled the U.S. Senate and consequently controlled U.S. policy for the Middle East. Subsequently he said he saw little hope that Capitol Hill would effectively challenge the Israeli lobby. It was, he said, “suicide for politicians to oppose them.”
⁸

And that brings me to what it was, really, that motivated me to research and write this book. In fact I was motivated, I can even say driven, by both a concern and a fear.

My concern is that peace-making and catastrophe prevention will remain an impossibility unless and until there is, on the part of all involved and concerned, an open, honest acknowledgment of how and why the Arab-Israeli conflict was created and sustained. This requires all concerned to acknowledge the difference between Zionist mythology and historical fact. One aim of this book is to show the difference. Some will say history is academic. “What’s done is done. We have to move on (with the peacemaking) from where we are today.” That is an expression much favoured and over-used by disingenuous American and European politicians. It is because such an attitude has prevailed—one that ignores objective history—that still today there is not enough real understanding, in America especially, of why the Arab and Muslim masses are so angry and why, more to the point, the whole Arab and wider Muslim world is outraged, with their deep humiliation and despair waiting for its time to explode

My fear is that as things stand and are going, in the world not just the Middle East, there will be another great turning against Jews, triggered by overflowing resentment of Israel’s arrogance of power and its conse- quences. (If Harkabi as quoted above had not raised this possibility, I would not have dared as a Gentile to go public with my own fear).

It is my hope that this book (all three volumes of it and perhaps a fourth) will contribute in two ways to preventing that from happening. On one level I hope this book will enable non-Jewish readers to understand the profound difference between the Jews and Judaism on the one hand and Zionism and its zealots on the other.

On another level I hope this book will encourage the Jews of the world to debate, among themselves if they insist, why they, Jewish Americans especially, should respond at this late hour to Harkabi’s call for them to exert themselves to convince Israel to change its thinking and its ways.

I am aware that much of this book could cause pain and possibly distress to very many Jews, so I want to take space in this Prologue to say that I do, in fact, work my way towards an uplifting conclusion, one that I hope will be a source of comfort, hope and inspiration for Jewish readers. In the Epilogue this
goy
dares to suggest that the Jews, because of their unique experience of suffering, are still uniquely placed to be a Light Unto Nations.

What I have tried to write above all is a book that is comprehensive enough—i.e. contains a sufficient amount of background information and global context—to enable non-expert readers, so-called “ordinary folk” especially, to make sense of what is happening in the Middle East and why, by seeing how all the pieces of the most complex jig-saw puzzle fit together.