Introduction
![]()
IF SOME
COMPELLING justification was required for bringing a most controversial
book, with a most unorthodox approach, before a world in which the human
psyche has become far more attuned to the pleasant process of being softly
lulled by Big Brother than to the painstaking task of absorbing upsetting,
nonconsensus material, then the astounding November 19-20, 1977,
pilgrimage of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat to Jerusalem supplied the
reason. The Middle East imbroglio, always complex, had now become
"curiouser and curiouser," to borrow words from Alice in Wonderland.
Euphoric Americans clung to their video
sets over that weekend. Sadat was addressing the Knesset--Egyptians and
Israelis were not only talking to one another, but smiling. The "A-rabs"
were at last willing to give up war. Peace, surely, must be on the
way.
This wishful thinking of course
overlooked the fact that since 1948 there had been two wars going on
simultaneously in the Middle East. The one between Israel and the Arab
states was only a secondary consequence of what Syrian President Hafez
al-Assad has called the "mother question"-the conflict between the Israeli
Zionists and the Arab Palestinians. While there was some possibility of a
separate agreement ending the Egyptian-Israeli war, a solution for the
core of the dangerous Holy Land conflict seemed as distant as
ever.
The November 10, 1975, U.N. resolution
equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination, and for the first
time placed the genesis of the continuing Middle East struggle squarely
before a startled American public. But fervent supporters of Israel,
Christians as well as Jews, reacted with unprecedented furor to the
overwhelming U.N. censure and stirred the media to direct an equally
unprecedented onslaught against the U.N., the Arab states, and the Third
World bloc. The supporters of the resolution were denigrated with the
charge "emulators of Hitler." The pro-Israel American public was led to
believe that this was indeed but another attack on Jews and Judaism, a
Nazi renaissance. The pertinency of this U.N. action to the continuing
Arab rejection of the State of Israel was totally covered over by
whipped-up emotionalism.
What is Zionism, and what is its
connection with the Middle East conflict? How, if at all, is it
differentiated from Judaism? Why has Organized Jewry, invariably an
unequivocal exponent of the separation of church and state, condoned their
union in an Israeli state demanding the allegiance of everyone everywhere
who considers himself a Jew, whether he be an observant practitioner or
not? What validity is there to the insistence of a persistent minority
that anti-Zionism is the equivalent of anti-Semitism? Such questions may
mystify 90 percent of Americans, yet the answers go to the very heart of
the Middle East conflict.
It was the serious confusion between
religion and nationalism that led directly to the 1948 establishment of
the Zionist state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world, causing
disastrous consequences for all concerned, including Americans whose
government had played a major role in that nation-making. The resultant
uprooting of Palestinian Arabs, whose numbers today have swollen to more
than 1.6 million, many exiled for thirty years to refugee camps living on
a U.N. dole of seven cents per day, brought down on the U.S. the enmity of
an Arab-Muslim world, eroding a measureless reservoir of goodwill stemming
from the educational and eleemosynary institutions America helped found.
The creation of Israel, likewise, led to the penetration of the area for
the first time by the Soviet Union, endangered the security interests of
the U.S., and thrust the burden of a premature energy crisis into every
American home.
However much the essence of Judaism may
have remained as distinct as ever from Zionism, the nationalist shadow has
so overtaken the religious substance that virtually all Jews have, in
practice, become Israelists, if not Zionists. Many who mistrust the
Zionist connotation can still have their cake and eat it, through
Israelism.
While the vast majority of Jews in the
Diaspora (the aggregate of Jews living outside of Palestine) do not
believe in Zionist ideology, out of what is mistaken for religious duty
they have given fullest support, bordering on worship, to Israel. Such
worship of collective human power is just about as old as Pharaonic Egypt,
and was practiced by the Sumerians, pre-Christian Greeks, and Romans as
well. As Dr. Arnold Toynbee pointed out in A Study of
History.
The
prevalence of this worship of collective human power is a calamity. It
is a bad religion because it is the worship of a false god. It is a form
of idolatry which has led its adherents to commit innumerable crimes and
follies. Unhappily, the prevalence of this idolatrous religion is one of
the tragic facts of contemporary human life.
And
these Jewish Zionists-Israelists have been joined by a large segment of
articulate Christian opinion in the new worship of the State of Israel,
which has been accorded the same privileges and immunities that have been
vouchsafed to religionists who follow a genuine faith.
On every other issue of concern to
Americans, both sides have invariably been publicly presented, no matter
how controversial: the cigarette lobby vs. cancer research, the drug
alarmists vs. the upholders of pot, traditionalists-oldsters vs.
Beatles-hippies, civil rights gradualists vs. extremists, hawks and doves
over Vietnam, pro-Watergate outcome vs. Nixon apologists-to mention but a
few. It has only been on the subject of Jews, Zionism, and Israel that the
U.S. and most of the Western world have had a near-total blackout. The
mere presence of the powerful Anti-Defamation League, even before the
fearsome "anti-Semitic" label might be brandished, has imparted a
sensitivity so powerful as to smother any idea of private discussion, let
alone public debate, on the grave issues involved.
The record of pressures, suppression,
and terrorization practiced against many-including Presidents of the U.S.,
who in undisclosed memoranda, letters, and documents have entertained
serious doubts about the course upon which Zionism has embarked-is massive
and yet incomplete. The more submissive of the Victims of Jewish
nationalist pressure have usually been either too ashamed or too afraid to
publicize their experiences.
Rarely has the deceit of so few been so
widely practiced to the disastrous detriment of so many, as in the
formulation and implementation of U.S. Middle East policy. Guilt, fear,
and the preoccupation with domestic politics rather than consideration of
policy, justice, and security interests have molded the direction of the
deep U.S. involvement. And if John Q. Citizen was unmindful of what was
really taking place, it was largely due to the inordinate power of the
media to penetrate the inner sanctum of every home with its slantings,
distortions, and myth-information. "T'ain't people's ignorance," as
Artemus Ward once quipped, "that does the harm, 'tis their knowin' so much
that ain't so." Barnum notwithstanding, the media has been able to fool
the people most, if not all, of the time.
The Watergate cover-up has to play
second fiddle to the concealments in the Middle East fiasco for more than
thirty years, involving, as it has, the continuous serious threat to world
peace manifested by four regional wars and three serious Big Power
confrontations, which only narrowly missed becoming World War III. The
stationing of American technicians in the Sinai to help supervise the
second Egyptian-Israeli disengagement accord may have been a step in the
making of a new Vietnam. "One day," predicted a senior U.S. diplomat,
according to Newsweek magazine, "there will be a congressional
investigation into how we lost the Middle East that will make the great
China debate seem trivial."
This book, it is hoped, will contribute
to a great Middle East debate that should take place before, rather than
after, catastrophe strikes again in that already harassed portion of the
globe. Certain basic questions require. answers: "Whose legal and moral
claim to Palestine is stronger, the Israeli Zionists or the Arab
Palestinians? How, if at all, may these claims be reconciled? How may the
U.S. protect its vast political and economic stake in the area and
simultaneously continue to foster its special, unique relationship with
Israel? Will the undeniable, overwhelming public statement of "never
again," as to another Vietnam, be meticulously regarded in our pursuit of
Middle East peace? And above all, this clincher: Will President Reagan and
his policy advisers cease avoiding and openly face the central issue in
the entire problem--not the existence of an Israeli state, nor even the
nonexistence of a Palestinian state, but the kind of a state Israel has to
become so as to bring lasting peace to the area?
For some time it has been apparent that
someone would have to assume the burden of carefully examining the
historical record of the Arab-Israeli conflict, starting with the
"original sin" in uprooting the indigenous Arab Palestinians, and daring
to articulate conclusions seldom aired. As Norman Thomas once observed,
one of the Jewish faith is perhaps able to speak with "the necessary moral
authority that no Gentile can express."
However strong the temptation may be
for any author to succumb to the prevailing mood of his surroundings and
to indulge in indiscriminate stereotyping, heightened by cliche's and
slogans, I have tried to maintain a fair perspective and not to allow
personal experiences to dull the observer's vision, nor instill too
deep-seated a passion. It is out of sadness, not anger, that I am forced
to conclude that in embarking upon the new path that Organized Jewry has
hewn for it, prophetic Judaism has incurred an incalculable loss in moral
values, which author Moshe Menuhin has described as "the Decadence of
Judaism in Our Times." What else can account for the anomaly by which the
once-persecuted have adopted the philosophy of their chief
persecutor?
In doling out incarceration and death
while sweeping through conquered Europe, did not the Führer undo the laws
of emancipation for which so many Jews had so long struggled, as he
decreed: "You are not a German, you are a Jew-you are not a Frenchman, you
are a Jew, you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew"? Yet these are the
identical words that Zionist leaders have been intoning as they have
meticulously promoted the in-gathering to Israel (Palestine) of Jews from
around the globe, even plotting their exodus from lands in which they have
lived happily for centuries.
If at times this book seems unduly
critical of Israel, and neglects to place in balance the oft-repeated
arguments in its favor, it is simply because the gigantic propaganda
apparatus of Israel-World Zionism has spun such extensive and deeply
ingrained mythology that there is hardly enough space to refute widely
accepted theses and expose the picture as it really is. The reader,
however, is particularly cautioned to keep in mind at all times the very
vital distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel.
Nor can he overlook the fact that one of Western man's most precious
possessions is the inalienable right to dissent. As Thomas Jefferson
expressed it, "For God's sake, let us freely hear both sides."
This new, updated paperback edition has
been published as an answer to the widespread demand to learn more about
the untold side of a subject, the understanding of which may be vital to
man's very existence.
In giving fair consideration to what to
many will come as an astounding recital, my readers are asked to display
what William Ellery Channing once defined as the free mind:
"I call that mind free which jealously guards its
intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does
not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens
itself to light whencesoever it may come, and which receives new truth
as an angel from heaven."
- AML
|
