This book, first written between 1949 and 1952, was rewritten in the years 1953-1956, and its concluding chapter in October and November of 1956.This was a timely moment to sum up the impact of Talmudic Zionism on human affairs, for just fifty years, or one-half of �the Jewish century,� then had passed from the day when it first broke the political surface, after submergence for some 1800 years.[fn] (The British Uganda offer, in 1903, was the first public revelation that Western politicians were privily negotiating with �the Jewish power� as an entity. Mr. Balfour�s hotel-room reception of Dr. Weizmann in 1906, after the Zionist rejection of Uganda, now may be seen as the second step, and the first step on the fateful road of full involvement in Palestinian Zionism.)
[fn text: About 1952, a coelenterate fish, of a kind until then believed to have been extinct for millions of years, was brought to the surface of the Indian Ocean (seriously damaging the chain of the Darwinian theory by its appearance, as did the discovery, a little later, that the Piltdown skull was a fake). The emergence of Levitical Zionism, when it broke the political surface of the 20th Century, was a somewhat similar surprise from the deep.]
In 1956, too, the revolution (which I hold to have been demonstrably Talmudic in our time) was also about fifty years old (from the revolutionary outbreaks following Japan�s defeat of Russia in 1905) as a permanent factor in our daily lives (its roots, of course, go back through 1848 to the revolution in France and to Weishaupt, and to the one in England and Cromwell).
Finally, 1956 was the year of one more presidential election in America, and this, more openly than any previous one, was held under the paralyzing pressure of Zionism.
Therefore if I could so have planned when I began the book in 1949 (I was in no position to make any such timetable) I could not have chosen a better moment than the autumn of 1956 to review the process depicted, its consequences up to this date, and the apparent denouement now near at hand: the climax to which it was all bound to lead.
During the writing of the book I have had small expectation, for the reasons I have given, that it would be published when it was ready; at this stage of �the Jewish century� that seems unlikely. If it does not appear now, I believe it will still be valid in five, ten or more years, and I expect it to be published one day or another because I anticipate the collapse, sooner or later, of the virtual law of heresy which has prevented open discussion of �the Jewish question� during the past three decades. Some day the subject will be freely debated again and something of what this book records will then be relevant.
Whatever the sequel in that respect, I end the book in October and November of 1956 and when I look around see that all is turning out just as was to be foreseen from the sequence of events related in it. The year has been full of rumours of war, louder and more insistent than any since the end of the Second War in 1945, and they come from the two places whence they were bound to come, given the arrangements made in 1945 by the �top-line politicians� of the West. They come from Palestine, where the Zionists from Russia were installed by the West, and from Eastern Europe, where the Talmudic revolution was installed by the West. These two movements (I recall again) are the ones which Dr. Weizmann showed taking shape, within the same Jewish households of Russia in the late 19th Century: revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism.
At two moments during recent years the war-noises made by the politicians of the West were louder than at any others. On each occasion the immediate cause of the outburst was soon lost to sight in the outcry about the particular case of �the Jews,� so that, even before general war began (in both instances it receded) it was presented to the public masses as war which, if it came, would be fought primarily for, on behalf of or in defence of �the Jews� (or �Israel�).
I earlier opined that any third general war would be of that nature, because the events of 1917-1945 led inevitably to that conclusion, which has been greatly strengthened by the events of 1953 and 1956. The wars which in 1953 and 1956 seemed to threaten would evidently have been waged by the West in that understanding, this time much more explicitly avowed in advance than on the two previous occasions. By any time when this book may appear the short-memoried �public,� if it has not again been afflicted by general war, may have forgotten the war-crises, or near-war-crises, of 1953 and 1956, so that I will briefly put them on record.
In 1953 some Jews appeared among the prisoners in one of the innumerable mock-trials announced (this one was never held) in Moscow. This caused violent uproar among the Western politicians, who again and with one voice cried that �the Jews� were being �exterminated� and �singled out� for �persecution.� The outcry had reached the pitch of warlike menace when Stalin died, the trial was cancelled and the clamour abruptly ceased. To my mind the episode plainly indicated that if the war �against Communism� came about (which Western politicians and newspapers in these years spoke of as an accepted probability) it would be fought, and this time even avowedly, for �the Jews.� The general multitude of enslaved humanity would be left unsuccoured, as in 1945.
In July 1956 threats of war again were uttered when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. For the first few days of this war-crisis the British Prime Minister justified the menaces to the British people, by the argument that Egypt�s action imperilled �the vital British lifeline.� Very soon he switched to the argument (presumably held to be more effective) that �Egypt�s next act, if this is allowed to succeed, will be to attack Israel.� The Zionist state then began to figure in the news as the worst sufferer from Egyptian control of the Suez Canal. Ergo, war in the Middle East too, if it came, was to be a war �for the Jews.�
Thirdly, 1956 saw a presidential election held, for the seventh time under the direct, and for the third time under the open pressure of the Zionists in New York. The election campaign became a public contest for �the Jewish vote,� with the rival parties outbidding each other in the promise of arms, money and guarantees to the Zionist state. Both parties, on the brink of war in that part of the world, publicly pledged themselves to the support of �Israel� in any circumstances whatever.
These results of the process which I have described from its start were to be expected. The conclusion to be drawn for the future seems inescapable: the millions of the West, through their politicians and their own indifference, are chained to a powder-keg with a sputtering, shortening fuse. The West approaches the climax of its relationship with Zion, publicly begun fifty years ago, and the climax is precisely what was to be foreseen when that servience started.
In our century each of the two great wars was followed by numerous books of revelation, in which the origins of the war were scrutinized and found to be different from what the mass, or mob, had been told, and the responsibility elsewhere located. These books have found general acceptance among those who read them, for a mood of enquiry always follows the credulity of wartime. However, they produce no lasting effect and the general mass may be expected to prove no less responsive to high-pressure incitement at the start of another war, for mass-resistance to mass-propaganda is negligible, and the power of propaganda is intoxicating as well as toxic.
Whether full public information about the causes of wars would avail against this continuing human instinct (�By a divine instinct, men�s minds mistrust ensuing danger�) if it were given before war�s outbreak, I cannot surmise; I believe this has never been tried. One modest ambition of this book is to establish that the origins and nature of and responsibility for a war can be shown before it begins, not merely when it has run its course. I believe the body of the book has demonstrated this and that its argument has already been borne out by events.
I believe also that the particular events of the years 1953-1956 in the West greatly strengthen its argument and the conclusion drawn, and for that reason devote the remainder of its concluding chapter to a resume of the relevant events of those years; (1) in the area enslaved by the revolution; (2) in and around the Zionist state; and (3) in �the free world� of the West, respectively. They appear to me to add the last word to the tale thus told: Climax, near or at hand.
Author�s interpolation: The preceding part of this concluding chapter, up to the words, �Climax, near or at hand,� was written on Friday, October 26, 1956. I then went away for the weekend, intending to resume and complete the chapter on Tuesday, October 30, 1956; it was already in rough draft. When I resumed it on that day Israel had invaded Egypt, on Monday, October 29, 1956. Therefore the rest of the chapter is written in the light of the events which followed; these made it much longer than I expected.
1. The Revolution
In the area of the revolution, swollen to enslave half of Europe, the death of Stalin in 1953 was followed by a series of popular uprisings in 1953 and 1956.
Both events rejoiced the watching world, for they revived the almost forgotten hope that one day the destructive revolution would destroy itself and that men and nations would again be free. This clear meaning was then confused by the forced intrusion into each of �the Jewish question.� In �the Jewish century� the public masses were prevented from receiving or considering tidings of any great event save in terms of what its effect would be �for the Jews.�
Stalin�s death (March 6,1953) startled the world because the life of this man, who probably caused the death and enslavement of more human beings than any other in history, had come to seem endless, like the uncoiling of the serpent.[fn] The circumstances of his death remain unclear, but the timetable of the events attending it may be significant.
[fn text: His leading place was briefly taken by one Grigori Malenkov, who yielded it to duumvirs, Nikita Kruschev (partyleader) and Nikolai Bulganin (Premier). The world could not tell to what extent they inherited Stalin�s personal power or were dominated by others. A survivor of all changes and purges, Mr. Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, remained a First Deputy Premier throughout and on the Bolshevik anniversary in November 1955 was chosen to tell the world, �Revolutionary ideas know no frontiers.� When the duumvirs visited India in that month the New York Times, asking who ruled the Soviet Union in their absence, answered �Lazar M. Kaganovich, veteran Commmunist leader.� Mr. Kaganovich was among Stalin�s oldest and closest intimates, but neither this nor any other relevant fact deterred the Western press from attacking Stalin, in his last months, as the new, anti-semitic �Hitler.�]
On January 15, 1953 the Moscow newspapers announced that nine men were to be tried on charges of conspiring to assassinate seven high Communist notables. Either six or seven of these nine men were Jews (the accounts disagree). The other two or three might never have been born for all the world heard of them, for in the uproar which immediately arose in the West the affair was dubbed that of �the Jewish doctors.�[fn]
[fn text: This outcry in the West had begun ten weeks earlier, on the eve of the Presidential election in America, on the strength of a trial in Prague, when eleven of fourteen defendants were hanged, after the usual �confessions,� on charges of Zionist conspiracy. Three of the victims were not Jews, but they too might not have been born or hanged for all the notice they received in the press of the West.]
In February, while the clamour in the West continued, diplomats who saw Stalin remarked on his healthy look and good spirits.
On March 6 Stalin died. A month later the �Jewish doctors� were released. Six months later Stalin�s terrorist chief, Lavrenti Beria, was shot for having arrested them and the charges were denounced as false. Of Stalin�s death, a notable American correspondent in Moscow, Mr. Harrison Salisbury, wrote that after it Russia was ruled by a group or junta �more dangerous than Stalin,� consisting of Messrs. Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich. To acquire power, he said, the junta might have murdered Stalin, everything pointed to it; �if Stalin just happened to be struck down by a ruptured artery in his brain on March 2, it must be recorded as one of the most fortuitous occurrences in history.�
For the West these attendant circumstances and possibilities of Stalin�s end had no interest. The entire period of some nine months, between the Prague trial (and presidential election) and the liquidation of Beria was filled with the uproar in the West about �anti-semitism in Russia.� While the clamour continued (it ceased after �the Jewish doctors� were released and vindicated) things were said which seemed plainly to signify that any Western war against the Communist union would be waged, like the one against Germany, solely on behalf of �the Jews,� or of those who claimed to represent the Jews. In 1953 Sovietized Russia was held up as the new anti-semitic monster, as Germany was held up in 1939 and Czarist Russia in 1914. This all-obscuring issue, to judge by the propagandist hubbub of that period, would again have befogged the battle and deceived the nations.
The timing of this campaign is significant and can no longer be explained by the theory of coincidence. In order to give maximum effect to the �pressure-machine� in America, the �Jewish question� has to become acute at the period of any presidential election there. Nowadays it always becomes acute at that precise period in one of its two forms: �anti-semitism� somewhere (this happened in 1912, 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1952) or a peril to �Israel� (this happened in 1948 and 1956). The prediction that, in one of the two forms, it will dominate the Presidential election of 1960 may be made without much risk.
Nothing changed in the situation of the Jews in Russia at that time.[fn] Some Jews had been included among the defendants in a show-trial at Prague and in one announced, but never held, in Moscow. The thirty-five Communist years had seen innumerable show-trials; the world had become indifferent through familiarity with them. As the terrorist state was based on imprisonment without any trial, the show-trials obviously were only held in order to produce some effect, either on the Sovietized masses or on the outer world. Even the charge of �Zionist conspiracy� was not new; it had been made in some trials of the 1920�s, and Communism from the start (as Lenin and Stalin testify) formally outlawed Zionism, just as it provided the Zionists from Russia with the arms to establish �Israel� in 1948.[fn]
[fn text: Of whom, according to the current Jewish �estimates� there were some two millions, or about one percent of the total Soviet population, (stated by the Soviet Government�s Statistical Manual of the Soviet Economy in June 1956 to be 200,000,000).]
If Stalin went further than was allowed in attacking �Zionism� on this occasion, his death quickly followed. To the end he was obviously not anti-Jewish. Mr. Kaganovich remained at his right hand. A few days before he died Stalin ordered one of the most pompous funerals ever seen in Soviet Moscow to be given to Lev Mechlis, one of the most feared and hated Jewish Commissars of the thirty-five years. Mechlis�s coffin was carried by all the surviving grandees of the Bolshevik revolution, who also shared the watch at his lying in state, so that this was plainly a warning to the captive Russian masses, if any still were needed, that �the law against anti-semitism� was still in full force. Immediately after Mechlis�s funeral (Jan. 27, 1953) the �Stalin Peace Prize� was with great public ostentation presented to the apostle of Talmudic vengeance, Mr. Ilya Ehrenburg, whose broadcasts to the Red Armies as they advanced into Europe incited them not to spare �even unborn Fascists.� A few days before he died Stalin prompted the Red Star to state that the struggle against Zionism �had nothing to do with anti-semitism; Zionism is the enemy of the working people all over the world, of Jews no less than Gentiles.�
The plight of the Jews, in their fractional minority in Russia, thus had not changed for the better or for worse. They still had �a higher degree of equality in the Soviet Union than any other part of the world� (to quote the derisive answer given, at this period, by a Jewish witness to a Republican Congressman, Mr. Kit Clardy, before a Congressional Committee, Mr. Clardy having asked �Do you not shrink in horror from what Soviet Russia is doing to the Jews?�). They remained a privileged class.
The uproar in the West therefore was artificial and had no factual basis, yet it reached a pitch just short of actual warlike threat and might have risen to that note had not Stalin died and �the Jewish doctors� been released (I was never able to discover whether the non-Jewish ones also were liberated). There could only be one reason for it: that Zionism had been attacked, and by 1952‑3 opposition to Zionism was deemed by the frontal politicians of the West to be �Hitlerism� and provocation of war. The episode showed that this propaganda of incitement can be unleashed at the touch of a button and be �beamed� in any direction at changing need (not excluding America, in the long run). When this propaganda has been brought to white heat, it is used to extort the �commitments� which are later invoked.
The six month period, between nomination-and-election, election-and-inauguration is that in which American presidents now come under this pressure. President Eisenhower in 1952-3 was under the same pressure as President Woodrow Wilson in 1912‑3, Mr. Roosevelt in 1938-9, and President Truman in 1947-8. The whole period of his canvass, nomination, election and inauguration was dominated by �the Jewish question� in its two forms, �anti-semitism� here, there or everywhere, and the adventure in Palestine. Immediately after nomination he told a Mr. Maxwell Abbell, President of the United Synagogue of America, �The Jewish people could not have a better friend than me … I grew up believing that Jews was the chosen people and that they gave us the high ethical and moral principles of our civilization� (all Jewish newspapers, September 1952).[fn]
[fn text: Mr. Eisenhower �added that his mother had reared him and his brother, in teachings of the Old Testament.� This somewhat cryptic allusion is to the Christian sect of Jehovah�s Witnesses, in which Mr. Eisenhower and his brothers were brought up in their parental home.]
This was the basic commitment, familiar in our century and always taken to mean much more than the givers comprehend. Immediately after it came the Prague trial and President Eisenhower, just elected, was evidently pressed for something more specific. In a message to a Jewish Labour Committee in Manhattan (Dec. 21, 1952) he said the Prague trial �was designed to unloose a campaign of rabid anti-semitism throughout Soviet Europe and the satellite nations of Eastern Europe. I am honoured to take my stand with American Jewry … to show the world the indignation all America feels at the outrages perpetrated by the Soviets against the sacred principles of our civilization.�
The �outrages� at that moment consisted in the hanging of eleven men, three of them Gentiles, among the millions done to death in the thirty-five Bolshevik years; their fate was not included in these �outrages.� The new president could not have known what �campaign� the trial was �designed to unloose,� and innumerable other trials had received no presidential denunciation. The words implicitly tarred the captives of Communism, too, with the �anti-semitic� brush, for they were termed �satellite nations� and the primary meaning of �satellite� is �An attendant attached to a prince or other powerful person; hence, an obsequious dependent or follower� (Webster�s Dictionary). As the commander whose military order, issued in agreement with the Soviet dictator, had ensured their captivity, President Eisenhower�s choice of word was strange. It reflected the attitude of those who were able to put �pressure� on all American presidents and governments. To them the enslavement of millions meant nothing; indeed, their power was used to perpetuate it.
This state of affairs was reflected, again, in two of the new President�s first acts. In seeking election, he had appealed to the strong American aversion to the deed of 1945 by pledging to repudiate the Yalta agreements (the political charter of his own military order halting the Allied advance west of Berlin and thus abandoning Eastern Europe to Communism) in these explicit words:
�The Government of the United States, under Republican leadership, will repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavement.� Elected, the new president sent to Congress (20 February 1953) a resolution merely proposing that Congress join him �in rejecting any interpretations or applications … of secret agreements which have been perverted to bring about the subjugation of free people.� By that time he had publicly referred to the enslaved peoples as �satellites.� As the resolution neither �repudiated� nor even referred to �Yalta,� it was disappointing to the party led by President Eisenhower and in the end it was dropped altogether.
In its place, the new President transmitted to Congress a resolution condemning �the vicious and inhuman campaigns against the Jews� in the Soviet area. Thus �the enslaved� were deleted altogether and �the Jews� put in their place, an amendment typical of our time. The perspiring State Department succeeded in having this resolution amended to include �other minorities.� The present Jewish �estimates� are that there are in all �about 2,500,000 Jews behind the Iron Curtain,� where the non-Jewish captives amount to between 300 and 350 millions; these masses, which included whole nations like the Poles, Hungarians, Bulgars and Ukrainians, to say nothing of the smaller ones or even of the Russians themselves, were lumped together in two words �other minorities.� The Senate adopted this resolution (Feb. 27, 1953) by unanimous consent, but this was not deemed enough for proper discipline, so that every American Senator (like the Members of the British House of Commons, at Mr. Eden�s behest, during the war) stood up to be counted. A few who were absent hurriedly asked in writing to have their names added to the roll-call.
Had the peoples behind �the Iron Curtain� understood the story of these two resolutions, or been allowed to learn of it, they would not have hoped (as they did hope) for any American succour in their national uprisings against the terror in 1956.
The President having spoken and acted thus, the uproar waxed. One of the most powerful Zionist leaders of that period (in the line of Justice Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise) was Rabbi Hillel Silver, who during the election had defended Mr. Eisenhower against ex-President Truman�s charge of �antisemitism� (now invariably used in presidential elections), and later was invited by the new president to pronounce the �prayer for grace and guidance�at his inauguration. Thus Rabbi Silver may be seen as a man speaking with authority when he announced that if Russia were destroyed, it would be on behalf of the Jews: he �warned Russia that it will be destroyed if it makes a spiritual pact with Hitlerism.� This method of giving the �Hitler� label to any individual threatened with �destruction� later was generally adopted (President Nasser of Egypt being a case in point).
The menace was always implicitly the same: �Persecute men if you will, but you will be destroyed if you oppose the Jews.� Mr. Thomas E. Dewey (twice a presidential aspirant and the architect of Mr. Eisenhower�s nomination in 1952) outdid Rabbi Silver at the same meeting (Jan. 15, 1953): �Now all are beginning to see it� (�anti-semitism� in Russia) �as the newest and most terrible programme of genocide yet launched … Zionism, as such, has now become a crime and merely being born a Jew is now cause for hanging. Stalin has swallowed the last drop of Hitler�s poison, becoming the newest and most vituperative persecutor of Jewry … It seems that Stalin is willing to admit to the whole world that he would like to accomplish for Hitler what Hitler could not do in life.�
The extravagance of this campaign astonishes even the experienced observer, in retrospect. For instance, the Montreal Gazette, which by chance I saw in the summer of 1953, editorially stated that �thousands of Jews are being murdered in East Germany�; the Johannesburg Zionist Record three years earlier (July 7, 1950) had stated that the entire Jewish population of Eastern Germany was 4,200 souls, most of whom enjoyed preference for government employ.
The new president�s �commitments� became ever firmer, at all events in the minds of those to whom they were addressed. In March 1953, either just before or after Stalin�s death, he sent a letter to the Jewish Labour Committee above-cited pledging (the word used in the New York Times; I have not the full text of his message) that America would be �forever vigilant against any resurgence of anti-semitism.� When the recipient committee held its congress at Atlantic City the �Jewish doctors� had been released and the whole rumpus was dying down, so that it was no longer eager to make the letter public and returned it to the sender. The president was insistent on publication and sent it back �with a very tough note bitterly condemning Soviet anti-semitism.�
In this world of propagandist fictions the masses of the West were led by their governors from disappointment to disappointment. Who knows whither they would have been led on this occasion, had Stalin not died, the �Jewish doctors� not been released, the finger not been removed from the button of mass-incitement?
Stalin died and the machine-made outcry (on both sides of the Atlantic) died with him. What if he had lived and �the Jewish doctors� been tried? When he died the propaganda had already reached eve-of-war pitch; the �new Hitler� had begun �the newest and most terrible programme of genocide yet launched�; �thousands of Jews� were being �murdered� in a place where only hundreds lived: soon these thousands would have become millions, one … two … six millions. The entire holocaust of Lenin�s and Stalin�s thirty-five years, with its myriads of unknown victims and graves, would have been transformed, by the witchcraft of this propaganda, into one more �anti-Jewish persecution�; indeed, this was done by the shelving of President Eisenhower�s �repudiation of Yalta and Communist enslavement� pledge and the substitution for it of a resolution which singled out for �condemnation� the �vicious and inhuman treatment of the Jews� (who continued, behind the Iran Curtain, to wield the terror over those enslaved by Communism). In that cause alone, had war come, another generation of Western youth would have gone to war, thinking their mission was to �destroy Communism.�
Stalin died. The West was spared war at that time and stumbled on, behind its Zionised leaders, towards the next disappointment, which was of a different kind. During the ten years that had passed since the ending of the Second War their leaders had made them accustomed to the thought that one day they would have to crush Communism and thus amend the deed of 1945. The sincerity of the Western leaders in this matter was again to be tested in the years 1953 and 1956.
In those years the enslaved people themselves began to destroy Communism and to strike, for that liberation which the American president, the military architect of their enslavement, promised them but counselled them not militantly to effect.[fn] Stalin�s death seemed to have the effect of a thaw on the rigid fear which gripped these peoples and it set this process of self-liberation in motion. The writer of this book was confounded, in this case, in his expectations. I believed, from observation and experience, that any national uprising was impossible against tanks and automatic weapons, and against the day-to-day methods of the terror (arrest, imprisonment, deportation or death without charge or trial), which seemed to have been perfected during three centuries (that is, through the revolutions in England, France and Russia) to a point where, I thought, only outside succour could make any uprising possible. I had forgotten the infinite resources of the human spirit.
[fn text: �While once again proclaiming the policy of liberation, Mr. Dulles, the Secretary of State, disclaimed any United States responsibility for the ill-fated uprising in Hungary. He said that beginning in 1952, he and the President consistently had declared that liberation must be achieved by peaceful, evolutionary means.� Statement at Augusta, Georgia, Dec. 2, 1956.]
The first of these revolts occurred in Sovietized East Berlin on June 17, 1953, when unarmed men and youths attacked Soviet tanks with bands and stones.[fn] This example produced an unprecedented result deep inside the Soviet Union itself: a rising at the Vorkuta slave camp in the Arctic Circle, where the prisoners chased the terrorist guards from the camp and held it for a week until secret police troops from Moscow arrived and broke them with machine-gun fire.
[fn text: This was crushed and ruthless vengeance taken by �the dreaded Frau Hilde Benjamin� (The Times, July 17, 1953) who was promoted Minister of Justice for the purpose and became notorious for her death sentences (one on a boy in his teens who distributed anti-Communist leaflets) and for her especial persecution of the sect of Jehovah�s Witnesses, in which President Eisenhower was brought up. In the popular thought and in New York newspaper descriptions she was described as �a Jewess.� As far as my research can discover, though married to a Jew, she was not by birth Jewish.]
These two uprisings occurred while the clamour in the West about �anti-semitism behind the Iron Curtain� was still loud. No similar outcry was raised on behalf of the legion of human beings, a hundred times as numerous, whose plight was once more revealed. No threats of war or �destruction� were uttered against the Soviet Union on their account. On the contrary, the politicians and the press of the West urged them to remain quiet and simply to hope for �the liberation� which, by some untold means, one day would come to them from America, which had abandoned them in 1945.
Nevertheless, the anguished longing for liberation continued to work in the souls of the peoples and in the sequence to the East Berlin and Vorkuta outbursts came the risings in Poland and Hungary in October, 1956, after I began this concluding chapter. The first was a spontaneous national uprising. The second, ignited by the first, became something which history can scarcely match: a national war of a whole, captive people against the captor�s overwhelming might. I believe the passage of time will show this event either to have marked the rebirth of �the West� and the revival of Europe, or the end of Europe as it has been known to mankind for the past thousand years and therewith the end of anything the words, �the West,� have stood for.
Whatever the future, one thing was achieved by the October uprisings, and more especially by the Hungarian uprisings. Never again could the revolution pretend to have even the passive acceptance of its captives. These showed that, under Karl Marx�s Communism, they found they had nothing to lose but their chains and would face death rather than endure them.
The causes for which both nations rose were the same and were made completely clear. They wanted, in each case, the liberation of the nation through the withdrawal of the Red Army; the liberation of individual men from the terror through the abolition of the secret police and the punishment of the chief terrorists; the restoration of their faith through the release of the head of their church (who in both cases was imprisoned); the release of their political system from the one-party thrall through the return of contending parties and elections.
Thus the issue at stake was completely plain: through a little nation on its eastern borders �the West� rose against Asiatic despotism; here was God against godlessness, liberty against slavery, human dignity against human degradation. The issue at the moment turned, and the final decision will turn, on the measure of support which these outpost-nations of the West found in the remainder of the West, which professed kinship and fellowship with them but in the hour of need had abandoned them before.
In that quarter, vision of the clear issue at stake was obscured by the intrusion of the all-obscuring side-issue of our century: �the Jewish question.� The tale of the October events in Poland and Hungary is as clear, in itself, as crystal, but was not allowed to become clear to the masses of America and England because of this one aspect, concerning which information has consistently been denied to them since the Bolshevik overthrow of the legitimate regime in Russia in 1917.
Three months before the Polish and Hungarian uprisings an article by Mr. C.L. Sulzberger published in the New York Times revived the cry of �Anti-semitism behind the Iron Curtain� which had been raised in 1953. As an instance of this �anti-semitism� the article cited the dismissal of Jakub Berman, �detested party theorist and a Jew,� who was the chief Moscovite terrorist in Poland.
In this article lurked the secret of which the Western masses have never been allowed to become aware; Mr. Robert Wilton, who �lost the confidence� of The Times for trying to impart it to that newspaper�s readers in 1917-1918, was the first of a long line of correspondents who tried, and failed, during the next thirty-nine years. The masses in Russia, and later in the other countries which were abandoned to Communism, could not rise against the terror without being accused of �anti-semitism,� because the terror was always a Jewish and Talmudic terror, thus identifiable by its acts, and not a Russian, Communist or Soviet terror.
In this one thing the ruling power in Moscow, whatever it truly was and is, never departed from the original pattern, and that is the basic fact from which all research into the events of our century must start. The theory of coincidence might conceivably be applied to the 90 percent-Jewish governments which appeared in Russia, Hungary and Bavaria in 1917-1919; (Even at that time, as I have shown earlier, a Jewish writer described the national abhorrence of the Jewish Bolshevik government in Hungary as �anti-semitism,� an epithet which could only have been escaped by submission to it). But when the Moscow Government installed Jewish governments in the countries abandoned to it in 1945 no doubt remained that this was set and calculated policy, with a considered purpose.
I repeat here information, from unchallengeable sources, about the composition of these governments at the very moment in 1952-1953 when Stalin was being called �the new Hitler� and �Russia� was being threatened with �destruction� from New York and Washington if it permitted �any resurgence of anti-semitism�: �In Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere in Central and South-Eastern Europe, both the party intellectuals and the key men in the secret police are largely Jewish in origin; the man in the street, therefore, has been inclined to equate the party cares with the Jews and to blame the �Jewish Communists� for all his troubles� (New Statesman, 1952); �… The strongly Jewish (90 percent in the top echelons) Government of Communist Hungary under Communist Premier Matyas Rakosi, who is himself a Jew� (Time, New York, 1953). �Rumania, together with Hungary, probably has the greatest number of Jews in the administration� (New York Herald-Tribune, 1953). All these, and many similar reports in my files, come from articles reprobating �anti-semitism� in �the satellite countries,� and at this period, when these countries were known to be Jewish-ruled, President Eisenhower made his statement about �a wave of rabid anti-semitism in … the satellite countries of Eastern Europe.�
What could these menaces from Washington mean to the captive peoples, other than a warning not to murmur against the wielders of the knout; yet at the same time they were promised �liberation,� and �The Voice of America� and �Radio Free Europe� daily and nightly tormented them with descriptions of their own plight.
This was the confusing background to the Polish and Hungarian national uprisings of October 1956, the first sign of which, again, was given by the riots at Poznan, in Poland, in June 1956. Immediately after that Mr. Sulzberger�s article about �Anti-semitism behind the Iron Curtain� appeared, complaining that Mr. Jakub Berman had been dismissed and that Marshal Rokossovsky, commander of the Polish army, had dismissed �several hundred Jewish officers.� In August one of the two Deputy Premiers, Mr. Zenon Nowak (the other was a Jew, Mr. Hilary Mine) said the campaign for �democratization�or �liberalization� which was being conducted in the Polish press was being distorted by the introduction of, and the especial prominence given to the case of �the Jews,� He said the nation believed there was �a disproportionate number of Jews in leading party and government positions� and in evidence read a list of their representation in the various ministries. A Professor Kotabinski, replying to and attacking Mr. Nowak, said the Jews �had become almost a majority in key positions, and preference for their own people in giving out jobs has not been avoided� (New York Times, Oct. 11, 1956).
By that time Poland had been for eleven years under Soviet rule and Jewish terror. Little had changed in the picture given by the American Ambassador, Mr. Arthur Bliss Lane, of the years 1945-1947: �Many an arrest by the Security Police was witnessed by members of the American Embassy … . terrifying methods, such as arrests in the middle of the night, and the person arrested generally was not permitted to communicate with the outside world, perhaps for months, perhaps for all time … Even our Jewish sources admitted … the great unpopularity of the Jews in key government positions. These men included Minc, Berman, Olczewski, Radkiewic and Spychalski … there was bitter feeling within the militia against the Jews because the Security police, controlled by Radkiewicz, dominated the militia and the army … Furthermore, both the Security Police and Internal Security Police had among their members many Jews of Russian origin.�
Only after eleven years did this Jewish control of the terror begin to weaken. In May 1956 Mr. Jakub Berman (�thought to be Moscow�s No. 1 man in the Polish Party,� New York Times, Oct. 21, 1956) resigned as one deputy Premier and early in October 1956, Mr. Hilary Minc (�thought to be Moscow�s No. 2 man�) also resigned. (Mr. Nowak, one of the new Deputy Premiers, from the start was assailed as �anti-semitic�).
This was the significant background to the national uprising of October 20. Poland, at its first experience of Communist rule, like Russia, Hungary and Bavaria in 1917-1919, had found the terror, on which that rule rested, to be Jewish and was already being attacked for �anti-semitism� in America and England because it tried to throw off the terror. Like all other countries, it was caught in the dilemma caused by �the Jewish question.� The actual situation of such Jews as were not in high position in Poland appears to have been better than that of other sections of the population, to judge from various reports made at this period by visiting rabbis and journalists from America. Incidentally, the total number of Jews in Poland at that time ranges, in published Jewish �estimates,� from �thirty thousand� (New York Times, July 13, 1956) to �about fifty thousand� (New York Times, Aug. 31, 1956), the total population of Poland being given, in current reference works as approximately 25,000,000. Their proportion, therefore, is a small fraction of one percent, and never before this century has a minority of this minuteness, anywhere, claimed to become �almost a majority in key positions� and in showing �preference for their own people in giving out jobs.�
The case of Hungary was more significant, for this country after 1945 endured its second experience of Communist rule. It not only found the terror to be Jewish again, but it was wielded by the same men. This deliberate reinstalment of Jewish terrorists detested by a nation for their deeds of twenty-six years before (the details are given later in this chapter) is the strongest evidence yet provided of the existence in Moscow of a power, controlling the revolution, which deliberately gives its savageries the Talmudic signature, not the Soviet, Communist or Russian one.
Against this background, which was not comprehended in �the free world,� the forces of national regeneration gradually worked to throw off the terror. In April 1956 Mr. Vladislav Gomulka (imprisoned from 1951 to 1956 under the Berman-Minc regime as a �deviationist�) was released and became the symbol of the national hope at this instant, for although he was a Communist he was a Pole. He was restored to the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party on October 19, 1956 and on October 20 did something which might have changed the whole shape of our century, but for the shadow which soon fell across the ensuing events (this time from the other centre of �the Jewish question,� Palestine). He presented the Polish nation with a virtual declaration of independence, attacked �the misrule of the last twelve years,� promised elections and declared that �the Polish people will defend themselves with all means so that we may not be pushed off the road to democratization.�
He did this in face of a flying visit from the Moscovite chiefs themselves. Mr. Kruschev was accompanied by generals and threatened the use of the Red Army. He seems to have been utterly discomfited by the bold front offered to him by Mr. Gomulka and, in particular by Mr. Edward Ochab (also an �anti-semite� in Mr. Sulzberger�s article) who said, according to report, �If you do not halt your troops immediately, we will walk out of here and break off all contact.� The Polish army was evidently ready to defend the national cause and Mr. Kruschev capitulated. Marshal Rokossovsky disappeared to Moscow[fn] and, as the symbol of the nation�s rebirth, Cardinal Wyszynski (deprived of his office under the Berman-Minc regime in 1953) was released.
[fn text: A good instance of the confusion introduced into this event by the �Jewish question.� Rokossovsky, Polish-born and a Soviet marshal, halted the advancing troops at the gates of Warsaw in 1944 to give the SS. and Gestapo troops time and freedom to massacre the Polish resistance army. He was thus the most hated man in Poland. At the same time he was held to be �anti-semitic� by the New York newspapers. Which current of feeling counted most heavily against him, one cannot at this stage determine.]
Jubilation spread over Poland. The revolution [Communist] had suffered its first major defeat; the faith had been restored (this was the meaning of the Cardinal�s liberation); the nation, abandoned by the outer world, had taken a great first step towards its self-liberation.
At once the bush-fire spread to Hungary. The great event in Poland was forgotten in the excitement caused by a greater one. All the processes of human nature, time and providence seemed at last to be converging to a good end.
In Hungary on October 22, 1956, two days after the Polish declaration of independence, the people gathered in the streets to demand that Mr. Imre Nagy return to the premiership and the Soviet occupation troops be withdrawn. None of them realized at that moment that they were beginning a national uprising which was to turn into a national war of liberation.
The spark came from Poland and the background was the same, with the difference that Hungary was undergoing its second ordeal at the hands of Jewish commissars. The chief object of its fear and detestation at that instant was one Erno Geroe, head of the Hungarian Communist Party and the third of the Jewish terrorists of 1919 sent to Hungary by Moscow to wield the terror there. Thus in this event, not only the accumulated bitterness of the years 1945-1956 exploded, but also the memories of the terror in 1918-1919.
Mr. Imre Nagy, like Mr. Gomulka in Poland, became the symbol of the nation�s hopes at that moment because he was a �national� Communist. That is to say, he was a Magyar, as Gomulka was a Pole, and not an alien. His part in the historical process, had he been allowed to fulfil it, would probably have been to take the first steps towards the restoration of Hungarian national sovereignty and individual liberty, after which he would have given way to an elected successor. His symbolic popularity at the moment of the national uprising was chiefly due to the fact that he had been forced out of the premiership in 1953, and expelled from the Communist party in 1955, by the hated Matyas Rakosi and Erno Geroe.
In Hungary, as in Poland, the nation wanted distinct things, all made clear by the words and deeds of the ensuing days: the restoration of the national faith (symbolized by the release of the Cardinal, imprisoned by the Jewish terrorists), the liberation of the nation (through the withdrawal of the Soviet troops), the abolition of the terrorist secret police and the punishment of the terrorist chiefs. The initial demand for these things, however, was expressed by peaceful demonstration, not by riot or uprising.[fn] They became noisy after a violently abusive speech by Geroe, the party leader, who retained that post when the party�s central committee installed Mr. Nagy as premier. Geroe then instructed the Soviet troops to enter Budapest and restore order. Encountering demonstrators in Parliament Square, who were gathered to demand Geroe�s dismissal, the Soviet tanks and Geroe�s terrorist police opened fire, leaving the streets littered with dead and dying men and women (Oct. 24, 1956). This was the start of the true uprising; the nation unitedly rose against the Soviet troops and the hated terrorist police and within a few days the Communist revolution suffered a defeat which made the one in Poland look like a mere rebuff.
[fn text: The best authentic account of the original event was given, for reasons of his own, by the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, Tito, in a national broadcast on Nov. 15, 1956. He said, among much else, �When we were in Moscow we declared that Rakosi�s regime and Rakosi himself did not have the necessary qualifications to lead the Hungarian state or to lead it to internal unity � Unfortunately, the Soviet comrades did not believe us � When Hungarian Communists themselves demanded that Rakosi should go, the Soviet leaders realized that it was impossible to continue in this way and agreed that he should be removed. But they committed a mistake by not also allowing the removal of Geroe and other Rakosi followers � They agreed to the removal of Rakosi on the condition that Geroe would obligatorily remain � He followed the same policy and was as guilty as Rakosi � He called those hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, who were still demonstrators at the time, a mob� (a participant stated that Geroe�s words were �filthy Fascist bandits and other words too dirty to repeat�).� � This was enough to ignite the barrel of gunpowder and cause it to explode � Geroe called in the army. It was a fatal mistake to call in the Soviet Army at a time when the demonstrations were still going on � This angered these people even more and thus a spontaneous revolt ensued � Nagy called the people to arms against the Soviet Army and appealed to the Western countries to intervene ��]
The Cardinal was released, Mr. Nagy established himself as premier, the hated Geroe disappeared (to the Crimean Riviera, in company with Rakosi, said one report), the terrorist police were hunted down and their barracks wrecked. The statue of Stalin was thrown down and smashed to pieces; the Hungarian troops everywhere helped the uprising or remained passive; the Soviet troops (who at that moment were mainly Russian) often showed sympathy with the Hungarians and many of their tanks were destroyed. This was the most hopeful moment in Europe�s story since 1917, but far away Zionism was moving to rescue the revolution from its discomfiture and in a few days, even hours, all that was gained was to be undone.
The background should be briefly sketched here, before the second stage of the Hungarian people�s war is described, because the case of Hungary is probably the most significant of all. For some reason the Moscovite power was more determined in this case than any other to identify Jews with the terror, so that the Hungarian experience, more strongly than any, points to continuing Jewish, or Talmudic, control of the revolution itself at its seat of power in Moscow.
The 1919 regime in Hungary, which the Magyars themselves threw out after a brief but merciless terror, was Jewish. The presence of one or two non-Jews in the regime did not qualify this, its essential nature. It was the terror of four chief Jewish leaders, supported by a mass of subordinate Jews, namely Bela Kun, Matyas Rakosi, Tibor Szamuely and Erno Geroe, none of whom could be called Hungarians and all of whom were trained for their task in Moscow.
After the Second War free elections, for some reason of political expediency, were permitted in Hungary (Nov. 1945). These produced the natural result: a huge majority for the Smallholders Party; the Communists, despite the presence of the Red Army, made a poor showing. Then Matyas Rakosi was sent again to Hungary (Szamuely had committed suicide in 1919; Bela Kun disappeared in some nameless Soviet purge of the 1930�s, but in February 1956 his memory was pompously �rehabilitated� at the Twentieth Soviet Congress in Moscow, and this may now be seen as an intimation to the Hungarians of what they had to expect in October 1956).
With the help of the terrorist police and the Red Army Rakosi began to destroy other parties and opponents, five of whom (including the renowned Mr. Laszlo Rajk) he and Geroe had hanged in 1949 after the familiar �confessions� of conspiracy with �the imperialist powers� (an allegation which left the imperialist powers as unmoved as they were infuriated by the allegation of �Zionist conspiracy� in 1952). By 1948 Hungary, under Rakosi, was completely Sovietized and terrorized. The chief terrorist this time, under Rakosi himself, was Erno Geroe, also returned to Hungary from Moscow after twenty years; he staged the trial and ordered the incarceration of Hungary�s religious leader, Cardinal Mindszenty[fn] (who before he disappeared into durance instructed the nation not to believe any confession imputed to him by his jailers). After that Hungary for several years lay under the terror of two of the men who had crucified it in 1919, and the entire government became �90 percent Jewish in the top echelons.� To Hungarians also, then, the terror was Jewish and Talmudic, not Communist, Soviet or Russian, and it was most deliberately given that nature; the intent of the return of Rakosi and Geroe after the Second War is unmistakable, and their acts were equally unmistakable.
[fn text: The invariable and deliberate anti-Christian trait appeared again in the treatment given to Cardinal Mindszenty, the details of which were published by him after his liberation. In summary, he said he was tortured by his captors for twenty-nine days and nights between his arrest and trial, being stripped nude, beaten for days on end with a rubber hose, kept in a cold, damp cell to irritate his weak lung, forced to watch obscene performances and questioned without sleep throughout the period (interview published in many newspapers and periodicals, December 1956).]
In July 1953 Rakosi resigned the premiership and The Times announced that �Mr. Geroe is the only Jew left in the Cabinet, which under Mr. Rakosi was predominantly Jewish.� As Rakosi remained party leader and Geroe was Deputy-Premier, nothing very much changed, and in July 1956, when Rakosi also resigned his party-leadership, he was succeeded in that post by Geroe, with the consequences which were seen in October.
Even Geroe seemed to have done his worst at that moment, for after the Hungarian people�s victory the Red Army troops were withdrawn (Oct. 28) and two days later (Oct. 30) the Soviet Government broadcast to the world a statement admitting �violations and mistakes which infringed the principles of equality in relations between Socialist states,� offering to discuss �measures … to remove any possibilities of violating the principle of national sovereignty,� and undertaking �to examine the question of the Soviet troops stationed on the territory of Hungary, Rumania and Poland.�
Was it a ruse, intended only to lull the peoples while the assassin took respite, or was it a true retreat and enforced admission of error, opening great vistas of conciliation and hope to the peoples?
If Israel had not attacked Egypt … if Britain and France had not joined in that attack … if these things had not happened the world would now know the answer to that question. Now it will never know, for the Zionist attack on Egypt, and the British and French participation in it, released the revolution from its dilemma; as if by magic, the eyes of the watching world turned from Hungary to the Middle East and Hungary was forgotten. Vainly did Mr. Nagy broadcast his appeal to the world the very next day, saying that 200,000 men with five thousand tanks were moving into Hungary.
Budapest was pulverized. On November 7 the voice of the last free Hungarian radio faded from the air (Radio Rakoczy at Dunapentele), as the voices of the Poles had faded in 1944 and of the Czechs in 1939, bequeathing their sorrows to �the West.�
�This is our last broadcast. We are being inundated with Soviet tanks and planes.� These words, the Vienna correspondent of the New York Times recorded, �were followed by a loud crashing sound. Then there was silence.�
Mr. Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav Legation, and on leaving it under Soviet safe-conduct was deported some-whither, none knows where. The Cardinal took refuge in the American Embassy. At the end of November the Cuban delegate to the United Nations, a well-informed authority, stated that 65,000 people had been killed in Hungary. More than 100,000 by that time had fled across the frontier into Austria, a small country which upheld the tattered standard of �the West� by taking in all who came, without question. A few thousand of these reached America, where they were received by the U.S. Secretary of the Army, a Mr. Wilbur M. Brucker, who ordered them �to applaud the American flag� and then �to applaud President Eisenhower.�
These truly were ten days that shocked the world, and will shock it ever more if the true tale is ever told. They showed that the values which once were symbolized by the two words, �The West,� now were embodied in the captive peoples of Eastern Europe, not in America or England or France.
Those countries had their backs turned to the scene in Hungary. They were intent on events in the Middle East. �The Jewish question� in the Middle East intervened to blot out the dawn of hope in Europe again. Once more revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism worked as in perfect synchronization, as in October 1917; the acts of each directly benefited the other. The United Nations could not find time to discuss the Hungarian appeal for help before the new terror crushed the appellants and restored approved agents of the revolution to the delegates� places.
In Hungary itself the place of the vanished Geroe was taken by yet another commissar of 1919. Mr. Ference Munnich, who had taken prominent part in the Bela Kun regime then, also had returned to Hungary after the Second War with the Red Army. From 1946 to 1949, when Rakosi was clamping down the second terror, Mr. Munnich was Budapest chief of police. Now he became �Deputy Premier, Minister of National Defence and of Public Security� in the government of one Janos Kadar, set up by Moscow. Mr. Kadar also had a record of some independence, and therefore was not likely to be allowed to wield any power. Mr. Munnich, (said the New York Times) was �Moscow�s ace in the hole, controlling Mr. Kadar.�
In this way the night came down again on Hungary and it had to find what consolation it might in the President�s words that his heart went out to it. The time bomb in the Middle East, originally planted there in the very week of the Bolshevik revolution�s triumph in Moscow, blew up at the moment of the revolution�s fiasco and defeat. This diversion changed the brightest situation for many years into the darkest one. The Soviet Union was left undisturbed in its work of massacre in Hungary while the great powers of the West began to dispute among themselves about Israel, Egypt and the Suez Canal; all the world turned to watch them, and the Soviet state, with the blood of a European nation on its hands, was able to join in the general anathema of Britain and France when they joined in the Israeli attack.
The creation of the Zionist state proved to be even more ill-omened than the other creation of the Talmudic Jews in Russia, the Communist revolution. The second section of this record of the years of climax therefore has to do with events in the Zionist state in the eight years between its creation by terror in 1948 and its attack on Egypt in October 1956.
2. The Zionist State
In those years the little state misnamed �Israel� proved to be something unique in history. It was governed, as it was devised, set up and largely peopled, by non-semitic Jews from Russia, of the Chazar breed. Founded on a tribal tradition of antiquity, with which these folk could have no conceivable tie of blood, it developed a savage chauvinism based on the literal application of the Law of the Levites in ancient Judah. Tiny, it had no true life of its own and from the start lived only by the wealth and weapons its powerful supporters in the great Western countries could extort from these. During these years it outdid the most bellicose warlords of history in warlike words and deeds. Ruled by men of the same stock as those who wielded the terror in Poland and Hungary, it daily threatened the seven neighbouring Semitic peoples with the destruction and enslavement prescribed for them in Deuteronomy of the Levites.
It did this in the open belief that its power in the Western capitals was sufficient to deter the governments there from ever gainsaying its will, and to command their support in any circumstances. It behaved as if America, in particular, was its colony, and that country�s deeds conformed with that idea. Within its borders its laws against conversion and intermarriage were those of the much-cited Hitler; beyond its borders lay a destitute horde of Arabs, driven into the wilderness by it, whose numbers rose through childbirth to nearly a million as the eight years went by. These, and their involuntary hosts, were by repeated raid and massacre reminded that the fate of Deir Yasin yet hung over them too: �utterly destroy, man, woman and child , . . leave nothing alive that breatheth.� The Western countries, its creators, murmured reproof while they sent it money and the wherewithal of the war which they claimed to fear; thus, like Frankenstein, they created the destructive agency which they could not control.
Based on fantasy, the little state had no real existence, only the power to spread unease throughout the world, which from the moment of its creation had no moment�s true respite from fear. It began to fulfil the words of the ancient Promise: �This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven … who shall be in anguish because of thee.�
Left to its own resources, it would have collapsed, as the �Jewish Homeland� of the inter-war years would have collapsed. The urge to leave it once more began to master the urge to enter it, and this despite the power of chauvinism, which for a time will overcome almost any other impulse in those who yield to it. In 1951, already, departures would have out-numbered arrivals save that the �amazing crack� earlier mentioned (New York Herald-Tribune, April 1953) then opened �in the Iron Curtain� (where cracks do not occur unless they are intended; the Communist-revolutionary state evidently had a calculated purpose in replenishing the Zionist-revolutionary state with inhabitants at that time). Nevertheless, in 1952, 13,000 emigrants left and only 24,470 entered, and in 1953 (the last year for which I have figures) emigration exceeded immigration, according to the Jewish Agency. A Dr. Benjamin Avniel, speaking in Jerusalem, said in June that in the first five months 8,500 immigrants had arrived and 25,000 persons had departed.
This was the natural development, if �Israel� were left alone, for it had nothing to offer but chauvinism. The picture of conditions in the land is given by Jewish authorities. Mr. Moshe Smilanski (of sixty years experience in Palestine) wrote in the Jewish Review of February, 1952:
�When the British mandate came to an end the country was well off. Food warehouses, private and governmental, were full and there were good stacks of raw materials. The country had thirty million pounds in the Bank of England, besides British and American securities to a large amount. The currency in circulation was about thirty million pounds, which had the same value as sterling … The Mandatory Government left us a valuable legacy, the deep harbour in Haifa, two moles in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, railways, many good roads and government buildings, large equipped military and civil airfields, good army barracks and the Haifa refineries. The Arabs who fled left behind about five million dunams of cultivable land, containing orchards, orange graves, olives, grape vines and fruit trees, about 75,000 dwelling houses in the towns, some of them very elegant, about 75,000 shops and factories and much movable property, furniture, carpets, jewellery, etc. All this is wealth, and if we in Israel are sunk in poverty we blame the excessive bureaucratic centralization, the restriction of private enterprise and the promise of a Socialistic regime in our day.�
In April 1953 Mr. Hurwitz of the Revisionist Party in Israel told a Jewish audience in Johannesburg of the �degeneration� of the Zionist state. He said he could not blind himself to the alarming position: �Economically the country is on the verge of bankruptcy. Immigration has diminished and in the past few months more people have left the country than have come in. In addition, there are 50,000 unemployed and thousands more working on short time.�
These two quotations (I have many others of similar tenor) by Jewish residents may be compared with the picture of life in Israel which the Western masses received from their politicians. A Mr. Clement Davies (leader of that British Liberal Party which had 40l seats in the 1906 House of Commons and six, under his leadership, in that of 1956) before a Jewish audience in Tel Aviv �hailed the progress being made in the Jewish state, which to him seemed to be a miracle of progress along the road to restoring the country to a land flowing with milk and honey� (printed in the same Jewish newspaper as Mr. Hurwitz�s remarks). At the same period, the younger Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, electioneering in New York (where �the Jewish vote� is held to be decisive) said, �Israel is a pocket of life and hope in the sea of seething Arab peoples. It �sells freedom� for the free world more successfully than all the propaganda we could send out from the U.S.A.�
Mr. Adlai Stevenson, campaigning for the presidency in 1952, told the Zionist audience that �Israel has welcomed into her midst with open arms and a warm heart all her people seeking refuge from tribulation … America would do well to model her own immigration policies after the generosity of the nation of Israel and we must work to that end� (the only conceivable meaning of this is that the American people should be driven from the United States and the North American Indians be restored to their lands). Another presidential aspirant, a Mr. Stuart Symington, said �Israel is an example of how firmness, courage and constructive action can win through for democratic ideals, instead of abandoning the field to Soviet imperialism� (about that time Israeli state scholars were by governmental decree singing the Red Flag on May Day, while the politicians of Washington and London inveighed against �anti-semitism behind the Iron Curtain�).
Against this sustained inversion of truth by the frontal politicians of all parties in America and England, only Jewish protests, as in the preceding decades, were heard (for the reason I previously gave, that non-Jewish writers were effectively prevented from publishing any). Mr. William Zukerman wrote:
�The generally accepted theory that the emergence of the state of Israel would serve to unify and cement the Jewish people has turned out to be wrong. On the contrary, the Congress� (the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, 1951) �has dramatically demonstrated that the creation of a Jewish political state after two thousand years has introduced a new and potent distinction which Jews as a group have not known in centuries and that Israel is likely to separate rather than unite Jews in the future … In some mystical manner Israel is supposed to have a unique jurisdiction over the ten to twelve million Jews who live in every country of the world outside it … It must continue to grow by bringing in Jews from all over the world, no matter how happily they live in their present homes … Jews who have lived there for generations and centuries, must according to this theory be �redeemed� from �exile� and brought to Israel through a process of mass immigration … Israeli leaders of all parties, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, including Premier Ben-Gurion, have begun to demand that American Jews, and particularly Zionists, redeem their pledges to the ancient homeland, leave their American �exile,� and settle in Israel, or at least send their children there … The Jerusalem Congress marked officially the end of the glory of American Zionism and the ushering in of a period of intense Middle Eastern nationalism … fashioned after the pattern of the late Vladimir Jabotinsky, who dreamed of a big Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan to take in all the Jews and to become the largest military power in the Near East.�
Mr. Lessing J. Rosenwald similarly protested:
�We declare our unalterable opposition to all programmes designed to transform Jews into a nationalist bloc with special interests in the foreign state of Israel. The policy laid down by Mr. Ben-Gurion for American Zionism encourages Zionists to intensify their efforts to organize American Jews as a separate political pressure-block in the United States. This programme is designed to transform American Jews into a spiritual and cultural dependency of a foreign state … We believe that �Jewish� nationalism is a distortion of our faith, reducing it from universal proportions to the dimensions of a nationalistic cult.�
These Jewish protests, as was natural, were prompted by fear of the divisive effect of Zionism on Jews. That was but a fractional aspect of the matter: The real danger of Zionism lay in its power to divide the nations of the world against each other and to bring them into collision, in which catastrophe the great masses of mankind would be involved in the proportion of a hundred or a thousand to every Jew.
To depict this obvious possibility was heresy in the 1950�s, and the non-Jewish protests remained unpublished while the Jewish ones were ineffective. In 1953 the New York Jewish journal, Commentary, thus was able to announce that the foreseeable catastrophe had been brought another step nearer in the following terms: �Israel�s survival and strengthening have become a firm element of United States foreign policy and no electoral result or change will affect this.�
Here, once more, is the cryptic reference to a power superior to all presidents, prime ministers and parties to which I earlier drew attention. It is what Mr. Leopold Amery, one of the British Ministers responsible for Palestine in the inter-war period, once said: The policy is set and cannot change. The inner secret of the whole affair is contained in these menacing statements, in which the note of authority and superior knowledge is clear. They are cryptic, but specific and categorical, and express certainty that the West cannot and will not withdraw its hand from the Zionist ambition in any circumstances. Certainty must rest on something firmer than threats, or even the ability, to sway �the Jewish vote� and the public press this way or that. The tone is that of taskmasters who know the galleyslaves must do their bidding because they are chained and cannot escape. The New York Times, which I judge to speak with authority for �the Jewish power� in the world, has often alluded to this secret compact, or capitulation, or whatever its nature is: for instance, �In essence, the political support the state of Israel has in the United States makes any settlement antagonistic to Israeli interests impossible for a United States administration to contemplate� (1956). If this merely alludes to control of the election-machine, it means that the process of parliamentary government through �free elections� has been completely falsified. In my opinion, that is the case in the West in this century.
This state of affairs in the West alone enabled the new state to survive. It was kept alive by infusions of money from America. Commentary (above quoted) stated that by June 1953 total United States Government assistance to Israel amounted to $293,000,000, with a further $200,000,000 in such forms as Export-Import bank loans. The Jerusalem representative of President Truman�s �technical aid� programme stated (October, 1952) that Israel received the largest share of any country in the world, in proportion to its population, and more than all the other Middle East states together. The New York Herald-Tribune (March 12, 1953) said the total amount of United States money, including private gifts and loans, amounted to �more than $1,000,000,000 during the first five years of Israel�s existence,� which, it added, had thus been �ensured.� On top of all this came the German tribute, extorted by the American Government, of 520,000,000 Israeli pounds annually. I have not been able to find official figures for the cumulative total up to 1956; the Syrian delegate to the United Nations, after one of the Zionist attacks during the year, said that �since 1948 a stream of $1,500,000,000 has been flowing from the United States to Israel in the form of contributions, grants in aid, bonds and loans� (even this figure excluded the German payments and other forms of Western tribute).
Nothing like this was ever seen in the world before. A state so financed from abroad can well afford (in the monetary sense) to be belligerent, and the menacing behaviour of the new state was only made possible by this huge inflow of Western, chiefly American money. Assured of this unstinting monetary backing, and of a political support in Washington which could not change, the new state set out on its grandiose ambition: to restore to full force, in the 20th Century of our era, the �New Law� promulgated by the Levites in Deuteronomy in 621 B.C. All that was to come was to be �fulfilment� of it; the Mongolian Chazars were to see that Jehovah kept his compact, as the Levites had published it. And what ensued was in fact an instalment on account of this �fulfilment�; the vision of �the heathen� bringing the treasures of the earth to Jerusalem began to become reality in the form of American money, German tribute and the like.
With a purse thus filled, the little state began to pursue the fantasy of entire and literal �fulfilment,� which in the miraculous end is to see all the great ones of the earth humbled, Zion all-powerful and all the Jews �gathered.� It drew up the charter of this �gathering�: the �nationality law,� which made all Jewish residents in the Zionist state Israelis, and the �law of the return,� which claimed all Jews anywhere in the world for Israel, in both cases whether they wished or not.[fn]
[fn text: The Law of the Return, 1953, says among other things, �The ingathering of the exiles requires constant efforts from the Jewish nation in dispersion and the state of Israel therefore expects the participation of all Jews, either privately or in organizations, in the upbuilding of the state and in assisting mass immigration and sees the necessity of all Jewish communities uniting for this purpose.� A permanent state of �anti-semitism� in the world is obviously the pre-requisite for the realization of this law, and as the largest single body of Jews in the world is now in America, an �anti-semitic� situation there would evidently have to be declared at some stage in the process.]
These were the laws which, like ghosts from vanished ghettoes, alarmed Mr. Zukerman and Mr, Rosenwald. They express the greatest ambition ever proclaimed by any state in history, and the Premier, a Mr. Ben-Gurion from Russia, was explicit about it on many occasions, for instance in his message of June 16, 1951 to the Zionists of America: �A rare opportunity has been given to your organization to pave a way for a unifying and united Zionist movement which will stand at the head of American Jewry in the great era opened to the Jewish people with the establishment of the state and beginning of ingathering of exiles.� Rabbi Hillel Silver, President Eisenhower�s close associate, expressed particular gratification that �Mr. Ben-Gurion now accepts the view that main tasks of the Zionist movement, as heretofore, include the full and undiminished programme of Zionism,� In New York in June, 1952 Mr. Ben-Gurion was more explicit: �The Jewish state is not the fulfilment of Zionism … Zionism embraces all Jews everywhere.� Israel�s second president, Mr. Ben Zvi, at his inauguration in December 1952, said, �The ingathering of the exiles still remains our central task and we will not retreat … Our historic task will not be accomplished without the assistance of the entire nation in the West and East.�
The world would have raised a pandemonium of protest if a Kaiser or a Hitler had said such things. The ambition expressed by such words as �the full and undiminished programme of Zionism� is in fact boundless, for it is the political programme contained, in the guise of a compact with Jehovah, in the Torah; world dominion over �the heathen,� wielded from an empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. The support of Western governments gave reality to what otherwise would be the most absurd pretension in all history.
That the politicians of the West comprehended this full meaning of what they did seemed impossible until 1953, when a statement was made that implied full understanding. In May, 1953, Mr. Winston Churchill, then British Prime Minister, was in dispute with the Egyptian premier about the Suez Canal and threatened him, not with British but with Jewish retribution. He spoke, in Parliament, of the Israeli army as �the best in the Levant� and said that �nothing we shall do in the supply of aircraft to this part of the world will be allowed to place Israel at a disadvantage.� Then he added, in words closely akin to those of Mr. Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Hillel Silver, that he �looked forward to the fulfilment of Zionist aspirations.�
Here, in an aside, is probably the largest commitment ever undertaken by a head of government on behalf of an unsuspecting nation. The Israeli parliament at once recorded its gratification at �Mr. Churchill�s friendly attitude towards the Israeli government now and towards the Zionist movement throughout its existence.� The public masses in England read the loaded words uncomprehendingly, if at all. They startled many Jews, among them even Mr. A. Abrahams, who as a veteran Revisionist might logically have been pleased (the Revisionists openly pursue the late Mr. Jabotinsky�s ambition for �a big Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan to take in all the Jews and to become the largest military power in the Near East�; Mr. William Zukerman).
Mr. Abrahams asked wonderingly, with an undernote even of alarm, if Mr. Churchill�s words could be genuinely intended, saying, �The Prime Minister is an old student of the Bible; he knows very well that the Zionist aspirations remain unfulfilled until Israel is fully restored within the historic boundaries, the land of the Ten Tribes.�
This �aspiration,� of course, cannot be �fulfilled� without universal war, and that is evidently why Mr. Abrahams was taken aback, and made almost aghast. Mr. Churchill�s words, if they were considered and deliberately intended, signified support for the grandiose ambition in all its literalness, and the final price of that could only be the extinction of �the West� as it has always been known.[fn]
[fn text: An event of a month earlier, April 1953, had already shown that Mr. Churchill was prepared to go further, in his tributes to Zionism, than any would have thought possible who judged him by his public record and legend. In that month he ostentatiously associated himself with the Zionist canonization of an English officer called Orde Wingate, and in so doing humiliated the English people in general and in particular all those British officials, officers and soldiers who for thirty years loyally did their duty in Palestine. Wingate, an officer of the British intelligence in Palestine during the inter-war years, so far deviated from the honourable impartiality, between Arabs and Jews, which was the pride and duty of his comrades as to become, not simply an enemy of the Arabs but a renegade to his country and calling. His perfidy first became public knowledge on this occasion when Mr. Ben-Gurion, dedicating a children�s village on Mount Carmel to Wingate�s memory (he was killed during the Second War) said �He was ready to fight with the Jews against his own government� and at the time of the British White Paper in 1939 �he came to me with plans to combat the British policy.� One proposal of Wingate�s was to blow up a British oil pipeline. Mr. Churchill in his message read at the dedication ceremony described the village named after Wingate as �a monument to the friendship which should always unite Great Britain and Israel,� and the British Minister was required to attend in official token of the British Government�s approval. Thus the one Britisher so honoured in the Zionist state was a traitor to his duty and the British Prime Minister of the day joined in honouring him. The significant history of Wingate�s army service is given in Dr. Chaim Weizmann�s book. Dr. Weizmann, who speaks indulgently of Wingate�s efforts to ingratiate himself with Zionist settlers by trying to speak Hebrew, says he was �a fanatical Zionist.� In fact Wingate was a very similar man to the Prophet Monk in the preceding century, but in the circumstances of this one was able to do much more harm. He copied Monk in trying to look like a Judahite prophet by letting his beard grow, and significantly found his true calling in the land of Judas. He was either demented or hopelessly unstable and was adjudged by the British Army �too unbalanced to command men in a responsible capacity.� He then turned to Dr. Weizmann, who asked a leading London physician (Lord Horder, an ardent Zionist sympathizer) to testify to the Army Medical Council �as to Wingate�s reliability and sense of responsibility.� As a result of this sponsorship Wingate �received an appointment as captain in the Palestine intelligence service,� with the foreseeable result above recorded. During the Second War this man, of all men, was singled out for especial honour by Mr. Churchill, being recalled to London at the time of the Quebec Conference to receive promotion to Major General. Dr. Weizmann says his �consuming desire� was to lead a British army into Berlin. The context of Dr. Weizmann�s account suggests that this would have been headed by a Jewish brigade, led by Wingate, so that the event would have been given the visible nature of a Talmudic triumph, shorn of pretence of a �British victory.� �The generals,� Dr. Weizmann concludes, averted this humiliation; their refusal �was final and complete.� The episode again throws into relief the uneven and enigmatic nature of Mr. Churchill, who preached honour, duty and loyalty more eloquently than any before him and bluntly asked a nation at bay to give its �blood and sweat, toil and tears� for those eternal principles. He had seen one of his own Ministers murdered and British sergeants symbolically hanged �on a tree� and yet gave especial patronage to this man, alive, and singled him out for honour when he was dead. Mr. Churchill. at an earlier period, once abandoned the task of writing the life of his great ancestor because of a letter which appeared to prove that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, betrayed an impending attack by the British fleet to its enemy of that day, the French. �The betrayal of the expedition against Brest,� he then wrote, �was an obstacle I could not face�; and he refused from shame to write the biography, only reconsidering when he convinced himself that the letter was a forgery. Yet even in that book his conception of loyalty is not clear to follow, for in his preface he accepts as natural and even right Marlborough�s first and proved act of treachery, when he rode out from London as King James�s commander to meet the invading German and Dutch armies of William of Orange and went over to the enemy, so that the invasion of England succeeded without an English shot fired.]
The event of October 30, 1956 (though it was ordered by Sir Winston�s political heir-designate) seems to show that Mr. Churchill�s words of May, 1953, with all they boded for his country, were seriously meant. If the West, as these words implied, was secretly harnessed to the unqualified �fulfilment of Zionist aspirations,� that could only mean a greater war than the West had yet endured, in which its armies would play the parts of pawns in a ruinous game, for the purpose of dividing the Christian peoples, crushing the Muslim ones, setting up the Zionist empire, and thereafter acting as its janissaries. In this great gamble, Jews everywhere in the world, on whatever side of the apparent fighting line, would be expected under the �law of the return� to act in the overriding interest of Zion. What that might mean may be seen from an article published in the Johannesburg Jewish Herald of Nov. 10, 1950, about a secret episode of the Second War. It stated that when the production of atomic weapons began �a proposal was put forward to Dr. Weizmann to bring together some of the most noted Jewish scientists in order to establish a team which would bargain with the allies in the interest of Jewry … I saw the project as originally outlined and submitted to Dr. Weizmann by a scientist who had himself achieved some renown in the sphere of military invention.�
The threat is plain, in such words. As to �the fulfilment of Zionist aspirations,� by these or other means, Dr. Nahum Goldman, leader of the World Zionist Organization, made a significant statement to a Jewish audience at Johannesburg in August, 1950. Describing an interview with Mr. Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Minister, Dr Goldman said, �This tiny country (Israel) is a very unique country, it is in a unique geographical position. In the days when trying to get the Jewish state with the consent of the British Government, and at one of the private talks I had with Mr. Bevin, he said, �Do you know what you are asking me to do? You are asking me to deliver the key to one of the most vital and strategic areas in the world.� And I said, �It is not written in either the New or Old Testament that Great Britain must have this key.��
Mr. Churchill, if his words were fully intended, apparently was ready to hand over the key, and after Mr. Bevin died all others in Washington and London seemed equally ready. The effects are already plain to see and foresee, and these effects can no longer be dismissed as chance. Here a great plan is plainly moving to its fulfilment or fiasco, with the great nations of the West acting as its armed escort and themselves assured of humiliation if it succeeds; they are like a man who takes employment under the condition that his wage shall fall as the firm prospers.
At all its ill-omened stages this adventure has been discussed among the initiates as a plan. I earlier quoted the words of Max Nordau at the sixth Zionist Congress in 1903: �Let me show you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward … the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be erected.�
Twenty-five years later a leading Zionist in England, Lord Melchett, spoke in the same tone of secret knowledge to Zionists in New York: �If I had stood here in 1913 and said to you �Come to a conference to discuss the reconstruction of a national home in Palestine,� you would have looked upon me as an idle dreamer, even if I had told you in 1913 that the Austrian archduke would be killed and that out of all that followed would come the chance, the opportunity, the occasion for establishing a national home for the Jews in Palestine. Has it ever occurred to you how remarkable it is that out of the welter of world blood there has arisen this opportunity? Do you really believe that we have been led back to Israel by nothing but a fluke?� (Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 9, 1928).
Today the third world war, if it comes, will obviously not be a �fluke�; the sequence of cause leading to consequence, and the identity of the controlling power, has been made visible by the developing fluid of time. Thirty-one years after Lord Melchett�s imperial pronouncement I was by chance (February, 1956) in South Carolina, and only by that chance, and the local newspaper, learned of a comment in similar vein, apparently inspired from a similar, Olympian source, about the third war. Mr. Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston�s son, was at that time visiting his family�s friend Mr. Bernard Baruch, whose residence is the Barony of Little Hobcaw in South Carolina. On emerging from his interview with this authority Mr. Randolph Churchill stated (Associated Press, Feb. 8, 1956) that �the tense Middle East situation could explode into armed conflict at any moment. But I don�t think civilization is going to stumble into the next war … World War III, if it comes, will be coldly calculated and planned rather than accidental.�
Against the background of �fulfilment� (the payment of tribute by the great nations of the world and the declaration that all Jews of the world were its subjects) the new state gave earnest of its intention to restore the �historic frontiers� by word and deed. No Western �warmonger� ever used such words. Mr. Ben-Gurion proclaimed (Johannesburg Jewish Herald, Dec. 24, 1952) that Israel �would not under any conditions permit the return of the Arab emigrants� (the native inhabitants). As to Jerusalem (partitioned between Zionists and Jordanians pending �internationalization� under United Nations administration), �for us that city�s future is as settled as that of London, despite its ridiculous boundaries; this cannot be an issue for negotiations.� The �exiles� abroad were to be �ingathered� at the rate of �four million immigrants in the next ten years� (the Foreign Minister, Mr. Moshe Sharett, June 1952) or �the next ten to fifteen years� (on another occasion).
Two world wars had been needed to set up the �homeland� and �state,� successively, and to get some 1,500,000 Jews into it. These intimations meant another world war within fifteen years at the latest, for by no other means could so many Jews be extracted from the countries where they were. As to the cost of their transportation, Mr. Ben-Gurion said this would be between 7,000 and 8,000 million dollars (at present rates, equal to the entire national debt of Italy, and about five times the British national debt in 1914) and he �looked to American Jewry to provide this money.� Obviously, even American Jewry could not find such sums; they could only be obtained from the taxpayers of the West.
Everything that was said was thus a plain threat of war to the neighbouring Arabs, and it had an especial meaning when it was said (which was often) by Mr. Menachem Beigin, chief of the �activist,� or killer, group which had carried out the massacre at Deir Yasin. Formally disowned at that time, they had been honoured in the new state and formed a major political party, Herut, in its parliament. Therefore the Arabs knew exactly with what they were menaced when Mr. Beigin spoke to them.
I give a typical instance. In May 1953 he threatened the 18-year old King of Jordan, at the moment of his coronation, with death under the Law of Deuteronomy (which governed the deed of Deir Yasin). Speaking to a mass meeting in the Zionist part of Jerusalem, a stone�s throw from the Jordan lines, Mr. Beigin said, �At this hour a coronation is taking place of a young Arab as King of Gilead, Bashan, Nablus, Jericho and Jerusalem. This is the proper time to declare in his and his masters� ears: �We shall be back, and David�s city shall be free.��
The allusion, obscure to Western readers and explicit to any Arab or Jew, is to a verse in the third chapter of Deuteronomy: �The King of Bashan came out against us … And the Lord said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him, and all his people, and his land into thy hand … So the Lord our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people and we smote him, until none was left to him remaining … And we utterly destroyed them … utterly destroying the men, women and children.�
These threats had a lethal meaning for the hordes of Arab fugitives huddled beyond the frontiers. According to the report of Mr. Henry R. Labouisse, Director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, made in April 1956 there were of these more than 900,000: 499,000 in Jordan, 88,000 in Syria, 103,000 in Lebanon and 21,000 in Egypt (the Gaza area). Mr. Beigin�s threats kept them in constant prospect of new flight, or attempted flight, into some deeper, even more inhospitable desert. Then the words were made real by deeds; a long series of symbolic local raids and massacres was perpetrated, to show them that the fate of Deir Yasin hung actually over them.
These began on October 14, 1953 when a strong force suddenly crossed the Jordan frontier, murdered every living soul found in Qibya and destroyed that village, sixty-six victims, most of them women and children, being found slaughtered. The 499,000 Arab refugees in Jordan drew the natural conclusion. The Archbishop of York said the civilized world was �horrified,� that �the Jewish vote in New York had a paralyzing effect on the United Nations in dealing with Palestine,� and that unless strong action were taken �the Middle East will be ablaze.� The Board of Deputies of British Jews called this statement �provocative and one-sided�; the Mayor of New York (a Mr. Robert Wagner) said it �shocked� him, and �the good Archbishop is evidently unfamiliar with the American scene.� The United Nations mildly censured Israel.
On February 28, 1955 a strong Israeli force drove into the Gaza area (�awarded� to the Arabs by the United Nations in 1949, and under Egyptian military occupation) where the 215,000 Arab refugees repined �in abject poverty along a narrow strip of barren coastline, two-thirds of it sand-dunes� (Sir Thomas Rapp, The Listener, March 6, 1955). Thirty-nine Egyptians were killed and an unspecified number of the Arab refugees, who then in hopeless protest against their lot burned five United Nations relief centres, and therewith their own meagre rations. The Mixed Armistice Commission condemned Israel for �brutal aggression� in �a prearranged and planned attack.�[fn]
[fn text: These United Nations Mixed Armistice Commissions, which will henceforth be denoted by U.N.M.A.C. comprized in each case a representative of Israel and of the neighbour Arab state, and a United Nations representative whose finding and vote thus decided the Source of blame. The findings were invariably against Israel until, as in the case of the British administrators between 1917 and 1948, �pressure� began to be put on the home governments of the officials concerned to withdraw any who impartially upheld the Arab case. At least two American officials who found against Israel in such incidents were withdrawn. All these officials, of whatever nationality, of course worked with the memory of Count Bernadotte�s fate, and that of many others, ever in their minds. In the general rule they, like the British administrators earlier, proved impossible to intimidate or suborn, and thus the striking contrast between the conduct of the men on the spot and the governments in the distant Western capitals was continued.]
The case then went to the United Nations Security Council itself, which by unanimous vote of eleven countries censured Israel. The United States delegate said this was the fourth similar case and �the most serious because of its obvious premeditation�; the French delegate said the resolution should serve as �a last warning� to Israel, (an admonition which received a footnote in the shape of French collusion in the Israeli attack on Egypt twenty months later).
On June 8, 1955 the U.N.M.A.C. censured Israel for another �flagrant armistice violation� when Israeli troops crossed into Gaza and killed some Egyptians. The only apparent effect of this censure was that the Israelis promptly arrested six United Nations military observers and three other members of the staff of the United Nations Truce Supervisor (Major General E.L.M. Burns, of Canada) before they again attacked into Gaza, killing 35 Egyptians (Time, September 1955). In this same month of September 1955 Mr. Ben-Gurion in an interview said that he would attack Egypt �within a year� (the attack came in October, 1956) if the blockade of the Israeli port of Elath on the Gulf of Aqaba were not lifted.
The United Nations Security Council seemed nervous about �censuring� this new attack (the American presidential election campaign was beginning) and merely proposed that the Israelis and Egyptians withdraw 500 metres from each other, leaving a demilitarized zone, a proposal which the Egyptians had already vainly made. Then on October 23, 1955 General Burns �condemned Israel� for a �well planned attack� into Syria, when several Syrians were kidnapped and General Burns�s observers were again prevented by detention from observing what happened. On October 27, 1955 Mr. Moshe Sharett, the Israeli Foreign Minister, told newspaper correspondents at Geneva that Israel would wage a �preventive war� against the Arabs if necessary. On November 28, 1955 the Zionist Organization of America announced in leading newspapers (by paid advertisement) that �Britain, too, has joined the camp of Israel�s enemies�; Sir Anthony Eden, who within the year was to join in the Israeli attack, at that moment had some idea about minor frontier rectifications.
On December 11, 1955 the Israelis attacked into Syria in strength and killed 56 persons. This produced the strongest United Nations �censure,� which is of some historic interest because the presidential-election year had opened and �censure� on any account at all soon became unfashionable. The Syrian delegate pointed out that repeated condemnations �have not deterred Israel from committing the criminal attack we are now considering.� The Security Council (Jan. 12, 1956) recalled four earlier resolutions of censure and condemned the attack as �a flagrant violation of … the terms of the general armistice agreement between Israel and Syria and of Israel�s obligations under the Charter� and undertook �to consider what further measures� it should take if Israel continued so to behave.
The response to this was imperious Israeli demands for more arms. Mr. Ben-Gurion (at Tel Aviv, Mar. 18, 1956) said that only early delivery of arms could prevent �an Arab attack� and added that �the aggressors would be the Egyptian dictator, Nasser� (seven months earlier Mr. Ben-Gurion had undertaken to attack Egypt �within a year�) �together with his allies, Syria and Saudi Arabia.� On April 5, 1956, as the UN Security Council was about to send its Secretary General, Mr. Dag Hammarskjold, on a �peace mission� to the Middle East, Israeli artillery bombarded the Gaza area, killing 42 and wounding 103 Arab civilians, nearly half of them women and children.
On June 19 Mr. Ben-Gurion dismissed Mr. Sharett from the Foreign Ministry in favour of Mrs. Golda Myerson (now Meier, and also from Russia) and the New York Times significantly reported that this might denote a change from �moderation� to �activism� (Mr. Sharett, like Dr. Weizmann and Dr. Herzl earlier, having incurred the reproach of moderation). The issue was that which led to Dr. Weizmann�s discomfiture at the Zionist Congress of 1946, when �activism� won and Dr. Weizmann saw the resurgence of �the old evil, in a new and even more horrible guise.� �Activism� was always, from the old days in Russia, a euphemism for violence in the forms of terror and assassination. From the moment when this word reappeared in the news the student of Zionism knew what to expect before the year�s end.
On June 24, 1956 the Israelis opened fire across the Jordan border and the U.N.M.A.C. censured Israel. Thereon Israel pressed for the removal of the UN Member of the Commission, whose casting vote had decided the issue, and General Burns yielded, supplanting him (an American naval officer, Commander Terrill) by a Canadian officer. The UN observers were being put in the same position as the British administrators in the inter-war years; they could not count on support by their home governments. They had a constant reminder before their eyes (the Wingate Village in Israel) that preferment and promotion, in Palestine, were the rewards of treachery, not of duty. Two years earlier another American observer, Commander E.H. Hutchison, had voted against censure of Jordan and been removed when the Israelis then boycotted the Commission. Returned to America, he wrote a book about this period in the Middle East which is of permanent historical value. Like all good men before him, he reported that the only way out of the tangle was to establish the right of the expelled Arabs to return to their homes, to admit that the armistice lines of 1949 were only temporary (and not �frontiers�), and to internationalize the city of Jerusalem so that it might not become the scene of world battle.
On July 24, 1956 two U.N. military observers and a Jordanian officer of the M.A.C. were blown up by mines on Mount Scopus which, the Zionists blandly explained, were part of �an old Israeli minefield.� Two Egyptian colonels, said by the Zionists to belong to the Egyptian intelligence service, were killed by �letter bombs� delivered to them through the post (this method was used a decade earlier against a British officer in England, Captain Roy Farran, who had served in intelligence in Palestine and incurred Zionist enmity; his brother, whose initial was also R., opened the package and was killed). On July 29, 1956 a U.N. truce observer, a Dane, was killed by a mine or bomb near the Gaza strip and two others were wounded by rifle fire. �Activism� was taking its toll by the method of assassination, as in earlier times.
On August 28, 1956 Israel was again censured by the M.A.C. for �a serious breach of the armistice.� The censure was followed by another Israeli attack (Sept.12) when a strong military force drove into Jordan, killed some twenty Jordanians and blew up a police post at Rahaw. General Burns protested that such deeds �have been repeatedly condemned by the U.N. Security Council,� whereon another strong force at once (Sept.14) attacked Jordan, killing between twenty and thirty Jordanians at Gharandai. The British Foreign Office (Britain had an alliance with Jordan) expressed �strong disapproval,� whereon the Board of Deputies of British Jews attacked it for this �biased statement.� On September 19 the M.A.C. again �condemned� Israel for �hostile and warlike acts� (these two attacks apparently were made with symbolic intent, the moment chosen for them being during the Jewish New Year period), and on September 26 the Commission �censured� Israel specifically for the September 12 attack.
The immediate answer to this particular censure was an official announcement in Jerusalem on the same day (Sept. 26) that the biggest attack up to that time had been made by the Israeli regular army, in strength, on a Jordanian post at Husan, when some 25 Jordanians were killed, among them a child of twelve. The M.A.C. responded (Oct. 4) with its severest �censure,� for �planned and unprovoked aggression.� The retort was another, larger attack (Oct. 10) with artillery, mortars, bazookas, Bangalore torpedoes and grenades. The U.N. observers afterwards found the bodies of 48 Arabs, including a woman and a child. An armoured battalion and ten jet aeroplanes appear to have taken part in this massacre, which produced a British statement that if Jordan, its ally, were attacked, Britain would fulfil its undertakings. The Israeli Government said it received this warning �with alarm and amazement.�[fn]
[fn text: From the start of the presidential-election year all leading American newspapers, and many British ones, reported these Israeli attacks as �reprisals� or �retaliations,� so that the victims were by the propaganda-machine converted into the aggressors in each case. General Burns, in his report on the last attack, told the U.N. that Israel �paralyzed the investigating machinery� by boycotting the Mixed Armistice Commissions whenever these voted against it, and added: �At present the situation is that one of the parties to the general armistice agreement makes its own investigations, which are not subject to check or confirmation by any disinterested observers, publishes the results of such investigations, draws its own conclusions from them and undertakes actions by its military forces on that basis.� The British and American press, by adopting the Israeli word �reprisal� in its reports, throughout this period gave the public masses in the two countries the false picture of what went on which was desired by the Zionists.]
The September 26 attack was the last of the series which filled the years 1953-1956; the next one was to be full-scale war. I have summarized the list of raids and massacres to give the later reader the true picture of the Middle East in the autumn of 1956, when Mr. Ben-Gurion declared that Israel was �defenceless� and the politicians of Washington and London were competing with each other in the demand that Israel receive arms to ward off �Arab aggression.� If the accumulated pile of resolutions which at that time lay on the United Nations table, �condemning� Israel�s �unprovoked aggression,� �flagrant violation� and the like, had meant anything at all, this last attack, openly announced while it occurred and flung contemptuously in the teeth of the latest �censure,� must have produced some action against Israel by the United Nations, or the implicit admission that Israel was its master.
The matter was never tested because, before Jordan�s appeal to the United Nations Security Council had even been considered the attack on Egypt came. It had been announced, to any who cared to heed, at the very moment of the attack on Jordan, for Mr. Menachem Beigin at Tel Aviv �urged an immediate Israeli attack on Egypt� (Daily Telegraph, Sept. 26, 1956). Mr. Beigin was the voice of �activism� and from the moment he said that all who had watched the developing situation knew what would come next: a full-scale Zionist invasion of Egypt.
The story I have related shows that, at the moment of the Israeli invasion, no attentive observer could hope that the United Nations would do much more than reprobate it. The Zionists obviously had chosen a moment when, they calculated, the imminence of the vote in the American presidential election would paralyze all means of effective action against them. I believed I was prepared for Western submission to Zionism once again, in some form or other. What even I would not have believed, until it happened, was that my own country, Britain, would join in the attack. This, the latest and greatest of the series of errors into which the people of England were led by their rulers in the sequence to the original involvement in Zionism, in 1903, darkened the prospect for England and the West during the remainder of this century, just when it was brightening; it was like a sudden eclipse of the sun, confounding all the calculations of astronomers.
In this event, �irresistible pressure� of �international politics� in the capitals of the West produced a result, the full consequences of which will be calculable only when many years have passed. Therefore the last section of this chapter and book must survey again the workings of �irresistible pressure� behind the Western scene, this time in the phase of the approaching climacteric, the years 1952-1956. At the end of this phase revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, the twin destructive forces released from the Talmudic areas of Russia in the last century, were in extremis. By the act of the West, in the autumn of 1956, both were reprieved for further destruction.
3. The Years of Climax
The years 1952-1956 brought the peoples of the West ever nearer to the reckoning for the support which their leaders, through two generations and two world wars, had given to the revolution and to Zionism. They were being drawn towards two wars which foreseeably would merge into one war serving one dominant purpose. On the one hand, they were committed by their politicians and parties to the preservation of the Zionist state, the declared policy of which was to enlarge its population by �three or four million people� in �ten to fifteen years�; that meant war. On the other hand, they were daily made accustomed to the idea that it was their destiny and duty to destroy Communism, which had overflowed into half of Europe when the West opened the sluice-gates; that meant war.
These two wars inevitably would become one war. The calculation is simple. The territory for the expansion of the Zionist state could only be taken from the neighbouring Arab peoples; the people for the expansion of the Zionist state could only be taken from the area occupied by the revolution, because �three or four million� Jews could not be found anywhere else save in the United States.[fn]
[fn text: The extraction of the Jews from the United States, although essential to the �ingathering of the exiles,� obviously belongs to a later stage of the process and would depend on the success of the next phase, the �ingathering� of the Jews from the Soviet area and from the African Arab countries. After that, strange though the idea will seem to Americans and Britishers today, there would have to be a �Jewish persecution� in America and this would be produced by the propagandist method used in the past and applied impartially to one country after another, including Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Spain and Britain. Dr. Nahum Goldman, leader of the World Zionist Organization, in October 1952 told an Israeli audience that there was one problem Zionism must solve if it was to succeed: �How to get the Jews of the countries where they are not persecuted to emigrate to Israel.� He said this problem was �especially difficult in the United States because the United States is less a country of Jewish persecution or any prospect of Jewish persecution than any other� (Johannesburg Zionist Record, Oct. 24, 1952). The reader will note that there are no countries without �Jewish persecution�; there are only degrees of �Jewish persecution� in various countries.]
For this purpose the West, in the phase that began in 1952, will have to be persuaded that �anti-semitism� is rife in the Soviet area, just as it was persuaded in the four following years that Zionist attacks on Arab countries were Arab attacks on Israel. Mr. Ben-Gurion (Dec. 8, 1951) officially informed the Soviet Government that �the return of the Jews to their historic homeland is the pivotal mission of the state of Israel … the Government of Israel appeals to the Soviet Union to enable those Jews in the Soviet Union who wish to emigrate to do so.� The New York Times two years later, reporting declining immigration to Israel, said Mr. Ben-Gurion�s aim �seems very remote� and added that �the present pattern of immigration� would only change radically if there were �an upsurge of anti-semitism� somewhere (at that period, June 26, 1953, the denunciation of �anti-semitism behind the Iron Curtain� had begun). The New York Herald-Tribune at the same period (Apr. 12, 1953) said �anti-semitism� had become virulent in the Soviet Union and �the most crucial rescue job� facing Israel in its sixth year was that of the �2,500,000 Jews sealed in Russia and the satellite countries.�
Therefore it was clear, in the light of the two world wars and their outcome in each case, that any war undertaken by �the West� against �Communism� would in fact be fought for the primary purpose of supplying the Zionist state with new inhabitants from Russia; that any Middle East war in which the West engaged would be waged for the primary purpose of enlarging the territory of the Zionist state, to accommodate this larger population; and that the two wars would effectively merge into one, in the course of which this dominant purpose would remain hidden from the embroiled masses until it was achieved, and confirmed by some new �world instrument,� at the fighting�s end.
Such was the position of �the West, fifty years after Mr. Balfour�s and Mr. Woodrow Wilson�s first ensnarement by Zionism. I have a reason for enclosing the words, �The West,� in quotation marks, namely, that they no longer mean what The West meant. Earlier the term signified the Christian area, from the eastern borders of Europe across the Atlantic to the western seaboard of America and including the outlying English-speaking countries in North America, Africa and the Antipodes. After the Second War, when half of Europe was abandoned to the Talmudic revolution, the two words received a more limited application. In the popular mind �the West� meant England and America, ranked against the new barbarism which one day it would extirpate in Europe and thrust back into its barbaric, Asiatic homeland. America and England, first and foremost, still represented �the free world� which one day would be restored throughout its former area and with it, as in earlier times, the hopes of men outside it who wanted to be free; so the mass mind understood.
Militarily, this was a proper assumption; the physical strength of �the West,� supported by the longing of the captive peoples, was more than equal to the task. Actually the great countries to which the enslaved peoples looked were themselves captive of the power which had brought about this enslavement; and twice had shown that their arms, if used, would not be employed to liberate and redress, but to prolong the 20th Century�s ordeal.
What moral and spiritual values were earlier contained in those two words, The West, were strongest in the countries abandoned to Communism, and those menaced by Zionism, where suffering and peril were rekindling them in the souls of men. In the once great citadels of the West, London and Washington, they were repressed and dormant.
For this reason America was not truly qualified to takeover from England the leading part in the world in the second half of the 20th Century and to perform the task of liberation which the public masses were led to expect from it. Materially, the Republic founded nearly two hundred years before was prodigious. The riches of the world had poured into it during two world wars; its population rapidly increased to two hundred millions; its navy and air force were the greatest in the world and, like its army, were built on that order of compulsion which its people long had held to be the curse of Europe. In industry and technical skill it was so formidable as to be a nightmare to itself. Its production was so vast that it could not be absorbed and the dread memory of the 1929 slump caused its leaders to devise many ways of distributing goods about the world in the form of gifts and paying the producer for them out of revenues, so that, for a while, manufacturer and workmen should be paid for an output for which, in peace, no natural market offered. Its military bases, on the territory of once sovereign peoples, were strewn over the globe, so that at any instant it could strike in overwhelming force … at what, and for what?
At �Communism,� its people were told, and for the liberation of the enslaved, the relief of the world in thrall, the rectification of the deed of 1945. If that was true, the end of the century�s ordeal was at least in prospect, some day, for the hearts of men everywhere were in that cause. But every major act of the government in Washington in the years 1952-1956 belied these professions. It seemed more in thrall to �the Jewish power� than even the British governments of the preceding fifty years. It appeared to be unable to handle any leading question of American foreign or domestic affairs save in terms of its bearing on the lot of �the Jews,� as the case of the Jews was presented to it by the imperious Zionists. No small, puppet government looked much more vassal in its acts than this, which the general masses held to be the most powerful government in the world: that of the United States under its chief executive, President Eisenhower, in the years 1953 to 1956.
Like that of a chancellor at a royal birth, the shadow of Zionism fell over the selection, nomination and election of General Eisenhower. His meteoric promotion during the 1939-1945 war, from the rank of a colonel, unversed in combat, to that of Supreme Commander of all the Allied armies invading Europe, seems to indicate that he was marked down for advancement long before, and research supports that inference. In the 1920�s young Lieutenant Eisenhower attended the National War College in Washington, where a Mr. Bernard Baruch (who had played so important a part in the selection, nomination and election of President Woodrow Wilson in 1911-1912) gave instruction. Mr. Baruch at that early period decided that Lieutenant Eisenhower was a star pupil, and when General Eisenhower was elected president thirty years later he told American veterans that he had for a quarter-century �had the privilege of sitting at Bernard�s feet and listening to his words.� Early in his presidency Mr. Eisenhower intervened to resolve, in Mr. Baruch�s favour, a small dispute at the National War College, where some opposed acceptance of a bust of Mr. Baruch, presented by admirers (no living civilian�s bust was ever displayed there before).
The support of �the adviser to six Presidents� obviously may have helped bring about Lieutenant Eisenhower�s rapid rise to the command of the greatest army in history. On public record is the support which Mr. Baruch gave when General Eisenhower (who had no party affiliations or history) in 1952 offered himself as Republican Party candidate for the presidency. Up to that time Mr. Baruch had been a staunch member of the Democratic Party, not just a regular Democrat, but a passionate approver of the party label and an almost fanatical hater of the Republican label� (his approved biography). In 1952 Mr. Baruch suddenly became a passionate approver of the Republican label, provided that Mr. Eisenhower wore it. Evidently strong reasons must have caused this sudden change in a lifetime�s allegiance, and they are worth seeking.
In 1952 the Republican Party had been out of office for twenty years. Under the pendulum theory alone, therefore, it was due to return and thus to oust the Democratic Party, of which Mr. Baruch for fifty years had been �a passionate approver.� Apart from the normal turn of the tide against a party overlong in office, which was to be anticipated, the American elector in 1952 had especial reasons to vote against the Democrats; the chief of these was the exposure of Communist infestation of government under the Roosevelt and Truman regimes and the public desire for a drastic cleansing of the stables.
In these circumstances it was reasonably clear, in 1952, that the Republican Party and its candidate would win the election and the presidency. The natural candidate was the party�s leader, Senator Robert E. Taft, whose lifetime had been given to it. At that very moment, and after his own lifetime of �passionate� support of the Democratic Party (his cash contributions were very large, and Mr. Forrestal�s diary records the part played by such contributions, in general, in determining the course of American elections and state policy) Mr. Baruch, the �fanatical hater� of the Republican label, produced an alternative candidate for the Republican nomination. That is to say, the officer so long admired by him suddenly appeared in the ring, and Mr. Baruch�s warm commendation of him indicated the source of his strongest support.
The prospect which then opened was that if Mr. Eisenhower, instead of Senator Taft, could obtain the party�s nomination, the Republican Party would through him be committed to pursue the Democratic policy of �internationalism� begun by Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman. That, in turn, meant that if the party-leader could be ousted the American elector would be deprived of any genuine choice, for the only man who offered him an alternative, different policy was Senator Taft.
This had been made plain, to the initiated, more than a year before the election by the Republican leader next in importance to Senator Taft, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York State. Mr. Dewey (who had astonished himself and the country by losing the 1948 presidential election to Mr. Truman, a classic example of the foredoomed failure of the �me too� method) stated, �I am an internationalist. That�s why I am for Eisenhower. Eisenhower is a Republican at heart, but more important than that, he is an internationalist� (Look, Sept. 11, 1951). Among initiates �internationalist� (like �activist� in Zionism) is a keyword, signifying many unavowed things; thus far in our century no avowed �internationalist� in a frontal post has genuinely opposed the advance of Communism, the advance of Zionism, and the world-government project towards which these two forces convergingly lead. Senator Taft, on the other hand, was violently attacked at this time as an �isolationist� (another key-word; it means only that the person attacked believes in national sovereignty and national interest, but it is made to sound bad in the ear of the masses).
Thus Mr. Eisenhower offered himself at the Republican Party convention at Chicago in 1952 in opposition to Senator Taft. I was an eye-witness, through television, and, although no novice, was astonished by the smoothness with which Senator Taft�s defeat was achieved. This event showed, long before the actual election, that the nomination-mechanism had been so mastered that neither party could even nominate any but a candidate approved by powerful selectors behind the scene. The outcome of the presidential election itself is in these circumstances of relatively little account in America today, nor can the observer picture how the Republic might escape from this occult control. It is not possible for either party to nominate its party-leader, or any other man, unless he has been passed as acceptable to �the internationalists� beforehand.
The supplanting of the veteran party-leader, on the eve of his party�s return to office, was achieved through control of the block votes of the �key states.� Population-strength governs the number of votes cast by the state-delegations, and at least two of these preponderant states (New York and California) are those to which the Jewish immigration of the last seventy years had evidently been directed for this purpose.[fn] In 1952, when I watched, the voting for the two men was running fairly even when Mr. Dewey smilingly delivered the large package-vote of New York State against his party�s leader and for Mr. Eisenhower. Other �key states� followed suit and he received the nomination, which in the circumstances of that moment also meant the presidency.
[fn text: This is essential to the electoral strategy laid down, though presumably not originally devised by Colonel House. The spanner-in-the-works problem posed by it is the subject of many allusions earlier quoted, i.e.: �Our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California; I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States� (Mr. James J. Forrestal); �Niles had told the President that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position and unless the President anticipated this New York State would be lost to the Democrats� (Secretary of State James J. Byrnes); �The Democratic Party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish Vote� (Governor Thomas E. Dewey).]
It also meant, in effect, the end of any genuine two-party system in America for the present; the system of elected representatives which is known as �democracy� sinks to the level of the one-party system in non-democracies if the two parties do not offer a true choice of policy. The situation was so depicted to Jewish readers by the Jerusalem Post on the eve of the election (Nov. 5, 1952), which instructed them that there was �not much to choose between the two.� (Mr. Eisenhower, Republican; Mr. Stevenson, Democrat) �from the point of view of the Jewish elector� and that Jewish interest should be concentrated on �the fate� of those Congressmen and Senators held to be �hostile to the Jewish cause.�
Immediately after the new President�s inauguration (January, 1953) the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill hastened to America to confer with him, though not to Washington, where Presidents reside; Mr. Eisenhower suggested that they meet �at Bernie�s place,� Mr. Baruch�s Fifth Avenue mansion (Associated Press, Feb. 7, 1953). Mr. Baruch at that time had been urgently recommending the adoption of his �atom bomb plan� as the only effective deterrent to �Soviet aggression� (his remarks to the Senate Committee were quoted in an earlier chapter). Apparently he was not so suspicious of or hostile to the Soviet as he then seemed, for some years later he disclosed that the notion of a joint American-Soviet atomic dictatorship of the world had also appealed to him: �A few years ago I met Vyshinsky at a party and said to him … �You have the bomb and we have the bomb … Let�s control the thing while we can because while we are talking all the nations will sooner or later get the bomb�� (Daily Telegraph, June 9, 1956).
General Eisenhower�s election as the Republican candidate deprived America of its last means of dissociating itself, through electoral repudiation, from the Wilson-Roosevelt-Truman policy of �internationalism.� Senator Taft was the only leading politician who, in the public mind, clearly stood for the clean break with that policy, and evidently for this reason the powers which have effectively governed America in the last forty years attached major importance to preventing his nomination. Some extracts from his book of 1952 have enduring historic value, if only as a picture of what might have been if the Republican voter had been allowed to vote for the Republican party leader:
�The result of the� (Roosevelt-Truman) �Administration policy has been to build up the strength of Soviet Russia so that it is, in fact, a threat to the security of the United States … Russia is far more a threat to the security of the United States than Hitler in Germany ever was … There is no question that we have the largest navy in the world, and certainly, while the British are our allies, complete control of the sea throughout the world … We should be willing to assist with our own sea and air forces any island nations which desire our help. Among them are Japan, Formosa, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand; on the Atlantic side, Great Britain of course … I believe that an alliance with England and a defence of the British Isles are far more important than an alliance with any continental nation … With the British there can be little doubt of our complete control of sea and air throughout the world … If we really mean our anti-Communist policy … we should definitely eliminate from the government all those who are directly or indirectly connected with the Communist organization … Fundamentally I believe the ultimate purpose of our foreign policy must be to protect the liberty of the people of America … I feel that the last two presidents have put all kinds of political and policy considerations ahead of their interest in liberty and peace … It seems to me that the sending of troops without authorization of Congress to a country under attack, as was done in Korea, is clearly prohibited� (by the American Constitution) �… The European Army project, however, goes further … It involves the sending of troops to an international army similar to that which was contemplated under the United Nations Charter … I was never satisfied with the United Nations Charter …it is not based on an underlying law and an administration of justice under that law … I see no choice except to develop our own military policy and our own policy of alliances, without substantial regard to the non-existent power of the United Nations to prevent aggression … The other form of international organization which is being urged strenuously upon the people of the United States, namely, a world state with an international legislature to make the laws and an international executive to direct the army of the organization … appears to me, at least in this century, to be fantastic, dangerous and impractical. Such a state, in my opinion, would fall to pieces in ten years … The difficulties of holding together such a Tower of Babel under one direct government would be insuperable … But above all, anyone who suggests such a plan is proposing an end to that liberty which has produced in this country the greatest happiness … the world has ever seen. It would subject the American people to the government of a majority who do not understand what American principles are, and have little sympathy with them. Any international organization which is worth the paper it is written on must be based on retaining the sovereignty of all states. Peace must be sought, not by destroying and consolidating nations, but by developing a rule of law in the relations between nations …�
These extracts show that Senator Taft saw through today�s �deception of nations�; they explain also why his name was anathema to the powers which control �the vote of the key states� and why he was not allowed even to run for president.[fn] The entire period of Mr. Eisenhower�s canvass, nomination, election and early presidency was dominated by �the Jewish question�; he might have been elected president only of the Zionists, so constantly were his words and deeds directed towards the furtherance of their ambition.
[fn text: Whether Senator Taft, had he become president would have found himself able to carry out the clear, alternative policy here outlined is a question now never to be answered. In the particular case of Zionism, which is an essential part of the entire proposition here denounced by him, he was as submissive as all other leading politicians and presumably did not discern the inseparable relationship between it and the �world state� ambition which he scarified. A leading Zionist of Philadelphia, a Mr. Jack Martin, was asked to become Senator Taft�s �executive secretary� in 1945 and records that his first question to Mr. Taft was, �Senator, what can I tell you about the aspirations of Zionism?� Taft is quoted as answering, in Balfourean or Wilsonian vein, �What is there to explain? The Jews are being persecuted. They need a land, a government of their own. We have to help them to get Palestine. This will also contribute incidentally to world peace �� The contrast between this, the typical talk of a vote-seeking ward politician, and the enlightened exposition given above is obvious. Mr. Martin, who is described in the article now quoted (Jewish Sentinel, June 10, 1954) as Senator Taft�s �alter ego� and �heir,� after Taft�s death was invited by President Eisenhower to become his �assistant, advisor and liaison with Congress.� Mr. Martin�s comment: �President Eisenhower is ready to listen freely to your opinion and it is easy to advise him.�]
Immediately after the nomination he told a Mr. Maxwell Abbell, president of the United Synagogue of America, �The Jewish people could not have a better friend than me� and added that he and his brothers had been reared by their mother in �the teachings of the Old Testament� (Mrs. Eisenhower was a fervent adherent of the sect of Jehovah�s Witnesses), and �I grew up believing that Jews were the chosen people and that they gave us the high ethical and moral principles of our civilization� (many Jewish newspapers, September 1952).
This was followed by ardent professions of sympathy for �the Jews� and for �Israel� from both candidates on the occasion of the Jewish New Year (Sept. 1952); during this festival, also, American pressure on the �free� Germans in West Germany succeeded in extorting their signature to the agreement to pay �reparations� to Israel. In October came the Prague trial, with the charge of �Zionist conspiracy,� and Mr. Eisenhower began to make his menacing statements about �anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries.�
The charge of �anti-semitism� was deemed to be a vote-getter in the election itself and was brought by the outgoing president, Mr. Truman, against Mr. Eisenhower, who told an audience that he was overcome by the insinuation: �I just choke up and leave it to you.� Rabbi Hillel Silver of Cleveland (who threatened the Soviet Union with war on the count of �anti-semitism�) was called into conclave with Mr. Eisenhower and on emerging from it exonerated the aspirant from all anti-semitic taint (Rabbi Silver had offered a prayer at the Republican Convention which nominated Mr. Eisenhower; at the new President�s inauguration, and at Mr. Eisenhower�s request, he offered the prayer �for grace and guidance.�) Among the rival campaigners the outgoing Vice-President, a Mr. Alben Barkley, excelled all others. Of a typical statement by Mr. Barkley (�I predict a glorious future for Israel as a model on which most of the Middle East might pattern itself�) Time magazine said; �The star of the speech circuit is Vice President Alben Barkley, who for years has drawn up to $1 000 for each appearance. Barkley is a paid platform favourite for Israel bond-selling drives. Many Arabs think … that this fact has had an influence on United States policy in the Middle East; but not many Arabs vote in U.S. elections.�
A few weeks after the inauguration the West German tribute agreement was ratified, a German Minister then announcing that the Bonn Government had yielded to pressure from America, which did not wish to appear openly as the financier of the Zionist state. In the same month (April 1953) Jewish newspapers, under the heading �Israel Shows Its Might,� reported that �The whole diplomatic corps and the foreign military attaches who watched the Israel Army�s biggest parade in Haifa, with the Navy drawn up offshore and units of the Air Force flying overhead, were duly impressed and the parade�s aim, to demonstrate that Israel was ready to meet a decision in the field, was achieved.�
In these circumstances, with various new �pledges� and undertakings given and noted for the future, with Stalin dead, Israel ready for �a decision in the field� and the �free� half of Germany toiling to pay tribute, one more presidential term began in 1953. A curious incident marked the great Inauguration Day parade in Washington. At the tail of the procession rode a mounted man in cowboy dress who reined in as he reached the presidential stand and asked if he might try his lariat. Obediently Mr. Eisenhower stood up and bowed his head; the noose fell around him and was pulled taut; the moving pictures showed a man, with bared head, at the end of a rope.
The new president many have thought to utter simple platitudes when he said, �The state of Israel is democracy�s outpost in the Middle East and every American who loves liberty must join in an effort to make secure forever the future of this newest member of the family of nations.� In fact, this was a commitment, or so held by those to whom it was addressed, like similar words of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Woodrow Wilson. Eight years after Hitler�s death the new state, where Hitler�s very laws held and whence the native people had been driven by massacre and terror, was �democracy�s outpost� and all who �loved liberty� must (the imperative) join to preserve it.
If the new president thought he was free to form state policy, after he uttered such words, he was taught better within nine months of his inauguration. In October, 1953 the commitment was called, and imperiously. An effort to act independently, and in the American national interest, in an issue affecting �the newest member of the family of nations� was crushed, and the American President made to perform public penance, in much the same way that �Rockland� (Woodrow Wilson) was brought to heel in Mr. House�s novel in 1912.
This humiliation of the head of what mankind saw as the most powerful government in the world is the most significant incident in the present story, which has recounted many episodes, similar in nature but less open to public audit. The series of Zionist attacks on the Arab neighbour-states (listed in the preceding section) began on Oct. 14, 1953, when every living soul in the Arab village of Qibya, in Jordan was massacred. This was a repetition of the Deir Yasin massacre of 1948, with the difference that it was done outside Palestine, and thus deliberately intimated to the entire body of Arab peoples that they all in time would suffer �utter destruction,� again with the connivance of �the West.�
The facts were reported to the United nations by the Danish General Vagn Bennike, chief of the U.N. Truce Observation Organization (who received threats against his life) and his immediately-responsible subordinate, Commander E.D. Hutchison of the U.S. Navy, who described the attack as �cold blooded murder� (and was later removed). At the subsequent discussion before the U.N. Security Council, the French delegate said �the massacre� had aroused �horror and reprobation� in France and reproached Israel, the state founded on the claim of �persecution,� with �wreaking vengeance on the innocent.� The Greek delegate spoke of �the horrible massacre� and the British and American delegates joined in the chorus of �condemnation� (Nov. 9, 1953). In England the Archbishop of York denounced this �horrible act of terrorism� and a Conservative M.P., Major H. Legge-Bourke, called it �the culminating atrocity in a long chain of incursions into non-Israeli territory, made as part of a concerted plan of vengeance.�
When these expressions of horror were uttered Israel had, in effect, been awarded an American bonus of $60,000,000 for the deed and the American President had publicly submitted to the Zionist �pressure� in New York. This is the chronology of events:
Four days after the massacre (Oct. 18, 1953) the American Government �decided to administer a stern rebuke to its protegé� (The Times, Oct. 19). It announced that �the shocking reports which have reached the Department of State of the loss of lives and property involved in this incident convince us that those who are responsible should be brought to account and effective measures be taken to prevent such incidents in the future� (these words are worth comparing with what happened within a few days). The Times added that �behind this statement is a growing resentment at the high-handed way in which the Israel Government is inclined to treat the United States – presumably because it believes that it can always count on domestic political pressure in this country.� It was even reported (added The Times, as if with bated breath) �that a grant of several million dollars to the Israel Government may be held up until some guarantee is given that there will be no more border incidents.�
Two days later (Oct. 20) the State Department announced that the grant to Israel would be halted. If President Eisenhower calculated that, with the election a year behind and the next three years ahead, his administration was free to formulate American state policy, he was wrong. The weakness of America, and the strength of the master-key method, is that an election always impends, if not a presidential election, then a Congressional, mayoral, municipal or other one. At that instant three candidates (two Jews and a non-Jew) were contending for the mayoralty of New York, and the campaign was beginning for the 1954 Congressional elections, when all 435 members of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senators were to seek election. Against this background, the screw was applied to the White House.
The three rivals in New York began to outbid each other for the �Jewish vote.� Five hundred Zionists gathered in New York (Oct. 25), announced that they were �shocked� by the cancellation of �aid to Israel,� and demanded that the Government �reconsider and reverse its hasty and unfair action.� The Republican candidate wired to Washington for an immediate interview with the Secretary of State; returning from it he assured the anxious electors that �full U.S. economic aid will be given to Israel� (New York Times, Oct. 26) and said this would amount in all to $63,000,000 (nevertheless, he was not elected).
Meanwhile the Republican party-managers clamoured at the President�s door with warnings of what would happen in the 1954 election if he did not recant. On October 28 he capitulated, an official statement announcing that Israel would receive the amount previously earmarked, and $26,000,000 of it in the first six months of the fiscal year, (out of a total of about $60,000,000).
The Republican candidate for the New York mayoralty welcomed this as �recognition of the fact that Israel is a staunch bastion of free world security in the Near East,� and an act of �world statesmanship� typical of President Eisenhower. The true picture of what had produced the act was given by Mr. John O�Donnell in the New York Daily News, Oct. 28: �The professional politicians moved in on him with a vengeance. Ike didn�t like it at all … but the pressure was so violent that to keep peace in the family he had to reverse himself. And the about-face, politically and personally, was about the smartest and swiftest seen in this political capital of the world in many a month … For a week the pressure of candidates, seeking the huge Jewish vote in New York City, has been terrific … The political education of President Eisenhower has moved with dizzy speed in the last ten days.� (Nevertheless, the Republican Party did lose control of Congress in the 1954 election, this being the familiar and invariable result of these capitulations; and after even greater capitulations it suffered a still greater setback in 1956, when its nominee, again Mr. Eisenhower, was re-elected president).
After this the American Government never again ventured to �rebuke its protegé� during the long series of equally �horrible acts� committed by it, and on the anniversary of Israel�s creation (May 7, 1954) the Israeli Army proudly displayed the arms received by it from the United States and Great Britain; a massive display of American and British tanks, jet aircraft, bombers and fighters was then offered to the view. (The United States had reported Israel �eligible for arms aid� on August 12, 1952, and Great Britain authorized arms exports to Israel by private dealers on January 17, 1952).
Two years of relative quiet followed, but it was merely the hush of preparation; the next series of events was obviously being staged for the next presidential election year, 1956. In May 1955 (the month when Sir Anthony Eden succeeded Sir Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in England), the American Secretary of State, Mr. John Foster Dulles, like Mr. Balfour thirty years before, at last visited the country which was wrecking American foreign policy, as it had wrecked that of England. After his experience with the �rebuke,� so swiftly swallowed, he must have realized that he was dealing with the most powerful force in the world, supreme in his country, of which �Israel� was but the instrument used to divide and rule others.
Like Mr. Balfour, he was received with Arab riots when he went outside Palestine. In Israel he was seen by few Israelis, being hurried in a closed car, between hedges of police, from the airport into Tel Aviv. The police operation for his escort and guard was called �Operation Kitavo,� Kitavo being Hebrew for �Whence thou art come.� The allusion is to Deuteronomy 26: �And it shall be, when thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance … and the Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandements, and to make thee high above all nations which he hath made … that thou mayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy God.� Thus an American Secretary of State was seen in Zionist Israel merely as a minor character in the great drama of �fulfilling� the Levitical Law.
Mr. Dulles on his return said he had found that the Arabs feared Zionism more than Communism, a discovery of the obvious; the Arabs had read the Torah and seen its literal application to themselves at Deir Yasin and Qibya. He said in a television broadcast (according to the Associated Press, June 1, 1953), �the United States stands firmly behind the 1950 declaration made jointly with Britain and France; it pledges the three nations to action in the event the present Israeli borders are violated by any military action� (the famous �Tripartite Declaration�). I have not been able to discover if Mr. Dulles said this or was misquoted (the Declaration was supposedly impartial and guaranteed �Middle East frontiers and armistice lines not �Israeli borders� but this was the kind of news which always reached the Arabs and in fact the verbal lapse, or misquotation, came much nearer to the obvious truth of affairs.
Once more the generations were passing, but the lengthening shadow of Zionism fell more heavily on each new one. Sir Winston Churchill, his powers at last failing, relinquished his post to the man on whom he had already bestowed it in the manner of a potentate determining the succession: �I take no step in public life without consulting Mr. Eden; he will carry on the torch of Conservatism when other and older hands have let it fall.� That being the case, Sir Anthony presumably inherited Sir Winston�s unqualified support for �the fulfilment of the aspirations of Zionism� and might well have wished the torch in other hands, for it could only ruin, not illumine �Conservatism,� and England. From the moment when he reached the office for which all his life had prepared him his administration of it was bedevilled by �the problem of the Middle East,� so that his political end seemed likely to be as unhappy as that of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Woodrow Wilson.
And, the scribe might add, that of President Eisenhower. In September 1955 he was stricken down, and although he recovered the pictures of him began to show the traits which appeared in those of Messrs. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson towards the end of their terms. The �pressure� which these apparently powerful men have to endure in this, �the Jewish century,� seems to have some effect which shows in a careworn physiognomy. They are surrounded by the praise-makers, but if they try to follow conscience and duty they are relentlessly brought to book. After his first experience the general expectation was that he would not run a second time.
He was not a Republican and during his first term felt uncomfortable as a �Republican� president. Indeed, soon after his inauguration his �vexation with the powerful right wing of the party� (in other words, with the traditional Republicans, who had wanted Senator Taft) �reached such extremes that for a time he gave prolonged thought to the idea of a new political party in America, a party to which persons of his own philosophy, regardless of their previous affiliations, might rally … He began asking his most intimate associates whether he did not have to start thinking about a new party. As he conceived it, such a party would have been essentially his party. It would have represented those doctrines, international and domestic, which he believed were best for the United States and indeed for the world.�[fn] He only gave up this idea when Senator Taft�s death left the Republican Party without a natural leader and when the Senate, at the President�s personal encouragement, censured Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin for the ardour of his attack on Communism-in-government. The public anger aroused by the exposure of Communist infestation of the administration under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman was one of the main causes for the swing of votes to the Republican Party (and its nominee, Mr. Eisenhower) in 1952.
[fn text: This significant disclosure comes from a book, Eisenhower. The Inside Story, published in 1956 by a White House correspondent, Mr. Robert J. Donovan, evidently at Mr. Eisenhower�s wish, for it is based on the minutes of Cabinet meetings and other documents which relate to highly confidential proceedings at the highest level. Nothing of the kind was ever published in America before and the author does not explain the reasons for the innovation. Things are recorded which the President�s Cabinet officers probably would not have said, had they known that they would be published; for instance, a jocose suggestion that a Senator Bricker and his supporters (who were pressing a Constitutional amendment to limit the President�s power to make treaties, and thus to subject him to great Congressional control) ought to be atom-bombed.]
Thus at the end of 1955 a presidential-election year again impended, in circumstances which the dominant power in America had always found ideal: an ailing president, party-politicians avid for �the Jewish vote,� a war situation in the Middle East and another in Europe. In such a state of affairs �domestic political pressure� in the capital of the world�s wealthiest and best-armed country might produce almost any result. The Republican party-managers, desperate to retain at least a nominal Republican in the White House if they could not gain a majority in Congress, gathered round a sick man and urged him to run.[fn]
[fn text: The most significant domestic events of President Eisenhower�s first term (in view of the fact that his election chiefly expressed the desire of American voters, in 1952, to redress the proved Communist infestation of government and combat the menace of Communist aggression) were the censure of the most persistent investigator, Senator McCarthy, which received the President�s personal encouragement and approval; and the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in 1955, which denied the right of the forty-eight individual States to take measures against sedition and reserved this to the Federal Government. This ruling, if given effect, will greatly reduce the power of the Republic to �contend with sedition� (the �Protocols�). The third major domestic event was the Supreme Court ruling against segregation of White and Negro pupils in the public schools, which in effect was directed against the South and, if pressed, might produce violently explosive results. These events draw attention to the peculiar position held in the United States by the Supreme Court, in view of the fact that appointments to it are political, not the reward of a lifetime�s service in an independent judiciary. In these circumstances the Supreme Court, under President Eisenhower, showed signs of developing into a supreme political body (Supreme Politburo might not be too inapt a word), able to overrule Congress. The United States Solicitor General in 1956, Mr. Simon E. Sobeloff, stated, �In our system the Supreme Court is not merely the adjudicator of controversies, but in the process of adjudication it is in many ways the final formulator of national policy� (quoted in the New York Times, July 19, 1956).]
The real campaign began, as always, a full year before the election itself. In September 1955 the Egyptian Government of President Gamel Abdel Nasser contracted with the Soviet Union for the purchase of some arms. The American, British and French �Tripartite Declaration� of 1950 provided that Israel and the Arab states might buy arms from the West. President Nasser, in justification of his act, stated (Nov. 16, 1955) that he had been unable to obtain �one single piece of armament from the United States in three years of trying� and accused the American government of �a deliberate attempt to keep the Arabs perpetually at the mercy of Israel and her threats.�
This Egyptian arms purchase from the Soviet produced an immediate uproar in Washington and London similar to that which was raised in 1952-3 about �the trial of the Jewish doctors.� President Eisenhower appealed to the Soviet Union to withhold arms shipments to Egypt (the bulk of these came from the Skoda arms factory in Czechoslovakia, which fell into Soviet possession in consequence of the Yalta agreement of 1945 and which had supplied the arms enabling �Israel� to set up house in 1947-8 and to �hail the Soviets as deliverers�). In London on the same day (Nov. 9, 1955) Sir Anthony Eden accused the Soviet Union of creating war tensions in the Middle East; the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Harold Macmillan, complained of the introduction of a �new and disturbing factor into this delicate situation.� To the Arabs all these words from the West meant what they had always meant: that Israel would be given, and the Arabs would be denied, arms.
After this the propaganda campaign swelled day by day, in the same way as that of 1952-3, until, within a few weeks, the memory of the three years of Israeli attacks on the Arab countries and the United Nations� condemnations of these had been blotted out of the public mind. In its place, the general reader received the daily impression that unarmed Israel, through the fault of the West, was being left to the mercy of Egypt, armed to the teeth with �Red� weapons. At that early stage the truth of the matter was once published: the leading American military authority, Mr. Hanson W. Baldwin, speaking of the supply of American arms to Israel, said, �We are trying to maintain a very uneasy �balance� between the Israelis and the Arabs. This is not now, nor is it likely to be soon, a true balance in the sense that the two sides possess equal military strength. Today, Israel is clearly superior to Egypt, in fact to the combined strength of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq� (New York Times, Nov. 11, 1955).
This truth was not again allowed to reach the newspaper-reading masses in the eleven months that followed, at any rate in my observation.[fn] They were kept bemused by the growing clamour about �Red Arms for the Arabs,� which set the note for both election campaigns (for Congress and for the presidency) then beginning.[fn.2] All the presidential aspirants on the Democratic side (Messrs. Estes Kefauver, Governor Harriman of New York State, Stuart Symington and Adlai Stevenson) made inflammatory statements in this sense.[fn.3] At one point an American Zionist committee considered a �march on Denver� but refrained (the President was in hospital there after his stroke), and instead approached all candidates, of either party, with a demand that they sign a �policy declaration� against the grant of arms to any Arab state. 120 Congressional aspirants signed forthwith, and the number later increased to 102 Democrats and 51 Republicans (New York Times, Apr. 5, 1956). This excess of Democratic signatories accounts for the statement made at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on April 26 by Mr. Yishak Gruenbaum, a leading Israeli politician and former Minister: �Israel will get no support from the United States so long as the Republican leadership is in control.� This was a public demand, from Israel, that American Jews should vote Democratic, and the belief of the American party-managers in the power of �the Jewish vote� there was strengthened, on this occasion, by the Democratic success in the Congressional election, desired by Mr. Gruenbaum in Jerusalem.
[fn text: However, fourteen months later (Jan 4, 1957), after the attack on Egypt, Mr. Hanson Baldwin, writing from the Middle East, confirmed the continuance of �defenceless� Israel�s military predominance: �Israel has been, since 1949, the strongest indigenous military force in the area. She is stronger today, as compared with the Arab states, than ever before.�]
[fn.2 text: �The supply of arms by Soviet Czechoslovakia made Jews in Israel and elsewhere look to the Soviets as deliverers,� Johannesburg Jewish Times, Dec. 24, 1952.
�The state of Israel will be defended if necessary with overwhelming outside help,� Governor Harriman, New York Times, March 23, 1955.
]
[fn.3 text: �The state of Israel will be defended if necessary with overwhelming outside help,� Governor Harriman, New York Times, March 23, 1955.]
Against this background of �pressure� on an ailing President through the party-managers and of one more campaign about �the persecution of the Jews� (symbolized, this time, by Israel) the year of the presidential election began. From the start, experienced observers saw that it had been chosen (like preceding presidential-election years) as a year of staged and rising crisis which might erupt in general war. The basis of all calculations was the �domestic political pressure� which could be exercized on the American government and its acts.
In the real world the year opened, typically, with one more unanimous �condemnation� (Jan. 19, 1956) of Israel for a �deliberate� and �flagrant� attack (the one on Syria on Dec. 11, 1955). This was the fourth major condemnation in two years and it came at a moment when the propaganda campaign about Israel�s �defencelessness� and Arab �aggression� was already in full swing in the West. At the same period a �state of national emergency� was declared in Israel.
The Zionist attack then turned on the core of responsible officials in the American State Department who (like those in the British Colonial Office and Foreign Office in the earlier generation) tried to ward off the perilous �commitments� to Israel. In November 1955 the world�s largest religious Zionist organization, the Mizrachi Organization of America, had declared at Atlantic City that �a clique� of �anti-Israel elements in the United States State Department� was �blocking effective United States aid to Israel� (this, word for word, is the complaint made by Dr. Chaim Weizmann against the British responsible officials over a period of three decades, 1914-1947).
In the presidential-election year 1956 the man who had succeeded to the burden in America, was Mr. John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State. Immediately after the U.N. Security Council�s �condemnation� of Israel in January Mr. Dulles announced that he was trying to gain the agreement of leading Democratic politicians to keep the Israeli-Arab question �out of debate in the Presidential election campaign� (Jan. 24, 1956). The New York Times commented, �it is known that Mr. Dulles has complained that Israeli Embassy officials here have sought to persuade candidates for congress to take positions favourable to the Israeli cause … The Secretary is eager that neither party should complicate the delicate negotiations for a Mid East settlement by discussing the Israeli question for personal or party advantage in the election campaign … Specifically, he is apprehensive lest anything be said in the Presidential campaign that would encourage Israelis to think that the United States could condone or co-operate with an Israeli invasion of Arab territory.�
Thus Mr. Dulles was complaining of the �political pressure� recorded by President Truman in his memoirs,[fn] and was attempting in 1956 what Mr. Forrestal in 1947 had attempted, at the price of dismissal, breakdown and suicide. He at once came under attack from the press (equally in America and England) in the same way as Mr. Ernest Bevin and Mr. Forrestal in the years 1947-8. He received a reproachful letter from �a group of Republican members of Congress,� to whom he placatingly replied (Feb. 7, 1955) that �The foreign policy of the United States embraces the preservation of the state of Israel … We do not exclude the possibility of arms sales to Israel.� By this time he had further sinned, for the Jerusalem Post, which in 1956 was a sort of Court Gazette for the Western capitals, announced that he had committed �a minor but unfriendly act … he received for 45 minutes a delegation of the American Council for Judaism.�[fn.2]
In the intervening years another book had appeared. Mr. Chesly Manly�s The U.N. Record, which said that four senior officials of the American Foreign Service, called from the Middle East to Washington during the congressional elections of 1946 for consultation on the Palestine question, had presented the Arab case and received from President Truman the answer, �Sorry, gentlemen, I have to answer hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.� Mr. Truman�s submissiveness to Zionist pressure, when in office, and his complaint about it, when in retirement, thus are both on record.[fn text: This is an example, in the new generation, of the �outside interference, entirely from Jews� of which Dr. Weizmann bitterly complained in the earlier one. The Council feared and fought the involvement of the West in Zionist chauvinism. It was headed by Mr. Lessing Rosenwald, formerly head of the great mercantile house of Sears, Roebuck, and Rabbi Elmer Berger. Meeting in Chicago at this period, it resolved that President Truman�s memoirs �confirm that Zionist pressures � labelled as those of American Jews � were excessive beyond all bounds of propriety� and �offered a spectacle of American citizens advancing the causes of a foreign nationalism� The reader, if he refers to earlier chapters, will see how precisely the situation in England in 1914-1917 had been reproduced in America in 1947-8 and 1955-6.]
The American Zionist Council immediately �protested� against Mr. Dulles�s proposal that the Palestine issue �be kept out of debate during the presidential election; its chairman, a Rabbi Irving Miller, called this �the misguided view that any particular segment of foreign policy should be withdrawn from the arena of free and untrammelled public discussion.� As to this freedom from trammel, the following rare allusions to the state of affairs prevailing appeared at that time in the American press: �Israel�s quarrels with her neighbours have been transferred to every American platform, where merely to explain why the Arabs feel the way they do is to become a candidate for professional extinction� (Miss Dorothy Thompson); �A pro-Egypt policy will make no votes for Republicans in New Jersey, Connecticut or Massachusetts and when one talks to professional politicians he hears much on the subject� (Mr. George Sokolsky); �The political masterminds argue that to get the Jewish vote in such critical states as New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania the United States should go down the line against the Arabs� (Mr. John O�Donnell).
The next development was an announcement in the New York Times (Feb. 21, 1956) that Mr. Dulles would have �to face an investigation on foreign policy� called by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee �to enquire into the twistings and turnings of the Administration�s arms policy in the Mid East.� Mr. Dulles duly appeared before the Committee (Feb. 24, 1956) and this led to a significant incident. In the ordinary way the public masses, in America as in England, are debarred from expressing any adverse opinion about the adventure in Palestine, so costly to them; candidates for election cannot expect party-nomination unless they subscribe to the Zionist view, and the press in general will not print any other. On this occasion the responsible Cabinet officer had an audience comprizing as many Americans as could crowd into the space reserved for spectators and they gave him ovations when he entered, while he spoke, and when he left.
The reason for these ovations was plain, and the incident showed how the general masses of the West would all react if their political leaders ever appealed to them candidly in this question. Mr. Dulles said among other things, �one of the greatest difficulties facing the United States in its role of attempted mediation between Arabs and Israelis is the belief of the Arab world that Washington�s approach would be guided by domestic political pressures� There was danger that the Israelis might �precipitate what is called a preventive war.� If that occurred the United States �will not be involved on the side of Israel� because it had commitments with its allies to oppose any nation that started �aggression� in the Middle East. He �suggested several times that domestic political pressures were being applied to attempt to force the Administration to take an unduly and unwisely pro-Israel course in the Middle East.�
What was applauded, then, is clear, and this was the first official and public allusion, within hearing of a general audience, to the clutch that holds the West in thrall. The demonstration of public approval did not diminish the �pressures� of which Mr. Dulles complained. A few weeks later (Apr. 12, 1956) he was hailed before Congressional leaders to report on the Middle East and told them �I fear the time may have passed for a peaceful solution.� He pointed out that the two �key factors� in United States policy there were �in conflict,� namely, �Retention of the immense oil resources of the region for the military and economic use of Western Europe,� (these resources are at present in the Arab countries) and �preservation of Israel as a nation.� The Democratic House leader, Mr. John McCormack then asked peremptorily, �Which policy comes first, saving Israel, or keeping hold of the oil?� By his answer, �We are trying to do both,� Mr. Dulles showed that the entire West was more deeply than ever imprisoned in the insoluble dilemma created by Britain�s original involvement in Zionism.
In the vain effort to �do both� Mr. Dulles soon made the matter worse. Apparently he never had any hope that his original proposal would succeed; he �gave a bellow of sardonic laughter� when asked, at a press conference at this time, if he truly believed that he could get the Arab-Israeli issue taken out of election politics. Even as he spoke to the Senate Committee (would those spectators have applauded, had they known?) the method was being devised whereby America could officially announce that it would not supply �arms to the Middle East� at all, and at the same time would ensure that Israel receive such arms, enabling it to launch the �preventive war� which the Secretary of State �feared.� The device was similar to that used in the case of West German �reparations,� which were exacted under American pressure and ensured the flow of money or goods to Israel without this appearing in any American budget.
Immediately after Mr. Dulles�s report to the Senate Committee, and apparently in reply to it, Israeli troops made �a pre-arranged and planned� attack on the Egyptians in the Gaza area, killing thirty-eight persons (Feb. 27, 1956), and was condemned for �brutal aggression� by the U.N.M.A.C. Within a few weeks the columnists then began to hint at the new method of supplying arms to Israel: �If the United States sold arms to Israel, it would reopen the Communist pipeline of arms to the Arab States … apparently it is felt that the same would not be true if Britain, France and Canada met Israeli requests for weapons … It is assumed here that if the Allies sell Israel arms, the United States can maintain its own position of impartiality.�
This was �doing both� in practice. Rabbi Hillel Silver (the Zionist leader who had uttered the prayer for �grace and guidance� at the President�s inauguration) then stated in Israel that �the Eisenhower Administration has not yet said the last word on arms for Israel� (New York Times, Apr. 4, 1956). Returned to Washington, he had �a very frank and friendly discussion� with the President. Then it was revealed that the United States was �discreetly encouraging the French and Canadian governments to sell arms to Israel� (New York Times, April 1956). Next, these proved in truth to be American-supplied arms, for the French Government officially announced (May 12, 1956) that the American Government �had agreed to a delay in deliveries to allow France to make speedily a last delivery of twelve Mystere IV planes to Israel.� These were some of the French aircraft used in the attack an Egypt five months later; that the French Air Force itself would take part was not in May disclosed.[fn]
[fn text: Six months later, on the eve of the presidential election and immediately before the Israeli attack on Egypt, the New York Daily News appealed to �the Jewish voter� by recounting the following Republican services: �The Eisenhower Administration has not seen its way clear to supplying Israel with heavy hardware, because of various touchy international situations. However, the Administration, last April and May, did help Israel get 24 Mystere jet planes from France, and last month Canada announced sale of 24 Sabre jets to Israel. Mr. Dulles was declared by Israeli officials to have actively used United States Government influence in promoting both the French and Canadian plane sales.�]
In explanation: the American Government was financing the purchase of arms for its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at that time, by placing orders with the foreign manufacturers. These American-financed deliveries were diverted to Israel at American �encouragement.� Thus the North Atlantic Treaty, supposed at the start to be an alliance of the West against �Soviet aggression� and �Communism,� also was turned to the purpose of Zionism. Signed in 1949, the ostensible, original purpose was that the members (America and Canada, England, France and ten other European countries, and Turkey) would regard any attack on one as an attack on all and aid the one attacked.
Therefore the American Government, while attacking the Soviet Union for supplying Egypt with arms and declaring that it would not itself promote �the arms race� in the Middle East by supplying them to Israel, was in fact procuring arms for Israel to maintain its superiority over all seven Arab countries. Here Mr. Dulles operated with a Machiavellian touch which had the effect of oil on fire. The act of procurement was not even kept secret; as the above quotations show, it was given publicity and used as a vote-getting vaunt in that election campaign, from which Mr. Dulles had appealed for the Israeli-Arab issue to be kept aloof.
A strange side effect on these machinations in the West was that statements made, on this particular question, by the utterly unscrupulous rulers in Moscow gained a look of honest respectability. For instance, the Soviet Government, when the Western uproar about �arms for Egypt� began, sent a note to the American, British, Egyptian and Czechoslovak Governments stating, �The Soviet Government holds that each state has the legitimate right to look after its defence and to buy weapons for its defence requirements from other states on usual commercial terms, and that no foreign state has the right to intervene.� That was an irreproachable statement of the legal, and even moral position, and it was echoed by Israel, for while the Western rumpus welled the Israeli Foreign Minister, then Mr. Moshe Sharett, stated in New York (Nov. 10, 1955) �If driven to a tight corner and our existence is at stake we will seek and accept arms from any source in the world� (in answer to a question whether the Soviet had offered Israel arms). Thus the whole burden of the outcry in the West was in fact that Soviet arms ought not to go to the Arab states, and for this no moral or legal argument whatever can be found.
Against this background, �defenceless Israel� (Mr. Ben-Gurion) on April 16, 1956 held its anniversary parade with great display of United States, British and French aircraft and tanks (New York Times, Apr. 17); the Soviet weapons were presumably withheld from the parade on that occasion in harmony with the propaganda of that moment in the West. On April 24, in Jerusalem, Mr. Ben-Gurion once more proclaimed the nationalist and expansionist aim: �The continued ingathering of exiles is the supreme goal of Israel and an essential precondition for realization of the messianic mission which has made us an eternal people.�
The subterfuge by means of which the United States procured arms for Israel while officially refusing to supply them (�Nobody particularly welcomes our decision not to sell weapons to Israel but to encourage other allies to do so, and to relinquish earmarked equipment for this purpose,� New York Times, May 19, 1956) brought no respite to the American President. Open submission is the invariable requirement, and the Zionist wrath began to turn against him. On the eve of his second breakdown in health (in the early summer he had to undergo an operation for hepatitis) the jeer began to be thrown at him that he was but �a part-time president.� A leading woman Zionist, Mrs. Agnes Meyer, launched it by telling a Jewish audience in New York that while �the bastion of democracy� (Israel) was in peril �the President is not at his post in Washington; he is playing golf in Augusta,� and urging him to ask himself �whether this nation can afford a part-time president.� His second illness, which followed almost at once, stopped this particular attack for the time, but President Eisenhower, like others before him, was not allowed to forget that the full resources of Zionist propaganda might at any moment be turned against him if he stepped out of his predecessors� line.
While he struggled in these toils, across the Atlantic another Prime Minister seemed likely to be broken on the Zionist wheel. Sir Anthony Eden, in any other century, would have become a major statesman; in this one, the �commitment� he inherited was from the start of his premiership a millstone round his neck.
No politician in the world was equal to him, when he took the chief office in 1955, in qualification and experience. He was of the First War generation, so that the memory of Flanders fields formed the background of all his adult life, which thereafter was spent entirely in politics. He came of old family with an inherited tradition of service, and was gifted and personable. He rose to ministerial rank at an early age and with brief intervals held one high post after another for over twenty years, during which he came to know personally every dictator and parliamentary politician in Europe and North America. He thus gained a unique experience for the testing years ahead; only Sir Winston Churchill, in the entire world, had a comparable range of aquaintanceship, negotiation and in general of training in what was once held to be the art of statesmanship.
He was still young, for the chief office, when Sir Winston yielded to the law of age and handed on �the torch� to the man he had described as embodying �the life hope of the British nation� (1938), Mr. Eden (as he was in 1938) gained the hope of men of his generation through his resignation from the British Government in protest against the placation of Hitler, which (he rightly judged) was the one sure road to war. The event of October, 1956 was made harder for his contemporaries to endure by the fact that his name was given to it.
I knew Mr. Eden, as a foreign correspondent may know a politician, in the years that led to the Second War, and on the strength of our similar feelings at that darkling time was later able to write to him at moments when he seemed to be losing touch with the mind of his generation; and to receive pleasant reply, acknowledging earlier acquaintanceship and perusal of my books. I saw him, in 1935 emerge, with troubled mien, from a first encounter with Hitler, who in menacing tones had told him that the German air force (then officially non-existent) was greater than the English one. I accompanied him to Moscow and was able to confirm with him something I had heard of his first encounter with Stalin: that the Georgian bandit had pointed to the little point on the world�s map that represented England and said how strange it was that so small a country should hold the key to the world�s peace (a true statement at that time). Having these personal memories, I was probably more aghast than most men when I learned of the deed to which he was misled in October, 1956.
From the start in May 1955 the professional observer saw that he was in truth, not so much Prime Minister, as Minister for the Jewish Question, in his generation represented by the Zionist state and its ambition. This meant that his whole term of office would fall under that shadow and that his political fate would be determined by his actions in regard to Zionism, not by his success or failure in matters of native interest. That was shown on the eve of his premiership, when he was still Foreign Secretary for a few weeks more. The British Government had concluded an arrangement with Iran and Turkey to ensure the defence of British interests in the Middle East, the oil resources of which were vital to England and the Antipodean Dominions. The debate in the House of Commons ignored this aspect and raged around the effect of the agreement �on Israel,� so that two lonely members (among 625) protested: �This debate is not about Palestine and the Foreign Secretary must look after world interests and the interests of Britain, even though they cause annoyance and embarrassment to other states� (Mr Thomas Reid); �Judging by nearly every speech from hon. Members on both sides of the House, one might be forgiven for imagining that the debate was primarily concerned with the effect of a pact on Israel instead of the improvement of our worldwide defensive system against the threat of Russian imperialism� (Mr. F. W. Bennett).
To this a Jewish Socialist member replied, �Why not?� In effect, it was by that time almost impossible to debate any major issue save in terms of its effect for Israel, and this plainly prefigured the course of Sir Anthony�s premiership.
During the remaining months of 1955, as Prime Minister, he continued to struggle with �the Middle East question,� at one time suggesting that an international force be placed between Israel and the Arab states (the United States demurred) and at another, that Israel might agree to minor frontier rectifications, having seized in 1948 more territory than that �awarded� to it by the United Nations (this brought angry Zionist charges in the New York newspapers that �Britain has now joined the ranks of Israel�s enemies�). Then the presidential-election year, and Sir Anthony�s crisis, began. The Zionist machine went into top gear, playing Washington against London and London against Washington with the skill of forty years� experience. In March a significant thing occurred; unknown to the world, it made an early attack on Egypt seem a certainty to the diligent watcher of events.
On the eve of the Jewish Passover the mysterious �Voice of America� broadcast a commemoration, laden with explosive topical allusions, of �the escape of the Jews from the Egyptian captivity.� Considered in its obvious relationship to the propaganda bombardment of Egypt which was then in progress in Washington and London, this plainly portended violent events before the next Passover. The American people in general know nothing of what �The Voice of America� says, or to whom it speaks. Even my research has not discovered what official department is supposed to supervise this �voice,� which to listening peoples far away is taken to express the intentions of the American Government. I was able to learn that its funds, budgetary and other, are immense and that it is largely staffed by Eastern Jews. It appears to work in irresponsibility and secrecy.[fn]
[fn text: During the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet in October-November 1956, several American correspondents, returning from the shambles, and Hungarian fugitives attributed a large measure of responsibility for the tragedy to this �Voice.� The Americans had found the Hungarian people confident of American intervention; the Hungarians complained that, although the word �revolt� was not used, the �Voice� in effect incited and instigated revolt and held out the prospect of American succour. At the same time President Eisenhower told the American people, �We have never counselled the captive peoples to rise against armed force.� Similar criticisms were made against �Radio Free Europe,� a private American organization which operated from Germany under West German Government license.
One of the first Hungarian refugees to reach America complained that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for years �picked at us� to revolt, but when the national uprising came no American help was given (New York Times, Nov. 23, 1956).
The West German Government ordered an investigation into Radio Free Europe�s broadcasts during the Hungarian uprising (it operated from Munich) after widespread charges appeared in the West German press that it had, in effect, played a provocative part; as example, a script prepared on Nov. 5, 1956, while the uprising was in progress, told the Hungarian people that �Western military aid could not be expected before 2am tomorrow,� an obvious intimation that it would come at some moment (N.Y.T., Dec. 8, 1956) The gravest implication of a provocative purpose was contained in statements made by Mrs Anna Kethly, head of the Hungarian Social Democratic party, who escaped during the brief liberation of the country. She said that while she was in jail in 1952 Radio Free Europe in a broadcast to the captive countries said �that I was leading the underground liberation movement from my jail and quoted the names of several leaders of the alleged movement. I was taken out of the jail where I had been in complete seclusion since 1950 and confronted with hundreds of former militants of the Social Democratic party and the trade unions. All of them were tortured by the political police to confess their participation in the non-existent anti-Communist plot. There was absolutely no truth in the Radio Free Europe report; I had lived in complete seclusion since my arrest and had met nobody. Radio Free Europe has gravely sinned by making the Hungarian people believe that Western military aid was coming, when no such aid was planned� (N.Y.T., Nov. 30, 1956).
Thus America spoke with two voices, those of the President addressing himself officially to the world, and of the �Voice� speaking in more dangerous terms over the head of the American people to the peoples of the world. At this period the New York Times described the official line: �High officials have made clear privately that the Administration wants to avoid being identified solely with Israel and thus surrendering the Arab countries to the influence of the Soviet Union.� The Arab peoples, if they ever heard of these �private� intimations, could not be expected to believe them, in view of what they heard from �The Voice of America� about the liberation of the Jews from �the Egyptian captivity.�]
From this moment the whole weight of Western propaganda was turned against Egypt. The events which followed might be considered in the light of Secretary of War, Henry Stimson�s diarial note in the period preceding Pearl Harbour, to the effect that the aim of President Roosevelt�s administration was to manoeuvre Japan into �firing the first shot.� Subsequent events had all the appearance of being designed to manoeuvre Egypt into firing the first shot. Egypt did not do this. Then the world found that the firing of a first shot was no longer necessary to qualify as an aggressor; the country in question could be dubbed the aggressor while it was being invaded, and even before that; so far had the resources of mass-propaganda developed in the 20th century. All the �condemnations� of Israel on the score of aggression had meant nothing.
This crisis-period began on March 7, 1956 (just before the �Voice of America�s� Egyptian-captivity broadcast) when Sir Anthony Eden again faced the House of Commons on the eternal question. By that time his Socialist adversaries (despite the many �condemnations� of Israel) were furious in their demand for arms for Israel and �a new treaty of guarantees for Israel�; like the New York politicians, they saw the hope of office in new submissions to Zion. The Prime Minister �was subjected to a storm of vituperation and abuse beyond anything heard in the House of Commons since the last days of Neville Chamberlain�s prime ministership� (the New York Times); �It was a scene which, for a time, seemed to shock even those who had caused it; the Speaker himself had to intervene to plead that the House should give the Prime Minister a hearing� (the Daily Telegraph). Sir Anthony vainly protested that he had thereto been heard with courtesy �for over thirty years� by the House. At that moment he might have hoped for American support, for on the same day President Eisenhower said it was �useless to try to maintain peace in the Middle East by arming Israel, with its 1,700,000 people, against 40,000,000 Arabs� (the American procurement of arms for Israel was then under way).
In England Sir Anthony found all hands against him. The Daily Telegraph (ostensibly of his own party) might in its news reports appear shocked by his treatment in the House, but editorially it said the case for giving Israel arms was �incontrovertible,� a word which always spares the need for supporting argument. His opponents, the Socialists, cast off all restraint in their eagerness to overthrow him by way of Israel. The leading leftist journal, the New Statesman, in two successive issues said that England had no right or means to wage war in any circumstances whatever and should lay down all arms (�Effective defence is now beyond our means and disarmament is the only alternative to annihilation,� March 10) and that England should arm Israel and pledge itself to go to war for Israel (�War is less likely if Israel is supplied with up to date arms and the Labour Party is correct in urging that Israel must now have them … The problem is not so much the undesirability of guaranteeing a frontier which has not yet been formally established … but the military problem of assembling and delivering the necessary force … Is sufficient naval strength available in the Eastern Mediterranean? Does Mr Gaitskell (the Socialist leader) �even feel sure that the British public would back him in going to war, probably without the endorsement of the United Nations, in defence of Israel?� (March 17).
The endless effects of the original, apparently small commitment to Zion may be studied in such quotations. Sir Anthony Eden on this occasion appeared to be trying, in unison with the United States Government, to stem a lunatic tide, but he gave a �warning to Egypt� which was not then justified and was ominous, as events proved. At that moment both the British and American Governments were (officially) courting Egyptian friendship in the hope of helping to pacify the Middle East. To that joint end England, �under American pressure� was preparing to withdraw its troops from the Suez Canal.[fn]
[fn text: The fact that this ��pressure� was used is authentic. It was everywhere recorded in terms of an American success by the American press, for instance, �Secretary of State Dulles was confident that he could win the friendship of the Arabs, as when he brought pressure on the British to get out of Egypt, while retaining that of the Israelis (New York Times, Oct. 21, 1956).]
Why Sir Anthony Eden yielded without security to �the pressure� to let go of what, immediately after, was proclaimed to be �the vital lifeline� of the British Commonwealth is of those questions which politicians never answer. �Pressure� from Washington in matters related to the Middle East has in the last four decades always been Zionist pressure, ultimately; and about this time an Egyptian journalist, Mr. Ibrahim Izzat, was cordially received by the Premier, Foreign Minister and Labour Minister of Israel who told him �Israel and Egypt had the identical aim of opposing British influence in the Middle East� (Ros el Youssef, May, 1956; New York Times, May 20, 1956).
The effect of this submission to pressure very soon became clear: it was to be war, involving England in a great humiliation and fiasco. The British withdrawal was supposed to be one-half of a larger, Anglo-American arrangement for �winning the friendship of the Arabs,� and the American half had yet to be performed. This was to join with the British Government and the World Bank in providing $900,000,000 for the construction of a dam on the Nile at Aswan (the offer had been made to Egypt in December 1955).
The chronology of events again becomes important. The British troops withdrew from the Suez Canal in June 1956, as undertaken. On July 6, 1956 the State Department spokesman told the press that the Aswan Dam offer �still stood.� A few days later the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington announced that Egypt had �definitely decided that she wanted Western help for the dam.� On July 19 the Egyptian Ambassador called on Mr. Dulles to accept the offer. He was told that the United States government had changed its mind. In London the day before the Foreign Office spokesman had announced that the British share of the offer �still stood.� On July 19 the spokesman informed the press (not the Egyptian Ambassador) that the British offer, too, was withdrawn. The spokesman declined to give reasons but admitted to �continuous consultation between Whitehall and Washington.�
Therefore the �pressure� to infuriate the Egyptians by this contemptuous affront came from the same quarter as the �pressure� to mollify them by withdrawing from the Suez Canal. The British Government was left far out on a limb, in the American phrase; if the first submission was made in reliance on President Eisenhower�s announcement of February (that he wanted �to stem the deterioration in relations between the Arab nations and the United States� and �restore the Arabs� confidence and trust� in America), the about-face in the Aswan Dam offer should have warned it, and it would then have saved much if it had resisted the �pressure� in the second case.
I cannot remember any more calculated or offensive provocation to a government with which �the West� was ostensibly seeking friendship. Such behaviour by the Washington and London governments has only become imaginable since they fell under the thrall of Zionism. American withdrawal of the offer, and the manner of withdrawal (its imitation by London is beyond comment) were clearly the true start of the war crisis of 1956, but the original source, the �pressure,� was not �American.� �Some Congressmen feared Zionist disapproval,� discreetly remarked the New York Times of the withdrawn offer to Egypt; and this was election year.
Within the week President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and at once the air was filled with war-talk, as in 1952-3 during the episode of �the Jewish doctors.� From that moment President Nassser received the �wicked man� treatment; this is the sure sign of the imminence of war. I have seen many �wicked men� built up in my life, and have observed that this propaganda can be turned on and off as by a tap, and infused with toxic effect into the public mind:
My early childhood was clouded by the wickedness of The Mad Mullah (a Muslim leader now universally forgotten) and of a respectable old Boer called Paul Kruger. Of all the figures in this Chamber of Horrors, built around me as I went along, I now see that nearly all were no better or worse than those who called them wicked.
Even before the war-talk reached the �wicked man� stage, and long before the unprecedented provocation of July 19, (which still provoked no warlike act from Egypt), President Nasser had been declared the aggressor in a war yet to begin. In March Mr. Ben-Gurion stated at Tel Aviv that early delivery of arms to Israel alone could prevent �an attack by the Arab states within the next few months� and added that the aggressor �would be the Egyptian dictator Nasser.� On April 13 Sir Winston Churchill emerged from a year�s retirement to tell a Primrose League audience that �prudence and honour� demanded British aid for Israel if it were attacked by Egypt. Sir Winston expressed implicit, but clear approval of the Israeli attack on Egypt which the �activists� in Israel were then demanding: �If Israel is dissuaded from using the life force of their race to ward off the Egyptians until the Egyptians have learned to use the Russian weapons with which they have been supplied and the Egyptians then attack, it will become not only a matter of prudence but a measure of honour to make sure that they are not the losers by waiting.� This was followed in May by an Israeli attack on Egyptian troops in the Gaza area in which about 150 men, women and children were killed or wounded. Nevertheless, the outcry about the �wicked man� and �Egyptian aggression� grew ever louder in the West.
The state of servitude into which England had fallen at this period was shown by two symbolic events. In June 1956 the �Anglo-Jewish Community� held a banquet at the Guildhall to commemorate �the three hundredth anniversary of the resettlement of the Jews in the British Isles�; the young Queen�s consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, was required to appear in a Jewish skullcap. In September the �Cromwell Association� held a service at the statue of the regicide and butcher of Drogheda to celebrate this same fiction (that he �restored� the Jews to England three hundred years before). In his speech the president of this body, a Mr. Isaac Foot, recommended that the young Prince Charles, when he reached the throne, take the name of �Oliver II,� because �We don�t want Charles III.�[fn]
[fn text: The same shadow was with deliberate intent cast across the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. As part of the festival the newly-crowned queen reviewed at Spithead a great assembly of war vessels from every country that could send a ship. Among the many craft, between the lines of which the Queen�s ship passed, was one alone, the crew of which did not cheer (a mistake, the later explanation asserted). This Soviet ship was the Sverdlov, named for Yankel Sverdlov, the assassin of the Romanoff family, in whose honour the town where they were butchered, Ekaterinburg, was renamed Sverdlovsk.]
After President Nasser�s seizure of the Suez Canal the war cries from the West rose to a high note. �Nationalization� in itself was not startling or shocking enough, in 1956, to account for it. America had accepted the seizure of foreign-owned oilfields, Mexico agreeing (as President Nasser agreed) to pay the going price for the property; domestically, America, through the Tennessee Valley Authority, was already treading this well-worn path to impoverishment; in England the Socialist Government had nationalized railways and coalmines. A valid legal or moral ground for violent denunciation was not easy to find, although shades of difference, admittedly existed between President Nasser�s act and the many precedents and his action was obviously one of protest against provocation, not of rational policy.
In any case, the only effective answer, if his act was intolerable, was to reoccupy the Canal forthwith, and that was not done. Instead, all the oracles, as if reading from a long-prepared script, began to dub him �Hitler.� Premier Ben-Gurion began with �dictator,� which soon became �Fascist dictator,� and the French Prime Minister (a M. Guy Mollet at that instant) changed this to �Hitler.� Thereafter the campaign followed the lines of the one against Stalin in 1952-3. Dictator-Fascist Dictator-Hitler: the inference was plain; President Nasser was to be depicted, and punished if he were punished, as an enemy of the Jews.
When Sir Anthony Eden again rose in the House of Commons (Aug. 9, 1956) to grapple with that monster of his dreams, �the Middle East question,� the Socialist leader, Mr. Hugh Gaitskell, said, �It is all terribly familiar … It is exactly the same as we encountered with Mussolini and Hitler before the war.� Another Socialist speaker, Mr. Paget Q.C., (events having altered K.C�s [Queen�s Counsel/King�s Counsel -- ed.]) baited him thus: �This weekend technique is just what we got from Hitler. Are you aware of the consequences of not answering force with force until it is too late?�
The Socialists were deliberately prodding Sir Anthony to use force (they shouted �Murderer� at him when he used it) by these taunting allusions to his political past. He was the man who resigned in 1938 in protest against the placation of Hitler, and his resignation was immediately vindicated by Hitler�s invasion of Austria. That was �force,� long foreseen, and Mr. Eden of 1938 was right. In 1956 the case was different, and no comparison was possible. Egypt was not a great military power but a very weak one. Egypt had not been �appeased� after the British withdrawal, but subjected to provocation by public humiliation. Egypt was not a proven aggressor; it had been the victim of attack and Israel had declared that it would make war on Egypt.
Therefore the comparison with �Hitler� was absurd, unless it was intended solely to denote that the Zionists held Egypt for their enemy. Nevertheless Sir Anthony Eden yielded to this fiction (perhaps the memory of 1938 had too strong a hold on him) for he alluded to President Nasser as �a Fascist plunderer whose appetite grows with feeding,� which was just the language he and Mr. Churchill had rightly used about Hitler eighteen years before. I must add that I do not find these exact words in the text of his speech but this is the form in which they reached �the mob� through the New York Times and that is what counts, as Prime Ministers should know. For the rest, Sir Anthony based his attack on President Nasser on the argument that the Suez Canal �is vital to other countries in all parts of the world … a matter of life and death to us all … the canal must be run efficiently and kept open, as it always has been in the past, as a free and secure international waterway for the ships of all nations …�
But President Nasser had not closed the canal, only nationalized it. It was �open� to the ships of all nations, with one exception. In those five words lay the secret. The only country which was denied full freedom of passage was Israel, with which Egypt was still technically at war; Egypt had been stopping ships bound for Israel and examining them for arms. This was the only case of interference; ergo, Sir Anthony represented only that case; not any British one. However, he concluded: �My friends, we do not intend to seek a solution by force,�
In the following weeks, while �a solution� was sought at various conferences in London and Washington, the press informed the masses that �the Egyptians� would not be able to run the canal, where traffic would soon break down. In fact, they proved able to operate it and shipping continued to pass without hindrance, with the one exception. By clear implication, therefore, the case of Israel was the sole one on which Sir Anthony�s Government could rest its increasingly angry protest. This was soon made clear. On August 22, 1956 Mrs. Rose Halprin, acing chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, stated in the New York Times that �the only legal case which the Western powers have against Egypt in terms of the contravention of the 1888 convention is Egypt�s denial of the canal to Israel ships and the strictures on ships bound for Israel.�
Mrs. Halprin�s statement of the legal position is correct. If the whole dispute rested on a point of law, then the only case which could be invoked was that of Israel; and that would open the whole question of the legality of the creation of Israel itself and of the unterminated state of war between Israel and Egypt. Therefore any government which joined in the uproar against President Nasser was in fact acting on behalf of Israel and Israel alone, and was prejudging all legal questions in favour of Israel.
By October Sir Anthony Eden had gone further in presuming Egyptian aggression. I have not the text of this speech but the version distributed by the Associated Press, and therefore reproduced in thousands of newspapers all over the world, says, �Prime Minister Eden predicted tonight that President Nasser would attack Israel next if he got away with seizure of the Suez Canal. Sir Anthony hinted that Britain would go to Israel�s rescue with arms if necessary� (Sept. 13, 1956).
Thus the British Prime Minister was sliding on a slippery path. Within the space of six weeks the �vital lifeline� and �matter of life and death� theme had become subordinate and the world faced the menace of war based on something that the Egyptian president would do if something else happened. From this point on �the mob� was fed with news of an impending Egyptian attack on Israel (the �interference with international navigation� theme was dropped, as it could not be maintained) and in time this took on so definite a note that many casual readers, I fancy, must have thought that Egypt had already attacked Israel. I give one of many examples (from the London Weekly Review, September 1956, a few weeks before the Israeli attack on Egypt): �We can be absolutely certain that the Arabs, encouraged by Russia, will attack Israel. This is now beyond all doubt and should form the basis of our calculations.�
In writing this book I have been chiefly impelled by the hope of giving the later reader, in what I hope will be a more rational time, some idea of the astonishing condition of the public prints during the 1950�s. He will certainly be unable to comprehend the things that happened unless he is aware of this regime of sustained mis-information and of the boundless lengths to which it was carried. The last statement quoted came after years of repeated Israeli attacks on the various Arab neighbours and of repeated United Nations condemnations of these acts.
In the way I have summarized above the ground was prepared, during the first nine months of the presidential-election year, for the climactic events of October. Arms continued to move into Israel from the West. After the seizure of the Suez Canal Sir Anthony Eden announced that �all arms shipments to Egypt had been stopped�; in the same month (July) two British destroyers were delivered to Israel. Throughout the spring and summer months France, under American �pressure,� supplied jet fighters and other weapons to Israel. In September Canada, at the same prompting, agreed to send jet aircraft to Israel, the Ottawa Government announcing that it had �consulted with the United States before the decision was made� (New York Times, Sept. 22, 1956).
All this time the presidential-election campaign continued. The Democrats, eager to regain the White House, exceeded all past performances in their bids for �the Jewish vote� (the Mayor of New York demanded that Israel should receive arms �as a gift�); the Republican incumbents were slightly more reserved. However, when the rival nomination conventions were held (the Republican at San Francisco, the Democratic at Chicago, both in August) there was little to choose between the submissions which each party made (so that the Jerusalem Post might have repeated, and perhaps did repeat its dictum of 1952, that for the Jewish voter there was �little to choose� between the presidential aspirants).
The only passage of any vital meaning in the �foreign policy programmes� adopted by the two parties related, in each case, to Israel; the other foreign policy statements were platitudinous. The commitments to Israel were in both cases specific.
The Republican Party programme, on which President Eisenhower was unanimously elected candidate, said: �We regard the preservation of Israel as an important tenet of American foreign policy. We are determined that the integrity of an independent Jewish state shall be maintained. We shall support the independence of Israel against armed aggression.�
The Democratic Party programme said: �The Democratic Party will act to redress the dangerous imbalance of arms in the area created by the shipment of Communist arms to Egypt, by selling or supplying defensive weapons to Israel, and will take such steps, including security guarantees, as may be required to deter aggression and war in the area.� (The phrase, �dangerous imbalance of arms,� reflected the propagandist fiction that Israel was �defenceless� and the Arab countries strong; the truth, a little earlier established by Mr Hanson Baldwin was that Israel was stronger in arms than all seven Arab countries together).
These two policy statements gave the picture of a world in the Zionist thrall, and complemented the statements then being made by the British Government. They had no relation to any native American interest but reflected simply Zionist control of the election-machine, or the unshakeable belief of the party-managers in that control. (On this occasion events appeared to justify that belief; the Democratic Party, the higher bidder, captured Congress, although the nominal �Republican� was re-elected President).
The only other event of importance in the two conventions was one which may appear to have little bearing on the theme of this book, but in the later sequel might prove to be of direct significance; the re-nomination of Mr. Richard Nixon as President Eisenhower�s running-mate (and in effect as Vice-President). Mr Eisenhower�s state of health made the Vice-Presidency more important than usual, and the possibility that Mr. Nixon might succeed to the Presidency between 1956 and 1960 was evidently regarded as a major danger by the powers that govern America today, so that a supreme effort was made to prevent his nomination. That was not remarkable, in this century; what was remarkable is that the attempt failed. At some time men will obviously emerge who will break the thrall that lies on American and British political life, and this failure was a portent of that coming liberation, so that the person of Mr. Richard Nixon gains a symbolic importance in our day, even though he, if he became President, might find himself unable to break the bonds.
The reason for this powerful enmity to Mr. Nixon is that he is not an �internationalist.� Far from it, he played the decisive part in the unmasking and conviction of Mr. Alger Hiss, the Soviet agent in Mr. Roosevelt�s administration. This is the true reason why he has ever since had a uniformly bad �press,� not only in America but elsewhere in the Western world. Having that black mark against him, he is held to be a man who, in the chief office, might conceivably rebel against the constraints to which American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, almost without exception, have submitted in the last fifty years and which Vice-President�s automatically incur.[fn]
[fn text: The inevitable twin-reproach, of �anti-semitism,� was also raised against him during the election campaign. A rabbi who knew him well came forward to defend him against it.]
Hence a campaign of great force and ingenuity was begun to prevent his nomination. A member of the President�s own political household (and nominal party) was released from duty for some weeks to conduct a nationwide �Stop Nixon� offensive, with committee-rooms, placards and meetings. This had no effect on the general public, with whom Mr. Nixon appears to be popular. Then, for his particular discomfiture, new tactics were introduced at the convention of the rival, Democratic party. Instead of the elected nominee (Mr Adlai Stevenson) choosing his own vice-presidential �running mate� as on former occasions, the selection of a �running mate� was thrown open to vote and of various competitors Senator Estes Kefauver (an exceptionally zealous Zionist) received the nomination as vice-presidential candidate.
The aim of the manoeuvre was to force the Republican Party�s convention to follow this �democratic procedure� and also to submit the choice of the vice-presidential candidate to vote. It did so and Mr. Nixon, like Mr. Eisenhower, received a unanimous vote. This event, and his deportment during President Eisenhower�s illnesses, made Mr. Nixon�s prospects of becoming President in his own right one day much better than they had ever been deemed before. His story up to now makes him a hopeful figure (as Mr. Eden appeared to be in 1938), and in the chief office he might conceivably produce a sanative effect on American policy and foreign relations.
After the nominations America sat back with relief, for Mr. Eisenhower�s re-election was held sure and he had been given a rousing build-up in the press as �the man who kept us out of war.� The phrase was reminiscent of similar phrases used about Mr. Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and Mr. Roosevelt in 1940, but by 1956 a respite of three years was held to be a boon and he was given credit for this period of �peace,� such as it was.
I was a witness of this election, as of the one in 1952, and realized that in fact war, localized or general, was near. I felt that a respite, at least, would be gained if election day (Nov. 6) passed without the eruption in the Middle East which for months obviously had been preparing (once the election is over the Zionist power to exert pressure diminishes, for a little while). I remember saying to an American friend on October 20 that if the next seventeen days could be got over without war the world might be spared it for another three or four years.[fn]
[fn text: I had in mind what is known to American politicians as �the Farley law.� Named after an exceptionally astute party-manager, Mr James A. Farley, who was held to have contrived the early electoral triumphs of Mr. Roosevelt, the essence of this �law� is that American voters have decided by mid-October for whom they will vote and only their candidate�s death, war or some great scandal between then and November 6 can change their minds. The morning after the Israeli attack on Egypt Mr. John O�Donnell wrote, �Spokesmen in the worried State Department, Pentagon� (War Office) �and headquarters of both parties agree that the Israelis launched their attack on Egypt because they were convinced that the United Slates would take no action in an Israeli war so close to the Presidential elections � Word came through to political headquarters that American Zionists had informed Tel Aviv that Israel would probably fare better under a Democratic administration of Stevenson and Kefauver than under a Republican regime of Eisenhower and Nixon� (New York Daily News).]
On October 29, eight days before the election, war came, by obvious predetermination of the moment held most suitable to cause consternation in Washington and London. From that moment events swept along on a tide of elemental forces let loose and only much later will mankind be able to see what was destroyed and what survived. For Britain and the family of oversea nations offsprung from it, this was nearly ruin, the foreseeable end of the involvement in Zionism.
On October 29, 1956 the Israeli Government announced that it had begun a full-scale invasion of Egypt and that its troops had �advanced 75 miles into Egypt�s Sinai Peninsula.�[fn]
[fn text: At the very moment of the invasion of Egypt another massacre of Arabs was carried out inside Israel and at a point far removed from the Egyptian frontier, namely, the frontier with Jordan, on the other side of Israel. 48 Arabs, men, women and children, of the village of Kafr Kassem, were killed in cold blood. This new Deir Yasin could only be taken by the Arabs, inside or outside Israel, as a symbolic warning that the fate of �utter destruction � man, woman and child � save nothing that breatheth� hung over all of them, for these people were of the small Arab population that stayed in Israel after Deir Yasin and the creation of the new state. The deed was officially admitted, after it had become widely known and was the subject of an Arab protest en route to the United Nations (where it seems to have been ignored up to the date of adding this footnote), by the Israeli premier, Mr. Ben-Gurion six weeks later (Dec. 12). He then told the Israeli Parliament that the murderers �faced trial,� but as the Arabs remembered that the murderers of Deir Yasin, after �facing trial� and being convicted, had been released at once and publicly feted, this was of small reassurance to them. Up to the time this footnote (Dec 20) I have not seen any allusion, among the millions of words that have been printed, to the fate of the 215,000 fugitive Arabs (U.N. Report, April 1956) who were huddled in the Gaza Strip when the Israelis attacked it and Egypt. The Israeli Government has announced that it will not give up this territory: earlier, it had announced that it would under no conditions permit the return of the Arab refugees to Israel. Therefore the lot of this quarter-million people, which at any earlier time would have received the indignant compassion of the world, has been entirely ignored. Presumably they are referred to in the only statement I have seen on the subject, the letter of eleven Arab states to the United Nations of Dec 14, stating that �Hundreds of men, women and children have been ruthlessly murdered in cold blood,� but there seems small prospect of impartial investigation or corroboration, and the Arab letter itself says, �The whole story will never be told and the extent of the tragedy will never be known.� However, in the particular case of Kafr Kassem the facts are on authentic record.]
The news, coming after the long series of earlier attacks on the Arabs and their repeated �condemnation� by the United Nations, sent a shock of repugnance round the world. At that very moment the Hungarians were fighting and winning their people�s war against the Communist revolution. The two destructive forces released from Russia in October 1917 stood self-condemned by acts equally brutal. They were destroying themselves; there was no need to destroy them. At this instant great counter-forces of universal reprobation were released which would have been too strong for them. Not even the �Zionist pressure� in New York could make this deed appear to be �Egyptian aggression� or induce the public multitudes to accept it. This was a gift from heaven, releasing �The West� from both its dilemmas. It only needed to stand aside and, for once, let �world opinion� do the work; for on this occasion there was world opinion, produced by deeds that could not be hidden, disguised or misrepresented by �the press.�
Within twenty-four hours the golden opportunity was cast away, The British and French Governments announced that they would invade the Suez Canal zone �unless Israeli and Egyptian troops agree to stop fighting and withdraw ten miles from the canal within twelve hours,� As this would have left the Israeli troops nearly a hundred miles inside Egyptian territory, the demand obviously was not meant to be accepted by Egypt. Thereon the British and French air forces began intensive bombing of Egyptian airfields and other targets and by destroying Egypt�s air weapon gave unchallenged victory to the invader.
The future reader will hardly be able to imagine the feelings of an Englishman of my kind, who heard the news in America. Shame is too small a word, but as it is the only word I use it to express something I felt more deeply than even at the time of Munich, when I resigned from The Times as the only protest (a stupid one, I now estimate) I could make. I shall always remember the fairmindedness of Americans at this moment. Incredulous, shocked and bewildered, none that I met gave way to the glee over a British discomfiture which is instinctive, though irrational, in many Americans. Some of them realized that American policy, twisting and turning under �the pressure,� had mainly caused this calamitous denouement and shared my sense of shame. These were the ones who understood that the shame was that of all �the West,� in its servience, not particularly of England or America.
However, the blame, as distinct from the shame, at that moment was Britain�s. The consequences of this act reach so far into the future that they cannot be estimated now, but one thing will always be clear: that the glorious opportunity offered by the simultaneous events in Sinai and Hungary was thrown away, apparently through a series of miscalculations unprecedented, I should think, in history.
I aim to show here that merely as a political gamble (surely it cannot be considered as an act of statesmanship) this was like the act of a man who might wager his entire fortune on a horse already withdrawn from a race. By no imaginable turn of events could it have benefited England or France.
Of the three parties concerned, Israel had nothing to lose and much to gain: the world�s instant reprobation glanced off Israel when England and France dashed in to snatch the aggressor�s cloak and win its war; it was left deep in Egyptian territory, cheering its �conquest.� France had no more to lose, unhappily, than the lady in the soldiers� song who �lost her name again.� France was left by its revolution the land of the recurrent fiasco, ever unable to rise out of the spiritual despondency where it lay. During 160 years it tried every form of government conceivable by man and found reinvigoration and new confidence in none. Its prime ministers changed so often that the public masses seldom knew their names; shadowy figures, they seemed indistinguishable even in appearance, and the French politician acquired a tradition of venality; the American comedian said he went to London to see the changing of the Guard and to Paris to see the changing of the Cabinet. A country rendered incapable, by a series of corrupted governments, of resistance to the German invader of its own soil in 1940, in 1956 invaded Egyptian soil in the service of Israel. But this was only an episode in the sad story of France since 1789 and could not much affect its future.
England was a different case, an example, a great name and a tradition of honourable dealing not less in hard times than in good ones. England had a soul to lose, in such company, and no world to gain. England had shown wisdom in applying the lessons of history. It had not tried to petrify an empire and to ward off the tides of change with bayonets. It had accepted the inevitability of change and successfully ridden those tides, successively transforming its Empire of colonies, first into a Commonwealth of independent oversea nations and colonies, and next, as more and more colonies attained to self-government, into a great family of peoples, held together by no compulsion at all, but by intangible bonds which, as the Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth showed in 1953, were, if anything stronger than ever before, not weaker. The avoidance of any rigid organization based on force, and the ever-open door to new forms of relationship between these associated peoples, made the family of nations sprung from �England� and �the British Empire� a unique experiment in human history, in 1956, and one of boundless promise, if the same course were continued.[fn] The outstanding result of the apparent weakness of this elastic process was the strength it produced under strain; it yielded, without collapsing, to stresses which would have snapped a rigid organization based on dogmatic rules, and became taut again when the strain was past.
[fn text: This method is the exact opposite of that by which the world would be ruled under the �world-government� schemes propounded from New York by Mr. Bernard Baruch and his school of �internationalists.� Their concept may in fact be called that of �super-Colonialism� and rests entirely on rigid organization, force and penalty. Speaking at the dedication of a memorial to President Woodrow Wilson in Washington Cathedral in December 1956, Mr. Baruch again raised his demand, in the following, startlingly contradictory terms: �After two world wars � we still seek what Wilson sought � a reign of law based on the consent of the governed � that reign of law can exist only when there is the force to maintain it � which is why we must continue to insist that any agreement on the control of atomic energy and disarmament be accompanied by ironclad provisions for inspection, control and punishment of transgressors .�]
Thus England had the whole achievement of British history to imperil, or lose, in 1956 by any act which, in fact or even in appearance, reversed the policy, or method, which had gained it so great a reputation and produced, on balance, good material results. In that light the British Government�s action of October 30, 1956 has to be considered.
If the Suez Canal was �vital� to it, why had it ever withdrawn? If a friendly Egypt was vital after the withdrawal, why the calculated affront in July? If British ships were freely using the Canal, why the pretence that it was not �open� and that �the freedom and security of international shipping� were endangered? If any vital British interest was at stake, why did it wait until Israel attacked Egypt and only then attack Egypt?
The question may be turned and scrutinized from every angle, and always the same answer emerges. This cannot have been done for the sake of Britain or France; the moment chosen is incriminating. It would not have been done at all, had Israel not existed; ergo, the humiliation which England (and France, if the reader will) suffered was in that cause. The involvement begun by Mr. Balfour fifty years before produced its logical consequence, and by this act its continuance was ensured when release from it was at last at hand.
If any rational calculations of national interest prompted this foolhardiest of Jameson Raids, they will one day appear in the memoirs of men concerned; personally, I doubt if it can ever be justified. At this moment it can only be examined in the light of four weeks� developments, which have already seen the great fiasco.
The enterprise was evidently long prepared between two of the parties at least, Israel and France, evidence of that soon appeared. [fn]
[fn text: Correspondents of The Times, Reuters and other newspapers and agencies subsequently reported that they had seen French aircraft and French air officers in uniform on Israeli fields during the invasion, and at the �victory party� given in Tel Aviv by the Israeli air force, when the Israeli commander, General Moshe Dayan, was present. These reports agreed in an important point: that the French Air Force was present to �cover� or provide �an air umbrella� for Tel Aviv if it were attacked by Egyptian aircraft. Reuters reported that same French air officers admitted attacking Egyptian tanks during the Sinai fighting. As far as the French were concerned, therefore, the pretence of a descent on the Suez Canal to �separate� the belligerents was shown to be false. French officers and aircraft having been seen behind the Israeli lines in Israel and Sinai during the fighting. The Times correspondent reported �an undertaking on the part of France to do her best, if war broke out between Israel and Egypt, to prevent any action against Israel under the terms of the tripartite declaration of 1950 and to see that Israel had appropriate arms with which to fight.� The 1950 declaration pledged France impartially �to oppose the use of force or threat of force in that area. The three governments, should they find any of these states were preparing to violate frontiers or armistice lines, would � immediately take action � to prevent such violations.�]
In England the Government (up to the time of concluding this book) has refused the demand for enquiry into the charge of collusion, which cannot be established in the British (as distinct from the French) case. There does seem a possibility that the British action was a sudden one, taken on the spur of a moment deemed to be favourable. In that case, it was a titanic miscalculation, for when the British and French �ultimatum� was launched the United States had already called an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council and presented a resolution censuring the Israeli attack and demanding that the Israelis withdraw from Egyptian territory (Oct. 29).
Thus the only effect of the British and French attack was to divert the reprobation of the world from Israel to themselves and by November 7 (after a second resolution calling on Israel to withdraw) an overwhelming majority of the General Assembly had duly transferred the weight of its censure to �Britain and France,� Israel then appearing in the third place among the parties told to withdraw.[fn]
[fn text: From that moment, following the example set by the American President, the weight of censure was by stages shifted from �Israel� to �Israel, Britain and France,� then to �Britain and France,� and in the last stage to �Britain� (thus recalling the transformation earlier effected in the case of Hitler�s persecution of men, which began as �the persecution of political opponents,� then became �the persecution of political opponents and Jews,� then �Jews and political opponents� and, at the end, �of Jews�).]
A characteristic public comment of this period was made by Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was generally accepted in America as the voice of her husband, the late President. She said at a news conference three days before the presidential election (she was campaigning for the Democratic nominee), �I do not consider that Israel is an aggressor; she acted in self-defence … I believe Britain and France were technically guilty of aggression� (New York Times, Nov, 4, 1956).
By that time the military fiasco was as clear as the political one; English ears had had to listen for nearly five days to the reports of British bombing of Egyptians, the Suez Canal was blocked by sunken ships, President Nasser was more popular in the Arab world than he had ever been, and the British Government was gradually retreating from �no withdrawal� through �conditional withdrawal� to �unconditional withdrawal.�
President Eisenhower and his administration, made the most of these events. What was coming was evidently known in Washington, (as the attack on Pearl Harbour had been foreknown). American residents had been told to leave the danger zone some days before the attack, and in the two days preceding it President Eisenhower twice admonished Mr Ben-Gurion, once in �urgent� and then in �grave� terms; the only answer he received was a radio message, delivered to him during an aeroplane trip from Florida to Virginia, telling him that Mr. Ben-Gurion had launched the attack.
However, the British government did not officially inform the President (or even the Dominion Governments) of its intention, and Mr. Eisenhower was able to present a face of patient suffering to his people when he appeared on the television screen with the words, �We believe it� (the attack) �to have been taken in error for we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument for the settlement of international disputes.� This was an irreproachable statement, against a background of culpability (the American-prompted supply of French, British and Canadian arms to Israel all through the summer). If the British Government counted on �Zionist pressure� in Washington, it was deceived at that moment. There is always a margin of error in these things and Mr. Eisenhower was ensured of election; in any case, the opportunity to divert his wrath to Britain spared him the need to spend any more of it on Israel (which, for that matter, had got what it wanted). A harsh word to England, moreover, has been a popular thing in America since the Boston Tea Party; is it conceivable that a British government did not realize that?
The British action seems to be accountable only in the context of the entire Zionist delusion. If the thing was to be done at all, the only hope lay in a swift and massively efficient operation which would have gained possession of an intact canal and have confronted the world with something accomplished. The British undertaking was slow from the start and very soon showed all the signs of second thoughts. After the fiasco The Times (Nov. 16) reported from the British base at Cyprus, �The British Government�s decision to intervene in Egypt was taken without the advice of nearly all its senior diplomatic representatives in the area. It was continued against the warnings of most of them about its probable effects on the future of British relations with the Arab nations … When details of the British ultimatum to Cairo and the decision to intervene militarily against Egypt were first learned in British Embassies and Legations in the Arab countries the reactions in nearly all of them appear to have ranged from frank disbelief to talk of its being potentially a disaster … Many were incredulous or aghast when the form of this direct action appeared to associate British policy with that of Israel and France� (this passage vividly recalled to me the feeling I found in �British Embassies and Legations� throughout Europe at the time of Munich).
So much for the political decision; next, the military execution of it. The Times (Nov. 17) reported that among the military commanders in Cyprus �There was a nearly unanimous feeling that if it were done it had best be done quickly. The failure to allow them to complete the job has produced a sense of frustration and confusion among many senior officers here, as well as among many of their subordinates.� The eminent American military writer, Mr. Hanson Baldwin, later discussing �A Confused Invasion� which was �likely to become a famous case study in the world�s military staff colleges,� said that under the confused direction from London �the multiple political, psychological and military objectives became inextricably confused; the result was no clearcut purpose, or at least no objective that military force could achieve, given the limitations imposed on it.�
It soon became apparent that something was indeed delaying and deterring the British and French governments in carrying out the enterprise. To the French this mattered little, for the reasons previously given; for the British, reputation, honour, the hope of prosperity, the cohesion of the great British family were all at stake. Already, in the stress of those days, the Canadian Prime Minister had given warning that such actions might lead to the dissolution of the Commonwealth. In the United Nations Britain stood in the pillory with Israel and France, a sorry sight indeed. Against huge adverse votes, only Australia and New Zealand remained at its side, and that possibly from dogged fidelity more than conviction.
What caused the hazardous undertaking, so vaingloriously announced, to be delayed until it fizzled out? The �vigorous and emphatic protest� from President Eisenhower and the United Nations resolution presumably caused the first reconsideration in London. Then there was the agonizing coincidence of events. As soon as the British and French began to bomb Egyptians the Moscovites turned back into Hungary and began to massacre Hungarians. Then at the United Nations the spokesmen of East and West began to shout �You�re another� at each other; while British and French aeroplanes bombed Port Said the British and French delegates accused the Soviet of inhuman savagery; while Soviet tanks murdered the Magyars the Soviet delegates accused the British and French of naked aggression. These exchanges began to show something of the professional mendacity of peddlers in a Levantine bazaar.
The picture then took on nightmare shapes. Sir Anthony Eden, the rising young man when he resigned in 1938, received the resignation of Mr. Anthony Nutting, the rising young man of 1956, who as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs �had most strongly advised against British intervention in Egypt,� and of other colleagues. To restore his position he had recourse to Sir Winston Churchill, who proclaimed, �Israel, under the gravest provocation, erupted against Egypt … I do not doubt that we can shortly lead our course to a just and victorious conclusion. We intend to restore peace and order in the Middle East and I am convinced that we shall achieve our aim. World peace, the Middle East and our national interest will surely benefit in the long run from the Government�s resolute action.�
This, possibly one of the last of Sir Winston�s pronouncements, remains for the future to audit. The British action has strongly Churchillian traits, and his successor was so closely associated with him that, at all events, it is unlikely to have been done without Sir Winston�s approval. At that same moment the veteran published the second volume of his History of the English-speaking Peoples, and the New York Times said of it, �The author is proud of the fact that his small island, �the little kingdom in the northern sea,� although possessing when this volume begins but three million inhabitants, should have civilized three continents and educated half the world.� Only time can show whether the British attack on Egypt was in that civilizing and educating tradition, or will remain to the discredit of England.
Then came the biggest of the shocks resulting from the British Government�s action. The Soviet Premier Bulganin, in notes to Sir Anthony Eden and the French Prime Minister, plainly threatened them with rocket and atomic attack if they did not �stop the aggression, stop the bloodshed� (the bloodshed, in Budapest continued and the stream of Hungarian fugitives across the hospitable Austrian frontier swelled towards a hundred thousand souls; in Budapest another Bela Kun man of 1919, Mr. Ferenc Munnich, became Moscow�s �key man� in succession to Rakosi and Geroe, and began the new terror). More than that, Mr. Bulganin in a letter to President Eisenhower proposed a joint American-Soviet attack �within the next few hours� on Britain and France, a proposal which the White House in a press statement, merely termed �unthinkable.�
Is anything �unthinkable� in our time? The Hitler-Stalin alliance of 1939 (an obvious development, which the present writer and others foretold) was portrayed to the masses as something �unthinkable� until it was made and the Second War begun. The New York Times at this period quoted �a senior United States diplomat with long experience in the Arab world� as implicitly approving the suggestion: �Our rejection of the Russian offer as �unthinkable,� without offering to consider it within the framework of the United Nations, is interpreted here� (he was in Jordan) �as meaning that despite whatever we may say we will always side with the West and Israel when the chips are down.�
No doubt the proposed joint American-Soviet atomic attack on England was unthinkable at that time, but in fact the two countries were acting together against England in different ways, which combined to produce a massive pressure from two sides. Sir Anthony Eden had embarked on torrential rapids in a frail canoe. There is in America a constant, latent matricidal instinct towards Europe in general and England in particular (it can not be explained but must always be taken into account) which is most easily made active by the charge of �colonialism.� The fact that America is the greatest colonial power in the world (for I see no valid difference between oversea and overland expansion) [fn] does not alter this; it is an irrational impulse which has always to be taken into account in calculating the results of any contemplated action involving �American opinion.�
[fn text: The United States, of course, is the occupant, by conquest or by purchase, of British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies, and of vast Mexican and Russian territories. Only the virtual extirpation, during the life of the American Republic, of the original inhabitants of this great area produces a present picture differing from that of today�s British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies, with their millions of �colonial peoples.� American�s oversea possessions, by conquest or purchase, are few. The Panama Canal Zone, which is under permanent United States sovereignty, is a separate case; if it proves anything, in relation to the Suez Canal and Britain, it proves only the advantages of good �title� and of military adjacency.]
However, �opinion� today is a manufactured product and can be produced in any form desired. What was much more important and should not have been overlooked, was that President Eisenhower, quite evidently, was selected, nominated and in effect elected by the �internationalist� group which dominated Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman, and that American state policy, under this direction, has always supported the revolution and taken on an anti-British nature at moments of peak-crisis. The ultimate �internationalist� ambition is the world-government project, to be achieved through the convergent, destructive forces of revolutionary-Communism and revolutionary-Zionism, and it is the essence of this ambition that the two great English-speaking countries on either side of the Atlantic be kept divided, for only through their division can empire be achieved. This ambition dominated the Second War.
President Eisenhower first emerged as the third figure in the Roosevelt-Marshall-Eisenhower group. The anti-British nature of General Marshall�s proposals in the war years has been earlier shown; he was, in fact, Mr Churchill�s great adversary and the man responsible for the fact that (as the official British history of the war recorded in 1956) despite Mr Churchill�s worldwide renown and apparently formidable authority, he proved, in fact, unable to shape a single major strategic decision during that war; by the outcome of which the Roosevelt-Marshall-Eisenhower policy must be judged. In the final palaver, at Yalta, Mr Roosevelt�s dominant wish was to effect injury on Britain, as the Yalta papers show.[fn]
[fn text: �The President said he would tell the marshall� (Stalin) �something indiscreet, since he would not wish to say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill � The British were a peculiar people and wished to have their cake and eat it too � He suggested the �internationalizing� of the British colony of Hong Kong and that Korea be placed under a trusteeship with the British excluded. Stalin indicated that he did not think this was a good idea and added that �Churchill would kill us.� When post-war political questions came up, he often took positions that were anti-British.� (New York Times, March 17, 1955).]
General Eisenhower, as the commander in Europe, gave the military order resulting, in effect, in the cession of half Europe to the revolution.
Against this background, the support of President Eisenhower could not have been counted on by the British Government; the prehistory is too weighty. He was the executor of the Roosevelt-Marshall policy in the war, and seven years after its end was patently selected by powerful backers, in opposition to Senator Taft, as a man who would further pursue the �internationalist� policy. What was unexpected, and cannot be justified, is the length to which he went in publicly humiliating Britain at this time, by enforcing the �unconditional� withdrawal in the most abject circumstances, by virtually ostracizing the British Ambassador in Washington, and generally by displaying a rancour reminiscent of President Roosevelt at Yalta.
This display of repugnance (the reproachful mien was seen by the entire country on the television screen) was without moral basis. The �pressure� on Britain to withdraw from the Canal, and the ensuing �pressure� on Britain to join with America in the provocative insult to Egypt, which was the true start of the war-crisis of 1956, originated in the White House.
Moreover, this was done while the massacre in Hungary went on and apart from saying that his heart went out to the victims the American President and his administration remained passive in face of that, much graver affair. In this, again, he was consistent with his earlier acts: the dropping of the� repudiation of Yalta� pledge, after his election in 1952, and the order to halt the Allied armies east of Berlin in 1945. The effect of all these was to continue that �support of the revolution� which was the dominant tenet of American state policy during two wars.
One great lesson was learned through the events of October and November, 1956. They showed that, if sufficiently shocked, something like �world opinion� can express itself through the debating society known as the United Nations in New York. The demonstration of repugnance was overwhelming in both cases, those of the attack on Egypt and of the Soviet massacre in Hungary. They showed, further, that as an instrument for giving effect to any such moral censure the United Nations is utterly impotent. In the graver case, that of Hungary, it could do nothing whatever, because the Soviet was in possession and the United States was passive. In the other case, that of Egypt, an immediate result was produced only because both these countries joined against Britain; the one with �measures short of war� (the refusal of oil supplies) and the other with the direct threat of war.
In fact, the British withdrawal from Suez was effected by American-Soviet collaboration, and while �the internationalists� are able to control the American selection-and election-machine that will remain a great danger to the world. An Eisenhower-Bulganin pact is not inherently more �unthinkable,� in the circumstances of this century, than was the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939; at all events, the professed intention (to crush �Communism�) is the same in both cases.
If the British Government put reliance on �Zionist pressure� in Washington (and this had effected the British withdrawal from Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1947-8), this was another miscalculation at that particular moment. It left out of account the shock-effect of the Israeli attack and the greater shock-effect of the British and French one, which turned the eyes of the world chiefly on Britain and much strengthened President Eisenhower in adopting the moral attitude.
Thus the British Government found itself between threats of Soviet attack, on the one hand, and a hostility, apparently surprising to it, from the White House, on the other. The �vital lifeline� was blocked, and Britain�s oil supplies were blocked with it. Apparently it looked confidently to the American Government to make these good and then learned that it could expect no American oil until it �got out�; by this time the entire brunt of the affair fell on Britain. British representatives in Washington were coldly received and found that no matter of substance would be discussed with them; they were left to understand that they might call again if they wished, in their quest for oil, when Britain had �got out.� The American President in those days went much further in the public humiliation of the British Government than he needed to go, and the reason for this must be sought in the anti-British feeling which was shown in the recorded deeds and words of his patron, President Roosevelt. The whole history of American governmental machinations in the matter, during his presidency, deprived him of ground for the posture of honest indignation.
Unhappily, the British humiliations were earned. The attack on Egypt was disastrous in every major point: in its plain appearance of complicity with Israel, in its delivery at the very moment of Soviet defeat in Hungary, and in its indecision and ineffectiveness, once begun. Sir Anthony Eden, worn down by the strain and politically ruined, retired to Jamaica to recuperate. �Unconditional withdrawal� (of the British and French, not of the original aggressor, Israel) began. An �international force,� hurriedly assembled by the United Nations, appeared on the Suez Canal and hung around, wondering what it was supposed to do. President Nasser�s renown soared in the Arab world; the Canal remained blocked; Egypt declared that it would not give up an inch of Egyptian territory; Israel began to complain about �anti-semitism� in Egypt.
Three weeks after the attack the drunken Kruschev, the Soviet Communist leader, jeered at the British and French Ambassadors at a Polish Embassy reception in Moscow: �You say we want war, but you now have got yourselves in a position I would call idiotic … You have given us a lesson in Egypt.� Who could gainsay him?
A week later the New York Times summed up the balance: �Britain and France have gambled and appear to be losing disastrously … Israel has so far emerged from the crisis in a somewhat better position� (Nov. 25).[fn]
[fn text: Two weeks later, after this chapter was finished, the same newspaper dismissed Britain as henceforth �a second class power.�]
The same issue prominently reported the remarks of a member of the Israeli Parliament, a Mr. Michael Hazani: �Mr. Hazani expounded his theory that the failure of Britain and France to clinch their Suez Canal objective was a lucky thing for Israel … The Israelis feel less isolated today than before their October 29 thrust into Sinai which alienated friends and raised the hackles of enemies around the world … Israelis revelled in their newly developed friendship with France which supplied the tools which enabled their forces to whip the Egyptians … A few weeks ago Israelis had a fright when they feared they might have brought the world to the brink of a thermonuclear war. The initial scare has worn off, the threats are regarded as tactics in a war of nerves … Some Knesset members said that Israel too could play that game … so they ask why Israel should not exploit her current nuisance value to induce the great powers to press Egypt and the other Arab states to negotiate peace.�
These sentences may show the reader how little hope of respite the world has until the Zionist adventure is liquidated. Fiasco is the inevitable fate of all who associate themselves with it because its own inevitable end is fiasco, but the brunt of each disaster must and always will fall on these associates, not on the original authors of the mad ambition. Today it cuts across all rational relationships between nations, antagonizing those which have no reason for discord, misleading some to undertakings which cannot possibly bring them good, and prompting others to threats of world war.
In the case of England, which by this act was reinvolved in the morass from which Mr. Ernest Bevin had extricated it in 1947-8, the penalties on this occasion were so heavy that, if the entire process of involvement in Zionism be likened to thirteen steps to the gallows, this may be said to have been the twelfth step; the only worse thing that could befall England through it would be final calamity. Already, on this occasion, the warning about the disintegration of the Commonwealth was heard from the highest place outside the British island itself, and on no earlier occasion had that been even a remote peril. It was put in the dock, beside Israel (and France) before the world and rebuked like a miscreant. It suddenly found alarming menaces arising on all sides. None of the aims announced were achieved, its fighting forces were not allowed to complete even a repugnant task, nothing but discredit remained. At the end higher taxation, deprivation and hardship fell on the land, as the price, and this was in truth further tribute to Zion.
In all this, one thing is clear: none of it could have happened but for the state set up in 1948. If general war had come, it would have been begun by Israel; if it should yet come out of this affair (and that is still an open possibility as this book is ended) it would have been begun by Israel.
Speaking for myself, if I could have persuaded myself that the British attack on Egypt was truly prompted by concern for any British interest, I would have accepted it in the belief that the British Government knew things, unknown to me, which somehow justified what seemed by all outer appearance indefensible and foredoomed. I cannot persuade myself of that. This was but the latest misstep in the tragedy of errors which began with the original British commitment to Zionism in 1903; I have traced them all in this book.
I think this is clearly implicit in what was said from the Government benches in the House of Commons at the fiasco�s end. Sir Anthony Eden being in Jamaica, the task of the apologia fell to his colleagues and one of these, Mr Anthony Head, the Minister of Defence, rested the apologia, not on any British interest at all, but on the claim to have averted �a crippled Israel, a bombed Tel Aviv and a united Arab world� (again, I have not the text and quote from the New York Times; I hold that politicians must stand to what the world understands them to say).
Now, the corollary of the achievement claimed is a disunited Arab world, a bombed Port Said and a crippled Egypt (of these three things one was done, the bombing, and the others were not achieved). What British interest is served by disuniting the Arab world and crippling Egypt? What Englishman would have supported the act if it had been put to him in those terms before it was done? When was the case, for supporting �the fulfilment of Zionist aspirations,� ever put to the British elector in those terms?
In some diseases modern medicine is able to identify the original source of infection, the primary sore. The primary source of all these troubles, as they culminated in the deeds of October 29 and 30, 1956 is demonstrably Zionism; they could not have happened in that way without it. In the logical sequence to its every act since it took shape as a political force in the ghettoes of Russia some eighty years ago, it led the world to the edge of universal war, and on that, brink none knew which of their friends of yesterday would be the foe of the morrow. Here was �the deception of nations� at the full, indeed.
Can time distil good of all this? Clearly it can and will; only for contemporaries is the needless turmoil in which we live infuriating. The first signs of the long-delayed turn for the better begin to show. The nations which lie in the chains of revolutionary-Communism are beginning to throw them off; the Eastern European peoples yet may save themselves by their exertions and the rest of the captive West by their example. I believe the Jews of the world are equally beginning to see the error of revolutionary-Zionism, the twin of the other destructive movement, and as this century ends will at last decide to seek involvement in common mankind.[fn]
[fn text: A development which may have been foreshadowed by a report (if it was accurate) published in the New York Times on December 30, 1956, that �fewer than 900 of the 14,000 Jews who have fled from Hungary � have decided to resettle in Israel,� the �vast majority� preferring to go to America or Canada. On the other hand, if they follow the example of their predecessors they will swell the mass of �explosive� Eastern Jews there whose transplantation, during the last seventy years, has produced the present situation; the incitement of these against America was shown by quotation from Jewish authorities in the preceding chapter.]
The events of October and November 1956 themselves supplied the apt concluding chapter for this book.[fn] I believe they also added the conclusive evidence to its argument.
[fn text: As to the Suez affair, the apt footnote was supplied by President Eisenhower on January 5, 1957 when he asked Congress for standing authority to use the armed forces of the United States against �overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international Communism� in the Middle East. He thus envisaged doing very much what he had censured the Eden Government for doing. An example of �overt� aggression is presumably the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbour; the explosion was �overt� and it was attributed to Spain. Before and after the attack on Egypt the international press began to accuse one Arab nation after another of being �controlled� by international Communism, and President Eisenhower�s request to Congress again opens the prospect that the much-heralded extirpation of Communism might prove, in the event, to be an attack on the Arabs, not on Communism. The description, �controlled by Communism,� is incapable of definition or proof, and simple to falsify through propaganda. For instance, the New York Times on Dec 2. 1956 published pictures of �Russian tanks captured by the Israelis� during the attack an Egypt. Readers� objections led it to admit that the tanks were in fact American. Whether they were captured from the Egyptians remains open to question; anyone can photograph a tank and write a caption. Israel was originally set up with Soviet arms, but is not on that account said to be �controlled by international Communism.�
The news of President Eisenhower�s act was followed by a sharp rise in various Israel shares on the American Stock Exchange and by sermons of praise in several New York synagogues. A possible reason for this was the fact that the President undertook to act militarily in the Middle East only in response to request from �any nation or group of nations� attacked. As Egypt was widely declared to be �the aggressor� in the attack on itself in October 1956, this proviso again lies open to many interpretations, at need. If the words were earnestly meant, they imply that American forces would have been used, on Egyptian request, to repel the Israeli attack of October, 1956. That is difficult to imagine; to put it mildly, American military intervention in response to a request from any other Middle Eastern state than Israel is hard to picture; however, times change and all things are possible.]