From Yahweh to Zion
Page 30
By defining itself as a “Jewish state,” Israel also included racial discrimination in its birth certificate. A constitutional law was passed in 1985 to prohibit political parties from opposing this principle.361 Just five years after the end of the Second World War, Israel adopted the Law of Return that prevented the 1948 Palestinian refugees from returning to their villages. As Haim Cohen, former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, remarked: “The bitter irony of fate decreed that the same biological and racist argument extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the state of Israel.”362
Even before its birth, it was clear that Israel would carry in its genes, not only colonialist expansion and racial discrimination, but also terrorism, trademarked by the “false flag” strategy. The Irgun, a right-wing militia founded in 1931 as an offshoot of the Haganah, on the ideological basis of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, whose leaders included future prime minister Menachem Begin, carried out dozens of bombings and other attacks against Palestinian and British targets between 1937 and 1948 (when it was integrated into the newly created Israeli army). Its most high-profile attack was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. The hotel was the British administrative and military headquarters. Six Irgun terrorists dressed as Arabs entered the building and deposited around the central pillar 225 kg of TNT hidden in milk cans, while other militiamen were spreading explosives along the access roads to the hotel to prevent the arrival of rescuers. The stratagem failed when a British officer grew suspicious and intervened; a shooting ensued. The commandos fled and detonated the explosives, killing ninety-two people, twenty-eight of them British and fifteen Jewish.
In his 1951 autobiography, Menachem (Volfovitz) Begin, former leader of the Irgun and founder of the Herut, forerunner of today’s Likud Party, vaunted the importance of his terrorist actions for the founding of the Zionist state. In his autobiography The Revolt, Menachem Begin brags about “the military victory at Deir Yassin,” because the news of this slaughter of 254 villagers (mostly unarmed men, women, and children) immediately led to the “maddened, uncontrollable stampede of 635,000 Arabs. […] The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”363
“Irgun was from the beginning organized on the strictly conspiratorial lines of a terrorist underground movement,” writes disillusioned Zionist Arthur Koestler. As for the members of the Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), a splinter group of the Irgun founded by Avraham Stern in 1940, which would subsequently be led by another future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, they “were believers in unrestricted and indiscriminate terror.”364 On November 6, 1944, members of Lehi (otherwise known as the Stern Gang) assassinated Lord Moyne, the British resident minister in the Middle East, for his anti-Zionist positions. (The bodies of his murderers, executed in Egypt, were later exchanged for twenty Arab prisoners and buried at the “monument of heroes” in Jerusalem). On September 17, 1948, the same terrorist group murdered in Jerusalem Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat appointed United Nations mediator in Palestine. He had just submitted his report A/648, which described “large-scale Zionist plundering and destruction of villages,” and concluded that the “return of the Arab refugees rooted in this land for centuries” was necessary. His assassin, Nathan Friedman-Yellin, was arrested, convicted, and then amnestied; in 1960 he was elected to the Knesset.365
The “Human Material”
Anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Shonfeld claimed that the Zionists had, during World War II, knowingly aggravated the Holocaust, as a necessary founding sacrifice for their Jewish state. Relying on numerous testimonies, he thus summarized the politics of the Zionist leaders: “The shedding of Jewish blood in the Diaspora is necessary in order for us to demand the establishment of a ‘Jewish’ state before a peace commission. Money will be sent to save a group of ‘chalutzim’ (pioneers), while the remainder of Czech Jewry must resign itself to annihilation in the Auschwitz crematoria.” In other words, “The Zionist leaders saw the spilt Jewish blood of the holocaust as grease for the wheels of the Jewish national state.”366
In 1948, when international recognition was achieved, Israel’s goal was twofold: territorial expansion through annexation and ethnic cleansing of Arab territories, and demographic expansion through mass immigration. The first objective required that tensions be maintained in order to provide pretexts for the enlargement of borders by force. As for the immigrants needed to colonize the conquered territories, they would be acquired by whatever means might be necessary. In the 1940s, the first “human material” (to use Theodor Herzl’s own phrase from The Jewish State) came from the Jewish “refugees” who had fled or been deported during the war.
We have seen how behind the scenes, the Zionists opposed refugees being welcomed anywhere other than Palestine, in accordance with the principle enunciated by Ben-Gurion in 1935: “We must give a Zionist response to the catastrophe faced by German Jewry—to turn this disaster into an opportunity to develop our country.” Again on December 8, 1942, Ben-Gurion declared at the Mapai general assembly: “It is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people and the Yishuw.”367 Early in 1944, Roosevelt recommenced opening the borders of allied countries to Jewish refugees, but his efforts again clashed with the opposition of Jewish representative elites. When Morris Ernst, sent by Roosevelt to London to discuss the project, returned with British agreement to welcome 150,000 refugees, Roosevelt was satisfied: “150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.” But a week later, Roosevelt announced to Ernst the abandonment of the project “because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” The Zionists “know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.’ But if there is a world political asylum, they cannot raise their money.” Incredulous, Ernst made the rounds of his Jewish contacts. He wrote in his memoirs that “active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the US] in order to undermine political Zionism.”368
Truman’s efforts were similarly hampered. Rabbi Philip Bernstein, who was in 1946 adviser on Jewish affairs to the US high commissioner in Germany, testified in 1950 in the Yiddish Bulletin that he had lied to the president by making him believe that the overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees wanted to settle in Palestine. In reality, they wanted either to return where they came from or to emigrate to the United States. Rabbi Abraham Klausner, chaplain and “father figure” at the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation in April 1945, wrote in a report of May 2, 1948, to the American Jewish Conference: “I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine. They are neither prepared to understand their own position nor the promises of the future. […] It must be borne in mind that we are dealing with a sick people. They are not to be asked, but to be told, what to do.” The means of “forcing” them to emigrate into Palestine against their will included propaganda (rumors of pogroms in the United States), harassment, and confiscation of food.369
The operation was a success: between 1945 and 1952, nearly one million Jews settled in the territories evacuated by the Palestinians. Until 1948, this still had to be done in violation of British rule. But it could be done with the approval of world public opinion, provided the right symbols were mobilized. And what more powerful symbol than the Exodus, the eternally recyclable myth of the Jewish people in desperate search of its Promised Land? On July 11, 1947, 4,500 refugees from Displaced Persons camps in Germany, selected by the organization in charge of Zionist clandestine immigration (Mossad Le’aliyah Beth) and smuggled to the south of France,
embarked from there for Palestine, aboard a vessel that, at sea, was renamed Exodus 1947 in order to attract more media attention. The British prevented the ship from landing. Three refugees were killed and dozens were wounded in the violent clashes. The British returned the refugees to their French port of origin, but the French government, headed by Léon Blum, agreed with the Zionists to prevent them from disembarking. They were finally sent back to Germany, which generated worldwide sympathy for them and protests against the British.370
The victims of Nazism were not the only ones “convinced” to immigrate to Israel. The Zionists also coveted the Jews of the Arab countries, especially those of Iraq—descendants of the millennial community of Babylon—who were unwilling to emigrate. The chief rabbi of Iraq, Khedourin Sassoon, spiritual leader of his community for forty-eight years, declared in 1950: “Iraqi Jews will be forever against Zionism. Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges for 1000 years and do not regard themselves as a distinctive separate part of this nation.”371
The Zionists then used a method that they later perfected: the fabrication of false anti-Semitic acts. Between 1950 and 1951, the city of Baghdad was hit by a series of explosions targeting Iraqi Jews, causing deaths, injuries, and material damage. These bombings, blamed on Arab nationalists, spread fear in the Jewish community. On the very night of the first attack, Zionist tracts were already circulating, enjoining “all the tribe of Zion living in Babylon” to make its Aliyah. An Iraqi court later convicted about 20 people for these bombings. All were members of the secret Iraqi Zionist organization. Approximately 125,000 Jews had meanwhile left Iraq for Israel.372 These new Israelis of Iraqi origin soon complained of discrimination. One of them, Naeim Giladi, testified in his book of the racism which then prevailed among the Ashkenazi toward the Jews of the Middle East and Africa (descendants of converted Berbers or Sephardic Jews exiled in the sixteenth century) and who were subjected to aggressive eugenic measures.373
The Soviet Union and Israel
The Eastern European Ashkenazim nevertheless remained the main reservoir of Jews coveted by the Zionist state. Since they were in the Soviet Union or its satellites, their immigration was subject to Stalin’s goodwill, and relations between Israel and Stalin would deteriorate.
Until 1947, the historic founders of Israel had skillfully exploited the rivalry between the US and Soviet empires in order to persuade each of them to support the UN Partition Plan (and bring with them the countries in their respective spheres of influence) by offering to both parties the prospect of a strategic alliance in the Middle East. Truman’s support for the creation of a Jewish state was unsurprising, but Stalin’s was unexpected. Using newly uncovered documents from Russian archives, Laurent Rucker shows, in Moscow’s Surprise, that Soviet support resulted from years of secret diplomatic dealings that started in January 1941 in London, when Ivan Maisky, Moscow’s ambassador to London, met with Chaim Weizmann, then in November with Ben-Gurion, who was on his way to the United States. On that occasion, Maisky stated to Ben-Gurion, “You are going to America. You will render us a great service if you will impress upon people there the urgency of helping us; we need tanks, guns, planes—as many as possible, and above all, as soon as possible.” In 1943, Maisky was transferred to Moscow to prepare for the future peace conferences, and stopped in Palestine on the way, to meet with Ben-Gurion. From that time, writes Rucker, “contact between Soviet and Zionist representatives intensified as plans for the postwar order were formulated.” In return for Zionist help in securing US military support for the Soviet Union in 1941–1943, the Soviet Union would provide “political, military, and demographic support for the Zionist movement” from 1947 to 1949.374
Recognizing the Jewish state on May 14, 1948, Stalin had good reason to hope that Israel would lean on the Soviet side in the Cold War that was looming. After all, the Israeli Labor Party, the founding and majority party, was of socialist and collectivist orientation. Israel thus obtained from the Soviets the armaments that enabled it to fight the Arab countries hostile to the new state in 1948, even while the United States was respecting the UN arms embargo. The weapons came from Czechoslovakia, where the great Skoda arsenal had passed from the Nazis to the Communists. Without these weapons, it is likely that the State of Israel would not have survived. Moreover, more than two hundred thousand Jews, mainly from Poland, but also from Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, were allowed to emigrate to Palestine, after the British withdrawal, during the years 1948–1952.
Stalin, however, was not long in noticing the double game Israel was playing in asking for American support. Moreover, Stalin was concerned about the unexpected and overwhelming enthusiasm of the Soviet Jews for Israel and their massive demand for emigration. When Golda Meir (born Mabovitch in Kiev) moved to Moscow as the first ambassador of the State of Israel, five months after the official foundation of the Jewish state, her arrival aroused a suspicious enthusiasm among the Russian Jewish population: fifty thousand Jews went to the synagogue on the Saturday following her arrival. Golda Meir missed no occasion to remind Russian Jews that their current country of residence was not their true home, and “every one of her public appearances was accompanied by a demonstration of Soviet Jewish identification with Israel,” writes Yuri Slezkine.375
Stalin was also concerned about the loyalty of Soviet Jews in the war against America, where many had relatives.376 He began to repress the resurgence of Jewish nationalism in November 1948, arresting the leaders of the influential Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee, and closing many Jewish institutions in the country. On January 15, 1953, nine doctors, including seven Jews, were accused by Stalin of conspiracy to poison him. This affair of the “Jewish doctors” caused an uproar in the West. “Stalin will succeed where Hitler failed,” predicted Commentary, press organ of the American Jewish Committee. “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. […] The parallel with the policy of Nazi extermination is almost complete.”377 On February 11, the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. It was in this context that Stalin died suddenly, on the morning of March 6, 1953, at the age of seventy-four, officially of a cerebral hemorrhage, but more likely of poisoning. A month later, the “Jewish doctors” were released.
The 1950s were marked by the disaffection of many European Communists, some of whom converted to Trotskyism. Their denunciation of Soviet anti-Semitism made it possible to forget the strong involvement of Jews in the Red Terror. Thus, for example, Annie Kriegel left the French Communist Party, the PCF, in 1956 to devote herself to writing a critical history of communism. In her 1982 book Israël est-il coupable? (Is Israel Guilty?) Kriegel absolved Israel of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, casting the accusation as far-left propaganda. In the same year, she founded the journal Communisme with Stéphane Courtois, who, after her death, directed the publication of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997), which sold over a million copies worldwide. That volume succeeds in exposing the crimes of Communism (80 million deaths) without ever mentioning the Jewish component of the Communist forces in Europe.
Nasser, the Useful Enemy
In the United States, after Truman’s two terms, General Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in November 1952. Although he had previously been a member of Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, he ran on the Republican ticket, at the invitation of a faction that wanted to block the natural leader of the Republican Party—Robert Taft, a senator who had protested against Roosevelt’s military and economic support to the USSR. In 1948, Taft had also courageously denounced the Nuremberg trials, which in his view violated the basic principles of justice. Taft then opposed the formation of NATO in 1949; Eisenhower, in contrast, had just been appointed first commander-in-chief of this military alliance. “Ike” would become the president of the Cold War, and his two inaugural addresses (January 1953 and 1957) were entirely devoted to this subject. Eisenhower was the first of a long series of American presidents who would me
ntion his support of Israel during election campaigns: “The state of Israel is democracy’s outpost in the Middle East and every American who loves liberty must join the effort to make secure forever the future of this newest member in the family of nations” (October 16, 1952).378
In 1948, the Arab countries had proven totally unfit to confront the Israeli intruder due to their dissensions, corruptions, and betrayals. But in 1952, a more formidable enemy stood against Israel in the person of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who took power in Egypt and soon became a hero of Arab nationalism and, even more dangerously, pan-Arabism. Nasser’s willingness to recognize Israel within the borders of the Partition made him an even more formidable obstacle to the secret project of Israeli expansionism. Israeli hawks reacted with a new, highly confrontational policy aimed at creating pretexts for attacking Egypt and conquering new lands, while discrediting Nasser in the eyes of the West so as to prevent any alliance between Egypt and the West. If Nasser—the founder of a secular democratic state—allied with the Americans, they would apply irresistible diplomatic and economic pressure forcing Israel to accept peace on a territorial basis deemed insufficient by the Zionists. The Zionist strategy thus was to ensure that Israel was perceived in Washington, London, and Paris as the only reliable bastion of anti-communism in the Middle East, while simultaneously portraying Nasser’s Egypt as a communist ally. The Cold War was the indispensable context for achieving these objectives, which is why a climate of anti-communist paranoia had to be maintained among the American people and elite. Zionist propaganda did not hesitate to demonize Nasser by comparing him to Hitler: Ben-Gurion called him a “fascist dictator” while Menachem Begin insisted that he was surrounded by Nazi emissaries.379