The tightly-coordinated Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Western Asia, initiated in the early 20th century, involved every conceivable form of clandestine activity.
From Alison Weir’s book gainst Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel1All sources all come from Alison Weir’s extensively-researched 2014 book.we learn that in 1913, an academic named Horace M. Kallen founded an elitist secret society called the Parushim which, according to former New York Times editor and author Peter Grose, means ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate’ in Hebrew. The Parushim grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society and its aim was to covertly push Zionism in the U.S. and internationally.
One of its leaders was prominent Jewish American attorney Louis Brandeis who in 1915 became head of the international Zionist Central Office, newly moved to America from Germany, and in 1916 Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson. From this position he would exercise immense political power, in contravention of all ethical principles of judicial reserve.
Brandeis recruited ambitious young men, often from Harvard, to work for the Zionist cause – and further their careers in the process. Historian Bruce Allen Murphy wrote in 1982: “In one of the most unique arrangements in the Court’s history, Brandeis enlisted Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, as his paid political lobbyist and lieutenant. Working together over a period of 25 years, they placed a network of disciples in positions of influence, and labored diligently for the enactment of their desired programs.” Frankfurter also went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939.
Peter Grose wrote2Israel in the Mind of America (1984), 53. of the Parushim: “As the Harvard men spread out across the land in their professional pursuits, their interests in Zionism were kept alive by secretive exchanges and the trappings of a fraternal order. Each invited initiate underwent a solemn ceremony, swearing the oath ‘to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims’”.
Israeli professor Dr. Sarah Schmidt described it as “a secret guerrilla force”.3Dr. Sarah Schmidt, “The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 65 (Dec. 1975).
The Zionist strategy for colonising Palestine was first to try to buy up the land, and if that failed, to use force to drive out the inhabitants. So from the late 1930s to 1948 they organised illicit gunrunning operations in the U.S., to supply weaponry to Zionist terrorist groups they had created in Palestine, to fight both the Palestinians and the British. Future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, a terrorist and head of the Irgun militia, later boasted that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.
As a consequence, chaos and civil war raged in Palestine under the British mandate and by 1947, when Britain had lost all control of the territory, it announced it would end its mandate, and tossed the fate of Palestine to the newly-formed United Nations. Zionists, who already wielded enormous influence in U.S. political spheres, pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them 55 percent of the territory. The immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population to 30 percent, but land ownership had only increased from 1 percent to 6/7 percent.
Virtually every senior Foreign Service diplomat, American State Department chief, and top military advisor voiced strenuous opposition to the plan of partitioning Palestine, on moral grounds, on grounds of U.S. interests, and on the grounds that it violated every principle laid down in the U.N. Charter, as well as every principle on which American concepts of Government were based.
The State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, George F. Kennan, issued a top-secret document in January 1947 that outlined the enormous damage done to the U.S. by the partition plan.”4Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with respect to Palestine” Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, 57-58.
The director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, Loy Henderson, consistently opposed the Zionist proposal, maintaining that such a partition would have to be implemented by force, was “not based on any principle” and “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future…”
For his ethics and prescience, Henderson received the Zionist treatment: He was virulently attacked, called “anti-Semitic”, his resignation demanded and his family threatened. In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas.
Meanwhile the Zionists turned their attention to the U.N. delegates at the General Assembly, threatening a number of delegations, including that of France, saying they would block post-war economic aid ear-marked for their countries if they didn’t vote for the partition plan of Palestine.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had died in April 1945 and been succeeded by his vice-president Harry Truman. As 1948 was an election year, Truman found himself under unrelenting pressure by campaigners to recognise a Jewish state in Palestine, whilst his diplomatic corps and top military aids unanimously advised against it.
As Truman vacillated, Secretary of State George Marshall, chief of staff of U.S. armed forces in WW2 and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious, and condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, warning Truman that if he succumbed to pressure, he would leave the “great dignity of the office of the President…seriously diminished”. According to Marshall, Truman was shaken but agreed with him.
Yet, within two days, Truman did a volte face.
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was outraged.5See John Snetsinger, Truman, the Jewish Vote, and the Creation of Israel (1974), 140.
An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through aggression masked as defence.
And Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, noted:
The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests… No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes.
In 1949, after what Israel calls its “war of independence”, in which it ruthlessly forced from their homes as many non-Jews as possible, the Jewish state extended its territory to 78 percent of Palestine.
The State of Israel was not forged through debate, agreement and consent, but through blackmail, bribery and bullets.
Britain was Israel’s midwife and the U.S. its consolidating force. In the 1880s the Zionists realised that the American political framework was uniquely susceptible to organised external pressure, because the very elements of a system designed to support democracy could be subverted.
America’s first president, George Washington, in his farewell address warned that the American system of government could all too easily be exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country.
A new book entitled America in the Grip of a Foreign Power: Israel’s Lobby, written by Eli Clifton, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Ian Lustick, political scientist specialising in Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. foreign policy, describes how all the most determined U.S. presidents of the last 80 years were coerced and blackmailed into supporting Israel, and how the Israel Lobby’s power has only increased since 1948.
The Guardian of August 2 published a presentation of the book by its authors.
Starting with the Truman years, they move on twenty years to President Gerald Ford, who commissioned a “reassessment” of U.S. policy in the Middle East in the face of continuous Israeli intransigence towards a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement.
Former foreign policy officials were convened by Kissinger to make up a committee, and the unanimous recommendation was to pressure Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in order to achieve enduring peace. Ford was ready to adopt the recommendation when fierce opposition from the main Israel Lobby organisations culminated in the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) drafting a letter that it managed to get signed by 76 senators.
Next up to have his peace initiative comprehensively sabotaged was Jimmy Carter, of whom the authors write: “The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict… Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.” His public consideration of a Palestinian homeland sparked outrage in the Israel Lobby as they mobilised against him.
The authors inform us that Carter was undeterred and criticised prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. Carter’s differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even more marked, and he began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.
In October 1977, his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communiqué with the Soviet foreign minister committing the superpowers to achieving “as soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. The authors describe the reaction of the Israeli government and of the Israel Lobby as “nearly apoplectic”. Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan threatened Carter with the political price he would pay for defying the powerful lobby saying: “I can go to the American Jews”, and Carter surrendered.
Negotiations were scaled back. A Palestinian homeland would no longer feature as a central issue. And a separate peace was signed between Israel and Egypt, which led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and the assassination of Sadat. As the authors point out: “It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
President George HW Bush also trod a similar path. And when it came to Obama, the authors write: “No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims.” But he too would be blackmailed into dramatically reversing course. And in his memoir, A Promised Land, he complains about AIPAC’s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled anti-Semitic.
Of all the covert means they use to secure their goals: money, propaganda and censorship, the Israel Lobby’s naked exploitation of the word “anti-Semitic” has to be the most craven ploy.
Now in a position to silence politicians, journalists, professors and university students across the globe, it is not only America that must find the courage to fight for its freedom, but all of us. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “[C]ourage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at its testing point”…
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