Two of President Harry Truman's letters from 1947 appear in Harry S. Truman by Margaret Truman (William Morrow and Co, New York, 1973) pages 384-385. The first is to Eleanor Roosevelt :
"The actions of some of our United States Zionists will eventually prejudice everyone against what they are trying to get done. I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side."
The second letter (to Henry Morgenthau, Jr) reads in pertinent part :
"The vote in the United Nations is only the beginning and the Jews must now display tolerance and consideration for the other people in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be neighbors."
The following verses (from the 23rd chapter of Exodus) present Zionism in a nutshell :
I will send my terror upon all the people whose land you invade, and they will panic before you. I will send hornets ahead of you to drive out the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites. But I will not do this all in one year because the land would become a wilderness, and the wild animals would become too many to control. I will drive them out a little at a time until your population has increased enough to fill the land and I will fix your boundaries from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the southern deserts to the Euphrates River. I will help you defeat the people now living in the land, and you will drive them out ahead of you.
Make no treaties with them and have nothing to do with their gods. Do not even let them live among you! If you do, they will infect you with their sin of idol worship, and that would be disastrous for you. (Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.)
"Berl Katznelson, a close ally of Ben-Gurion and a leading intellectual force among the early Zionists, put the point bluntly : 'The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.'" (quoting from The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stehen M. Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2007, p. 80)
"Israeli terrorists also murdered the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, because they opposed his proposal to internationalize Jerusalem. The perpetrators of these acts were not isolated extremists : the leaders of the murder plot were eventually granted amnesty by the Israeli government and one of them was later elected to the Knesset." (quoting from The Israel Lobby, see just above, p. 102)
Article I (Purposes) of the United Nations Charter states :
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end : to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and
4. To be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
The passage from Exodus and the Purposes of the United Nations are diametrically opposed. The sixty-six years on conflict in the Middle East, the terrorist attacks on the United States, the resulting war in Afghanistan, as well as the war in Iraq--all have their root cause and grow out of United States policies that favor Zionism and contravene the purposes of the United Nations.
Here is a paragraph with citations omitted from the website TrueTorahJews.org : "Zionism was supported by the German SS and Gestapo. Hitler himself personally supported Zionism. During the 1930's, in cooperation with the German authorities, Zionist groups organized a network of some 40 camps throughout Germany where prospective settlers were trained for their new lives in Palestine. As late as 1942 Zionists operated at least one of these officially authorized 'Kibbutz' training camps over which flew the blue and white banner which would one day be adopted as the national flag of 'Israel'."
A version of the birth of Israel is offered by the former Lisa Halaby -- the California girl and Princeton grad who married the King of Jordan -- in her book Leap of Faith -- Memoirs of an Unexpected Life (Her Majesty Queen Noor, Miramax Books, 2003). She reports that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived peacefully in the Middle East and in Palestine for centuries, and it was not until the rise of Zionism and the creation of Israel that animosities "took root." She cites a process that started with a 1917 declaration by British Foreign Minister Balfour. That process took a "giant step" in 1920 when the newly formed League of Nations created Britain's postwar "trusteeship" of Palestine, The British, she says, were in effect promising two contradictory goals for the territory : a homeland to the Jews and eventual independence for the Arabs. There was a steady influx of European Jews thereafter and that increased when the Nazis came to power in Germany and then proceeded to occupy much of Europe.
Halaby/Noor further reports that following the war, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states. 55% of the land went to the Jews -- even though they owned 6 percent of the land and represented only one-third of Palestine's population. Queen Noor quotes Mahatma Gandhi as saying at that time : "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France to the French. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct."
Queen Noor also reports that Palestine experienced its own 9/11 at a place called Deir Yassin where a massacre of its inhabitants was carried out by the Stern gang, a Jewish terrorist group of several hundred members founded in 1940, and the Irgun, the military arm of the Revisionist Party, under the command of Menachem Begin, a future Prime Minister of Israel. She further states : "Though the leaders of Deir Yassin had made a peace pact with neighboring Jewish villages, Israeli terrorist forces entered the village on the morning of April 9, 1948, and, after overcoming initial resistance, went house to house, shooting the people inside at close range, then blowing up some of the houses. No one knows the exact number of Palestinians who died that day. The gangs said they killed hundreds."
She reports further : "Were it not for the testimony of eyewitnesses, the report of a member of the International Red Cross, and a few brave Jewish scholars who pressed for access to primary sources in Israeli archives, the scope of the tragedy might never have been known. Some key documents are still 'classified' by the Israeli government, including photographs of the aftermath of the attack. Some Zionists even go so far as to deny the massacre ever happened."
Queen Noor adds that, following Dier Yassin, atrocities were committed by both sides in the countdown to the British withdrawal. She says further that "It was clear that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had no intention of allowing the Palestinians to be part of the Jewish state. Jewish military forces had been steadily and systematically depopulating Arab villages for months, driving out the inhabitants and then bulldozing their houses to the ground....When I was growing up in the United States, the prevailing view of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war was the Israel was forced to defend itself against hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs pouring across its borders. But now that I was living in Jordan, I was discovering that the Arab view was quite the opposite: Israel had been on the offensive, demonstrated by the fact that most of the fighting was not within the territory partitioned to Israel but in the territory partitioned to the Palestinians." She observes further in her book that by the end of the 1948 Israel had captured 78 percent of the land assigned to the Arab state, thereby gaining nearly one-third more of the territory than the UN had originally granted in UN General Assembly Resolution 181. And she reports further that Israel then ignored UN Resolution 194, passed in December 1948 and reaffirmed many times since, acknowledging the rights of the Palestinians to receive compensation for properties seized and the right of return to their homes.
One matter that was not mentioned by Queen Noor was the secret agreement between the Zionists and Jordan's King Abdullah reported at page 30 of The Iron Wall by Avi Shliam (W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London, 2000 and 2001) : "On 17 November 1947, twelve days before the UN met to decide the fate of Palestine, Golda Meir, representing the Jewish Agency in Sharett's absence, secretly met with King Abdullah in Naharayuim, on the river Jordan, and reached a broad understanding with him. Abdullah began by outlining his plan to preempt the mufti, to capture the Arab part of Palestine, and to attach it to his kingdom, and he asked about the Jewish response to this plan. Mrs. Meir replied that the Jews would view such an attempt in a favourable light, especially if Abdullah did not interfere with the establishment of a Jewish state, avoided a military confrontation, and appeared to go along with the United Nations. She did not promise Abdullah any active Jewish support in his bid to annex the Arab part of Palestine adjacent to his kingdom. Rather, the understanding was that he would take it himself, the Jews would set up their own state, and, after the dust had settled, the two parties would make peace. This meeting did not commit either side formally to a particular course of action, certainly not in advance of the UN decision. But it did result in a meeting of minds and laid the foundations for a partition of Palestine along lines radically different from the one eventually envisioned by the United Nations."
In his book FDR Meets Ibn Saud, (Friends of the Middle East: New York, 1954) William A. Eddy, U. S. Minister to Saudia Arabia, recalled a November 1945 White House meeting between President Harry Truman, Minister Eddy, and three other Chiefs of Mission to Arab countries. These ministers complained that the countries that were hosting them were upset with the rise of Zionism and U. S. support for it. Truman concluded the meeting by saying, "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."
Wikipedia reports that there was a UN General Assembly vote on partition of Palestine (resolution 181) held on November 29, 1947. A two-thirds majority was needed to pass and with some vote switches, it was obtained.
President Truman is quoted by Wikipedia as saying : "I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders -- actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats -- disturbed and annoyed me." (The pressure included a personal visit from Truman's former business partner and a letter from Truman's mother, as reported In Harry S. Truman by daughter Margaret.) The Wikipedia account states further that "Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke with anger and contempt for the way the UN vote had been lined up. He said the Zionists had tried to bribe India with millions and at the same time his sister, Vijayalalshmi Pandit, had received daily warnings that her life was in danger unless 'she voted right'. Three countries--Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines -- were persuaded to change their positions, which enabled the required majority to be reached. Liberia's Ambassador to the United States complained that the US delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries."
UN resolution 181 legitimized two states, but sixty-four years later there's still no Palestinian state. Moreover, Israel has yet to adopt a constitution that protects the civil rights of the Palestinians within its borders. Over the years there have been any number of UN General Assembly resolutions that attempted to apply pressure, and usually these resolutions pass with the votes of nations representing a large portion of the world's 7 billion inhabitants. These resolutions are consistently voted against by six or seven nations (Israel and the US being two of these with the US being the only country with a population over 25 million.) Since UN General Assembly votes carry no sanction while its Security Council votes do, perennial US vetoes of anti-Zionist resolutions emasculates the United Nations and renders it incapable of carrying out the purposes laid out in its charter.
Israel is a legitimate state only so long as it is in compliance with UN resolution 181 which created it. Barring prior resolution of all matters to the satisfaction of the United Nations, United States diplomatic recognition of and aid to the state of Israel will cease on the first day of my administration. I will direct my ambassador to the United Nations to work through the Security Council to ensure that the United Nations takes whatever action is required reach compliance with UN resolution 181 of 1947 and the adoption of an Israeli constitution that guarantees the civil rights of Palestinians. In addition, I will seek repeal of 36 US Code sec. 2301 that begins : "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is an independent establishment of the United States Government..." as well as associated legislation that provides for payment out of the public treasury of museum employees, officers, and directors. The way the museum is set up and its placement on federal land makes our government a communicator of Zionist propaganda, which is not just inappropriate--it's downright wrong.
In his book, Eisenhower and the Cold War, (Oxford University Press, 1981) Robert A. Divine reports on the 1956 Suez War. When Egypt's President Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, the British and and French didn't like it. Their representatives met with Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion where a plot was hatched whereby Israel would be the first to attack Egypt. The French and the British, pretending great surprise, would then invade Egypt on the pretext of having to "save" the canal from destruction by the warring parties. And that's just what they did.
The Soviets were livid and threatened World War III. President Eisenhower was himself furious, but was able to mollify the Russians and worked through the United Nations to force the British and French to abandon their attempt to seize the canal and withdraw from all conquered territory. When Israel dragged its feet on withdrawing from two key pieces of real estate (Gaza and Sharm el-Sheikh) alleging that they harbored terrorists, Eisenhower threatened Israel with reduction of U. S. aid, termination of private U. S. aid to Israel and U. N. economic sanctions. At that point the Israel lobby went to work on Congress...and all hell broke loose. Although the House of Representatives was supportive (Speaker Sam Rayburn said : "America has either one voice or none, and that voice is the voice of the President -- whether everybody agrees with him or not."), the Senate refused to go along.
The President was forced to go over the Senate's head with a nationwide radio and television address. Only then did the Senate back down and Israel agree to withdraw. But the Israeli withdrawal was made under several conditions that clearly rewarded its aggression. Chief among them was that the retreating Israeli army would be replaced in Gaza with a United Nations police force, as indeed it was.
Distinguished professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government have written a thoroughly researched and footnoted academic work titled The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2007.) I'll quote from the dust jacket : "They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argue that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to steer U. S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America's posture throughout the Middle East...and that the policies it has encouraged are profoundly damaging to both America's national interests and Israel's long-term security. The lobby's influence also affects America's relationship with important allies and increases the dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror."
The book lives up to that billing. Additionally, I believe anyone reading this book would reach this conclusion : no president of the United States has ever successfully stood up to the Israel Lobby. I intend to be the first to do so. Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.
The following quote from George P. Schultz, Reagan's secretary of state, appearing on page 46 of the Mearsheimer book and on page 112 of Shultz's Turmoil and Triumph : My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner, 1993) is illustrative :
"In early December (1982)...I got word that a supplement was moving through the lame-duck session of Congress to provide a $250 million increase in the amount of U. S. military assistance granted to Israel: this in the face of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, its use of cluster bombs, and its complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres! We fought the supplement and fought it hard. President Reagan and I weighed in personally, making numerous calls to senators and congressmen. On December 9, I added a formal letter of opposition saying that the supplement appeared 'to endorse and reward Israel's policies.' Foreign Minister Shamir called President Reagan's opposition 'an unfriendly act' and said that 'it endangers the peace process.' The supplement sailed right by us and was approved by Congress as though President Reagan and I had not even been there. I was astonished and disheartened. This brought home to me vividly Israel's leverage in our Congress."
On page 35 and 36 of the Mearsheimer book there is reported the sorry tale of how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made a show of "inspecting" to prevent Israel's development of atomic bombs and how, when President Johnson was told by CIA head Helms that they in fact had those weapons, that Johnson told him to hide the evidence! (Excuse me, but did not the United States in the not too distant past attack a thoroughly inspected regional rival of Israel's in order to destroy that rival's non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)
Here is a quote from page 218-219 of the Mearsheimer and Walt book where they talk about George W. Bush's efforts to have negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians which was called his "Road Map" to peace :
"During the entire period, the Israelis continued building settlements in the West Bank, despite American protests and despite the fact the the Road Map explicitly calls upon Israel to 'freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).' They also continued assassinating Palestinian leaders, sometimes at the most unhelpful moments -- at least from a U. S. perspective. For example, the Israeli Defense Force scuttled a proposed Palestinian cease-fire on July 22, 2002, when it killed Sheik Salah Shehada, a prominent Hamas leader, and fourteen others (including nine children). The White House denounced the attack as "heavy handed" but did not force Israel to end its targeted assassinations policy. As noted previously, the IDF undermined another emerging cease fire in June 2003, when it tried but failed to kill Rantisi, another Hamas leader.
On March 22, 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheik Ahmet Yassin with American-made Hellfire missiles. This move was generally perceived as a serious blow to America's position in the Middle East, not only because U. S. weapons were used but also because many in the Arab world believed that the Bush administration had given Israel the green light to kill a paraplegic in a wheelchair....Less than a month later, on April 17, 2004, the IDF finally killed Rantisi."
Further quoting from page 219 of The Israel Lobby under the heading "Arafat Dies and Nothing Changes" comes this paragraph :
"By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon contributed directly to Hamas's electoral victory in January 2006. The Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston wrote just before the election, 'If it appears to you...that Israel is Hamas' campaign manager in next week's elections for the Palestinian parliament, few would argue--especially in Hamas.' With Hamas in power, Israel had another reason not to negotiate and the Bush administration was even less likely to push them to talk with the Palestinians."
Here are a number of other quotes from The Israel Lobby.
On page 102: "As former Prime Minister Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he "would have joined a terrorist organization.'" On page 91: ""...Israel's democratic status is undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own and by its continued imposition of a legal, administrative, and military regime in the Occupied Territories that denies them basic human rights. Israel at present controls the lives of about 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while colonizing lands on which they have long dwelt."
Also from page 91: "Indeed, the Israeli organization Peace Now recently released a study based on Israeli government records, which shows that more than 32 percent of the land that Israel holds for the purpose of building settlements is privately owned by Palestinians. Israel intends to keep almost all of this land forever. This seizure of Palestinian property violates not only Israel law but also a fundamental principle of democracy: the protection of private property."
From p. 88: "Israel refuses to adopt anti-discrimination laws as part of what it call its "Basic Law." …"There is widespread support among Israeli Jews for the unequal treatment of Israel Arabs. A poll released in March 2007 found that 55 percent of Israeli Jews wanted segregated entertainment facilities, while more than 75 percent said they would not live in the same building as an Israeli Arab. More than half of the respondents said that for a Jewish woman to marry and Arab is equal to national treason, and 50 percent said that they would refuse employment if their immediate supervisor was an Arab."
From page 96: "Prime Minister Golda Meir, for example, famously remarked that 'there was no such thing as a Palestinian.'"
From page 87: "There are now about 5.3 million Jews and 1.36 million Arabs living in Israel, including the disputed area of East Jerusalem. There are another 3.8 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, which means that there are only about 140,000 more Jews than Palestinians living in what used to be called Mandate Palestine..."
From page 99: "In 1967 it expelled between 100,000 and 260,00 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights."
From page 89: "In early 2007, Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to ultra-Orthodox Israelis with large families for the hardships that were caused by welfare cuts that he had made in 2002 when he was finance minister. He noted, however, that there was at least one important and unexpected benefit of these cuts: 'there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate' within the 'non-Jewish public.'"
From page 89: "Menachem Begin once said the 'Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs,'"..."Such discriminatory view are not restricted to Israeli leaders. In a recent survey of Jewish high school students in Israel, 75 percent of the respondents said that Arabs are 'uneducated.' The same percentage said that they are 'uncivilized,' while 74 percent of those polled said that Arabs are 'unclean.'"
From page 100: "The Swedish branch of the Save the Children organization released a report in May 1990 that 23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the first Palestinian uprising."
From p. 38: "When President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger grew impatient with Israeli intransigence during the disengagement negotiations with Egypt in 1975, a threat to curtail aid and conduct a far-reaching reassessment of U. S. policy was derailed when 76 senators signed a letter sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee demanding Ford remain "responsive" to Israels' economic and military needs. With their ability to reduce U. S. aid effectively blocked, Ford and Kissinger had little choice but to resume "step-by-step" diplomacy and try to gain Israeli concessions by offering additional inducements."
No reader interested in this matter should fail to google "Zionism" and check out the website "True Torah Jews Against Zionism" already quoted in this section. Their articles delineate the evils of Zionism much more thoroughly and eloquently than I can. On that website is this appeal : "Bold Jewry is looking for brave statesmen and open-minded journalists who could help to defend us from our tragic enemies, camouflaged as our spokesmen, our defenders and friends : the Zionist so-called 'state of Israel' and their sympathizers abroad." I offer myself as such a statesman. Should I suffer the same fate as U. N. mediator Bernadotte--dead in a pool of blood, his assailants unpunished and rewarded with high political office -- so be it.
Don't get me wrong. I want to live to a ripe old age as much as anyone. But when I remember my friend Jimmy Davis -- who served in Vietnam, came home in one piece, thought he'd survived it, only to die a horrible death from exposure to Agent Orange -- I feel it's worth the risk. So many died in Vietnam, but we all gained some solace in the belief that at least by their sacrifice our country had learned its lesson and would never again get sucked into another quagmire half way around the world.
Yet here we've gone and done it again -- and again. These military actions have been deemed necessary, according to George W. Bush, because we must crush those who "hate our freedoms." I believe we've created enemies who hate our policies. President Obama's assertion at West Point that "Our security is at stake in Afghanistan" just makes me ill.
We are faced with two choices : 1. maintain our support for an evil force called Zionism and face endless war 2. change our policy and allow the United Nations to function as it is supposed to function to end wars and threats of wars. I, obviously, support that second option.
