Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (13 page)

In
What Price Israel?
, first published in 1953, Lilienthal gave historical substance to the fact that the lineal ancestors of Eastern and Western European Jewry were the 8th century Khazar converts to Judaism. He also noted that “this is being kept a dark secret because it tends to vitiate the principle prop of the Zionist claim to Israel.”
⁷

As Lilienthal himself subsequently stated in
The Zionist Connection II: What Price Israel?
first published in 1978, the historical truth to which he had drawn attention did not become “widely known” until the publication in 1976 of a book by Arthur Koestler, the bestselling author of
Darkness At Noon, Promise and Fulfillment
and
The Roots of Coincidence
.
⁸
Koestler’s 1976 bestseller was titled
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage
.
⁹
Lilienthal commented that Koestler had “dropped a bombshell by proving that today’s Jews were, for the most part, descendants of the Khazars who converted to Judaism seven centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the dispersion of the small original Judaic Palestine population by Roman Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus.”
¹⁰

After the publication of Koestler’s book, and taking account of it as well as his own previous research, Lilienthal offered this background perspective:

The Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turko-Finnish people who settled in what is now southern Russia between the Volga and the Don, spread to the shores of the Black, Caspian and Azov seas. Jews who had been banished from Constantinople by Byzantine ruler Leo III found a home among the pagan Khazars and then, in competition with Muslim and Christian missionaries, won Khagan (King) Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria, over to the Judaic faith around 740 A.D. Some details of these events are contained in letters exchanged between Khagan Joseph of Khazaria and R. Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi Foreign Minister to Sultan Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain.”
¹¹

Lilienthal noted that this correspondence, circa 936–950 AD, which had been verified, was first published in 1577 “to prove that Jews still had a country of their own—namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria.
¹²

Encyclopaedia Britannica’s
account of the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism has the Khazar King saying to those who were seeking to convert him, “Your intentions are pleasing to the Creator, but your works are not.”
¹³

Lilienthal went on:

When Khazaria fell to the Mongols in the 13th century, its population of ‘Jewish’-convert Khazars fled northwest to become the progenitors of Ashkenazim (Russian/German/ Baltic/Polish) Jewry. These Khazar Jews greatly out- numbered racially Jewish Jews who had reached Europe by other routes and at other periods of history. Therefore, the great majority of Eastern European Jews were not Semitic Jews at all, and as most Western European Jews came from East Europe, most of them are also not Semitic Jews…
This nullifies Zionism’s strongest claim to Palestine/ Israel.
¹⁴

In the years that have passed since Lilienthal published his own findings as quoted above, new facts have emerged which, as Shomlo Sand has put it, “face any honest historian with fundamental questions.” Those words of his were in an article he wrote for
Le Monde diplomatique
in September 2008. At about the same time, Sand, who is Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, made history of his own with the publication in Hebrew by Resling, Tel Aviv, of his book
Matai ve`ech humtza ha`am hayehudi?
(
When and How Was the Jewish People Invented
?) In it he argues that the idea of a Jewish nation is a myth invented little more than a century ago. Before the invention Jews thought of themselves only as Jews because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.

Sand also endorses in depth the view that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel. In his article for
Le Monde diplomatique
, he wrote that until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. He went on:

But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from public memory. After 1960, Zionist historiography ceased to acknowledge, then erased the complex origins of the Jewish people. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than— God forbid—of Berber warriors of Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering. This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s, supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related. Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the ‘chosen people’. The problem is that this
historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel.
” [emphasis added]

And why is that a bad thing? Sand said: “By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judasim it encourages a segration that separates Jews from non-Jews—whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.” And that, he adds, is why 60 years on from its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of all of its citizens.

As we shall see, the significance of the facts of Jewish history is impossible to exaggerate in the context of the wrong done to the indigenous Arabs of Palestine by Zionism. It explains among other things why critics of Zionism in the House of Lords and elsewhere used adjectives such as “extraneous” and “alien” to describe those Jews entering Palestine to serve Zionism’s cause.

There is no certainty about the number of Jews who were living in Palestine at the time of the first Zionist Congress. The estimates vary from 20,000 to about 40,000, but the lower figure is generally reckoned to be the more accurate one. Some of them, probably about 10,000. were the descendants of the few who stayed in Palestine through everything, living as religious communities mainly in Tiberias and Safed but also Hebron and Jerusalem, waiting for the Messiah to come. Their presence was a continuous one and their connection to the land of Palestine was real. They were Palestinians. The rest (of the 20,000 to 40,000) were the descendants of those Jews who entered Palestine over many centuries, mainly during the “Expulsions” of the first half of the second millennium—1000 to 1500 AD.

During this period the giant of anti-Semitism was wide awake and rampaging through many lands. Jews were killed in, and expelled from, England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sicily, Lithuania and the Crimea. They sought sanctuary in three main areas— Poland, Italy and the Turkish Empire. At the time of the first Zionist Congress the most recent arrivals in Palestine, then a part of the Turkish Empire, were those of the second half of the 19th century. They settled in communities founded by Sir Moses Montefiore and funded by Lord Rothschild. On his first visit in 1837 Montefiore put the total number of Jews in Palestine at 9,000.

Like many alien Jews who played a leadership role in the creation of the Zionist state, Ben-Gurion, the founding father, was a Polish Jew. The son of a lawyer, he was born David Green in the small factory town of Plonsk about 38 miles from Warsaw. He was later to write that he arrived in Palestine in 1906 as a Russian tourist on a three months visa “and simply overstayed”.
¹⁵
His own first experience of Jerusalem provides revealing and amusing insight about one consequence of the fact that all but the small number of Jews who stayed in Palestine through everything were from many different lands, ethnic groups and cultures. He found Jerusalem to be a “Tower of Babel”, with Jews “speaking to each other in 40 different languages, half of them unable to communicate with the other half.”
¹⁶

The number of Palestine’s Arabs at the time of the first Zionist Congress was about 500,000. In other words, at the time of Zionism’s secret commitment to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of that land.

It is also a fact that the minority Jewish community of Palestine was strongly opposed to the Zionist enterprise. Prior to the birth of Zionism, the Jews in Palestine were there for religious reasons. They quickly grasped the implication of Zionism—that it would make them as well as incoming Zionist Jews the enemies of the Arab majority. Zionism was thus seen by the religious Jews of Palestine as a threat to their continued well-being. The religious Jews of Palestine also believed that what the Zionists were proposing was morally wrong.

How did the Arabs of Palestine see things in the earliest days of Zionism? As Lilienthal noted, the majority Arab population of the time “failed to recognise the European Jewish émigrés as a threat until it was too late.” This was largely because the Arabs “looked then upon the Jews in past historic terms as nothing more than a small, docile minority thriving in the region under the special protection of Muslim Arab rulers, protection traditionally provided to non-believers by the Koranic right of El Dimha with the payment of tax.”

The two most powerful Jewish organisations in Britain (the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Association), and many American Jews did sympathise with the cultural aspects of Zionism, and did support the idea of a Jewish community in the Holy Land that would be secure in the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and which “would receive equal political rights with the rest of the population and reasonable facilities for immigration.” But they were opposed to any recognition of Zionism on a political basis. They objected to “recognition of Jews as a homeless nationality and to the investment of Jewish settlers in Palestine with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population.”
¹⁷

In the pre-holocaust period one of the most prominent of Britain’s anti-Zionist Jews was none other than Edwin Samuel Montagu, Secretary of State for India and the only Jew in the British cabinet. He insisted that Zionism was a “mischievous political creed” and that there was no such thing as a “Jewish nation”. The Jews of England, like Jews elsewhere, were a religious community not a nation. He himself, he said, was a “Jewish Englishman”.
¹⁸

Montagu and his fellow anti-Zionists fought against the establishment of a Jewish state. They maintained that it would have the effect of “stamping Jews as strangers” in the lands in which they had settled and would undermine their hard won position as citizens and nationals of those lands.
¹⁹
With prophetic vision anti-Zionist Jews maintained that the idea of a Jewish state was all the more inadmissible “because Jews are and will probably long remain a minority of the population of Palestine, and because it might involve them in the bitterest of feuds with their neighbours of other races and religions.”

The founding fathers of Zionism had some serious problems to overcome. If their ambition was to be fulfilled, there had to be a transfer of Jews to Palestine
.
But for that to happen on a significant scale, Zionism needed the recognition that only big power support could convey. Without the recognition of a major power, Zionism would be without credibility. And without credibility it would not attract enough Jews to make the Palestine project a viable one. (The story of the remarkable effort Montagu made from inside the cabinet to persuade his government colleagues that Britain should not support Zionism has its place in Chapter Four).

Zionism’s recruiting propaganda was based on a lie, a lie which was to become a truth of necessity in the minds of many of those Jews who, after they were traumatised by the Nazi holocaust, became Israelis. Still today there are Israelis who tell the lie as truth when they are seeking to justify or explain what happened. The lie was in the recruiting slogan which proclaimed that Zionism was concerned with “A land without people for a people without land.”

When the lie was told for the first time there were hundreds of Arab settlements in Palestine. And Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa, Nablus, Acre, Jericho, Ramle, Hebron and Nazareth were flourishing towns. And Jerusalem was a flourishing city. As many a traveller had noted, the hills of Palestine were painstakingly terraced and irrigation ditches criss-crossed the most fertile parts of the land. The products of the citrus orchards and the olive groves were known throughout the world. Cottage industries of all kinds were much in evidence. Yes, Palestine was underdeveloped, but so was all of the Arab world, as was most of the whole world. Yes, Palestine was not free. It was a feudal system with Palestinian landowners exploiting their own people and cheerfully collaborating with their masters by conquest of the time— the rulers of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire. This major Muslim power had controlled south-eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa since the 16th century. Under the Turks, Palestine was a part of Greater Syria which also included present day Lebanon. But uninhabited, uncultivated and uncivilised Palestine was not. Except in Zionist mythology. When time and events exposed as a nonsense the notion that Palestine was an “empty land”, the Zionists were ready with another piece of mythology. There were Arabs in Palestine but they were late arrivals. They came with the Muslim Arab conquest in the 7th century AD. The meaning implicit if not always openly stated in Zionist propaganda was that since the first Israelites were in Palestine nearly two thousand years before the Muslim Arab conquest of it, the Zionist claim to Palestine was far, far superior to that of the Arabs. To those who did not know history it was and would remain a plausible story. To those who knew history it was another big lie.