Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (36 page)

Option (4) was the one favoured by Henderson and recommended to the new Secretary of State, James Byrnes. When Henderson came down in favour of option (4) he acknowledged that it would be opposed by both the Arabs and the Jews but, he thought, “with less intensity than any of the other alternatives.”

Like all senior State Department people who argued against the creation of a Jewish state on the grounds that it was not in America’s longer- term interests, Henderson, and Henderson especially, became the target of a Zionist campaign of character assassination.

It was not to Truman’s credit that, when it suited him to do so for reasons of domestic politics—appeasing the Zionist lobby—he sometimes said, or allowed others to say for him, that State Department people were “disloyal” to him.

Many years after the events Henderson wrote the following in a letter to Lilienthal: “More criticism has been aimed at me for what I did during my three years as Director of NEA than what I did in all my other years of service [nearly 40]. I can take criticism for bad judgement, for poor performance and for inadequacy. But attacks on my motives, charges of disloyalty and lack of honour leave scars that are slow to heal.”
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(The same could have been said by other senior State Department officials including, after Stettinus, three successive Secretaries of State, and America’s first Defence Secretary, who each did their professional and patriotic duty by trying to put the American national interest first and arguing against the creation of a Jewish state in the face of Arab opposition).

At about the time Henderson was putting together the State Department’s options paper, the American and British governments were presented with the first official figures of the total number of displaced persons—those made refugees by Hitler’s rampage in Europe. They showed that the refugees were from many lands, mainly Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Rumania and the Baltic countries; and of many faiths. In numbers the three main groups, assembled in refugee camps, were: Jews—226,000; Protestants—100,000; and Catholics—500,000.

On 31 August President Truman sent a top-secret communication to Britain’s new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. (His Labour Party had beaten the Conservatives by a huge margin and Churchill was gone—respected by many for his inspirational wartime leadership, but wanted by few for the task of rebuilding Britain and preparing the country to take its place in what many hoped would be a new and better world).

Truman’s letter informed Attlee that the issuance by Britain of 100,000 certificates of immigration to Palestine would help to alleviate the Jewish refugee problem.

The Truman letter was so secret that it was handed to Attlee in person by Secretary of State Byrnes. Truman feared that if his request to Britain became public, the Zionists, led by Ben-Gurion’s in-Palestine lot, would attack him and accuse him of manoeuvring to solve the refugee problem as a prelude to killing the idea of a Jewish state.

Somehow a copy of Truman’s top-secret communication found its way into the hands of a former Iowa Senator, Guy Gillette. As an officer of the American League for a Free (Jewish) Palestine, he was one of Zionism’s most devoted servants in the U.S. And he fed the story of Truman’s request to Attlee to the media. And then, politically speaking, all hell broke loose.

The Zionists protested because they did fear it might be the opening move in a strategy to deny them their state. In Britain Truman was attacked for his “generosity at the expense of the Arabs”. And Arab leaders angrily complained that Truman was dishonouring the promises, first made by President Roosevelt, then repeated by Truman himself, to consult with them.

My reading of events in perspective is that if Truman’s letter could have been kept secret, it might well have been possible for Britain to persuade the Arab leaders who mattered most to accept another 100,000 Jewish immigrants on the basis that that was it—no more Jewish immigrants and no Jewish state. And that, I believe, is what Ben-Gurion feared would happen. It was because he had anticipated the possibility of the politics going against him that, on 27 June, he had gone to the State Department to tell the Americans to their faces that immigration would not solve the problem of anti-Semitism and that only the immediate creation of a Jewish state would.

There was then a most bizarre episode. The story was put about, President Truman did not deny it, that a search of the late President Roosevelt’s papers had failed to discover any record of a pledge made by him to Ibn Saud about prior consultations with the Arabs! Ibn Saud himself was so disgusted by this propaganda lie that he cabled Truman saying that if the President was not prepared to reveal the truth, he, Ibn Saud, would publish the memorandum of his meeting with President Roosevelt on board the USS
Quincy
and the correspondence between himself and Roosevelt. And eventually that’s what he did.

Question: Who of the White House insiders was best placed to leak President Truman’s top-secret request to Attlee and also had a powerful enough motive for doing so? The most likely answer, I believe, is Niles. I suspect it was also Niles who put about the story that a search of Roosevelt’s papers had not produced evidence of any promises to the Arabs. His position and his access was such that he would have been believed, especially by Zionism’s unquestioning supporters in the media. It might have been that Niles did actually conduct a search for evidence of Roosevelt’s promises and did not find any because it had been put beyond his reach.

Because of the emotions generated by the Nazi holocaust and the way those emotions were being exploited by Zionism, in America especially, the Palestine problem was becoming almost too dangerous politically for Truman and Attlee to handle.

The experience of the Gillette affair taught Attlee that, on the super sensitive subject of the Jewish refugees and what to do about Palestine, Truman’s White House was too insecure for a British prime minister to put things in writing under his own signature. Thus it was, on 29 October, that Attlee’s eventual reply to Truman’s request for 100,000 immigration certificates was in the form of a memorandum written by Britain’s Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, to Secretary of State Byrnes. It was handed in person to Byrnes by Halifax but the real substance of what Britain wanted to say was reserved for the one-to-one conversation between the two men.

The memorandum itself called for the urgent establishment of a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to examine the question of Jewish immigration. In conversation Halifax insisted, as instructed, that the Committee should explore the possibilities of Jewish emigration to countries “other than Palestine.”
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The British view, Halifax said, was that the Jewish refugees “should be enabled to play their active part in building up the life of the countries from which they came.”
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Halifax also conveyed the British impression that if the Jewish refugees themselves were consulted, most of them would express a preference for going not to Palestine but returning to the homelands from which they came or starting a new life in America. (This British input was to have a profound effect on President Truman’s thinking and cause him, just before Christmas of 1945, to take a bold initiative).

Halifax also told Byrnes that “the Zionists are using every possible form of intimidation to stop Jews from leaving Palestine to go back to Europe and play their part in its reconstruction.” (It is a fact that before the Nazi holocaust quite a number of new Jewish arrivals in Palestine were horrified by the discovery that it was not the empty land of Zionism’s recruiting propaganda. And, morally outraged by what Zionism was proposing to do, they turned around and went back to Europe and America).

It was, however, the timing of what Britain wanted to happen next that most concerned the Attlee government. The need for Truman’s agreement to set up the proposed Anglo-American Committee was desperately urgent because of the worsening situation on the ground in Palestine. Not only was the fighting between the Arabs and the Jews escalating, the two main Zionist terrorist organisations were launched on their campaign of violence to drive the occupying British and the Arabs out of Palestine.

Lord Halifax emphasised the need for urgency. Secretary of State Byrnes was in sympathy with all that Halifax said but was totally honest in his assessment of what could be expected of his President at the time they were speaking. Byrnes pointed to the nearness of elections in New York City and did not need to tell Halifax they were elections in which Jewish votes were far more important than Jewish campaign money.

An explanation of the importance of the Jewish vote in general was provided by Lilienthal in his epic work
The Zionist Connection II
. He opened his chapter headed “Whose Congress: Thwarting the National Interest” as follows:

The reason for the remarkable political success achieved by the Jewish connection and the Zionist connectors lies deep in the American political system. Our system of representative government has been profoundly affected by the growing influence and affluence of minority pressure groups, whose strength invariably increases as presidential elections approach, making it virtually impossible to formulate foreign policy in the American national interest. And the Electoral College system has greatly fortified the position of the national lobbies established by ethnic, religious and other pressure groups, the Jewish-Zionist Israel lobby in particular.

An added tower of strength to the Jewish connection has been the Jewish location: 76 percent of American Jewry is concentrated in 16 cities of six states—New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Florida—with 181 electoral votes. It takes only 270 electoral votes to elect the next President of the U.S. Our Chief Executive is chosen by a plurality of the Electoral College votes, not of the popular vote. Under this system the votes of a state go as a unit to the candidate winning a plurality of voters, which endows a well-organised lobby with a powerful bargaining position.

For example, in the presidential election of 1884, in the State of New York, Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland received 563,015 popular votes while his Republican rival, James G. Blaine received 562,011 votes. With a bare 1,004 plurality Cleveland received all of New York’s electoral votes, resulting in his election. A change of 503 votes would have shifted the election to Blaine. This explains why the politicians have been mesmerised by fear of the “Jewish vote” and by those who claim they can deliver the “swing vote” in a hotly contested state.

The will of the majority has often been frustrated. Three Presidents—John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888—were elected with fewer popular votes than their leading opponents. [In a note Lilienthal added that, in all, 12 presidents had been elected with an actual minority of the popular votes. The last edition of his book was published in 1982. In an up-to-date edition he might well have noted that at least one president, George W. Bush, secured The White House only because the Florida vote, if not others, was rigged.] But it is the Cleveland 1884 election that is the classic example, under the prevailing system, of how a minority group such as the Zionists possesses a potent bargaining strength by pandering the votes of a block. The inordinate Israelist influence over The White House, the Congress and other elected officials, stems principally from the ability to pander to the alleged ‘Jewish vote’ as well as fill the campaign coffers of both parties with timely contributions on a national as well as a local level, while taking full advantage of the anachronistic system by which American Presidents are elected.

None of the many powerful political lobbies in Washington is better entrenched than the meticulously organised brokers of the “Jewish vote”.

The individual Jew, who might not go along with the Zionist ideology or Jewish nationalism, is too cowardly to speak up and take the usurpers of his voice to task, and so the peddling of his vote goes forward. Hence the happy alliance dating back to World War I, between the supine American politicians and the Zionists, who have controlled the Congress in its near 100 percent pro-Israel stance.

As reported by Halifax, Byrnes said, “I know it [the decision Truman had to make in response to Attlee’s suggestion] has a lot to do with that election.”
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Reading between the lines it is obvious that Byrnes was saying to Halifax something like: “If you press me before the New York election to get the President to approve your Prime Minister’s proposal for the setting up of an Anglo-American Committee, he will say no.” The alternative for the present, Byrnes told Halifax, was that “nothing would be done.”
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Byrnes also told Halifax that he himself was being subjected to intensive Zionist lobby pressure.

By not pressing Truman until the New York election was over, the Attlee government got not only his approval for the setting up of an Anglo- American Committee of Inquiry; it also got, eventually, after a lot of hassle, terms of reference for the inquiry that were less than disastrous from the British point of view.

It was to be called the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. The formal announcement that there would be such an inquiry was made simultaneously on 13 November, in London by Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was to be falsely accused by some Zionists of being anti-Semitic, and in Washington by Truman himself. Between then and 10 December when the names of the Committee’s members and their terms of reference were announced, the Arabs piled on political pressure of their own.