Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (4 page)

Not in 1948.

Not in 1967.

And not even in 1973.

The myth of poor little Israel in danger of annihilation was created to give Zionist diplomacy the best possible chance of preventing the Jewish state being pressed to be serious about peace on terms which would provide the dispossessed Palestinians with an acceptable amount of justice. Yes but... It has to be acknowledged that the myth would not have been sustainable without empty and stupid Arab rhetoric about destroying the Jewish state. The irony is in the prospect of Israel, having said “No” to peace on a number of occasions when it was there for the taking, being defeated in the future as a consequence of the ultimate explosion of Arab and Muslim fury—the product of unending humiliation—generated by Zionism’s unshakable commitment to the notion that might is right.

Unfortunately, this commitment is endorsed by many of the pork-barrel politicians in the U.S. Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate; and by tens of millions of born-again American Christians who are variously described as “conservative”, “evangelical” and “fundamentalist”, and who claim to be the “moral majority” in the Land of the Free. The bible-thumping shepherds of these flocks actually want the Armageddon scenario to be played out. They pray and, in political alliance with Zionism’s own zealots, work for it to come to pass. They are convinced it will because, they say, such an endgame is in accordance with God’s plan.

Consider the spine-chilling words of Pastor John Hagee, one of the most influential voices of Christian fundamentalism in America, influential enough to enjoy more or less instant access by telephone to American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. He leads the congregation of the Corner Stone Church in San Antonio, Texas, where he performs with a mass choir and a deafening band in front of six cameras which take his Sunday morning show live to the nation. In early 2006, he founded Christians United for Israel, (CUFI). Pastor Hagee was among those interviewed by the BBC’s Stephen Sackur for a remarkable radio documentary broadcast in May 2002. Like many American politicians and commentators, Hagee had subscribed to the notion—Zionism’s latest deception—that Israel’s all- out offensive against the Palestinians on the occupied West Bank was part and parcel of the global war against terrorism declared by President Bush.

Sackur’s programme,
A Lobby to Reckon With
, was honest investigative journalism at its very best. His mission was to explain why it was no longer accurate to talk about the Zionist lobby as the main influence on American policy for the Middle East. There was now a more powerful lobby, one that had been formed, effectively if not institutionally, by the Zionists joining forces with the born-again Christian right. That being so, it was more accurate to talk about the pro-Israel lobby of both. As Sackur observed, it is an alliance of “the two best organised networks in the U.S.”

In his preaching to the faithful on the Sunday morning of the BBC recording, Pastor Hagee reaffirmed that “God entered into an eternal covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that the nation of Israel would belong to the Jewish people forever”, with Jerusalem as “the eternal capital of the Jewish state.”

American Christians, the pastor proclaimed, would stand with Israel through “thick and thin”. After the service the admirable Sackur wanted to know why. The following was Pastor Hagee’s answer as broadcast.

The Jewish state was something born in the mind of God and we as a people believe the scripture, and the scripture says very clearly that God created Israel, that God is the protector and defender of Israel. If God created Israel, if God defends Israel, is it not logical to say that those who fight with Israel are fighting with God? We are seeing in my judgement the birth pangs that will be called in the future the beginning of the end. I believe in my mind that the Third World War has begun. I believe that it began on nine-eleven. I believe that we’re going to see an escalation of the Islamic influence all over the earth, and God in his sovereign grace is going to stand up and defend Israel, and the enemies of Israel are going to be decimated.

That, said Sackur, was “a very black and white, good against evil representation of global conflict”, which some listeners might consider to be “inflammatory and dangerous.”

Unruffled and courteously Pastor Hagee replied:

“No, it’s not dangerous. When you know the future, there’s no reason to consider it inflammatory. It’s going to happen.”

A report in
Monitorworld (The Christian Science Monitor)
for the week of 6–12 March 2004 noted that a 2002 survey showed “59 percent of Americans believe that the events in the Bible book of Revelations will occur in the future.” The report, by Jane Lampman, a staff writer, was headlined: THE END OF THE WORLD: THE DEBATE HEATS UP. She wrote that while fundamentalists were a minority of American Christians, “the interest in end-times prophecy has spread beyond their circles and is not only shaping people’s lives, but even influencing United States foreign policy, say supporters and critics.”

At about the same time as Pastor Hagee was making his prophesy, the most disingenuous Israeli leader, former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the man who might be Israel’s prime minister again when this volume is published in America, was insisting that Israel was engaged in a “biblical battle”. He made that declaration to the biggest ever rally of British Jews in London. Hoping to become prime minister again, Netanyahu was on a tour of selected Western capitals. His main purpose was to promote the message that Yasser Arafat was the Palestinian Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden rolled into one, and should be dealt with accordingly. As the leader of the Al Qaeda network responsible for the nine-eleven terror attacks on America, Bin Laden was the prime target of President Bush’s “war on terrorism.” Netanyahu had been the first Israeli leader to jump on the nine-eleven bandwagon as the means of crucifying Arafat. The most interesting question about Netanyahu—readers might like to keep it in mind as the story unfolds—is this: Does he know that much of what he speaks is complete and absolute propaganda nonsense, or does he really believe what he says? (According to a report in
The Jerusalem Post
of 7 April 2008, Netanyahu said the following to a conference of American Evangelicals in Jerusalem. “Israel has no better friends in the world than Christian Zionists. This is a friendship of the heart, a friendship of common roots and a friendship of common civilisation.”)

The equation is a truly terrifying one:

Bigotry, Zionist + Christian + Islamic = Armageddon (noting that some and perhaps many Muslims would claim that the bigotry on their side is a response to Zionist aggression and Christian fundamentalism). The forces of all three are on the rise.

Just how many would die and how much of the global environment would be polluted and destroyed by the fallout in the event of an apocalyptic endgame in and over Palestine are matters for speculation. But that it could happen is reason enough for every man, woman and child on planet Earth to be aware that they have a stake in what is happening in the Middle East.

The struggle for Palestine is not only the longest running conflict in all of human history—it started more than 3,000 years ago. It is by far the most dangerous.

In my experience of living the Arab-Israeli conflict—as a foreign correspondent for ITN as well as the BBC’s
Panorama
program, and as a participant at leadership level in the secret diplomacy of the search for peace—there were many chilling moments of 20th century revelation. All of them contributed to the insight I hope this book provides.

When I conceived the need for it there were, I believed, two main questions to be addressed.

The first was: Who can stop the countdown to Armageddon?

The second was: What can be done, and by whom, to prevent the sleeping giant of anti-Semitism, now stirring, from waking up with sufficient vigour to go on the rampage again?

As we shall see, the two questions are connected. If the countdown to Armageddon is to be stopped, the sleeping giant of anti-Semitism has got to be destroyed once and for all time. I mean that it will not be enough simply to put him back to sleep again. The stake has got to be driven into the monster’s heart.

This book has two central themes.

One is how the modern state of Israel, the child of political Zionism, became its own worst enemy and a threat not only to the peace of the region and the world, but also to the best interests of Jews everywhere and the moral integrity of Judaism itself.

The other main and related theme is why, really, the whole Arab and wider Muslim world is an explosion of frustration and despair waiting for its time to happen.

I am, of course, aware that the monster of Islamophobia is on the prowl in many Western nations and licking its lips. One of my hopes is that the truth of history this book seeks to represent will contribute to ending the ignorance and therefore the prejudice which feeds this particular monster. Because the fundamental issues with which this book is concerned are so sensitive and controversial, and because they have never been placed before the general public in a way that makes possible truly informed and rational debate about the obstacles to peace, I wish to make the following statement in order to leave readers in no doubt about where I am coming from.

The Israel I am writing about in this book is not a Jewish state. I mean it is not one governed in accordance with the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism. If it was, it could not have behaved in the way it has since its unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 which, as we shall see, was a defiant act against the will and wishes of the organised international community and triggered the first Arab-Israeli war. The Israel I am writing about in this book is a
Zionist state
. And the Zionism it represents (political Zionism as previously defined) has used and abused Judaism for political purposes.

For those readers who are not intimately familiar with the terminology of the conflict I should point out that the Zion of spiritual Zionism is Mount Zion in Jerusalem. As invoked by political Zionism’s founding fathers it is the symbol of the “return” of Jews to land occupied and ruled for a relatively short time by their alleged ancestors—the ancient Hebrews, the first Israelites—about a thousand years before the birth of the carpenter’s son who became the Christ of Christian mythology. Many Jews will be outraged by my use of the term alleged in the context above, but real history obliges me to stand by it.

The physical return of Jews, one possible but woefully inadequate definition of political Zionism, was a deeply flawed concept. Return implies that all the Jews who returned to create the modern state of Israel were biological descendants of the Hebrews of the ancient kingdom of Israel. If that had been the case, they would have had at least an arguable claim to some of the land of Palestine. But it was not so. Most if not all the returning Jews were foreign nationals of many lands who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom and what is called the “dispersal” into “oblivion” of its people. To put it bluntly but accurately, most if not all the Jews who returned to create the Zionist state had no rights whatsoever to the land of Palestine. Though it is still not politically correct to say so, the notion that there are two peoples with an equal claim to the same land does not bear serious examination. The fact that Israel exists does not mean that the Zionist claim on Palestine was a legitimate one. As we shall see, the matter of Israel’s legitimacy is one of the devils in the detail of the politics of peacemaking.

Most if not all the returning Jews were foreign nationals of many lands who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom
.

The distinction between spiritual and political Zionism is not only the key to understanding as previously explained, it is also critical to understanding what I call the Jewish predicament. That is my shorthand phrase for the unspeakable dilemma that confronts many if not most Jews of the world because of the Zionist state’s behaviour. Objectively that behaviour can be described as brutal and cruel, driven by self-righteousness of a most extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions and which, all up, makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism.

A hint of how troubled some British Jews are by the Zionist state’s behaviour was contained in an article on 28 October 2001 in
The Independent On Sunday
. The article, written by Andrew Johnson, was headlined BRITISH JEWS AT ODDS AFTER RABBI CRITICISES ISRAEL’S “COLONIALISM”. It was the story of how a “passionate argument” had broken out in the pages of
The Jewish Chronicle
after a prominent liberal London rabbi, Dr. David Goldberg, had spoken some of the unspeakable in public. Goldberg, the author of a popular introduction to Judaism,
The Jewish People, Their History and Their Religion
, had said that Israel’s “colonisation” had left many Jews “questioning their unconditional support for Israel.” He then said: “It may be time for Judaism and Zionism to go their separate ways.” Perhaps the most remarkable statement ever made by a diaspora Jew.

Eastern European in origin, political Zionism was born in Switzerland after a long pregnancy in the womb of Mother Russia, the Russia of the Tsars, in 1897. (Hereafter when I use the term Zionism I mean political Zionism. When I mean spiritual Zionism I will say so).