Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (5 page)

In 1897 Zionism represented only a small, even insignificant number of Jews in the world. At its foundation Zionism’s public commitment was to strive “to create for the Jewish people a
home
in Palestine secured by public law.” But Zionism’s real and unproclaimed commitment was to the creation of a Jewish
state
. The difference between the two concepts, home and state, was profound. By implication a Jewish “home” was, or for political and propaganda purposes could easily be presented as being, something much less than a state—i.e. a recognised Jewish presence which, because it possessed no sovereignty, would not pose a threat to the well-being and rights of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. The truth is that Zionism’s founding fathers lied in public about their real purpose. And why they felt the need to lie can be simply stated.

From its beginning the Zionist enterprise required some if not all of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine to be dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights. In other words, and as we shall see, to achieve its objective Zionism had to commit a crime—that of ethnic cleansing.

In my understanding of history, I mean real history as opposed to Zionist, North American and Western European mythology, that crime, the terrible injustice done to the Palestinians, would not have been committed if three related things had not happened:

1. • if Britain, out of desperation, had not played the Zionist card in the course of World War I;
   

2. • if Adolf Hitler and his Nazis had not come to power in a defeated and humiliated Germany;
   

3. • and if then, during World War II, six million Jews had not been exterminated by the Nazis; this most dreadful happening being the climax to the persecution of Jews over more than two thousand years.
   

The second World War was in part (I think a large part) the consequence of Britain and France, in the course of the first one, refusing to take on board the wisdom of a good and truly enlightened man—Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States of America, who had the misfortune to be many, many years ahead of his time.

Some truths are so obvious, apparently, that they are never stated; and because they remain unstated, the cause of understanding is not well served. One such unstated truth is this: It was not the Arabs who slaughtered six million Jews, it was Europeans in Europe
.
But it was the Arabs as a whole, and the Arabs of Palestine in particular, who, in effect, were punished for a European crime.

In my analysis the extreme self-righteousness that is the hallmark of Zionism is a mask for suppressed guilt on account of the injustice done to the Palestinians and, also, fear rooted in the past of the future.

One of Zionism’s greatest achievements for the first five decades of Israel’s existence was convincing the Western world that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same thing. They are not.

As Lenni Brenner, the anti-Zionist Jewish writer put it in 1983 (emphasis added): “
Zionism is not now, nor was it ever, co-extensive with either Judaism or the Jewish people.
” The quote is from Brenner’s book,
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators—A Reappraisal.
²

Zionism’s amazing propaganda success helps to explain why Western governments and the mainstream media were content to regard Zionist mythology and objective history as one and the same thing when, in fact, they are two vastly different things. That in turn helps to explain why still today there is not nearly enough understanding in the Western world, in North America especially, of how the Arab-Israeli conflict was created, what fuelled and sustained it and why to date, stopping the final countdown to catastrophe for the region and the world has been a mission impossible.

It is inevitable, as surely as night follows day, that Zionists will accuse me of being anti-Semitic. I am content in my belief that no individual of sound mind who reads this book could come to such a conclusion.

When I set about the task of writing this book I had in front of me two signed photographs from (in my opinion) the two greatest opposites in all of human history. (They are among the souvenirs of my television reporting days). One was of Golda Meir, Mother Israel. The other was of Yasser Arafat, Father Palestine. Arafat signed with his “Best wishes”. Golda’s inscription was “To a good friend, Alan Hart”.

Because I am a
goy
(non-Jew), Golda’s inscription meant a great deal to me. It also assisted me to put down Zionist bigots when, on public speaking tours across America, they accused me of being anti-Semitic. In television and radio studios, and sometimes on other public platforms, I would produce the photograph of Golda, read aloud the inscription in her own hand, and then say to my accuser, “Do you really think that this old lady was so stupid that she could not have seen through me if I was anti-Jew?”

I also want to say that I will not be bothered if such a charge is made against me because I would recognise it for what it was—an attempt to smear me for the purpose of discrediting my work. Against the ever- present background of the obscenity of the Nazi Holocaust, making the false charge of anti-Semitism is the Zionist way of trying to discredit and preferably silence any non-Jew who dares with justification to criticise Zionism and Israel. Because the slaughter of six million Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe was a European crime, there is nothing that makes greater moral cowards of European politicians and media people than fear of being labelled anti-Semitic. In my judgement the most perceptive passage ever written on this subject is to be found in Alfred M. Lilienthal’s amazingly well-documented book,
The Zionist Connection II, What Price Peace?
, first published in 1978 before the Cold War ended. In his chapter headed
Exploiting Anti-Semitism
, Lilienthal wrote this:

Nothing has accounted more for the success of Zionism and Israelism in the Western world than the skillful attack on the soft under-belly of public opinion—Mr. Decent Man’s total repugnance toward anti-Semitism. The charge of this bias, instantaneously bringing forth the spectre of Nazi Germany, so totally pulverizes the average Christian that by contrast calling him a Communist is a pleasant epithet. It was the Christian revulsion toward anti-Semitism in the wake of Hitlerian genocide, not the superiority of Zionist over Arab rights, that first created and then firmly entrenched the Israeli state, even permitting the occupation of conquered territories in the face of the UN Charter and international morality.
³

As we shall see, all of the most perceptive and the most devastating of Zionism’s critics were and are Jews. The most perceptive of them all was Ahad Ha-am, the pen name of a Russian Jew we will meet later (and whose words were the inspiration for
The False Messiah
as the title for this volume).

As a matter of fact the term “anti-Semitic” is hardly ever used in the correct or proper way. When Jews make the accusation with right on their side, what they really mean is that the person they accuse of being anti-Semitic is anti-Jew. In reality Arabs as well as Jews are Semitic peoples or Semites. Somebody who is anti-Semitic is therefore somebody who hates Jews
and
Arabs. With that qualification made, I will stay with the Western tradition and use the term anti-Semitic as though it has only one meaning, anti-Jew.

My own position has been a matter of public record for many years. In my book
Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?
, first published in the UK 1984 and subsequently in America as
ARAFAT
, I said I regarded the Jews, generally speaking, as the intellectual elite of the European civilisation, and the Palestinians, generally speaking, as the intellectual elite of the Arab world. I went on to say that what Jews and Palestinians could do together in peace and partnership was the stuff that real dreams are made of. I even dared to suggest that together in peace and partnership Jews and Palestinian Arabs could give new hope and inspiration to the world.

The main purpose of the book in which I first expressed those thoughts was to put a great and exciting truth into the public domain. It was a truth I had discovered during my first period of privileged and unique access to Arafat when, at the start of 1980, I became the linkman in a secret exploratory dialogue between him and the one Israeli leader of the time who seemed to be serious about peace.

My hope was that the truth represented in
Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?
would open some closed minds and make possible for the first time—in the Western world especially—a rational debate about the way to peace in the Middle East.

Until the first publication of my book about Arafat and his struggle, Israel and its unquestioning and very influential supporters in the media, in America especially, had succeeded in getting the Western world to accept Zionism’s version of who and what the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was. In this version Arafat was not merely a terrorist, he was the personification of all evil. The most dangerously deluded of Israel’s leaders—Menachem Begin, who had made the transition from terrorist leader to prime minister—had convinced himself and his followers, and proclaimed to the world, that Arafat was the reincarnation of Hitler. Such a man, said the Israel of Begin (and Shamir and Netanyahu and Sharon), was one the Jewish state never could or ever would do business with. And thanks to the efforts of Henry Kissinger while serving as President Nixon’s Secretary of State, Israel had seen to it that no American administration could do business with Arafat and his PLO so long as Israel said “No”.

The truth represented in
Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?
was this: By the end of 1979—repeat 1979, nearly a quarter of century ago!—Arafat had done in principle everything that could be done on the Palestinian side at leadership level to prepare the ground for peace with Israel.

It was a truth Begin’s Israel did not want to hear or be heard, but the facts supporting it were impressive, and were recognised as such by President Carter. He understood that Arafat really was serious about wanting to make peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.

The facts in summary were these. Before 1979 was out, only months after Egypt’s separate (and actually disastrous) peace with Begin’s Israel, Arafat had persuaded the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament-in-exile and the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, to be ready to make an historic compromise for peace with Israel. The compromise was unthinkable to all Palestinians, but given Israel’s military superiority in the region—an even more overwhelming fact of life after Egypt had been taken out of the military equation—it was, Arafat insisted, a compromise they had to make if they were to obtain an acceptable minimum of justice; “something concrete” as Arafat himself put it.

The historic compromise required the Palestinians to recognise Israel inside more or less its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war and make peace with that Israel in exchange for the return of less than 23 percent of all the land that was rightfully theirs. Put another way, peace on that basis, to provide for Palestinian self-determination in a mini-state on the 23 percent of occupied land from which Israel would withdraw (the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip), required the Palestinians to renounce for all time their claim to the other 77 percent of their land.

That was the basic “land for peace” arithmetic of the historic compromise. And it was in accordance with the letter and the spirit of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967, which Israel had said it accepted and would honour.

For Israel there was, however, a far greater prize on offer. There was something even more important than peace that Israel craved. It was the only thing the Zionist state could not take from the Palestinians by force.

The cover name of that thing was recognition, meaning recognition of Israel’s “
right to exist
”. The question I have never seen asked let alone answered in literature of any kind about the Arab-Israeli conflict is this: Why, actually, was it so important for Israel’s “right to exist” to be recognised by the Palestinians? The answer, which has its context in the pages to come, is this: In international law and because of the circumstances of its creation, Israel was NOT a legitimate state and therefore did NOT have the right to exist. In international law only the Palestinians—not the United Nations or any other earthly or even heavenly authority—could give the Zionist state the legitimacy it craved.

From that perspective the historic compromise required the Palestinians not only to make peace with the Zionist state but, by doing so, legitimise it—i.e. legitimise Zionism’s theft of Arab land up to more or less Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

For a people emotionally committed to “driving the Jews into the sea”—a rhetorical, empty and stupid threat Arafat and his leadership colleagues never made—the historic compromise was a completely unacceptable proposition.

And that, as I revealed in
Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?
was why it took the PLO leader six long years—from 1973 to 1979—to sell it to the PNC. To do so he had to put his credibility with most of his leadership colleagues on the line and his life at risk.

As it actually happened, Arafat committed himself to a policy of politics and historic compromise with Israel in 1973, but he knew that if he put the policy to a PNC vote then, it would have been rejected by an overwhelming majority.