[2] About 1952, a coelenterate fish, of a kind until then believed to have been extinct for millions of years, was brought to the surface of the Indian Ocean (seriously damaging the chain of the Darwinian theory by its appearance, as did the discovery, a little later, that the Piltdown skull was a fake). The emergence of Levitical Zionism, when it broke the political surface of the 20th Century, was a somewhat similar surprise from the deep.
[3] His leading place was briefly taken by one Grigori Malenkov, who yielded it to duumvirs, Nikita Kruschev (partyleader) and Nikolai Bulganin (Premier). The world could not tell to what extent they inherited Stalin’s personal power or were dominated by others. A survivor of all changes and purges, Mr. Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, remained a First Deputy Premier throughout and on the Bolshevik anniversary in November 1955 was chosen to tell the world, “Revolutionary ideas know no frontiers.” When the duumvirs visited India in that month the New York Times, asking who ruled the Soviet Union in their absence, answered “Lazar M. Kaganovich, veteran Commmunist leader.” Mr. Kaganovich was among Stalin’s oldest and closest intimates, but neither this nor any other relevant fact deterred the Western press from attacking Stalin, in his last months, as the new, anti-semitic “Hitler.”
[4] This outcry in the West had begun ten weeks earlier, on the eve of the Presidential election in America, on the strength of a trial in Prague, when eleven of fourteen defendants were hanged, after the usual “confessions,” on charges of Zionistconspiracy. Three of the victims were not Jews, but they too might not have been born or hanged for all the notice they received in the press of the West.
[5] Of whom, according to the current Jewish “estimates” there were some two millions, or about one percent of the total Soviet population, (stated by the Soviet Government’s Statistical Manual of the Soviet Economy in June 1956 to be 200,000,000).
[6] Mr. Eisenhower “added that his mother had reared him and his brother, in teachings of the Old Testament.” This somewhat cryptic allusion is to the Christian sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in which Mr. Eisenhower and his brothers were brought up in their parental home.
[7] “While once again proclaiming the policy of liberation, Mr. Dulles, the Secretary of State, disclaimed any United States responsibility for the ill-fated uprising in Hungary. He said that beginning in 1952, he and the President consistently had declared that liberation must be achieved by peaceful, evolutionary means.” Statement at Augusta, Georgia, Dec. 2, 1956.
[8] This was crushed and ruthless vengeance taken by “the dreaded Frau Hilde Benjamin” (The Times, July 17, 1953) who was promoted Minister of Justice for the purpose and became notorious for her death sentences (one on a boy in his teens who distributed anti-Communist leaflets) and for her especial persecution of the sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in which President Eisenhower was brought up. In the popular thought and in New York newspaper descriptions she was described as “a Jewess.” As far as my research can discover, though married to a Jew, she was not by birth Jewish.
[9] A good instance of the confusion introduced into this event by the “Jewish question.” Rokossovsky, Polish-born and a Soviet marshal, halted the advancing troops at the gates of Warsaw in 1944 to give the SS. and Gestapo troops time and freedom to massacre the Polish resistance army. He was thus the most hated man in Poland. At the same time he was held to be “anti-semitic” by the New York newspapers. Which current of feeling counted most heavily against him, one cannot at this stage determine.
[10] The best authentic account of the original event was given, for reasons of his own, by the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, Tito, in a national broadcast on Nov. 15, 1956. He said, among much else, “When we were in Moscow we declared that Rakosi’s regime and Rakosi himself did not have the necessary qualifications to lead the Hungarian state or to lead it to internal unity … Unfortunately, the Soviet comrades did not believe us … When Hungarian Communists themselves demanded that Rakosi should go, the Soviet leaders realized that it was impossible to continue in this way and agreed that he should be removed. But they committed a mistake by not also allowing the removal of Geroe and other Rakosi followers … They agreed to the removal of Rakosi on the condition that Geroe would obligatorily remain … He followed the same policy and was as guilty as Rakosi … He called those hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, who were still demonstrators at the time, a mob” (a participant stated that Geroe’s words were “filthy Fascist bandits and other words too dirty to repeat”).” … This was enough to ignite the barrel of gunpowder and cause it to explode … Geroe called in the army. It was a fatal mistake to call in the Soviet Army at a time when the demonstrations were still going on … This angered these people even more and thus a spontaneous revolt ensued … Nagy called the people to arms against the Soviet Army and appealed to the Western countries to intervene …”
[11] The invariable and deliberate anti-Christian trait appeared again in the treatment given to Cardinal Mindszenty, the details of which were published by him after his liberation. In summary, he said he was tortured by his captors for twenty-nine days and nights between his arrest and trial, being stripped nude, beaten for days on end with a rubber hose, kept in a cold, damp cell to irritate his weak lung, forced to watch obscene performances and questioned without sleep throughout the period (interview published in many newspapers and periodicals, December 1956).
[12] The Law of the Return, 1953, says among other things, “The ingathering of the exiles requires constant efforts from the Jewish nation in dispersion and the state of Israel therefore expects the participation of all Jews, either privately or in organizations, in the upbuilding of the state and in assisting mass immigration and sees the necessity of all Jewish communities uniting for this purpose.” A permanent state of “anti-semitism” in the world is obviously the pre-requisite for the realization of this law, and as the largest single body of Jews in the world is now in America, an “anti-semitic” situation there would evidently have to be declared at some stage in the process.
[13] An event of a month earlier, April 1953, had already shown that Mr. Churchill was prepared to go further, in his tributes to Zionism, than any would have thought possible who judged him by his public record and legend. In that month he ostentatiously associated himself with the Zionist canonization of an English officer called Orde Wingate, and in so doing humiliated the English people in general and in particular all those British officials, officers and soldiers who for thirty years loyally did their duty in Palestine. Wingate, an officer of the British intelligence in Palestine during the inter-war years, so far deviated from the honourable impartiality, between Arabs and Jews, which was the pride and duty of his comrades as to become, not simply an enemy of the Arabs but a renegade to his country and calling. His perfidy first became public knowledge on this occasion when Mr. Ben-Gurion, dedicating a children’s village on Mount Carmel to Wingate’s memory (he was killed during the Second War) said “He was ready to fight with the Jews against his own government” and at the time of the British White Paper in 1939 “he came to me with plans to combat the British policy.” One proposal of Wingate’s was to blow up a British oil pipeline. Mr. Churchill in his message read at the dedication ceremony described the village named after Wingate as “a monument to the friendship which should always unite Great Britain and Israel,” and the British Minister was required to attend in official token of the British Government’s approval.
Thus the one Britisher so honoured in the Zionist state was a traitor to his duty and the British Prime Minister of the day joined in honouring him. The significant history of Wingate’s army service is given in Dr. Chaim Weizmann’s book. Dr. Weizmann, who speaks indulgently of Wingate’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Zionist settlers by trying to speak Hebrew, says he was “a fanatical Zionist.” In fact Wingate was a very similar man to the Prophet Monk in the preceding century, but in the circumstances of this one was able to do much more harm. He copied Monk in trying to look like a Judahite prophet by letting his beard grow, and significantly found his true calling in the land of Judas. He was either demented or hopelessly unstable and was adjudged by the British Army “too unbalanced to command men in a responsible capacity.” He then turned to Dr. Weizmann, who asked a leading London physician (Lord Horder, an ardent Zionist sympathizer) to testify to the Army Medical Council “as to Wingate’s reliability and sense of responsibility.” As a result of this sponsorship Wingate “received an appointment as captain in the Palestine intelligence service,” with the foreseeable result above recorded. During the Second War this man, of all men, was singled out for especial honour by Mr. Churchill, being recalled to London at the time of the Quebec Conference to receive promotion to Major General. Dr. Weizmann says his “consuming desire” was to lead a British army into Berlin. The context of Dr. Weizmann’s account suggests that this would have been headed by a Jewish brigade, led by Wingate, so that the event would have been given the visible nature of a Talmudic triumph, shorn of pretence of a “British victory.” “The generals,” Dr. Weizmann concludes, averted this humiliation; their refusal “was final and complete.”
The episode again throws into relief the uneven and enigmatic nature of Mr. Churchill, who preached honour, duty and loyalty more eloquently than any before him and bluntly asked a nation at bay to give its “blood and sweat, toil and tears” for those eternal principles. He had seen one of his own Ministers murdered and British sergeants symbolically hanged “on a tree” and yet gave especial patronage to this man, alive, and singled him out for honour when he was dead. Mr. Churchill. at an earlier period, once abandoned the task of writing the life of his great ancestor because of a letter which appeared to prove that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, betrayed an impending attack by the British fleet to its enemy of that day, the French. “The betrayal of the expedition against Brest,” he then wrote, “was an obstacle I could not face”; and he refused from shame to write the biography, only reconsidering when he convinced himself that the letter was a forgery. Yet even in that book his conception of loyalty is not clear to follow, for in his preface he accepts as natural and even right Marlborough’s first and proved act of treachery, when he rode out from London as King James’s commander to meet the invading German and Dutch armies of William of Orange and went over to the enemy, so that the invasion of England succeeded without an English shot fired.
[14] These United Nations Mixed Armistice Commissions, which will henceforth be denoted by U.N.M.A.C. comprized in each case a representative of Israel and of the neighbour Arab state, and a United Nations representative whose finding and vote thus decided the Source of blame. The findings were invariably against Israel until, as in the case of the British administrators between 1917 and 1948, “pressure” began to be put on the home governments of the officials concerned to withdraw any who impartially upheld the Arab case. At least two American officials who found against Israel in such incidents were withdrawn. All these officials, of whatever nationality, of course worked with the memory of Count Bernadotte’s fate, and that of many others, ever in their minds. In the general rule they, like the British administrators earlier, proved impossible to intimidate or suborn, and thus the striking contrast between the conduct of the men on the spot and the governments in the distant Western capitals was continued.
[15] From the start of the presidential-election year all leading American newspapers, and many British ones, reported these Israeli attacks as “reprisals” or “retaliations,” so that the victims were by the propaganda-machine converted into the aggressors in each case. General Burns, in his report on the last attack, told the U.N. that Israel “paralyzed the investigating machinery” by boycotting the Mixed Armistice Commissions whenever these voted against it, and added: “At present the situation is that one of the parties to the general armistice agreement makes its own investigations, which are not subject to check or confirmation by any disinterested observers, publishes the results of such investigations, draws its own conclusions from them and undertakes actions by its military forces on that basis.” The British and American press, by adopting the Israeli word “reprisal” in its reports, throughout this period gave the public masses in the two countries the false picture of what went on which was desired by the Zionists.
[16] The extraction of the Jews from the United States, although essential to the “ingathering of the exiles,” obviously belongs to a later stage of the process and would depend on the success of the next phase, the “ingathering” of the Jews from the Soviet area and from the African Arab countries. After that, strange though the idea will seem to Americans and Britishers today, there would have to be a “Jewish persecution” in America and this would be produced by the propagandist method used in the past and applied impartially to one country after another, including Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Spain and Britain. Dr. Nahum Goldman, leader of the World Zionist Organization, in October 1952 told an Israeli audience that there was one problem Zionism must solve if it was to succeed: “How to get the Jews of the countries where they are not persecuted to emigrate to Israel.” He said this problem was “especially difficult in the United States because the United States is less a country of Jewish persecution or any prospect of Jewish persecution than any other” (Johannesburg Zionist Record, Oct. 24, 1952). The reader will note that there are no countries without “Jewish persecution”; there are only degrees of “Jewish persecution” in various countries.
[17] This is essential to the electoral strategy laid down, though presumably not originally devised by Colonel House. The spanner-in-the-works problem posed by it is the subject of many allusions earlier quoted, i.e.: “Our failure to go along with the Zionists might lose the states of New York, Pennsylvania and California; I thought it was about time that somebody should pay some consideration to whether we might not lose the United States” (Mr. James J. Forrestal); “Niles had told the President that Dewey was about to come out with a statement favouring the Zionist position and unless the President anticipated this New York State would be lost to the Democrats” (Secretary of State James J. Byrnes); “The Democratic Party would not be willing to relinquish the advantages of the Jewish Vote” (Governor Thomas E. Dewey).
[18] Whether Senator Taft, had he become president would have found himself able to carry out the clear, alternative policy here outlined is a question now never to be answered. In the particular case of Zionism, which is an essential part of the entire proposition here denounced by him, he was as submissive as all other leading politicians and presumably did not discern the inseparable relationship between it and the “world state” ambition which he scarified. A leading Zionist of Philadelphia, a Mr. Jack Martin, was asked to become Senator Taft’s “executive secretary” in 1945 and records that his first question to Mr. Taft was, “Senator, what can I tell you about the aspirations of Zionism?” Taft is quoted as answering, in Balfourean or Wilsonian vein, “What is there to explain? The Jews are being persecuted. They need a land, a government of their own. We have to help them to get Palestine. This will also contribute incidentally to world peace …” The contrast between this, the typical talk of a vote-seeking ward politician, and the enlightened exposition given above is obvious. Mr. Martin, who is described in the article now quoted (Jewish Sentinel, June 10, 1954) as Senator Taft’s “alter ego” and “heir,” after Taft’s death was invited by President Eisenhower to become his “assistant, advisor and liaison with Congress.” Mr. Martin’s comment: “President Eisenhower is ready to listen freely to your opinion and it is easy to advise him.”
[19] This significant disclosure comes from a book, Eisenhower. The Inside Story, published in 1956 by a White House correspondent, Mr. Robert J. Donovan, evidently at Mr. Eisenhower’s wish, for it is based on the minutes of Cabinet meetings and other documents which relate to highly confidential proceedings at the highest level. Nothing of the kind was ever published in America before and the author does not explain the reasons for the innovation. Things are recorded which the President’s Cabinet officers probably would not have said, had they known that they would be published; for instance, a jocose suggestion that a Senator Bricker and his supporters (who were pressing a Constitutional amendment to limit the President’s power to make treaties, and thus to subject him to great Congressional control) ought to be atom-bombed.
[20] The most significant domestic events of President Eisenhower’s first term (in view of the fact that his election chiefly expressed the desire of American voters, in 1952, to redress the proved Communist infestation of government and combat the menace of Communist aggression) were the censure of the most persistent investigator, Senator McCarthy, which received the President’s personal encouragement and approval; and the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in 1955, which denied the right of the forty-eight individual States to take measures against sedition and reserved this to the Federal Government. This ruling, if given effect, will greatly reduce the power of the Republic to “contend with sedition” (the “Protocols”). The third major domestic event was the Supreme Court ruling against segregation of White and Negro pupils in the public schools, which in effect was directed against the South and, if pressed, might produce violently explosive results. These events draw attention to the peculiar position held in the United States by the Supreme Court, in view of the fact that appointments to it are political, not the reward of a lifetime’s service in an independent judiciary. In these circumstances the Supreme Court, under President Eisenhower, showed signs of developing into a supreme political body (Supreme Politburo might not be too inapt a word), able to overrule Congress. The United States Solicitor General in 1956, Mr. Simon E. Sobeloff, stated, “In our system the Supreme Court is not merely the adjudicator of controversies, but in the process of adjudication it is in many ways the final formulator of national policy” (quoted in the New York Times, July 19, 1956).
[21] However, fourteen months later (Jan 4, 1957), after the attack on Egypt, Mr. Hanson Baldwin, writing from the Middle East, confirmed the continuance of “defenceless” Israel’s military predominance: “Israel has been, since 1949, the strongest indigenous military force in the area. She is stronger today, as compared with the Arab states, than ever before.”
[22] “The supply of arms by Soviet Czechoslovakia made Jews in Israel and elsewhere look to the Soviets as deliverers,” Johannesburg Jewish Times, Dec. 24, 1952.
[23] “The state of Israel will be defended if necessary with overwhelming outside help,” Governor Harriman, New York Times, March 23, 1955.
[24] In the intervening years another book had appeared. Mr. Chesly Manly’s The U.N. Record, which said that four senior officials of the American Foreign Service, called from the Middle East to Washington during the congressional elections of 1946 for consultation on the Palestine question, had presented the Arab case and received from President Truman the answer, “Sorry, gentlemen, I have to answer hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” Mr. Truman’s submissiveness to Zionist pressure, when in office, and his complaint about it, when in retirement, thus are both on record.
[25] This is an example, in the new generation, of the “outside interference, entirely from Jews” of which Dr. Weizmann bitterly complained in the earlier one. The Council feared and fought the involvement of the West in Zionist chauvinism. It was headed by Mr. Lessing Rosenwald, formerly head of the great mercantile house of Sears, Roebuck, and Rabbi Elmer Berger. Meeting in Chicago at this period, it resolved that President Truman’s memoirs “confirm that Zionist pressures – labelled as those of American Jews – were excessive beyond all bounds of propriety” and “offered a spectacle of American citizens advancing the causes of a foreign nationalism” The reader, if he refers to earlier chapters, will see how precisely the situation in England in 1914-1917 had been reproduced in America in 1947-8 and 1955-6.
[26] Six months later, on the eve of the presidential election and immediately before the Israeli attack on Egypt, the New York Daily News appealed to “the Jewish voter” by recounting the following Republican services: “The Eisenhower Administration has not seen its way clear to supplying Israel with heavy hardware, because of various touchy international situations. However, the Administration, last April and May, did help Israel get 24 Mystere jet planes from France, and last month Canada announced sale of 24 Sabre jets to Israel. Mr. Dulles was declared by Israeli officials to have actively used United States Government influence in promoting both the French and Canadian plane sales.”
[27] During the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet in October-November 1956, several American correspondents, returning from the shambles, and Hungarian fugitives attributed a large measure of responsibility for the tragedy to this “Voice.” The Americans had found the Hungarian people confident of American intervention; the Hungarians complained that, although the word “revolt” was not used, the “Voice” in effect incited and instigated revolt and held out the prospect of American succour. At the same time President Eisenhower told the American people, “We have never counselled the captive peoples to rise against armed force.” Similar criticisms were made against “Radio Free Europe,” a private American organization which operated from Germany under West German Government license.
One of the first Hungarian refugees to reach America complained that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for years “picked at us” to revolt, but when the national uprising came no American help was given (New York Times, Nov. 23, 1956).
The West German Government ordered an investigation into Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts during the Hungarian uprising (it operated from Munich) after widespread charges appeared in the West German press that it had, in effect, played a provocative part; as example, a script prepared on Nov. 5, 1956, while the uprising was in progress, told the Hungarian people that “Western military aid could not be expected before 2am tomorrow,” an obvious intimation that it would come at some moment (N.Y.T., Dec. 8, 1956) The gravest implication of a provocative purpose was contained in statements made by Mrs Anna Kethly, head of the Hungarian Social Democratic party, who escaped during the brief liberation of the country. She said that while she was in jail in 1952 Radio Free Europe in a broadcast to the captive countries said “that I was leading the underground liberation movement from my jail and quoted the names of several leaders of the alleged movement. I was taken out of the jail where I had been in complete seclusion since 1950 and confronted with hundreds of former militants of the Social Democratic party and the trade unions. All of them were tortured by the political police to confess their participation in the non-existent anti-Communist plot. There was absolutely no truth in the Radio Free Europe report; I had lived in complete seclusion since my arrest and had met nobody. Radio Free Europe has gravely sinned by making the Hungarian people believe that Western military aid was coming, when no such aid was planned” (N.Y.T., Nov. 30, 1956).
Thus America spoke with two voices, those of the President addressing himself officially to the world, and of the “Voice” speaking in more dangerous terms over the head of the American people to the peoples of the world. At this period the New York Times described the official line: “High officials have made clear privately that the Administration wants to avoid being identified solely with Israel and thus surrendering the Arab countries to the influence of the Soviet Union.” The Arab peoples, if they ever heard of these “private” intimations, could not be expected to believe them, in view of what they heard from “The Voice of America” about the liberation of the Jews from “the Egyptian captivity.”
[28] The fact that this “‘pressure” was used is authentic. It was everywhere recorded in terms of an American success by the American press, for instance, “Secretary of State Dulles was confident that he could win the friendship of the Arabs, as when he brought pressure on the British to get out of Egypt, while retaining that of the Israelis (New York Times, Oct. 21, 1956).
[29] [Hamlet, 1, v.]
[30] The same shadow was with deliberate intent cast across the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. As part of the festival the newly-crowned queen reviewed at Spithead a great assembly of war vessels from every country that could send a ship. Among the many craft, between the lines of which the Queen’s ship passed, was one alone, the crew of which did not cheer (a mistake, the later explanation asserted). This Soviet ship was the Sverdlov, named for Yankel Sverdlov, the assassin of the Romanoff family, in whose honour the town where they were butchered, Ekaterinburg, was renamed Sverdlovsk.
[31] [Queen’s Counsel / King’s Counsel.]
[32] The inevitable twin-reproach, of “anti-semitism,” was also raised against him during the election campaign. A rabbi who knew him well came forward to defend him against it.
[33] I had in mind what is known to American politicians as “the Farley law.” Named after an exceptionally astute party-manager, Mr James A. Farley, who was held to have contrived the early electoral triumphs of Mr. Roosevelt, the essence of this “law” is that American voters have decided by mid-October for whom they will vote and only their candidate’s death, war or some great scandal between then and November 6 can change their minds. The morning after the Israeli attack on Egypt Mr. John O’Donnell wrote, “Spokesmen in the worried State Department, Pentagon” (War Office) “and headquarters of both parties agree that the Israelis launched their attack on Egypt because they were convinced that the United Slates would take no action in an Israeli war so close to the Presidential elections … Word came through to political headquarters that American Zionists had informed Tel Aviv that Israel would probably fare better under a Democratic administration of Stevenson and Kefauver than under a Republican regime of Eisenhower and Nixon” (New York Daily News).
[34] At the very moment of the invasion of Egypt another massacre of Arabs was carried out inside Israel and at a point far removed from the Egyptian frontier, namely, the frontier with Jordan, on the other side of Israel. 48 Arabs, men, women and children, of the village of Kafr Kassem, were killed in cold blood. This new Deir Yasin could only be taken by the Arabs, inside or outside Israel, as a symbolic warning that the fate of “utter destruction … man, woman and child … save nothing that breatheth” hung over all of them, for these people were of the small Arab population that stayed in Israel after Deir Yasin and the creation of the new state. The deed was officially admitted, after it had become widely known and was the subject of an Arab protest en route to the United Nations (where it seems to have been ignored up to the date of adding this footnote), by the Israeli premier, Mr. Ben-Gurion six weeks later (Dec. 12). He then told the Israeli Parliament that the murderers “faced trial,” but as the Arabs remembered that the murderers of Deir Yasin, after “facing trial” and being convicted, had been released at once and publicly feted, this was of small reassurance to them. Up to the time this footnote (Dec 20) I have not seen any allusion, among the millions of words that have been printed, to the fate of the 215,000 fugitive Arabs (U.N. Report, April 1956) who were huddled in the Gaza Strip when the Israelis attacked it and Egypt. The Israeli Government has announced that it will not give up this territory: earlier, it had announced that it would under no conditions permit the return of the Arab refugees to Israel. Therefore the lot of this quarter-million people, which at any earlier time would have received the indignant compassion of the world, has been entirely ignored. Presumably they are referred to in the only statement I have seen on the subject, the letter of eleven Arab states to the United Nations of Dec 14, stating that “Hundreds of men, women and children have been ruthlessly murdered in cold blood,” but there seems small prospect of impartial investigation or corroboration, and the Arab letter itself says, “The whole story will never be told and the extent of the tragedy will never be known.” However, in the particular case of Kafr Kassem the facts are on authentic record.
[35] This method is the exact opposite of that by which the world would be ruled under the “world-government” schemes propounded from New York by Mr. Bernard Baruch and his school of “internationalists.” Their concept may in fact be called that of “super-Colonialism” and rests entirely on rigid organization, force and penalty. Speaking at the dedication of a memorial to President Woodrow Wilson in Washington Cathedral in December 1956, Mr. Baruch again raised his demand, in the following, startlingly contradictory terms: “After two world wars … we still seek what Wilson sought … a reign of law based on the consent of the governed … that reign of law can exist only when there is the force to maintain it … which is why we must continue to insist that any agreement on the control of atomic energy and disarmament be accompanied by ironclad provisions for inspection, control and punishment of transgressors .”
[36] Correspondents of The Times, Reuters and other newspapers and agencies subsequently reported that they had seen French aircraft and French air officers in uniform on Israeli fields during the invasion, and at the “victory party” given in Tel Aviv by the Israeli air force, when the Israeli commander, General Moshe Dayan, was present. These reports agreed in an important point: that the French Air Force was present to “cover” or provide “an air umbrella” for Tel Aviv if it were attacked by Egyptian aircraft. Reuters reported that same French air officers admitted attacking Egyptian tanks during the Sinai fighting. As far as the French were concerned, therefore, the pretence of a descent on the Suez Canal to “separate” the belligerents was shown to be false. French officers and aircraft having been seen behind the Israeli lines in Israel and Sinai during the fighting. The Times correspondent reported “an undertaking on the part of France to do her best, if war broke out between Israel and Egypt, to prevent any action against Israel under the terms of the tripartite declaration of 1950 and to see that Israel had appropriate arms with which to fight.” The 1950 declaration pledged France impartially “to oppose the use of force or threat of force in that area. The three governments, should they find any of these states were preparing to violate frontiers or armistice lines, would … immediately take action … to prevent such violations.”
[37] From that moment, following the example set by the American President, the weight of censure was by stages shifted from “Israel” to “Israel, Britain and France,” then to “Britain and France,” and in the last stage to “Britain” (thus recalling the transformation earlier effected in the case of Hitler’s persecution of men, which began as “the persecution of political opponents,” then became “the persecution of political opponents and Jews,” then “Jews and political opponents” and, at the end, “of Jews”).
[38] The United States, of course, is the occupant, by conquest or by purchase, of British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies, and of vast Mexican and Russian territories. Only the virtual extirpation, during the life of the American Republic, of the original inhabitants of this great area produces a present picture differing from that of today’s British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies, with their millions of “colonial peoples.” American’s oversea possessions, by conquest or purchase, are few. The Panama Canal Zone, which is under permanent United States sovereignty, is a separate case; if it proves anything, in relation to the Suez Canal and Britain, it proves only the advantages of good “title” and of military adjacency.
[39] “The President said he would tell the marshall” (Stalin) “something indiscreet, since he would not wish to say it in front of Prime Minister Churchill … The British were a peculiar people and wished to have their cake and eat it too … He suggested the ‘internationalizing’ of the British colony of Hong Kong and that Korea be placed under a trusteeship with the British excluded. Stalin indicated that he did not think this was a good idea and added that ‘Churchill would kill us.’ When post-war political questions came up, he often took positions that were anti-British.” (New York Times, March 17, 1955).
[40] Two weeks later, after this chapter was finished, the same newspaper dismissed Britain as henceforth “a second class power.”
[41] A development which may have been foreshadowed by a report (if it was accurate) published in the New York Times on December 30, 1956, that “fewer than 900 of the 14,000 Jews who have fled from Hungary … have decided to resettle in Israel,” the “vast majority” preferring to go to America or Canada. On the other hand, if they follow the example of their predecessors they will swell the mass of “explosive” Eastern Jews there whose transplantation, during the last seventy years, has produced the present situation; the incitement of these against America was shown by quotation from Jewish authorities in the preceding chapter.
[42] As to the Suez affair, the apt footnote was supplied by President Eisenhower on January 5, 1957 when he asked Congress for standing authority to use the armed forces of the United States against “overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international Communism” in the Middle East. He thus envisaged doing very much what he had censured the Eden Government for doing. An example of “overt” aggression is presumably the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbour; the explosion was “overt” and it was attributed to Spain. Before and after the attack on Egypt the international press began to accuse one Arab nation after another of being “controlled” by international Communism, and President Eisenhower’s request to Congress again opens the prospect that the much-heralded extirpation of Communism might prove, in the event, to be an attack on the Arabs, not on Communism. The description, “controlled by Communism,” is incapable of definition or proof, and simple to falsify through propaganda. For instance, the New YorkTimes on Dec 2. 1956 published pictures of “Russian tanks captured by the Israelis” during the attack an Egypt. Readers’ objections led it to admit that the tanks were in fact American. Whether they were captured from the Egyptians remains open to question; anyone can photograph a tank and write a caption. Israel was originally set up with Soviet arms, but is not on that account said to be “controlled by international Communism.”
The news of President Eisenhower’s act was followed by a sharp rise in various Israel shares on the American Stock Exchange and by sermons of praise in several New York synagogues. A possible reason for this was the fact that the President undertook to act militarily in the Middle East only in response to request from “any nation or group of nations” attacked. As Egypt was widely declared to be “the aggressor” in the attack on itself in October 1956, this proviso again lies open to many interpretations, at need. If the words were earnestly meant, they imply that American forces would have been used, on Egyptian request, to repel the Israeli attack of October, 1956. That is difficult to imagine; to put it mildly, American military intervention in response to a request from any other Middle Eastern state than Israel is hard to picture; however, times change and all things are possible.
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