March, 1956
The complacency with which Americans accepted this event was the final flowering of an attitude that had prevailed here ever since the Jews revealed their intention of snatching up the Holy Land as their own domain. It was not, however, an attitude prompted by a single motive. Many Americans smiled upon Zionist ambitions by way of expressing their condolence for the sufferings the Jews said they had endured under the Nazis. But for other Americans, the acquiescence to Jewish schemes was inspired by the wild, desperate fancy that setting up the State of Israel would somehow spell an end to America’s own increasingly-urgent Jewish problem.
The root of this problem lay in the familiar axiom that Jews everywhere are part of a single, inseparable nation, living in many Gentile lands but belonging to none of them. “Jews are a distinctive nationality,” said Jewish Justice Louis Brandeis, “of which every Jew, whatever his country, his station, or his shade of belief, is necessarily a member.” During the twentieth century, as hordes of Jewish immigrants swarmed into America, the truth of Brandeis’ statement came painfully home. The Jews were a people apart, bristling and intransigent. The notion of America as a great melting pot, blending together all peoples and cultures, thus had to be modified with the significant exemption, “But Jews don’t melt.”
With the establishment of the Jewish state, hope surged that America’s “Jewish problem” would be departing as soon as there were boats enough to accommodate it. “We want to go home ... home ... home. We must go home,” Rabbi Stephen Wise had wailed in the days when Israel was still just a gleam in Jewish eyes. It was improbable that all Jews would turn their backs on the fat life in America in order to pioneer a meager, unmechanized land. Still, it did seem reasonable that those Jews most burningly aware of their Jewishness, their separateness, would head for Israel, where their ardor would be not only in place but most welcome; and that those Jews who wanted to remain here would consent to become less noisy, less aggressive, less of “a nation within a nation.”
This naive hope has by now been thoroughly blasted. With the State of Israel about to enter its ninth year of impassioned existence, there are more Jews in America than ever before, and more Jewish nationalism. Besides, it is Israel itself, the country to which the Jews of America have deliberately chosen not to go, that excites and benefits most from their labors. Every day come fresh reports of Jewish demands, ranging from indignant cries for American arms to exploratory requests for American troops.
The Jews of America were once instructed by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s Prime Minister, that they must have “neither friendship nor sympathy but love of Israel, of the State of Israel ... . It must be an unconditional love. There must be complete solidarity with the State and the people of Israel.” This admonition has been taken fervently to heart. Though nearly half the world’s Jews live in the U. S., their loyalty is to Israel, the political expression of that fierce and blood-bound thing: the Jewish nation.
In a bulletin put out by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Washington Heights, N. Y., there is contained the following bold statement of Jewish allegiance. “Here is Our Pledge, Israel: I pledge my loyalty to God, to the Torah and to the Jewish people and to the Jewish state.”
The young pretended-Americans who take this vow of loyalty to a foreign nation owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a top-notch Mason from Missouri. This benefactor is, of course, Harry S. Truman, and the immediate story of how American Jews got him to build the Jewish state starts early in 1948.
At that time, United States policy-makers were becoming just a bit wary of carving up the Holy Land into two explosive political divisions, one Arab and one Jewish. Although they had agreed to this so-called “partition,” after every Jew in America had screamed that they should, the U. S. State Department — and even the U. S. delegation to the Jewish-minded United Nations — were coming to feel that the setting-up of a Jewish government on property belonging to Arabs, with Arab governments surrounding it on all sides, would be much more likely to succeed if a period of “U. N. Trusteeship” came first.
But when the Trusteeship plan was announced (as the only feasible one which would give the Jews the country they were demanding, and yet forestall U. S. involvement in a Middle East war) the Jews of America began to wail. And then they began to push, shove, and employ all their considerable arts of political pressure.
The British occupation of the Holy Land was to cease on May 14, 1948. And the Jews were determined that as soon as the British pulled out, a Jewish government would take over. Every Jewish organization was loudly lobbying for the immediate establishment of such a state. Judge Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee even proposed that we sell U. S. arms to the Jewish gangs of Palestine, thus equipping them to force their will on the Arabs at the moment of British departure. On the 8th of April, 8,000 synagogues all across the nation held special “services” to demand that our government recognize the Jewish state right away, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.
Here enters Truman. It was at him that the Jews determined to aim the major pressure. For while the State Department might be hesitating, the President, said the Jews, could solve the whole Jewish-state problem by one swift grant of “official recognition.”
1948 was election year, and the fact that three-fourths of America’s Jews are concentrated in 14 key political cities, plus the fact that the Jews can always control New York State’s big bundle of 45 electoral votes, has a terrorizing effect on American politicians. In Truman’s case the pressure was further increased by the fact, later attested to by Jewish columnist David Lawrence, that without Jewish contributions Truman could never have financed his 1948 campaign.
Just how the Jews felt, vote-wise, in the matter of the Holy Land was no secret. In the off-year Congressional elections in the Bronx in 1947, a Jewish Labor Party candidate had carried a “solidly Democratic” district by telling the Jews that we should send American troops to Palestine to enforce the partition and protect the new Jewish state!
At the insistence of Jew Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s ex-partner in the clothing business, the President allowed himself to be closeted in a secret session with Jewry’s arch-intimidator, the ubiquitous Dr. Chaim Weizmann. As May 14 approached, party advisers let Truman know that his victory in the Fall depended entirely upon the Jewish issue. Finally, on the fateful day, Truman had a persuasive private visit from the President of the Jewish Masonic lodges in America, Frank Goldman of B’nai B’rith. Later that morning, Truman held a conference with his full-time Jewish adviser, David K. Niles, and a certain Mr. Epstein from the Jewish Agency in Washington. It was decided then, irrevocably, that as soon as the British Mandate in Palestine should run out (6 P. M. that evening, Washington time) Truman must officially recognize the government of the State of Israel. As a precautionary measure, care was taken that neither the State Department nor our U. N. Delegation should be advised of what the President intended to do.
It all came about as the Jews had planned. Mr. Truman granted official recognition at 6:11 P. M., May 14, 1948. And the Jews kept their part of the bargain. The President was returned to office the following November.
American Jews have been gloating over their success ever since, and in the February 5, 1953 issue of The American Zionist, Dr. Emmanuel Neumann made a summary statement of Mr. Truman’s role in the creation of the Jewish state. As head of the Zionist Organization of America, Dr. Neumann wrote that the President, “accepted the Zionist line reluctantly and under pressure, at first, but having accepted it, he followed through honestly and firmly.”
There is no political figure in the nation who cannot match Truman’s “pressure” story with one of his own. But even more bold than the constant intimidation of America’s public men, is the high-handed, brassy campaign to support the government of the State of Israel with a steady flow of American dollars. Since 1939, the Jews who live in the U. S. have contributed $l,100,000,000 to what they call the United Jewish Appeal. To get some small idea of just how successful the U. J. A. has been, we call attention to the relative receipts of that most familiar of all solicitors, the American Red Cross. In the year 1954, drawing upon a Jewish population which the Jews say is only five million, the United Jewish Appeal was able to set a goal that exceeded by $35,000,000 the amount sought by the entire Red Cross organization, which draws upon one hundred and fifty million Americans!
From these arresting figures, it is clear that American Jews look upon the United Jewish Appeal as much more than an ordinary community relief fund. By the Jews’ own boast, we are assured that millions of these dollars, wooed from Gentile pocketbooks on the Jewish-owned Main Streets of America, have gone into the building of their new country in Palestine. So much is this the case that on November 18, 1954, in a speech before the 23rd general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, U. J. A.’s Dr. Schwartz told American Jews that their “local” spending must be entirely “subordinated” to “allocations for overseas needs through the United Jewish Appeal.”
Thus, in obedience to an edict from Israel’s chief rabbi, Halevi Herzog, American synagogues, during the high holy days” of September, 1952, made the auctioning of Israeli government bonds the feature of all their services — a most lucrative form of devotion which has since been repeated. In 1954, besides the regular gifts and bond investments, a hastily-collected $65,000,000 was made available to Israel in order to meet the payments due on the national debt. And only a few months ago, no less a personage than Israel’s Foreign Minister himself landed in America with a trunk full of his government’s bonds and a predatory gleam in his eye. Again, American Jews came through for the “homeland,” sending the Foreign Minister back to Jerusalem richer by several millions.
A frightening sidelight on this matter of steady income from Israel’s nonresident citizens came in September of 1952, when a special “Reparations” fee of $715,000,000 was extorted by Israel from the government of West Germany. Fantastic as it sounds, this money (being paid in installments of $60,000,000 per annum) is to compensate for the fact that several years before the State of Israel even existed, German citizens mistreated some fellow-German citizens of Jewish blood. The clear claim of the State of Israel in all this is that the German Jews who suffered under Hitler were not Germans at all, but citizens of the Jewish State. And the only conclusion to draw from such a precedent is that, if the Jews have their way, anyone who offends any Jew, in any country, will be responsible to the government of the State of Israel, and liable for whatever “reparations” the Israelis may demand!
American Jews have been indicating of late that when their war in the Holy Land is resumed, they want everyone in the American Army to take part, not just the Jewish officers. For, encouraged by the U. S. Government’s past financial generosity to the new State of Israel ($400,000,000 in outright gifts, as of last summer) the Jews are confident that Uncle Sam can be high-pressured into being equally generous with his armed forces. If such help materializes, Mr. Liberman will have no difficulty with his modest proposal to annex Gaza and the Jordan kingdom. Indeed, the Jews will unquestionably make the most of the opportunity and grab up much more — all in the spirit of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s frank “war policy” statement in January of this year: “We have come a long way without peace. We can go a long way in the future without it.”
The prospect of American boys dying for the cause of Jewish imperialism is hardly a comforting one. It is eclipsed in the minds of American Catholics only by the more devastating prospect of what will happen to the Holy Land’s churches and shrines in those not-yet-Jewish areas which, in a future war, would pass into Jewish hands.
Readers of The Point are familiar with the previous Jewish desecrations of the Dormition Abbey, the Convent of Mary Reparatrix, the parish churches of Galilee, and countless others — sacrileges financed and approved by Israel’s citizens-in-exile, the Jews of America.
The story of the Crucifixion comes to us with new and stark clarity this Lenten season, in the knowledge that the immediate path of Israeli expansion takes in all the sacred shrines of Our Lord’s Passion and Death, the Holy Places of the First Good Friday.