Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (14 page)

As Henry Cattan pointed out in his acclaimed book,
Palestine and International Law
, “Arab” is a generic term which includes all the peoples who live in the Middle East whose mother tongue is Arabic, regardless of their religion. Today there are Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs and Israeli Arabs. The Arabs, originally pagan, have lived in the Middle East, including the land of Canaan which became Palestine, since the dawn of history. Prior to the Muslim conquest of Palestine in 637 AD, most of its indigenous Arab population were Christian Arabs. As a consequence of the Muslim conquest, most Palestinian Christian Arabs were converted to Islam and became Muslim Arabs. It was the religion, Islam, that came with Muslim Arab conquest, not the Palestinians. “The Muslim Arab conquest of Palestine did not involve any mass immigration of the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula into Palestine or any colonisation of that country. In fact, the number of invaders was very small and they were assimilated by the indigenous population.”
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The Zionists were not successful in their initial search for big power support for their political ambitions. Herzl turned first to the Turks as the “owners” by conquest of Palestine at the time. The deal Herzl proposed to the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, took account of the condition of the Turkish Empire. It was in the process of disintegration, “decomposing” as some said. The British had been occupying parts of it, Egypt and Sudan, since the early 1880s.

When they met, Abdul Hamid told Herzl he was willing to receive Jewish immigrants in all his provinces with the exception of Palestine, provided they became Ottoman subjects, accepted military service and settled “in a disbursed manner, five families here and five families there.”
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But Herzl wanted nothing less than an autonomous Jewish Palestine within the Turkish Empire; and he had gone to the meeting confident that he could make Abdul Hamid a good enough offer to get what he wanted. The offer was that the WZO would take up the Turkish Empire’s foreign debts. Whether Herzl had cleared this with Jewish bankers or was simply assuming they would deliver is not known to me. In response to the offer Abdul Hamid said: “I cannot agree to vivisection... my people fought for this land and fertilised it with their blood... let the Jews keep their millions.”
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Herzl concluded that he needed a major European power to pressure the Sultan on Zionism’s behalf. He believed that Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany (first choice) and Tsar Nicholas’s Russia (second choice) were his best bets. If one of them could persuade Turkey to grant Zionism even a small part of Palestine for starters, the Zionists would be able to claim, Herzl reckoned, that their aspirations had been recognised and their enterprise legitimised. The question was—what could Zionism offer that would motivate either Germany or Russia to put pressure on the Sultan?

The founding father of Zionism understood in principle how the real world worked. International politics was a game, The Game of Nations. As they played it, the big, powerful nations were not at all concerned with doing what was right for its own sake. Their only purpose was to advance their interests. There was no moral code. Only interests. If small, weak nations and, even more so, nationalist movements such as Zionism (and later Arafat’s PLO) wanted the support of a major foreign power, they had to be able to do one of two things—serve the interests of the big power or pose a credible threat to them.

Herzl’s answer to the question of what Zionism could offer the Kaiser’s Germany or the Tsar’s Russia for their support was, to say the least, a very pragmatic one.

The Kaiser and the Tsar were symbols of an Old Order that was reaching the end of its sell-by date because it was opposed to inevitable change; and those two leaders had one thing in common. Both wanted to be rid of sections of their Jewish communities. And for the same reason. Their Jewish intellectuals and workers were in the vanguard of the ever- growing revolutionary (Social Democratic) movement that was pressing for equal rights and a fair deal for all citizens—a New Order.

Herzl’s strategy was to put Zionism at the service of either the Kaiser or the Tsar as an anti-revolutionary taskforce. As a consequence of having its headquarters in Berlin, the WZO was well connected to the Kaiser’s regime. Herzl was aware that the Kaiser himself saw merit in Zionism as a solution to his Jewish problem. Behind closed doors the Kaiser had expressed the view that if the Zionists had a state of their own in Palestine, Germany’s “Social Democratic elements” (the Kaiser’s euphemism for “my troublesome Jewish citizens”) would “stream into it.”

In fact that was wishful thinking on the Kaiser’s part. The reality was that Germany’s Jews wanted to stay put. They did not see their future in Palestine. Life for Jews in Germany at the time was far from ideal but it was not so bad either. The Kaiser had frozen Jews totally out of the officer class and the foreign office, and sanctioned severe discrimination against them throughout the civil service; but he permitted them complete economic freedom. In that environment Germany’s wealthy Jews were content and the discontented Jewish students and workers were committed to struggle to improve their lot in Germany.

 


• Germany was the first base of the Jewish family with a name which became synonymous with immense wealth and the power that comes with it—the Rothschilds. According to Paul Vallely, writing about the Rothschilds in
  The Independent
  on 16 April 2004, banking industry insiders of today count the fortune of the Rothschilds “not in billions but in trillions.”
  

 


• The founding father of the world’s largest and secretive private banking dynasty was Amshel Mayer Rothschild. He was the son of an itinerant money lender and goldsmith who settled in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt in 1744. Amschel Mayer (1773–1855) specialised “not just in clever accounting practices but also kept secret books and subterranean vaults that he ensured were never the privy of auditor, lawyer or taxman.” What he founded in the 1790s was “a business that grew from the humble beginning of selling rare coins to becoming the prime money lender to greedy and spendthrift governments across Europe.” The Rothschilds loan-funded the military adventures (wars) of governments and frequently financed both sides.
  

 


• Amschel Mayer built on his own success by sending four of his five sons to different European capitals to take advantage of the rise of capitalism and the growth of international trade. Nathan was despatched to London, James to Paris, Saloman to Vienna and Carl to Naples. Their private banks made huge sums from buying and selling government bonds (government debt instruments with fixed interest rates), and they invested in the railways and all aspects of the industrial revolution. The Rothschilds “got a cut of everything” and it gave them “a new kind of power”. How much power is indicated by the following quotation attributed to Nathan by Vallely:
  “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”
  (Emphasis added). At a point Nathan rescued the Bank of England after a run on gold caused the collapse of 145 banks.
  

When Herzl met with the Kaiser he asked him to intervene personally with the Sultan to secure his agreement to the formation in Palestine of a chartered company under German protection. It was to be the Zionist acorn from which the oak tree would grow. From his diary we know that Herzl played what he thought was his trump card with the Kaiser. “I explained that we were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.”
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The Kaiser himself was so anxious to get rid of his revolutionary Jews that he seriously thought about pressing the Sultan on Zionism’s behalf. But his diplomats were totally opposed to such a move. They were cultivating the Sultan and they knew he would never agree to such a scheme. They also knew that Germany’s Jews would never leave their homeland voluntarily. Eventually the Kaiser said “No” to Herzl.

Herzl’s approach to Russia suggests that his grasp on reality was not strong.

As told by Brenner, Herzl met with the murderous Vyacheslav von Plevhe, the Tsar’s Minister of the Interior. Plevhe had just organised the first pogrom in 20 years. At Kishenev in Bessarabia at Easter, 45 Jews were slaughtered and more than a thousand were injured. After that even most Russian Zionists were opposed to Herzl’s meeting with Plevhe. But the Zionist leader still went ahead with it. What took place at the meeting was later revealed by Chaim Zhitlovsky, then a leading Jewish figure in the Russian Social Revolutionary Party. According to Zhitlovsky, this is what Herzl told him:

I have just come from Plevhe. I have this positive, binding promise that in 15 years, at the maximum, he will effectuate for us a charter for Palestine. But this is tied to one condition—the Jewish revolutionaries shall cease their struggle against the Russian government. If in 15 years from the time of the agreement Plevhe does not effectuate the charter, they become free again to do what they consider necessary.
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On the basis of the deal he had done with Plevhe, Herzl was asking Zhitlovsky to use his influence to stop Russia’s revolutionary Jews from pressing their efforts to improve their lot in Russia.

Zhitlovsky was furious and scornfully rejected Herzl’s proposition. Zhitlovsky knew the Tsar had not the slightest influence with the Turks who saw him as their enemy. The idea that Tsarist Russia could do for Herzl what the Kaiser’s Germany had refused to do was plain silly. From that perspective alone Herzl’s strategy was pointless and humiliating. But even if that had not been the case, there was no way, Zhitlovsky told Herzl, that Jewish revolutionaries would call off their struggle for elementary human rights in their Russian homeland in return for a vague promise of a Zionist state in Palestine in the distant future.

Zhitlovky’s subsequent judgement of Zionism’s founding father was sharp and perceptive and, in a word, withering. Herzl was, the Russian Jewish revolutionary leader said, “too loyal” to the ruling (corrupt and repressive) authorities to be interested in the revolutionaries and involving them in his calculations. Herzl had not made the journey to argue for better treatment of Russia’s Jews and “to awaken compassion for us in Plevhe’s heart.” Herzl had travelled to Russia, Zhitlovsky said, as a politician who was concerned only with “interests”, not with his Jewish people and their actual real needs and sentiments. “Herzl’s politics is built on pure diplomacy, which seriously believes that the political history of humanity is made by a few people, a few leaders, and that what they arrange among themselves becomes the content of political history.”
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Unable to get either the Kaiser’s Germany or the Tsar’s Russia to persuade Turkey to give him what he wanted in Palestine, Herzl became anxious and was prepared to do anything to get the support of a major foreign power. Without it Zionism had no credibility and was going nowhere. In some despair Herzl himself was prepared to accept a British proposal that the Zionists should settle in part of what is today Kenya (then a part of the East Africa segment of the British Empire), and develop a home there as the substitute for Palestine.

Though it is usually dismissed by historians with a sentence and a smile, this bizarre idea, born in the minds of leading figures of the ruling British Conservative Party, had both a serious purpose and a powerful history.

For centuries (as previously noted) the Russian empire of the Tsars had been the heartland of world Jewry. It had started to become something less than that after Oliver Cromwell reopened the doors of England to Jews in the 17th century and they began to make for England (and other Western nations) from all over Eastern Europe.

It was the re-opening of England’s doors to Jews that gave the Haskala movement both its inspiration and its impetus. A few of the Jews who decided that assimilation in England was their best and safest bet were quite wealthy, but most were peddlers, many so poor and destitute that they were little more than beggars. With time and effort on their part in a more enlightened England they were accepted by the host community, and began to acquire rights and freedoms they had never previously enjoyed: and in the process of becoming “Jewish Englishmen”, they started to feel secure. Then something happened to make them fear that their well-being and security was once again at risk; and that their loyalty to the Britain of which they were citizens might not be enough to protect them from a new upsurge of anti-Semitism.

Between 1881 and 1915 about three million Jews left Russia in search of a better life in Western Europe and America. It was the biggest mass migration in history. Russian Jews were leaving their homeland in such vast numbers because of poverty and persecution including pogroms. (Golda Mabovitch was among those who went to America).

Those who sought sanctuary and assimilation in England arrived in boats with excrement running down their sides. So appalling was their condition that these new Jewish immigrants smelled and looked like what they were described as being, even by some of England’s assimilated Jews, “the refuse of Eastern Europe.” Adding to the perception of the host community that they were the most undesirable of aliens was the fact that none of these new Jewish immigrants spoke a word of English. Their common language was Yiddish, a corrupted form of the speech of the ancient Hebrews, mixed with Russian, Polish and the many other native languages of the homeland they had abandoned. Among them was Michael Marks, a peddler who traded from a tray around his neck and went on to found Marks & Spencer.