Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (34 page)

But bloodshed and possible disruption to the flow of oil were not the State Department’s only concerns. At the time the Soviet Union was opposed (said it was opposed) to the creation of a Jewish state. With that in mind Murray also advised that it would not be wise to attempt a settlement of the Palestine problem without the full agreement of the Soviet Union. He added: “The continued endorsement by the President of Zionist objectives could throw the entire Arab world into the arms of the Soviet Union.”
³⁹
In his letters of reply to Ibn Saud and the other Arab leaders, President Roosevelt repeated in writing more or less what he said to the Saudi monarch face- to-face, that no decision would be taken with respect to the basic Palestine situation without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews, and that he would “take no action as Chief of the Executive Branch which might prove hostile to the Arab people.”
⁴⁰

Roosevelt’s letters were dated 5 April 1945. They were not transmitted until 10 April. Two days later he was dead.

The question that has to be asked about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with regard to Palestine is—what on earth was his game-plan?

Palestine did not become a significant item on President Roosevelt’s agenda until America entered World War II. What explains thereafter his double-speak? Why did he say one thing in private to the leaders of the Arab world, which represented his real position, and another thing, the opposite, to the Zionists, knowing that through the media they would proclaim what they represented him as saying to the people of America and the world?

I think there is only one answer that makes any sense.

Up to the moment of his death Roosevelt was not prepared to say “No” to the idea of a Jewish state; and the reason why can be summarised as follows.

Prior to the 1944 election he was unwilling to do so on account of domestic political considerations—his concerns about the damage in terms of campaign funds and votes the Zionist lobby could do to his party’s election prospects if it, and he himself, did not give at least the impression of support for Zionism’s objectives in Palestine. For reasons of political expediency he did actually sign, on demand, a public letter endorsing his party’s pro-Zionist election platform.

After the 1944 election, and because of the public sympathy for Jews as the full horror of the Nazi holocaust emerged and began to sink in and move public opinion,
the time for confronting Zionism was simply not right.
Not right emotionally and so not right politically. In the dreadful shadow of the Nazi holocaust, saying “No” to a Jewish state would have required a battle in Congress, with the most powerful media voices on Zionism’s side, that no President could have won.

But tied though his hands (and feet) were, I am in no doubt that President Roosevelt did have a game-plan with regard to Palestine.

Roosevelt died on the 82nd day of what would otherwise have been four more years in the White House. That would have been time enough, probably, for the emotional impact of the Nazi holocaust to become less of an exploitable factor in American politics. I mean exploitable by Zionism’s zealots and their unquestioning supporters in Congress and the mainstream media.

On that basis let us speculate for a moment or two about what might have happened if Roosevelt, opposed as he was to the creation of a Jewish state in the face of Arab opposition, had had four more years.

When he signed his letters to Ibn Saud and the other Arab leaders, Roosevelt had already decided (rather like President Wilson before him in similar international circumstances) that he would personally lead America’s delegation to a hugely important international conference. It was scheduled to open in San Francisco on 25 April, two weeks after Roosevelt’s death as it turned out.

The purpose of the San Francisco Conference, to be attended by 46 nations, was to draft a Charter for the founding of the United Nations —the world body to replace the discredited League of Nations. (It was, in fact, doomed from the beginning by America’s refusal to join, and then by Imperial Britain’s domination of it, initially to get a Mandate to give its continuing occupation of Palestine, and its intended implementation of the Balfour Declaration, the appearance of legitimacy. Later the League of Nations was discredited by its failure to prevent Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China; by Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia; and, the last nail in its coffin, Hitler’s repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. Early in the course of World War II the League of Nations was so discredited that it ceased to function. But Woodrow Wilson’s idealism did not die with it. World War II only confirmed the need for leaders to give substance to his vision with regard to the creation of a global institution).

At the Yalta summit, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had settled their differences about setting up the UN. Its Charter was signed and came into force on 24 October 1945. And the new world body came formally into being the following year. While it was convening elsewhere, in London and then Switzerland, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $8.5 million dollars for its headquarters site in New York.

If Roosevelt had lived to serve his full fourth term as President, he would have had four years minus 82 days to make good and proper use of the UN as the institution for settling not only the Palestine problem but his Palestine problem—the influence of the Zionist lobby.

Roosevelt believed, as indeed did everyone who was informed on the issue, that a resolution of the Palestine problem by the UN, representing the will of the organised international community at the time, would not be one that endorsed Zionism’s preposterous demand for the creation of a Jewish state—assuming only that all the member states were allowed to vote freely.

On that basis, probably not before he was nearing the end of his final term in office, and assuming the UN went for a settlement of the Palestine problem that did not give Zionism a state, President Roosevelt, politician
par excellence
that he was, could have said to the people of America something like this:

At such a critical but promising moment in the history of mankind, the United States of America cannot afford to be out of step with, and effectively challenging the authority of, the United Nations. We, too, must abide by its decisions, all the more so if it is our wish to give the world the moral leadership it so desperately needs.

He could also have pointed out that, as a consequence of resolving the Palestine problem with the agreement of the Arabs, there would be in Palestine not a Jewish state—that was impossible—but a home for Jews as envisaged by the Balfour Declaration and Ahad Ha-am.

Could it be that President Roosevelt, if he had lived, would have played his final hand in such a way?

The evidence in the record made public in 1964 suggests that the answer is very probably yes. In addition there are two summary reasons why I am in no doubt about it.

The first is that President Roosevelt did not believe in the idea of a Jewish state. (And that probably explains why he was called an “anti- Semite” —a false and wicked charge in my view—by Ben Hecht in his autobiography,
Child of the Century
). Roosevelt was fully aware, and not just because of the State Department’s line, that the Zionist enterprise was not in America’s longer term and best interests.

The second, or so I believe, is that Roosevelt meant what he said when he described the Presidency as being “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership”. FDR could and did play the game of politics (double-talking and double-dealing) as well as any and better than most. That was how he kept the Zionists at bay on his watch. He played them at their own game! He might not have had such a grand vision as Woodrow Wilson about how the world ought to be; and to that extent he was less of an idealist and less naïve than Woodrow Wilson. But fundamentally Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt were the same—good human beings who wanted to do what was right for the right reasons.

But I am more than content to leave the last word on the subject of President Roosevelt and Israel to one of Amercian Zionism’s most influential sons, David K. Niles, another voice from the grave. In 1974, Dr. Stephen D. Isaacs of
The Washington Post
had published (by Doubleday in New York) a book described as “A vast storehouse of information on a touchy subject which is poorly understood by Jews and their enemies.” The book’s title was
Jews and American Politics
. On page 244, Isaacs wrote this (emphasis added): “The late David K. Niles, a Jew who was an aide to Roosevelt and, later, to Truman, made the point that,
had Roosevelt lived, Israel probably would not have become a state.
” (The critical role Niles played in the determination of American policy has its place in the pages to come.)

President Roosevelt’s untimely death set the stage for the mother and father of political struggles in America. At issue was one very simple but profoundly important question: Who would determine U.S. policy for Palestine—an American President and his administration acting to serve and best protect the American interest, or the Zionist lobby?

When the struggle started Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, was the man in the middle, caught in the crossfire of the opposing forces.

The truth about this struggle only started to emerge in the 1970’s with the release into the public domain of de-classified State Department documents and Truman papers. Some vested interests had not wanted some of the information to be de-classified. And still today discussion about what actually happened behind closed doors is not welcomed. Why not? Because the documented truth raises seriously embarrassing and disturbing questions not only about how Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict were created, but also about how America is governed and, in particular, the quality of its democracy.

As the President of the United States of America and the leader of the so-called Free World, Truman was an enormously powerful man. If he was more powerful than Stalin, and surely he was, Truman was the most powerful man in the world. The single most dramatic symbol of his power was his decision to authorise the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; this to bring World War II to an end in a way that, according to the official version, would save the lives of up to 500,000 American ground troops. That was the projected number of Americans who might be killed in action if the defeated Japanese army honoured its promise to fight to the last man rather than surrender.

But thanks to Adolf Hitler, Zionism had its own awesome weapon— the Nazi holocaust as a political and emotional blackmail card. The Zionists had played it with skill to prevent President Roosevelt, up to the time of his death, denying them the prospect of victory in Palestine.

The question waiting for an answer after his untimely death was— how would the Zionists play this card on Truman’s watch and what impact on him would playing it have?

The first shot in the political struggle to determine which of two forces would command President Truman’s support—the State Department or Zionism—was fired by Secretary of State Stettinus.

On the sixth day of the Truman presidency Stettinus sent the new man in the White House a private and confidential letter. Apart from the deteriorating situation in Palestine and rising tension throughout the Middle East, there were several related reasons for the Secretary of State’s urgency.

One was to do with fact that in his 82 days as Roosevelt’s Vice President, Truman had met with Roosevelt only twice. When he took the presidential oath of office a month short of his 61st birthday, Truman therefore had no understanding worth having of either the complexities and dangers of the Palestine problem, or how the Roosevelt administration had been intending to deal with it. (Missouri’s Senator Truman had not been President Roosevelt’s own choice of running mate for the 1944 election).

Another reason for Stettinus’s urgency was to do with the perception, widely held, that Truman was “far too small for the job.”

That reputation did, in fact, stay with him for all of his nearly two terms as America’s 33rd President, but after his retirement many Americans saw him in a much more favourable light. Many agreed with what Truman himself once said—that he had “done his damndest.”

From the Arab point of view that was true in the profanatory sense.

There is good reason to believe that Truman had not wanted to be Vice President let alone President.

In
The Forrestal Diaries,
Forrestal recorded Senator Truman as having said to him, on 4 July 1944, “that he was being urged to accept the nomination for Vice President but that he proposed to resist”, because he was “happy in the Senate and felt that he was able to exercise (there) as much influence in Government as he wished.”
⁴¹

James Forrestal was the man who reorganised America’s armed forces and became the first U.S. Secretary of Defence. In Chapter Twelve of this book he gets the attention he deserves because he was one of the two truly great men of principle in Truman’s first administration who tried and failed to persuade the President to put America’s interests first so far as decision making about Palestine was concerned. The other was the legendary General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff during World War II, described by Churchill as “the organiser of victory”; and who was Secretary of State when Truman eventually surrendered to Zionism. But it was Forrestal, as we shall see, who tried to do the one thing necessary to prevent Zionism calling America’s foreign policy shots in the Middle East.