Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (41 page)

Begin had all of his Gentile readers in mind but, he said, it was to the British among them that he was addressing a special message. Because they had been conditioned to regard him as “Terrorist Number One”, they would ask, “quite sincerely”, this question: “What can such a man have to tell us; what message can come from him except a message of hate?”
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In a sort of Socratic dialogue he gave this answer: “Let us try, without fear, favour or prejudice, to understand the meaning of the awful word hate in this connection. You may ask me: Was there hate in our actions, in our revolt against British rule of our country? To such a question the sincere answer is Yes.”
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Begin continued: “It is axiomatic that those who have to fight have to hate—something or somebody. And we fought. We had to hate first and foremost the horrifying, age-old, inexcusable utter defencelessness of our Jewish people, wandering through millennia, through a cruel world, to the majority of whose inhabitants the defencelessness of the Jews was a standing invitation to massacre them. We had to hate the humiliating disgrace of the homelessness of our people. We had to hate—as any nation worthy of the name must and always will hate—the rule of the foreigner, rule unjust and unjustifiable per se, foreign rule in the land of our ancestors, in our own country. We had to hate the barring of our gates of our own country to our own brethren, trampled and bleeding and crying out for help in a world morally deaf. And, naturally, we had to hate all those who, equipped with modern arms and with the ancient machinery of the gallows, barred the way of our people to physical salvation, denied them of the means of individual defence, frustrated their efforts for national independence and ruthlessly withstood their attempts to regain their national honour and restore their self-respect… Who will condemn the hatred of evil that springs from the love of what is good and just?”
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If Begin was available for conversation today I would want to ask him a question, after pointing out that his homeland and country of origin was Poland not Palestine. The question would be: Is not the problem that the “new specimen of human being” was without a moral compass? (I would add that I was not necessarily blaming the new specimen, meaning that the absence of a moral compass might be the fault of those who persecuted Jews down the centuries).

I would also challenge Begin on the subject of the “utter defence- lessness” of Jews in Europe. Those Jews, I would assert, did not have to be utterly defenceless in the lands of their birth. If, for example, all Jews had joined with other progressive forces struggling for change in their homelands, they could have helped to bring about a New Order which would have included protection of Jews and their rights, to a very large extent and generally speaking. Zionism’s crime against the Jews was seeking to abort Jewish participation in that struggle because it, Zionism, saw advantage in offering its services to the Old Order as an anti-revolutionary force. It is at least possible that the Nazi holocaust would not have happened if Zionism, instead of seeing Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a gift for the Zionist enterprise, had supported the anti-Hitler forces before he came to power by democratic means.

The announcement to the world that Zionism’s terrorists were in business came in the form of the assassination in Cairo, on 6 November 1944, of Lord Moyne, Britain’s Resident Minister for the Middle East. His driver, Corporal Fuller, was also killed. The assassins were two Egyptian- born Jews, Eliahu Betzouri and his friend Eliahu Hakim. They were directed by the Stern Gang’s Shamir.

In the House of Commons Churchill responded to Lord Moyne’s assassination with these words: “If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ guns and our labours for its future produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past.”
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Prior to the Stern Gang’s assassination of Lord Moyne, Begin’s revitalised Irgun had published and distributed throughout Palestine and widely in America its
Call to Revolt
. The document included a lengthy explanation of why the Irgun had decided to take on the British while they were still at war with Hitler. It said: “There is no longer any armistice between the Jewish people and the British administration of Eretz Israel... Our people is at war with this regime—war to the end.”
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The Irgun’s demand was for “the immediate transfer of power in Eretz Israel to a Provisional Hebrew Government”. Then came the commitment: “We shall fight, every Jew in the homeland will fight. The God of Israel, the Lord of Hosts, will aid us. There will be no retreat. Freedom or death.”
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The call to revolt ended with an appeal to Jews everywhere, in America especially, not to “forsake” the Irgun’s fighters when the going got rough. “If you give them your aid you will see in our days the Return to Zion and the restoration of Israel.”
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The publication and distribution of the Irgun’s declaration of war was preceded by a long and agonised internal debate about the wisdom of going public. The Jews, some of Begin’s leadership colleagues argued, had had too many promises. They were fed up with mere words. Was there not a risk that the Irgun’s declaration would be seen as just more words and that, as a consequence, the Irgun would not be taken seriously? In which case the Irgun would start with a credibility problem. Would it not be better for a revitalised and re-focused Irgun to start with deeds rather than words? Begin decided that it was necessary, if they were to have the support of enough Jews everywhere, and in America especially, to start with an explanation of why they were fighting.

Events were to prove that the Irgun’s terrorists were not only as good as their words, they were better. They were quite simply the most ruthless and therefore the most effective terrorists the modern world had seen. In that sense Begin was right. A “new specimen of human being” had indeed been born.

Initially the Irgun concentrated on bombing British installations, facilities and communication networks of all kinds, for the purpose of making government impossible. Initially the British responded by executing, mostly by hanging, the Irgun terrorists they arrested. In retaliation the Irgun captured British army personnel and executed them. As needed, captured British officers and men were used as hostages and bargaining chips.

The Irgun’s most spectacular and politically important operation against the British was, on 22 July 1946, the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The British had taken over the southern wing of this most prestigious hotel to house the central institutions of their administration. It was both Military GHQ and the Secretariat of civil government. In other words, it was the very heart of British authority and power in Palestine.

As a result of an Irgun visit to deliver milk churns containing TNT (that Weizmann had invented for the benefit, at first, of the British), at least 91 people were killed and more than twice that number were injured. And Britain was humiliated.

Behind the front page reports of dynamite, destruction and death there was a truth which could not be told at the time.

In public and private Ben-Gurion had been assuring the Attlee government and the Truman administration that his Jewish Agency and the Haganah were opposed to the Irgun and its terrorism and most certainly did not sanction Irgun operations. The Haganah, Ben-Gurion had insisted, was not involved in any actions except those of a defensive nature—i.e. in response to Arab attacks. The truth was not only that the Haganah and so the Jewish Agency were colluding with the terrorists. After initially saying “No” to Operation Chick—the codename for the plan to blow up the King David—the Haganah ordered the Irgun to execute it. (In
The Revolt
Begin told of the liaison between the Irgun and the Haganah and named names). In all the circumstances as they were, it is inconceivable that the green light for blowing up the King David could have been given without the approval of Ben-Gurion himself.

Operation Chick was finally authorised because of Ben-Gurion’s reading, no doubt with the assistance of inputs from Niles in the White House, of the overall political situation. The Zionists had quickly destroyed the prospect of the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine being implemented, but another British and American diplomatic effort was underway—the one that resulted in the Morrison- Grady Plan. From Zionism’s perspective, and despite the awesome power of its lobby, things were not going too well for the Zionist enterprise; and that might continue to be the case so long as Britain perceived itself to be capable of influencing the situation on the ground in Palestine. So teach the British a lesson—that their grip on Palestine was not as firm as they thought it was—and that they were not safe anywhere.

After the blowing up of the King David and then the lynching by a Zionist mob of two British army sergeants, Ben Hecht, one of America’s most influential journalists—he knew everybody in Hollywood and publishing —declared: “Every time you let go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”
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Ben Hecht was one of the Irgun’s biggest supporters in America. Another was Congressman Joseph C. Baldwin, scion of one of New York’s oldest families. Baldwin had the distinction of being public relations adviser to the Irgun.

As a consequence of the brilliantly successful propaganda work of Baldwin and Hecht (and many others), organisations were formed across America to support illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine and to raise funds for Zionism’s terrorists. As Lilienthal noted: “Their competitive advertisements defended terrorism and stressed tax exemption for contributions to terrorist organisations.”

If the government in London had ordered the British army to take whatever action was needed to smash the Zionist terror networks, there would have been a tidal wave of protest in America that would have caused President Truman to order Britain to stop. And he would have had the leverage to make it obey.

As a consequence of World War II, Britain was just about bankrupt and already in debt to America. To have the certain prospect of reconstruction and recovery, Britain was in desperate need of further American financial assistance then under consideration by the Truman administration. It was to come in the form of Britain’s share of the $17 billion dollar budget for the American sponsored European Recovery Programme, which became known as the Marshall Plan after its proposer, Secretary of State George Marshall. It was not a matter of charity on the part of America. The view was that if Western Europe was not assisted to recover, the enemies of democracy— trade unions included, it was said—would make great gains everywhere. In short, the Marshall Plan was conceived as the most effective and least expensive way of keeping Soviet-style communism at bay.

In reality Zionism’s terrorists were bound to be the winners if they were prepared to be ruthless enough. With the assistance of American money, they were. In all the circumstances is it any wonder that Britain decided to cut and run from Palestine? I suppose not.

But breaking Britain’s will to hang on in Palestine was only the first item on the agenda of Zionism’s terrorists. The second was driving the Arabs out.

With the assistance of the Stern Gang, and grenades and other weapons provided by the Haganah for a quite different purpose, the most spectacular and politically important of the Irgun’s operations against the Arabs was its first. The target was the village of Deir Yassin.

The full truth about the massacre at Deir Yassin of 254 Palestinians —mainly women, children and old men—is inseparable from the story of the Haganah’s attempt to hold another Arab village, Kastel, after it was taken by the Palmach on 2 April 1948. Holding Kastel was considered to be a strategic imperative if the fighting Jews were to succeed in breaking the Arab siege of Jerusalem.

On 29 November the previous year the UN General Assembly, in a rigged vote, had passed a resolution to partition Palestine. The original intention was that partition—the creation of an Arab state and a Jewish state—would come into effect when the British Mandate expired at midnight on 14 May 1948, by which time the British would be gone. But as we shall see in the next chapter, the UN was unable to implement the partition resolution and it was, in fact, vitiated. As a consequence the question of what to do about Palestine was still without an answer so far as the UN was concerned.

That, however, was of no concern to the Zionists in Palestine. They were intending, unilaterally, to declare the coming into being of their state on 15 May. In other words, they were intending to proceed as though the partition plan had not been vitiated. What was happening at the UN was an irrelevance so far as they were concerned. As we shall also see later, Ben-Gurion was confident, with very good reason, that, if the Arabs opted for war, they, the Zionists, would be able to take more Arab land than had been assigned to them under the partition plan.

The problem for Zionism was that in the UN’s partition plan Jerusalem was to be an international city. In the UN’s view Jerusalem had too much potential as a cause of strife for it to be an integral part of either the proposed Arab or Jewish state. So Jerusalem was to become a UN trusteeship. This was totally unacceptable to Ben-Gurion. In his view, recreating the Jewish state without Jerusalem as its capital would amount to the resurrection of the body without the soul.

By April 1948, as a result of Jewish immigration, legal and illegal, nearly two-thirds of the inhabitants of what had become Greater Jerusalem were Jewish. After the Balfour Declaration the Zionists had given priority to building up their numbers in Jerusalem—i.e. around the Old walled and mainly Arab City. The Jewish extensions were New Jerusalem. It was all part of Ben-Gurion’s strategy of creating facts on the ground. His intention was to seize all of Jerusalem as soon as possible after the Jewish state came into being, then to say to the world: “There’s no point in discussing the matter of Jerusalem (New and Old) further. We Jews now control all of it. Jerusalem is our eternal capital and the idea of it becoming an international city is dead.”