Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (48 page)

The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but the White House too was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favourable votes in the General Assembly. I have never approved of the practice of the strong imposing their will on the weak whether among men or among nations.
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Political threats? That was Truman’s way of acknowledging that Zionists had let him know that he could forget about being re-elected for a second term if his administration did not put pressure on member states— to guarantee the necessary two-thirds majority for the partition resolution in the General Assembly.

The Zionist threat to the Democratic Party’s election prospects had also been invoked at the Cabinet table. Robert E. Hannegan was the Postmaster General. On at least two occasions he pressed the President to take sides with the Zionists in order to protect the flow of Jewish campaign funds. In cabinet on 4 September, the day after the UNSCOP majority report recommended partition, Hannegan said the position taken on Palestine would have “a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee.”
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He reminded his Cabinet colleagues that “very large sums”
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had been obtained from Jewish contributors in the past and they would be influenced “in either giving or withholding by what the President does on Palestine.”
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In cabinet on 6 October, when the Zionists and their supporters were wanting the Truman administration to “pressure sovereign nations into favourable votes in the General Assembly”, Hannegan had again raised the importance of Jewish campaign funds.
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He said that many who had contributed to Democrat campaigns in the past were “pressing hard for assurances from the administration of definitive support for the Jewish position in Palestine.”
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On that occasion Forrestal quoted the President as telling Hannegan that if those who were pressing would only keep quiet, he thought that everything would be alright; but “if they persisted in the endeavour to go beyond the report of the United Nations Commission, there was grave danger of wrecking all prospects for settlement.”
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Hannegan still pressed the President to give the Zionists definitive assurance of his support. Truman was, Forrestal noted, “adamant”—i.e. he refused to give definitive assurance.

Truman’s assertion that his administration at Executive level did not press governments to change their votes from “No” to “Yes” was correct. What many UN delegates understandably but wrongly perceived to be Truman administration pressure was applied by a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators who were motivated by their needs for Jewish votes and campaign funds. They co-ordinated their activities with Niles and his unofficial “private citizens” group.

The pro-Zionist Senators and their allies targeted the governments of the non-Muslim member states most in need of American assistance, economic and other. France, for example, was asked to contemplate its future without the economic assistance it was due to receive under the Marshall Aid Plan. Baruch was the conveyer of that message to the French. (Through former ambassador William Bullitt, Baruch also put pressure on China).

Of all the manoeuvres of the Senatorial hit squad, the most effective was a telegram signed by all 26 and sent to the representatives of 12 of the UN delegations a few days before the vote. It helped to change four “No” votes to “Yes” and, crucially, seven “No” votes to abstention. Of the 12, only Greece risked antagonising the U.S. Senate and stuck to its “No” vote.

But the two-thirds majority was still not there. Zionism’s last minute calculations indicated the need to turn three more “No” votes into “Yes” votes. The countries re-targeted for the final push were Liberia, the Philippines and Haiti.

To change Liberia’s intended “No” vote into a “Yes” vote, the trio sought and obtained the services of Harvey Firestone, the Firestone of the Firestone Tyre & Rubber Company. It had a vast rubber concession in Liberia. Rubber was then the principal source of Liberia’s national wealth.

At the bottom of the bulge that is West Africa, Liberia was a very remarkable country. It had been created by American philanthropists wishing to evangelise West Africa and find a permanent home for freed American Negro slaves. They started the re-settlement of the continent of their ancestors in 1818. After it became Africa’s first independent republic in 1847, Liberia was (and remained for many years) a model of stability and continuity of government. In 1927 the Firestone Company concluded a 99-year lease agreement with the government of Liberia on a 100,000-acre rubber plantation. Before and during World War II the Firestone Company played a major role in Liberia’s economy, accounting for a large proportion of both exports and imports. The Firestone Company was the biggest single employer of labour in the country. The government of Liberia derived most of its revenue from dividends and royalties paid by foreign companies and, in the case of Firestone, from fees paid for the rubber concession. Probably no outsider had greater potential influence on the Liberian government than Harvey Firestone. On behalf of the trio, Nathan asked Harvey Firestone to use his influence. On behalf of Zionism.

Harvey Firestone himself talked to the government of Liberia and then sent a message to his company’s chief representative in the country instructing him to press for a vote in favour of the partition resolution. The government of Liberia was left in no doubt that if it did not do what the Firestone Company wanted, its revenue from rubber would suffer.

The man who discovered how the Firestone Company had been used to intimidate Liberia was Undersecretary of State Lovett. He informed both Secretary of State Marshall and Defence Secretary Forrestal of what he knew; and Forrestal noted what Lovett had told him in his diary.

The starting “No” position of the Philippines could not have been more explicit. In the General Assembly on 26 November, three days before the vote, the head of the delegation from the Philippines, war hero General Carlos Romulo, made this ringing declaration: “I will defend the fundamental rights of a people to decide its political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of the land of its birth!”
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Fearing that Romulo might be capable of influencing other delegates, the Zionists hit their panic button; and the Philippines war hero found himself on the receiving end of threats. The fact that he took the next plane back to Manila leaving the permanent representative of the Philippines, Ambassador Elizalde, to cast the “No” vote” might suggest that Romulo believed his life was in danger in New York.

While Romulo was on his way back to Manila, the President of the Philippines, Manuel Roxas, was informed that his country had too much to lose by offending the U.S. Subsequently, and as reported in a lengthy cable from the American ambassador to Manila to the State Department, President Roxas had a telephone conversation with Ambassador Elizalde. Roxas asked Elizalde for his views. Elizalde had been one of the recipients of the telegram from the 26 Senators and was very worried by it. He had also received “messages” from two American judges, Justice Frankfurter and Justice Murphy, strongly urging him to vote for partition. Elizalde told his President that the partition of Palestine was not a wise move but... The U.S. was determined to see it happen and it would be foolish to vote against the U.S. at a time when there were seven bills pending in Congress in which the Philippines had a vital interest.

It was President Truman himself who gave the best summary explanation of how the President of Haiti had been persuaded to change his mind about how his country should vote on the partition resolution. On 11 December, 12 days after the vote, an angry Truman said the following in a memorandum to Lovett:

I have a report from Haiti in which it is stated that our Consul in Haiti approached the President of that country and suggested that, for his own good, he should order the vote of his country changed, claiming that he
had instructions from me
[my emphasis] to make such a statement to the President of Haiti.

It was perfectly clear, the memorandum added, “that pressure groups will succeed in putting the United Nations out of business if this sort of thing is continued.”
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Who would have dared to tell the American Consul in Haiti to make such a threat and would have had sufficient credibility to be believed by the Consul when he said he was passing on an instruction from President Truman? The most likely answer, it seems to me, is Niles. The Consul would have known that when President Truman himself was not hands-on, Niles was running the White House Palestine show.

The official record of the General Assembly in session reflected the pressures that were brought to bear on delegates to change their votes from “No” to “Yes”.

Lebanon’s Camille Chamoun appealed to his fellow delegates to think about the damage that would be done to the United Nations if democratic methods were abandoned. He said:

My friends, think of these democratic methods, of the freedom of voting which is sacred to each of our delegations. If we were to abandon this for the tyrannical system of tackling each delegation in hotel rooms, in bed, in corridors and ante-rooms, to threaten them with economic sanctions or to bribe them with promises in order to compel them to vote one way or another, think of what our Organisation would become in the future.
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And Egypt’s delegate, Mahmoud Fawzi, did not mince his words:

Let us say frankly to the whole world that, despite the pressure that was brought to bear upon delegates and governments in order to vote in favour of partition,
a majority of the United Nations cannot stomach the violation of the principles of the Charter.
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(emphasis added)

All the delegates of the member states were aware that some money had changed hands. One Latin American delegate had taken a bribe of $75,000 to vote “Yes” instead of “No”. And the delegate of Costa Rica was later to dine out on the story of how, after he had refused a bribe of $45,000, he had been instructed to change his vote. The obvious implication was that somebody higher up the Costa Rica line had taken a bigger bribe.

It can be said without fear of contradiction that the partition resolution would not have been approved by the General Assembly if all the member states of the United Nations had been allowed to vote freely.

Immediately after the vote, the feelings of the true majority of the member states were expressed by Sir Muhammed Zafrullah Khan, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and the head of his country’s delegation to the Special Session of the General Assembly. He said:

Partition totally lacks legal validity. We entertain no sense of grievance against those of our friends and fellow representatives who have been compelled under heavy pressure to change sides and to cast their votes in support of a proposal the justice and fairness of which do not commend themselves to them. Our feeling for them is one of sympathy that they should have been placed in a position of such embarrassment between their judgement and conscience on the one side, and the pressure to which they and their governments were being subjected on the other.
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The delegates and governments of those countries which were obliged by one means or another to change their votes from “No” to “Yes”, or to abstain, were convinced that the whole institution of the American government had been responsible for the campaign of intimidation and threats to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. That was not the case. There is more than enough evidence in the record to support the view that the Truman administration at Executive level—the President himself and his cabinet colleagues—played the game by the rules and never did exert any pressure on member governments. The pressure was applied by the Zionists and their stooges in the U.S. Senate; and it was the involvement in the Zionist conspiracy of the 26 Senators that made it appear to be a total institutional American conspiracy when, actually, it was not.

In the decades that followed Israel frequently complained (as it still does today) that the General Assembly of the United Nations is unduly and excessively hostile to it. If my friend Chaim Hertzog was still alive today— this former DMI served for a period as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations—I would ask him this question: Is it really any wonder that the Zionist state has so few friends at the UN?

When Lovett told Forrestal on 1 December about how the Zionists had achieved their victory in the General Assembly, he said: “The zeal and activity of the Jews almost resulted in defeating the Zionist objectives they were after.”
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(As we will see later in this chapter, the continuing zeal and activity of the Zionists almost resulted in their loss of President Truman’s support, provoking a crisis like no other for Zionism; and ultimately for Truman himself).

After noting Lovett’s comments in his diary, Forrestal added this: I remarked that many thoughtful people of the Jewish faith had deep misgivings about the wisdom of the Zionists’ pressures for a Jewish state in Palestine, and I also remarked that
The New York Times
editorial of Sunday morning pointed up those misgivings when it said ‘Many of us have long had doubts… concerning the wisdom of erecting a political state on the basis of a religious faith.’
I said I thought the decision was fraught with great danger for the future security of this country.
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(Emphasis added).