Yahweh and Ethnic Cleansing

 

       
 


The Zionization of the American Media by Edward Said

Confronting the Bible'sEthnic Cleansing In Palestine

12 February, 2002 Orthodox Jews Mass Protest Against the State of Israel  

Germany and the Jews The Role of the Jews in WWI and WWII speech by Benjamin Freedman

The Thirteenth Tribe  by Arthur Koestler. Random House, 1976. 256 pp. Reviewed by Grace Halsell

Israel Can't Hide From Its History Forever  by Greg Felton

New York Times Reveals that European-Descended Jews have no Blood line to Abraham

The Jews Are Not A Race! By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal Excerpt from his book, What Price Israel? (1953)

THE NEW COMPLAINT OF PORTNOY  By Israel Shamir   March 18, 2001

Introduction of Victor Ostrovsky and Comments on the USS Liberty by Republican Paul N. McCloskey

After 19 years, The Truth at Last? By Robert Fisk The Independent

Gandhi on "The Jews," November 26, 1938:

The Jewish Laundry of Drug Money

 

[The material that follows is taken from the December, 2000, issue of The Link, which is published by Americans for Middle East Understanding. It may be reprinted in part or in full without prior permission, but those who do so should send a copy of the extracted material to: AMEU, 475 Riverside Drive, Room 245, New York, NY 10115-0245.]

About This Issue
Is Yahweh the Great Ethnic-Cleanser? Did He not instruct the Israelites to rid their Promised Land of its indigenous people?
Few biblical scholars want to wrestle with these questions. Rev. Michael Prior needs to wrestle with them. He's been to today's Holy Land and has seen today's variation on biblically sanctioned genocide.
Dr. Prior is Professor of Biblical Studies in the University of Surrey, England, and visiting professor in Bethlehem University, Palestine. He is a biblical scholar and author of "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry" and "The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique."

John F. Mahoney
Executive Director

Confronting the Bible's
Ethnic Cleansing
In Palestine

BY MICHAEL PRIOR, C.M.

It is mid-October 2000; to date, at least 98 Palestinians and 7 Jews have been killed, and over 3,000, mostly Palestinians, injured in the Holy Land's most recent un-holiness. That's the math of it.
It is, however, the morality of it that has engaged me over the past quarter of a century.
I would have been spared some pain had I not undertaken significant portions of my postgraduate biblical studies in the land of the Bible. And although the focus of my engagement was "the biblical past," I could not avoid the modern social context of the region. As a result, my studying the Bible in the Land of the Bible provoked perspectives that scarcely would have arisen elsewhere.
For me, as a boy and young man, politics began and ended in Ireland, an Ireland obsessed with England. It was much later that I recognized that the history I absorbed so readily in school was one fabricated by the nationalist historiographers of a newly independent Ireland, who refracted the totality of its history through the lens of 19th-century European nationalisms. Although my Catholic culture also cherished Saint Patrick and the saints and scholars after him, the real heroes of Ireland's history were those who challenged British colonialism in Ireland. I had no interest in the politics of any other region - except that I knew that Communism, wherever, was wrong. Anyhow, the priesthood beckoned.
My seminary courses on the Old Testament first sensitized me to the social and political context of theological reflection. We inquired into the real-life situations of the prophets, and considered the contexts of the Wisdom Literature. Beyond the narratives of Genesis 1-11 and Exodus, however, I do not recall much engagement with the Torah. The atrocities recorded in the Book of Joshua made no particular impression on me. The monarchy period got a generous airing, noting the link between religious perspectives and changing political circumstances. But just as I was not sensitive at that stage to the fact that Irish nationalist historiography had imposed a rigid nationalist framework on everything that preceded the advent of interest in the nation state, it never crossed my mind that the biblical narrative also might be a fabrication of a past, reflecting the distinctive perspective of its later authors.
Prior to the 5-10 June 1967 war, I had no particular interest in the State of Israel, other than an admiration for Jews having constructed a nation state and restored a national language. In addition to stimulating my first curiosity in the Israeli-Arab conflict, Israel's conquest of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and Sinai brought me "face to face," via TV, with wider, international political realities. The startling, speedy, and comprehensive victory of diminutive Israel over its rapacious Arab predators produced surges of delight in me. And I had no reason to question the mellifluous mendacity of Abba Eban at the United Nations, delivered in that urbanity and self-assurance characteristic of Western diplomats, however fraudulent, claiming that Israel was an innocent victim of Egyptian aggression.
Later that summer in London, I was intrigued by billboards in Golders Green, with quotations from the Hebrew prophets, assuring readers that those who trusted in biblical prophecy could not be surprised by Israel's victory. Up to then, my understanding was that biblical prophecy related to the period of the prophets, and was not about predicting the future. The prophets were "forth-tellers" for God, rather than foretellers of future events. I was intrigued that others thought differently.
I was to learn later, in the 1980s and 1990s, that the 1967 war inaugurated a new phase in the Zionist conquest of Mandated Palestine, one which brought theological assertions and biblical interpretations to the very heart of the ideology that propelled the Israeli conquest and set the pattern for Jewish settlement. After two more years of theology, ordination, and three years of postgraduate biblical studies, I made my first visit to Israel-Palestine at Easter 1972, with a party of postgraduate students from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
Seeing and Believing
The visit offered the first challenge to my favorable predisposition toward Israel. I was disturbed by the ubiquitous signs of the oppression of the Arabs, whom later I learned to call Palestinians. I was witnessing some kind of "institutionalized oppression" - I cannot recall whether 'apartheid' was part of my vocabulary at the time. The experience must have been profound since, when the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, my support for Israel did not match my enthusiasm of 1967. I had no particular interest in the area for the remainder of the 1970s, but I recall watching on TV the visit of Egypt's President Sadat to the Israeli Knesset in November 1977, an initiative which would culminate in a formal peace agreement in Camp David in 1979. Things changed for me in the 1980s.
In 1981 I went with a party from my university to visit Bir Zeit University in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Because the campus was closed by the military just before our arrival, carefully planned programs had to yield to Palestinian "ad-hocery." Bir Zeit put a bus at our disposal, and equal numbers of its and our students constituted a university on wheels. I was profoundly shocked when I began to see from the inside the reality of land expropriation and the on-going Jewish settlement of the West Bank. I began to question the prevailing view that the Israeli occupation was for security reasons, but even with such obvious evidence I could not bring myself to abandon it.
I spent my 1983-84 sabbatical year at Jerusalem's École Biblique researching the Pauline Epistles. Again, the day-to-day life in Jerusalem sharpened my sensitivities. I was beginning to suspect that the Israeli occupation was not after all for security reasons, but was an expansion toward the achievement of "Greater Israel," which, I was to learn later, was the goal of even mainstream Zionism.


One incident in particular alerted me to the religious dimension of the conflict. On a spring morning in 1984, the Voice of Israel radio reported that during the night a Jewish terrorist group had been caught attempting to blow up the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount), only a few hundred meters south of the École. Subsequently the newspapers published a picture of one of those convicted of the offence, wearing the typical dress of the religious settler movement Gush Emunim. He had the Book of Psalms in his hand as the judge read out the verdict. That an attempted act of such enormous international and inter-faith significance sprang from religious fervor shocked me. Settler Jews performed other acts of terror during that year, and the name of the overtly racist Rabbi Meir Kahane was seldom off the headlines.
I can date to that period also voicing my first displeasure at my perception that the land traditions of the Bible appeared to mandate the genocide of the indigenes of '"Canaan." At the end of his public lecture in Tantur, I suggested to Marc Ellis, a young Jewish theologian who was developing a Jewish Theology of Liberation with strong dependence on the Hebrew prophets, that it would be no more difficult to construct a Theology of Oppression on the basis of other biblical traditions, especially those dealing with Israelite origins that demanded the destruction of other peoples.
Following my sabbatical in 1984, I returned to London where, later that year, a colleague told me of the plea of Abuna Elias Chacour of Ibillin to pilgrims from the West to meet the Christian communities, "the Living Stones" of the land, and not be satisfied with the "dead stones" of archaeological sites. Soon a group of interested people in London established the ecumenical trust, Living Stones, which promotes links between Christians in Britain and the Holy Land, and appointed me Chairman. In 1985 I co-led a study tour to Israel and the Occupied Territories, and led a group of priests on a "Retreat through Pilgrimage" in 1987 and made other visits in 1990 and 1991.


In 1991, I participated in an International Peace Walk from Jerusalem to Amman, and although I did not reach the destination, I gained the acquaintance of several groups of Israeli soldiers and police, enjoyed detention twice, and faced into what appeared to be an inevitable spell in prison. Officially, my crime, in the first instance, was to have trespassed into "a closed military zone" on the outskirts of Ramallah, and in the second, to have refused to leave a similarly designated area on the way from Taybeh to Jericho. The real purpose of such designations was to halt the silent walk of some 30 "peaceniks" from about 15 countries. Our presence was having a decidedly energizing effect on the Palestinians, who did not dare protest so forthrightly.
A few hours into walking silently over the Judean hills, before beginning our descent into the Jordan Valley, we were informed by the military that we were inside "a military zone." While our negotiators were engaging the Commanding Officer of the district, we sat on the side of the road and sang peace songs. I opened with a rendition, in my bel canto Irish-accented Hebrew, of Psalm 119 (118). My singing of this Passover song of deliverance had an obviously disturbing effect on the young soldiers "guarding" us. Formal arrest and several hours' detention in Jericho followed. To the policeman who informed me that I could make one phone call, I replied that I wished to speak to the Pope. "I am sorry, it cannot be international." My comportment during the day-long detention - insisting on the group being fed, being polite but firm under interrogation, refusing to sign my 'statement' of incrimination, etc.- left the police in no doubt about whom I considered to be the criminals.
After a long, wearying day in detention in sun-baked Jericho, we were driven to what we were assured would be a "prison." This was not good news. The principal of my college would not be pleased to read: "Sorry I cannot be there in time for class - am in prison in the Holy Land!" In the event, we were brought to a police station in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, and even having refused to sign another declaration, we were released. The peacewalk experience demonstrated how police, defense forces and the noble discourse of jurisprudence itself, designed to protect the vulnerable, can legitimize oppression, something I had experienced already in London while I struggled for the human rights of gypsies.


It took some time for my experiences to acquire an ideological framework. Gradually I read more of the modern history of the region. In addition to bringing a university group in 1992, I spent August in the Ècole Biblique, and while there interviewed prominent Palestinians, including the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Timotheos, the Anglican Bishop Samir Kafity, Canon Naim Ateek, and the Vice-President of Bir Zeit University, Dr. Gabi Baramki.
I made three visits in 1993, one at Easter to prepare the Cumberland Lodge Conference on Christians in the Holy Land, one for study in August, and the third to bring a group of students. Although my academic concentration in that period was on the scene of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4.16-30), my growing unease about the link between biblical spirituality and oppression stimulated me to examine the land traditions of the Bible, and so I began to read the narrative systematically with that theme in mind.


Yahweh and Ethnic Cleansing


What struck me most about the biblical narrative was that the divine promise of land was integrally linked with the mandate to exterminate the indigenous peoples, and I had to wrestle with my perception that those traditions were inherently oppressive and morally reprehensible. Even the Exodus narrative was problematic. While it portrays Yahweh as having compassion on the misery of his people, and as willing to deliver them from the Egyptians and bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3.7-8), that was only part of the picture. Although the reading of Exodus 3, both in the Christian liturgy and in the classical texts of liberation theologies, halts abruptly in the middle of verse 8 at the description of the land as one "flowing with milk and honey," the biblical text itself continues, "to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites." Manifestly, the promised land, flowing with milk and honey, had no lack of indigenous peoples, and, according to the narrative, would soon flow with blood:
When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, you shall not bow down to their gods, or worship them, or follow their practices, but you shall utterly demolish them and break their pillars in pieces (Exodus 23.23-24).
Matters got worse in the narrative of the Book of Deuteronomy. After the King of Heshbon refused passage to the Israelites, Yahweh gave him over to the Israelites who captured and utterly destroyed all the cities, killing all the men, women, and children (Deuteronomy 2.33-34). The fate of the King of Bashan was no better (3.3). Yahweh's role was central:
When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you - the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites...and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you...you must utterly destroy them...Show them no mercy...For you are a people holy to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession (Deuteronomy 7.1-11; see also 9.1-5; 11.8-9, 23, 31-32).
And again, from the mouth of Moses:
But as for the towns of these peoples that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them-the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites-just as Yahweh your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy 20.16-18).
It was some shock to realize that the narrative presents "ethnic cleansing" as not only legitimate, but as required by the deity. The book ends with Moses's sight of the promised land before he dies (34.1-3). Although Moses was unequalled in his deeds, he left a worthy successor, Joshua, who, after Moses had lain his hands on him, was full of the spirit of wisdom (34.4-12). So much for the preparation for entry into the Promised Land.


The first part of the Book of Joshua (chapters 2-12) describes the conquest of a few key cities, and their fate in accordance with the laws of the Holy War. Even when the Gibeonites were to be spared, the Israelite elders complained at the lapse in fidelity to the mandate to destroy all the inhabitants of the land (9.21-27). Joshua took Makkedah, utterly destroying every person in it (10.28). A similar fate befell other cities (10.29-39): everything that breathed was destroyed, as Yahweh commanded (10.40-43). Joshua utterly destroyed the inhabitants of the cities of the north as well (11.1-23). Yahweh gave to Israel all the land that he swore to their ancestors he would give them (21.43-45). The legendary achievements of Yahweh through the agencies of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua are kept before the Israelites even in their prayers: "You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it" (Psalm 80.8; see also Psalms 78.54-55; 105.44).
By modern standards of international law and human rights, what these biblical narratives mandate are "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." While readers might seek refuge in the claim that the problem lies with the predispositions of the modern reader, rather than with the text itself, one could not escape so easily. One must acknowledge that much of the Torah, and the Book of Deuteronomy in particular, contains menacing ideologies and racist, xenophobic and militaristic tendencies. The implications of the existence of dubious moral dispositions, presented as mandated by the divinity, within a book which is canonized as Sacred Scripture, invited the most serious investigation. Was there a way of reading the traditions which could rescue the Bible from being a blunt instrument of oppression, and acquit God of the charge of being the Great Ethnic-Cleanser?
In that August of 1994, the École library had just received a Festschrift consisting of studies in Deuteronomy. In addition to articles covering the customary source, historical-critical, and literary discussions, it contained one by F.E. Deist, with the intriguing title, "The Dangers of Deuteronomy," which discussed the role of that book in support of apartheid.1 It dealt with the text from the perspective of its reception history, especially within the ideology of an emerging Afrikaner nationalism. During that month I also read A.G. Lamadrid's discussion of the role of the Bible and Christian theology in the Iberian conquest of Latin America.2 The problem, then, went beyond academic reflection on the interpretation of ancient documents.


Somebody must have addressed the moral question before, I presumed. Back in Jerusalem in August 1995, I realized that this was not the case. Even though Gerhard von Rad lamented in 1943 that no thorough investigation of "the land" had been made, no serious study of the topic was undertaken for another 30 years. Even W.D. Davies acknowledged later that he had written his seminal work "The Gospel and the Land" at the request of friends in Jerusalem who, just before the war in 1967, had urged his support for the cause of Israel. Moreover, he confessed that he wrote both his 1982 "The Territorial Dimensions of Judaism" under the direct impact of that war, and its 1991 updated version because of the mounting need to understand the theme in the light of events in the Middle East, culminating in the Gulf War and its aftermath. I was intrigued by the frankness with which Davies publicized his hermeneutical key: "Here I have concentrated on what in my judgment must be the beginning for an understanding of this conflict: the sympathetic attempt to comprehend the Jewish tradition."3
While Davies considers "the land" from virtually every other conceivable perspective, little attention is given to broadly moral and human rights issues. In particular, he excludes from his concern, "What happens when the understanding of the Promised Land in Judaism conflicts with the claims of the traditions and occupancy of its other peoples?" He excused himself by saying that to engage that issue would demand another volume, without indicating his intention of embarking upon such an enterprise. I wondered whether Davies would have been equally sanguine had white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or even white Catholics of European provenance been among the displaced people who paid the price for the prize of Zionism. Reflecting a somewhat elastic moral sense, Davies, although perturbed by the aftermath of the 1967 conquest, took the establishment of the State of Israel in his stride. Showing no concern for the foundational injustice done to the Palestinians in 1948, Davies wrote as if there were later a moral equivalence between the dispossessed Palestinians and the dispossessing Zionists. The rights of the rapist and the victim were finely balanced.
Walter Brueggemann's "The Land" brought me no further. While he saw land as perhaps "the central theme" of biblical faith, he bypassed the treatment to be meted out to the indigenous inhabitants, affirming, "What is asked is not courage to destroy enemies, but courage to keep Torah," avoiding the fact that "keeping Torah" in this context demanded accepting its xenophobic and destructive militarism. By 1994, however, Brueggemann was less sanguine, noting that while the scholastic community had provided "rich and suggestive studies on the 'land theme' in the Bible...they characteristically stop before they get to the hard part, contemporary issues of land in the Holy Land." 4


It was beginning to dawn on me that much biblical investigation - especially that concentration on the past which is typical of the historical-critical method - was quite indifferent to moral considerations. Indeed, it was becoming clear that the discipline of biblical studies over the last hundred years reflected the Euro-centric perspectives of virtually all Western historiography and had contributed significantly to the oppression of native peoples. The benevolent interpretation of biblical traditions which advocate atrocities and war crimes had given solace to those bent on the exploitation of new lands at the expense of native peoples. While the behavior of communities and nation states is complex, and is never the result of one element of motivation, there is abundant evidence that the Bible has been, and still is for some, the idea that redeems the conquest of the earth. This was particularly true in the case of the Arabs of Palestine, in whose country I had reached these conclusions as I studied the Bible.


By the autumn of 1995 I was well into a book on the subject, and in November I went to discuss with Sheffield Academic Press a draft MS on "The Bible and Zionism." The editor, apprehensive at my concentration on Zionism, persuaded me to use three case studies. The task ahead, then, would require further immersion in the histories of Latin America, South Africa, and Israel, as well as a more detailed study of the biblical narrative and its interpretation in the hands of the biblical academy.
Having had my moral being sensitized by the biblical mandate to commit genocide, I was amazed that scholars had a high esteem for the Book of Deuteronomy. Indeed, commentators conventionally assess it to be a theological book par excellence, and the focal point of the religious history of the Old Testament. In the Nov. 14, 1995 Lattey Lecture in Cambridge University, Professor Norbert Lohfink argued that it provides a model of an utopian society in which there would be no poor.5 In my role as the formal proposer of a vote of thanks - I was the chairperson of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain - I invited him to consider whether, in the light of that book's insistence on a mandate to commit genocide, the utopian society would be possible only after the invading Israelites had wiped out the indigenous inhabitants. The protocol of the Lattey Lecture left the last word with me, and subsequently I was given a second word, being invited to deliver the 1997 Lattey Lecture, for which I chose the title, "A Land flowing with Milk, Honey, and People."6


O Little Bantustan of Bethlehem


The final revision of my study on the relation between the Bible and colonialism was undertaken in 1996-97 while I was Visiting Professor in Bethlehem University and Scholar-in-Residence in Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Jerusalem. My context was a persistent reminder of the degradation and oppression which colonizing enterprises inflict on their indigenes. I also became more aware of the collusion of Western scholarship in the enterprise.
Working against a background of bullet fire, and in the shadow of tanks, added a certain intensity to my research. Several bullets landed on the flat roof of Tantur on 25-26 September 1996. Two Palestinians, one a graduate of the University, were killed in Bethlehem, and many more, Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, were killed in the disturbances elsewhere in the West Bank. However, with no bullets flying in Jerusalem on the 26th, I was able to deliver my advertised public lecture in the Swedish Christian Study Center, entitled "Does the God of the Bible sanction Ethnic Cleansing?" By mid-December I was able to send the MS of "The Bible and Colonialism" to Sheffield Academic Press.
I preached at the 1996 Christmas Midnight Mass in Bethlehem University, presided over by Msgr. Montezemolo, the Holy See's Apostolic Delegate, a key player in the signing of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel on 30 December 1993. I reflected with the congregation that, notwithstanding the Christmas rhetoric about God's Glory in the Highest Heaven and Peace on Earth, the reality of Bethlehem brought one down to earth rather quickly. I assured them that passing by the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem twice a day made me boil with anger at the humiliation which the colonizing enterprise of Zionism had inflicted on the people of the region. I suggested that the Christmas narratives portray the ordinary people as the heroes and the rulers as the anti-heroes, as if assuring believers that the mighty will be cast down, and that God is working for the oppressed today. I would meet His Excellency again soon.


On 30 December, I listened to Msgr. Montezemolo lecture in Notre Dame on the third anniversary of the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and Israel. The audience was composed exclusively of expatriate Christians and Israeli Jews, with not a Palestinian in sight.
Well into the question time, I violated the somewhat sycophantic atmosphere: "I had expected that the Agreement would have given the Holy See some leverage in putting pressure on Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians, if only on the matter of freedom to worship in Jerusalem - Palestinians have been forbidden entry into even East Jerusalem, whether on Friday or Sunday, since March 1993."
His Excellency replied rhetorically, "Do you not think that the Holy See is doing all it can?" At the reception afterwards, a certain Ambassador Gilboa, one of the Israeli architects of the Agreement, berated me in a most aggressive fashion for my question. Rather than assuming the posture of a culprit, I took the attack to him on the matter of the Jews having "kicked out" the Palestinians in 1948. "No, they were not kicked out," he, who was a soldier at the time, insisted. "In fact helicop ters dropped leaflets on the Arab towns, beseeching the inhabitants to stay put, etc."
I told him I did not believe him, and cited even the Israeli revisionist historiographer, Benny Morris, whom he dismissed as a compulsive attention-seeker. It was obvious all round the room that a not insignificant altercation was taking place. In the hope of discouraging him from trying to stifle the truth in the future, I assured him that he should have remained a soldier, because he had the manners of a "corner-boy," and not what I expected from a diplomat. I went home righteous.
Academic life rolled on. My 28 Feb. 1997 lecture on "The Bible and Zionism" seemed to perplex several of the students of Bethlehem Bible College. Most of the questions reflected a literalist understanding of the Bible, and I struggled to convey the impression that there were forms of discourse other than history.
Having visited the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron as a gesture of solidarity on 6 March, I returned home for the Tantur public lecture on "The Future of Religious Zionism" by the Jewish philosopher, Professor David Hartman. It was an eventful occasion. Hartman gave a dazzling exegesis on the theme of covenant, from the Bible through the Rabbis, to Zionism. My journal takes the matter up from the second half of his talk, devoted to questions:
I made the fourth intervention, to the effect that in being brought through the stages of understanding of the covenant, from the Bible to Rabbinic Judaism, I was enchanted, and much appreciative. However, I was shocked to hear Zionism described as "the high point of covenantal spirituality." Zionism, as I saw it, both in its rhetoric and in its practice, was not an ideology of sharing, but one of displacing. I was shocked, therefore, that what others might see as an example of 19th-century colonial plunder was being clothed in the garment of spirituality.
Somewhat shaken, Professor Hartman thanked me for my question, and set about putting the historical record straight. The real problem was that the Arabs had not welcomed Jews back to their homeland. Moreover, the displacement of the Arabs was never intended, but was forced on the Zionist leadership by the attack of the Arab armies in 1948. Nevertheless, great developments in history sometimes require initial destruction: consider how the USA had defeated totalitarianism, although this was preceded by the displacement of the Indians.


On the following day, in the discussion time after my final session of teaching on "Jesus the Liberator" in Tantur, one of the Continuing Education students brought the discussion back to the previous day's deliberations. He was very embarrassed by my attack on "that holy man."
There was a particularly lively exchange with several getting into the discussion. A second student said that he was delighted with my question yesterday and was sure that it represented the disquiet of many of the group. A third responded enthusiastically to my liberation ethic, saying that it disturbed him, but he had to cope with the disturbance. An American priest came to me afterwards, saying how much he appreciated my courage in speaking yesterday, and on a previous occasion, etc. His enthusiasm was not shared by everyone. After the class, an advertising notice appeared on the board from the overseer of the Scholar's Colloquium. It read, "Dr. Michael Prior presents a largish paper, 'Zionism: from the Secular to the Sacred,' which is a chapter from a book he is in the process of writing." The next paragraph read:
Zionism is a subject on which there are hot opinions - not least from the author himself. Some have suggested to me that this disunity is a reason why we should not discuss such matters at all. I believe the opposite: the quality of hot opinions is best tested in a scholarly discussion, where they must be supported by evidence and good argument. One can even learn something. Welcome!
The Swedish New Testament scholar, Bengt Holmberg, chaired the Colloquium.
The first scholar to respond to my paper, a U.S. Catholic veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, did so in a decidedly aggressive manner, accusing me of disloyalty to the Church, etc.
The second was long in praise.
The third intimated that there was nothing new in the paper, and rambled on about the Zionists' intentions to bring benefits to the indigenous population, etc. Losing patience, I asked him to produce evidence for his claims, adding that not only was there not such evidence, but the evidence there was showed that the Zionist ideologues were virtually at one in their determination to rid the land of Arabs.
A fourth scholar, a Dutch Protestant veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, chastised me for my audacity in addressing the question at all, insisting that I should be silent, because I was an outsider and a Christian.
I rose to the challenge. Was I understanding him to say that, having seen the distress of the Palestinian people for myself, I should now not comment on it? Was he asking me to deny my experience, or merely to mute my critique? I assured the Colloquium that as a biblical scholar, and an ongoing witness to what transpired in the region, I considered it an obligation to protest what was going on. Once again, the admiring remarks were made later, in private.


The proofs of "The Bible and Colonialism" arrived on Good Friday. I got my first taste of teargas in the vicinity of Rachel's Tomb on my way to Easter Sunday Mass at St. Catherine's in Bethlehem. On 3 April, I delivered the Tantur public lecture, "The Moral Problem of the Bible's Land Traditions,'" followed by questions, both appreciative and hostile. Uniquely for the series, the lecture was not advertised in the Jerusalem Post. In dealing with a trilogy of hostile questions I availed of the opportunity to say that I considered Zionism to be one of the most pernicious ideologies of the 20th century, particularly evil because of its essential link with religious values.
Stars from the West studded the sky over Bethlehem for the celebrations of Tantur's 25th birthday (25-28 May 1997). Under the light of the plainly visible Hale-Bopp comet, a frail Teddy Kollek was introduced at the opening ceremony as though he were the founder of the Institute. A choir from the USA sang, one song in Hebrew. Palestinian faces, not least that of Afif Safieh, the Palestinian Delegate to the UK and the Holy See, looked decidedly out of joint throughout the opening festivities. But the Palestinians were not altogether forgotten, being thanked profusely for their work in the kitchen and around the grounds.
Moreover, for the lecture on "Christians of the Holy Land" which was given on May 27, prominent Palestinians were invited to speak from the floor. Although the lecture was billed to be presented by a distinguished expatriate scholar "with local presenters," in fact the Palestinian savants had been invited only to the audience floor. Having excused himself from dealing with the political context, the lecturer delivered an urbane, accomplished historical perspective.
The token Palestinians were invited to speak from the floor, first Naim Ateek, then Mitri Raheb, and then Kevork Hintlian. After two rabbis had their say, also from the floor, I was allowed to speak, wishing to make two points: that my experience with the Palestinians had impressed upon me their unity, rather than their diversity, and, secondly, that the Jewish-Christian dialogue had been hijacked by a Zionist agenda. After one more sentence had escaped from my mouth the Chair stopped me short. I had broken the Solemn Silence. This was the third time that year I had been prevented from speaking in public. I paused, producing a most uncomfortable silence, thanked him, and sat down.
Saturday 31 May, 1997 being the 28th anniversary of my ordination, I determined to do something different. Since it was also the Feast of the Visitation, I decided that I would go to Ein Karem, the traditional site of Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth. But on the way, I would call at Jabal Abu Ghneim, the hill opposite Tantur, which, despite UN condemnation, was being prepared for an Israeli settlement. The teeth of the high-tech machinery had cut into the rock, having chewed up thousands of trees. Joseph Conrad's phrase, "the relentless progress of our race," kept coming at me.
On the way to Ein Karem, I visited Mount Herzl to see the grave of the founder of Zionism. Knowing that I would also visit the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, I was struck by the irony of the situation. Theodor Herzl was sure that Jews could survive only in their own nation state. Nevertheless, he died a natural death in Europe, and was re-interred in the new state in 1949, while Prime Minister Rabin, born in Palestine, was gunned down by a Jewish religious zealot in what was intended to be the sole haven for Jews.


Back in England


I returned to London in July 1997. By December, "The Bible and Colonialism" and "Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine" were hot off the press. In "The Bible and Colonialism" I promised that I would discuss elsewhere the more theological aspects of Zionism, and, while still in Jerusalem in 1997, I had laid out my plans for writing the book I had really wanted to write some years earlier.
I submitted a draft MS to a distinguished publisher in November 1997, and even though the anonymous reader found it to be "a brilliant book which must be published," the press declined, because, I was informed orally, the press had "a very strong Jewish list," and could not offend its Jewish contributors and readers. While an American publishing company judged it to be "a prodigious achievement of historical and theological investigation" and "a very important work," it deemed that it would not really suit its publishing program. Routledge "bit the bullet," publishing it under the title "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry."7


On the basis of his having read my "The Bible and Colonialism," Professor Heikki Räisänen of the University of Helsinki invited me to address the most prestigious of the international biblical conferences, the Society of Biblical Literature International Conference (Helsinki-Lahti, 16-22 July 1999) on the subject, "The Bible and Zionism." The session at which I was invited to speak dealt with '"Reception History and Moral Criticism of the Bible," and I was preceded by Professors Robert Jewett (USA) and David Clines (UK) on aspects of Paul and Job, respectively.
When my hour came, I invited biblical scholarship not to maintain an academic detachment from significant engagement in contemporary issues. I noted that "the view that the Bible provides the title-deed for the establishment of the State of Israel and for its policies since 1948 is so pervasive even within mainstream Christian theology and university biblical studies, that the very attempt to raise the issue is sure to elicit opposition. The disfavor usually took the form of personal abuse, and the intimidation of publishers."
In the light of what happened next I might have added that one is seldom honored by having the substantive issues addressed in the usual way.
After I had delivered my 25-minute lecture the official respondent, who had my paper a month in advance, said he would bypass the usual niceties ("A very fine paper, etc."), and got down to his objections, which were so standard as not to deserve my refutation. Instead I suggested to the Chair to open up the discussion.
Some five Israelis in turn took up the challenge. "Jews have always longed for the land." "They never intended displacing anyone." "The land was empty - almost." "I was wrong historically: Herzl never intended dislocating the Arabs."
I interrupted, quoting Herzl's 12 June 1895 diary entry - in the original German for good measure - about his endeavor to expel the poor population, etc.
I was berated for having raised a '"political matter" in an academic conference: "See what can happen when one abandons the historical critical method!" Another Israeli professor began by saying, "I am very pleased to have been here this morning," but added, "because I understand better now how anti-Semitism can present itself as anti-Zionism, all under the guise of academic scholarship." A cabal, including at least one Israeli and a well-known scholar from Germany, clapped. The Chair had to restore order.
In the course of my "defense" I reiterated that it was the displacement of another people that raised the moral problematic for me. I had witnessed the effects of the oppression rather more than even most of the audience. Having been given the last word, I professed that until Israelis acknowledge their having displaced another people and make some reparation and accommodation, there would be no future for the state.
In the course of the following day several who had attended expressed their appreciation, albeit in private. A Finnish scholar congratulated me on having raised a vital issue, adding, "The way you were received added sharpness to your argument." A distinguished biblical scholar from Germany, who was very distressed by my having raised the question, later pleaded that his people were responsible for killing six million Jews.


The Importance of the Issue


I have learned that, distinctively in the case of Zionist colonisation, a determined effort was made to rid the terrain altogether of the native population, since their presence in any number would frustrate the grand design of establishing a Jewish state. The necessity of removing the Arabs was recognised from the beginning of the Zionist enterprise - and advocated by all major Zionist ideologues from Theodor Herzl to Ehud Barak - and was meticulously planned and executed in 1948 and 1967. In their determination to present an unblemished record of the Zionist achievement, the fabricators of propagandistic Zionist history are among the most accomplished practitioners of the strange craft of source-doctoring, rewriting not only their history, but the documents upon which such a history was based. The propagandistic intent was to hide things said and done, and to bequeath to posterity only a sanitized version of the past.
In any case, the argument for the compelling need of Jews to settle in a Jewish state does not constitute a right to displace an indigenous population. And even if it had never been intended from the start, which it most certainly was, the moral problematic arises most acutely precisely from the fact that Zionism has wreaked havoc on the indigenous population, and not a little inconvenience on several surrounding states. Nor can the Shoah (Holocaust) be appealed to credibly to justify the destruction of an innocent third party. It is a dubious moral principle to regard the barbaric treatment of Jews by the Third Reich as constituting a right to establish a Jewish state at the expense of an innocent third party. Surely the victims of Auschwitz would not have approved.
My study of the Bible in the Land of the Bible brought me face to face with the turbulence of Israel-Palestine and raised questions not only about the link between biblical interpretation and colonial exploitation but about the nature of the biblical narrative itself. An academic interest became a consuming moral imperative.
Why should the State of Israel, any more than any other state, be such a challenge to morality? The first reason, I suggest, derives from the general moral question attendant upon the forcible displacement of an indigenous people from its homeland. The second springs from the unique place that the land has in the Sacred Scriptures of both Jews and Christians, and the significance attached to it as the location of the state for Jews. In addition, there is the positive assessment of the State of Israel on the part of the majority of religious Jews of various categories, as well as in certain Christian ecclesial and theological circles.
As a biblical scholar, I have been shocked to discover that the only plausible validation for the displacement of the Palestinians derived from a naïve interpretation of the Bible, and that in many Church and academic parties - and not only the "fundamentalist" wing - biblical literalism swept away any concerns deriving from considerations of morality. I contend that fidelity to the literary genre of the biblical traditions and respect for the evidence provided mainly by archaeological investigation demands a rejection of such simplistic readings of the biblical narratives of land, and of the prophetic oracles of restoration.
And to these academic perspectives, one must add one of faith, namely, that God is fundamentally moral, and, for those espousing the Christian vision, loves all his people, irrespective of race, etc.
Rather than relate the establishment of the State of Israel to the Shoah, I have been led gradually to situate Zionism within the category of xenophobic imperialism, so characteristic of the major European powers towards the end of the 19th century. I consider the espousal of it by a majority of Jews world-wide to mark the nadir of Jewish morality. Because I trust in a God before whom tyranny ultimately dissolves, and because one learns something from history, I have no doubt that a future generation of diaspora and Israeli Jews will repudiate its presumptions, and repent for the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinians by their fathers and grandfathers.


While I regret the descent of Judaism into the embrace of Zionism, there is little I can do about it. However, the degree to which a thoroughly Zionised Judaism infects the so-called Jewish-Christian dialogue - which I prefer to designate "a monologue in two voices" - is a matter of grave concern. I am perturbed that concurrence with a Zionist reading of Jewish history - that Jews everywhere, and at all times, wanted to re-establish a nation state in Palestine (with no concern for the indigenous population), etc.- is virtually a component of the credo of the dialogue. In that fabricated scenario, the planned, and systematically executed dislocation of the Palestinian population, far from incurring the wrath of post-colonial liberalism, becomes an object of honor, and even religious significance. While most Jews world-wide - there are notable exceptions-allow themselves to be deluded by such perspectives, I see no reason why Christians should.


God the Ethnic Cleanser?


Often I am asked: How do you as a Catholic priest and biblical scholar explain to an ordinary believer the Yahweh-sanctioned ethnic-cleansing mandated in some of the narrative of the Old Testament? Is not this also the Word of God? Such questions have forced themselves on me in a particular way as a result of my contact with the Holy Land. Let me indicate some of my perspectives. But first, let us look at the stakes.
Recently a full-page advertisement in the 10 September 2000 New York Times, signed by over 150 Jewish scholars and leaders, stated:
Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel. The most important event for Jews since the Holocaust has been the reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. As members of a biblically-based religion, Christians appreciate that Israel was promised - and given - to Jews as the physical center of the covenant between them and God. Many Christians support the State of Israel for reasons far more profound than mere politics. As Jews, we applaud this support.
Here we see clothed in the garment of piety the Zionist enterprise, which was determined to create a state for Jews at the expense of the indigenous Arab people - a product of the nationalistic and imperialistic spirit of 19th-century Europe.
Whatever pangs of conscience one might have about the expulsion of a million Palestinian Arabs, and the destruction of their villages to ensure they would not return, the Bible can salve it. Zionism, a program originally despised by both wings of Judaism, Orthodox and Reform, as being anti-religious (by the Orthodox) and contrary to the universal mission of Judaism (by Reform Jewry), is now at the core of the Jewish credo. And credulous Christians allow themselves to be sucked into the vortex. Only when Zionism is being evaluated are normal rules of morality suspended; only here is ethnic-cleansing applauded by the religious spirit.


Many theologians on seeing how the revered sacred text has been used as an instrument of oppression seek refuge in the view that it is the misuse of the Bible, rather than the text itself which is the problem. The blame is shifted from the non-problematic biblical text to the perverse predispositions of the interpreter.
This "solution" evades the problem. It must be acknowledged that several traditions within the Bible lend themselves to oppressive interpretations and applications, precisely because of their inherently oppressive nature.


Towards a Moral Reading of the Bible


My approach is set forth in a chapter of my book, "The Bible and Colonialism. A Moral Critique."8 I begin by stressing how important it is to acknowledge the existence of texts of unsurpassed violence within Sacred Scripture, and to recognise them to be an affront to moral sensitivities. The problem is not only theoretical. In addition to being morally reprehensible texts, some have fuelled terrible injustices through colonialist enterprises.
The Holy War traditions of the Old Testament pose an especially difficult moral problem. In addition to portraying God as one who cherishes the slaughter of his created ones, they acquit the killer of moral responsibility for his destruction, presenting it as a religious obligation.
Every effort must be made to rescue the Bible from being a blunt instrument in the oppression of one people by another. If a naïve interpretation leads to such unacceptable conclusions, what kind of exegesis can rescue it?
Some exegetes note that Christians read the Old Testament in the light of the life and paschal mystery of Christ. In such a perspective, the writings of the Old Testament contain certain "imperfect and provisional" elements, which the divine pedagogy could not eliminate right away. The Bible, then, reflects a considerable moral development, which finds its completion in the New Testament. I do not find this proposal satisfactory.
The attempts of the Fathers of the Church to eliminate the scandal caused by particular texts of the Bible do little for me. The allegorical presentation of Joshua leading the people into the land of Canaan as a type of Christ, who leads Christians into the true promised land does not impress.


The Catholic Church deals with the embarrassment of having divinely mandated ethnic cleansing in the biblical narrative by either excluding it altogether from public use, or excising the most offensive verses. The disjuncture between this censoring of the Word of God and the insistence on the divine provenance of the whole of the Scriptures has not been satisfactorily resolved.
There is another method which is more amenable to modern sensibilities, one which takes seriously the literary forms of the materials, the circumstances of their composition, and relevant non-literary evidence. According to this view, the fundamental tenet of the Protestant Reformation that the Bible can be understood in a straightforward way must be abandoned. Narratives purporting to describe the past are not necessarily accurate records of it. One must respect the distinctive literary forms within the biblical narrative - legend, fabricated myths of the past, prophecy and apocalyptic, etc.
The relevant biblical narratives of the past are not simple history, but reflect the religious and political ideologies of their much later authors. It is now part of the scholarly consensus that the patriarchal narratives of Genesis do not record events of an alleged patriarchal period, but are retrojections into a past about which the writers knew little, reflecting the author's intentions at the later period of composition. It is naïve, then, to cleave to the view that God made the promise of progeny and land to Abraham after the fashion indicated in Genesis 15.


The Exodus narrative poses particular difficulties for any reader who is neither naïve nor amoral. It is the entrance (Eisodus) into the land of milk and honey which keeps the hope of the wandering Israelites alive. It is high time that readers read the narrative with sensitivity to the innocent third-party about to be exterminated, that is, "with the eyes of the Canaanites."
Moreover, there is virtual unanimity among scholars that the model of tribal conquest as narrated in Joshua 1-12 is unsustainable. Leaving aside the witness of the Bible, we have no evidence that there was a Hebrew conquest. Evidence from archaeology, extra-biblical literature, etc., points in an altogether different direction from that propounded by Joshua 1-12. It suggests a sequence of periods marked by a gradual and peaceful coalescence of disparate peoples into a group of highland dwellers whose achievement of a new sense of unity culminated only with the entry of the Assyrian administration. The Iron I Age settlements on the central hills of Palestine, from which the later kingdom of Israel developed, reflect continuity with Canaanite culture, and repudiate any ethnic distinction between "Canaanites" and "Israelites." Israel's origins, then, were within Canaan, not outside it. There was neither invasion from outside, nor revolution within.
A historiography of Israelite origins based solely, or primarily on the biblical narratives is an artificial construct influenced by certain religious motivations obtaining at a time long post-dating any verifiable evidence of events. Accordingly, pace the 150 plus Jewish scholars and rabbis who signed The New York Times ad, the biblical narrative is not sufficient to transform barbarism into piety.


Conclusion


Western theological scholarship, while strong in its critique of repressive regimes elsewhere, gives a wide berth to Zionism. Indeed a moral critique of its impact on the Palestinians is ruled out.
I try to break the silence in my "The Bible and Colonialism" and "Zionism and the State of Israel." The former explores the moral question of the impact which colonialist enterprises, fueled by the biblical paradigm, have had on the indigenous populations in general, while the latter deals with the impact of Zionism on the Palestinians. They are explorations into terrain virtually devoid of inquirers, which attempt to map out some of the contours of that terrain. They subject the land traditions of the Bible to an evaluation which derives from general ethical principles and criteria of human decency, such as are enshrined in conventions of human rights and international law.
Such an enterprise is necessary. When people are dispossessed, dispersed and humiliated, not only with alleged divine support, but at the alleged express command of God, one's moral self recoils in horror. Any association of God with the destruction of people must be subjected to an ethical analysis. The obvious contradiction between what some claim to be God's will and ordinary civilized, decent behavior poses the question as to whether God is a chauvinistic, nationalistic and militaristic xenophobe. It also poses the problem of biblical prophecy finding its fulfillment in what even unbelievers would regard as a form of "ethnic cleansing."
I consider that biblical studies and theology should deal with the real conditions of people's lives, and not satisfy themselves with comfortable survival in an academic or ecclesial ghetto. I am concerned about the use of the Bible as a legitimization for colonialism and its consequences. My academic work addresses aspects of biblical hermeneutics, and informs a wider public on issues which have implications for human well-being, as well as for allegiance to God.
While such a venture might be regarded as an instructive academic contribution by any competent scholar, to assume responsibility for doing so is for me, who has witnessed the dispossession, dispersion and humiliation of the Palestinians, of the order of a moral imperative. It is high time that biblical scholars, church people, and Western intellectuals read the biblical narratives of the promise of land "with the eyes of the Canaanites."9


End Notes


1 Deist, F. E., The Dangers of Deuteronomy: A Page from the Reception History of the Book, in Martinez, F. Garcia, A. Hilhorst, J.T.A.G.M. van Ruiten, and A.S. van der Woud (eds), "Studies in Deuteronomy. In Honour of C.J. Labuschagne on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday," 1994, Leiden/New York/Köln: Brill, 13-29.
2 Lamadrid, A.G., Canaán y América. La Biblia y la Teologia medieval ante la Conquista de la Tierra, in "Escritos de Biblia y Oriente. Bibliotheca Salmanticensis," Estudios 38, 1981, Salamanca-Jerusalén: Universidad Pontificia, 329-46.
3 Davies, W.D., "The Gospel and the Land. Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine," 1974, Berkeley: University of California Press. See also his "The Territorial Dimensions of Judaism," 1982, Berkeley: University of California Press; and his "The Territorial Dimensions of Judaism. With a Symposium and Further Reflections," 1991, Minneapolis: Fortress.
4 Brueggemann, Walter, "The Land. Place as Gift, and Challenge in Biblical Faith," 1977, Philadelphia: Fortress. See also his Forward in March, W. Eugene, "Israel and the Politics of Land. A Theological Case Study," 1994, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press.
5 Lohfink, Norbert, The Laws of Deuteronomy. Project for a World without any Poor, in Scripture Bulletin, 1996, 26:2-19.
6 Prior, Michael, "A Land flowing with Milk, Honey, and People," 1997, Cambridge: Von Hügel Institute; and in Scripture Bulletin, 28 (1998):2-17.
7 Prior, Michael, "Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry," 1999, London and New York: Routledge.
8 Prior, Michael, "The Bible and Colonialism. A Moral Critique," 1997, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
9 My study of the Bible in the Land of the Bible obviously aided me in seeing "with the eyes of the Canaanites." Others, surely, have had no less interesting experiences to tell, some of which I have collected in "They Came and They Saw. Western Christian Experiences of the Holy Land," Michael Prior, ed., 2000, London: Melisende. ?

 

 

The Thirteenth Tribe

by Arthur Koestler. Random House, 1976. 256 pp. List: $9.95; AET: $7.95 for one, $9.95 for two.
Reviewed by Grace Halsell (as appeared in The Washington Report For Middle East Affairs, June 1991)
AET and Washington Report e-mail: wrmea@aol.com
AET and Washington Report website: http://www.washington-report.org
 

Since 1948, when Zionists succeeded in carving out a Jewish state from the land of the Palestinians, the question "who is a Jew" has been endlessly debated.

Zionists (both Christian and Jewish) often declare that "God gave the land" of Palestine "to the Jews." They infer that God deeded territories, in perpetuity, to a biblical tribe of Oriental Middle Eastern people.

Since millions of American Christians accept a dogma that God has a Chosen Land and a Chosen People (the Jews), then the question "who is a Jew?" takes on political connotations that impinge on national and international decisions.

In his carefully researched book entitled The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler refutes the idea of a Jewish "race." Moreover, he says that most Jews of the contemporary world did not come from Palestine and are not even of Semitic origin. His research shows  that most Jews originated in what today is the Soviet Union. And that a group of people there became Jews through conversion, on the orders of their king.

"The bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin," Koestler writes. "Their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus." And he stresses: "The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently western direction, from the Caucasus, from the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe."
While Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish world community, "the main bulk originated from the Khazar country" in the USSR.

Koestler, a Jew born in 1905 in Budapest, writes that the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to the 11th century, were a major power. Their empire extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian and from the Caucasus to the Volga.
They were located "between two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Muhammad."

Since the world was polarized between these two superpowers representing Christianity and Islam, the Khazar Empire, representing a Third Force, "could only maintain its independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam- for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad."
Not wishing to be dominated by either of the two, the Khazar king "embraced the Jewish faith" in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to do the same. Judaism thus became the state religion of the Khazars.

The king's motives in adopting Judaism, Koestler stresses, were purely political.

At the peak of its power, from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD, the Khazar kingdom controlled or exacted tribute from some 30 different nations and tribes inhabiting the vast territories between the Caucasus , the Aral Sea, the Ural Mountains, the town of Kiev and the Ukrainian steppes.

People under Khazar suzerainty included the Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz, Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek colonies of the Crimea, and the Slavonic tribes in the northwestern woodland.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century Jews numbered about one million. Koestler quotes scholars as docu-menting that "the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars."

Koestler, who after the Second World War became a British citizen, and whose most famous book, Darkness at Noon, was translated into 33 languages, has one main thesis: the bulk of Eastern Jewry-and hence of world Jewry is of Khazar-Turkish, rather than Semitic, origin.

As Koestler points out, Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardim, descendants of the Jews who had lived in Spain until their expulsion, with the Muslims, at the end of the 15th century, and who later settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino. In the 1960s, the Sephardim numbered about 500,000.

The Ashkenazim, at the same period, were about 11 million. Thus, "in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew." However, Koestler adds, the term Ashkenazim is misleading because it is generally applied to Germany, thus contributing to the legend that modem Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no other term to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of contemporary Jewry, which came after conversion to Judaism from the Khazar country.
After the destruction of their empire (in the 12th or 13th century), the Jewish Khazars migrated into those regions of Eastern Europe, mainly Russia and Poland, where, at the dawn of the modem age, the greatest concentrations of Jews were found. It is "well documented," Koestler writes, that the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle Ages was of Khazar origin.

An Israeli scholar, A. N. Poliak, a Tel Aviv University professor of medieval Jewish history, quoted by Koestler, states that the descendants of Khazar Jews, "those who stayed where they were (in Khazaria), those who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who went to Israel--constitute now the large majority of world Jewry."
Since Israel's support among millions of American Christians is founded on a concept that God had bequeathed territory to a biblical "tribe" of Oriental Middle Eastern Jews, it becomes ironic to learn from Koestler's research that most Jews today are not descended from natives of the "holy land," or even of the Middle East.
Koestler, who originally published the Thirteenth Tribe in 1976, noted that the story of the Khazar empire "begins to look like the most cruel hoax history has ever perpetrated." The Palestinians, imprisoned and brutalized by Zionism's "hoax," would be the first to agree.

Needless to say, the book has been difficult to find. It disappears from many library shelves. A check at the Library of Congress reveals that the most prestigious library of our land had one reading copy. That one copy, however, is "missing from the shelf."

Grace Halsell is a journalist based in Washington, DC and the author of more than 10 books.

 

Read  Arthur Koestler's  The Thirteenth Tribe  on line

 

 

Israel Can't Hide From Its History Forever

by Greg Felton
(Article first appeared in the May 11, 1997 Vancouver Courier. Reprinted in the Jan/Feb 1998 Washington Report for Middle East Affairs.)

A country is part fact, part myth. The former is a province of economists, politicians and other practitioners of the mundane; the latter principally belongs to history, and is no less important to a healthy country. For a country to be healthy and united , its leaders must promote a unifying national ethos replete with heroes, traditions and celebrations of its past. It's all well and good to beat the drums of pragmatism, fiscal and otherwise, but a people who needs to know that it belongs to a larger community and to have that membership reinforced through ritual and common celebration. Otherwise, there'd be nothing that could properly be called a country -- just a community of communities.

However, myths and their attendant celebrations have a dark side. If used to prop up ideologies and false histories, their innate mendacity will sooner or later tear a country apart.

This brings me to Israel, which celebrates its 49th birthday on Thursday. Given the events of the past year, one wonders how many it has left. Notwithstanding the fact that it was created by a United Nations decree, Israel is built on a lie.

The lie manifests itself from time to time, as in last year's tunnel opening and the construction of the latest Jewish colony in Arab East Jerusalem. In good Zionist fashion, prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has often declared that Israel is in the West Band and Jerusalem to stay, and that all Jews have a historical right to settle there. From the Israeli view, the Palestinians must accept this before there can be peace. The Palestinians will have none of it, and for good reason. Although Netanyahu's claim is familiar with Israeli history, it is entirely fallacious. It fails to mention the Khazars.

The Khazars were a nomadic Turko-Finnic people who migrated out of the Caucasus in the second century and came to settle, broadly speaking in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine. In AD 740, Bulan, the khagan (ruler) of Khazaria, declared that paganism wasn't good enough for his people and decided to adopt one of the "heavenly" religions: Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He sent for representatives of each faith, but found their arguments unconvincing. Bulan then asked each of them a question: if they had to give up their creed for one of the others, which would it be. When the Christian and Muslim both said Judaism, Bulan had his answer. From that moment, the Khazars lived according to Judaic law.

The Khazar Empire lasted until the Mongol invasions of the 13th century forced its Jewish population to flee northwest into Poland, Germany, Russia and elsewhere. They quickly outnumbered the established Semitic Jews who had come centuries earlier from the Middle East. We know these Khazari Jews today as the Ashkenazim, or European Jews.

The history of the Khazars and their Judaic conversion is a documented, undisputed part of Jewish history, but you see why it causes the Zionists fits. It proves that the European Jewry is largely Caucasian, not Semitic. This means that Israel's Zionist founders Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir and Golda Meir, for example, cannot claim affiliation with Israel's biblical past. In fact, the region's Semitic Jews, Christians and Muslims who have genealogies going back to biblical times do have a right to live in Israel. It is with good reason that author Alfred M. Lilienthal declared Judaism's Khazar's heritage to be Israel's Achilles heel.

The false history of Israel as a homeland for victims of European persecution is tied up with fallacies of Israel's "war" of independence. Zionist history says the victorious Jews won nationhood in a war against superior Arab numbers. We know this to be a fiction. On May 15, when Israel received formal U.S. recognition, well equipped Zionist forces included: 30,000 fully mobilized regulars, 32,000 second-line troops; 15,000 settlement police, a home guard of 32,000, as well as 3000-5000 troops from the Irgun and 200-300 from the Stern Gang. Soldiers in the Arab forces comprised fewer than 20,000 poorly trained and armed troops, including volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army.

More than falsified history, though, European Jews exploited the suffering of their own people to further a policy of aggression and expropriation. As prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University wrote in the Journal of Palestine Studies (winter 1997): " generally speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of world public opinion to link the Zionist cause with the Holocaust. Against such a claim, even able Palestinian diplomats --and there were not many in those days- could hardly win the diplomatic game."

(Ironically, the term anti-Semitic, so often used to label critics of Israel, is a misnomer; European Jews are the true anti-Semites in Israel.)

Within Israel today, Pappe said Zionist version of the truth are beginning to loose credibility. So-called "New Sociologists" and "New Historians" are openly criticizing traditional verities, such as Israel never provokes hostilities, and whole peoples can be displaced and marginalized in the name of "national security". They're even exposing the false history of 1948. While some Zionists are willing to criticize Israel's post-1967 expansionism, Pappe says the period 1882-1967 is still of limits.

Now that Israel's expansionism in the West Bank is open to general debate, perhaps one day so too will be the period 1947-48 and maybe even Zionism itself.

REFERENCES:
Khalidi, Walid. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, DC, 1987.
Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage. Random House, New York, 1967.
Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, DC, 1953.


New York Times Reveals

 that European-Descended Jews have no Blood line to Abraham

The fact that most of those who call themselves Jews are not Jews and have no claim to the lands of Palestine because they have no genetic relation to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can no longer be suppressed. The October 29, 1996 N.Y. Times, in an article entitled, "Scholars Debate Origins of Yiddish and the Migrations of Jews," states:

"Arching over these questions is the central mystery of just where the Jews of Eastern Europe came from. Many historians believe that there were not nearly enough Jews in Western Europe to account for the huge population that later flourished in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and nearby areas.

"By reconstructing the Yiddish mother tongue, linguists hope to plot the migration of the Jews and their language with a precision never possible before.

"It has even been suggested, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that the Jews of Eastern Europe were not predominantly part of the diaspora from the Middle East, but were members of another ethnic group that adopted Judaism.

"...One linguist has recently argued that Yiddish began as a Slavic language that was 'relexified,' with most of its vocabulary replaced with German words.

"...Even more troublesome are demographic studies indicating that during the Middle Ages there were no more than 25,000 to 35,000 Jews in Western Europe. These figures are hard to reconcile with other studies showing that by the 17th century there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe.

"...Some scholars believe the roots of Yiddish, and even the Ashkenazic people themselves, lie much farther east. In his 1976 book, The Thirteenth Tribe, Arthur Koestler made the startling suggestion, never taken seriously by linguists, that the Eastern European Jews were not really Semitic -- that they were largely descended from the Turkish Khazars, who converted en masse to Judaism in medieval times.

"More recently, Koestler's controversial thesis has been revived and expanded in a 1993 book, The Ashkenazic 'Jews': A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity (Slavica Publishers), by Dr. Paul Wexler, a Tel Aviv University linguist.

"Wexler uses a reconstruction of Yiddish to argue that it began as a Slavic language whose vocabulary was largely replaced with German words. Going even further, he contends that the Ashkenazic Jews are predominantly converted Slavs and Turks who merged with a tiny population of Palestinian Jews from the Diaspora."

 

 

The Jews Are Not A Race!

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal
Excerpt from his book, What Price Israel? (1953)

Today, to trace anyone's descent to ancient Palestine would be a genealogical impossibility; and to presume, axiomatically, such a descent for Jews, alone among all human groups, is an assumption of purely fictional significance. Most everybody in the Western world could stake out some claim of Palestinian descent if genealogical records could be established for two-thousand years. And there are, indeed, people who, though not by the widest stretch of imagination Jewish, proudly make that very claim: some of the oldest of the South's aristocratic families play a game of comparing whose lineage goes farther back into 'Israel'. No one knows what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel', but to speculate on who might be who is a favored Anglo-Saxon pastime, and Queen Victoria belonged to an 'Israelite' Society that traced the ancestry of its membership back to those lost tribes.

Twelve tribes started in Canaan about thirty-five centuries ago; and not only that ten of them disappeared - more than half of the members of the remaining two tribes never returned from their "exile" in Babylon. How then, can anybody claim to descend directly from that relatively small community which inhabited the Holy Land at the time of Abraham's Covenant with God?

The Jewish racial myth flows from the fact that the words Hebrew, 'Israelite', Jew, Judaism, and the Jewish people have been used synonymously to suggest a historic continuity. But this is a misuse. These words refer to different groups of people with varying ways of life in different periods in history. Hebrew is a term correctly applied to the period from the beginning of Biblical history to the settling in Canaan. 'Israelite' refers correctly to the members of the twelve tribes of 'Israel'. The name Yehudi or Jew is used in the Old Testament to designate members of the tribe of Judah, descendants of the fourth son of Jacob, as well as to denote citizens of the Kingdom of Judah, particularly at the time of Jeremiah and under the Persian occupation. Centuries later, the same word came to be applied to anyone, no matter of what origin, whose religion was Judaism.

The descriptive name Judaism was never heard by the Hebrews or 'Israelites'; it appears only with Christianity. Flavius Josephus was one of the first to use the name in his recital of the war with the Romans to connote a totality of beliefs, moral commandments, religious practices and ceremonial institutions of Galilee which he believed superior to rival Hellenism. When the word Judaism was born, there was no longer a Hebrew-'Israelite' state. The people who embraced the creed of Judaism were already mixed of many races and strains; and this diversification was rapidly growing...

Perhaps the most significant mass conversion to the Judaic faith occurred in Europe, in the 8th century A.D., and that story of the Khazars (Turko-Finnish people) is quite pertinent to the establishment of the modern State of 'Israel'. This partly nomadic people, probably related to the Volga Bulgars, first appeared in Trans-Caucasia in the second century. They settled in what is now Southern Russia, between the Volga and the Don, and then spread to the shores of the Black, Caspian and Azov seas. The Kingdom of Khazaria, ruled by a khagan or khakan fell to Attila the Hun in 448, and to the Muslims in 737. In between, the Khazars ruled over part of the Bulgarians, conquered the Crimea, and stretched their kingdom over the Caucasus farther to the northwest to include Kiev, and eastwards to Derbend. Annual tributes were levied on the Russian Slavonians of Kiev. The city of Kiev was probably built by the Khazars. There were Jews in the city and the surrounding area before the Russian Empire was founded by the Varangians whom the Scandinavian warriors sometimes called the Russ or Ross (circa 855-863).

The influence of the Khazars extended into what is now Hungary and Roumania. Today, the villages of Kozarvar and Kozard in Transylvania bear testimony to the penetration of the Khazars who, with the Magyars, then proceeded into present-day Hungary. The size and power of the Kingdom of Khazaria is indicated by the act that it sent an army of 40,000 soldiers (in 626-627) to help Heraclius of the Byzantines to conquer the Persians. The Jewish Encyclopedia proudly refers to Khazaria as having had a "well constituted and tolerant government, a flourishing trade and a well disciplined army."

Jews who had been banished from Constantinople by the Byzantine ruler, Leo III, found a home amongst these heretofore pagan Khazars and, in competition with Mohammedan and Christian missionaries, won them over to the Judaic faith. Bulan, the ruler of Khazaria, became converted to Judaism around 740 A.D. His nobles and, somewhat later, his people followed suit. Some details of these events are contained in letters exchanged between Khagan Joseph of Khazaria and R. Hasdai Ibn Shaprut of Cordova, doctor and quasi foreign minister to Sultan Abd al-Rahman, the Caliph of Spain. This correspondence (around 936-950) was first published in 1577 to prove that the Jews still had a country of their own - namely, the Kingdom of Khazaria. Judah Halevi knew of the letters even in 1140. Their authenticity has since been established beyond doubt.

According to these Hasdai-Joseph letters, Khagan Bulan decided one day: "Paganism is useless. It is shameful for us to be pagans. Let us adopt one of the heavenly religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam." And Bulan summoned three priests representing the three religions and had them dispute their creeds before him. But, no priest could convince the others, or the sovereign, that his religion was the best. So the ruler spoke to each of them separately. He asked the Christian priest: "If you were not a Christian or had to give up Christianity, which would you prefer - Islam or Judaism?" The priest said: "If I were to give up Christianity, I would become a Jew." Bulan then asked the follower of Islam the same question, and the Moslem also chose Judaism. This is how Bulan came to choose Judaism for himself and the people of Khazaria in the seventh century A.D., and thereafter the Khazars (sometimes spelled Chazars and Khozars) lived according to Judaic laws.

Under the rule of Obadiah, Judaism gained further strength in Khazaria. Synagogues and schools were built to give instruction in the Bible and the Talmud. As Professor Graetz notes in his History of the Jews, "A successor of Bulan who bore the Hebrew name of Obadiah was the first to make serious efforts to further the Jewish religion. He invited Jewish sages to settle in his dominions, rewarded them royally... and introduced a divine service modeled on the ancient communities. After Obadiah came a long series of Jewish Chagans (Khagans), for according to a fundamental law of the state only Jewish rulers were permitted to ascend the throne." Khazar traders brought not only silks and carpets of Persia and the Near East but also their Judaic faith to the banks of the Vistula and the Volga. But the Kingdom of Khazaria was invaded by the Russians, and Itil, its great capital, fell to Sweatoslav of Kiev in 969. The Byzantines had become afraid and envious of the Khazars and, in a joint expedition with the Russians, conquered the Crimean portion of Khazaria in 1016. (Crimea was known as "Chazaria" until the 13th century). The Khazarian Jews were scattered throughout what is now Russia and Eastern Europe. Some were taken North where they joined the established Jewish community of Kiev.

Others returned to the Caucasus. Many Khazars remarried in the Crimea and in Hungary. The Cagh Chafut, or "mountain Jews," in the Caucasus and the Hebraile Jews of Georgia are their descendants. These "Ashkenazim Jews" (as Jews of Eastern Europe are called), whose numbers were swelled by Jews who fled from Germany at the time of the Crusades and during the Black Death, have little or no trace of Semitic blood.

That the Khazars are the lineal ancestors of Eastern European Jewry is a historical fact. Jewish historians and religious text books acknowledge the fact, though the propagandists of Jewish nationalism belittle it as pro-Arab propaganda. Somewhat ironically, Volume IV of the Jewish Encyclopedia - because this publication spells Khazars with a "C" instead of a "K" - is titled "Chazars to Dreyfus": and it was the Dreyfus trial, as interpreted by Theodor Herzl, that made the modern Jewish Khazars of Russia forget their descent from converts to Judaism and accept anti-Semitism as proof of their Palestinian origin.

For all that anthropologists know, Hitler's ancestry might go back to one of the ten Lost Tribes of 'Israel'; while Weizmann may be a descendant of the Khazars, the converts to Judaism who were in no anthropological respect related to Palestine. The home to which Weizmann, Silver and so many other Ashkenazim Zionists have yearned to return has most likely never been theirs. "Here's a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox": in anthropological fact, many Christians may have much more Hebrew-'Israelite' blood in their veins than most of their Jewish neighbors.

Race can play funny tricks on people who make that concept the basis for their likes and dislikes. Race-obsessed people can find themselves hating people who, in fact, may be their own racial kith and kin.

Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist Jew, is a graduate from Cornell University and Colombia Law School. He is also a historian, journalist and lecturer. He is the author of five books.

 

 

The Zionization of American Media

Nov. 2000

By Edward Said

The events of the past four weeks in Palestine have been a near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States for the first time since the modern re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1960s. Political as well as public discourse has so definitively transformed Israel into the victim during the recent clashes, that even though 140 Palestinian lives were lost and close to 5,000 casualties have been reported, it is still something called "Palestinian violence" that has disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the "peace process."  There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an unspoken assumption: these have been engraved in ears, minds, and memories as a guide for the perplexed, a manual or machine for turning out phrases that have clogged the air for at least a month.

I can recite most of them by heart: Barak offered more concessions at Camp David than any Israeli prime minister before him (90 per cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary courage to accept Israeli offers to end the conflict; Palestinian violence, directed by Arafat, has threatened Israel (all sorts of variations on this, including the wish to eliminate Israel, anti-Semitism, suicidal rage in order to get on television, putting children in the front lines so that they would become martyrs) and proved that an ancient "hatred" of the Jews motivates Palestinians; Arafat is a weak leader who allows his people to attack Jews and incite against them by releasing terrorists and producing schoolbooks that deny Israel's existence.  There are probably one or two more formulae that I have not cited, but the general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by rock-throwing barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships that have been used to "defend" Israelis from the violence are simply warding off a terrible force. Bill Clinton's injunctions (dutifully parroted by his secretary of state) for Palestinians to "pull back" goes a long way to suggest that it is Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way round.

It is also worth mentioning that so successful has this Zionisation of the media been that not a single map has been published or shown on television to remind American viewers and readers -- notoriously ignorant of both geography and history -- that Israeli encampments, settlements, roads and barricades crisscross Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank.  Moreover, as happened in Beirut in 1982, there is a veritable Israeli siege of Palestinians, including of Arafat and his men. Completely forgotten, if it was ever at all understood, is the system of Areas A, B, and C by which the military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank continues, and which the Oslo peace process was never really designed to end, much less totally modify.
As suggested by the absence of geography in this most geographical of conflicts, the resulting void is a vitally important point since the pictures that are either shown or described are without context at all. I think the omission by the Zionised media was a deliberate one at the outset and has now become automatic.

It has allowed phony commentators like Thomas Friedman to peddle his wares shamelessly, droning on about American even-handedness, Israeli flexibility and generosity and his own perspicacious pragmatism with which he berates Arab leaders and stuns his bored readers. It has the result not only of permitting the completely preposterous notion of a Palestinian attack on Israel to prevail, but it also further dehumanizes Palestinians as being beasts without sentience or motive.  Thus little wonder that when the figures of the dead and wounded are recited no nationalities are given: this lets Americans assume that the suffering is equally divided between the "warring parties," and in fact elevates Jewish suffering and reduces or eliminates Arab feelings entirely, except of course for rage.  Rage and its cognates remain as the only and certainly the defining Palestinian emotion. It explains the violence, and indeed, it reifies it so that Israel has come to represent a decency and democracy that is forever surrounded by rage and violence.

No other process can logically explain the stone throwers and the stalwart Israeli "defense." Nothing is said of house demolitions, land expropriations, illegal arrests, torture and the like. Nothing is cited about what is (except for the Japanese occupation of Korea) the longest military occupation in modern times; nothing about UN resolutions; nothing about Israeli contraventions of all the Geneva Conventions; nothing about the sufferings of one entire people and the obduracy of another.  Forgotten are the catastrophe of 1948, ethnic cleansing and massacres, the devastation of Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila, the long years of military government for non-Jewish Israeli citizens to say nothing of their continued oppression as a persecuted 20 per cent minority within the Jewish state.

Ariel Sharon at best is a provocation, never a war criminal, Ehud Barak a statesman, never the assassin of Beirut. Terrorism is always on the Palestinian side of the ledger, defense on the Israeli.

What Friedman and pro-Israeli "peaceniks" fail to mention when they extol Barak's unprecedented generosity is the real substance of it. We are not reminded that his commitment to a third withdrawal (of about 12 per cent) made at Wye 18 months ago has never occurred. Of what value then are more such "concessions?"  We are told that he was willing to give back 90 per cent of the territory.  What gets left out is that the 90 per cent is of what Israel has no intention of giving back. Greater Jerusalem is well over 30 per cent of the West Bank; large settlements to be annexed are another 15 per cent; military roads of areas have yet to be determined. So after all this is deducted, 90 per cent of the balance isn't so much  after all. As for Jerusalem: the Israel concession was principally in being willing to discuss and maybe, just maybe, to offer shared authority over the Haram Al-Sharif. The breathtaking dishonesty of the matter is that all of West Jerusalem (principally Arab in 1948) was already conceded by Arafat, plus most of a vastly expanded East Jerusalem.

One detail further: Palestinians' firing by small arms on Gilo is routinely made to seem like gratuitous violence, whereas no one mentions that Gilo itself sits on land confiscated from Beit Jala, the place from which the firing emanates. Besides, Beit Jala was disproportionately shelled by Israeli helicopters using missiles to destroy civilian houses.
 
I have made a survey of the major newspapers. Ever since 28 September, there have been anywhere between one and three opinion articles per average day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception of perhaps three articles written from a pro-Palestinian point of view in the Los Angeles Times, and two (one by an Israeli lawyer, Alegra Pacheco, the other by a pro-Oslo liberal Jordanian journalist, Rami Khoury) in the New York Times, all the articles -- (including those by regular columnists like Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer and others like them), have been in support of Israel, the US-sponsored peace process, and the idea that Palestinian violence, Arafat's lack of cooperation, and Islamic fundamentalism are to blame. The writers have been former US military as well as civilian officials, Israeli apologists and officials, think tank specialists and experts, officials of pro-Israeli lobbies and organizations.

In other words, the total blanketing of the mainstream has taken place on the assumption that no Palestinian or Arab or Islamic
position on such matters as Israeli terror tactics against civilians, settler-colonialism, or military occupation exists at all, or is worth
hearing from.  This is simply without precedent in the annals of US journalism, and is a direct reflection of a Zionist mind-set that makes Israel the norm in human behavior, thereby excluding from equal consideration the existence of 300 million Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims.  In the long run this is of course a suicidal position for Zionists to be in, but such is the arrogance of power that the thought seems not to have occurred to anyone.

The mind-set I have described is truly staggering in its recklessness and, were it not very much a practical as well as actual distortion of reality, one could quite easily be talking about a form of private mental derangement. But it corresponds very closely to official Israeli policy of dealing with Palestinians not as a people with a history of dispossession for which in large measure Israel is directly responsible, but as a periodic nuisance for whom force, and neither understanding nor full accommodation, is the only possible response. Everything else is literally unthinkable.  This astonishing blindness is compounded in the United States since Arabs and Muslims are scarcely paid attention to except as (I have said in an earlier article) the butt of every aspiring politician. A few days ago Hillary Clinton announced in a gesture of the most revolting hypocrisy that she was returning a $50,000 donation from an American-Muslim group because, she said, they supported terrorism; this in fact was an outright lie, since the group in question had only said that it supported Palestinian resistance against Israel during the current crisis, not in itself an untoward position but criminalized in the American system only because a totalitarian Zionism requires that any -- and I mean literally any -- criticism of what Israel does is simply intolerable and the rankest anti-Semitism.

And this despite the fact that (again literally) the entire world has criticized Israel's policies of military occupation, disproportionate violence, and the siege of the Palestinians. In America you must refrain from any criticism, otherwise you are hounded as an anti-Semite requiring the severest opprobrium.

The further peculiarity of American Zionism, which is a system of antithetical thought and Orwellian distortion, is that it is impermissible to speak of Jewish violence, or Jewish actions when it comes to Israel, even though everything done by Israel is done in the name of the Jewish people, for and by a Jewish state.  That such a state is a misnomer, since almost 20 per cent of the population is not Jewish, is never mentioned and this too accounts for the amazing, entirely deliberate discrepancy between what the media calls "Israeli Arabs" and "the Palestinians:" no reader or viewer could possibly know that they are the same people in fact divided by Zionist policy, or that both communities represent the result of Israeli policy -- apartheid in one case, military occupation and ethnic cleansing in the other.  In fine, American Zionism has made any serious public discussion of
Israel, by far the largest ever recipient of US foreign aid, its past and its future, a taboo not be broken in any circumstance. To call this literally the last taboo in American discourse is by no means an exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget have been talked about with some freedom (although always within limits).

The American flag can be burned in public, whereas the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year-old treatment of the Palestinians is virtually unimaginable, a narrative with no permission to appear.  This consensus might be somehow tolerable were it not for the fact that it makes the continuing punishment and dehumanization of the Palestinian people an actual virtue. There is simply no people in the world today whose killing on television screens seems to be considered by most American viewers to be acceptable as well-deserved punishment.

This is the case with Palestinians whose daily loss of life in the past month is herded under the rubric "the violence on both sides," as if the stones and slings of young men thoroughly tired of injustice and repression were a major offence rather than the courageous resistance to a demeaning fate meted out to them not just by Israeli soldiers armed by America, but by a peace process designed to coop them up in Bantustans and reservations fit for animals. That the US supporters of Israel could have plotted for seven years to produce a document designed essentially to cage people like inmates in an asylum or prison -- that is the real crime. And that this could be passed off as peace instead of the desolation that it really has been all along, that surpasses my powers to understand or adequately describe as anything less than untrammeled immorality.

The worst thing of all is that so iron-like is the wall protecting American discourse about Israel that no questions can be put to the minds that produced Oslo and that for seven years have been passing off their scheme to the world as peace. One scarcely knows which is more pernicious, the mentality that thinks of Palestinians as not entitled even to express a sense of injustice (they are too low a form for that) or the one that continues to plot their further enslavement. Were this the whole it would be bad enough. But our miserable status as far as US Zionism is concerned  is compounded by the absence of any institution here or in the Arab world ready and able to produce an alternative. I fear that the coverage of those stone-throwing protesters in Bethlehem, Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron may not be adequately reflected in the dithering Palestinian leadership, unable either to retireor to go forward. That is the ultimate pity of it.

Reproduced From:  http://www.al-bushra.org/zionism/media.htm 

 

THE NEW COMPLAINT OF PORTNOY

By Israel Shamir
March 18, 2001

The Viennese Jewish shrinks decided to disinvite the American Palestinian Professor Edward Said, who had been called to lecture them in memory of Sigmund Freud. The Professor had been seen throwing a stone towards an Israeli border. The psychiatrists said it speaks a lot about his subconscious. They would never throw a rock, as the wild Arab from Columbia University; they prefer Sharon’s missiles.

I think it is a right approach, and it should be applied not only to professor Said. In the far-away 1969, Phillip Roth decided to probe the subconscious of his contemporary American Jew. In the novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s hero, Alexander Portnoy, lies on the psychiatrist’s couch and tells of his inner feelings, domineering mother and adolescent sex. What would a modern Portnoy blubber on the newest reclining couch model 2001?

We can find this out by turning towards the press. Philip Weiss[i] in the New York Observer noted that the Jews are to politics and media what the blacks are to basketball. The leading media powerhouses like the New York Times Corporation and the Washington Post are fully kosher, owned by Jews and a substantial majority of the editorials and the op-eds are written by Jews. They are representative of the Jewish American opinion. With a very few exceptions, they are supportive of Israel, its policies towards the Palestinians and its brave ruler, general Sharon.

The situation in our land is well known. The Jews rule supreme. The local non-Jewish inhabitants have few rights. The majority of them is disenfranchised. Their property is seized at will and their sources of independent livelihood are destroyed. Their cities are besieged, activists assassinated, women and children starved. They have no access to public media, to welfare; they are not allowed to even go to the beach. None of this is secret. It is freely discussed in the Israeli media.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the Jews of Israel hate goys and wish them all gone. To borrow the expression of Conrad Black, the owner of British and Canadian newspapers, it would be ‘a lie worthy of Goebbels’. Israel imports hundreds of thousands of goys and shiksas: Chinese, Thai, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians and Africans. In just the last few months, the Israeli Ministry of Labour issued thousands of new permits for guest workers. The Jews of Israel welcome goys, as long as they have no rights, make no demands and agree to work for minimal wage. At the first objection, they are taken by force to the first plane back home.

That is the country adored by William Safire, Tom Friedman and other Jews in the mainstream media. ‘Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are’, goes the Latin adage. The pro-Israel position of the American Jews in the media is a good indication of their subconscious feelings towards the world at large.

Their favourite neo-liberal globalist trend is but a tendency to turn the whole world, including the United States, into a Palestine with a small ruling class, big security machine and voiceless impoverished natives. But let us give their due to the gentlemen of the press. They could be worse. The more vocal part of American Jewry considers them rather soft. The US correspondent of Haaretz in Washington, Nitzan Horovitz, writes in today’s edition (March 16, 2001), “The Israeli lobby in the US (AIPAC) is more intransigent[ii] than any government of Israel, including that of Sharon.” It is a Jewish supremacist organisation, according to Yossi Beilin, an Israeli ex-minister who is not much of a liberal himself.

What do they hate in Palestinians? The Palestinians have roots, they are living in harmony with their environment, they love their villages, they stick to their land, they can live without Jewish guidance. The Jewish supremacists wish to destroy their society, to confiscate their land and turn them into slaves sweating in the Jewish factories. If that is what Portnoy-2001 feels about Palestinians, why would he feel any different about other goys? A good Viennese shrink would pronounce him sick and possibly dangerous to his neighbours. He is as sick as any bigot of Ku Klux Klan, but much more influential due to his control over the media.

What is the source of Portnoy’s influence? Why did he change so much since 1969? Phillip Weiss explains it by the success of the Jews to break through the barriers, to enrich themselves and to occupy the commanding positions in the establishment. He writes, “I don’t claim to know how Jewish the membership of the establishment is. Twenty percent, 50 percent? I’m guessing 30”. Even 30% would be sufficient to promote any idea, if the other 70% have no interest in the subject. In many financial companies, a 10% controlling share is as good as total ownership, as the rest is divided among small shareholders.

In the absence of solid statistics for the US, it is instructive to consider the  economy of Apartheid-era South Africa. The Economist, hardly a ‘hate publication’, estimated that the Jews who constituted 0.03% of the population owned sixty percent of that rich country’s market capitalization. All other players, Anglos, Boers, Indians and native Africans competed for the remaining 40%.

The power of money is translated into the rule over the minds by the feudal structure of the media. At the peak, there are media lords, the proprietors. They delegate authority to their faithful retainers, the chief editors, who in turn, choose loyal soldiers. The structure does not stand alone, but links to the financial and trading structures, the main ad-suppliers. The ad-suppliers are more important than the readers. In England, the Daily Herald, a newspaper targeted at a working class constituency, went bankrupt. Although it had five times as many readers as The Times, it only attracted half the advertising revenues. Advertisements account for approximately 75% of the revenue of an average newspaper. In the case of Radio and TV broadcasters, that figure leaps to almost 100%. It is no wonder that the media is accountable to its ‘paying’ patrons, the privileged few who are members of an elite club.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the media is not the message. The media is not a line of business, either. Lev Chernoi, a Russian-Israeli billionaire who sold his vast media empire to another Jewish tycoon, Mr. Berezovsky, put it concisely in a recent interview: “Media is politics”. The media is a means of shaping public consensus; of swaying the consciousness of a nation. Once, the readership provided a feedback, not anymore. Ordinary people still own most of the body parts of America and they are the muscle, but the nerve system and the brain have been taken over by the club of media lords and the managers of finance and trade, a new dominant power in the world. They decide what Americans think. Americans enforce their decision how we should manage our planet, from the rain forests of the Amazon to the last besieged Palestinian village.

The Club disposed with the pretence of the pluralism in press.  Russian politicians and journalists visiting the US often express amazement at how in this huge and heterogeneous country the scope of expressed opinions is so narrow. “You succeeded where the communists failed”, is a frequent refrain. Indeed, the differences between American newspaper coverage and TV News have all but disappeared.

Noam Chomsky recently wrote, “the editors of the NY Times, and their brethren, have refused - not "missed," but refused to publish a single word about the sending of unprecedented numbers of military helicopters to Israel. Last week, the latest $.5 billion deal was struck between the Pentagon and the IDF for more advanced Apaches. They recognize how the (US) population is likely to react. To date, the total coverage of this massive transfer of public funds has been one opinion piece in a newspaper in Raleigh, North Carolina. I've actually attempted to personally contact editors I've known for years.  No use.  The discipline, and uniformity, are really impressive.  People who thought that Stalin had reached the limits of totalitarianism are quite wrong”.

Well, Joseph Stalin had no such compliant media machine or the modern technology at his disposal. Its potential is not fully realized yet, as the three major networks plan to launch one united and unified news programme every night, to spread its message to every house in America. A painter Diane Harvey wrote in despair: “its main technique is through feeding the public an entire world-view made out of toxic substitutes for information and truth. The 360-degree, surround-sound World Lie most people believe is built and sustained by the non-stop flow of highly purposeful, integrated and carefully directed fabrications. The spirit of truth has departed, an upgraded version of global totalitarianism has been coalescing into a new death-grip on human freedom”[iii].

Paradoxically, this machine is vulnerable as it is too formidable. Subjugation and destruction of Palestine is but one of its applications. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you, as no man is an island, said the Elizabethan poet, John Donne, proclaiming the common humanity of Man. These words sent Ernest Hemingway to fight for freedom in Spain in 1936, as freedom is indivisible. We repeated these words in 1968, we should repeat it now. The struggle for freedom in the US and the battle for Palestine are but one war.

Whenever the Almighty sends a malaise, says a Jewish wisdom, He sends the cure for it. The cure lies in democracy. The media should be returned to people, taken out of the rich men’s hands. Israel/Palestine should be democratised, equal rights provided to Jew and Gentile alike. It would cure the New Complaint of Portnoy.
 
 
 

[i] New York Observer, 22.01.01

[ii] In Israeli parlance, the Jewish supremacists are called ‘right-wing’, while national moderates are called ‘left-wing’, though this division has no connection to their social positions.

[iii] http://www.rense.com/general8/harv.htm 

 

Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer and journalist. His articles The Rape of Dulcinea, The Test Failed, Galilee Flowers could be found on many Internet sites, http://www.thestruggle.org/ , http://www.antiwar/, http://www.nilemedia/  etc. He can be reached at shamiri_@netvision.net.il, or write P.O.B. 23714 Tel Aviv 61236

 

 

Germany and the Jews
The Role of the Jews in WWI and WWII

 

Speech By:

Benjamin H. Freedman

 

1961

Introductory Note:

Benjamin H. Freedman was born of Jewish parents in 1890. He became a successful businessman in New York City, and was at one time the principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after World War II, and spent the remainder of his life and at least 2.5 million dollars publicizing the facts of Jewish influence on the United States. Mr. Freedman knew. He had been an insider at the highest levels of Jewish organizations, and was personally acquainted with Bernard Baruch, Samuel Untermyer, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy, and many more of the movers and shakers of his time.

This speech was given in 1961 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on behalf of a newspaper of that time, Common Sense.

Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co- religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.

What happened? World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. There are few people here my age who remember that. Now that war was waged on one side by Great Britain, France, and Russia; and on the other side by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.

Within two years Germany had won that war: not only won it nominally, but won it actually. The German submarines, which were a surprise to the world, had swept all the convoys from the Atlantic Ocean. Great Britain stood there without ammunition for her soldiers, with one week's food supply -- and after that, starvation. At that time, the French army had mutinied. They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting, they were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed.

Not a shot had been fired on German soil. Not one enemy soldier had crossed the border into Germany. And yet, Germany was offering England peace terms. They offered England a negotiated peace on what the lawyers call a status quo ante basis. That means: "Let's call the war off, and let everything be as it was before the war started." England, in the summer of 1916 was considering that -- seriously. They had no choice. It was either accepting this negotiated peace that Germany was magnanimously offering them, or going on with the war and being totally defeated.

While that was going on, the Zionists in Germany, who represented the Zionists from Eastern Europe, went to the British War Cabinet and -- I am going to be brief because it's a long story, but I have all the documents to prove any statement that I make -- they said: "Look here. You can yet win this war. You don't have to give up. You don't have to accept the negotiated peace offered to you now by Germany. You can win this war if the United States will come in as your ally." The United States was not in the war at that time. We were fresh; we were young; we were rich; we were powerful. They told England: "We will guarantee to bring the United States into the war as your ally, to fight with you on your side, if you will promise us Palestine after you win the war." In other words, they made this deal: "We will get the United States into this war as your ally. The price you must pay is Palestine after you have won the war and defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey." Now England had as much right to promise Palestine to anybody, as the United States would have to promise Japan to Ireland for any reason whatsoever. It's absolutely absurd that Great Britain, that never had any connection or any interest or any right in what is known as Palestine should offer it as coin of the realm to pay the Zionists for bringing the United States into the war. However, they did make that promise, in October of 1916. And shortly after that -- I don't know how many here remember it - - the United States, which was almost totally pro-German, entered the war as Britain's ally.

I say that the United States was almost totally pro-German because the newspapers here were controlled by Jews, the bankers were Jews, all the media of mass communications in this country were controlled by Jews; and they, the Jews, were pro-German. They were pro-German because many of them had come from Germany, and also they wanted to see Germany lick the Czar. The Jews didn't like the Czar, and they didn't want Russia to win this war. These German-Jew bankers, like Kuhn Loeb and the other big banking firms in the United States refused to finance France or England to the extent of one dollar. They stood aside and they said: "As long as France and England are tied up with Russia, not one cent!" But they poured money into Germany, they fought beside Germany against Russia, trying to lick the Czarist regime.

Now those same Jews, when they saw the possibility of getting Palestine, went to England and they made this deal. At that time, everything changed, like a traffic light that changes from red to green. Where the newspapers had been all pro-German, where they'd been telling the people of the difficulties that Germany was having fighting Great Britain commercially and in other respects, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies' hands. They were no good. Shortly after that, Mr. Wilson declared war on Germany.

The Zionists in London had sent cables to the United States, to Justice Brandeis, saying "Go to work on President Wilson. We're getting from England what we want. Now you go to work on President Wilson and get the United States into the war." That's how the United States got into the war. We had no more interest in it; we had no more right to be in it than we have to be on the moon tonight instead of in this room. There was absolutely no reason for World War I to be our war. We were railroaded into -- if I can be vulgar, we were suckered into -- that war merely so that the Zionists of the world could obtain Palestine. That is something that the people of the United States have never been told. They never knew why we went into World War I.

After we got into the war, the Zionists went to Great Britain and they said: "Well, we performed our part of the agreement. Let's have something in writing that shows that you are going to keep your bargain and give us Palestine after you win the war." They didn't know whether the war would last another year or another ten years. So they started to work out a receipt. The receipt took the form of a letter, which was worded in very cryptic language so that the world at large wouldn't know what it was all about. And that was called the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was merely Great Britain's promise to pay the Zionists what they had agreed upon as a consideration for getting the United States into the war. So this great Balfour Declaration, that you hear so much about, is just as phony as a three dollar bill. I don't think I could make it more emphatic than that.

That is where all the trouble started. The United States got in the war. The United States crushed Germany. You know what happened. When the war ended, and the Germans went to Paris for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 there were 117 Jews there, as a delegation representing the Jews, headed by Bernard Baruch. I was there: I ought to know. Now what happened? The Jews at that peace conference, when they were cutting up Germany and parceling out Europe to all these nations who claimed a right to a certain part of European territory, said, "How about Palestine for us?" And they produced, for the first time to the knowledge of the Germans, this Balfour Declaration. So the Germans, for the first time realized, "Oh, so that was the game! That's why the United States came into the war." The Germans for the first time realized that they were defeated, they suffered the terrific reparations that were slapped onto them, because the Zionists wanted Palestine and were determined to get it at any cost.

That brings us to another very interesting point. When the Germans realized this, they naturally resented it. Up to that time, the Jews had never been better off in any country in the world than they had been in Germany. You had Mr. Rathenau there, who was maybe 100 times as important in industry and finance as is Bernard Baruch in this country. You had Mr. Balin, who owned the two big steamship lines, the North German Lloyd's and the Hamburg-American Lines. You had Mr. Bleichroder, who was the banker for the Hohenzollern family. You had the Warburgs in Hamburg, who were the big merchant bankers -- the biggest in the world. The Jews were doing very well in Germany. No question about that. The Germans felt: "Well, that was quite a sellout."

It was a sellout that might be compared to this hypothetical situation: Suppose the United States was at war with the Soviet Union. And we were winning. And we told the Soviet Union: "Well, let's quit. We offer you peace terms. Let's forget the whole thing." And all of a sudden Red China came into the war as an ally of the Soviet Union. And throwing them into the war brought about our defeat. A crushing defeat, with reparations the likes of which man's imagination cannot encompass. Imagine, then, after that defeat, if we found out that it was the Chinese in this country, our Chinese citizens, who all the time we had thought were loyal citizens working with us, were selling us out to the Soviet Union and that it was through them that Red China was brought into the war against us. How would we feel, then, in the United States against Chinese? I don't think that one of them would dare show his face on any street. There wouldn't be enough convenient lampposts to take care of them. Imagine how we would feel.

Well, that's how the Germans felt towards these Jews. They'd been so nice to them: from 1905 on, when the first Communist revolution in Russia failed, and the Jews had to scramble out of Russia, they all went to Germany. And Germany gave them refuge. And they were treated very nicely. And here they had sold Germany down the river for no reason at all other than the fact that they wanted Palestine as a so-called "Jewish commonwealth."

Now Nahum Sokolow, and all the great leaders and great names that you read about in connection with Zionism today, in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1923 wrote in all their papers -- and the press was filled with their statements -- that the feeling against the Jews in Germany is due to the fact that they realized that this great defeat was brought about by Jewish intercession in bringing the United States into the war. The Jews themselves admitted that. It wasn't that the Germans in 1919 discovered that a glass of Jewish blood tasted better than Coca-Cola or Muenschner Beer. There was no religious feeling. There was no sentiment against those people merely on account of their religious belief. It was all political. It was economic. It was anything but religious. Nobody cared in Germany whether a Jew went home and pulled down the shades and said "Shema' Yisroel" or "Our Father." Nobody cared in Germany any more than they do in the United States. Now this feeling that developed later in Germany was due to one thing: the Germans held the Jews responsible for their crushing defeat.

And World War I had been started against Germany for no reason for which Germany was responsible. They were guilty of nothing. Only of being successful. They built up a big navy. They built up world trade. You must remember that Germany at the time of the French Revolution consisted of 300 small city-states, principalities, dukedoms, and so forth. Three hundred separate little political entities. And between that time, between the times of Napoleon and Bismarck, they were consolidated into one state. And within 50 years they became one of the world's great powers. Their navy was rivaling Great Britain's, they were doing business all over the world, they could under sell anybody, they could make better products. What happened as a result of that?

There was a conspiracy between England, France, and Russia to slap down Germany. There isn't one historian in the world who can find a valid reason why those three countries decided to wipe Germany off the map politically.

When Germany realized that the Jews were responsible for her defeat, they naturally resented it. But not a hair on the head of any Jew was harmed. Not a single hair. Professor Tansill, of Georgetown University, who had access to all the secret papers of the State Department, wrote in his book, and quoted from a State Department document written by Hugo Schoenfelt, a Jew whom Cordell Hull sent to Europe in 1933 to investigate the so-called camps of political prisoners, who wrote back that he found them in very fine condition. They were in excellent shape, with everybody treated well. And they were filled with Communists. Well, a lot of them were Jews, because the Jews happened to comprise about 98 per cent of the Communists in Europe at that time. And there were some priests there, and ministers, and labor leaders, and Masons, and others who had international affiliations.

Some background is in order: In 1918-1919 the Communists took over Bavaria for a few days. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and a group of other Jews took over the government for three days. In fact, when the Kaiser ended the war he fled to Holland because he thought the Communists were going to take over Germany as they did Russia and that he was going to meet the same fate as the Czar. So he fled to Holland for safety, for security. After the Communist threat in Germany was quashed, the Jews were still working, trying to get back into their former status, and the Germans fought them in every way they could without hurting a single hair on anyone's head. They fought them the same way that, in this country, the Prohibitionists fought anyone who was interested in liquor. They didn't fight one another with pistols. Well, that's the way they were fighting the Jews in Germany. And at that time, mind you, there were 80 to 90 million Germans, and there were only 460,000 Jews. About one half of one per cent of the population of Germany were Jews. And yet they controlled all the press, and they controlled most of the economy because they had come in with cheap money when the mark was devalued and bought up practically everything.

The Jews tried to keep a lid on this fact. They didn't want the world to really understand that they had sold out Germany, and that the Germans resented that.

The Germans took appropriate action against the Jews. They, shall I say, discriminated against them wherever they could. They shunned them. The same way that we would shun the Chinese, or the Negroes, or the Catholics, or anyone in this country who had sold us out to an enemy and brought about our defeat.

After a while, the Jews of the world called a meeting in Amsterdam. Jews from every country in the world attended this meeting in July 1933. And they said to Germany: "You fire Hitler, and you put every Jew back into his former position, whether he was a Communist or no matter what he was. You can't treat us that way. And we, the Jews of the world, are serving an ultimatum upon you." You can imagine what the Germans told them. So what did the Jews do?

In 1933, when Germany refused to surrender to the world conference of Jews in Amsterdam, the conference broke up, and Mr. Samuel Untermyer, who was the head of the American delegation and the president of the whole conference, came to the United States and went from the steamer to the studios of the Columbia Broadcasting System and made a radio broadcast throughout the United States in which he in effect said, "The Jews of the world now declare a Holy War against Germany. We are now engaged in a sacred conflict against the Germans. And we are going to starve them into surrender. We are going to use a world-wide boycott against them. That will destroy them because they are dependent upon their export business." And it is a fact that two thirds of Germany's food supply had to be imported, and it could only be imported with the proceeds of what they exported. So if Germany could not export, two thirds of Germany's population would have to starve. There was just not enough food for more than one third of the population. Now in this declaration, which I have here, and which was printed in the New York Times on August 7, 1933, Mr. Samuel Untermyer boldly stated that "this economic boycott is our means of self-defense. President Roosevelt has advocated its use in the National Recovery Administration," which some of you may remember, where everybody was to be boycotted unless he followed the rules laid down by the New Deal, and which was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of that time. Nevertheless, the Jews of the world declared a boycott against Germany, and it was so effective that you couldn't find one thing in any store anywhere in the world with the words "made in Germany" on it. In fact, an executive of the Woolworth Company told me that they had to dump millions of dollars worth of crockery and dishes into the river; that their stores were boycotted if anyone came in and found a dish marked "made in Germany," they were picketed with signs saying "Hitler," "murderer," and so forth, something like these sit-ins that are taking place in the South. At a store belonging to the R. H. Macy chain, which was controlled by a family called Strauss who also happen to be Jews, a woman found stockings there which came from Chemnitz, marked "made in Germany." Well, they were cotton stockings and they may have been there 20 years, since I've been observing women's legs for many years and it's been a long time since I've seen any cotton stockings on them. I saw Macy's boycotted, with hundreds of people walking around with signs saying "murderers," "Hitlerites," and so forth. Now up to that time, not one hair on the head of any Jew had been hurt in Germany. There was no suffering, there was no starvation, there was no murder, there was nothing.

Naturally, the Germans said, "Who are these people to declare a boycott against us and throw all our people out of work, and make our industries come to a standstill? Who are they to do that to us?" They naturally resented it. Certainly they painted swastikas on stores owned by Jews. Why should a German go in and give his money to a storekeeper who was part of a boycott that was going to starve Germany into surrendering to the Jews of the world, who were going to dictate who their premier or chancellor was to be? Well, it was ridiculous.

The boycott continued for some time, but it wasn't until 1938, when a young Jew from Poland walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot a German official, that the Germans really started to get rough with the Jews in Germany. And you found them then breaking windows and having street fights and so forth.

Now I don't like to use the word "anti-Semitism" because it's meaningless, but it means something to you still, so I'll have to use it. The only reason that there was any feeling in Germany against Jews was that they were responsible for World War I and for this world-wide boycott. Ultimately they were also responsible for World War II, because after this thing got out of hand, it was absolutely necessary for the Jews and Germany to lock horns in a war to see which one was going to survive. In the meanwhile, I had lived in Germany, and I knew that the Germans had decided that Europe is going to be Christian or Communist: there is no in between. And the Germans decided they were going to keep it Christian if possible. And they started to re-arm. In November 1933 the United States recognized the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was becoming very powerful, and Germany realized that "Our turn was going to come soon, unless we are strong." The same as we in this country are saying today, "Our turn is going to come soon, unless we are strong." Our government is spending 83 or 84 billion dollars for defense. Defense against whom? Defense against 40,000 little Jews in Moscow that took over Russia, and then, in their devious ways, took over control of many other countries of the world.

For this country now to be on the verge of a Third World War, from which we cannot emerge a victor, is something that staggers my imagination. I know that nuclear bombs are measured in terms of megatons. A megaton is a term used to describe one million tons of TNT. Our nuclear bombs had a capacity of 10 megatons, or 10 million tons of TNT, when they were first developed. Now, the nuclear bombs that are being developed have a capacity of 200 megatons, and God knows how many megatons the nuclear bombs of the Soviet Union have.

What do we face now? If we trigger a world war that may develop into a nuclear war, humanity is finished. Why might such a war take place? It will take place as the curtain goes up on Act 3: Act 1 was World War I, Act 2 was World War II, Act 3 is going to be World War III. The Jews of the world, the Zionists and their co-religionists everywhere, are determined that they are going to again use the United States to help them permanently retain Palestine as their foothold for their world government. That is just as true as I am standing here. Not alone have I read it, but many here have also read it, and it is known all over the world.

What are we going to do? The life you save may be your son's. Your boys may be on their way to that war tonight; and you don't know it any more than you knew that in 1916 in London the Zionists made a deal with the British War Cabinet to send your sons to war in Europe. Did you know it at that time? Not a person in the United States knew it. You weren't permitted to know it. Who knew it? President Wilson knew it. Colonel House knew it. Other insiders knew it.

Did I know it? I had a pretty good idea of what was going on: I was liaison to Henry Morgenthau, Sr., in the 1912 campaign when President Wilson was elected, and there was talk around the office there. I was "confidential man" to Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who was chairman of the finance committee, and I was liaison between him and Rollo Wells, the treasurer. So I sat in these meetings with President Wilson at the head of the table, and all the others, and I heard them drum into President Wilson's brain the graduated income tax and what has become the Federal Reserve, and I heard them indoctrinate him with the Zionist movement. Justice Brandeis and President Wilson were just as close as the two fingers on this hand. President Woodrow Wilson was just as incompetent when it came to determining what was going on as a newborn baby. That is how they got us into World War I, while we all slept. They sent our boys over there to be slaughtered. For what? So the Jews can have Palestine as their "commonwealth." They've fooled you so much that you don't know whether you're coming or going.

Now any judge, when he charges a jury, says, "Gentlemen, any witness who you find has told a single lie, you can disregard all his testimony." I don't know what state you come from, but in New York state that is the way a judge addresses a jury. If that witness told one lie, disregard his testimony.

What are the facts about the Jews? (I call them Jews to you, because they are known as Jews. I don't call them Jews myself. I refer to them as so-called Jews, because I know what they are.) The eastern European Jews, who form 92 per cent of the world's population of those people who call themselves Jews, were originally Khazars. They were a warlike tribe who lived deep in the heart of Asia. And they were so warlike that even the Asiatics drove them out of Asia into eastern Europe. They set up a large Khazar kingdom of 800,000 square miles. At the time, Russia did not exist, nor did many other European countries. The Khazar kingdom was the biggest country in all Europe -- so big and so powerful that when the other monarchs wanted to go to war, the Khazars would lend them 40,000 soldiers. That's how big and powerful they were.

They were phallic worshippers, which is filthy and I do not want to go into the details of that now. But that was their religion, as it was also the religion of many other pagans and barbarians elsewhere in the world. The Khazar king became so disgusted with the degeneracy of his kingdom that he decided to adopt a so-called monotheistic faith -- either Christianity, Islam, or what is known today as Judaism, which is really Talmudism. By spinning a top, and calling out "eeny, meeny, miney, moe," he picked out so-called Judaism. And that became the state religion. He sent down to the Talmudic schools of Pumbedita and Sura and brought up thousands of rabbis, and opened up synagogues and schools, and his people became what we call Jews. There wasn't one of them who had an ancestor who ever put a toe in the Holy Land. Not only in Old Testament history, but back to the beginning of time. Not one of them! And yet they come to the Christians and ask us to support their armed insurrections in Palestine by saying, "You want to help repatriate God's Chosen People to their Promised Land, their ancestral home, don't you? It's your Christian duty. We gave you one of our boys as your Lord and Savior. You now go to church on Sunday, and you kneel and you worship a Jew, and we're Jews." But they are pagan Khazars who were converted just the same as the Irish were converted. It is as ridiculous to call them "people of the Holy Land," as it would be to call the 54 million Chinese Moslems "Arabs." Mohammed only died in 620 A.D., and since then 54 million Chinese have accepted Islam as their religious belief. Now imagine, in China, 2,000 miles away from Arabia, from Mecca and Mohammed's birthplace. Imagine if the 54 million Chinese decided to call themselves "Arabs." You would say they were lunatics. Anyone who believes that those 54 million Chinese are Arabs must be crazy. All they did was adopt as a religious faith a belief that had its origin in Mecca, in Arabia. The same as the Irish. When the Irish became Christians, nobody dumped them in the ocean and imported to the Holy Land a new crop of inhabitants. They hadn't become a different people. They were the same people, but they had accepted Christianity as a religious faith.

These Khazars, these pagans, these Asiatics, these Turko-Finns, were a Mongoloid race who were forced out of Asia into eastern Europe. Because their king took the Talmudic faith, they had no choice in the matter. Just the same as in Spain: If the king was Catholic, everybody had to be a Catholic. If not, you had to get out of Spain. So the Khazars became what we call today Jews. Now imagine how silly it was for the great Christian countries of the world to say, "We're going to use our power and prestige to repatriate God's Chosen People to their ancestral homeland, their Promised Land." Could there be a bigger lie than that? Because they control the newspapers, the magazines, the radio, the television, the book publishing business, and because they have the ministers in the pulpit and the politicians on the soapboxes talking the same language, it is not too surprising that you believe that lie. You'd believe black is white if you heard it often enough. You wouldn't call black black anymore -- you'd start to call black white. And nobody could blame you.

That is one of the great lies of history. It is the foundation of all the misery that has befallen the world.

Do you know what Jews do on the Day of Atonement, that you think is so sacred to them? I was one of them. This is not hearsay. I'm not here to be a rabble-rouser. I'm here to give you facts. When, on the Day of Atonement, you walk into a synagogue, you stand up for the very first prayer that you recite. It is the only prayer for which you stand. You repeat three times a short prayer called the Kol Nidre. In that prayer, you enter into an agreement with God Almighty that any oath, vow, or pledge that you may make during the next twelve months shall be null and void. The oath shall not be an oath; the vow shall not be a vow; the pledge shall not be a pledge. They shall have no force or effect. And further, the Talmud teaches that whenever you take an oath, vow, or pledge, you are to remember the Kol Nidre prayer that you recited on the Day of Atonement, and you are exempted from fulfilling them. How much can you depend on their loyalty? You can depend upon their loyalty as much as the Germans depended upon it in 1916. We are going to suffer the same fate as Germany suffered, and for the same reason.

The above speech was given by Benjamin H. Freedman at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D. C. in 1961.

 

Introduction of Victor Ostrovsky
and Comments on the USS Liberty

Our last speaker will be introduced by a very distinguished and interesting gentleman known to many of you over the years as a maverick Republican, a liberal Republican, a pain in the Republican butt, but always a Republican, and a great figure from the state of California, a great former Marine from the Korean War. He holds two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star and a man of great moral conviction and courage, the Honorable Pete McCloskey.

Paul N. McCloskey

It is my privilege to introduce to you one of the most exciting speakers on this continent, Victor Ostrovsky. But before I do I want to tell you a story that Willis Carto gave me permission to tell you about the meaning of Spotlight and one great achievement of Spotlight.

It’s a story of the USS Liberty that, some of you may remember, in 1967 was attacked by the Israeli Navy, torpedo boats - aircraft. Suffered the casualties of over 190 young sailors, and a ship that was literally unarmed; it was a surveillance ship off the Egyptian and Israeli coast during the 1967 War. Israeli planes machine gunned it, torpedoed it from torpedo boats, and when they lowered lifeboats, machine gunned the lifeboats. The intent, that there would be no survivors. The boat did survive, limped back to port. The story was covered up. Lyndon Johnson had ordered airplanes to support it. When he learned that it was an Israeli attack the airplanes were withdrawn. The U.S. Navy covered up the story for many years, dispersed the crews and were told not to discuss it. You can imagine this crew in 1967 having suffered probably more casualties than any naval engagement since the battle off Guadalcanal of the Solomon Islands. They were devastated by the fact that nobody recognized them.

One day a little town up in Wisconsin in a town called Grafton, a town north of Milwaukee of twenty-thousand people, they were conducting what is fairly rare in America. They wanted to have more libraries, unlike turning away and closing libraries, the city of Grafton determined that they would have a library. They put out a fund-raising effort. They brought in a professional that told them, “If you’re going to raise three-million dollars for a library you’ve got to find somebody that will give a half of a million dollars. Then you get so many gifts at one-hundred thousand dollars, so many at ten-thousand, and you raise the money like that.” You all probably have been involved in that kind of campaign for the YMCA or something in your own community. So they said, “How do we get this half of a million dollars?”

There were two old men that came over to this country in the early part of this century. They had founded a machine tool shop that had become successful. All during the depression the Grob Brothers, G R O B, the Grob Brothers did two things. They read Spotlight every week and they also, whenever the town or the community needed money, would give the money - such as a little league baseball team, nursing home, new wing for the hospital. The Grob brothers were the heart and soul of the town of Grafton, Wisconsin. Well they got Mr. Grob, one of the Grobs, to pledge the half million dollars. They went to him and said, “Well Mr. Grob, do you want to call this new library the Theodore Grob Memorial Library?” He said, “No!” He had been reading in SpotLight about the USS Liberty and the injustice. He said, “I want to name it the USS Liberty Memorial Library.”

It caused an international sensation. They had just dedicated the Golda Meir Library of Milwaukee. The entire Jewish community rose up and said, “We can’t have a USS Liberty.” They accused them of anti-Semitism in the Milwaukee Journal. They had an ex-CPO that was the mayor of the town and they stuck to their guns and finally dedicated the USS Liberty Memorial Library.

The surviving crew members came, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was a memorial, which had the names of the thirty-four dead on that memorial. They had six old men that fired a salute with the old Springfield rifle. They had a band and everybody was just overjoyed. In the meantime the press was appearing them as an anti-Semitic town.

That night I was invited to dinner with Mr. Grob, who by reading the Spotlight had caused this crew to come from all over the United States and restored their faith. It was a little like the Vietnam War Memorial did for the Vietnam veterans. Sitting across from Mr. Grob, he said, “McCloskey, I’ve read your record in the Spotlight over the years. You’re right on this issue. But you’re a damn liberal.” And we have been good friends ever since.

So when a voice speaks the truth it can lead to great things. In the Spotlight, no matter how many times over the years they have called me a liberal or disagreed with me on believing with me on the United Nations or one of those liberal positions, I have never ceased to thank them for what they did for the surviving sixty or seventy members of the Liberty which take their faith from that dedication at the little town of Grafton, which would not have happened but for Spotlight.

The man I am going to introduce to you now has shown as much or more courage than many of the Marines that I fought with in Korea and watched fight in Vietnam. Victor Ostrovsky is a former member of the Israeli Mossad, a patriotic Israeli, his wife is a patriotic Israeli, but they concluded some years ago that the Mossad control and leadership over the Israeli government was such that somebody had to speak the truth about it. Victor and his wife in Ottawa, Canada, Victor wrote a book called By Way of Deception. He has written a follow up book called The Other Side of Deception. Those two books should be mandatory reading for every citizen in the United States. In the book By Way of Deception he described that the Mossad has a network all over the world of Jewish communities, in France, and Canada, London, the United States, who inadvertently and sometimes knowingly and sometime unknowingly furnish information to the Mossad which can be funneled back to Israel to discredit American citizens who speak out against Israel. The Anti-Defamation League, of all the thirty-three major Jewish organizations in this country, is the most pro-Zionist. If you take your cue, as I do, from George Washington’s farewell address, you will remember his cautioning against foreign entanglements, either great hatred against a nation or great affection for a nation, which might lead the United States into foreign policy positions which are inimical to the United States. There is no foreign relationship of the United States today that becomes close to the relationship with the nation of Israel. And there is no nation whose foreign policy is sponsored and supported by a community of supporters in the United States, who so rigorously controls Congress in all matters affecting the Mid-East in Israeli policy.

When Victor Ostrovsky wrote his book the Israeli government tried to suppress it. Our freedom of speech in this country, freedom of the press permitted the publication of the book that sold two-million copies and has done more to educate Americans about the insidious excessive influence of the Israeli government and their supporters in our political system than any book that I know. The courage that caused him to publish that also subjected him to the very real possibility of assassination, which he will describe, because of the dedication of certain elements in Israel to the execution or suppression of voices who speak out critical to Israel.

I come from California where Alex O’Day, an Arab-American who spoke out on a television program, indicated that he thought what Yasar Arafat was saying was a voice of peace. He was blown up by a bomb when he went into his office the next day. The plans of his office were discovered in the possession of Roy Bullock, a paid agent of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the plans for that office that was blown up and had assassinated this American citizen who had spoken out in criticism of the policies of Israel.

Victor Ostrovsky has spoken the truth. Because the truth hurts, he is subject to assassination at any time. I have particular thanks that I want to express to him. I served in a minor capacity on one of the commissions, appointed by my friend George Bush. George Bush outraged the American Jewish community, if you recall, by taking a position that our aid to them of ten billion dollars should be conditioned on a reasonable Israeli position toward a Mid East peace. Victor Ostrovsky spoke out and said that the President of the United States is subject to the possibility of assassination by a Mossad hit team when he goes to Spain to an international convention. By his willingness to speak out he may have saved the life of the President of the United States. In any event they have decorated me for various things, Victor, for fighting in Korea. I know of no act of courage that begins to match the courage that you have shown..

 

 

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisksabra.html 

After 19 years, The Truth at Last? 

By Robert Fisk The Independent

Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her just over 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon-- who was then Israel's defence minister--she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia [Phalangists] had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, 'Give us the men, give us the men.' We thought, 'Thank God, they will save us.'" It was to prove a cruelly false hope.

Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her husband Hassan, 30, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. "We were told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to the Cite Sportif, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying 'Sit, sit.' It was 11am. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men."

Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about 4pm, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: 'What are you all waiting for?' He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again."

Today, a Belgian appeals court will begin a hearing to decide if Prime Minister Sharon should be prosecuted for the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. (Belgian laws allow courts to try foreigners for war crimes committed on foreign soil.) In working on this case, the prosecution believes that it has discovered shocking new evidence of Israel's involvement.

The evidence centres on the Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium-- the "Cite Sportif". Only two miles from Beirut airport, the damaged stadium was a natural holding centre for prisoners. It had been an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18 September 1982--about the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium--I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, probably well over 1,000, sitting in its gloomy, dark interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers and plain- clothes Shin Beth (Israeli secret service) agents and men who I suspected were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles--for further "interrogation".

Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, inside the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps, up to 600 massacre victims rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed--given our Western appearance-- that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads bowed. But Israel's Phalangist militiamen--still raging at the murder of their leader and president elect Bashir Gemayel--had been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in charge. So what did these men have to fear?

Looking back--and listening to Sana Sersawi today--I shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time, subsequently written into a book about Israel's 1982 invasion and its war with the PLO, contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one of the prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad [Christian militia] men. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return them." Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the prisoners talk to me, I asked? "They can talk if they want," he replied. "But they have nothing to say."

All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist jeep with the words "Military Police" painted on it--if so exotic an institution could be associated with this gang of murderers--drove by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cite Sportif. He also filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya" for the release of her husband. (The colonel has now been positively identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army.)

Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside the camps. One of the members of the tank crews, Lt Avi Grabovsky--he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission--had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous day and had been told not to "interfere".

And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague rumours of "disappeared" people.

I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's 'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut". But I had not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cite Sportif. I had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's coup d'etat, a stadium from which many prisoners never returned?

Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday, 17 September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still (unknown to her) underway inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese Forces [Phalangists] on the road. The men were separated from the women." This separation--with its awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war--were a common feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the Cite Sportif. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cite Sportif, as the Israelis told us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again."

The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cite Sportif and the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some militiamen--watched by the Israelis--loaded him into a car, blindfolded, she claims. "That's how he disappeared," she says in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again since."

It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as "missing". We assumed--how easy assumptions are in war--that they had been killed in the three days between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on the 18th, that their corpses had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young people had been murdered outside the camps or after the 18th, that the killings were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us.

Why did we not think of this at the time? The following year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a one-line hint--unexplained-- that several hundred people may have "disappeared" at about the same time. The commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of the 18th. A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated Christian president-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I realise now that I had even met the woman who ordered the boy's execution.

Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cite Sportif where, in one of the underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her gratitude for an Israeli soldier--inside the Chatila camp, against all the evidence given by the Israelis--who prevented the murder of her daughters by the Phalange.

Long after the war, the ruins of the Cite Sportif were torn down and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie beneath its foundations--and its frightful implications--might give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment.

 

 

 

"Let the Jews, who claim to be the chosen race, prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth."

--Mahatma Gandhi, Nov. 26, 1938 (full text below)

M.K. Gandhi, Towards Lasting Peace, ed. by Anand T. Hingorani (Chowpatty: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1956)

Gandhi on "The Jews," November 26, 1938:

Several letters have been received by me asking me to declare my views about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine, and the persecution of Jews in Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on this very difficult question.

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South Africa. Some of them became life-long companions. Through these friends, I came to learn much of their age-old persecution. They have been the untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by Christians and the treatment of untouchables by hindus is very close. Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships, therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for the Jews.

But the sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English, or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine to-day cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely, it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews, partly or wholly, as their national home.

The nobler cause would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or, do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.

But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For, he is propounding a new religion of exclusive and militant nationalism, in the name of which any inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter. The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his whole race with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is, therefore, outside my horizon or province.

But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with Germany. How can there be an alliance between a nation which claims to stand for justice and democracy and one which is the declared enemy of both? Or, is England drifting towards armed dictatorship and all it means.

Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked, when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism. It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.

Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. No person who has faith in a living God need feel helpless or forlorn. Jehovah of the Jews is a God more personal than the God of the Christians, the Mussalmans or the Hindus, though, as a matter of fact, in essence, He is common to all and one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or caste me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest would were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy, which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of they tyrant. For to the God fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

It is hardly necessary for me to point out that it is easier for the Jews than for the Czechs to follow my prescription. And they have in the Indian Satyagraha campaign in south Africa an exact parallel. There the Indians occupied precisely the same place that the Jews occupy in Germany. The persecution had also a religious tinge. President Kruger used to say that the white Christians were the chosen of God, and Indians were inferior beings created to serve the Whites. A fundamental clause in the Transvaal constitution was that there should be no equality between the Whites and the colored races, including Asiatics. There, too, the Indians were consigned to ghettos, the same types as those of the Jews in Germany. The Indians, a mere handful, resorted to Satyagraha without any backing from the world outside or the Indian Government. Indeed, the British officials tried to dissuade the Satyagrahis from their contemplated step. World opinion and the Indian Government came to their aid after eight years of fighting. And that, too, was by the way of diplomatic pressure, not of a threat of war.

But the Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa. The Jews are a compact, homogenous community in Germany. They are far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa. And they have organized world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has to-day become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand, offered by un-armed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be, then, a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity. They will have rendered service to fellow-Germans and proved their title to be the real Germans as against those who are to-day dragging , however unknowingly, the German name into the mire.

And now, a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be preformed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the good-will of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart. The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart. They can offer Satyagraha in front of the Arabs, and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger against them. They will find the world opinion in their favor in their religious aspiration. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them.

I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Let the Jews, who claim to be the chosen race, prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home, including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving service. A Jewish friend has sent me a book called The Jewish Contribution to Civilization by Cecil Roth. It gives a record of what the Jews have done to enrich the world's literature, art, music, drama, science, medicine, agriculture, etc. Given the will, the Jew can refuse to be treated as the outcaste of the West, to be despised or patronized. He can command the attention and respect of the world by being man, the chosen creation of God, instead of being man, who is fast sinking to the brute and forsaken by God. They can add to their many contributions the surpassing contribution of non-violent action. (end quote) -- Harijan, Nov. 26, 1938 ---- 

 

 

 

Maariv, September 2, 1994

By: Ben Kaspit, the New York correspondent 

The Jewish Laundry of Drug Money

 

Rabbi Yosef Crozer fell because of his big mouth. "I launder money, a lot of money", he once told an acquaintance. "Every day I take $300,000 from 47 Street in Manhattan, bring it to the synagogue, give a receipt and then take a commission". The man who heard that story from Crozer was, how sad, an undercover Jewish agent of the U.S. agency for fighting drug use, DEA. A month later, in February 1990, Crozer was arrested by agents on his way from 47 Street to Brooklyn. They found on him prayer books, five passports, and also $280.000 dollars in cash in the trunk of his car. He traveled that route every day. He would arrive at the gold trading oflice on 47 Street in the afternoon, and leave shortly later, carrying suitcases and bags loaded with cash. From there he drove to the "Hessed Ve'Tzadaka" ["Mercy and Charity"] synagogue in Brooklyn, which was turned into an instrument for laundering millions of dollars, the revenue from drug sales in the New York area.

That was how Crozer made his living. Assuming that the commission for laundering money ranged in the area of 2-6%, Rabbi Crozer can be presumed not to have suffered from hunger. The investigators who questioned him faced a simple task, A respectable and pious Jew who never imagined that he will be interrogated, a son of a highly respected rabbi who headed a large yeshiva in city of New Square, Crozer broke down and cooperated. But then his lawyer, Stanley Lupkin, argued that his client, a pious Jew, had no idea that he was laundering drug money. Crozer, according to his lawyer, believed that he was laundering money for a Jewish diamond trader "who trades in cash and not for Gentile drug traders, and was using the situation to make some extra money just for his synagogue. It seems that this argument had some effect since Crozer was sentenced to one year and one day imprisonment. In exchange for a lenient sentence, he supplied his interrogators with valuable information which helped them to capture a person whom they had been seeking for a long time: Avraham Sharir, another pious Jew, the owner of a gold trading office on 47 Street, who was really one of the biggest sharks of laundering drug money in New York City. Sharir, an Israeli Jew aged about 45, to whom we will later return, subsequently confessed to having laundered $200 million for the Colombian drug cartel of Kali.

The drug trade is considered to be tbe most profitable branch of crime in the world. The profit margin ranges in the area of 200% for cocaine and 1, 200% for heroin. The amounts of money circulated in the branch are larger than the budgets of many small states. The temptation is great. The main problem of the Colombian drug barons who control a significant part of world drug trade is how to get rid of the money. It is a problem of the rich, but a nagging one. Two major Colombian drug cartels operate in the U.S.: the Kali cartel and the Medellin cartel. The killing of the head of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escovar, by Colombian authorities in December 1993, greatly weakened this cartel, which had controlled the drug trade in the New York area. The Kali people, in contrast, hold a monopoly over the Los Angeles and Miami area markets. At present, the Kali people distribute about 80% of the world's cocaine and a third of heroin. The Kali drug cartel makes $25 billion each year within the U.S. alone. The money must somehow be shipped out of the U.S. without arousing the attention of the American authorities. Besides, the cash must be given a seal of approval and, one way or another, become legitimized. Around this complex issue a mega-business has sprung up: laundering and smuggling drug money. American customs investigators have found millions of dollars in containers supposed to have contained dried peas, in double-sided gas tanks, in steel boxes attached to freight ships. In 1990 they found $14 million in cash in a shipment of cables, supposed to have been sent from a Long Island warehouse to Colombia. According to records found on the site, that was shipment no.234 (multiplied by 14 million, calculate it yourselves). The same year, at Kennedy Airport, in a warehouse, 26 large containers were found which were supposed to have contained bull sperm. The latter was not there, but there were $6.5 million. In May of this year American investigators raided a bowling ball plant in Long Island. They picked the balls, cut them in half and found within 210,000 dollars, in used $100 bills.

Despite their active imagination, the drug barons find it hard to keep up. $25 billion is a lot of money and it must fill a lot of space, since most of the money gained in drug deals conies in bills of $l0-20. And that is how the match was made between the drug cartels and the 47 Street in Manhattan, That street is the world center for trading diamonds, gold, jewels and precious stones. Hundreds of businesses are crowded in there, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, Shops, businesses, display halls. In the back rooms and on the top floors, far from public access, the action takes place. That is where the major traders sit, that is where the deals are made. Diamonds, gold and jewels pass from hand to hand, with a handshake. The frantic activity there offers an ideal cover for illegal transfers of money. "In fact, even legitimate business appears, on 47 Street, to be dark and mysterious", said a customs official. "Merchandise arrives constantly, boxes, suitcases and packages are constantly opened, everything arrives in armored cars, under heavy security and a shield of secrecy. Now, go find the black money".

"The match between the drug barons and 47 Street", an American customs investigator told "Maariv", " is ideal." The gold and diamonds industry circulates large amounts of cash. The diamond traders are accustomed to transporting large amounts of money in cash, from one state to another, efficiently and without leaving a trace. Large amounts of money pass from hand to hand on 47 Street, without arousing suspicion. A diamond trader might launder $5 million every day, without arousing special attention. It is difficult to monitor the deals, to locate the sources of the money and it is very difficult to infiltrate that closed field, which is based on personal acquaintance and trust. Added to it is the fact that in the course of the past five years, the diamond industry on 47 Street has been in a deep slump, which led many traders into bankruptcy. "A trader like that", said an investigator, "faces the choice of bankruptcy or making easy, quick and relatively safe money. Not everyone is strong enough to withstand the temptation".

All of that would not have been of interest to us if not for the massive Israeli or Jewish presence on 47 Street. "At least 50% of the diamond traders there are Israelis", so an Israeli diamond merchant who wishes to remain anonymous, told "Maariv.". 'Not a few Israelis also operate in the field of jewels, precious stones and gold. All of them came to New York to make fast money, conquer the market, get their big break. Not all of them succeeded, especially not recently". But Jewish presence on 47 Street is much greater than that. Experts in the field estimate that 75-80% of the active traders on the street are Jews. A large part of them are very talous Orthodox Jews, mainly Hassids. There is also a respectable representation of Jews from Iran and Syria, usually also very pious. One can get along fine in Hebrew on 47 Street. There are many more kosher restaurants in the area than in the entire Tel-Aviv. The place is also the biggest laundry for drug money in the U.S..

The expansion of the phenomenon of laundering drug money in the U.S. in general and on 47 Street in particular, led to the establishment of a special American task force, to combat the phenomenon. The unit is called Eldorado, after the mythical South American city of gold. It is staffed with 200 agents, officials of the U.S customs and internal revenue agencies. Eldorado, established in April 1990, investigates the money laundering in general. Fifty of its agents dedicate their time just to 47 Street. "It is work that demands tremendous manpower, said Robert Van Attan, an Eldorado officer, since the money has to be monitored along the length and breadth of the continent, sometimes also abroad". The target of the Eldorado agents is money, and money alone. They are not interested in drug imports, drug deals or drug dealers. "We want to put our hands on the money. To hit their pockets", say members of the unit.

The task is difficult. In America there is no law that prohibits possessing money. On the other hand, when a large amount of cash is found in the possession of a launderer, the agents confiscate the money. If the person can prove that the source of the money was legitimate, he gets it back. That does not happen. The launderers are experienced. When one of them is caught and several million dollars are found in his possession, he willingly hands over the money, but asks for a receipt. "The money is not mine, I want you to confirm that you took it," is the common request. Incidently, their lives depend on that receipt. It is not a simple matter to trail them. The eyes of a typical launderer are glued to his rear-view mirror. He makes sudden stops, moves from one lane to another, chooses long and twisted routes from one place to another. Eldorado has an answer. The investigators follow their targets with eight, ten, sometimes 12 vehicles. If necessary they use one or two helicopters. There is also sophisticated equipment, the wonders of American technology in the fields of tapping. surveillance and code-breaking. In the first two years of its operations, Eldorado captured 60 million dollars and arrested 120 launderers. Compared to the scope of overall laundering, that is peanuts. "That is not the point," say the Eldorado agents. "Obviously, it is impossible, with the existing legal restrictions, to put an end to the phenomenon. Our warfare is psychological". Incidently, Eldorado is not the only agency combatting money laundering. The DEA, the American Drug Enforcement Agency, and the FBI, also conduct lively activity in that field. Not always is that activity coordinated.

In recent months the Eldorado agents discovered a new center of operations. It is termed The Cocaine Triangle. Its sides are: Colombian drug barons, Israeli-Jewish money launderers. Jewish-Russian mafiosi. The Colombians funnel the money, the Israelis launder it, the Russian mafiosi (who have recently overrun New York in droves), provide the security and the muscle. A New York journalist recently told "Ma'ariv"; "The Israeli Jews are gaining notoriety in the money laundering market. You need only look at the list of arrests and the inditements of the past 3 years, in order to grasp the enormous scope of Israeli involvement in that field".

One reason for the growing power of the Jews in the laundering drug money business is the Law of Return with its easy possibility of escape to Israel. In May 1993, five members of Jewish international laundering which had worked with the Kali cartel were arrested. The ring was exposed following an FBI 'sting' operation, in the framework of which it established a dummy corporation called Prism, which served the gang for laundering money. In the course of less than one year $22.5 million were laundered through the company. The head of the ring was an Israeli named Zion Ya'akov Evenheim, known as 'Zero' Evenheim who had a dual Israeli and Colombian citizenship, stayed in Kali, from where he coordinated the activity and supervised the transfers of money. Most of the ring's members were arrested in May 1993. Evenheim was arrested by Interpol in Switzerland and extradited to the U.S.. He is cooperating with the FBI. Additional Israeli detainees; Raymond Shoshana, 38, Daniella Levi, 30, Binyamin Hazon, Meir Ochayon, 33, Alex Ajami, 34. Many other suspects, to whom we will later return, escaped to Israel, and there are difficulties in extradicting them to the U.S.

In the course of the investigation, FBI agents recorded hundreds of hours of conversations in Hebrew among the Israeli suspects. For the purpose of translating the material, they employed, among others, Neil Elefant, a Jewish resident of New Jersey who had lived in Israel for some time and who spoke fluent Hebrew. Elefant translated and translated, until one day in May 1992 he was amazed to discover among the speakers a friend, Jack Zbeida, an Jewish antique dealer from Brooklyn. Elefant was in a difficult dilemma. He approached his rabbi, Elazar Teitz, who told him that his religious duty is to warn Zbeida. Elefant then secretly met Zbeida and told him that he was targetted by the FBI. Alex Ajami, an Israeli Jew who was one the heads of the gang, was also present. Zbeida and Ajami hurried to the FBI offering to cooperate, turning in Elefant, who was arrested and charged with interfering with legal procedures. He argued that one of the reasons for his decision to warn Zbeida was the zealousness, almosst approaching anti-Semitism, which he found among the FBI agents trying to involve State of Israel in drug affairs. Judge Kevin Duffy sentenced Elefant to 18 months imprisonment. In the meantime the FBI was forced to hurriedly arrest all those involved in the affair. In spite of the hurry, many involved Israeli Jews fled to Israel. Some few of the tens Israeli and American Jews who fled on this occasion to Israel are: Raymond Shoshana, Adi Tal, David Va'anunu, his nephew Yishai Vanunu, Ya'akov Cohen. Most of them came out of the affair with a lot of money which they also took to Israel. The Americans know that the chances of any one of them being extradited to the U.S. are close to nil.

The story of Adi Tal is worthy of elaboration. He is an impressive youth, handsome, with a good record in the army, a son of a fine Israeli family, formerly a security guard at El-Al. All that did not hinder Tal from becoming involved in laundering drug money already in 1988. In March 1988 the American authorities arrested 11 members of the laundering ring, including Tal and his good friend, also an Israeli, Nir Goldstein. The investigators at the time said that Tal and his friends had operated cautiously, used aliases and codes and lived in constant fear. They would receive large amounts of money from Colombian couriers, divide the money into sums of less than 10,000 dollars (any amount over 10,000 dollars that is deposited in an American bank requires a report), deposit the sums in banks and convert them into travellers checks which they sent, by means of international couriers, to a dummy corporation in Panama. The most popular code which Tal's gang used was taken from diamond industry. When information was transmitted about the transfer of a diamond of 30.4 carats, it meant the sum of $30,400. Tal worked for the money launderer of the Kati cartel, Jose Satro. The Colombians constantly pressured him to increase the scope of the laundering. Tal was afraid. "He lived in constant fear, his bags were always packed and he was prepared to flee at any minute to Israel", one investigator said.

An important member of Tal's laundering ring was Rabbi Shalom Leviatan, a Lubavitch Hassid, head of the branch in Seattle. It is assumed that all the considerable political power of of these Hassids and of their rebbe (then alive), were exerted in favor of that laundering ring. "My intentions were good" Leviatan said after he was captured. "A person learns from experience", he added. According to him, he did not know that he was laundering drug money, and he was certain that he helps Iranian Jews trying to smuggle their money out of Iran. Leviatan got out cheaply and was sentenced to 30 days community service. Tal, who confessed to laundering $10 million, was sentenced to 52 months imprisonment. He served his sentence at Danbury jail in Connecticut, but did not learn his lesson. When he was released, he joined a gang which was captured in the FBI's 'sting' operation. This time he managed to flee to Israel where he apparently remains, to this day.

The gold and diamond industry has recently become the favorite of the drug barons, due to the numerous possibilities for laundering which it contains. One of the popular methods is laundering by means of trading in gold. This is how it works: the drug money is converted into gold, which is smuggled to Colombia, from where it is exported to Milano and used to make jewellry which then legitimately returns to 47 Street. "The funniest thing in this business", say the investigators, "is that the jewellry comes here under favored import conditions because the gold seemingly originates from Colombia, and that state has favored trade conditions with the U.S." There are also other methods. Drug money is deposited in the accounts of diamond merchants as though it were their profits and is later transferred to Colombia. Sophisticated diamond deals are made between various parties with the aim of 'releasing' large amounts of money on the side. Sums of less than $10,000 are deposited in various bank accounts, converted into travellers' checks and are then transported to their final destination. But in spite of the ingenuity, undoubtedly one of the most popular and successful ways to launder money is through Jewish religious institutions, such as yeshivas and synagogues. Since the majority of the 47 Street gold and diamond merchants are religious Jews the process is made easier. The Jewish religious institutions badly need funds. The Colombians drug traders can be generous. They transfer their drug money "us donations, which go to the Jewish religious institutions one way and come out by the other way back to the donors. On the way the synagogue or yeshiva obtain a respectable percentage for its pious uses. Everyone is happy: the drug barons who launder their money quickly and efficiently and the synagogue or yeshiva which makes easy money.

The lirst laundering operation in which a Jewish institute in New York was involved was exposed already in 1984. A ring which laundered about $23 million while making a profit of $2 million operated at the oldest yeshiva in the city, "Tifereth Yerushalayim", located in Manhattan. The laundering was performed for the Kali cartel. The contact man was David Va'anunu, mentioned in the context of the Prism affair, who worked with the cartel's major launderer, Jose Sairo. The yeshiva's representative was a very pious Hassid, Mendel Goldenberger who daily received cash from Va'anunu and deposited the money in the yeshiva's accounts. Goldenberger, who claimed not to have known the source of the money, was convicted of forging bank documents and given five years suspended imprisonment. Vanunu was convicted, sentenced to eight years imprisonment but released much earlier after he became an informer for the DEA. Later, as was stated, he ran into trouble again and fled the U.S.. Nine persons were convicted in that affair, including Rabbi Israel Eidelman, Vice President of the yeshiva, and some of its dignitaries. Tiferet Yerushalayim faced financial difficulties at that time. Its leaders attempted to maintain the number of students by paying them from the laundering drug profits.

That phenomenon, incidently, is very common among the New York Jews. Many Jewish congregations are dying out because their members are leaving the city or their former neighborhoods. Thus, they are losing their sources of income and facing large debts. In that situation the road is short for the synagogue or yeshiva to launder drug money as a pious duty, since it means easy money, and lots of it. "Laundering money is extremely beneficial to the yeshivas and other Jewish religious institutions", said a source close to the investigation. "They are in a difficult situation and therefore they turn a blind eye to the drug problem. They don't ask what is the source of the money as long as it keeps coming in". The attitude of the pious Jewish community, according to the same source, is "drugs are sold anyway. As long as it does not harm our own community and only does good for it, it doesn't matter if we benefit from drug trade". The role of the Israel is is, in many cases, to make the connection between the religious Jewish communities of New York and the Colombians.

The Colombians are more satisfied with this method of laundering than with any other because, for political reasons, it is a relatively secure way which could be assumed initially not to be forcibly investigated by the U.S. authorities. Only in July 1990 the situation began to change. The Federal authorities renewed an investigation of some Williamsburg's Hassids, owners of jewellry shops on 47 Street, who were suspected of laundering drug money. The investigation focussed on brothers Naftali, Miklosh and Yitzhak Shlesinger, and on Ya'akov Shlesinger (Naftali's son) and Milon Jakoby his nephew. The investigators found evidence of close connections between the Shlesingers and the Andonian brothers, members of a Colombian family accused of laundering almost one billion dollars. The Shlesingers were suspected of laundering money by means of a subsidiary called Bali, through checks drawn from the account of "Camp Yereim" [Camp of the Pious"] - a Hassidic summer camp in the Catskills. Camp Yereim denies any connection with those checks. On April 7 of this year, Rabbi Abraham Lau, a prominent Hassid from "Magen Abraham" synagogue in Los Angeles was convicted of conspiring to launder drug money. Lau is married to the niece of the Satmar Rebbe, Moshe Teitlebaum who wields enormous political influence in New York State. Unfortunately, Lau told an undercover FBI agent about a "sacred network" of Satmar Hassids in which other Orthodox Jews had also participated. The "sacred network", whose membership was strictly limited to pious Jews, operated in the 47 Street area in New York and was capable of laundering up to $5 million weekly, thanks to its widespread contacts with Jewish charitable institutions.

Unfortunately, law enforcement agents in New York do not believe that the "sacred network" and the many other Jewish laundering rings have any sanctity. In the past year the Federal activity concerning Israelis and Jews on 47 Street has greatly increased. The investigators now employ the services of many Hebrew translators since the rings, even if composed of native American Jews, employ only "the sacred language" (i.e. Hebrew] for their operations. Aharon Sharir is, undoubtedly, the major Israeli launderer. He was born in Iraq about 45 years ago, immigrated to Israel with his family at the age of one year, graduated from an Israeli high school, served with distinction in the army and became an expert in fixing delicate mechanical instruments used to mend gold jewellry. In 1979, Sharir came to New York on a tourist visa with $6,000 in his pocket. He went into the gold business, established a small plant for manufacturing gold jewellry and did well. Then, through another Israeli diamond trader, he discovered the laundering business. Sharir reached a laundering scope of about $160,000 per day, six days per week (laundering is not done on the Sabbath) but in 1985 his wings were clipped when he was accused of having swindled a New York bank to the tune of $3 million. He quickly returned the money and was sentenced to a fine and a suspended imprisonment sentence. In 1988 Sharir's laundering activities reached amazing heights. His gold shop on 47 Street became one of the greatest laundering centers in the entire U.S. "Three times a week", Sharir told the court at one of the many trials in which he is now testifying, "we received the cash. It used to arrive in canvas sacks, in carboard boxes or in suitcases. Sometimes there were a million dollars in one shipment". Ruy Lopez, representing the Colombian cartels would especially arrive from Miami equipped with a document sent from Colombia which contained detailed coded instructions about where to send the money. "Even with automatic money counting machines it was difficult to count the money"e;. Sharir testified. "It arrived in bills of 5, 10 and 20 dollars. The bills, most of which had been used to sniff cocaine, had a strong odor of coke. A real stink. My employees could not stand it. Every 2-3 hours they had to take a break, go out for some fresh air, so as not to get high".

Sharir's role was to see to it that the money would be transported out cf the U.S. and arrive in the bank accounts of the Colombian cartels in Panama and in Colombia. For that purpose he deposited money into his bank accounts, as though it was his profits from the shop, purchased assets for the use of the drug cartels, bought and sold gold at inflated prices from merchants who were part or the conspiracy, concealed money through various manipulations. Finally, all the money was turned into checks drawn on the accounts of Jewish religious institutions. Sharir received from the Colombians for his labors 6% of the turnover. Within a short period of time he moved with his family to a luxurious house in Woodmere, on Long Island. He purchased a luxury Jaguar car, showered his wife, Miryam, with expensive jewels, and donated lavishly to Jewish charities.

The troubles began in late 1988. In December his shop was raided by American customs and internal revenue agents, after they received notice from his banks concerning the volume of his deposits. They brought dogs to sniff out drugs, carried out a meticulous search of the offices and took away cars full of documents. Sharir did not lose his cool. While the agents were milling around his offices, he managed to conceal $600,000 which were in his bank account at the time, and transfer the money to a safe place. Simultaneously, Sharir fell out with his Colombian operators who claimed that he stole from them $26 million of drug money. Sharir, who denied the accusation, hired an Israeli professional investigator, Lihu Ichilov, to solve the mystery. Ichilov soon became Sharir's partner. He flew to Panama, established two dummy corporations there, opened bank accounts and improved the laundering routes.

Following the Federal agents' raid on his offices Sharir did not give up. Within two weeks he opened two other offices on 47 Street and resumed work. When asked by one of his lawyers how he had expected to escape the attention of the law, Sharir replied: "I changed my system and believed that now, with God's help, I would never be caught". Sharir's new system included Rabbi Yosef Crozer whom we discussed earlier. Crozer's big mouth brought Sharir down, and he was arrested in March 1990. Crozer also led to Sharir confessing to having laundered $200 million. His wife, Miryam, was arrested together with him. Sharir, under the pressure of the interrogation agreed to cooperate in exchange for his wife's release and for the cancellation of the charges against her. The prosecution agreed.

It was an extremely good deal as far as the prosecution was concerned. For three months Sharir fed the Federal investigators with most valuable information concerning the Jewish laundering industry. The information included names, methods of operation, codes, and bank accounts. Sharir led them to the exposure of what is termed the new "cocaine triangle". He led to the incrimination of more than 35 Jewish launderers, the capture of $10 million and the break up of numerous Jewish laundry rings. Among others, Sharir incriminated the biggest laundering shark in the history of the U.S., Stephan Scorkia. Sharir, who testified at his trial, directly led to his conviction. Scorkia was charged with laundering $300 million, and was sentenced to 660 years imprisonment.

Sharir is now enrolled in the U.S. witness protection program. He lives under an assumed identity, released on bail, travels under heavy security between New York, Rhode Island, Arizona and other states, testifies in criminal trials and goes on. His wife, Miryam divorced him shortly after the affair erupted. She refuses to comment on the matter and told Daily News; "I have no intention of talking. I divorced Aharon in order to distance myself from him and from his friends, and that is exactly what I am doing." Sharir was directly responsible for the flight of at least 35 Colombians from the U.S. back to Colombia. One of the escapees was Duvan Arbolda, one of the Kali cartel's major launderers. Arbolda was charged in a Manhattan court of laundering on a vast scale, following Sharir's testimony. When he completes testifying, Sharir himself will stand trial. The prosecution will agree to a very low sentence, but this does not improve his chances of survival. "At present, Aharon Sharir heads the Kali cartel's wanted list" said an American customs official. Charges have also been served against Lihu Ichilov, Sharir's partner. However, Ichilov fled to Israel on the eve of his trial, in January 1991. That was the period of the Gulf War and the judge, Richard Owen, who tried Ichilov in absentia, said: "Mr. Ichilov apparently prefers to face the horror of Scud missiles falling on Israel than the American justice system".


 

12 February, 2002

Orthodox Jews Mass Protest Against the State of Israel

Estimated 20,000 Orthodox Jews demonstrating on Tuesday February 12th, in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York City, organized by the Central Rabbinical Congress of USA and Canada, to voice their opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, their suppression of religion and brutal treatment of religious people.

       

 

 

The posters read as follows: [L-R]

"Israel" dos not represent world Jewry

Rabbinical leaders fought Zionism since its inception

Authentic Rabbis always opposed Zionism and the State of Israel

Zionism have no right to rule over any part of the holy land

No doubt! Herzl's dream was a catastrophe for Jews

Zionism stole the name of Jews

"Israel" dos not represent world Jewry

Jews mourn 53 years existence of "Israel"

True Jews will never recognize Israel

Torah Jewry is united against Zionism & the State of Israel

Zionist ideology opposes the Creator

Oh No! Zionism will never succeed

We are against "Israel" because we are Jews

Zionism and Judaism are extreme opposites

Background sign: Israeli government: stop oppressing religious Jewry in the State of Israel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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