THE ORIGINS OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY IN THE US

 AMERICA'S ROLE IN THE CREATION OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL 

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Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can’t help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.” ~ Fr. John Sheehan, S.J.

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By Alison Weir

Counterpunch

March 22, 2014
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The immediate precursor to today’s pro-Israel lobby began in 1939 [i] under the leadership of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, originally from Lithuania. He created the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which by 1943 had acquired a budget of half a million dollars at a time when a nickel bought a loaf of bread. [ii]

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In addition to this money, Zionists [adherents of “political Zionism,” a movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine] had become influential in creating a fundraising umbrella organization, the United Jewish Appeal, in 1939 [iii], giving them access to the organization’s gargantuan financial resources: $14 million in 1941, $150 million by 1948. This was four times more than Americans contributed to the Red Cross and was the equivalent of approximately $1.5 billion today. [iv]

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With its extraordinary funding, AZEC embarked on a campaign to target every sector of American society, ordering that local committees be set up in every Jewish community in the nation [for decades the larger majority of Jewish Americans had been either non-Zionist or actively anti-Zionist]. In the words of AZEC organizer Sy Kenen, it launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labour.” [v]
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AZEC instructed activists to “make direct contact with your local Congressman or Senator“ and to go after union members, wives and parents of servicemen, and Jewish war veterans. AZEC provided activists with form letters to use and schedules of anti-Zionist lecture tours to oppose and disrupt.
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A measure of its power came in 1945 when Silver disliked a British move that would be harmful to Zionists. AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements ~ the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches. [vi]
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Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition. [vii]
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Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the American Council for Judaism, which opposed Zionism in the 1940s and ‘50s, writes in his memoirs that there was a “ubiquitous propaganda campaign reaching just about every point of political leverage in the country.” [viii]
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The Zionist Organization of America bragged of the “immensity of our operations and their diversity” in its 48^th Annual Report, stating, “We reach into every department of American life…” [ix]
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Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding.

Among other things, would-be dissenters were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured. [x]

Berger writes that when he and a colleague opposed a Zionist resolution in Congress, Emanuel Celler, a New York Democrat who was to serve in Congress for almost 50 years, told them: “They ought to take you bastards out and shoot you.” [xi]
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ED Noor:  Congressman Emanuel Celler (NY),  who fought for unrestricted immigration for over 40 years (even against the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924) in the House of Representatives, introduced similar legislation resulting in the "Hart-Celler Immigration Bill," the precursor to the fatal bill of 1965. Cellar is reputed to threatened President Truman over Zionist policy. 
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When it was unclear that President Harry Truman would support Zionism, Cellar and a committee of Zionists told him that they had persuaded Dewey to support the Zionist policy and demanded that Truman also take this stand.

Cellar reportedly pounded on Truman‘s table and said that if Truman did not do so, “We’ll run you out of town. [xii]

Jacob Javits, another well-known senator, this time Republican, told a Zionist women’s group: “We’ll fight to death and make a Jewish State in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.” [xiii]
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Richard Stevens, author of American Zionism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1942-1947, reports that Zionists infiltrated the boards of several Jewish schools that they felt didn’t sufficiently promote the Zionist cause. When this didn’t work, Stevens writes, they would start their own pro-Zionist schools. [xiv]
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Stevens writes that in 1943-44 the ZOA distributed over a million leaflets and pamphlets to public libraries, chaplains, community centers, educators, ministers, writers and “others who might further the Zionist cause.” [xv]
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Alfred Lilienthal, who had worked in the State Department, served in the U.S. Army in the Middle East from 1943-45, and became a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, reports that Zionist monthly sales of books totalled between 3,000 and 4,000 throughout 1944-45.
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Richard Stevens reports that Zionists subsidized books by non-Jewish authors that supported the Zionist agenda. They would then promote these books jointly with commercial publishers. Several of them became best sellers. [xvi]
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ZIONISTS MANUFACTURE CHRISTIAN SUPPORT

AZEC founder Silver and other Zionists played a significant role in creating Christian support for Zionism.
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Secret Zionist funds, eventually reaching $150,000 in 1946, were used to revive an elitist Protestant group, the American Palestine Committee. This group had originally been founded in 1932 by Emanuel Neumann, a member of the Executive of the Zionist Organization. The objective was to organize a group of prominent (mainly non-Jewish) Americans in moral and political support of Zionism. Frankfurter was one of the main speakers at its launch. [xvii]
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Silver‘s headquarters issued a directive saying, “In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediately organized.” [xviii]
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Author Peter Grose reports that the Christian committee’s operations

“were hardly autonomous. Zionist headquarters thought nothing of placing newspaper advertisements on the clergymen’s behalf without bothering to consult them in advance, until one of the committee’s leaders meekly asked at least for prior notice before public statements were made in their name.” [xix]

AZEC formed another group among clergymen, the Christian Council on Palestine. An internal AZEC memo stated that the aim of both groups was to 

“crystallize the sympathy of Christian America for our cause.” [xx]

By the end of World War II the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee boasted a membership of 6,500 public figures, including senators, congressmen, cabinet members, governors, state officers, mayors, jurists, clergymen, educators, writers, publishers, and civic and industrial leaders.

Historian Richard Stevens explains that Christian support was largely gained by exploiting their wish to help people in need. Steven writes that Zionists would proclaim “the tragic plight of refugees fleeing from persecution and finding no home,” thus linking the refugee problem with Palestine as allegedly the only solution. [xxi]

Stevens writes that the reason for this strategy was clear:

“…while many Americans might not support the creation of a Jewish state, traditional American humanitarianism could be exploited in favour of the Zionist cause through the refugee problems.” [xxii]

Few if any of these Christian supporters had any idea that the creation of the Jewish state would entail a massive expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Jews, who made up the large majority of Palestine‘s population, creating a new and much longer lasting refugee problem.
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Nor did they learn that during and after Israel’s founding 1947-49 war, Zionist forces attacked a number of Christian sites. Donald Neff, former Time Magazine Jerusalem bureau chief and author of five books on Israel-Palestine, reports in detail on Zionist attacks on Christian sites in May 1948, the month of Israel’s birth.
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Neff tells us that a group of Christian leaders complained that month that Zionists had killed and wounded hundreds of people, including children, refugees and clergy, at Christian churches and humanitarian institutions. For example, the group charged that

“‘many children were killed or wounded’ by Jewish shells on the Convent of Orthodox Copts…; eight refugees were killed and about 120 wounded at the Orthodox Armenian Convent…; and that Father Pierre Somi, secretary to the Bishop, had been killed and two wounded at the Orthodox Syrian Church of St. Mark.”

“The group’s statement said Arab forces had abided by their promise to respect Christian institutions, but that the Jews had forcefully occupied Christian structures and been indiscriminate in shelling churches,” reports Neff. He quotes a Catholic priest: “‘Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.’ [The priest] added that Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, ‘but their deeds do not correspond to their words.’” [xxiii]

After Zionist soldiers invaded and looted a convent in Tiberias, the U.S. Consulate sent a bitter dispatch  back to the State Department complaining of “the Jewish attitude in Jerusalem towards Christian institutions.” [xxiv]
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An American Christian Biblical scholar concurred, reporting that a friend in Jerusalem had been told,

“When we get control you can take your dead Christ and go home.” [xxv]

ZIONIST COLONIZATION EFFORTS IN PALESTINE

In order to reach their goal of a Jewish state in Palestine, Zionists needed to clear the land of Muslim and Christian inhabitants and replace them with Jewish immigrants.

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ED Noor: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them. ~ Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

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This was a tall order, as Muslims and Christians accounted for more than 95 percent of the population of Palestine. [xxvi] Zionists planned to try first to buy up the land until the previous inhabitants had emigrated; failing this, they would use violence to force them out. This dual strategy was discussed in various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians. [xxvii]
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As this colonial project grew, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land.
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When the buyout effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British.

ED Noor: 

“The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. For Ever.” ~ Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine.

"Without preamble, I turned my shoulder to the camera, stared straight into Begin’s eyes, and asked: 

‘How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?’ ‘In the Middle East?’ he bellowed, in his thick, cartoon accent. ‘In all the world.’”

Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large. [xxviii]

By the eve of the creation of Israel, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent [xxix] and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6-7 percent. [xxx]
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This was in 1947, when the British at last announced that they would end their control of Palestine. Britain turned the territory’s fate over to the United Nations.
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Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country. [xxxi]
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Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine. [xxxii] [xxxiii] (While they rarely announced this publicly, their plan, stated in journal entries and letters, was to later take the rest of Palestine. [xxxiv])
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U.S. OFFICIALS OPPOSE CREATION OF ISRAEL

The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and U.S. interests.

For example, the director of the State Department‘s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs consistently recommended against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The director, named Loy Henderson, warned that the creation of such a state would go against locals’ wishes, imperil U.S. interests and violate democratic principles.

Henderson emphasized that the U.S.

would lose moral standing in the world

if it supported Zionism:

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“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequalled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the [second world] war.” [xxxv]

When Zionists pushed the partition plan in the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal, saying that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and was “not based on any principle.” He warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future…”
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Henderson elaborated further on how plans to partition Palestine would violate American and UN principles:

“[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race…” [xxxvi]

ED Noor: Bingo! Say these things today and you are roundly attacked from every quarter.
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Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and threatening his family. They pressured the State Department to transfer him elsewhere; one analyst describes this as “the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests” were moved on. [xxxvii]
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ED Noor: Loy Henderson serving in India after speaking out against the concept of Israel. They made sure he was posted far away so his warnings could be negated.
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In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then officially under India). [xxxviii]

(In recent years, at times virtually every State Department country desk has been directed by a Zionist.) [xxxix]

But Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the [State] Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.” [xl]

He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.

In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.” [xli]
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Ambassador Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on U.S. national interests.

“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended,” wrote Grady. “I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty…. [I]n the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.” [xlii]

Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had

“the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.” [xliii]

Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson‘s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another author, John Mulhall, records Acheson‘s warning of the danger for U.S. interests:

“…to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.” [xliv]

The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported in late 1947,

“A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East” to the point that “United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.” [xlv]

The Joint Chiefs issued at least sixteen papers on the Palestine issue following World War II. They were particularly concerned that the Zionist goal was to involve the U.S.
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One 1948 paper predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” [xlvi]
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The CIA stated that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.” [xlvii]
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The head of the State Department‘s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:

“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter ~ a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN‘s own charter.” [xlviii]

Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.
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An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

“…the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN.… In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.” [xlix]

And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw one last outcome of the “partition“ plan: that no Arab state would actually ever come to be in Palestine. [l]

 

This essay is excerpted from Alison Weir’s Against Our Better Judgment: How the US was Used to Create Israel.
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Alison Weir is the president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew.
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Citations for this excerpt, which also contain additional information, are available in the book. Discounted bulk orders can be obtained by writing orders@ifamericansknew.org
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NOTES:

[i] “American Zionist Movement (AZM),” Jewish Virtual Library, 2008,

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0002_0_00978.html.

[ii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

The executive secretary of AZEC was a man named Isaiah Kenen, who went on to found today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), rated as one of the most powerful lobbying organization in the U.S. Grant Smith, in his book Declassified Deceptions: the Secret History of Isaiah L. Kenen and the Rise of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2007) describes Kenen‘s activities in detail, particularly how he worked to elude U.S. legal requirements that he register as a foreign agent.

[iii] Elmer Berger, Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978), 9.

Originally there had been two organizations, the United Palestine Appeal (the main Zionist fund-raising effort in the U.S.) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was dominated by non-Zionists and which raised more money. Its purpose was to “provide assistance to Jews in the countries in which they lived, hoping to facilitate their eventual integration into those societies.” Berger reports, “Never at a loss for maneuver – or dissembling– however, the Zionist manager persuaded the ‘big givers’ that a ‘united campaign’ would be more efficient than the competing, double campaigns,” and they managed to push through the creation of the United Jewish Appeal.

[iv] Christison, Perceptions, 73; Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 134.

Wilson reports that Zionists, wishing to pressure the U.S. government to support partition and end its arms embargo, raised $35 million (the equivalent of $349 million today) in just two weeks for the United Jewish Appeal in just two weeks.

[v] Neff, Pillars, 23; Tivnan, The Lobby, 24.

[vi] Tivnan, The Lobby, 24

[vii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

[viii] Berger, Memoirs, 11.

In 1947 the American Council for Judaism submitted a 27-page memorandum to the UN opposing Zionism. ACJ President Lessing J. Rosenwald railed against what he termed Zionists’ “anti-Semitic racialist lie that Jews the world over were a separate, national body.”

Smith, Declassified Deceptions, 29.

[ix] Stevens, American Zionism, 101.

[x] Berger, Memoirs, 17.

[xi] Berger, Memoirs, 22.

[xii] Wright, Zionist Cover-up, 25.

Wright was General staff G-2 Middle East specialist, Washington, 1945-46; Bureau Near East-South Asian-African Affairs Department of State, since 1946, country specialist 1946-47, advisor U.N. affairs, 1947-50, advisor on intelligence 1950-55. He retired from the State Department in 1966.

[xiii] Lilienthal, What Price Israel, 63.

[xiv] Stevens, American Zionism, 24.

[xv] Stevens, American Zionism, 22.

[xvi] Stevens, American Zionism, 22-23.

[xvii] Neff, Pillars, 23.

Herbert Hoover, “Message to the American Palestine Committee, January 17, 1932,” The American Presidency Project,

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=23121.

Patai, ed. “American Palestine Committee,” Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.iahushua.com/Zion/zionhol10.html.

[xviii] Neff, Pillars, 23-24.

[xix] Grose, Mind of America, 173.

[xx] Neff, Pillars, 23-24.

[xxi] Stevens, American Zionism, 28.

[xxii] Stevens, American Zionism, 28.

Joseph M. Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2004).

Researchers may wish to explore an interesting though speculative discussion about what might have been an earlier effort by Zionists to influence Christians. Many years before AZEC targeted Christians, an annotated version of the bible known as the Scofield Reference Bible had been published, which pushed what was a previously somewhat fringe “dispensationalist“ theology calling for the Jewish “return” to Palestine.

Some analysts have raised questions about Cyrus Scofield and how and why the Oxford University Press published his book. Scofield, a Texas preacher who had been something of a shyster and criminal and had abandoned his first wife and children (when his wife then filed for divorce, the court ruled in her favor, noting that Scofield was “…not a fit person to have custody of the children”). (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 113) He mysteriously became a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. Biographer Joseph Canfield comments:

“The admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.” (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 220)

Canfield suggests that Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who was also a member of the Lotus Club, may have played a role in Scofield‘s project, writing that “Scofield‘s theology was most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermyer‘s pet projects ~ the Zionist Movement.” (Canfield, Incredible Scofield, 219)

Professor David Lutz, in “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” writes: “Untermyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

David Lutz, “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” in Neo-Conned! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq, ed. D. Liam O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe (Vienna, VA: Light in the Darkness Publications, 2005), 127-169.

According to the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy website, Untermyer “was a partner in the law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall, and was the first lawyer in America to earn a one million dollar fee on a single case.  He was also an astute investor, and became extremely wealthy.

He was instrumental in the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, was an influential Democrat and a close ally of Woodrow Wilson.

The bio continues: “Samuel Untermyer was one of the most prominent Jews of his day in America. He was a prominent Zionist, and was President of the Keren Hayesod.  In addition, he was the national leader of an unsuccessful movement in the early 1930’s for a worldwide boycott of Germany, and called for the destruction of Hitler‘s regime.”

“Samuel Untermyer,” Untermyer Gardens Conservancy, accessed January 1, 2014,

http://www.untermyergardens.org/samuel-untermyer.html.

Irish journalist Maidhc Ó Cathail suggests that “absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine ‘this peer among scalawags’ ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible.” ~ Maidhc O Cathail, “Zionism‘s Un-Christian Bible,” Middle East Online, November 25, 1999,

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=35914.

[xxiii] Donald Neff, “Christians Discriminated Against By Israel,” in Fifty Years of Israel (Michigan: American Educational Trust, 1998).

[xxiv] Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (Brattleboro: Amana, 1988), 20.

[xxv] Millar Burrows, Palestine Is Our Business (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 116.

[xxvi]    See citation 7.

[xxvii]   Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

Masalha Nur, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, 4th Ed. (Washington, DC: Inst. for Palestine Studies, 2001).

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2004).

Mazin Qumsiyeh, “Palestinian Refugees Right to Return and Repatriation” in Sharing the Land of Canaan (London: Pluto, 2004). Online at

http://ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-qumsiyeh.html.

[xxviii] Russell Warren Howe, “Fighting the ‘soldiers of Occupation’ From WWII to the Intifada,” in Seeing the Light: Personal Encounters with the Middle East and Islam, Ed. Richard H. Curtiss and Janet McMahon (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1997), 38-39.

Warren and his film crew were filming an interview with Begin in 1974. “The red light had come on, under the lens. Without preamble, I turned my shoulder to the camera, stared straight into Begin’s eyes, and asked: 

‘How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?’ ‘In the Middle East?’ he bellowed, in his thick, cartoon accent. ‘In all the world.’”

[xxix]    McCarthy, Population of Palestine, 35.

[xxx]    British Mandatory Commission, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991), 243-267.

This gives Jewish ownership in 1945 as approximately six percent.

A UN map showing percentages of each district can be seen at http://domino.un.org/maps/m0094.jpg.

Israeli author Baruch Kimmerling gives the landownership in 1947 as seven percent.

Robert J. Brym, review of Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, by Baruch Kimmerling, The Canadian Journal of Sociology 11, no. 1 (1986), 80.

It is interesting to note that the Arab position was largely based on democratic principles. At a British conference on Palestine in 1946, Arabs presented a proposal “calling for the termination of the Mandate and the independence of Palestine as a unitary state, with a provisional governing council composed of seven Arabs and three Jews.” (Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 97)

[xxxi]    “Charter of the United Nations: Chapter I, Purposes and Principles.” UN News Center, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

[xxxii]   “United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181,” The Avalon Project, accessed January 1, 2014, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/res181.htm.

“UN Partition Plan,” BBC News, November 29, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1681322.stm.

For a US equivalent, see:

“UN Partition Applied To US,” Palestine Remembered, September 10, 2001,

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Maps/Story581.html.

[xxxiii] Neff, Pillars, 41.

[xxxiv]   Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Boston: South End, 1983), 161.

“In internal discussion in 1938 [David Ben-Gurion] stated that ‘after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine.’”

[xxxv]   Neff, Pillars, 30-31.

[xxxvi]   Neff, Pillars, 46-47.

[xxxvii] Berger, Memoirs, 21.

Berger writes that in a personal conversation with him, Henderson had said:

“I hope you and your associates will persevere. And my reason for wishing this is perhaps less related to what I consider American interests in the Middle East than what I fear I see on the domestic scene. The United States is a great power. Somehow it will surmount even its most foolish policy errors in the Middle East. But in the process there is a great danger of creating divisiveness and anti-Semitism among our own people. And if this danger materializes to a serious extent, we have seen in Germany and in Europe that the ability of a nation to survive the consequences is in serious question.”

[xxxviii]             Richard D. McKinzie, “Oral History Interview with Edwin M. Wright,” Truman Library, Wooster, OH, July 26, 1974,

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/wright.htm.

“Mr. Henderson was, therefore, told, ‘You’ve got to leave the State Department or the Zionists are going to keep after us.’ The State Department suggested he be sent as an ambassador to Turkey. The Zionists had a clearance process going and they said, ‘No, that’s too near the Middle East, we want to get him completely away from the Middle East.’ The result was that they sent him as ambassador to India to get him out of the area completely.”

[xxxix]   Revealed during conversation with State Department associate.

[xl] Neff, Pillars, 46; Wilson, Decision, 117; Wright, Zionist Cover-up, 21.

[xli]     Green, Taking Sides, 20.

[xlii]    Henry Grady, “Chapter 9,” Adventures in Diplomacy (unpublished manuscript), (Washington D.C.: Truman Library, n.d.), 170. Online at

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/documents/index.php?documentdate=0000-00-00&documentid=4-7&studycollectionid=ROI&pagenumber=1.

Henry Francis Grady and John T. McNay, The Memoirs of Ambassador Henry F. Grady: from the Great War to the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 2009). Online at

http://books.google.com/books?id=7BKTLX0mppoC&hl=en.

[xliii]    Grady, Adventures, 166.

Benzion Netanyahu, a Zionist who travelled to the US from Palestine to propagandize Americans and father of future Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, tried – unsuccessfully – to use the Cold War as a rationale for the U.S. to support Israel. Netanyahu believed that “arguments appealing to American fears of Soviet expansion” would be the best way to win over U.S. officials. He used this argument in 1947 in meetings with Loy Henderson and General Dwight Eisenhower, but found no takers, (though Eisenhower arranged for him to meet with someone else). (Medoff, Militant Zionism, 146)

[xliv]    Mulhall, America, 130.

Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: a Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 215.

[xlv]     Mark Perry, “Petraeus wasn’t the first,” Foreign Policy, April 2, 2010,

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/01/petraeus_wasnt_the_first.

[xlvi]    Perry, “Petraeus wasn’t the first.”

The paper speculated that the eventual goal was sovereignty over “Eretz Israel,” which included Transjordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria.

[xlvii]   Green, Taking Sides, 20.

[xlviii]   Neff, Pillars, 42-43.

[xlix]    Neff, Pillars, 65. Citation: “Draft Memorandum by the Director of the Office of United Nations Affairs (Rusk) to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett),” Secret, Washington May 4, 1948, FRUS 1948, pp. 894-95.

[l]       Wilson, Decision on Palestine, 131.