LIKE EGYPT, THE USA IS A ‘WEAK REED THAT PIERCES THE HAND…” BEWARE & BE FREE
by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006
Many Jews in Israel assume that the American government will somehow rescue or help rescue them from the existential predicaments of the “land for [promises of] peace” deals. Since ‘the Rogers Plan’ that picked up the Israeli government’s own designation of the Jewish heartland as ‘bargaining chips’ “responsible” diplomacy in the Middle East has featured the odd desire of Israel’s elites for ‘recognition’ from inveterate foes and the “good offices” of America’s Executive Branch as the facilitator of the exchange.
In regard to this lopsided and suicidal process, Jews, and not only those in Israel should note at least two main points: 1) the various forms of the “peace process” are identical to the Arab demand that became explicit no later than during the Peel Commission hearings of 1936-7: NO Jewish state of any size is acceptable to them. To this day this continues to be their explicit and emphatic policy with Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah and others vying to lead the war of extermination against Israel and the Jews.
It is in this context that the soporific promises of “convergence” and the “support” of soon-to-be lame duck President George W. Bush need to be considered. Even in the announcement we hear that the world will not (or need not) “recognize” the newly shrunken boundaries that a Kadima-led government will impose upon Israel. This should alert everyone that the familiar problems will continue: there will be retreat, alienation of territory and birthright, and no official acknowledgement even of Israel’s existence. (Some would say that such a self-alienation can have no other result). It resembles the attitude of the British Foreign Office official who in 1948 stated that “Israel is not a nation; therefore it cannot be invaded.” *
Even as the affiliates of Islamic Jihad turn Israel into carnage, the official word from “the world community,” led by Britain and the EU will be that Israel is the aggressor. Israel’s “best friend,” good old Uncle Laban will call for “an end to the cycle of violence” while the Jews “converge” upon Tel Aviv, looking for boats.
Forewarned is forearmed, at least it is for people who want to live. And especially for Jews, there is no life without “being a free people in [their entire] land.” Partitioning it, contorting it into switchbacks, doglegs, pseudopodia, corridors and bottlenecks only makes it indefensible. Even if the “wall” were straight, it would be a deterrent mainly to the movements of the IDF attempting to respond to attacks. That is the deal, a raw and bitter one.
Second main point, 2) studying the history of what the British did to the Jews, in Mandatory “Palestine” and in Europe from 1920 onward, and what America did in complementary fashion beginning at least with the Evian conference in 1938 demonstrates conclusively that the two greatest western powers, the Anglo-American alliance committed to a vague and half-hearted “war on terror” (that its elites actually do much to support) are not the true friends but the betrayers and enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people generally.
One could write many books on this critical topic (one will be appearing this summer); but for now, consider just a few of the material in one of the most central of these texts, David S. Wyman’s “America and the Holocaust: the Abandonment of the Jews, 1941-45” (1984, W. W. Norton; 1998 revised with new and fascinating Afterword that illuminates how the major media distort or bury history in order to create official ‘facts.’ See also Laurel Leff, “Buried by the Times,” 1995, and the fine web site of the Wyman Institute).
Wyman’s text makes plain that the betrayals of the “land for peace” deals since 1968 are a continuation of a malicious, homicidal contempt for Jews fully visible during WW II and the shoah. Let’s consider the two periods, then and now, in relation for a bit…
By June of 1942, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who had escaped from Poland to Switzerland and German industrialists with dealings in Poland and the Alpine nation had conveyed to London that the German-led extermination of Europe’s Jews was progressing. On the morning of August 08, 1942, further confirmation of these reports came to American consulate in Geneva where Vice Consul Howard Elting personally received a briefing stating, in part, that already the Germans had transferred nearly four million Jews to Poland for extermination, “all Jews from Germany and German occupied areas in Europe” were to be murdered. Elting “considered the report fantastic” Wyman writes, “though it did mesh exactly with the recent [and widely publicized] deportations of Jews from Holland, France and elsewhere in western Europe.
On August 11, officials at the State Department in Washington “dismissed Riegner’s disclosures as war rumors” even though the head of the Polish Government in exile, General Sikorski already had received numerous such reports and publicly called on America and Britain to threaten and bomb the Germans in retaliation. London Foreign Office officials sat on the addtional information for a week. Reprisal bombing for the shoah never occurred.
Later, US Secretary of State, Sumner Welles called Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise (whose “shtadlanut” were considered by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver to be “weak-kneed and a disaster”) to downplay the news. Rabbi Wise, a major booster of FDR, was lulled by Welles’ insistence that the additional eyewitness stories, if true at all, probably only reflected “the Nazi government’s intention to use Jews for labor…” precisely the official German story.
That’s the “help” of the US state department even faced with abundant evidence. Not very different from today when first the PLO - Fatah and now Hamas have become the interlocutors with whom Israel is put in virtual moral equivalence and to whom (and also to al Qaida, this is hardly classified information) it is commanded to yield ancient Jewish land including all, or all but one, of Judaism’s holiest sites.
Yes, the peace process is not only a war on Israel and the Jews, but a religious war against Judaism.
Wyman’s and related texts provide more details filling this pattern. Consider here just a tiny bit more. Keep in mind Secy of State Welles’ brutally cavalier remarks in light of the fact that the Polish government-in-exile in London was receiving daily coded cablegrams from Bern (Switzerland) and frequent diplomatic couriers which brought information on German war and extermination plans from eastern Europe to New York and London from early 1942 onward.
One of the ‘more sensitive’ Roosevelt administraton officials proposed allowing a “temporary safe haven” in the Virgin Islands to “perhaps 2000 refugee Jews.” Roosevelt turned it down. So also with a request to funnel $12,000 / month through Portugal for food aid to the four million and more Jews in Poland. Dean Acheson killed this “relief” effort of about two cents / month / Jew.
It’s instructive in discerning the genuine agenda of America’s ruling elites to contrast the official attitudes and proposals today to amnesty and/or naturalize eleven - twenty million illegal immigrants (with countless more in future) many of whom make no secret of their hatred of or hostile designs toward America and its sovereignty. What kind of people do America’s ruling elites welcome, fund and apologize for and whom did and do they keep out? It is a curious contrast that sheds light on the contradictory and erratic way the war on terror is defined (or not defined) and pursued.
In that September 1942, a Swedish businessman who had recently traveled throughout Poland provided detailed information on the mass separation of families and gassing to death of thousands of Jews each day from the ghettos in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and Lvov. That same month, the State Department received photostats of semi-coded letters smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto which spoke of the activities of “Mr. Jagr” (”hunter,” — the Germans), and troubles of “uncle Achenu” (”our brothers” — the Jews) and the increasing work of “Uncle Gerush” (”deportation,” an uncle whose grandchildren recently are active in Israel). Secretary Welles declined to share the news with the press. Everything was done to downplay what actually was happening, to downplay the USA’s ability to do anything about it, and to overplay the negative consequences of actually helping. It is as today when the benefits of encouraging or assisting the Arabs to ‘make aliyah’ to an Islamic state are downplayed (as are the benefits of vigorous and pro-active military initiatives against terror (Ariel Sharon pledged this method in 2000), and the dangers of both grossly overstated.
The people in both cases must be lulled to sleep, anaestheticized, given a warm ‘toddy’ of ‘convergence’ and “process” while the Titanic sinks…
Let’s end this sad overview with a summary of the agenda of the Bermuda Conference that the W. Churchill and FDR Administrations finally were pressed into convening to quiet down the steadily building demand that something be done (for example, purchase from Roumania of the 70,000 Jews still alive in detention there. Romania had offered them for $50/head). The British were appalled that any rescue might be initiated:
“What if Hitler accepted a proposeal to release millions of unwanted person, we might find ourselves in a very difficult position… we should be made to look exceedingly unwise…” Mr. Peake then added, “many of the refugees are empty mouths [n.b. the Germans called them “useless eaters”; apparently the British were comfortable adopting the description] for which Hitler has no use. We would be relieving him of the obligation to care for these useless people…” (Wyman pp. 114-15).
This is part of what it means to be slaves and not free; this is part of what it means to cede decisions over Jewish land and sovereignty to the mighty powers of the West. To be defined by your benefactors as “useless people,” a perennial problem.
“Approaches to the Axis satellite countries” that, seeing the war tipping clearly toward the western allies already were signalling their willingness to release their Jewish populations, “were not discussed at all” by the Anglo-American teams at Bermuda. The British also demanded, successfully, that their policy of restricting (essentially banning) Jewish immigration into the Jewish National Home “would not be discussed at the conference.”
And what now of Jewish immigration into the heartland of Israel? The Bush administration forbade it in 2001. There was a direct line from the Pharaonic decree to Amona… Both are extensions of British Mandate policy.
In sum, the agenda of the Bermuda conference was that, 1) “no approach be made to Hitler for release of potential [Jewish] refugees; 2) to discuss the possiblility of obtaining neutral shipping [almost nothing was done here though the resources were large]; 3) a “request that the British review admitting Jews to Cyrenica [Libyan coast] would be considered” [it came to nothing]; 4) “discuss suggestions for removing [the 3500] Jewish refugees already in Spain; 5) a potential “joint Allied declaration on postwar repatriation of refugees” [i.e. anyhwere but the Jewish National Home].
I refer readers of Wyman’s 1998 edition (strongly preferred) to the last chapter there, “Responsibility” whose discussion of the treatment of the 1000 [!] Jewish refugees from Europe (many of them with American children, including in the American armed services) that FDR allowed into America, to Camp Oswego on Lake Ontario in December 1945 for further evidence of the place of Jews in the post war World envisioned by America’s foreign policy establishment.
Reports state the Mr. Olmert has received “permission” from London, Washington, and Brussels [the EU] for a ‘major attack’ on Islamic terrorists in Gaze by the end of Pesach. A major attack indeed is urgently needed. But if Israel’s government lets it be used as a rubber stamp, and Israel as a chit in great power games then the prognosis both for the state and the Jewish presence in it is grim. There is no freedom and little life without sovereignty…
It’s Pesach, the foundational festival of the Jewish nation, faith, practice, and journey to freedom in its Promised Land. Get a copy of Wyman’s text to study during Chol HaMoed or after the holiday and ponder the connection of freedom / sovereignty to life and of slavery to death. It’s a lesson, the lesson for our time: b’yamim haheim, bazman hazeh [“in those days, at this seasonâ€?].
Dr. Eugene E. Narrett
* Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (Harper, 1984)