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A bit of a stretch; only the coincidence of time and place. They say everyone has the synagogue they attend and the one they don’t. This could have been the one that Jesus didn’t attend. Ah well, don’t want to kill it for the tourists, I mean pilgrims.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/15/09 at 4:51 pm

Yo Benny,

Here is some history for you:

THE DECLARATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
May 14, 1948

On May 14, 1948, on the day in which the British Mandate over a Palestine expired, the Jewish People’s Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved the following proclamation, declaring the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was recognized that night by the United States and three days later by the USSR.

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma’pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE “ROCK OF ISRAEL”, WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).

David Ben-Gurion

Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner
Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi   Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
  David Zvi Pinkas
Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

THE SECULAR ZIONIST AGENDA FOR A JEWISH STATE
Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
August 2007
© Copyright. 2007. Chaim Simons
INTRODUCTION
In an article in the English edition of “Mishpacha” in January 2005 appeared the following:
“The Left is still loyal to the State of Israel in varying levels of faithfulness, but it hates Eretz Yisrael. The difference between these two is clear: Eretz Yisrael is a reminder of the Left’s Jewish past, which it wishes to forget. … The Left’s disconnection from the Jewish nation has reached the point where they are prepared for settlers to be killed during the evacuation effort [Gaza area and North Shomron]. Spokesmen of the Left have already announced that this will not be a war of brother against brother since ‘the settlers are not our brothers’.” (1)
Unfortunately this is not a new phenomenon. It has always been an integral part of the secular Zionist agenda. They wanted a Jewish State (according to some of them, even if it were to be in Uganda or Argentina) but it had to be administered according to their programme and perception for the “New Jew.”
***********************************************
NOTE
Although much of the material appearing in this paper can be found in other books or articles, the material is often brought down as secondary or even tertiary sources. In addition, the primary sources are on a number of occasions incorrectly quoted and there are even cases where the quotations given do not occur in the sources given. Therefore the only quotations of statements made by secular Zionists brought in this paper are those which the author of this paper has a photocopy from in the original in his possession. Due to limitations in the disc space, facsimiles of these documents cannot appear in this online copy. In many cases the original documents are no longer extant or could not be located, despite extensive searching. In such cases the information alleged to be contained in them has been completely omitted from this paper.
In the English quotes, Palestine usually appears when referring to Eretz Yisrael and it has of course be left as it appears in the original.
The following words appearing in the Hebrew quotes have not been translated:
Aliyah – Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael
Hachshara – Training given to people in preparation for Aliyah
Shlichim - Jewish emissaries sent abroad to Jewish communities
Yishuv - Jewish community of Eretz Yisrael
*************************************************
SELECTIVITY – THE SECULAR ZIONIST WAY
Eretz Yisrael was Divinely given to the Jewish people (2) and every Jew has an equal right to live there. However as we shall see, the secular Zionists thought otherwise.
At the eighteenth Zionist Congress held in Prague in August 1933, Ben-Gurion said:

“Eretz Yisrael today needs not ordinary immigrants, but pioneers. The difference between them is simple – an immigrant comes to take from the land, whereas a pioneer comes to give to the land. Therefore we demand priority for Aliyah to pioneers.”(3)
The question here is how would Ben-Gurion define an “ordinary immigrant” and how a “pioneer”? From his speech, it is obvious that a person working the land on a kibbutz is a pioneer. However, it would almost certainly appear that an old person coming to spend his last years in the Holy Land or even a Yeshiva student would be classed as a mere “ordinary immigrant”!(4)
A few months later in mid-October 1933 a meeting took place between, amongst others, the High Commissioner for Palestine, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok (Sharett). The Minutes of the meeting were written up by Shertok.
During the course of this meeting Ben-Gurion spoke about the three million Jews then living in Poland and stated that

“Palestine offered no solution for all Polish Jews. Immigration into Palestine was necessarily limited; therefore it had to and could be a selected immigration. Zionism was not a philanthropic enterprise, they really wanted here the best type of Jew to develop the Jewish National Home, but they had to be given sufficient scope to bring over people of whom the country was in need.”(5)
The question which remains is who would decide who was “the best type of Jew”? As will soon be seen, such a Jew was someone who was a secular Zionist!
It was a few years later at the 20th Zionist Congress held in Zurich in August 1937, that Weizmann spelled out more specifically what was meant by “selective Aliyah.”

“I told the members of the Royal [Peel] Commission that six million Jews want to go on Aliyah. One of the members asked me ‘Do you think you could bring all of them to Eretz Yisrael?’ On this I answered … that two million young people… we want to save. The old people will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They have already become like dust, economic and moral dust in this cruel world.”(6)
A similar rejection of elderly Jews to go on Aliyah was made by Henry Montor, the Executive Vice-Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees towards the beginning of 1940. A ship full of refugees not certified by the Zionist organisations, were on the high seas. Many of the passengers were elderly. The captain of the ship required money to bring them to Eretz Yisrael. Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz of Maryland took the matter in hand and tried to get the necessary money from Montor to pay the captain. In his long rambling letter of reply, Montor wrote about the Jewish Agency’s policy of “selectivity” – “the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes either in agriculture or industry.” With regard to the elderly Jews on board this ship, Montor wrote:
“There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism, whether they be in the ranks of the British Government or the Arabs, or even in the ranks of the Jewish people, if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would insure a continuity of immigration.”(7)
Maybe it would have been appropriate for him to have renamed his organisation “United Jewish Appeal for Selected Refugees”! At least the donors would then have had a better idea of what they were giving money for.
The secular Zionists were not even ashamed to put out a memorandum in which they quite openly had a section “Who to save”. This memorandum (of April/May 1943) was headed that its distribution was “intended for Zionist functionaries only” and it included instructions “not to pass it on to non-Zionist groups who participate in the Working Committee.”(8) Although it came out under the name of A. [Apolinary] Hartglas, it has been suggested that in fact it was Yitzchak Gruenbaum who actually wrote it. (9) Under this section, he wrote
“…. to my sorrow we have to say that if we are able to save only ten thousand people and we need to save fifty thousand [those chosen] should be of use in building up the land and the revival of the nation.… First and foremost one must rescue children since they are the best material for the Yishuv. One must rescue the pioneering youth, especially those who have had training and are idealistically qualified for Zionist work. One should rescue the Zionist functionaries since they deserve something from the Zionist movement for their work…. Pure philanthropic rescue, for example, saving the Jews of Germany, if carried out in an indiscriminate manner, could from a Zionist prospective only cause harm.”(10)
As can be seen, just as with both Weizmann and Montor, Hartglas was not interested in old people coming to Eretz Yisrael. Even amongst the younger generation, he was only interested in those who would work the land - Yeshivah students were of no use to him.
Further exclusions to Aliyah by the secular Zionists were people who were not members of the Zionist camp. Some Jews who succeeded in arriving in Eretz Yisrael in the second half of 1944 gave evidence on this question. Pinchas Gross who had been one of the public workers of Agudat Yisrael in Rumania stated:
“The first principle of the Zionist Aliyah Committee in Bucharest was not to allow members of Agudat Yisrael to go on Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. This was despite the agreement which had been made before the war between Agudat Yisrael and the Jewish Agency on the Aliyah quotas for members of Agudat Yisrael… Shlichim from the [Aliyah] Committee in Bucharest arrived in Transylvania with large sums of money in order to transfer hundreds of pioneers to Bucharest for the purpose of Aliyah. We also asked for our members the possibility of Aliyah but we were rudely rejected.”(11)
One might think that this money was “Zionist money” and therefore it was proper to reject such a request. However, this was shown not to be the case just a few weeks later when Weissberg who was a member of the Aliyah Committee in Bucharest, gave evidence before the Rescue Committee in Jerusalem. During this evidence he stated:
“It is true that the Agudah was not granted equal rights with regards to receiving money for assistance in Rumania. We did not know that the money which arrived from Eretz Yisrael was money from the Rescue Committee in which all the Yishuv participated. We thought that the money was Jewish Agency money.… I must inform you that help was not given to the pioneers and youth of Agudat Yisrael. We did not know that Agudah is a partner in matters of rescue and in particular in matters of Aliyah. Also regarding the Aliyah of the pioneers of Agudah, we did not know that they were entitled to go on Aliyah, until we arrived in Eretz Yisrael.”(12)
We can thus see that the secular Zionists did nothing to even inform the Agudah what they were entitled to, let alone implement such an entitlement.
There were also others who had been misled in believing that the money was “Zionist money”. For example, the Vishnitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Eliezer Hager, testified that when he asked why the ultra-Orthodox were not receiving any money, received the answer, “This money is Zionist and it is set aside solely for Zionists.”(13)
Pinchas Gross further stated:
“The ultra-Orthodox youth were not at all considered for this [financial] assistance either in their home town or for the possibility of Aliyah. We applied… for assistance for our youth who before the war did a period of Hachshara and were no less fit for Aliyah than other pioneers – but we did not even receive an answer. The excuse was that the money was Zionist money and was solely for them.”(14)
This attitude of the secular Zionists in their use of public money for their kith and kin and of their “priorities” did not pass without comment, even from non-Orthodox sources.
Dr. Judah Leon Magnes in addressing a meeting of the Rescue Committee in July 1944 was very critical of those who wanted:
“first of all to save the Zionists, and afterwards, if possible – also the others, but above all the Zionists. I spoke to somebody…. The man said… we will save our men…. I said to him … the others are also Jews. He said: It is so, they are Jews, but this is a universal argument, a perpetual argument and we will not give in on this.”(15)
Magnes’ comments on the necessity for non-selectivity when doing rescue work are illustrated by the work performed during the Second World War by Recha Sternbuch, who succeeded in rescuing thousands of Jews from the Nazis. Recha was associated with the strictly Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party. However, unlike the secular Zionists, she rescued Jews (and even some non-Jews) regardless of their level of religious observance or Zionist party affiliation.(16)
ZIONISM – AND ONLY THEN JEWISH LIVES
A few months after the beginning of the Second World War the Zionists received entry visas to Eretz Yisrael for 2,900 German Jews. It was necessary to have a meeting with the British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, in connection with these visas and in November 1939, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok met to discuss this question. Ben-Gurion strongly opposed such a meeting with MacDonald and he told Shertok that
“our political future is more important than saving 2,900 Jews.” Shertok, who completely disagreed with Ben-Gurion, commented in his diary, “he [Ben-Gurion] was prepared to forgo them [the 2,900 Jews].”(17)
Even in July 1944, which was towards the end of this war, when the Holocaust was still in full progress and its implementation was already well known, Ben-Gurion still had the same attitude. A meeting of the Executive of the Jewish Agency was held in Jerusalem at the beginning of July 1944. On its agenda was the subject of the rescue of Jews.
Rabbi Baruch Yehoshua Yerachmiel Rabinowicz, the Munkaczer Rebbe in Hungary, was involved in this rescue effort and the question of a meeting with him was mentioned at this Jewish Agency meeting. In answer Ben-Gurion stated that he did not oppose such a meeting, “We must do everything in this matter [of rescue] including things which seem fantastic.” Had Ben-Gurion said no more, it would have been praiseworthy, but he then continued, “But there is one condition: the work will not cause damage to Zionism.”(18)
In a letter to the Israeli daily newspaper “Ha’aretz” in 1983, the historian Professor Yigal Eilam confirmed that this was the attitude of the Zionist leaders during the period of the Holocaust. He wrote:

“The policy of the Zionists during the long period of the Holocaust gave priority to the building up of the land and the establishment of a State, over the saving of Jews…. One already needs to tell these things in a open and direct manner. The Zionists did very little in the saving of Jews, not because they were unable to do more, but because they were concentrating on the Zionist enterprise.”(19)
In a similar vein, in an article by the historian Dina Porat which appeared in “Ha’aretz” in 1991, she wrote
“From the moment that the State became the primary objective, the life of a Jew became secondary in accordance with the principal ‘the State of Israel is above everything’”.(20)
The shortsightedness of the secular Zionist leaders in this matter was written about in 1984 by Rabbi Morris Sherer, the President of Agudat Yisrael, in his comments on the report by Professor Seymour Maxwell Finger entitled “American Jewry during the Holocaust.” Rabbi Sherer commented:
“Alas, they [the secular Zionist leaders] did not perceive how utterly ridiculous and heartless it was for Jewish leaders to concentrate on a postwar homeland, when the people for whom they were seeking this home were being slaughtered like sheep!” (21)
Unlike Ben-Gurion who put Zionism first, and Jewish lives just in second place, the Rabbis of the period immediately put “Pikuach Nefesh” (the saving of lives) first. Sabbath observance is one of the fundamentals of Jewish observance, with the most stringent of punishments for their non-observance, yet despite this, Pikuach Nefesh overrides the Sabbath.(22) In order to save lives during the Holocaust, two leading British Rabbis, Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld and Rabbi Isadore Grunfeld, who were occupied in forging passports to save Jews, continued their work on the Sabbath.(23) Rabbis Boruch Kaplan and Rabbi Alexander Linchner rode around Brooklyn in New York in a car on the Sabbath from house to house collecting money to save Jews.(24) (These actions are normally forbidden on the Sabbath.)
IF NOT ALIYAH, LET THEM PERISH
In 1933, Hitler rose to power and during the subsequent years, more and more draconian measures, such as the Nuremberg laws were enacted against the Jews. In 1938 Hitler marched into Austria to the cheers of the non-Jewish population. The situation for the Jews under Hitler’s domination became unbearable and places of refuge became a grave necessity. It was thus at this period that President Franklin Roosevelt convened a conference of thirty-two nations at the French resort town of Evian to try and find places of refuge for Jews wanting to flee from Hitler. One would naturally have thought that the Zionist leaders of the time would make the most of this opportunity and devote all their time and energy to ensure that successful results would emerge from this Conference. But sadly this was not to be. Already in mid-June 1938, before the opening of the Conference, Dr. Georg Landauer wrote to Dr. Stephen Wise, who was head of the Zionist Organization of America. In it he wrote:
“I am writing this letter to you at the request of Dr. Weizmann, as we are very much concerned in case the issue is presented at the [Evian] Conference in a manner which may harm the work for Palestine. Even if the Conference will not place countries other than Palestine in the front for Jewish immigration, there will certainly be public appeals which will tend to overshadow the importance of Palestine…. We feel all the more concern as it may bind Jewish organisations to collect large sums of money for assisting Jewish refugees, and these collections are likely to interfere with our own campaigns.”(25)
Two weeks later the Jewish Agency Executive met in Jerusalem and opposition to the planned Evian Conference was openly stated.
Yitzchak Gruenbaum said:
“The Evian Conference can be expected to cause us grave damage - Eretz Yisrael could be eliminated as a country for Jewish immigration … [we are] very apprehensive that in this Conference, it could be relegated to the end of the line. We have to prevent this damage… There is the danger that whilst searching for a destination country, some new territory will be found to which Jewish immigration will be directed. We must defend our principle that Jewish settlement can only succeed in Eretz Yisrael and that no other settlement can come into the calculation.”(26)
Menachem Ussishkin then addressed the meeting in a similar vein. The Evian Conference very much worried him and he supported the words of Gruenbaum.
“Mr. Gruenbaum is right when he says that there is the danger that Eretz Yisrael will be removed from the agenda even by the Jews and one should see this as a tremendous blow to us.”(27)
Of course the ideal solution was for Jews to go to Eretz Yisrael. However in view of the then political situation, immigration there was not a feasible proposition. Surely the only question then should have been how to save and help as many Jews as possible. It was this fact that should have been the only concern of the speakers at that Jewish Agency Executive meeting – but it wasn’t!
A few weeks later, Weizmann wrote to Stephen Wise. Towards the beginning of his letter he wrote: “I made arrangements, before leaving for my holiday, to put in a few days at Evian.”(28) If one thinks for a moment about this sentence, one can see that it is horrific. Surely, if there was even the slightest opportunity of saving even one Jew, Weizmann who was the President of the Zionist Organization should have immediately cancelled his personal holiday arrangements and spent all his time at Evian trying to lobby the various delegates to accept Jews in their countries. But what do we see? – he will just before going on holiday “put in a few days at Evian.”
In fact he was later persuaded by his friends not to even “put in a few days” there, to which advice he followed.(29) The reason was stated by Dr. Arthur Ruppin at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 21 August. Ruppin stated “we then decided that it would not be to our prestige for Dr. Weizmann to appear in Evian” (30) – the reason being that he would only have been allowed to speak in a sub-committee! Jewish lives were at stake and to worry about prestige!!
One can immediately contrast this attitude with that of the Jewish religious leaders of the time. Rabbi Aharon Kotler had come under some criticism for meeting in the course of his rescue work with Stephen Wise, a leader of the Reform movement. He shrugged such reprobation saying, “I would prostrate myself before the Pope if I knew it would help to save even the fingernail of one Jewish child.”(31)
Unfortunately nothing concrete came out of the Evian Conference. The situation of the Jews in Germany got even worse and on 9 November 1938 there was the infamous Kristallnacht.
A few days later, Weizmann heard that there was a scheme to resettle German Jews in a country other than Eretz Yisrael. This he did not like and he immediately sent off a telegram to stop any financial backing for such a scheme. This telegram was sent to Samuel Vandenbergh in Wassemar:
“Understand you are embarking large financial effort for settlement German Jews. Beg of you to be careful not disperse and dissipate energies which can nowhere be applied with greater effectiveness both immediately and lasting than in Palestine.”(32)
Since at that period emigration to Eretz Yisrael was unfortunately not a practical proposition, Weizmann is effectively saying that rather than immigrate to another country, the Jews must remain in Nazi Germany. We can see that also Ben-Gurion thought on these same lines as the other secular Zionist leaders. It was at this period that Ben-Gurion addressed the Mapai Central Committee. He realised the seriousness of the situation and said
“On these awesome days at the start of the threatened destruction of European Jewry…. If I would know that it would be possible to save all the German [Jewish] children by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, I would choose the second option – since before us is not just these children but the history of the Jewish people.”(33)
At this period, the Germans had already established concentration camps and were sending Jews to them. In order to pre-empt this, it was necessary to find the means of arranging their emigration from Germany. Ben-Gurion, however, felt this could cause a diversion of resources and endanger Zionism. A few days after his above quoted speech to the Mapai Central Committee, he addressed the Executive of the Jewish Agency:

“Zionism now stands in danger.… If the Jews will have to choose on the one hand the refugee question,[namely] saving Jews from concentration camps and on the other hand assisting a national museum in Eretz Yisrael, mercy would decide the matter and all the energy of the [Jewish] people would be diverted to saving Jews in the various countries. Zionism would be struck off the agenda, not only in world opinion in England and America, but also in Jewish public opinion. The existence of Zionism would be at risk if we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Eretz Yisrael problem.”(34)
NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE CENT
The mass extermination of the Jews of Europe was already well known by the end of 1942. Saving Jews could and should have been top priority. But in order to save large numbers of people from extermination costs money – whether normal expenses or money for bribery. Needless to say, the money has to come from somewhere. All the time money was donated by world Jewry to funds such as the Keren Hayesod, the JNF, and so on. It is true that this money had been specifically donated for Eretz Yisrael, but here was a case of Pikuach Nefesh and it would have been quite legitimate, indeed mandatory, to have utilised this money for the saving of Jewish lives. The Jews then living in Eretz Yisrael were even saying so. However Yitzchak Gruenbaum, who was head of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency thought otherwise. In a speech to the Zionist Smaller Actions Committee in January 1943 he expressed his views:
“Meanwhile a mood has begun to sweep over Eretz Yisrael which I think is very dangerous to Zionism…. How is it possible that such a thing can occur in Eretz Yisrael, that in a meeting they will call out to me, ‘If you don’t have any money [for rescuing European Jewry] take the money of the Keren Hayesod, take the money from the bank – there, there is money, in the Keren Hayedod there is money.’ … These days in Eretz Yisrael it is being said, ‘don’t put Eretz Yisrael at the top of your priorities at this difficult time, at the period of a Holocaust and destruction of European Jewry,’ …. I don’t accept such a thing. And when they asked me to give money of the Keren Hayesod to save Diaspora Jewry, I said no and I again said no…. I am not going to defend myself, in the same way that I will not justify or defend myself if they accuse me of murdering my mother …. But I think it is necessary to say here: Zionism is above everything.”(35)
The only consolation from reading Gruenbaum’s speech, is that the Jews living in Eretz Yisrael were demanding the diverting of Keren Hayesod money to rescue efforts, even though this meant that less money would arrive in Eretz Yisrael and could accordingly affect their living standards. In contrast Gruenbaum commented “Zionism is above everything” even though this meant not rescuing European Jewry from the Holocaust.
In his book “Perfidy”, Ben Hecht quoted how Gruenbaum said “No” to the giving of money for rescue activities.(36) In a critical “Analysis” of this book by the American Section of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, they write that this quoted sentence by Ben Hecht “has been most viciously torn out of context. The writer of this Analysis then tries to prove, quoting other parts of Gruenbaum’s speech that he wanted to do everything to save European Jewry. (37) However he conveniently omitted one crucial part of the speech: “Zionism is above everything” – namely we will certainly do everything to save European Jewry provided that it is not at the expense of Zionism!
One might add that in 1961, Gruenbaum gave an interview to the paper “Etgar” from the comfort of his house in Gan Shmuel, in which he repeated these statements he made during the war, without even hinting he had been wrong.
“Interviewer: Was there then no money in the kitty of the Jewish Agency, the JNF, the Keren Hayesod?

Gruenbaum: Yes. Even then the argument went: Isn’t there any money? Take it from the JNF. I said: No! They did not want to forgive me for this and until this day, there are murmurings about this. The money was needed for Zionism.

Interviewer: What is the meaning of “for Zionism” when the saving of lives is at stake? Does Zionism want Jews alive or dead?

Gruenbaum: The saving of life does not override Zion. For Jews, the State is essential. Therefore, in accordance with my manner I said the truth – that is No!”(38)
Gruenbaum went on to say that he then went to South Africa to raise money for rescue purposes. However we all know that the raising of money, especially when one has to travel to another continent takes time and every day taken meant more Jews were being sent to the gas chambers. Surely the correct thing was to immediately take money from these Zionist kitties and if at a later date one succeeded in raising money, one could return it to the Zionist funds.
Even before the war, when Jews were already being persecuted in Germany and Austria, it was widely accepted that money to save Jewish lives came before money for Zionism. In was in late October 1938 that the treasurer of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) said
“The upbuilding of Palestine was all very well, but Jews in Europe were starving and persecuted – and they, JDC felt, had first claim on whatever funds were available.”(39)
ALSO THE BRITISH SECULAR ZIONISTS
Placing Zionism above the saving the lives of Jews was also a phenomenon of the British secular Zionists. Towards the end of 1942, when the Nazi extermination plans became known, British Jewry decided to make representations to the British Government. At a meeting of the British section of the Jewish Agency held in December 1942, the “Nazi Extermination Policy” was on the agenda. Here is an extract from the official minutes of this meeting when discussing this item:
“Dr. Brodetsky … made it quite clear that if Palestine was not properly mentioned then he would not be a member of the Delegation to Mr. Eden….
Lord Melchett said it would be disastrous for any body of Jews to go to Mr. Eden and not put Palestine in the forefront of their plans. Such a body would not represent the views of the Jews either here or elsewhere…..
Mr. Marks said he fully agreed, and if this condition was not satisfied, then he would not be a member of the delegation. Unless Palestine was properly dealt with, they should criticise the delegation up and down the country and cause a revolution inside the Board of Deputies…. The dignity of the Jewish people was at stake and it was only in Palestine that the Jews could get their dignity back.”(40)
As we well see, the above British secular Zionists would only attend a meeting with British Government officials to save Jews from the “Nazi Extermination Policy” if Eretz Yisrael was to be given a prominent place at these meetings. Furthermore it was Jewish lives which were “at stake” and it was no time to worry about “dignity” being “at stake”.
It was at the same period that the British secular Zionists sabotaged negotiations that Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld was making with the British Government for the rescue of the endangered Jews in Nazi Europe. Such rescue of Jews was not a new thing with Rabbi Schonfeld. Just before the Second World War, he had organised Kindertransports and brought over to England from Germany and Austria thousands of children.(41) To accommodate some of them he even utilized his own house with him sleeping in the attic.(42)
Towards the end of 1942, Rabbi Schonfeld organised steps to rescue Jews from Nazi Europe. To this end he worked exceptionally hard to organise wide support for a Motion to be tabled in the British Parliament for the British Government to be prepared to find temporary refuge in its territories or territories under its control for those endangered by the Nazis. Within two weeks he amassed a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties for this Motion. (43)
One would have thought that the British secular Zionists would have welcomed and co-operated in such an initiative. Sadly this was not the case. In a letter to the “Jewish Chronicle” at that period, Rabbi Schonfeld wrote

“This effort was met by a persistent attempt on the part of Professor Brodetsky [President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews] and some of his colleagues to sabotage the entire move. Without even full knowledge of the details, he and his collaborators asked Members of the House [of Parliament] to desist from supporting the new effort.”(44)
Rabbi Schonfeld further elaborated on this in a letter to “The Times” of London at the time of the Eichmann trial in 1961.
“Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: ‘Why not Palestine?’ The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives….When the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.Ps [Members of Parliament] and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine …. and thereafter the motion was dead.”(45)
Rabbi Schonfeld’s initiative came up at a meeting of the British Executive of the Jewish Agency in January 1943. At this meeting, Berl Locker said that he and two of his colleagues
“had asked him [Rabbi Schonfeld] to postpone the meeting in the House of Commons and not to continue working off his own bat. They had also pointed out that the resolution which he had proposed did not mention Palestine…. Mr. Locker wondered whether it would be a good thing for him or Dr. Brodetsky to write a letter to the Chief Rabbi, who might be able to do something to stop this mischief.”(46)
What was this “mischief” of Rabbi Dr. Schonfeld’s that these British secular Zionists wanted “stopped”? This “mischief” was his trying to save the lives of Jews who were in Nazi Europe!!
EPILOGUE
In an interview given by someone who worked with the late Klausenberger Rebbe for half a century, he said in answer to a question on the Holocaust,

“When the Sabra and Shatila affair rocked the nation, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv, demanding a commission of inquiry into the government’s lack of response to the massacre of Palestinians by Phalangist militants in Lebanon, the Rebbe couldn’t restrain himself. During a Shiur he delivered in Bnei Brak, he asked pointedly why there was no call for a commission of inquiry into the lack of response of the Zionist leaders in Eretz Yisrael during the murder of millions of Jews in the Nazi-occupied lands. They had ignored the matter completely.”(47)
REFERENCES
1) Rabbi Moshe Grylak, “How do they “know” it all?” Mishpacha (English edition), (Monsey, NY: Tikshoret VeChinuch Dati-Yehudi), 12 January 2005, pp.6-7.
2) e.g. Genesis chap.12 verse 7.
3) Stenographisches Protokoll XVIII Zionistenkongresses, [Official Minutes of the 18th Zionist Congress], (London: Zentralbureau der Zionistischen Organisation), p.219.
4) David Kranzler, Thy Brother’s Blood, (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1987), pp.61-62, 241, 244.
5) Minutes of Interview with His Excellency the High Commissioner, 17 October 1933, pp.4-5 (Labour Archives – Lavon Institute IV-104-49-2-64. There is also a copy in Ben-Gurion Archives). At a later date Ben-Gurion wrote up these minutes (in Hebrew) in his memoirs without any suggestion that they were not what he had said at this meeting, (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, vol.1, (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971), p.672).
6) Official Minutes of the 20th Zionist Congress, (Jerusalem: Executive of the Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency), pp.32-33.
7) Montor to Rabinowitz, 1 February 1940, pp.2, 4, (Jabotinsky Archives, HT-10/16).
8) A. Hartglas, Comments concerning assistance and rescue, (April/May 1943 – possibly 24 April 1943), p.1, (CZA S26/1306 [previous no. S26/1232]).
9) Aryeh Morgenstern, “Vaad hahatzalah hameuchad .…,” Yalkut Moreshet, (Tel Aviv: Moreshet), vol.13, June 1971, p.95 fn.67.
10) Hartglas, op. cit., p.3.
11) Evidence of Pinchas Gross, a public worker of Agudat Yisrael of Rumania, given in Tel Aviv on 27 July 1944, p.2, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no. S26/1079]).
12) Minutes, Presidium of the Rescue Committee, Jerusalem, 25 August 1944, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no. S26/1079]).
13) Evidence of Vishnitzer Rebbe taken in Tel Aviv in April 1944, p.1, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no, S26/1079]).
14) Pinchas Gross, op. cit.
15) Minutes, Rescue Committee, Jerusalem, 14 July 1944, p.7, (CZA S26/1327 [previous no. S26/1238aleph]).
16) Kranzler, op. cit., pp194-95.
17) Moshe Shertok Handwritten diary, 13 November 1939, p.66, (CZA S25/198/3. [Shertok also made a handwritten copy of his own diary CZA A245/14]
18) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive. Jerusalem, 2 July 1944. p.8, (CZA).
19) Yigal Eilam, Letters to the Editor, Haaretz, (Tel Aviv), 15 April 1983, p.24.
20) Dina Porat, “Manipulatzit Haadmorim,” Haaretz, (Tel Aviv), 12 April 1991, p.3b.
21) Seymour Maxwell Finger, American Jewry during the Holocaust, (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, second printing May 1984), Comment by Rabbi Morris Sherer, p.16.
22) Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, chap.328, para.2.
23) S. Fordsham, Inbox, Mishpacha (English edition), op. cit., 9 May 2007, p.10
24) Kranzler, op. cit., p.6.
25) Landauer to Wise, 13 June 1938, p.1, (CZA S53/1552aleph).
26) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 26 June 1938, p.6, (CZA)
27) Ibid., p.7.
28) Weizmann to Wise. 14 July 1938, p.1, (CZA Z4/17198).
29) Ibid., p.2.
30) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 21 August 1938, p.7. (CZA).
31) Kranzler, op. cit., p.146.
32) Telegram, Weizmann to Vandenburgh, 16 November 1938, (CZA Z4/17335).
33) Minutes, Mapai Central Committee, 7 December 1938, p.41, (Labour Party Archives – Bet Berl 2-23-1938-21 bet).
34) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 11 December 1938, p.4, (CZA)
35) Minutes, Zionist Smaller Actions Committee, 18 January 1943, pp.12-13, (CZA).
36) Ben Hecht, Perfidy, (New York: Julian Messner, 1962), p.50.
37) The American Section of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. Ben Hecht’s ‘Perfidy’ - An analysis of his rewriting of history, (New York: [s.n.], 1962), p.9.
38) “Mi asham b’hafkara,” conversation with Yitzchak Gruenbaum, Etgar, (Tel Aviv: Mercaz Hapeula Hashemit), no.8, 29 June 1961, p.5.
39) Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), p.255.
40) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, London, 21 December 1942, pp.2-3. (CZA Z4/302/26).
41) e.g. David Kranzler. Holocaust Hero, (New Jersey: Ktav, 2004).
42) Ibid., pp.38-39.
43) Solomon Schonfeld, Letters to the Editor, The Times, (London), 6 June 1961, p.13.
44) Solomon Schonfeld, Letters to the Editor, The Jewish Chronicle, (London), 29 January 1943, p.5.
45) Schonfeld, The Times, op. cit.
46) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, London, 21 January 1943, (CZA Z4/302/26).

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/16/09 at 8:47 am

Yo Gober,
here is some history for you:

Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land
The Jews were never a people without a homeland. Having been robbed of their land, Jews never ceased to give expression to their anguish at their deprivation and to pray for and demand its return. Throughout the nearly two millennia of dispersion, Palestine remained the focus of the national culture. Every single day in all those seventy generations, devout Jews gave voice to their attachment to Zion.

The consciousness of the Jew that Palestine was his country was not a theoretical exercise or an article of theology or a sophisticated political outlook. It was in a sense all of these—and it was a pervasive and inextricable element in the very warp and woof of his daily life. Jewish prayers, Jewish literature, are saturated with the love and the longing for and the sense of belonging to Palestine. Except for religion and the love between the sexes, there is no theme so pervasive in the literature of any other nation, no theme has yielded so much thought and feeling and expression, as the relationship of the Jew to Palestine in Jewish literature and philosophy. And in his home on family occasions, in his daily customs on weekdays and Shabbat, when he said grace over meals, when he got married, when he built his house, when he said words of comfort to mourners, the context was always his exile, his hope and belief in the return to Zion, and the reconstruction of his homeland. So intense was this sense of affinity that, if in the vicissitudes of exile he could not envisage that restoration during his, lifetime, it was a matter of faith that with the coming of the Messiah and the Resurrection he would be brought back to the land after his death.

Over the centuries, through the pressures of Persecution—of social and economic discrimination, of periodic death and destruction—the area of exile widened. Hounded and oppressed, the Jews moved from country to country. They carried Eretz Israel with them wherever they went. Jewish festivals remained tuned to the circumstances and conditions of the Jewish homeland. Whether they remained in warm Italy or Spain, whether they found homes in cold Eastern Europe, whether they found their way to North America or came to live in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed, the Jews celebrated the Palestinian spring and its autumn and winter. They prayed for dew in May and for rain in October. On Passover they ceremonially celebrated the liberation from Egyptian bondage, the original national establishment in the Promised Land-and they conjured up the vision of a new liberation.

Never in the periods of greatest persecution did the Jews as a people renounce that faith. Never in the periods of greatest peril to their very existence physically, and the seeming impossibility of their ever regaining the land of Israel, did they seek a substitute for the homeland. Time after time throughout the centuries, there arose bold spirits who believed, or claimed, they had a plan, or a divine vision, for the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine. Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews’ hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.

There were Jews who fell by the wayside. Given a choice under torture, or during periods of civic equality and material prosperity, they forsook their religion or turned their backs on their historic country. But the people, the land—as it was called for all those centuries: simply Ha’aretz, the Land—remained the one and only homeland, unchanging and irreplaceable. If ever a right has been maintained by unrelenting insistence on the claim, it was the Jewish right to Palestine.

Widely unknown, its significance certainly long ungrasped, is the no less awesome fact that throughout the eighteen centuries between the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and the beginnings of the Third, in our time, the tenacity of Jewish attachment to the land of Israel found continuous expression in the country itself. It was long believed—and still is—even in some presumably knowledgeable quarters, that throughout those centuries there were no Jews in Palestine. The popular conception has been that all the Jews who survived the Destruction of 70 C.E. went into exile and that their descendants began coming back only 1,800 years later. This is not a fact.1 One of the most astonishing elements in the history of the Jewish people—and of Palestine—is the continuity, in the face of the circumstances, of Jewish life in the country.

It is a continuity that waxed and waned, that moved in kaleidoscopic shifts, in response to the pressures of the foreign imperial rulers who in bewildering succession imposed themselves on the country. It is a pattern of stubborn refusal, in the face of oppression, banishment, and slaughter, to let go of an often tenuous hold in the country, a determined digging in sustained by a faith in the ultimate full restoration, of which every Jew living in the homeland saw himself as caretaker and precursor.

This people that was “not here”—the Jewish community in Palestine, its history continuous and purposeful—in fact played a unique role in Jewish history. Too often lacking detail and depth, the story of the Jewish presence in Palestine, threaded together from a colourful variety of sources and references, pagan and Christian, Jewish and Moslem, spread over the whole period between the second and the nineteenth centuries, is a fascinating and compelling counterpoint to the, dominating theme of the longing-in-exile.

Only when they had crushed the revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba in 135 C.E.—over sixty years after the destruction of the Second Temple—did the Romans make a determined effort to stamp out Jewish identity in the Jewish homeland. They initiated the long process of laying the country waste. It was then that Jerusalem, “plowed over” at the order of Hadrian, was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and the country, denied of the name Judea, was renamed Syria Palestina. In the revolt itself—the fiercest and longest revolt faced by the Roman Empire—580,000 Jewish soldiers perished in battle, and an untold number of civilians died of starvation and pestilence; 985 villages were destroyed.2

Yet even after this further disaster, Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was then that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land.

The Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century; henceforth its policy in Palestine was governed by a new purpose: to prevent the birth of any glimmer of renewed hope of Jewish independence. It was after all, basic to Christian theology that loss of national independence was an act of God designed to punish the Jewish people for their rejection of Christ. The work of the Almighty had to be helped along. Some emperors were more lenient than others, but the minimal criteria of oppression and restriction were nearly always maintained.

Nevertheless, even the meagre surviving sources Name forty-three Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley.

The Jews’ thoughts at every opportunity turned to the hope of national restoration. In the year 351, they launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution When, in 438, the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews’ praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call “to the great and mighty people of the Jews” which began: “Know that the end of the exile of our people has come”!3

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for three years governed the city.4 But the Persians made their peace with the Emperor Heraclius. Christian rule was re-established, and those Jews who survived the consequent slaughter were once more banished from the city. A new chapter of vengeful Byzantine persecution was enacted, but as it happened, it was short-lived. A new force was on the march. In 632, the Moslem Arab invaders came and conquered. By the year 640, Palestine had become a part of the emerging Moslem empire.

The 450-year Moslem rule in Palestine was first under the Omayyads (predominantly Arab), who governed tolerantly from Damascus; then under the Abbasid dynasty (predominantly Turkish), in growing anarchy, from Baghdad; and finally, in alternating tolerance and persecution, under the Fatimids from Cairo. The Moslem Arabs took from the Jews the lands to which they had clung for twenty generations after the fall of the Jewish state. The Crusaders, who came after them and ruled Palestine or parts of it for the better part of two centuries, massacred the Jews in the cities. Yet, under the Moslems openly, under the Crusaders more circumspectly, the Jewish community of Palestine, in circumstances it is impossible to understand or to analyse, held on by the skin of its teeth, somehow survived, and worked, and fought. Along with the Arabs and the Turks, the Jews were among the most vigorous defenders of Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered the Jews in a synagogue and burned them. The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month (June-July 1099). At this time, a full thousand years after the fall of the Jewish state, there were Jewish communities all over the country. Fifty of them are known to us; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.

During more than six centuries of Moslem and Crusader rule, periods of tolerance or preoccupied indifference flickered fitfully between periods of concentrated persecution. Jews, driven from the villages, fled to the towns. Surviving massacre in the inland towns, they made their way to the coast. When the coastal towns were destroyed, they succeeded somehow in returning inland. Throughout those centuries, war was almost continuous, whether between Cross and Crescent or among the Moslems themselves. The Jewish community, now heavily reduced, maintained itself in stiff-necked endurance.

Moslem and Christian records report that they pursued a variety of occupations. The Arab geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed—known as Mukadassi—writing in the tenth century, describes the Jews as the assayers of coins, the dyers, the tanners, and the bankers in the community. In his time, a period of Fatimid tolerance, many Jewish officials were serving the regime. While they were not allowed to hold land in the Crusader period, the Jews controlled much of the commerce of the coastal towns during times of quiescence. Most of them were artisans: glassblowers in Sidon, furriers and dyers in Jerusalem.

In the midst of all their vicissitudes and in the face of all change, Hebrew scholarship and literary creation went on flourishing. It was in this period that the Hebrew grammarians at Tiberias evolved their Hebrew vowel-pointing system, giving form to the modem study of the language; and a large volume of piyutim and midrashim had their origin in Palestine in those days.

After the Crusaders, there came a period of wild disturbance as first the Kharezmians—an Asian tribe appearing fleetingly on the stage of history—and then the Mongol hordes, invaded Palestine. They sowed new ruin and destruction throughout the country. Its cities were laid waste, its lands were burned, its trees were uprooted, the younger part of its population was destroyed.

Yet the dust of the Mongol hordes, defeated by the Mamluks, had hardly settled when the Jerusalem community, which had been all but exterminated, was re-established. This was the work of the famous, scholar Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides, the “RaMbaN’). From the day in 1267 when RaMbaN settled in the city, there was a coherent Jewish community in the Old City of Jerusalem until it was driven out, temporarily as it proved, by the British-led Arab Legion from Transjordan nearly seven hundred years later.

For two and a half centuries (1260-1516), Palestine was part of the Empire of the Mamluks, Moslems of Turkish-Tartar origin who ruled first from Turkey, then from Egypt. War and uprisings, bloodshed and destruction, flowed in almost incessant waves across their domain. Though Palestine was not always involved in the strife, it was frequently enough implicated to hasten the process of physical destruction. Jews (and Christians) suffered persecution and humiliation. Yet toward the end of the rule of the Mamluks, at the close of the fifteenth century, Christian and Jewish visitors and pilgrims noted the presence of substantial Jewish communities. Even the meagre records that survived report nearly thirty Jewish urban and rural communities at, the opening of the sixteenth century.

By now nearly fifteen hundred years had passed since the destruction of the Jewish state. Jewish life in Palestine had survived Byzantine ruthlessness, had endured the discriminations, persecutions, and massacres of the variegated Moslem sects-Arab Omayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids, the Turkish Seljuks, and the Mamluks. Jewish life had by some historic sleight of hand outlived the Crusaders, its mortal enemy. It had survived Mongol barbarism.

More than an expression of self-preservation, Jewish life had a purpose and a mission. It was the trustee and the advance guard of restoration. At the close of the fifteenth century, the pilgrim Arnold Van Harff reported that he had found many Jews in Jerusalem and that they spoke Hebrew. They told another traveller, Felix Fabri, that they hoped soon to resettle the Holy Land.5

During the same period, Martin Kahatnik (who did not like Jews), visiting Jerusalem during his pilgrimage, exclaimed:
 

The heathens oppress them at their pleasure. They know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews, for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.6
At the height of their splendour, in the first generations after their conquest of Palestine in 1516, the Ottoman Turks were tolerant and showed a friendly face to the Jews. During the sixteenth century, there developed a new effervescence in the life of the Jews in the country. Thirty communities, urban and rural, are recorded at the opening of the Ottoman era. They include Haifa, Sh’chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north. Their centre was Safed; its community grew quickly. It became the largest in Palestine and assumed the recognised spiritual leadership of the whole Jewish world. The luster of the cultural “golden age” that now, developed shone over the whole country and has inspired Jewish spiritual life to the present day. It was there and then that a phenomenal group of mystic philosophers evolved the mysteries of the Cabala. It was at that time and in the inspiration of the place that Joseph Caro compiled the Shulhan Aruch, the formidable codification of Jewish observance, which largely guides orthodox custom to this day. Poets and writers flourished. Safed achieved a fusion of scholarship and piety with trade, commerce, and agriculture. In the town, the Jews developed a number of branches of trade, especially in grain, spices, and cloth. They specialised once again in the dyeing trade. Lying halfway between Damascus and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast, Safed gained special importance in the commercial relations in the area. The 8,000 or 10,000 Jews in Safed in 1555 grew to 20,000 or 30,000 by the end of the century.7
In the neighbouring Galilean countryside, a number of Jewish villages—from Turkish sources we know of ten of them—continued to occupy themselves with the production of wheat and barley and cotton, vegetables and olives, vines and fruit, pulse and sesame.8

The recurrent references in the sketchy records that have survived suggest that in some of those Galilean villages—such as Kfar Alma, Ein Zeitim., Biria, Pekiin, Kfar Hanania, Kfar Kana, Kfar Yassif—the Jews, against all logic and in defiance of the pressures and exactions and confiscations of generation after generation of foreign conquerors, had succeeded in clinging to the land for fifteen centuries.9 Now for several decades of benevolent Ottoman rule, the Jewish communities flourished in village and town.

The history of the second half of the sixteenth century illustrates the dynamism of the Palestinian Jews their prosperity, their progressiveness, and their subjugation. In 1577, a Hebrew printing press was established in Safed. The first press in Palestine, it was also the first in Asia. In 1576, and again in 1577, the Sultan Murad III, the first anti-Jewish Ottoman ruler, ordered the deportation of 1,000 wealthy Jews from Safed, though they had not broken any laws or transgressed in any way. They were needed by Murad to strengthen the economy of another of the Sultan’s provinces—Cyprus. It is not known whether they were in fact deported or reprieved.10

The honeymoon period between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews lasted only as long as the empire flourished. With the beginning and development of its long decline in the seventeenth century, oppression and anarchy made growing inroads into the country, and Jewish life began to follow a confused pattern of persecutions, prohibitions, and ephemeral prosperity. Prosperity grew rarer, persecutions and oppressions became the norm. The Ottomans, to whom Palestine was merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the Jews’ fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently made to pay a heavy price for living there. They were taxed beyond measure and were subjected to a system of arbitrary fines. Early in the seventeenth century, two Christian travellers, Johann van Egmont and John Hayman, could say of the Jews in Safed: “Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.” The Turks so oppressed them, they wrote, that “they pay for the very air they breathe.“11

Again and again during the three centuries of Turkish Decline, the Jews so lived and bore themselves that even hostile Christian travellers were moved to express their astonishment at their pertinacity—despite suffering, humiliation, and violence-in clinging to, their homeland

The Jews of Jerusalem, wrote the Jesuit Father Michael Naud in 1674, were agreed about one thing: “paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here.—They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere… The love of the Jews for the Holy Land, which they lost through their betrayal [of Christ], is unbelievable. Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though the yoke is heavy.“12

And not in Jerusalem alone. Even as anarchy spread over the land, marauding raids by Bedouins from the desert increased, and the roads became further infested with bandits, and while the Sultan’s men, when they appeared at all, came only to collect both the heavy taxes directed against all and the special taxes exacted from the Jews, Jewish communities still held on all over the country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, travellers reported them in Hebron (where, in addition to the regular exactions, threats of deportation, arrests, violence, and bloodshed, the Jews suffered the gruesome tribulations of a blood libel in 1775); Gaza, Ramleh, Sh’chem, Safed (where the community had lost its pre-eminence and its prosperity); Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish; And Jews continued to live and till the soil in Galilean villages.

But as the country itself declined and the bare essentials of life became inaccessible, the Jewish community also contracted. By the end of the eighteenth century, historians’ estimates put their number at between 10,000 and 15,000. Their national role, however, was never blurred. When the Jews in Palestine had no economic basis, the Jews abroad regarded it as their minimum national duty to insure their physical maintenance, and a steady stream of emissaries brought back funds from the Diaspora. In the long run, this had a degrading effect on those Jews who came to depend on these contributions for all their needs. But the significance of the motive and spirit of the aid is not lessened: the Jews in Palestine were regarded as the guardians of the Jewish heritage. Nor can one ignore the endurance and pertinacity of the recipients, in the face of oppression and humiliation and the threat of physical violence, in their role of “guardians of the walls.”

However determined the Jews in Palestine might have been, however deep their attachment to the land, and however strong their sense of mission in living in it, the historic circumstances should surely have ground them out of physical existence long before the onset of modem times.

Merely to recall the succession of conquerors who passed through the country and who oppressed or slaughtered Jews, deliberately or only incidentally to their struggle for power or survival, raises the question of how any Jews survived at all, let alone in coherent communities. Pagan Romans, Byzantine Christians, the various Moslem imperial dynasties (especially during the Seljuk Turkish interlude, before the Crusaders), the Crusaders themselves, the Kharezmians and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks-all these passed over the body of the Jewish community. How then did a Jewish community survive at all? How did it survive as an arm of the Jewish people, consciously vigilant for the day of national restoration?

The answer to these questions reflects another aspect of the phenomenal affinity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. In spite of bans and prohibitions, in spite of the most improbable and unpromising circumstances, there was never a period throughout centuries of exile without Jewish immigration to Palestine. Aliyah (“going up”) was a deliberate expression and demonstration of the national affinity to the land. A constant inflow gave life and often vigour to the Palestinian community. By present-day standards, the numbers were not great. By the standards of those ages, and in the circumstances of the times, the significance and weight of that stream of aliyah—almost always an individual undertaking—matches the achievements of the modem Zionist movement.

Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organisation were new: The living movement to the land had never ceased.

The surviving records are meagre. There was much movement during the days of the Moslem conquest. Tenth century appeals for aliyah by the Karaite leaders In Jerusalem have survived. There were periods when immigration was forbidden absolutely; no Jew could “legally” or safely enter Palestine while the Crusaders ruled. Yet precisely in that period, Yehuda Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, issued a call to the Jews to emigrate, and many generations drew active inspiration from his teaching. (He himself died soon after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1141, crushed, according to legend, by a Crusader’s horse.) A group of immigrants who came from Provence in France in the middle of the twelfth century must have been scholars of great repute, for they are believed to have been responsible for changing the Eretz Israel tradition of observing the New Year on only one day; ever since their time, the observance has lasted two days. There are slight allusive records of other groups who came after them. Among the immigrants who began arriving when the Crusaders’ grip on Palestine had been broken by Saladin was an organised group of three hundred rabbis who came from France and England in 1210 to strengthen especially the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Ramleh. Their work proved vain. A generation later came the destruction by the Mongol invaders. Yet no sooner had they passed than a new immigrant, Moses Nachmanides, came to Jerusalem, finding only two Jews, a dyer and his son; but he and the disciples who answered his call re-established the community.

Though Yehuda Halevi and Nachmanides were the most famous medieval preachers of aliyah, they were not the only ones. From the twelfth century onward, the surviving writings of a long series of Jewish travellers described their experiences in Palestine. Some them remained to settle; all propagated the national duty and means of individual redemption of the “going up” to live in the homeland.

The concentrated scientific horror of the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe has perhaps weakened the memory of the experience of the people to whom, year after year, generation after generation, Europe was purgatory. Those, after all, were the Middle Ages; those were the centuries when the Jews of Europe were subjected to the whole range of persecution, from mass degradation to death after torture. For a Jew who could not and would not hide his identity to make his way from his own familiar city or village to another, from the country whose language he knew through countries foreign to him, meant to expose himself almost certainly to suspicion, insult, and humiliation, probably to robbery and violence, possibly to murder. All travel was hazardous. For a Jew in the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century (and even later) to set out on the odyssey from Western Europe to Palestine was a heroic undertaking, which often ended in disaster. To the vast mass of Jews sunk in misery, whose joy it was to turn their faces eastward three times daily and pray for the return to Zion, that return in their lifetime was a dream of heaven.

There were periods, moreover, when the Popes ordered their adherents to prevent Jewish travel to Palestine. For most of the fifteenth century, the Italian maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for getting to Palestine, thus forcing them to abandon their project or to make the whole journey by a roundabout land route, adding to the initial complications of their travel the dangers of movement through Germany, Poland, and southern Russia, or through the inhospitable Balkans and a Black Sea crossing before reaching the comparative safety of Turkey. In 1433, shortly after the ban was imposed, there came a vigorous call by Yitzhak Tsarefati, urging the Jews to come by way of then tolerant Turkey. Immigration of the bolder spirits continued. Often the journey took years, while immigrant worked at the intermediate stopping places to raise the expenses for the next leg of his journey or, as sometimes happened, while he invited the local rich Jews to finance his journey and to share vicariously in the mitzvah of his aliyah.

Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in 1479, wrote down the route and stopping places of a Jew newly arrived as an immigrant from Germany. He had set out from Nuremberg and travelled to Posen (about 300 miles). Then Posen [Poznan] to Lublin 250 miles Lublin to Lemberg [Lvov] 120 miles Lemberg to Khotin 150 miles Khotin to Akerman 150 miles Akerman to Samsun 6 days Samsun to Tokat 6-7 days Tokat to Aleppo 15 days Aleppo to Damascus 7 days Damascus to Jerusalem 6 days

Ottoman Sultans had encouraged Jewish immigration into their dominions. With their conquest of Palestine, its gates too were opened. Though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a very few Jews to “get up and go,” a stream of immigrants flowed to Palestine at once. Many who came were refugees from the Inquisition. They comprised a great variety of occupations; they were scholars and artisans and merchants. They filled all the existing Jewish centres. That flow of Jews from abroad injected a new pulse into Jewish life in Palestine in the sixteenth century.

As the Ottoman regime deteriorated, the conditions of life in Palestine grew harsher, but waves of immigration continued. In the middle of the seventeenth century, there passed through the Jewish people an electric current of self-identification and intensified affinity with its homeland. For the first time in Eastern Europe, which had given shelter to their ancestors fleeing from persecution in the West, rebelling Cossacks in 1648 and 1649 subjected the Jews to massacre as fierce as any in Jewish history. Impoverished and helpless, the survivors fled to the nearest refuge—now once more in Western Europe. Again the bolder spirits among them made their way to Palestine.

That same generation was electrified once more by the advent of Shabbetai Zevi, the self-appointed Messiah whose imposture and whose following among the Jews in both the East and the West was made possible only by the unchanged aspirations of the Jews for restoration. The dream of being somehow wafted to the land of Israel under the banner of the Messiah evaporated, but again there were determined men who somehow found the means and made their way to Palestine, by sea or by stages, overland through Turkey and Syria.

The degeneration of the central Ottoman regime, the anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions, plagues and pestilence, and the min of the country, continued in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. The masses of Jews in Europe were living in greater poverty than ever. Yet immigrants, now also in groups, continued to come. Surviving letters tell about the adventures of groups who came from Italy, Morocco, and Turkey. Other letters report on the steady stream of Hasidim, disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, from Galicia and Lithuania, proceeding during the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century.

It is clear that by now the state of the country was exacting a higher toll in lives than could be replaced by immigrants. But the immigrants who came shut their eyes to the physical ruin and squalor, accepted with love every hardship and tribulation and danger. Thus, in 1810, the disciples of the Vilna Goan who had just emigrated, wrote:
 

Truly, how marvellous it is to five in the good country. Truly, how wonderful it is to love our country.—Even in her ruin there is none to compare with her, even in her desolation she is unequalled, in her silence there is none like her. Good are her ashes and her stones.13
These immigrants of 1810 were yet to suffer unimagined trials. Earthquake, pestilence, and murderous onslaught by marauding brigands were part of the record of their lives. But they were one of the last links in the long chain bridging the gap between the exile of their people and its independence. They or their children lived to see the beginnings of the modern restoration of the country. Some of them lived to meet one of the pioneers of restoration, Sir Moses Montefiore, the Jewish philanthropist from Britain who, through the greater part of the nineteenth century, conceived and pursued a variety of practical plans to resettle the Jews in their homeland. With him began the gray dawn of reconstruction. Some of the children of those immigrants lived to share in the enterprise and purpose and daring that in 1869 moved a group of seven Jews in Jerusalem to emerge from the Old City and set up the first housing project outside its walls. Each of them built a house among the rocks and the jackals in the wilderness that ultimately came to be called Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the Seven). Today it is the heart of downtown Jerusalem, bounded by the Jaffa Road, between Zion Square and the Bank of Israel.
In 1878, another group made its way across the mountains of Judea to set up the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement at Petah Tikva, which thus became the “mother of the settlements.” Eight years earlier, the first modern agricultural school in Palestine had been opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa. As we see it now—and they in 1810 would not have been surprised, for this was their faith and this was their purpose—the long vigil was coming to an end.

1. James Parkes, the Christian scholar who has done much to explode the myth, writes: “[The Jews’] real title deeds were written by the ... heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in the Land through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (London, 1970), p. 266.

2. Dio Cassius, History of the Romans, Theodor Monunsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire. Both quoted in Jacob De Haas, History of Palestine, the Last Two Thousand Years (New York, 1934). p. 52.

3. Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

4. A. Malmat, H. Tadmor, M. Stem, S. Safrai, Toledot Am Yisrael Bi’mei Kedem (Tel Aviv, 1969), p. 348. Recent archaeological finds in Jerusalem suggest that the period was five years.

5. The Pilgrimage of Arnold van Harff (London, 1946), p. 217; The Wanderings of Felix Fabri (London, 1807), p. 130.

6. Justin V. Prasek, Martin Kabatnik (Prague). Quoted in Michael Ish-Shalom, Masaei Notzrim Beeretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1965), p. 265.

7. H. H. Ben-Sasson, Toledot Hayehudim Bi’mei Habeinayim (Tel Aviv, 1969), pp. 239-240.

8. Bernard Lewis, Notes and Documents from the Turkish Archives (Jerusalem, 1952), p. 15ff

9. Yitzhak Ben-Zwi, She’ar Yashuv (Jerusalem, 1966), p. 10.

10. Lewis, pp. 28-33.

11. Travels (London, 1759), quoted by Ish-Shalom, p. 388.

12. R. P. Michael Naud, Voyage Nouveau de la Terre-Sainte (Paris, 1702), pp. 58, 563.

13. Avraham Yaari, p. 330.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/16/09 at 11:28 pm

Yo Benny,

Question:

If the Jews yearned for Israel for sooooo long, why are you & your fellow Jews not living there now? It seems to me that you & your fellow Jews living in America & Europe like living among the non-Jew better than with the Jews of Israel. You are a hypocrite!

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/17/09 at 6:38 am

Dear Mr Plonie,

I liked ready your piece of history, so here is another chapter for your history book that we don’t read about in Jewish blogs:

THE MIDDLE EAST & ORGANIZED JEWRY

The Middle East is a particularly interesting issue, because any honest person who studies the recent history of the Middle East will very quickly conclude that the Jews are far from the poor, persecuted, powerless people their leaders would have us believe. The power center of world Jewry is not the State of Israel, but the United States, and political Zionism has long been entangled intimately with United States foreign policy. At times it is difficult to discern which is the tail and which is the dog, but there is more than a grain of truth in the claim that the Israel lobby dictates US foreign policy in the Middle East rather than the United States exploits Israel for its own purposes.

The roots of what is generally referred to as the Arab-Israeli conflict can actually be traced in large measure to British rather than United States foreign policy. In November 1917 the British Government issued the Balfour Declaration, which contains the following pronouncement:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”. (1)

The Balfour Declaration has been rightly described as the most remarkable proclamation ever issued by any government anywhere at any time. One nation promised to the second the country of a third which was at that time ruled by a fourth. (2) The real purpose of the Balfour Declaration was not in any sense humanitarian, to provide Jews with a safe haven to flee from pogroms, but to persuade the leaders of American Jewry, in particular American finance Jewry, to drag the United States into the First World War. This is tacitly and sometimes even candidly admitted now. In 1988, the anti-Zionist author Robert John wrote that “Britain, France and Germany attached considerable importance to the attitudes of Jewry towards them because money and credit were needed for the war. The international banking houses of Lazard Freres, Eugene Mayer, J.&W. Seligman, Speyer Brothers and M.M. Warburg, were all conducting major operations in the United States, as were the Rothschilds through the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.” (3)

Mr John also made the point that the leader of Zionist Jewry, Chaim Weizmann, “claimed that Jews controlled the grain trade of the Ukraine and could deny it to the Germans if Russia stopped fighting in World War I…” (4) While in 1983, American “aid” to Israel amounted to $625 for every man, woman and child in that country, and that although there were concentration camps in Israel, as in Nazi Germany, any criticism of the State of Israel or of its policies is inevitably condemned as anti-Semitism. (5) Mr John devotes much space in his book to an analysis of the reasons for the Balfour Declaration. His conclusion is that it was indeed used to drag the United States into the First World War.

Three years later, two mainstream authors made the same claim about the Balfour Declaration in their book on the Gulf War. Journalists John Bullock and Harvey Morris wrote that by 1916:

“Zionist ideas had already taken a strong hold on Jewish opinion in the United States and the British government hoped to gain the support of influential American Jews in its efforts to persuade the United States to join the allied war effort against Germany and Turkey.” (6)

This, they say, led to the Balfour Declaration.

At University College London, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Professor Chimen Abramsky told his audience that Zionists under Chaim Weizmann entered into a conspiracy (7) with the British government to drag the US into the War, and that this resulted in the break up of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by the British Empire. (8) He quoted Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who in March 1916 stated candidly “I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews.” (9) And just for good measure Professor Abramsky added a quote from Chaim Weizmann:

“...if you give us a declaration in favor of Zionism, this declaration will make the Jews of the World understand that you are really friendly, and the friendship of the Jews of the world is not a thing to be blown upon: it is a thing that matters a great deal, even for a mighty empire like the British.” (10)

I am sure that this admission of Professor Abramsky was made more by accident than by design, but if this boastful claim by Chaim Weizmann is true that “the friendship of the Jews of the world is not a thing to be blown upon” then it is also true, as no doubt Weizmann intended it to be understood, that the enmity of the Jews is something not to be envied, even for a mighty empire like the British, so you had better not antagonize us. Or else. This is a truism that I and very many other researchers in this field have discovered, to our personal cost.

Changing perceptions of the Middle East, even in this era of political correctness, mean that this is slowly changing, but refreshingly, Jewish authors are often more candid than us goyim. Some, like Professor Abramsky, let the cat out of the bag in all innocence, but others are so candid that it is embarrassing, particularly in relation to their boastful claims about the nature and extent of Jewish power.

A staple of anti-Semitic propaganda is that the Jews control the media. In his book The Jewish Image in American Film, Lester D. Friedman boasts that “Until television undercut the industry’s power, Jews guided the destiny of America’s largest propaganda machine [and] put their stamp on the American mind…” (11) The 1992 edition of Friedman’s book was distributed in Britain by Virgin; hardly a cranky little anti-Semitic publishing house. Another Jewish author wrote a book in which he boasted that Jews had literally invented Hollywood. Neal Gabler’s book, which was published by the mainstream publishing house W.H. Allen, claimed that in 1936, of 85 names engaged in production in Hollywood, 53 - a staggering 62% - were Jews. (12) I don’t know how many of you use the Internet, probably quite a few, but if you’ve ever logged onto the newsgroup alt.revisionism you will quite likely have seen discussions about Jewish power, media control and media manipulation between Revisionists.

Jewry in the Middle Ages - and many other ages - is concerned, is that Jews have very often lived as a privileged minority in their host nations rather than as a persecuted one, and at times they have risen to positions of great wealth and power. (13)

Jewish Chronicle correspondent J.J. Goldberg says of the American media that:

“It is true that Jews are represented in the media business in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the population. Studies have shown that while Jews make a little more than 5 percent of the working press nationwide - hardly more than their share of the population - they make up one fourth or more of the writers, editors, and producers in America’s ‘elite media,’ including network news divisions, the top newsweeklies and the four leading daily papers…” (14)

Then he alludes to an October 1994 Vanity Fair feature which profiles - in his words - the kingpins of the new media elite.

“[Just] under half of the two dozen entrepreneurs profiled were Jews. In the view of the magazine’s editors, these are America’s true power elite…” (15)

And, most candidly:

“For all of the rank anti-Semitism lurking in the Jewish-conspiracy theories, the notion of Jewish influence in the media is not necessarily anti-Semitic in and of itself…” (16) because “in a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood studio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a statistical observation.” (17)

Here’s another quote:

“The combined weight of so many Jews in one of American’s most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power.” (18)

Goldberg even has the audacity to quote from the Protocols Of Zion at one point:

“Through the Press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade.” (19)

Bear in mind that I and countless others before me have been branded anti-Semitic for making similar and often more modest observations. I’ve certainly never attempted to support my arguments about Jewish power and wire-pulling by quoting from the Protocols Of Zion.

Goldberg’s book is a mine of information, among other things he boasts that “the Jews” - his phrase - won the cold war. (20)

On page 174 the reader is told that:

“...the organized American Jewish community gained enormous bargaining power across the globe.”

And that:

“The Jewish community saw that it could change laws, and in so doing change history. Attention and money shifted from New York to Washington.” (21)

On the following page we are informed that the Washington offices of the major Jewish organizations became major power centers. And on the very next page, Goldberg claims that:

“Each victory was easier than the last, as the organizations learned to cooperate.”

However, it has to be said in all fairness that, unlike J.J. Goldberg and his cronies at the Jewish Chronicle, some Jewish authors are far from happy with the way their co-racialists ride roughshod over the rest of mankind. These authors are to be commended for their outspokenness and their courage. In spite of their ethnic origins they too run the risk of being smeared by Jewish hate-mongers and their goy fellow travelers as anti-Semites, and also as self-hating Jews.

In 1993, an American Jew named Ron David made his own contribution to exposing the incessant lies about the Middle East which Organized Jewry, their powerful allies and their lapdogs have been forcing down everybody’s throats since the end of the Second World War. His book is called ARABS & ISRAEL FOR BEGINNERS; here are a couple of quotes from it.

“Until six or seven years ago I was certain that the Israelis were on the side of the Angels, period. No questions, no conditions, no mitigating factors - just the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys.” (22) But, after doing some basic research he concluded that “...I cannot see how any fair-minded person with an IQ over fifty can believe the Zionist/Jewish/Israeli version of what happened in the Middle East - and of what is happening now.” (23)

There are other Jewish authors who have spoken out against the mendacity of Zion, quite a few of them in fact, but like goyim who research this supposedly so difficult subject, their writings are, by and large, consigned to the memory hole, or else they are written off as cranks and eccentrics. Two of them deserve honorable mention here: Alfred Lilienthal, the American-Jewish scholar, and Rabbi Dr Elmer Berger, one of the leading anti-Zionist rabbis of the post-war era.

In recent years, even mainstream Jewish historians and others have wiped away the cobwebs of Zionist propaganda and Jewish apologetics. Writing in the review section of the Daily Telegraph in February 1998, Mordecai Richler had some incisive comments to make about the book Israel: a History. This book was written by another Jewish academic, Martin Gilbert, whom I’m sure you all know has been since 1968 the official whitewasher of Winston Churchill. (24)

“In 1986, Sir Martin writes, Mordechai Vanunu…was ‘taken to Israel’, but we are not told that he was, in fact, drugged and kidnapped.” Richler doesn’t think much of that. Nor does he think much of Gilbert’s claim that “During the War of Independence hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled their villages, but many thousands more were ‘encouraged’ to leave…”

Much more could be written in this vein, but by now I’m sure you get my drift. This is how Organized Jewry operates: they, especially Jewish leaders, are the world’s master liars and the world’s greatest hypocrites. This is not to say that at times the goyim don’t put them to shame, I’m thinking in particular of the British Government, but I’m sure that Americans, Canadians, Nigerians, and so on, have their own nominations for the most perfidious administrations in history. The big difference though is that when people attack the American government, the American administration, or - quote unquote - the Americans, the cry of anti-Americanism, bigotry, hatred, and so on, doesn’t register much impact. Ditto attacks on the British, etc.

It is even possible to expose the lies, perfidy and corruption of various black and other non-white nations and organizations, and provided it is done in a suitably diplomatic manner, the stock charge of racism can be avoided. But let any goy accuse any Jew of lying about the Holocaust, or of having less than noble motives for meddling in the race industry, and the cry of “anti-Semitism” will resound from here to the ends of the Earth and back.

I’ve just spoken about courageous Jewish authors; I’d like now to focus on a couple of Jewish creeps, in particular Dr Anthony Kushner, who is perhaps the most venal and insidious of the lot; and Dr David Cesarani, who is, among other things, Director of the prestigious Wiener Library. Both these men are full professors, which does rather make one despair for the future of academia.

Dr Kushner has written a number of books on Jewish themes. In 1994 he published The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination. (25) Needless to say, on this subject at least, Dr Kushner himself has a very liberal imagination indeed, but that is hardly surprising because not only is he Jewish, he is also a director of the Searchlight Educational Trust. In his aforementioned book he whines that:

“For survivors…Holocaust denial has been particularly disturbing. Yet attempts in Britain to ban such material in the late 1980s and early 1990s have been rejected…The liberal British state has refused to protect one of its most vulnerable minorities - even though it now has the most powerful anti-racist legislation in Europe.” (26)

What he doesn’t say, of course, is the reason “the liberal British state” - quote unquote - has “the most powerful anti-racist legislation in Europe” is largely because of the incessant whining, wire-pulling and lobbying of this supposedly so vulnerable minority.

The other Jewish creep I would like to mention is David Cesarani, who is, supposedly, an expert on fascism. It is widely believed nowadays that Fascism was first and foremost an anti-Semitic ideology, and that it remains so. Cesarani is as much to blame as any man for perpetuating this dangerous myth. In his biography of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, which, like Kushner’s garbage about the Holocaust, was published in 1994, Cesarani reports that “Jewish defense came to the fore when Sir Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists…in 1932. Individual members were soon identified with anti-Jewish agitation, and the Jewish Chronicle challenged Mosley to disown them.” Mosley is said to have made an ambivalent reply saying that the BUF would never attack Jews as Jews, but if attacked by Jewish subversives, or Jewish finance, his organization would react in kind.

In fact, the primary reason the British Union of Fascists adopted a “Jewish policy” was because of the hate campaign against Sir Oswald and his fellow travelers by Organized Jewry. On his founding of the BUF, Mosley issued a statement to the effect that: “Anti-Semitism is no issue of Fascism, and is, therefore, no part of the policy of the British Union of Fascists…Jews who are loyal citizens of Britain and who serve this country rather than its enemies will always have a Square deal from us.” (27)

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle the following year Mosley again set the record straight:

“As I have already said in public, I think that the anti-Semitic policy of the German Nazis was a great mistake. It certainly is not our policy.”

He also accused the British press of misrepresenting the BUF, and distanced himself from anti-Semitic fascist groups in Britain. (28) And I should point out that at that time the British press was not controlled by Jews so much as by the British upper classes, the Rothermere family, for example. Later that same year, Mosley was defended by the President of the Oxford University Jewish Society, A. Herman, who was quoted in the very same paper thus:

“At the present time, our greatest supporters in our fight against the Imperial Fascists are the Mosley Fascists themselves.” (29)

The Imperial Fascist League was a rabidly anti-Semitic organization led by Arnold Leese, who believed Mosley to be a Jewish agent. (30)

In 1934-5, of 293 people convicted of offenses against fascists, over 20% were of Jewish origin, (31) and when Mosley attacked these Jewish thugs, and other Jews whom he believed - rightly or wrongly - were seeking to drag Britain into a war with Nazi Germany for their own purposes, he was set upon by the entire Anglo-Jewish establishment. David Cesarani and his ilk won’t tell you that. Nor will they tell you any of the other dirty tricks that Organized Jewry, their powerful allies and lapdogs use to attack and suppress “anti-Semites”. And remember, they decide who is an anti-Semite.

So this is how Organized Jewry operate, the same way virtually every other political lobby and pressure group operates, except that they are by and large more efficient, a great deal more ruthless, and in many cases they have elevated lies, deception and special pleading into an art-form. Now I will end my dissertation with a review of some of the more readily provable lies and deceptions endorsed by Organized Jewry.

The biggest lie promulgated by this fascistic lobby is that the Jewish Question - as far as they concede that it exists at all - is a racial question. In particular that it is about racial hatred. The lie is promulgated tirelessly that anyone who attacks any Jew or group of Jews for any reason is attacking “the Jews”.

Thus if you are foolish enough to raise the issue of Jewish wire-pulling or Jewish influence in the media or anywhere else, it is assumed that you are in reality attacking Mr. Cohen the tailor, Mr. Rosenberg the accountant, and your local rabbi to boot. This is garbage. In fact, many or even most of the Jews of Organized Jewry are not Jews at all in any meaningful sense; they may go to synagogue a few times a year, but many of them don’t do even that, and have very tenuous cultural ties with Judaism into the bargain.

A very good article on this subject appeared in the homeless people’s magazine The Big Issue in June 1996. (32) The author, Paul Sussman, whom one might suppose from that name has some Jewish connection, wrote in an opinion column that:

“Never…has Judaism been as fashionable as it is today. People who couldn’t tell a Torah from a turnip, and think a bar mitzvah is a sort of trendy Japanese lager are loudly proclaiming previously unmentioned Jewish bloodlines….A friend of mine, with blond hair, blue eyes, a minuscule nose and an impeccable Anglo-Saxon heritage has unearthed a tenuous connection with a distant Semitic half-cousin. ‘I’m a Jew and I’m proud!’ he has taken to announcing.”

Now why should they do this? Why should anyone? Fashion? Mr Sussman hits the nail bang on the head; it is, he says, “the-need-to-be-part-of-a-persecuted-minority syndrome. It makes subscribers feel rather important; it’s seen as rather worthy, heroic and rebellious…”

He might have added that it is also a mask for privilege, (33) or what has become known in recent years as playing the race card. Organized Jewry are adepts at playing the race card, often but not always with regard to the so-called Holocaust. And they do it, or attempt to do it, with Jewish politicians and power-brokers as much as with the goyim. Confirmation of this comes from Gerald Kaufman. (34) In 1998 he became involved in a so-called controversy in which Foreign Secretary Robin Cook of all people was accused of anti-Semitism. Kaufman subsequently commented on this in the creeping left wing New Statesman and, after boasting of his Zionist credentials, he added that:

“At a lunch organized by Labour Friends of Israel at the Labour Party conference, I had made it clear that as shadow foreign secretary I must not be regarded as the representative of the Jewish community in the shadow cabinet. Everyone nodded sagely. It came as a surprise when they found out I meant it.” (35)

Whatever his racial or religious affiliations, Kaufman is his own man, so too is Michael Howard, who as Home Secretary was forever being targeted by his hatemongering co-racialists over his adherence to Conservative principles. Yet he consistently resisted pressures to make what they refer to pejoratively as “Holocaust denial” a criminal offense. In October 1993, he came under fire from Lord Lester, another member of that poor, persecuted, powerless minority. In fact, Lord Lester is so powerless that he was once described by the Jewish Chronicle as “one of the architects of Britain’s Race Relations Act”. (36) Three years later, Lester himself admitted that Britain’s equality laws [sic] have failed, and need “root and branch reform”. (37)

Notes And References

(1) BEHIND THE BALFOUR DECLARATION The Hidden Origins of Today’s Mideast Crisis, by Robert John, published by the Institute for Historical Review, Costa Mesa, California, (1988). A copy of the original letter appears on the front cover of the book.
(2) John, Behind The Balfour Declaration, page 28, (ibid).
(3) John, Behind The Balfour Declaration, page 52, (ibid).
(4) John, Behind The Balfour Declaration, page 104, (ibid).
(5) John, Behind The Balfour Declaration, page 89, (ibid).
(6) SADDAM’S WAR “The Origins of the Kuwait Conflict and the International Response”, by John Bullock and Harvey Morris, published by Faber & Faber, London, (1991), page 57.
(7) He didn’t actually use that word, but if the hat fits…Another Jewish author said much the same thing; writing in his 1944 pamphlet “ORIGINS OF THE BALFOUR DECLARATION” DR. WEIZMANN’S CONTRIBUTION, James A. Malcolm claimed that the original draft of the Balfour Declaration was prepared by Weizmann “and his friends in London in the summer of 1917”. While in the February 1999 edition of the prestigious academic monthly History Today, William D. Rubinstein writes that the final draft of the Balfour Declaration was produced by Leopold Amery, * who is revealed in the same article to have been Halakhically Jewish! **
* “The full Cabinet, of which Amery was not at that stage a member, made only two minor amendments to his draft.”
** Ironically, Amery’s eldest son became a fanatical Nazi and was hanged for treason in December 1945!
(8) WAR, REVOLUTION AND THE JEWISH DILEMMA, by C. Abramsky, Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the University of London, An Inaugural Lecture delivered at University College London, 28 April 1975, published by H.K. Lewis for UCL, London, page 13.
(9) Abramsky, War, Revolution and the Jewish Dilemma, page 14, (ibid).
(10) Abramsky, War, Revolution and the Jewish Dilemma, page 14, (ibid). [The emphasis is Professor Abramsky’s; he has also misquoted very slightly; in his speech, Weizmann referred to “a mighty empire like that of the British”].
(11) The Jewish Image in American Film, by Lester D. Friedman, published by Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, (1987), page 35.
(12) An Empire of Their Own: HOW THE JEWS INVENTED HOLLYWOOD, by Neal Gabler, published by W.H. Allen, London, (1989), page 2.
(13) This is the thesis of The Fatal Embrace: JEWS AND THE STATE, by the American-Jewish scholar Benjamin Ginsberg, published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, (1993).
(14) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 280, (op cit).
(15) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 280, (ibid).
(16) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 286, (ibid).
(17) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 280, (ibid).
(18) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 288, (ibid).
(19) Goldberg, Jewish Power, page 284, (ibid).
(20) Goldberg, Jewish Power, (ibid). How the Jews Won the Cold War is actually the title of Chapter 7!
(21) Goldberg, Jewish Power, pages 174-5, (ibid).
(22) ARABS & ISRAEL FOR BEGINNERS, by Ron David, published by Writers And Readers Publishing, New York, (1993), page 1.
(23) David, Arabs & Israel For Beginners, page 2, (ibid).
(24) The following quotes are taken from In the land of promises, promises, by Mordecai Richler, published in the Daily Telegraph, February 14, 1998, page A3.
(25) The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination is subtitled A Social and Cultural History, and was published by the academic publishing house Basil Blackwell of Oxford.
(26) Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, page 267, (ibid).
(27) The full statement reads thus: “Anti-Semitism is no issue of Fascism, and is, therefore, no part of the policy of the British Union Of Fascists. We attack Jews if they are engaged in subversive activities such as the direction of the Communist Party or equally when they are engaged in international financial transactions such as those which have recently shaken this country. We never attack Jews because they are Jews. Jews who are loyal citizens of Britain and who serve this country rather than its enemies will always have a Square deal from us.” [Sir Oswald Mosley and Anti-Semitism BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS’ POLICY, published in the Jewish Chronicle, September 30, 1932, page 12].
(28) Jewish Chronicle, May 12, 1933, page 35.
(29) Jewish Chronicle, September 29, 1933, page 16.
(30) Leese even published a leaflet called DOWN WITH KOSHER FASCISM, which reproduced a number of quotes from the contemporary press purporting to prove that Mosley was an agent of the Jews.
(31) PRO HO 144/21377.
(32) For the benefit of overseas readers (and future generations?) The Big Issue is a newspaper/magazine which was set up in London by “filthy capitalists” and is sold by homeless people. The article from which the following quotes are taken is Why Israelite is alright, by Paul Sussman, published in The Big Issue, June 24-30, 1996, No 187, page 18.
(33) This is actually the title of a 1949 study of “anti-Semitism”.
(34) Kaufman is a whinging left wing creep and a confirmed Zionist, although to give him proper credit he has long been a firm advocate of fair play for the Palestinians. I once attended a meeting at the House of Commons where he shared a platform with PLO supporters and made what was - for a Jewish politician - as principled a stand as any prominent Jew could make against Zionist mendacity without being hauled over the coals.
(35) From the article Re: Cook and the Deputies, by Gerald Kaufman, published in the New Statesman, April 10, 1998, pages 14-5.
(36) Howard clashes with leading Jewish peer over racism, by Bernard Josephs, published in the Jewish Chronicle October 15, 1993, page 40.
(37) Equality laws ‘have failed’, published in the Times, November 12, 1996, page 39. Lester was referred to in this article as “ONE OF the architects of Britain’s equality laws”.

Comment by Harry Wood on 9/17/09 at 7:05 am

Yo Benny,

Are these your people?

American Council for Judaism - Spring 1999

Murder in the Name of God: Where Religious Extremism Can Lead

by Allan C. Brownfeld

The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel on November 4, 1995 by an ultra-Orthodox religious zealot, Yigal Amir, brought the largely unknown and unreported world of Israel’s religious extremists under public scrutiny. The assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man nurtured within Israel’s far-right religious institutions. After the murder, he was hailed as a hero by many, not only in Israel but among kindred spirits in the United States.

In this well-researched book, which includes an exclusive interview with Amir, authors Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman, present the full story of the people whose words and deeds made Rabin’s assassination possible: the rabbis who condemned Rabin by invoking an arcane talmudic ruling; the politicians who joined in a sophisticated campaign of incitement against him; the militant West Bank settlers for whom the Oslo peace agreement spelled betrayal; and the security agents who saw what was coming but failed to prevent it. Michael Karpin is one of Israel’s leading journalists and served for many years as editor in chief of Mabat, Israeli television’s prime-time news broadcast. Ina Friedman, an American-born editor, journalist and translator is a correspondent in Israel, where she has lived since 1968, for the Dutch daily Trouw. In this book, they have provided us with more than the story of an assassination. It is a powerful indictment of Israeli society’s failure to look at itself honestly and its unwillingness to bring its own worst enemies to justice. For all of us, it is a lesson in where the dangerous combination of religious fundamentalism, ultra-nationalism and ethno-centrism can lead.

Eerie Ceremony

Two weeks before the assassination, Victor Cygielman, the correspondent of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, sat down at his computer in Tel Aviv to sum up the developments of the past months. He began by describing the eerie ceremony in which a small group of religious fanatics had stood before Rabin’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur and intoned the mystical Pulsa da-Nura, a kabbalistic curse of death. He wrote of the explicit “contract” put out on Rabin’s life by rabbis who invoked the talmudic concept din rodef, the sentence pronounced on a Jewish traitor. Cygielman cited the handbill passed out at a mass demonstration in Jerusalem on October 5 showing Rabin in an SS uniform. “The stage was set for the murder of the prime minister,” he said. A technical problem caused a week’s delay in the publication of Cygielman’s piece, and it didn’t appear until Thursday, November 2. Two days later Yitzhak Rabin was dead.

Authors Karpin and Friedman note that assassin Yigal Amir “believed that there is only one guideline for fixing the borders of the Land of Israel: the Divine Promise made to the Patriarch Abraham, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates’ (Genesis 15:17). Today these borders embrace a large part of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq . . . zealots read this passage as God’s Will and God’s Will must be obeyed, whatever the cost. No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than these. Thus, negotiating a peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors is unthinkable. After all, the manifest destiny of the Jewish people has not been realized, say the zealots, so what is the basis for making peace? The order of action must be reversed: First the territorial conquests must be completed, so as to bring the Divine Promise to fruition. Yet even after their territorial demands are satisfied, the zealots doubt whether it will be possible to reconcile with the Arabs. ‘Esau hates Jacob,’ says the Talmud, and you cannot make peace with those that hate you.”

Hard Core Zealots

The hard core zealots are roughly divided into two groups, the authors point out: vigilantes and ideologues, those who believe in direct action and those who devote themselves to philosophizing. Among the vigilantes Amir holds in high esteem is Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the physician from the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjoining Hebron, who gunned down twenty-nine Palestinians at morning prayer in the cave of the Patriarchs on February 25, 1994. Among the ideologues he especially admires is Noam Livnat of the Joseph Still Lives yeshiva (Od Yosef Chai) in Nablus. “Gathered there each day are among the most fanatic religious settlers in the West Bank,” the authors write. So rabid are the students in this yeshiva that at the beginning of 1996, Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, himself a religious settler, warned his colleagues: “There’s a potential for murder in the yeshiva . . . Do not accord it your protection.”

The yeshiva’s patron, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, repeatedly expressed a doctrine of racism. He declared that, ‘Jewish blood and gentile blood are not the same.” He defended the act of one of the yeshiva’s students who opened indiscriminate fire on Arab laborers standing alongside a highway near Tel Aviv in 1993, and he subsequently lauded Baruch Goldstein for massacring Arabs in Hebron. He explains that he differentiates between the murder of a gentile and that of a Jew because the Torah places a “light prohibition” on the former and a “grave” one on the latter.

It was Baruch Goldstein’s assault upon Arab worshipers in Hebron that galvanized Yigal Amir: “The Hebron massacre was a milestone for Yigal Amir. From that morning he concentrated his efforts on achieving the ‘spiritual readiness’ that Goldstein had displayed. He too aspired to be an agent of God, an emissary of his people.”

Goldstein’s Funeral

Amir told the authors that he traveled to Kiryat Arba to attend Goldstein’s funeral and meet the community in which he had lived, “I wanted first of all to get to know them . . . So I went there and saw all the thousands who were at the funeral. I saw the love they had for him, and I understood that this is no simple matter. I spoke with the people and began to understand that they were not simply fanatic extremists. They are people who are fighting very hard for the nation, for whom values are very important . . . It began after Goldstein. That’s when I had the idea that it’s necessary to take Rabin down.”

Amir came to know the zealots in Kiryat Arba and Hebron. He grew close to Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a leader of the settler movement who had been convicted of killing a Palestinian and who had pronounced Rabin responsible for the Goldstein massacre. When the Oslo Agreement was signed in Washington on September 13, 1993, Amir, watching the proceedings on television, thought to himself, “If there’s no choice, it will be necessary to take Rabin down.”

For years, the authors show, the Israeli government turned a blind eye to religious extremism, even when it led to violence. In the middle of 1984, a number of covert cells dubbed the Jewish Underground were discovered. Composed of 27 people, including prominent figures in Gush Emunim, the settler movement, the Underground had planned to execute a number of terrorist actions against Palestinians. The first of these operations targeted the mayors of three West Bank cities. Bombs that exploded in their booby-trapped cars severely maimed two of the mayors; one, Bassam Shaka of Nablus, had both legs blown off. The second operation was a “raid” on the campus of the Islamic University in Hebron, during which indiscriminate gunfire resulted in the deaths of three Palestinian students. The third operation, in which members of the Underground planted bombs on Arab buses in Jerusalem, was thwarted as the devices were being set. Under interrogation some of the terrorists confessed to the most ambitious plan of all: a plot to blow up the Mosque of Omar (Dome of the Rock) on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to clear the way for building the Third Temple.

“Fine Young Men”

Yitzhak Shamir lamented the excessive zeal of “these fine young men.” Knesset members from the Likud and the National Religious Party dissociated themselves from the terrorists’ actions but formed a lobby to have them pardoned. In return for expressing remorse, half the members of the Underground were granted pardons by President Chaim Herzog. “The double standard thus tacitly established applied not only to Jews and Arabs but to Jews living on opposite sides of the Green Line, which divided Israel from the territories,” write the authors.

The ultra-Orthodox world from which Yigal Amir came, in which he was educated and nurtured, has contempt for the idea of Israel as a secular democratic state with equal rights for all of its citizens. Karpin and Friedman report that the Orthodox view on the dichotomy between Israel’s self-definition as both a Jewish and democratic state “has consistently been that a Jewish state must, by definition, be ruled by Jewish religious law as interpreted by rabbinical scholars. Israel’s secular founders had never even entertained that idea. They established the state as a democracy governed by civil law and undertook, in the Declaration of Independence, to ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’ and to ‘guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language education and culture.’ But as a concession to the religious parties, they agreed to a certain blurring of the formal division between the authority of ‘church’ and state. Thus in the early 1950s an arrangement was reached whereby matters affecting a citizen’s ‘personal status’ — essentially meaning marriage, divorce and burial — was controlled exclusively by clerics. For Israel’s Jews this means they are controlled by the Orthodox religious establishment, and over the years this arrangement has played havoc with the civil rights of countless citizens.”

Religious or Civil Law

During the past decade the division over which system of law — religious or civil — should prevail has grown, with the religious right demanding that democratic values be subordinated to Jewish law and the secular left demanding that a bill of rights be legislated. On the right there are also calls for an end to equal political rights for non-Jews. Since the signing of the Oslo Agreement, some have demanded that any government decision fateful to the country’s future should require a “Jewish majority” to be ratified by the Knesset. The implication is that votes cast in the Knesset by parties representing Israel’s Arab citizens should simply be disqualified.

Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami, an historian and leading intellectual in Israel’s Labor Party, describes the gravity of Israel’s cultural divide: “The ties that hold Israel together as a united society have long been in a tragic process of disintegration. What we have here is not a society but cells inimical to one another in a state of potential civil war. Israel will not be able to stand this way before an enemy or confront the difficult challenge of peace.”

When a Gallup Poll done by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on the second anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin asked whether the country was closer to unity or civil war, more than twice as many respondents, 56 percent compared with 21 percent, answered the latter. Four months later the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research asked Israelis to rate the issues on which there is “a high chance of violence breaking out. Almost four-fifths (79 percent) of the respondents cited relations between the secular and the religious camps, with friction between left and right coming in a close second (70 percent). Noting that the messianic strain in Israeli life is growing increasingly militant, many see little room for compromise. Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lissak has gone so far as to characterize the secular Jewish state established in 1948 as “largely a fleeting episode.”

Death A Legitimate Goal

The rhetoric of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox political groups preceding the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the authors declare, “made it clear that Rabin’s death was a legitimate, even a religious goal.”

Eyakim Ha’etzni, a 67 year old lawyer, founder of the Yesha Council, the voice of the West Bank settler movement, a former Knesset member from the defunct radical right Tehiya Party, was one of three former Knesset members who signed an open letter in November 1993 calling upon soldiers and police to defy orders to evacuate settlements and warning that relinquishing any territory to the Palestinians would spark a civil war. In March 1995 he again tried to spur the army to revolt by telling the head of the Israel Defense Force’s Central Command, during a heated meeting with settlers in Hebron: “In Hitler’s Germany there were officers who understood that their government was leading the German people to oblivion, and they stood up and threw down their insignia and paid for it with their lives. Here the government is leading the people to oblivion.”

Ha’Etzni also harped on the alleged parallel between Rabin’s government and the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during World War II: “Those loyal to the Greater Land of Israel have the right to declare a government that gives up territory is an illegal one, just as De Gaulle declared the Vichy Government illegal.” He even drew a direct parallel between Rabin and Vichy leader Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, saying: “We will treat (the signing of the Oslo Agreement) as collaboration with the Nazis was treated in occupied France . . . This is an act of treason, and it’s unavoidable that the day will come when Rabin is tried for this act as Pétain was.”

Vicious Crusade

The ultra-Orthodox weekly Hashavna (“The Week”) was used by its publisher, Asher Zuckerman, to wage a vicious crusade against Rabin. The magazine regularly called the prime minister “a Kapo,” “an anti-Semite,” “ruthless,” and “a pathological liar.” The weekly, which is read by close to 20 percent of the ultra-Orthodox community, published a symposium on the question of whether Rabin deserved to die and the appropriate means of executing him. It also described the prime minister as mentally ill and suffering from alcoholism. “Senior figures,” a lead article stated in March 1993, “report signs of deterioration in the emotional condition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.”

Members of the Likud establishment expressed similar views. Hashavna published an interview with Ariel Sharon, who spoke of the Oslo peace policy as “graver than what Pétain did,” adding, “It’s hard to use the word ‘treason’ when speaking of Jews, but there’s no substantive difference. They’re sitting with Arafat and planning how to deceive the citizens of Israel.” In March 1995, Zuckerman wrote of a talk he had with Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu. He quotes Netanyahu as saying: “Rabin charges that he’s called a terrible word ‘murderer.’ But with all the unpleasantness (implied by that term) he has no reason to complain. Whoever is aware of the fetters he placed on soldiers’ hands have led directly to the murder of a large number of Jews has difficulty refraining from use of the terrible word ‘murder.’”

By the critical summer of 1995 Hashavna went so far as to charge that Rabin and Peres “are leading the state and its citizens to annihilation and must be placed before a firing squad.” In the issue published on Friday, November 3, 1995, the day before the assassination, Zuckerman (under the pen name A. Barak) offered his readers the forecast that, “The day will come when the Israeli public will bring Rabin and Peres into court with the alternatives being the gallows or the insane asylum. This nefarious duo has either lost its mind or is flagrantly treasonous.”

Sanction To Murder

The authors show how a group of Orthodox rabbis gave religious sanction to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. These rabbis, both in Israel and abroad, revived two obsolete precepts — din rodef (the duty to kill a Jew who imperils the life or property of another Jew) and din moser (the duty to eliminate a Jew who intends to turn another Jew in to non-Jewish authorities.)

By relinquishing rule over parts of the Land of Israel to the Palestinian Authority, these rabbis argued, the head of the Israeli government had become a moser. And by branding Rabin, they effectively declared open season on his life. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, an Orthodox rabbi critical of those who embarked upon this enterprise, declared that, “Hundreds of people heard the word rodef in connection with the late prime minister months before and around the time of the murder. The fact that these discussions leaked out and inspired a heated public debate in the religious community turned the obsolete notions of rodef and moser into household words.”

From the beginning of 1995 onward, the popularization of the words rodef and moser nourished the belief in religious circles that a consideration of whether or not they should be applied to Rabin was legitimate. Orthodox rabbis in Israel — and the U.S. — were consulting one another about whether Rabin fell into the category of a rodef or a moser. In the U.S. hundreds of Orthodox rabbis signed a statement declaring that he did.

Permissible To Kill

Two students of Rabbi Shmuel Dvir, a teacher in the Har Etzion Yeshiva in Gush Etzion, subsequently reported that he told them it was definitely permissible to kill Rabin under the provision of din rodef. A third described Dvir’s desire to execute the act personally. “If Rabin comes to visit Gush Etzion, I myself will climb on a roof and shoot him with a rifle’,” Dvir boasted.

It was not only obscure militant rabbis who engaged in such agitation, the authors point out. They cite the case of Rabbi Nachum Rabinovich, one of the most respected halachic authorities in the occupied territories. The 64-year-old Canadian-born scholar holds a doctorate in mathematics, has served in rabbinical posts in Canada and the U.S., and headed the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in London before immigrating to Israel. In an article published in the Jerusalem Post in July 1993, two months before the signing of the Oslo accord, Rabinovitch compared the position of the Rabin Government with those of the Judenrate in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also exploited the concept of moser, introducing it not as a direct charge against Rabin but as a warning to his government against trying to force the Israeli people into becoming collaborators in its designs. In a column entitled “Generals, Jews and Justice,” published in the Jerusalem Post in December 1993, Rabinovitch quoted Maimonides’s definition of a moser as “he who delivers his fellow into the hands of gentiles to kill him or beat him; and he who delivers his fellow’s property into the hands of goyim . . .” He recommended that settlers plant explosive devices along the paths of their communities to deter Israeli soldiers from entering them. He justified the suggestion by comparing the Israeli Government to the Nazis.

Agitation in U.S.

Within Orthodox circles in the U.S. the same agitation against Yitzhak Rabin followed the signing of the Oslo Agreement. “Soon after Oslo,” the authors write, “Rabin’s opponents in the American Jewish community began branding him a traitor and a rodef; it was not long before they advanced to calling him a Nazi. By the summer of 1995 the invective showered on the prime minister and his government had become so savage that Israel’s consul general in New York, Colette Avital, could restrain herself no longer. Avital knew that right-wing and Orthodox Jews were providing the extremists in Israel with inspiration and a great deal of money . . . She felt it was her duty to warn the prime minister what was going on . . . Supporters of peace in New York seemed unable to utter more than a murmur of protest as Orthodox rabbis and right-wing radicals called for the disposal of the prime minister of Israel. Avital was appalled.”

The World Likud (an extension of the Israeli party) swamped Orthodox synagogues in the U.S. with leaflets assailing the Israeli government. Rabbi Mordechai Friedman, head of the Orthodox American Board of Rabbis, took up the banner by charging in radio and t.v. interviews that, “Rabin’s democracy is persecuting the settlers” and that, “The Israeli Army has been transformed into the ultra radical left wing Rabin/Peres militia.” Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a professor at Yeshiva University and respected authority on the halacha, informed the media that according to Jewish religious law anyone perceived as a rodef should be killed.

On June 19, 1995, addressing a convention of the International Rabbinical Coalition for Israel, an organization of Orthodox rabbis dedicated to saving the occupied territories for Israel, Rabbi Abraham Hecht, head of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, declared that surrendering any part of the biblical Land of Israel is a violation of Jewish religious law and, thus, assassinating Rabin, and all who assist him, is both permissible and necessary. The authors note that, “Some of the rabbis supported Hecht and actually signed a statement that in their view Rabin was a rodef. Others were stunned by his pronouncement of such a dictum in public, visited his Brooklyn office and implored him to retract the statement. But Hecht was adamant. ‘I do not represent myself but the Jewish law,’ he told them, ‘and the concession of territory is a grave crime in Judaism.’”

Extreme Action

Rabbi Hecht would not be silenced. In August 1995 he used the platform of the Jewish Press to publish an open letter “to all the Rabbis in the U.S.A.” confirming that, “The Torah permits the most extreme action against those who would harm fellow Jews.” He also issued a declaration that the Israeli officers sent to the U.S. to explain the Oslo peace plan “are not wanted here and we must be prepared to expose them for what they are: enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.” On October 9, 1995, New York Magazine asked Hecht how he would feel if someone were to conclude from his June statement that he was entitled to murder Rabin, Hecht replied: “I wouldn’t feel at all . . . Rabin is not a Jew any longer . . . All I said was that according to Jewish law, any person ... who willfully, consciously, intentionally hands over human bodies or human property or the human wealth of the Jewish people to an alien people is guilty of the sin for which the penalty is death. And . . . it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good deed.”

After Yigal Amir acted upon the ultra-Orthodox agitation to remove Yitzhak Rabin from the scene and thereby bring the peace process to an end, he was hailed as a hero in many quarters. A resident of the ultra-Orthodox stronghold of Bnei Brak stood before t.v. cameras and declared: “There is no mourning here. Yitzhak Rabin was not one of us.” In Tapuach and Yishar, two West Bank settlements, pictures of Amir were hung on the walls at parties celebrating the “miracle.” When word of the assassination reached the large West Bank settlement of Ariel, participants at a political assembly stood up and applauded. In the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea in Jerusalem, young men embraced one another on hearing the news. In the Orthodox study group at Bar-Ilan University, in which Amir had been a participant, students called him “a saint.”

Support For Amir

A question in the 1996 high school matriculation examination in citizenship prompted many essays indicating support for Yigal Amir and his motives. Two of the teachers grading these exams spoke out about the answers of students from religious high schools and sought to publish them. But the Ministry of Education and Culture, then headed by Minister Zevulun Hammer of the National Religious Party, forbade them to do so. Bar-Ilan University sociologist Nissan Rubin, himself of moderate political views, declared: “There’s a feeling among the religious public that Rabin’s death was a miracle. Citing ancient Jewish myths of miraculous rescue . . . Just as the Jews were always saved from destruction at the last minute — an allusion to the parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus and to the 11th hour rescue of the Jews from Persia from the wicked Haman, so now people are saying a miracle has occurred.”

The depth of Israel’s cultural divide may be seen in the fact that Yigal Amir and those who embraced his act of murder are not a small, isolated fringe, but a large segment of Israeli society. Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lissak states that, “Yigal Amir grew out of the mainstream, not the margins. What is referred to as the ‘ideological fringe’ is actually very broad. We’re speaking of a variety of groups — social networks — some of which speak and write on a high level. They share a good degree of common ground, and they live and act in contiguous circles. They are not isolated or reclusive elements, and there is a big difference between them and the Kahanist thugs.”

Murderer Came From Among Us

Rabbi Yehudah Amital, the founder of Meimad, a small movement of politically moderate religious nationalists, said that, “The murderer came from among us, out of religious Zionism and Judaism, and we cannot say that ‘our hands have not shed this blood.’ Rather than be a tempering influence, many of our rabbis have been a radicalizing one, creating a political dogma and a public mood that made the murder possible. Political extremism has been dressed up as religion. Not only did the Prime Minister’s murderer come from among us, but Baruch Goldstein, the murderer in the Cave of the Patriarchs, did too. That the religious community brushed off that slaughter . . . shows that its moral sensibility is flawed . . . The decline began when the rabbis chose to turn a blind eye to the attacks on Arabs that eventually led to acts of murder . . .”

Authors Karpin and Friedman report that, “Historians are likely to characterize the post-Rabin period as a time of deep anxiety. There are many indications that racist and separatist philosophies are gaining ground, especially among . . . the national religious population. One particularly troubling development is the recent waves of verbal assaults on the High Court of Justice by religious circles . . . Knesset Member Aharon Cohen of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, which in the past decade has grown from a marginal political force to a major power, characterized the court’s justices as ‘foreign priests of modern primitive idolatry.’ Shas’s spiritual mentor, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, went a step further in urging all Israelis to boycott secular courts ‘which are not for Jews,’ and agree to be judged only before rabbinical tribunals.”

In the wake of the assassination, the authors argue, Israeli society refused to properly confront the forces which brought it about. The commission headed by Meir Shamgar to investigate Rabin’s murder “held back from scrutinizing the factors responsible . . . In effect, the report reduced the murder of the prime minister from a complex historical event to a simple lapse in security arrangements . . . Justice Shamgar had taken a similarly restrictive approach to circumstances two years earlier when he had chaired the commission investigating Baruch Goldstein’s massacre . . . In that instance too the panel confined itself to a strict elucidation of the facts and performance of the security personnel, rather than an examination of the religious, social and political conditions that had fueled the attack.”

Security Failure

Israeli security, the authors point out, is indeed a subject of legitimate criticism. They write of its “failure to acknowledge the new circumstances triggered by the Oslo Agreement: the possibility that the nationalist and messianist indoctrination of Orthodox youth, for more than twenty years, would lead at least some of them to reject the principle of democratic rule and resort to the use of force.”

Shabak, Israel’s security agency, concentrated on a potential threat to Rabin from Arab extremists, not their Jewish counterparts. In fact, the authors write, “Shabak misread the climate of violence. It did not know, for example, that there was talk of murdering the prime minister at the Sabbath conclaves organized for Bar-Ilan students by Yigal Amir. It was unaware that rabbis had issued judgments of din moser and din rodef. It did not maintain surveillance over most of the groups of zealots that were known to be gathering in settlements and yeshivas . . . The media, no less than the Shabak subscribed to the axiom that no Jew would go to the lengths of murdering another Jew for political or ideological ends. The notion was too grotesque to contemplate. Throughout the summer the media had routinely covered the wave of right-wing demonstrations but barely noticed the indictment against Rabin personally had reached intolerable proportions. Most of the vitriolic statements were unearthed only after the assassination . . .”

Silence of Those In Authority

The silence of those in positions of authority in Israel about the gathering storm of religious fanaticism preceding the assassination helped to create the atmosphere in which such an event could occur. Similarly, the silence of major Jewish organizations and prominent spokesmen in the United States in the face of the promotion of hatred and violence on the part of those in the Orthodox community who were willing to go to any lengths to bring the peace process to a halt tells us a great deal about the lack of moral courage which masquerades as leadership.

Much of the research for this important book was done in connection with the documentary film “The Road To Rabin Square,” which was the first attempt to present an in-depth picture of the campaign of incitement that preceded the assassination.

Discussing the achievement of authors Karpin and Friedman, the respected Israeli author Amos Elon writes that, “Murder In The Name Of God does two things: It offers an excellent account of the sinister cabal staged by reckless politicians, bogus rabbis and other mystagogues on both sides of the Atlantic that led to the ‘religious’ murder of Yitzhak Rabin. At the same time, Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman draw a frightening picture of a sick society (and a deeply flawed political system) that allowed this cabal to mature, and today sits by in equanimity as Israel is pushed back from the brink of peace to the black hole of history.” •

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/17/09 at 7:36 pm

So sorry, my history trumps your history. For if the Jews never relinquished Israel despite defeat, then the conventional wisdom pertaining to its reestablishment is not only misdirected, it is irrelevant. Balfour, Herzl, Einstein Ahad Haam, whatever.

Likewise as per Rabin:
Rabin Assassination Video Resurfaces After 10 Year Absence
Tishrei 30, 5766, 02 November 05 05:39by Scott Shiloh(Israelnationalnews.com) November 4, 2005, marks ten years since the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. Now, just before the ten year anniversary of Rabin’s murder, controversial footage of the event has reappeared.

Over the years, despite continuous and intense media coverage and analysis of the assassination and its ramifications, the video of the assassination, known as the Kempler video, had virtually disappeared from public view.

Numbered people are 1-Yitzchak Rabin, 2- Yigal Amir, 3-Student Mordi Israel, 4-Driver Menachem Damti, 5-Agent S.N. (Possibly S.G.), 6-Bodyguard Yoram Rubin

Since its showing on Channel 2 Israel television two months after the assassination, the Kempler video, one of history’s most dramatic and important video clips, has been hidden, perhaps deliberately, from the eyes of the public. It was never screened again on Israel’s state-regulated television, nor was it available on the internet.

Likewise, the purported maker of the video, amateur photographer Ron Kempler, appeared on television only once when the clip was screened. Since then, he appears to have vanished without a trace.

The circumstances under which the assassination occurred provided the left with fertile ground for a decade of denouncing and delegitimizing Israel’s nationalist camp and its political agenda via Israel news reports, particularly against the national-religious camp. Yigal Amir, a law student, activist, and vehement opponent of the Oslo accords, who was identified politically with the national-religious camp, was arrested and convicted of carrying out the assassination.

For the 25 years prior to the assassination, that group, more than any other, had been identified with the drive to settle Israel’s ancient Biblical heartland, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, liberated during the 1967 Six-Day War.

On the other hand, Rabin’s main accomplishment as prime minister was the signing of the Oslo accords. Those accords were designed to relinquish Israeli control of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and install in its place, a Palestinian state, run by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an international terrorist organization led by Yassir Arafat.

As Israel prepared to relinquish control of cities liberated in the Six-Day War to PLO control, tension in Israel between Rabin’s supporters and detractors reached a feverish pitch. The stage was set for November 4, 1995, the assassination of a prime minister, and a ten-year vendetta against the opponents of Rabin’s policies.

But did Yigal Amir really kill Yitzhak Rabin?

Not unlike the Kennedy assassination in 1963, Rabin’s assassination is riddled with factual inconsistencies that have given birth to conspiracy theories. Interestingly, both assassinations were filmed by amateur photographers. In both cases, examination and analysis of the filmed footage raise serious questions which conspiracy researchers use to support their contentions.

But while the Zapruder film is readily available for viewing and scrutiny by the general public, the Kempler video has only recently come out of hiding.

Click here to view the full Kempler Video if it does not appear below.

 

Private website operator David Rutstein explores on his Hebrew site glaring inconsistencies in the official assassination documents and has made available for the first time the full-length Kempler video for ongoing public scrutiny.

As a result, anyone interested in the Rabin assassination, conspiracy buffs included, can now watch the video and decide for himself whether it supports or contradicts the Israeli government’s claim that Yigal Amir acted alone in assassinating the prime minister. The conspiracy theorists contend that the upper echelons of Israel’s secret service orchestrated either an assassination attempt which backfired or an actual assassination.

A number of conspiracy theorists, the most prominent among them, Barry Chamish, do not deny that Amir was involved in the assassination. Concurrently, they are not interested in exonerating Amir or granting him clemency.

Chamish claims that Amir’s weapon fired only blanks at the prime minister. The real assassin was positioned in the back seat of Rabin’s car. This unknown assassin shot and killed Rabin only after his body guard, Yoram Rubin, pushed him into the car, following Amir’s gunshots.

Persons who espouse this theory claim that if Rabin indeed had been hit by Amir’s bullet (according to medical reports, the first bullet shattered Rabin’s spine) he would not have been able to remain standing, turn aside, and cast his face, startled, in Amir’s direction. Yet Rabin does exactly this, as the video clearly indicates at the 7:10 minute mark and again in slow motion at 8:20 minutes. Rabin’s facial expression does not depict any pain, not something one would expect after sustaining a serious wound of any kind, particularly a spinal injury.

This point is reiterated by one of the three bodyguards closest to Rabin, agent S.N. (possibly S.G.) who delivered his testimony on November 16, 1995 to police Internal Security Unit officer Yoav Gazit:

“During the salvo I jumped towards the Prime Minister and his personal bodyguard (Yoram Rubin). I didn’t hear any cry of pain from the Prime Minister or from his bodyguard and I didn’t notice any traces (signs) of blood. I and the personal bodyguard put the Prime Minister into his car and Rubin jumped with him inside and the car quickly exited the area. At this stage it wasn’t clear to me whether the PM or the bodyguard were hit or not.”

One of the most astonishing and mysterious events in the film occurs after Amir fires his shots. Kempler’s video clearly and unmistakably shows (7:17 minutes into video and repeated at 8:40) the back rear door of Rabin’s vehicle close before Rabin’s body guard, Yoram Rubin, whisks the prime minister into the drivers’ side of the car. Chamish suggests that Rabin’s actual assailant may have been pre-positioned in the back seat of the car as part of a conspiracy to eliminate the prime minister.

No one has yet to come up with another plausible explanation as to why the rear door of Rabin’s Cadillac suddenly slammed shut. The prime minister’s car was not equipped with automatic doors. One explanation claims that the Cadillac’s doors were built to close automatically if the car is suddenly shaken. But the rear door shut before the others entered the vehicle. That theory also does not explain why the front door opposite the driver remained open.

Another event depicted in the video that warrants examination is the conduct of Shimon Peres, one of the main architects of the Oslo accords, who served as Rabin’s foreign minister.

At the conclusion of that night’s mass demonstration in support of the Rabin government, held at a Tel Aviv park adjacent to city hall, Shimon Peres is filmed mingling with the crowd just meters away from Yigal Amir, who was inexplicably waiting for his target in a supposedly “sterile” area, reserved only for authorized security personnel.

After finishing with the crowd, Peres approaches Rabin’s car (6:20 minutes), which was parked behind his own in the sterile area. Peres stops by the car, and appears to look inside, or inspect the vehicle for something. Peres then starts talking with a body guard who points to the car. (As this occurs before the shots are fired, both the front and rear doors opposite the driver’s side are still open). What was it about the prime minister’s car that so interested Shimon Peres?

Then, suddenly, Peres is seen talking to Rabin’s driver, Menachem Damti (6:34 minutes). Prior to this, something apparently was cut out of video. Kempler claims he stopped filming for a few seconds.

Peres finally gets into his own car, just as Rabin walks down the stairs into the sterile area. Seconds later, he is shot at by Yigal Amir.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/18/09 at 1:48 am

Yo Benny,

Just wanted to remind you about Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. In this section it describes:

“it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;”

“THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations”.

Here is the Prophet Ezekiel speaking the word of God & giving a bit of a history lesson. What do you think?

Ezekiel 16
EZEK 16:1 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

EZEK 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations,

EZEK 16:3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.

EZEK 16:4 And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

EZEK 16:5 None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

EZEK 16:6 And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

EZEK 16:7 I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou hast increased and waxen great, and thou art come to excellent ornaments: thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas thou wast naked and bare.

EZEK 16:8 Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I swear unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou became mine.

EZEK 16:9 Then washed I thee with water; yea, I thoroughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.

EZEK 16:10 I clothed thee also with embroidered work, and shod thee with badgers’ skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk.

EZEK 16:11 I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck.

EZEK 16:12 And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head.

EZEK 16:13 Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom.

EZEK 16:14 And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord GOD.

EZEK 16:15 But thou didst trust in thine own beauty, and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by; his it was.

EZEK 16:16 And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.

EZEK 16:17 Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them,

EZEK 16:18 And tookest thy embroidered garments, and coveredst them: and thou hast set mine oil and mine incense before them.

EZEK 16:19 My meat also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey, wherewith I fed thee, thou hast even set it before them for a sweet savour: and thus it was, saith the Lord GOD.

EZEK 16:20 Moreover thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter,

EZEK 16:21 That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?

 

EZEK 16:22 And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood.

EZEK 16:23 And it came to pass after all thy wickedness, (woe, woe unto thee! saith the LORD GOD;)

EZEK 16:24 That thou hast also built unto thee an eminent place, and hast made thee an high place in every street.

EZEK 16:25 Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

EZEK 16:26 Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy neighbours, great of flesh (well hung); and hast increased thy whoredoms, to provoke me to anger.

 

EZEK 16:27 Behold, therefore I have stretched out my hand over thee, and have diminished thine ordinary food, and delivered thee unto the will of them that hate thee, the daughters of the Philistines, which are ashamed of thy lewd way.

EZEK 16:28 Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou wast unsatiable (couldn’t get enough); yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet couldest not be satisfied.

EZEK 16:29 Thou hast moreover multiplied thy fornication in the land of Canaan unto Chaldea; and yet thou wast not satisfied therewith.

EZEK 16:30 How weak is thine heart, saith the LORD GOD, seeing thou doest all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman;

EZEK 16:31 In that thou buildest thine eminent place in the head of every way, and makest thine high place in every street; and hast not been as an harlot, in that thou scornest hire;

EZEK 16:32 But as a wife that committed adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband!

EZEK 16:33 They give gifts to all whores: but thou givest thy gifts to all thy lovers, and hires them, that they may come unto thee on every side (back & front) for thy whoredom.

EZEK 16:34 And the contrary is in thee from other women in thy whoredoms, whereas none followeth thee to commit whoredoms: and in that thou givest a reward, and no reward is given unto thee, therefore thou art contrary.

EZEK 16:35 Wherefore, O harlot, hear the word of the LORD:

EZEK 16:36 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them;

EZEK 16:37 Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

EZEK 16:38 And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

EZEK 16:39 And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

EZEK 16:40 They shall also bring up a company against thee, and they shall stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their swords.

EZEK 16:41 And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee to cease from playing the harlot, and thou also shalt give no hire any more.

EZEK 16:42 So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry.

EZEK 16:43 Because thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, but hast fretted me in all these things; behold, therefore I also will recompense thy way upon thine head, saith the Lord GOD: and thou shalt not commit this lewdness above all thine abominations.

EZEK 16:44 Behold, every one that useth proverbs shall use this proverb against thee, saying, As is the mother, so is her daughter.

EZEK 16:45 Thou art thy mother’s daughter, that loathed her husband and her children; and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which loathed their husbands and their children: your mother was an Hittite, and your father an Amorite.

EZEK 16:46 And thine elder sister is Samaria, she and her daughters that dwell at thy left hand: and thy younger sister, that dwelleth at thy right hand, is Sodom and her daughters.

EZEK 16:47 Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, and not done after their abominations: but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways.

EZEK 16:48 As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters.

EZEK 16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

EZEK 16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

EZEK 16:51 Neither hath Samaria committed half of thy sins; but thou hast multiplied thine abominations more than they, and hast justified thy sisters in all thine abominations which thou hast done.

EZEK 16:52 Thou also, which hast judged thy sisters, bear thine own shame for thy sins that thou hast committed more abominable than they: they are more righteous than thou: yea, be thou confounded also, and bear thy shame, in that thou hast justified thy sisters.

EZEK 16:53 When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, and the captivity of Samaria and her daughters, then will I bring again the captivity of thy captives in the midst of them:

EZEK 16:54 That thou mayest bear thine own shame, and mayest be confounded in all that thou hast done, in that thou art a comfort unto them.

EZEK 16:55 When thy sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall return to their former estate, and Samaria and her daughters shall return to their former estate, then thou and thy daughters shall return to your former estate.

EZEK 16:56 For thy sister Sodom was not mentioned by thy mouth in the day of thy pride,

EZEK 16:57 Before thy wickedness was discovered, as at the time of thy reproach of the daughters of Syria, and all that are round about her, the daughters of the Philistines, which despise thee round about.

EZEK 16:58 Thou hast borne thy lewdness and thine abominations, saith the LORD.

EZEK 16:59 For thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even deal with thee as thou hast done, which hast despised the oath in breaking the covenant.

EZEK 16:60 Nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant.

EZEK 16:61 Then thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou shalt receive thy sisters, thine elder and thy younger: and I will give them unto thee for daughters, but not by thy covenant.

EZEK 16:62 And I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD:

EZEK 16:63 That thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord GOD.

Benny, I want you to read this chapter again & again & understand what the Prophet Ezekiel is saying. These words can be repeated to Israel TODAY. It is STILL acting the WHORE. It is a godless place. Oh, Yes! Plenty of religion, but no GODLINESS.

Always remember that the God of Israel used other nations to PUNISH Israel when they DISOBEYED Him. I know that is hard to accept, but it is true, not that these nations were godly, for He will PUNISH them too.

Jews have REJECTED TORAH, & put TALMUD & KABBALAH in its place. The net result is doctrines of demons, fables & old wives tale.

The Pulsa D’Nora

The “Tongue of Fire” Curse Placed Upon the Wicked
by Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok

In recent days there has been talk coming out of Israel of placing a certain Kabbalistic curse, upon the nations’ Prime Minister. Known as the ominous Pulsa D’Nora, the Tongue of Fire curse of death, one Rabbi claims he is willing to perform this ceremony to influence Israeli governmental decisions, the details of which are well documented in the media and we have no reason to delve into here. The secular interests in government and in Israeli society in general seek to have the Rabbi investigated by the police and charged with incitement of violence against government officials.

The secular interests claim to have good reason for their concerns. It has been said that on the Rosh HaShana prior to the late Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination that a Kabbalist or group of them placed a similar curse upon him. However, as political events unfolded in Israel in the days after Rabin’s assassination, it became clear that what happened to the Prime Minister had no source or connection to anything in Kabbalah or to any mystical curse whatsoever.

Whether or not the Pulsa D’Nora curse was placed on Rabin is of no matter. It is clear that it played no part whatsoever in his fate. In light of this, whether or not an Israeli Rabbi places such a curse upon the present Prime Minister is also of no matter. It will be a futile effort, one which is certainly not worthy of media attention or the notice of secular interests. But in Israel, paranoia runs deep and people are often afraid of things they shouldn’t be.

In order to contribute to the alleviation of this present concern, I believe it is in the public interest to expose the Pulsa D’Nora curse for what it truly is, how it works, and when it is legitimately supposed to be used. With all the notoriety the Pulsa D’Nora receives one might assume that the order and ceremony of this ancient ritual is well known and readily available in certain Kabbalistic texts. This is by no means the case. Actually, of the hundreds, if not thousands of Kabbalah books available in print today not one of them contains a formula for the Pulsa D’Nora curse ritual. Therefore, unless one has received an oral transmission on how it is
to be performed, no one knows how to do it, in spite of all claims to the opposite.

The Pulsa D’Nora has wrongfully been associated with a certain school of Kabbalah known as Kabbalah Ma’asit (magic). The Pulsa D’Nora is not a magical formula. Torah and Judaism have no connection to or tolerance of magic in any form. Therefore, the consideration of anything in holy Kabbalah, an integral part of HaShem’s Torah from Sinai to have any ties to magic is a spurious and offensive suggestion. The Pulsa D’Nora is actually not a “curse of death” as many mistakenly believe. No Rabbi or Kabbalist has the right or authority to curse another to death. In accordance to Torah Law, the only way a Jew is put to death is for violation of specific Biblical laws and then only after being tried and condemned by a kosher and authoritative Sanhedrin, the likes of which have not existed in Israel and among the Jewish people since the days of the Temple.

The Pulsa D’Nora was formatted actually as a last line of resort when all semblances of human justice fail to protect the Jewish people. The Pulsa D’Nora actually is a set of prayers asking HaShem to judge an individual who is deemed evil and a danger to the Jewish people but is outside the realm of human justice to punish.

The Rabbi or Kabbalist leading the minyan performing the ceremony asks HaShem to judge the soul of the individual in question and if he is found wanting, that HaShem should judge him and remove said soul from being a continued threat and danger to the Jewish people. In essence the Pulsa D’Nora is nothing more that a desperate cry of help to G-d. One who believes in the power of prayer will be impressed with this. One who does not believe in the power of prayer will ignore the Pulsa as such a one would ignore all other prayer. The power of the Pulsa lies more in the anguish of those suffering under the hand of the unreachable wicked one than in the ceremony itself. The ceremony only gives form and expression to the people’s suffering. It is up to G-d to judge, for no human being has the authority to play G-d.

It has been said, however, that the Pulsa D’Nora is not to be taken lightly. The ceremony does include the recitation of certain Holy Names. This itself is a sacred undertaking. It is said that when one approaches the Heavenly Court to judge the soul of the accused wicked one, the first one examined by the Heavenly Court is the petitioner. If the one seeking justice is himself not just and righteous, then the Pulsa can turn on his own head. It will be the petitioner who will meets his fate instead of the one who stands accused. For this reason, using the Pulsa D’Nora is a dangerous thing, for who can stand before the Heavenly Court and proclaim oneself to be righteous and just. Often the petitioning Rabbi will offer his own life as atonement for offering the Pulsa D’Nora prayers just so that the Heavenly Court will address the issue of the wicked one who is the subject of the Pulsa.

All of this might sound fearful to some and foolish to others. It is up to each and every individual to judge for themselves whether or not they wish to ascribe power and legitimacy to the Pulsa D’Nora. I have only documented what there is to be known about it. In light of current events it is important that we dispel myth and reveal facts. Only in this way can we ever hope to find true peace and unity among the Jewish people. In order to make this essay complete, I will now produce the entire formula of the Pulsa D’Nora ceremony in its original Hebrew. Due to the nature of this material it is not suitable for translation.

Accusations of the use of this curse by religious Jews against figures whom they find objectionable has been made often over the past 50 years and quoted in mostly Israeli media. As the saying goes in Israel “you have not made it in Israeli politics until you’ve been cursed by the Pulsa DiNura” Early in the 20th century, agitated Haredi Jews in Jerusalem were accused by the media of having recited the curse against the linguist Eliezer Ben Yehuda. There have been unsubstantiated media reports of the curse being recited against archaeologists and authors. Prior to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there have been rumors that the curse had been recited against him by right-wing extremists.
Avigdor Eskin, a member of the Gush Emunim (bloc of the faithful) claimed to have recited the following maledictions of the Pulsa diNura on the night of October 6, 1995: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned wherever he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body… and he will not survive a month. Dark will be his path and God’s angel will chase him. A disaster he has never experienced will befall him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him. I deliver to you, the angels of wrath and ire, Yitzhak, the son of Rosa Rabin, that you may smother him and the specter of him, and cast him into hed, and dry up his wealth, and plague his thoughts, and scatter his mind that he may be steadily diminished until he reaches his death. Put to death the cursed Yitzhak. May he be damned, damned, damned!” Rabin was assassinated within the month.
In July 2005, the Israeli media, without citing sources reported that opponents of the Gaza pullout plan recited the Pulsa diNura in the old cemetery of Rosh Pina, asking the “Angel of Death” to kill Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Six months later Sharon suffered two strokes and is currently in a coma, fighting for his life. Of course, most analysts link this to his age, 77, and obesity.
Reportedly, ten rabbis and kabalists, including Yosef Dayan, instigated the same curse at the gravesite near Safed several months prior to the assassination of former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/18/09 at 10:57 am

Hi Benny,

Found this on the Internet & wondered if you could shed some light on it from your perspective.

THE GEODE AND THE HEART OF THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL
My story of a miracle of His love!

“With all My heart and with all My soul” 

I want to share with you what the Father revealed to me so preciously one day recently, as I walked by the “Sea of Galilee” near Tiberias, Israel.  It reveals the passion of the heart of a Father for His children.  The Bible is a love story.  It is about a wedding.  It is about how much our Father-Elohim loves us. 
Ezekiel 3 and 33 tell us about the heart of the house of Israel—the ten northern tribes from the sons of Jacob (whose name was changed to Israel).  The “house of Israel” is also called in Scripture the “house of Ephraim”.  Ephraim was the son of Joseph who holds the birthright for all the tribes (Genesis 48).  These ten are also called the “house of Joseph”.  How beautiful that four times a day the Chasidic Orthodox Jews turn to the north, south, east and west to call for Ephraim to “come home”.  They know the end-time prophecies that the return of a remnant of the ancient ten tribes means that the Messiah of Israel is coming. 
These ten northern tribes became so idolatrous after Solomon’s death that finally Yahuewh had to scatter them out of the Land of their inheritance (the greatest punishment of all) into all nations, and mix them in with “gentiles”—pagans, heathen, barbarians, foreigners, aliens and strangers.  They lost their identity. (Hosea 1:10, chapters 2 and 3)  It broke the heart of the Father to have to separate these tribes from Himself.  In Jeremiah He refers to them as “the beloved of My soul”.  Jeremiah chapters 2:1-3:22 tell the story of His broken heart.  It is in these chapters that we get a picture of the great heart of compassion and love that our Father has towards His people.  It is hard to read this without weeping.  This great love-story of Elohim for His people is seen also in Hosea 11.
Yahuweh pleads for His people to return to Him, and re-enter the covenant that He made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—a covenant of peace, joy, love and contentment.  As we see from Jeremiah 3, a remnant did repent out of all the tribes, and returned under King Josiah to celebrate the feast of Passover (II Chronicles 35).  This is an amazing picture of what is soon to happen at the return of the Passover Lamb—the Lamb of Elohim—Yahushua Messiah.  When He comes, He will unite the whole house of Jacob (all 13 tribes) back together in Himself—“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” for His people. 
But, the house of Israel, whom Yahuweh had to finally divorce for their going after other gods (whoredom, idolatry), rejected His pleading and became hardened, “stiff-necked”, rebellious, proud and arrogant—rejecting His good Torah over them (the teachings and instructions of the Kingdom of heaven—His rule over mankind).  They created their own gods in their own image—gods of materialism, and gods of religion who would bless their efforts to gain wealth and power.  They became comfortable with the Phoenician world trading empire, comfortable also with the Phoenician gods, and later became comfortable with the Greek and Roman cultures that also had gods in their image.  They heartily accepted a religion whereby they might be saved from eternal hell, but a religion by which everyone could make up their own rules of lifestyle—a lawless religion that from its beginning did away with Yahuweh and his Torah as a rule, a covenant, of life. 
The house of Israel remained idolatrous.  They became wealthy, powerful and controlling, over the whole earth.  They settled in the most beautiful nations, acquired great wealth and power, rising above the “gentiles” of those nations—becoming the most militarily powerful of all people, skilled in education, in science, in medicine, and in all earthly wisdom (as was Solomon).  They also extended education opportunities to women, built hospitals for the sick, organized charities for the poor, shelters for the homeless, and opportunities for advancement for all people.  They became masters at “law”, which is surprising—creating the highest legal systems on earth, the greatest trading empires, and the greatest religious system.  They led the nations in mercy and tolerance for all people.  They blessed every nation that they entered—Genesis 13:14-17—fulfilling Yahuweh’s covenant to Abraham.  Today, the main groupings of the house of Israel are the most powerful people on earth—seeking to fulfill the dream of Nimrod (Genesis 11).  Because they are still idolatrous, they have also dedicated themselves to eliminate man’s need for Yahuweh, by their theories of evolution and humanism.  They are today the leaders of a world government bent on returning to Genesis 11, and the tower of Nimrod in defiance of Yahuweh and His right to rule over the earth. 

Today by archeology, history, language, names, and other ways, the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” are no longer lost.  The majority of them scattered themselves before 722BCE, when the Assyrians took the rest captive.  Then the Assyrians scattered the remaining ones.  (II Kings 17) 

In Isaiah 9:1-2 it talks about what Messiah would do to restore these “lost sheep” in the very land from which they were last totally scattered—the lands of the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulum—around the Sea of Galilee, in the Galilee.  Matthew 4:13-15 shows how Messiah fulfilled Isaiah 9:1-2.  Did you ever wonder why Messiah, being Jewish and Levite, would grow up in Nazareth—a town in the Galilee?  Did you ever ask why most of His ministry was in the Galilee?  Did you ever ask why all but two of His disciples were Galileans?  It is because He came to shed His light once again on the inheritance of the “lost sheep”—to re-gather them, with the house of Judah (the three southern tribes of the sons of Jacob) into one sheep fold under one Shepherd—John 10:14-16.

Under Solomon the ten northern tribes were in league with the Phoenicians.  Together they sailed around the world every three years to bring back goods for the Temple, for Solomon’s house, and for Solomon’s “collections”.  They even entered the rivers of Texas and brought out many things back to Solomon.  They went through the Straits of Gibraltar and into Great Britain (“Brit” in Hebrew is “covenant”, “ish” is man, “am” is people).  Therefore “Great Britain” means:  “The great covenant people”.  They sailed to Spain (ancient Tarshish), into many now western European nations and Ireland, even to the east coast of what is now America.  Archeological evidence has been found in the palio (ancient) Hebrew language used at the time of King David and King Solomon.  Solomon made ships at Ezion Geber—now the Red Sea ports of Eilat, Israel and Aqaba, Jordan.  He sailed them into ports of Africa, ports of what is now Saudi Arabia, into ports of South and Central America and Mexico.  Colonies of Israelites stayed different countries where they went—for example “Brazil” is a Hebrew word for “iron”.  The colonies of Columbia, the Mayans, and other great civilizations were Israelite colonies.  In Columbia surgical instruments have been found that surgeons today say are very advanced—examples found of heart surgery, brain surgery, C-section births.  Wherever the house of Israel went, they brought the wisdom of Solomon—which was the wisdom of Yahuweh.  Ezekiel was sent by Yahuweh north—into the empire of Parthia—a great empire that rivaled Rome, to give them the message of repentance and return.  The empire of Parthia was ruled over by members of the royal family of David.  The empire of Carthage was an Israelite empire.  They gave Rome the “stake”—the pole of execution on which our Savior died. 

After Solomon died and the United Kingdom split into a northern Kingdom (Israel) and a southern Kingdom (Judah),  (I Kings 11-12) because of their alliances with the pagans—they quickly turned to paganism, and the worship of golden calves.  Thus, for example, human sacrifice was part of Mayan worship—as well as the building of pyramids.  Yet, their mathematical system astounds intellectuals today—their great calendar ends in CE 2012.  Solomon’s great wisdom in science, medicine, astronomy, map-making, botany, zoology, biology has been inherited by the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 

Under the Kings of Israel, the northern ten tribes became so wicked that Yahuweh had to let them go—“put them away and write a bill of divorcement”.  Today most of the house of Israel does not know who they are.  (See Hosea 1:10, and chapters 2 and 3)  But, our loving Father is revealing to His set-apart ones, who are seeking Him with all their heart, who they really are.  HalleluYah!

In Messiah’s death and resurrection, He redeemed these lost people.

Do you notice that the Father never told the High Priest to take ten jewels off of his breastplate?  He never had any intention of losing these ten tribes.  Read Hosea chapter 11—for the whole book of Hosea is written to the ten tribes.  How beautiful! 
In these last days, a remnant of these ten tribes will “come trembling—fluttering like birds trying to find a place of rest—FROM THE WEST”.  He will shake everything that can be shaken, so that those things that cannot be shaken may remain.  In this great shaking, He will bring these trembling ones. (Hebrews 13:25-29)

The greatest concentration of the house of Israel today is in Western Europe and America.  Like I said, there is historical, archeological, etymological, and other proof of where these tribes went.  For starters on this great study, I recommend your reading the first two books of the series:  The Lost Tribes of Israel entitled: 1) Origins and Empire of Ancient Israel and 2) Israel’s Lost Empires by Steven M. Collins.  Mr. Collins works with several Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews in Israel who have searched out and found the “lost sheep”, as well as drawing from such great teachers on the ancient world as the late Dr. Barry Fell of Harvard University.   

Yahuweh is redeeming and restoring the whole house of Jacob now, back to the Land.  The hard hearts of the house of Israel are softening.  Some are even desiring to “go home”—back to the land of their inheritance—Israel.  They want to rejoin the house of Judah, and live in their ancient homeland again.

This great phenomenon of THE RETURN is happening, and will continue to happen.  There are hundreds of Bible verses about this return.  The greatest return will happen at Messiah’s coming. 

Jeremiah 31:5-6: “Again you shall plant vines on the mountains of Samaria…For there shall be a day when the watchmen cry on Mt. Ephraim, `Arise, and let us go up to Zion, to Yahuweh our Elohim”.  The word “watchman” is “natsar”.  The Orthodox Jews say that these “watchmen” are the returning House of Ephraim—returning as “Christians”.  Indeed there are Christians planting vines on the mountains of Samaria!

This is the story of the “prodigal son”.  (Luke 15) The “elder brother”—house of Judah (in which the three tribes of Judah, Levi and Benjamin are represented)—never left Yahuweh, the Father, and His Torah.  With all of their dabbling into the occult, and rabbinical superstitions, supposedly to reach Yahuweh—still Judah guard the basics of His Torah.  They have held intact His Shabbat, His festivals, His dietary laws, and His right-rulings.  Without them we would not have the Torah. 

In Romans 3:1-2 Paul says: “What then is the advantage of the Jews, or what is the value of circumcision?  Much in every way!  Because firstly indeed, that they were entrusted with the Words of Elohim”.  In intercession for them Paul writes in Romans 9:3-5: “For I myself could have wished to be banished from Messiah for the sake of my brothers, my relatives according o the flesh, who are Israelites, from whom is the adoption, and the esteem, and the covenants, and the giving of the Torah, and the worship and the promises, who are the fathers, from whom is the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all—Elohim –blessed forever. Amen”.  Does the house of Israel have any reason to boast over the house of Judah? —Absolutely NOT! 

At the coming of Messiah, a remnant of the “elder brother” of the story, will receive Messiah Yahushua at His coming (Zechariah 12), and join the house of Israel—the pig-eating prodigal who doesn’t eat pig anymore—and become “one stick” in His hand.  THIS IS the coming together of the “one new man”.  (Ezekiel 37:15-28)  Meanwhile, now, a trickle of the “prodigal son” is returning to the Father, Yahuweh, and to His covenant, to obey Him in His good Torah. 

NOW HERE IS MY BEAUTIFUL STORY:

One day in December 2006, I was walking along Lake Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee).  I was pondering all the volcanic rocks that are in the area of Samaria and the Galilee.  There are some that are huge.  There are some medium-sized, and many small ones of different sizes and shapes.  So many rocks!  The Father’s Spirit began to speak to my spirit that these rocks—most of them dull looking, not pretty, just plain—represent the house of Israel (the 10 northern tribes).  (Ezekiel 3:2:1-3:11)  Like these rocks, most of the house of Israel are still hard, cold, indifferent to Father’s covenant, steeped in a lawless (Torah-less) defiled, pig-allowing religion, that has relegated Father to antiquity. 

In Luke 15, the prodigal falls at the Father’s feet in repentance.  We must repent when we return to the Father’s covenant relationship.  Then we must go humbly learn His ways and His nature, learning what He expects of us, so that we are no longer lawless. 

As I looked at the rocks, since I’m an amateur geologist, I saw some that could possibly be geodes.  A “geode” is formed from volcanic “hail” that spews out of a volcano.  The rocks are usually rounded—not pretty on the outside—but once broken open contain beautiful crystals inside formed from mineral deposits.
The Father showed me that this is how He sees the house of Israel.

Matthew 15:24 with Matthew 10:5-6 give us an unusual picture of why Messiah came: “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”.  He only told His disciples to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel—which they did after His ascension. 
He primarily came to redeem back those from the ten tribes who had abandoned Him for idolatry and sin—transgressing His Torah and relegating Him to the past, in order to pick up a new religion with new festivals, a new priesthood, new doctrines, and a free-wheeling lifestyle that arrogantly said, “You don’t have to go to Jerusalem”—a lifestyle of rebellion against Yahuweh.  (I Kings 11-12)  Therefore, the greatest move of the Spirit of Yahuweh today is His orchestrating the return of these ten tribes of Israel, to join them once again with their brother Judah!
From a Jewish commentary on Ezekiel 37:15-28, I read recently that the return of the house of Israel is bringing great comfort to the house of Judah.  It says that when the Jews see that Elohim is bringing back the lost Israelites, it gives them comfort to know that He has not forgotten Judah either, and that the promises of Messiah to the whole house of Jacob will soon be fulfilled.  Awesome!

Zechariah 8:10-23 speaking of the time of the return of Israel’s Messiah: “Thus says Yahuweh of hosts, `Peoples shall yet come, inhabitants of many cities, and the inhabitants of the one go to another saying, “Let us earnestly go and pray before Yahuweh, and see Yahuweh of hosts.  I myself am going”.  `And many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek Yahuweh of hosts in Jerusalem, and pray before Yahuweh’.  Thus says Yahuweh of hosts, `In those days TEN MEN FROM ALL LANGUAGES OF THE NATIONS take hold, yes, they shall take hold of the edge of the garment of a man, a Jew, saying `Let us go with you, for we have heard that Elohim is with you.’”  The “ten men” represent the house of Israel who were scattered into all nations by 722BCE.  In these days, this is already beginning—a forerunning remnant is returning—some “trembling” from the West. 

Yahushua Messiah renewed the covenant with both houses in His own blood.  (Jeremiah 31:31)  Then He arose to confirm the covenant with both houses, and with anyone else who wanted to participate in it—the covenant established with His people on Sinai—when the terms of the marriage covenant was established. 

As He began showing me, that morning on my walk, how He looks at the “house of Israel—stubborn, rebellious, lawless, proud—I thought to myself that there were those of the house of Israel NOW who are humbly returning to the covenant of Yahuweh, through Messiah Yahushua, and guarding His Shabbat, His Festivals, His dietary laws.  They’ve given up the unclean in His eyes (represented by the pig—whom He created not for eating, but as a “vacuum cleaner” that eats garbage) and are adapting to His requirements for good citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven.  (Philippians 3:20-21)

These repentant returnees are not hard, cold, rebellious and proud.  They are born-again by faith in Messiah, and now see that to love Him means to obey His commandments (John 14:15).  They have left their religion of lawlessness, created by Greece and Rome and are submitting to His covenant with joy. 

So, on my walk I remembered the geodes and their crystals.  The crystals cannot be seen until the geode is broken in half.  Father confirmed to me that those who were “broken” and contrite, those who were “laid open” before Him, so that He could remove the heart of stone, and replace it with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:24-34)) indeed had a heart of like a geode—with shining beautiful crystals.  (See: Isaiah 57:15 and Isaiah 66:1-2)

I have been in Israel over 20 times, and never seen a broken geode—never once.  Usually the geode has to be cut open, because they are so hard, by an electric saw, designed to cut through rock.  I’m one of these people that often will walk with my head down—looking for rocks and archeological artifacts—so to find a broken geode would be almost a miracle.  Father showed me that He was doing the cutting, the surgery on the hearts of the His people, so that they would be opened up to reveal the glory He put within. 

But, as soon as He gave me revelation about the heart of the broken ones being like the center of a geode, within about 30 seconds I looked over and saw something shining in the sun.  I went over and there was a broken geode, with crystals glistening in the sun.

I thanked Him so much for this object lesson—especially since my calling is the house of Israel (as was Ezekiel’s).  I took the geode back to where I was staying and put it on my nightstand.  I sat back and looked at it.  I was shocked—I just stared at the geode.  In the center of the geode, among the crystals, was a well-formed “Y”.  It is the beginning initial of the name He gave me.  He spoke quietly to my spirit:  This is how I see you.  The geode was me.  I am not pretty on the outside, but on the inside He sees me as His shining “beloved”.  (“Yedidah” in Biblical Hebrew means “Beloved”). 

This is how He sees those of the house of Israel who are turning in humility and submission and yielding to His covenant.  He pleads in Ezekiel 18 for the house of Israel to return to Him through repentance.  Now, a small remnant is returning.  They are broken geodes—and He sees their heart as beautiful!

How passionate is He to return His people to His Land—their Land? 

I close with Jeremiah 32:37-42:

“See, I am gathering them (verse 32—the house of Israel AND the house of Judah) out of all the lands where I have driven them in My displeasure, and in My wrath, and in great rage.  And I shall bring them back to this place (Israel) and shall let them dwell in safety.  And they shall be My people, and I shall be their Elohim.  And I shall give them one heart and one way, to fear Me all the days, for the good of them and of their children after them.  And I shall make an everlasting covenant with them, that I do not turn back from doing good to them.  And I shall put My fear in their hearts so they will not turn aside from Me.  And I shall rejoice over them to do good to them, and shall plant them in this Land in truth, WITH ALL MY HEART AND WITH ALL MY SOUL”.  For thus says Yahuweh, `As I have brought all this great evil on this people, so I am bringing on them all the good that I am speaking to them’”.  (Italics mine) 

What a wonderful Father we have!
Nowhere else in all of His Word does He so passionately say that He is going to do anything “with all My heart and with all My soul” as He promises to restore a remnant of the whole house of Jacob back into covenant relationship with Him, through Messiah Yahushua, whose name means: I AM Salvation. 

Love, blessings, joy and peace,

Yedidah

January 16, 2007

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/18/09 at 3:31 pm

Yo Benny,

Shalom Racheal,

Could you help me understand Sanhedrin 54b?

I have heard Jews & non-Jews argue over quotes taken from Sanhedrin 54b. Jews always say verses are taken out of context, so here’s the whole section. Could this be the reason there is so much child sexual abuse in Orthodox Judaism?

Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin
Sanhedrin 54b

This teaches the punishment: whence do we derive the formal prohibition? — From the verse, Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.1 From this we learn the formal prohibition for him who lies [with a male]: whence do we know a formal prohibition for the person who permits himself thus to be abused? — Scripture saith: There shall be no sodomite of the sons of Israel:2 and it is further said, And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to the abominations of the nations which the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel:3 this is R. Ishmael’s view. R. Akiba said: This is unnecessary, the Writ saith, thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: read, ‘thou shalt not be lain with.‘4 Whence do we learn a formal prohibition against bestiality? — Our Rabbis taught: [and if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast].5 A man excludes a minor; [that] lieth with a beast — whether it be young or old; he shall surely be put to death — by stoning. You, by stoning; but perhaps one of the other deaths decreed in the Torah is meant? — It is here said, [and] ye shall kill [the beast]; and it is stated elsewhere, But thou shalt surely kill him. [… And thou shalt stone in him with stones]:6 just as there, stoning is meant, so here too.

We have learnt from this the punishment for him who commits bestiality; whence do we derive punishment for him who allows himself to be thus abused? — The Writ saith: Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.7 Since this is redundant in respect of the person committing bestiality,8 you must regard it as applying to the person permitting himself to be thus abused.9 From the Writ we know that there is punishment both for him who commits bestiality and for him who permits himself to be thus abused; whence do we know the formal prohibition? — Scripture saith, neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith.10 From this verse we learn the formal prohibition for him who commits bestiality, whence do we derive the formal prohibition for him who allows himself to be thus abused? Scripture saith: There shall be no Sodomite of the sons of Israel; and it is elsewhere said, And there were also sodomites in the land, etc.11 R. Akiba said: This is unnecessary. The Writ saith, Thou shalt not lie [with any beast], which means, thou shalt not permit thy lying [with any beast, whether actively or passively].

   

  Now, he who [actively] commits pederasty, and also [passively] permits himself to be thus abused — R. Abbahu said: On R. Ishmael’s view, he is liable to two penalties, one [for the injunction] derived from thou shalt not lie with mankind, and the other for [violating the prohibition,] There shall not be a Sodomite of the sons of Israel. But on R. Akiba’s view, he incurs only one penalty, since thou shalt not lie and thou shalt not be lain with is but one statement.12

He who commits bestiality, and also causes himself to be thus abused — R. Abbahu said: On R. Ishmael’s view, he incurs two penalties, one for the injunction, thou shalt not lie with any beast, and one for the prohibition, there shall be no sodomite of the sons of Israel. But on R. Akiba’s view, he incurs but one penalty, since thy lying [actively] and thy lying [passively] is but one injunction. Abaye said: Even on R. Ishmael’s view he incurs one penalty only, for there shall be no Sodomite applies to sodomy with mankind.13 If so, whence does R. Ishmael derive a formal prohibition against permitting oneself to be bestially abused? — From the verse, Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.14 Now, this being redundant in respect of him who [actively] lies with a beast,15 apply it to him who [passively] permits himself to be abused this; and the Divine Law designates the passive offender as the active offender:16 this teaches that the punishment for, and the formal prohibition against, active bestiality17 apply to passive submission too.18

He who submits both to pederasty and to bestiality — R. Abbahu said: On R. Akiba’s view, he incurs two penalties; one for thou shalt not lie [with mankind], and the other for thou shalt not lie [with any beast]. But on R. Ishmael’s view, he incurs only one punishment, both offences being derived from the single verse, There shall be no Sodomite.19 Abaye said: Even on R. Ishmael’s view, he incurs two penalties, because it is written, Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.20 This being redundant in respect of active bestiality, it must be applied to passive submission, and the Divine Law thus designated passive submission as an active offence: just as for the active offence there is punishment and prohibitions so for the passive offence too.21 But he who commits pederasty and causes himself to be abused thus; and also commits bestiality and causes himself to be abused too — both R. Abbahu and Abaye maintain that on R. Ishmael’s view he is trebly guilty, and on R. Akiba’s view he is doubly guilty.22

Our Rabbis taught: In the case of a male child, a young one is not regarded as on a par with an old one; but a young beast is treated as an old one.23 What is meant by this? — Rab said: Pederasty with a child below nine years of age is not deemed as pederasty with a child above that. Samuel said: Pederasty with a child below three years is not treated as with a child above that.24 What is the basis of their dispute? — Rab maintains that only he who is able to engage in sexual intercourse, may, as the passive subject of pederasty throw guilt [upon the active offender]; whilst he who is unable to engage in sexual intercourse cannot be a passive subject of pederasty [in that respect].25 But Samuel maintains: Scripture writes, [And thou shalt not lie with mankind] as with the lyings of a woman.26

It has been taught in accordance with Rab: Pederasty at the age of nine years and a day;

  1. Ibid. XVIII, 22.
  2. Deut. XXIII, 18.
  3. I Kings XIV, 24. Just as abomination applies to sodomy in the latter verse, so it applies to it in the former too: thus it is as though the former verse read, There shall be no Sodomite of the sons of Israel: it is an abomination. And just as the abomination implicit here applies to both parties, so the abomination explicitly stated in Lev. XIII, 22 refers to both.
  4. I. e., the niph’al, the letters being the same, [H], and [H].
  5. Ibid. XX, 15.
  6. Deut. XIII, 10, referring to a mesith, one who incites to idolatry.
  7. Ex. XXII, 18.
  8. As it is taught elsewhere, viz., in Lev. XX, 15.
  9. One of the methods of Talmudic hermenueutics is to apply a Biblical statement, superfluous in respect of its own law, to some other subject.
  10. Lev. XVIII, 23.
  11. Ibid. v. p. 368. n. 1: the same reasoning applying to bestiality as to pederasty.
  12. I.e., though differently vocalized in order to deduce two injunctions, it is nevertheless one statement only, so that a person transgressing these two injunctions violates one Biblical prohibition only.
  13. Not to bestiality at all, in spite of the fact that this was cited above in this connection.
  14. Ex. XXII, 18.
  15. Since it is stated in Lev. XVIII.
  16. I.e., though as shewn, this verse applies to a passive offender, yet its grammatical construction speaks of active bestiality.
  17. The reference having been given above.
  18. So that all is deduced from one verse, involving only one penalty.
  19. Since R. Akiba maintains that the prohibition of passive sodomy is included in active sodomy, it follows that passive pederasty and bestiality are two distinct offences, for there are two distinct injunctions. But as R. Ishmael maintains that the injunction against active sodomy does not include passive submission, and that the latter, whether in pederasty or bestiality, is derived from the single injunction, There shall be no sodomite, the double offence incurs one penalty only.
  20. Ex. XXII, 18.
  21. Thus, this applies to passive bestiality, whilst there shall be no sodomite applies to passive pederasty. Hence, there being two separate injunctions for the two offences, a double punishment is incurred.
  22. Thus: R. Abbahu maintains that on R. Ishmael’s view: (i) active pederasty is forbidden by Thou shalt not lie with mankind; (ii) active bestiality by Thou shalt not lie with any beast; (iii) passive pederasty and bestiality by There shall be no sodomite. Whilst Abaye maintains that on R. Ishmael’s view, (i) active pederasty is derived from Thou shalt not lie with mankind; (ii) submission thereto from There shall be no sodomite; and (iii) active and passive bestiality from Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith. (Lev. XVIII, 23) Hence, according to R. Abbabu and Abaye there are three injunctions for the four offences. Further, R. Abbahu and Abaye both teach R. Akiba’s view to be that (i) active and passive bestiality are derived from Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; and (ii) active and passive bestiality from Neither shalt thou lie with any beast. Hence there are two injunctions for the four offences.
  23. The reference is to the passive subject of sodomy. As stated supra 54a, guilt is incurred by the active participant even if the former be a minor, i.e., less than thirteen years old. Now, however, it is stated that within this age a distinction is drawn.
  24. I.e., Rab makes nine years the minimum; but if one committed sodomy with a child of lesser age, no guilt is incurred. Samuel makes three the minimum.
  25. At nine years a male attains sexual matureness.
 
26. Lev. XVIII, 22. Thus the point of comparison is the sexual matureness of woman, which is reached at the age of three.

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/20/09 at 9:39 am

My replies to your last few posts were not posted for some reason so I am not going to kill myself investigating whether your relentlessly pasted material is legit, although that is not guaranteed based on my encounters with antisemitic hate sites. All I can say is that discussions of sexual conduct and misconduct occupies a tiny fraction of Talmudic law (probably no more than that of American law), and reflects to some extent the contemporary culture and economy, a time-frame that encompassed that of Jesus incidentally. The Talmud has been the intense focus of antisemitic slander for centuries, usually however on the basis of ‘blasphemy’ against the Christian faith.

My answer to this and all other such posts on the Talmud will be to link to a useful site researched by Rabbi Gil Student several years ago to counter such slander on hate sites entitled ‘The Real Truth About The Talmud’, found here
http://www.angelfire.com/mt/talmud/

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/21/09 at 1:31 am

Tony Greenstein

Unholy Alliance
(June 2006)

What is the link between Zionism and anti-Semitism? Tony Greenstein explains that there is a closer connection than many modern Zionists would care to admit
If you are an anti-Zionist and a supporter of the Palestinian struggle, then you will inevitably be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. If you are Jewish, then you will likely be accused of being a ‘self-hater’ – the label the Nazis attached to anti-fascist Germans.
The accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ has become so widespread that it is regularly hurled by Zionists at each other. Even Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli prime minister, was depicted in posters by opponents of the 1993 Oslo accords wearing an SS uniform. [1] So ludicrous has this become that when the Marks and Spencers board rejected a takeover bid from Philip Green, the latter accused the M&S chairman, Paul Myners, of anti-Semitism! [2] For the last 30 years, there has been a continuous redefinition of anti-Semitism. No longer is it about racism or discrimination, instead it is about hostility to a political movement. In 2004 the US Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, which instructs the state department to start rating governments throughout the world on their treatment of Jewish citizens. [3]
It is strange that anti-Semitism, which today is a marginal prejudice, should warrant such concern by the US ruling class, when racism against Arab, Muslim, black and Hispanic people barely raises an eyebrow. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has become a powerful ideological tool in the hands of the United States ruling class. It is an ‘anti-Semitism’ which even the most anti-Semitic sections of US society – the white Christian evangelists with their passions of Christ – can subscribe to. The US establishment has redefined opposition to American imperialism and its strategic asset, the Israeli state, as a form of racism. Anti-Semitism has become the respectable anti-racism of the right. Zionism has taken the Jews full circle. In its strategic alliance with the USA, the Jews are once again offered ‘protection’ by the ruling class, just as in feudal times they were protected by royalty and the nobility.
The eternal Jew
As mercantile capitalism gave birth to industrial capitalism, so religious anti-Semitism gradually gave way to racial anti-Semitism, from the 17th century onwards. [4] Whereas Christian anti-Semites sought the conversion of the Jews, the racial anti-Semites argued it was all a question of race, not religion. The issue of the baptised Jews was to cause the Nazis all sorts of difficulties as they began to implement the final solution. [5]
In place of the eternal Jew, the Zionists posit the eternal anti-Semite. For 2,000 years, according to Zionist myth, the Jews have wandered the earth, the victims of unrelenting anti-Semitism, having been expelled from Palestine after the destruction of the first temple. In fact the majority of Palestinian Jewry had already dispersed to the cities of the Greek and later Roman empires, centuries before the fall of the second temple, to become a largely trading people. At the fall of the second temple in 70AD, some three-quarters of Palestinian Jews were already dispersed. [6]
And what was Zionism’s explanation of anti-Semitism? That it was inherent in the non-Jew, a product of the non-Jew’s ‘natural’ antagonism. As Leo Pinsker, founder of the Lovers of Zionism, explained, “Judaephobia is, then, a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary and, having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.” [7] Abram Leon noted in relation to this: “Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history; it saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.” [8]
During what Israel Shahak terms the classical period – approximately 800-1200AD in western Europe – and later in eastern Europe, the Jews become a ‘people-class’. They performed specific socio-economic functions as usurers and moneylenders, tax stewards, publicans, as well as certain professions allied to trade such as goldsmiths and diamond merchants. The Jews were the agents of money in a society based on use-values. As Marx observed, “We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will look for the secret of his religion in the Jews.” [9] Without their distinctive social and economic role, Judaism would have died out. The cause of anti-Semitism in this period was “the antagonism toward the merchant in every society based principally on the production of use-values.” [10] The Jews “formed an integral part of the privileged classes”. [11] Shahak notes: “… in all the worst anti-Jewish persecutions … the ruling elite … were always on the side of the Jews … all the massacres of Jews during the classical period were part of a peasant rebellion or other popular movement.” [12]
As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the Jews increasingly came into conflict with the growing merchant class and were usually expelled – in England in 1290 – seeking refuge in Eastern Europe. It was when capitalism began to develop in Eastern Europe and Russia in the late 19th century that the Jews once again fled or were expelled to Western Europe and the United States. Some three million Jews emigrating to the latter by 1914. It was the emigration of the Ost Juden that recreated the Jewish question in the west. As Leon remarked, “The Jewish masses find themselves wedged between the anvil of decaying feudalism and the hammer of rotting capitalism.” [13]
Zionism and anti-Semitism
It is not surprising that the main supporters of political Zionism, which began towards the end of the 19th century, were in fact the anti-Semites. And the most vociferous and bitter of Zionism’s opponents were, and remain, Jewish. When Theodore Herzl wanted to hold the first Zionist Congress in Munich in 1897, he was forced to move it from Germany to Basle in Switzerland because of the opposition of the local Jewish community. [14]
Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism – not least the Russian pogroms of 1881 in the wake of the assassination of tsar Alexander II. Hundreds were killed in nearly three years of pogroms. [15] In the Black Sea port of Odessa, centre of the Hebrew enlightenment (Haskallah), the pogroms spelt the end of the dream of the petty bourgeois Jewish intellectuals that the Jews could live on equal terms with the non-Jew. As Moshe Lillienblum wrote in The way of return (1881), “When I became convinced that it was not a lack of high culture that was the cause of our tragedy – for aliens we are and aliens we shall remain even if we become full to the brim with culture … all the old ideals left me.” [16] For the Zionists, as Pinsker noted above, anti-Semitism was an incurable disease. And if it was incurable it could not be fought. In this way Zionism was different from all other political currents among the Jews in its reaction to anti-Semitism: it accepted the main premise of the anti-Semites – viz. that the Jewish presence among non-Jews was unnatural and that they were strangers and aliens.
Isaac Deutscher observed:
“It should be remembered that the great majority of east European Jews were, up to the outbreak of World War II, opposed to Zionism ... the most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers ... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from east Europe to Palestine ... of an exodus from the countries in which they had their homes and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry, ‘Jews, get out!’ The Zionists were agreeing to get out.” [17] Herzl recognised both an identity of interest and a common ideology between Zionism and anti-Semitism. When he brought out his pamphlet Der Judenstaat in 1895, the warmest welcome was from anti-Semites: “Was at the printing office and talked with the managers ... both are presumably anti-Semites. They greeted me with genuine cordiality. They liked my pamphlet.” [18]
Desmond Stewart’s perceptive biography notes: “… already in 1896 Austrian anti-Semites were finding ammunition in Herzl’s arguments, as would the followers of Drumont …” [19] Eduard Drumont was one of the most important anti-Semitic ideologues of the 19th century. He wrote an influential book, La France juive (1886) and edited a daily paper, La Libre Parole, and was one of the leaders of the anti-Dreyfusards. Herzl was full of admiration for Drumont: “But I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist.” [20] Herzl lobbied for Drumont to review his pamphlet in La Libre Parole, which he did on January 15 1897, and he was delighted with the result. Drumont “praises the Zionists of Herzl’s persuasion for not seeing in us fanatics … but citizens who exercise the right of self-defence.” [21] Likewise Herzl’s deputy, Max Nordau, in an interview with Raphael Marchant, correspondent for La Libre Parole, observed that Zionism “is not a question of religion, but exclusively of race, and there is no one with whom I am in greater agreement on this position than M. Drumont.” [22] On this there was unanimous agreement amongst Zionist writers. The first Zionist theoretician was Moses Hess, an early acquaintance of Marx. In his pamphlet, Rome and Jerusalem, Hess wrote that “Race struggle is primary and class secondary”, [23] before going on to explain:
“The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than they hate their race – they hate the peculiar faith of the Jews less than their peculiar noses ... reform, conversion, education and emancipation – none of these open the gates of society to the German Jew, hence his desire to deny his racial origin.” [24]
Zionism and anti-Semitism shared the same political outlook and territory. Herzl soon realised that “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” [25] The touchstone both for Zionism and the anti-Semites (and later the Nazis) was their loathing of the French Revolution, which had liberated the Jews from the ghettos and granted political equality. The Zionists, like the orthodox rabbis, saw emancipation as the cause of all their ills. Zionism was the secular equivalent of Jewish orthodoxy. As Zionist historian Noah Lucas observed, “Zionism was the antagonist above all of the individual assimilation associated with emancipation.” [26] Max Nordau’s speech to the first Zionist Congress in 1897 derided the French Revolution and emancipation as a mere “geometric mode of thought of French rationalism”. Nordau’s only doubts regarding Zionism were that the Jews might not be “anthropologically fit for nationhood.” [27] Likewise Nahman Syrkin, the first ‘socialist’ Zionist, held that “Emancipation of the Jews was, from the beginning, a result of logical conformity to the implications of a principle rather than a real need.” [28]
It is often claimed that Herzl became a Zionist because of the 1894 Dreyfus affair – Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of espionage, stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil Island. This is unlikely. The Dreyfus affair became a cause célèbre and was proof that anti-Semitism could be successfully fought. It was this hostility to anti-Semitism which was to result in less than 25% of French Jews being exterminated in the holocaust. [29]
Desmond Stewart confirms that it is unlikely that Herzl’s Zionism derived from Dreyfus. [30] Likewise rabbi Elmer Berger:
“Where in all the world a century before would more than half a nation have come to the defence of a Jew? Had Herzl possessed a knowledge of history, he would have seen in the Dreyfus case a brilliant, heartening proof of the success of emancipation.” [31]
Herzl himself wrote:
“In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.” [32]
Antidote to socialism
Herzl’s strategy, which he was not to live to see fulfilled, was to appeal to the statesmen and rulers of Europe for an imperial alliance with the fledgling Zionist movement. In the course of his travels, he met with the German emperor, tsarist ministers counts Witte and von Plehve, the Ottoman sultan, Lord Cromer, Joseph Chamberlain, King Victor Emmanuel and even the pope! His message was always the same – help the Zionist movement and you are helping the Jewish opponents of socialism and revolution.
Leonard Stein notes:
“The events of 1917 made it natural to turn to Zionism as a stabilising force in the Jewish world, and to value it for its power … to provide an antidote to the destructive mania of Jews in rebellion against their lot …” [33]
To the German Kaiser Herzl wrote:
“Our movement, which is already widespread, has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret.” [34]
And when he reiterated this theme to the grand duke of Baden, the latter replied, regarding the need to keep the Zionist societies legal in Russia: “Pobedonostev ought to hear that. You should tell it to him.” [35] The grand duke had just one worry, according to Herzl:
“He took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism.” [36]
When Herzl met German foreign minister von Bulow, “The anti-socialist aspect of Zionism was gone into in the greatest detail.” [37] And when he finally got to see the Kaiser, he lost no time in explaining: “We were taking the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.” [38] The climax of Herzl’s search for anti-Semitic allies came with his visit in August 1903 to the tsar’s interior minister, von Plehve, who had organised the pogroms at Kishinev barely four months previously. As Herzl was explaining Zionism, Plehve interrupted him: “You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti” (You are preaching to a convert). [39]
This meeting was crucial to Herzl’s plans. Alone amongst political movements, Zionism in Russia was to remain legal. Plehve wrote a letter pledging “moral and material assistance”, a letter which became “Herzl’s most cherished asset.” [40] (It is difficult to overestimate the loathing with which the tsarist ministers were held in by Jews. The name of Plehve “had a resonance of evil later echoed later by that of Adolf Eichmann.” [41]) As a result of Herzl’s lobbying “there was no prohibition on Zionist activities and an official permit was even given for the holding of the second conference of Russian Zionists at Minsk (September 1902).” [42]
On February 17 1904, Plehve visited London, where he was interviewed by Lucien Wolfe for The Times. Plehve all but admitted that he had organised the pogroms “because Jewish youth were wholly giving themselves over to the revolutionary movements”. However, he “would not oppose the encouragement of Zionist ideas in Russia so far as they were calculated to favour emigration” and “he also thought that for non-emigrants they might be useful as an antidote to socialist doctrines.” [43] Years later Jabotinsky, leader of the revisionist Zionists, was to hold similar talks with the Ukrainian leader, Petlyura, whose fascist gangs murdered some 100,000 Jews between 1918 and 1921. As Lacquer admits, “The main culprit regarding the pogroms were the nationalist forces under Petliura.” [44]
It is often claimed that Zionism is a progressive, even socialist, movement. Yet the phenomenon of ‘socialist’ Zionism occurred only because Jewish workers in Eastern Europe gave their backing to the revolutionary and socialist parties, since they fought anti-Semitism. The Bund’s leaders claimed that the socialism of the left Zionists was a deliberate sham, that they wore a red mask to hide their real intentions and to adjust themselves to the radical Zeitgeist. [45] Of ‘left’ Zionism, Lucas notes: “Zionism came into direct conflict with the Jewish proletariat’s perceived interest. It was in this context that the ideas of socialist Zionism were formulated.” [46] In practice whenever the needs of Zionism and socialism conflicted, it was the latter which gave way. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, put it succinctly in 1921:
“Whenever we come across a contradiction between national and socialist principles, the contradiction should be resolved by relinquishing the socialist principle in favour of the national activity. We shall not accept the contrary attempt to solve the contradiction by dispensing with the national interest in favour of the socialist idea.” [47]
Justifiable reaction
It was a commonplace among the Zionist leaders that anti-Semitism was an understandable, if not justified, reaction to an alien Jewish presence. Jacob Klatzkin, an important Zionist intellectual and editor of its official paper, Die Welt, and co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, argued: “We are in a word naturally foreigners. We are an alien nation in your midst and we want to remain one.” [48] Klatzkin was inevitably drawn into justifying anti-Semitism:
“The contribution of our enemies is in the continuance of Jewry in eastern Europe. One ought to appreciate the national service which the Pale of Settlement performed for us ... we ought to be thankful to our oppressors that they closed the gates of assimilation to us and took care that our people were concentrated and not dispersed.” [49]
This theme, that anti-Semitism contains a force for good, is a constant one in Zionism, as was Klatzkin’s hatred of the Jewish diaspora (Galut):
“Galut can only drag out the disgrace of our people and sustain the existence of a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror. At the very worst it can maintain us in a state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature … The result will be something neither Jewish nor gentile – in any case, not a pure national type ...” [50]
The logic was clear: “Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends who desire to defend our rights.” [51] Nor was this merely rhetorical. At one meeting against anti-Semitism, called by the German Jewish communal body Centralverein, “Zionist and anti-Semitic hecklers took the same ground.” [52] As Niewyk asks, “Did the Zionists’ view of deformed Jewish lives outside of Palestine reinforce the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews as materialists, exploiters and traitors?” [53]
Herzl’s later successor and first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, negotiated the Balfour declaration. As home secretary in 1905, Arthur J Balfour had introduced the Aliens Act to keep out Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms. In 1902 Herzl had given evidence to the Royal Commission on Aliens’ Immigration, advocating restrictions on Jewish immigration: “Herzl’s appearance before the commission could have only two effects. The anti-Semites would be able to say that Dr Herzl, the expert, maintained that a Jew could never become an Englishman.” [54] When requested by Lord Rothschild not to support those advocating restrictions on Jewish immigration, he replied:
“I would be a mean creature if I said only things that could lead to a restriction of immigration. But I would be one of those mean creatures to whom the English Jews ought to erect a monument out of gratitude, because I saved them from an influx of east European Jews and thus perhaps anti-Semitism.” [55]
Besides being an anti-Semite, Balfour was also an ardent Zionist. Even today the Zionist headquarters in Finchley are called Balfour House. The main anti-immigration group of the early 20th century was led by Tory MP William Evans-Gordon. In his autobiography Weizmann wrote:
“The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew up around it were natural phenomena which might have been foreseen ... Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches saturation point, that country reacts against them … England had reached the point when she could or would absorb so many Jews and no more … The reaction against this cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word ... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice ... he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk.” [56]
Perhaps this sentiment is best summed up by Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua: “Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.” [57]
In the next article we will see how the traditional Zionist attitude to anti-Semitism did not change in the era of the Nazi holocaust. On the contrary, if anything, it became firmer, sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the process.
Notes
1. B. Kimmerling, Politicide, London 2006, p.123.
2. Jewish Chronicle, August 6 2004.
3. D. Rennie, The Daily Telegraph, October 13 2004.
4. See R. Hilberg, The destruction of European Jewry, New York 1985, p.19.
5. See, for example, G. Reitlinger, The final solution, London 1953, p.388. The Slovakian catholic fascists, who had no compunction in deporting ‘full’ Jews, refused to allow baptised Jews to be deported. The same was true throughout Europe, including Hungary and Romania.
6. See A. Ruppin, The Jews in the modern world, London 1934, p.22; cited in A. Leon, The Jewish question – a Marxist interpretation, New York 1980, p.68.
7. L. Pinsker, Autoemanzipation, ein Mahnruf an seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden, Berlin 1882, p.5.
8. A. Leon, op. cit., p.247.
9. On the Jewish question, Selected essays by Karl Marx, New York 1926, p.88.
10. A. Leon, op. cit., p.71.
11. I. Shahak, Jewish history, Jewish religion, London 1994, p.52.
12. Ibid., pp.66-67.
13. A. Leon, op. cit., p.226.
14. N. Weinstock, Zionism, a false messiah, 1969, p.39.
15. D. Vital, The origins of Zionism, Oxford 1980, pp.51-55.
16. Quoted in A. Hertzberg, The Zionist idea – a historical analysis and reader, New York 1981, pp.169-170.
17. I. Deutscher, The Russian Revolution and the Jewish question, The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays, pp.66-67.
18. M. Lowenthall, The diaries of T Herzl, New York 1962, p.91.
19. D. Stewart, Theodor Herzl, New York 1974, p.25.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p.251 fn.
22. Ibid., p.322.
23. M. Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, Foreword, New York 1958.
24. Ibid., p.49. See also p.71.
25. R. Patai (ed.), The complete diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol.1, London 1960: entry for June 11 1895.
26. N. Lucas, The modern history of Israel, New York 1975, p.18.
27. Complete diaries, pp.275-76.
28. N. Syrkin, The Jewish problem and the socialist-Jewish state; cited in A. Hertzberg op. cit., p.337.
29. Reitlinger estimates that 60-65,000 French Jews died in the extermination camps, Hilberg puts the figure at 75,000 out of some 300,000.
30. D. Stewart, Theodore Herzl – artist and politician, London 1974, p.164.
31. Ibid., p.167.
32. Ibid., p.6.
33. L. Stein, The Balfour declaration, London 1961, p.162.
34. R. Patai (ed.), op. cit., p.596.
35. Ibid., p.657.
36. M. Lowenthall, op. cit., p.118.
37. Ibid., p.666.
38. Ibid., p.729.
39. R. Patai (ed.), op. cit., p.1,525.
40. M. Menhuin, Decadence of Judaism in our time, New York 1969, p.46.
41. D. Stewart, op. cit., p.316.
42. C. Weizmann, Letters and papers, Vol 2, Oxford 1971, p.284.
43. Ibid., Vol.3, p.216 fn.
44. W. Lacqueur, A history of Zionism, New York 1975, p.441.
45. B. Ehud, Zionismus oder Sozialismus, Warsaw l899, p.30; and L. Monst Origins of the Russian-Jewish, Melbourne 1947, p.136; cited in W. Lacqueur, op. cit., p.273.
46. N. Lucas, op. cit., p.35.
47. Achduth, No.16, Tel Aviv 1921; cited in Machover and Offenburg, Zionism and its scarecrows, pp.49-50.
48. J. Klatzkin, Krisis und Entscheidung in Judentum, Berlin 1921, p.118; cited in K. Hermann, Zionism and racism, Guildford 1976, p.204.
49. Ibid., p.205.
50. Ibid., p.322-23.
51. J. Klatzkin in B. Matovu, The Zionist wish and the Nazi deed; cited in U. Davies, Zionism – utopia incorporated, p.17.
52. D.L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, Louisiana, p.139, fn.68; citing Israelitisches Familienblatt, June 3 1920.
53. Ibid.
54. W. Lacqueur, op. cit., p.119.
55. R. Patai (ed.), op. cit., pp.1,292-93.
56. C. Weizmann, Trial and error, New York 1966, pp.90-91.
57. Jewish Chronicle, January 22 1982.
Part 2
Tony Greenstein continues his examination of the unholy alliance between anti-Semitism and Zionism. With the coming to power of the Nazis the collaboration reached new depths
In his address to the 20th Zionist congress in August 1937, Chaim Weizmann recalled being asked whether he was saying that Palestine could accommodate all six million of Europe’s Jews. He replied:
“The old ones will pass, they will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world … Two millions, and perhaps less. She’erit Hapletah. We have to accept it.” [1]
Six years later, Ben-Gurion, chair of the Jewish Agency (JA) in 1943, warned that “Hitler’s regime puts the entire Jewish people in danger.” [2] The Nazis had made their intentions very clear. On January 30 1939 Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, declared:
“Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.” [3]
The Zionist record in relation to the holocaust was the logical outcome of a movement which, throughout the war, and in the face of the Nazi exterminations, prioritised above everything the building of a Jewish state.
Racial definitions of Jewry
German anti-Semites had long given their seal of approval to Zionism. Heinrich Class, president of the Pan German League, was made an honorary member of the Reichstag on Hitler’s assumption of power. “German anti-Semites regarded Class’s book as ‘trailblazing’ and his influence on the National Socialists was decisive ...” [4]
In his book If I was the Kaiser he wrote:
“Those who regard the Jews as a foreign race … must honour the fact that among the Jews themselves the nationalist movement called Zionism is gaining more and more adherents ... They also declare openly that a true assimilation of the Jewish aliens to the host nations would be impossible according to the natural laws of race ... the Zionists confirm what the enemies of the Jews, the adherents of the racial theory, have always asserted ...” [5]
Kurt Blumenfeld of the Union of German Zionists wrote to Walter Rathenau, a government minister: “Under no circumstance does a Jew have the right to represent the affairs of another people.” [6]
At no time did the Zionist movement join any campaign against the Nazis. [7] Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who later became chairman of the American Jewish Congress (AJC), wrote:
“[The Jews] have been drawn out of the last recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it … We want to replace assimilation by something new. The declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built according to the principles of purity of the nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.” [8]
On June 21 1933, the German Zionist Federation wrote a memorandum to the Nazi government:
“On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit in our community into the total structure so that for us too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible … Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews.” [9]
On January 28 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, the “real engineer of the final solution” [10], issued a directive stating:
“The activity of the Zionist-orientated youth organisations … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership … [these organisations] are not to be treated with the strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German Jewish organisations (assimilationists).” [11]
In April 1935 Heydrich issued another directive advocating the harassment of the non-Zionist German Jewish organisations. The result was that “Zionist groups were the only ones of a political nature that were allowed to continue functioning.” [12]
In October 1941 the Gestapo demanded that the renamed Reichsvereinigung hand over several thousand names to them and questionnaires. They acceded to the demand “in order to be able to do as much good as possible in the interests of the victims.” [13]
On May 15 1935, Schwarze Korps argued that
“The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine are helping to build their own Jewish state ... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany ... in order to subvert National Socialist principles.” [14]
As Hanna Arendt pointed out, “It is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy, the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude.” [15] Arendt’s book caused outrage in the Zionist movement. Her crime was to shine a light on events that the Eichmann trial had been designed to bury. A campaign of smears and disinformation against Arendt began.
“Even before its publication, this book became both the centre of a controversy and the object of an organised campaign ... The clamour centred on the ‘image’ of a book which was never written … I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had murdered themselves. And why had I told such a monstrously implausible lie? Out of ‘self-hatred’, of course.” [16]
One of the most infamous of the Nazi measures was the requirement for Jews to wear the yellow star. Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau, coined the slogan “Wear it with pride, the yellow star.” [17]
On September 15 1935, the Nuremburg laws, “the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history” [18] , were enacted, depriving German Jews of their citizenship and forbidding sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. The introduction to the Nuremburg laws stated:
“The least amount of opposition to the underlying ideas of the Nuremburg laws has been raised by the Zionists, because they know at once that these laws represent the only correct solution for the Jewish people as well.” [19]
Arendt noted in the Eichmann trial that
“... there certainly was something breathtaking in the naivety with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans, [since] Israeli citizens … seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage.” [20]
Transfer agreement
At a time when Jews, trade unionists and anti-fascists were launching a worldwide economic boycott of Nazi Germany, the World Zionist Organisation was secretly negotiating an economic agreement which allowed richer German Jews to liquidate their property in Germany and redeem part of the money in Palestine. This agreement was announced by the Nazis shortly before the 18th Zionist congress in Prague, in September 1933.
The Jewish Chronicle reported:
“The spectacle is puzzling to the world, whose sympathy we bespeak, and disheartening to Jews for whom the boycott is one of the few weapons to their hand and who now see themselves deserted by the movement which they most have a right to claim as an ally in their fight.” [21]
Some 60% of all capital invested in the settler economy in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany! [22] By June 1937, the largest exporter to Palestine was Germany. [23] As Baruch Vladeck, chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee in the USA described it, Palestine had become “the official scab-agent against the boycott in the Near East”. [24]
There were some boycotts that the Zionists did support. In 1941 Agudat Yisrael began sending food packages to the inhabitants of the ghettos in Poland. In July the AJC and the Zionist Organisation of America began picketing their offices. It is estimated that 25% of the Warsaw ghetto and 18% of the Lódz ghetto died from hunger and disease even before the deportations had begun. [25] Hans Frank spoke of a “sentence of hunger death” against 1.2 million Jews. [26]
The Judenräte
Everywhere the Nazis conquered, “the most important concentration measure prior to the formation of the ghettos was the establishment of Jewish councils (Judenräte).” [27] As Eichmann commented, “The assimilated Jew was, of course, very unhappy about being moved to a ghetto. But the orthodox were pleased with the arrangement, as were the Zionists.” [28] Some two-thirds of the Judenräte consisted of Zionist supporters. [29] There were three stages to the final solution – concentration in ghettos, deportation to the east and extermination. Everywhere there were functioning Judenräte, the Nazis were successful in their plans. The Prague Community Council was to provide the model for the Judenräte, which in the towns of Poland and Russia in 1941-43 registered the names of their flock, brought them to the assembly place, and eventually followed them to the execution pits and death camps. [30] The Judenräte were reviled by the Jewish population and with good reason. The Nazis insisted that “the authority of the Jewish council be upheld and strengthened under all circumstances”. [31]
Unable to fulfil their welfare function, “they made themselves felt all the more in their implementation of Nazi decrees. With the growth of the destructive function of the Judenräte, many Jewish leaders felt an almost irresistible urge to look like their German masters.” A Nazi observer in Kraków in March 1940 “was struck by the contrast between poverty and filth in the Jewish quarter and the businesslike luxury of the Jewish community headquarters.” In Warsaw, “the Jewish oligarchy took to wearing boots”. [32] In Lódz, Rumkowski had his portrait put on ghetto stamps and currency.
Arendt’s conclusion provoked outrage among the Zionists:
“The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganised and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” [33]
As Steinberg observed, “This argument provoked a general outcry among the Jewish historians of the catastrophe, but could not be refuted.” After all “The Jewish Councils had been created by the Germans for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews …” [34]
SS captain Dieter Wisliceny explained:
“Our system is to exterminate the Jews through the Jews. We concentrate the Jews in the ghettos – through Jews; we deport the Jews – by the Jews; and we gas the Jews – by the Jews.” [35]
Selectivity
The Zionists negotiated with the SS to secure facilities to train their pioneers in Europe and then bring them to Palestine. Ehud Avriel noted that “… there is keen competition for patronage of our work among the Nazis.” [36]
“… these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann. They had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine and they were not interested in rescue operations. That was not their job ... They wanted to select ‘suitable material’...” [37]
The ‘rescue activities’ of the Zionist movement were concentrated on saving the elite of their own organisations in Europe. Henry Montor, executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal explained:
“By ‘selectivity’ is meant the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes either in agriculture or industry and who are in other ways trained for life in Palestine ... There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism ... if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables … Until the resources of Palestine are adequately developed, immigration of 30,000 to 60,000 a year may be possible.” [38]
Selectivity was the explicit policy of the Zionist movement, as Chaim Cohen, attorney general confirmed, when conducting the appeal of Rudolph Kastner:
“If in Kastner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?” [39]
Lucy Dawidowicz explained:
“The Zionist movement itself set up rigid standards for prospective immigrants, … which to begin with excluded anti-Zionists as applicants for certificates. Young people in good health, with some training for agricultural work or manual trades, and persons with capital were the preferred candidates for Aliyah in a process where the needs and interests of Palestine took precedence over a strategy of rescue.” [40]
Refugeeism and territorialism
Why did all wings of the Zionist movement play down reports of annihilation and obstruct the rescue efforts of others? Nathan Schwalb, Hehalutz representative in Switzerland, provided one explanation, in a letter to Rabbi Michael Weissmandel in late 1942:
“After the victory [of the Allies], they will once again divide up the world between the nations, as they did at the end of the first war … we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations’ territories after the war? ... Because only through blood will the land be ours.” [41]
There was no more determined opponent of ‘refugeeism’, as it was termed, than Ben-Gurion:
“… are we again, in moments of desperation, going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism ... Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the Second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe ... Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.” [42]
In a letter December 17 1938 to the Zionist Executive, Ben-Gurion explained:
“…if the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and … also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.” [43]
Zionist historian Noah Lucas commented:
“As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism. Just as Weizmann in the first world war had realised the opportunities presented by the fluid political situation, so now Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe.” [44]
Describing a press conference he gave on his return from the USA,
“Ben-Gurion dwelt at length and replied to questions on the following topics: America in general and American Jewry in particular, anti-Semitism in America, the Biltmore Plan … As for the holocaust – not a word. Nothing was said, nothing was asked; the subject was simply not on the agenda.” [45]
The Evian conference, which met from July 6-15 1938, was called by president Roosevelt to try and find a solution to the problem of Jewish refugees. It was a face-saving exercise and very few offers to take in refugees were made.
Christopher Sykes wrote:
“The Zionists, who played no part in the conference, were not worried by its failure ... From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference ... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need, then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing the Zionist leaders wished for ...” [46]
Lucas reached exactly the same conclusion:
“The Zionists were not displeased by the failure of the Evian conference, since the opening up of the barriers to immigration elsewhere would have eased the pressure in Palestine.” [47]
Apart from the Dominican Republic, which offered to admit 100,000 Jews, virtually no other state was willing to accept Jewish refugees. Beit Zvi describes in detail how the Zionist movement set out to prevent the offer of the Dominican Republic being implemented. [48] Richard Crossman, a vehemently pro-Zionist Labour cabinet minister, wrote: “The Zionists’ ... main preoccupation is not to save Jews alive out of Europe, but to get Jews into Palestine.” [49]
The chairman of the ‘Rescue Committee’ of the JA in Palestine was Yitzhak Greenbaum. Not only did the committee lack an organisational base, budget and administration, but for a long time it even lacked a permanent name! [50] Greenbaum’s explained his policy:
“And when I was asked, ‘But could you donate from the resources of the United Jewish Appeal (Foundation Fund) for the rescue of Jews in Europe,’ I said no. And I say again no … In my opinion one should resist this wave which relegates the Zionist activities to secondary importance. And because of that I was called anti-Semitic and was judged to be responsible for the fact that we do not absorb ourselves completely in the rescue activity.” [51]
Greenbaum was consistent in his views that the needs of Zionism took precedence over the need to save European Jewry. He faced criticism, in particular from Melech Neustadt of Poalei Zion-Hitahdut, yet even Neustadt sought only to save the activists of the Zionist movement, not Jewry as a whole. [52] Greenbaum related in Haboker of December 7 1942 how his comrades from Poland “would always ask me to sound the alarm and I would throw cold water on their ideas and cool their enthusiasm.” [53]
By 1936 there was an extensive system of Zionist agricultural training centres throughout north Germany. Throughout 1935-36 the JA was permitted to send training instructors from Palestine to Germany. [54] Hagannah agent Feivel Polkes “declared himself ready to gather information for Germany that did not conflict with his own political ends. Among other things, he would vigorously support German foreign policy interests in the Middle East and use his influence to secure sources of oil for the German Reich … if German foreign currency regulations for Jews emigrating to Palestine would be relaxed.” [55]
Polkes wanted the Nazis to use their powers of persuasion to ensure that German refugees only went to Palestine. The Gestapo was happy to do “everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.” [56] SS files show that in return for information from Polkes on Jewish attempts to kill Hitler, “pressure will be exerted on the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland to oblige Jews who emigrate from Germany to go exclusively to Palestine, and not to other countries.” [57] Not only were the Zionists trying to close the doors of Britain and the USA to Jewish refugees: they were pressing the Nazis not to allow anyone to leave unless it was for Palestine, and passing information to the Gestapo.
Suppressing the holocaust story
Davar, the official JA newspaper, stated in an editorial in 1944 that “The Nazi denial of extermination has a good foundation.” [58] On April 11 of that year the concentration of Hungary’s Jews begins. No mention is made in the Zionist press. On May 11 1944 another speech of Ben Gurion and again no mention of Hungary. On May 15 the deportations begin. Moshe Sharrett makes a speech – again no mention of the danger to the Hungary’s Jews. On May 21, after some 60,000 Jews have been deported, Ben Gurion delivers a speech – again no mention of Hungary’s Jews. On May 23, Ehud Avriel sends a cable from the Zionist information office in Istanbul concerning the murder of Hungary’s Jews in Auschwitz. It has had this information since the end of April. On July 10 Davar publishes a small item of news about the deportations from dissident Zionist Moshe Krauss in Budapest. One day earlier, Horthy had ordered a halt to the deportations. For six weeks, until July 16, the JA utters not a single word about the deportations from Hungary.
Kastner, leader of Hungarian Zionism, testified that:
“I learned that the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee representatives in Switzerland, Moshe Schwalb and Saly Mayer, did not give out information to the press about the mass killings: they failed to give the press the news I sent from Budapest. I sent cables also to Istanbul Rescue Committee (of the Jewish Agency). They were also kept secret from the press. I informed them almost daily by cable about the pace of extermination. My cables were never published anywhere.” [59]
When confronted at the annual meeting of the WJC by Jewish survivors from Poland as to why they had refused to publicise the exterminations, the executive stated candidly: “The opinion of the executive board was that it was inadvisable because of our diplomatic ties with these governments.” [60]
In a Histadrut Council meeting in early December 1942, Anshel Reis, from the Association of Polish Immigrants, mentioned the pamphlet Stop them now of Zygelbolm and Wedgewood containing details of the exterminations. “Where were we? Why did our news agencies not report this? What did we do to stop the slaughter?” And Moshe Aram replied “Reis is right. For months, we – the Yishuv and the Histadrut and the haverim and the functionaries – have been unwitting accomplices to murder.” [61]
As early as 1940, Beit Zvi notes that the first direct reports of the killings in Poland had reached the JA from Zionist activists Bartglass and Koerner, and again in 1941 when Jewish refugees had reached Palestine from Vilna via the USSR. [62] There were two reports published in Palestine concerning the exterminations citing Hungarian soldiers returning home, who stated that nearly a quarter a million Ukrainian Jews had been massacred. The second report, emanating from Molotov, cited the murder of 100,000 Ukrainian Jews. Alongside these reports was an editorial comment:
“There is no doubt that the Nazi murderers spilled blood like water in the areas of occupation. However, all the large numbers cited from ‘soldiers returning from the front’ must naturally be taken with considerable restraint.” [63]
The following day there was a longer piece by one of the paper’s editors, Dan Pines, which spoke of
“... various irresponsible informants (who) are continuing to kill Jews with their own hands. They scoop up every rumour … and submit it to the papers … Do the disseminators of the reports … not realise that many people are not inclined to become overly excited about the facts and figures in these reports because their exaggerated character renders them untrustworthy?” [64]
Coming from the official paper of the JA, Pines’s comments carried significant weight with the other Zionist papers. For example, Hamashkif reduced the number of Jews murdered to “thousands”. Beit Zvi comments that Göbbels “in his wildest dreams” could not have dreamt of the kind of treatment that the Zionist press accorded the holocaust. On March 23 1943, Davar was reprimanded by Yosef Gravitzky of Palcor for copying a ‘report’ from the Nazi paper Ostland, that two million Jews remained in Poland.
Numerous ‘reports’ and false information were concocted by the ministry of propaganda in Berlin. Unfortunately they found an echo in the Palestine press. The religious Zionist paper, Hatzofeh, printed an editorial The high price of blood, four days before the Zygelboim report. It declared that “if authentication should prove impossible, it is better not to carry the report”. As Beit Zvi remarked, “Before a report concerning the annihilation of Jews could be absorbed in the country … it required confirmation by the information apparatus of the Third Reich.” [65]
On August 10 1942 in an editorial Davar argued: “Some of the numbers concerning the slaughter of tens of thousands which were published recently seemed to be exaggerated … From this point of view, the Nazi denial may be trustworthy.” [66] On November 8 it reported that its information on Poland was being supplied “according to German statistics, which are faithful in these instances”. [67]
Finally on November 12 1942 a JA communiqué admitted that the final solution was underway. This was because of reports from a group of Jews from Europe, including Poland, coming to Palestine in exchange for German citizens interned by the British. [68]
On December 7 of that year Haboker ran an item, ‘Sensational announcement by Y. Greenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee: We knew about the massacres in August but didn’t make them public’ [69]
A further report arrived in Geneva concerning the Vatican’s apostolic mission, Monsignore Martilotti, of Slovakia. It detailed the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews. For two weeks, until August 30, Richard Lichteim of the JA delayed sending it to Palestine. [70]
Notes
1. A. Hertzberg, The Zionist idea – a historical analysis and reader, New York 1981, p.588.
2. S. Teveth, Ben-Gurion – the burning ground 1886-1948, Boston 1987, p.445.
3. G. Reitlinger, The final solution, London 1953, p.22.
4. L. Dawidowicz, The war against the Jews 1933-45, London 1975, p.88.
5. P. Massing, Rehearsal for destruction, New York 1949, p.247.
6. N. Weinstock, Zionism – a false messiah, London 1979, p.135.
7. D.L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, Louisiana, p.372.
8. Wir Juden, Berlin 1934, p.154.
9. L. Dawidowicz, op. cit., pp.231-2; F. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine question, London 1985, p.42; L. Brenner Zionism in the age of the dictators, Croom-Helm, 1983, pp.48-49.
10. G. Reitlinger, op. cit., p.13.
11. Ibid., pp.118, 240.
12. F. Nicosia, op. cit., p.57.
13. Ibid., p.179.
14. L. Dawidowicz, op. cit., p.118, citing Schleunes, The twisted road to Auschwitz.
15. H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem – the banality of evil, London 1994, p.58.
16. Ibid., pp.282-84.
17. Ibid., p.59.
18. G. Reitlinger, op. cit., p.7.
19. F. Nicosia, op. cit., p.51.
20. H. Arendt, op. cit., p.7.
21. L. Brenner, Zionism in the age of the dictators, Westport 1983, p.73.
22. Ibid., p.65.
23. F. Nicosia, op. cit., p.49.
24. L. Brenner, 51 documents, New Jersey 2002, p.93.
25. L. Steinberg, Jews Against Hitler, New York 1978, p.182.
26. Ibid., p.216.
27. R. Hilberg, The destruction of European Jews, New York 1985, p.75.
28. L. Brenner, 51 documents, New Jersey 2002, p.274.
29. I. Trunk, Judenrat: the Jewish councils in eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, New York 1972.
30. G. Reitlinger, op. cit., p.24.
31. Ibid., p.299.
32. R. Hilberg, op. cit., pp.76-77.
33. Ibid., p.125.
34. L. Steinberg, op. cit., p.109.
35. B. Hecht, Perfidy, New York 1961, fn 68, p.261. Hecht’s book shook the Zionist movement to its foundations. The Zionists attacked Hecht for not being a good Zionist (i.e., not keeping quiet!).
36. E. Avriel, Open the gates, London 1975, p.72.
37. H. Arendt, op. cit., p.61.
38. B. Hecht, op. cit., fn 7, p.255.
39. Ibid., p.195.
40. Report to the 19th Zionist congress and 4th council of the JA, July 1935; cited in L. Dawidowicz, op. cit., pp.238-39.
41. R. Moshe Shonfield, Documents and testimony on Jewish war criminals, 1977, p.27-28. When this quote was used in the play Perdition, Uri Davies was sued by Schwalb for libel. Schwalb subsequently withdrew his action. See also S. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, pp.295-96.
42. 49th annual convention of Zionist Organisation of America, New York Times, October 27 1946. Eliezer Livneh declared during a symposium organised by Maariv in 1966 that “For the Zionist leadership, the rescue of Jews was not an aim in itself, but only a means” (Communist Party of Israel, Information Bulletin, 1969, p.l97).
43. Y. Elam, Introduction to Zionist history, Tel Aviv 1972, pp125-26. See also Ot, paper of youth cadre of Mapai, No.2, winter 1967.
44. N. Lucas, The modern history of Israel, 1975.
45. Ibid., p.89, citing Ha’aretz, October 9 1942.
46. C. Sykes, Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948, London 1973, p.188-91.
47. N. Lucas, op. cit., fn 2, p.458.
48. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., pp.315-64.
49. R.H. Crossman, Washington Diary, 1946.
50. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., p.99.
51. Statement to Zionist executive council on the holocaust and on the reaction, February 18 1943.
52. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., p.107.
53. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., p.45.
54. F. Nicosia, op. cit., pp.58-60.
55. Ibid., p.62.
56. Ibid., p.57.
57. Ibid., p.63. Polkes’s file in the Hagannah Archives in Tel Aviv remains closed to researchers for reasons which are self-evident (see F. Nicosia, op. cit., fn.65, p.245). Polkes arranged in his contacts with Eichmann and other Jewish ‘experts’ for arms supplies, Mauser pistols in particular, to be smuggled to Palestine in barrels of cement.
58. B. Hecht, op. cit., p.145.
59. Ibid., p.91.
60. Davar, January 12 1945.
61. Davar, December 4 1942.
62. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., p.34, citing Etgar, June 29 1961.
63. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., p.39.
64. Davar, March 17 1942.
65. Ibid., p.51.
66. Ibid., p.52.
67. Ibid., p.54.
68. S. Beit Zvi, op. cit., pp.59-60.
69. Ibid., p.64.
70. Ibid., p.69.
In his third article on Zionism, Tony Greenstein continues his examination of collaboration and denial
Part 3
Because the Nazis did not occupy Hungary till March 1944, “the country became an island of safety in an ocean of destruction” for about a third of a million Jews from neighbouring countries. [1] On April 17 1944 the Hungarian regent, Miklós Horthy, visited Hitler to discuss Hungary’s role in the war. Hitler was not best pleased with Hungary’s Jewish policy.
According to Dr Paul Schmidt,
“If the Jews there [Poland] did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become infected ... Why should the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism be spared more? Nations who did not rid themselves of Jews perished.” [2]
Schmidt felt that this practice should be implemented everywhere, but by 1944 the one country in German-occupied Europe with a major Jewish community left untouched by the holocaust was Hungary. It was the only Axis country to send Jewish troops to the eastern front. [3] That might account for reports that the Hungarian army had stopped an action by local police against the Jews and that Einsatzgruppe paramilitaries had cleared an area of Jews “except for a small area occupied by Hungarian forces.” [4]
Some three-quarter million Jews were living in Hungary when Adolph Eichmann and 300 Gestapo men arrived on March 15 1944. The same evening Eichmann summoned the Jewish leaders to a conference to persuade them to form a Judenrat (Jewish council). This was a time when, according to the papal nuncio, “the whole world knew what deportation meant in practice.” [5]
The Nazis also formed a ‘rescue committee’ whose de facto leader was Rudolph Kasztner of the minority Mapai (Labour Party) faction amongst the Zionists. When they met the Zionists, Eichmann did not try to lie or deceive as to the fate of the deportees. However, the Zionists were allowed greater privileges than those normally accorded members of a Judenrat: they were “free to come and go practically as they pleased”. They were exempt from wearing the yellow star and received permits to visit concentration camps in Hungary. Kasztner “could even travel about Nazi Germany without any identification papers showing he was a Jew”. [6]
The bargain that Kasztner and Eichmann struck resulted in a train carrying 1,684 members of the Zionist elite going to Switzerland. Eichmann also offered to send 15,000-18,000 Jews to Vienna to be kept on ice (auf Eis gelegt) pending negotiations with the Allies. These Jews were actually sent to the Vienna-Strasshof concentration camp. It was only the Nazis’ military collapse that prevented the women and children being subject to ‘special treatment’. [7]
Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz five weeks before the deportation of Hungary’s Jews (see below), wrote in the Daily Herald in February 1961:
“I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kasztner up in SS uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends.” [8]
Even Hungary’s Zionist chief rabbi Freudiger admitted that half the Jews could have been saved if they had ignored the instructions of the Jewish councils. [9] He also admitted that he received the Vrba report about Auschwitz on May 10-11 and immediately arranged his own escape. Unfortunately the rest of Hungarian Jewry was not let in on the secret. [10] Eichmann described his relationship with the Zionists in an interview he gave to a Dutch Nazi journalist, Willem Sassens, in 1955:
“This Dr Kasztner … agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews … was not too high for me ... With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.
“Dr Kasztner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel ... As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders …
“I believe that Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. ‘You can have the others,’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’ And because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape.” [11]
In 1953 Malchiel Greenwald, produced a news sheet in Israel accusing Kasztner, by then a senior functionary of the ruling Mapai party, of being a collaborator. The government sued for libel on Kasztner’s behalf in the Jerusalem district court. Judge Benjamin Halevi found against Kasztner on all but one point. By three to two the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s judgment, but it upheld the finding of facts by the lower court. It was an explicitly political judgment.
Kasztner went to Nuremberg after the war in an attempt to exonerate Nazi leaders, including SS colonel Kurt Becher and SS general Hans Juttner. In all Kasztner tried to save seven of Eichmann’s Gestapo colleagues. In his trial, Kasztner even stated that Himmler had helped him save Jews. [12]
Kasztner was described by Robert Kempner, a senior official at the Nuremberg trial, as “running around at Nuremberg looking for Nazis he could save”. [13] Kasztner’s testimony was given on behalf of the Jewish Agency.
The Eichmann trial in 1961 was a response to the Kasztner trials. Thus began the Zionist attempt to mould the history of the holocaust into a Zionist pattern. Missing from history would be the anti-Zionist Bund and the communists, the two largest parties of the resistance. The Bund had led the resistance in Warsaw but Marek Edelman, deputy commander of ZOB, the Jewish Fighting Organisation, was deliberately not called to give evidence at the trial. [14] As Linn notes, Edelman “remained alive and kicking and refusing and, therefore, extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth”. [15] Neither was Rudolph Vrba called. He was not a Zionist.
The strange case of Rudolph Vrba
On April 7 1944 two Slovakian Jews, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz, having learnt of the preparations being made to receive Hungary’s Jews. Two weeks later they began dictating what became known as the Auschwitz protocols (AP) to the Slovakian Jewish Council. By April 28 the AP was in the hands of Rudolph Kasztner. Yet there is no disputing that those few who returned alive from the deportations were wholly ignorant about what ‘resettlement’ meant. [16] News of the death camps was deliberately kept from all but the ‘rescue committee’ and Jews on the privileged train. [17]
Kasztner even travelled to his home town of Kluj to reassure the Jews living there that they would be safe where they were going, even though Kluj was but a few kilometres from the border with Romania, which actually was a refuge for Jews. However, it was not the case of the weakness of one man. Kasztner was the official representative of the Jewish Agency. It is little wonder that on October 15 1945 all the survivors who trickled back to Kluj, whatever their political complexion tried Kasztner in absentia in a people’s court and pronounced him a war criminal. [18]
On May 15 1945 the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz began (there was one train of a thousand Budapest Jews on April 28). [19] Some 440,000 of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews were exterminated.
The AP had not only been given to Kasztner and the Hungarian Zionists but to the papal nuncio in Slovakia, who forwarded them to the Vatican, and also to rabbi Weissmandel, as well as having been translated into several languages. Kasztner also sent the AP to the Zionist representatives in Istanbul and in Switzerland, Nathan Schwalb. Schwalb’s primary interest was to prevent the Vrba-Wetzler report from being published so as not to disrupt Kasztner’s negotiation with Eichmann. [20] However, the report had been through too many hands for the Zionists to silence. A copy reached the representative of the Czech government in exile, Dr Kopecky, on June 10, as did the ‘Polish major’s report’ from a Polish medical student who had escaped from Auschwitz on March 24 1943. Kopecky acted at once, realising that the Czech ‘family camp’ in Auschwitz was in danger of liquidation. By June 18, the contents of the Vrba report were broadcast on the BBC.
Weissmandel ran a one-man rescue campaign. He was a man of many contradictions. An orthodox rabbi, he had been a philosophy student at Oxford and did everything he possibly could to prevent the holocaust, but politically he was naive, working closely with Zionists like Gizi Fleischmann on the Slovak Jewish Council. On May 15 1942 a constitutional law had been passed which exempted categories of Jews from deportation, including all those baptised before 1939. [21] By June 1942 the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews had stopped after all but 35,000 of the 88,000 had been deported.
The Bratislava Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee, including Weissmandel, believed they had stopped the deportations by bribing Wisliceny with $50,000. However, the Jews left belonged to the exempted categories. Weissmandel drew up a scheme, the Europa Plan, to save all Jews outside Poland with a $2 million bribe.
The deportations in Slovakia h

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/22/09 at 6:31 pm

Similar principle to the last post and irrelevant in the face of my earlier post. I’m not reading all that but I recognize the players.

You wish to discredit Zionists and Israel and Jews by unpleasant anecdotal and distorted accounts. A child understands that this kind of thing is not representative. Kastner was a toad. Weissmandel was a hero. People are only human, most people are not heroes, and in those days Nazi Germany was a political and military reality that had to be coped with as well as possible.

Above all, nobody here but you and me know what the hell you are talking about, and I have my doubts about you. The bottom line is that regardless of he actions or mistakes of our mortal administrations, Palestine is just a foreign designation for Eretz Yisrael, the ancient and eternal homeland for the Israelite/Jewish nation, and as predicted by our prophets we’re on the way back.

In religious terms, I often point out that the Jewish people as an entity is actually the firstborn son of God and the Suffering Servant; intermediary and savior of the gentiles; and when you study the various ambiguous statements of Jesus in the New Testament that reading makes even more sense. In the course of this discussion I see now that the renewal of the Jewish nation in its homeland could be read as a second coming of the Messiah.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/23/09 at 1:01 am

Yo Benny,

You state:

“In religious terms, I often point out that the Jewish people as an entity is actually the firstborn son of God and the Suffering Servant; intermediary and savior of the gentiles; and when you study the various ambiguous statements of Jesus in the New Testament that reading makes even more sense. In the course of this discussion I see now that the renewal of the Jewish nation in its homeland could be read as a second coming of the Messiah”.

How can anyone take you SERIOUSLY? Time after time you denigrate Yeshua of Nazareth & question His very existence?

Now you ask me to study His “various ambiguous statements in the New Testament.”

You know something, He was right about the Jews of His day. Its not that they could not understand what He said, but that they didn’t want to understand what He was saying.

The New Testament is a MIRROR TO THE JEWISH HEART, to those who see their SIN, & to those who try and hide their SIN. The antics of the Pharisees & Sadducees is the same TODAY as it was 2000 years ago.

You make a big boast of being The Chosen People, but did you ever ask yourself, “What were we Chosen for?”
Its just like some COSMIC SEINFELD SHOW.

God miraculously brings the Chosen Ones out of Egypt, but they turn their back on Him & offer HUMAN SACRIFICES TO MOLOCH.

God wants to DESTROY the Chosen Ones & start over again with a BETTER NATION, but Moses begs Him not to, acknowledging that they are a STIFF-NECKED PEOPLE. God agrees but He lays it on the line;

“If these STIFF-NECKED Chosen Ones think they can claim SPECIAL PRIVILEGES because I Chose them to do a work for Me, & go around living like PAGANS, I WILL KICK THEIR ASS FROM NOW & UNTIL THEY OBEY ME”.

And that has been the HISTORY OF THE JEWS ALL THROUGH HISTORY & WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THEY RECOGNIZE THEIR MESSIAH THAT THEY REJECTED. THIS IS EPIGENETICS AT ITS BEST. YOU WILL BOW YOUR KNEE TO THE MESSIAH YOU HAVE REJECTED, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, & ALL YOUR SMART-ASSED ATTITUDE WILL BE SILENCED.

 

I think this Joke I got on a Jewish website sums up your dilemma:

A reporter goes to Israel to cover the fighting. She is looking for something emotional and positive and of human interest. Something like that guy in Sarajevo who risked his life to play the cello everyday in the town square.

In Jerusalem, she heard about an old Jew who had been going to the Wailing Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out. She goes to the Wailing Wall and there he is!

So she watches him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turns to leave, she approaches him for an interview.

“Rebecca Smith, CNN News. Sir, how long have you been coming to the Wall and praying?”

“For about 50 years.”

“What do you pray for?”

“For peace between the Jews and the Arabs. For all the hatred to stop.  For our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”

“How do you feel after doing this for 50 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a f$£king wall.”

 

And that is what the Jews have been doing for the past 2000 years. This is the RECORD of why you are TALKING TO A WALL:

  MT 26:59 Now the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death;

  MT 26:60 But found none: yea, though many false witnesses came, yet found they none. At the last came two false witnesses,

  MT 26:61 And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.

  MT 26:62 And the high priest arose, and said unto him, Answerest thou nothing? what is it which these witness against thee?

  MT 26:63 But Jesus held his peace, And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.

  MT 26:64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

  MT 26:65 Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy.

  MT 26:66 What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.

  MT 26:67 Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands,

  MT 26:68 Saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?

  MT 26:69 Now Peter sat without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee.

  MT 26:70 But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest.

  MT 26:71 And when he was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him, and said unto them that were there, This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth.

  MT 26:72 And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man.

  MT 26:73 And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

  MT 26:74 Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew.

  MT 26:75 And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

READ IT AGAIN BENNY!

MATT 26:63 And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.

MATT 26:64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

MATT 26:65 Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy.

MATT 26:66 What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.

MATT 26:67 Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands,

MATT 26:68 Saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?

You Benny have the same attitude as those who slapped & spit on the MESSIAH, & if the Talmud teaches that a person who hits a Jew is as one who hits God, what DO YOU THINK of people who insult, curse & make fun of MESSIAH? THIS IS JEWISH RELIGIOUS EPIGENETICS.

The HATRED TOWARDS YESHUA OF NAZARETH HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN “GENETICALLY” & you Benny were “standing there with the rest of the Jews CONDEMNING YOUR MESSIAH TO DIE ON THE CROSS.

Jews should prayerfully study Ezekiel chapter 16 EVERY time they get a BIG HEAD & go around calling themselves THE CHOSEN PEOPLE.

THIS IS WHAT GOD THINKS OF YOU:

EZEK 16:1 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,

  EZEK 16:2 Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations,

  EZEK 16:3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.

  EZEK 16:4 And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

  EZEK 16:5 None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

  EZEK 16:6 And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

  EZEK 16:7 I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou hast increased and waxen great, and thou art come to excellent ornaments: thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas thou wast naked and bare.

  EZEK 16:8 Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine.

  EZEK 16:9 Then washed I thee with water; yea, I throughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.

  EZEK 16:10 I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers’ skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk.

  EZEK 16:11 I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy neck.

  EZEK 16:12 And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head.

  EZEK 16:13 Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom.

  EZEK 16:14 And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord GOD.

  EZEK 16:15 But thou didst trust in thine own beauty, and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by; his it was.

  EZEK 16:16 And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.

  EZEK 16:17 Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them,

  EZEK 16:18 And tookest thy broidered garments, and coveredst them: and thou hast set mine oil and mine incense before them.

  EZEK 16:19 My meat also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey, wherewith I fed thee, thou hast even set it before them for a sweet savour: and thus it was, saith the Lord GOD.

  EZEK 16:20 Moreover thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter,

  EZEK 16:21 That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?

  EZEK 16:22 And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood.

  EZEK 16:23 And it came to pass after all thy wickedness, (woe, woe unto thee! saith the LORD GOD;)

  EZEK 16:24 That thou hast also built unto thee an eminent place, and hast made thee an high place in every street.

  EZEK 16:25 Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

  EZEK 16:26 Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy neighbours, great of flesh; and hast increased thy whoredoms, to provoke me to anger.

  EZEK 16:27 Behold, therefore I have stretched out my hand over thee, and have diminished thine ordinary food, and delivered thee unto the will of them that hate thee, the daughters of the Philistines, which are ashamed of thy lewd way.

  EZEK 16:28 Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou wast unsatiable; yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet couldest not be satisfied.

  EZEK 16:29 Thou hast moreover multiplied thy fornication in the land of Canaan unto Chaldea; and yet thou wast not satisfied therewith.

  EZEK 16:30 How weak is thine heart, saith the LORD GOD, seeing thou doest all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman;

  EZEK 16:31 In that thou buildest thine eminent place in the head of every way, and makest thine high place in every street; and hast not been as an harlot, in that thou scornest hire;

  EZEK 16:32 But as a wife that committeth adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband!

  EZEK 16:33 They give gifts to all whores: but thou givest thy gifts to all thy lovers, and hirest them, that they may come unto thee on every side for thy whoredom.

  EZEK 16:34 And the contrary is in thee from other women in thy whoredoms, whereas none followeth thee to commit whoredoms: and in that thou givest a reward, and no reward is given unto thee, therefore thou art contrary.

  EZEK 16:35 Wherefore, O harlot, hear the word of the LORD:

  EZEK 16:36 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them;

  EZEK 16:37 Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

  EZEK 16:38 And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

  EZEK 16:39 And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

  EZEK 16:40 They shall also bring up a company against thee, and they shall stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their swords.

  EZEK 16:41 And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee to cease from playing the harlot, and thou also shalt give no hire any more.

  EZEK 16:42 So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry.

  EZEK 16:43 Because thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, but hast fretted me in all these things; behold, therefore I also will recompense thy way upon thine head, saith the Lord GOD: and thou shalt not commit this lewdness above all thine abominations.

  EZEK 16:44 Behold, every one that useth proverbs shall use this proverb against thee, saying, As is the mother, so is her daughter.

  EZEK 16:45 Thou art thy mother’s daughter, that lotheth her husband and her children; and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which lothed their husbands and their children: your mother was an Hittite, and your father an Amorite.

  EZEK 16:46 And thine elder sister is Samaria, she and her daughters that dwell at thy left hand: and thy younger sister, that dwelleth at thy right hand, is Sodom and her daughters.

  EZEK 16:47 Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their abominations: but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways.

  EZEK 16:48 As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done, she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters.

  EZEK 16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

  EZEK 16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

  EZEK 16:51 Neither hath Samaria committed half of thy sins; but thou hast multiplied thine abominations more than they, and hast justified thy sisters in all thine abominations which thou hast done.

  EZEK 16:52 Thou also, which hast judged thy sisters, bear thine own shame for thy sins that thou hast committed more abominable than they: they are more righteous than thou: yea, be thou confounded also, and bear thy shame, in that thou hast justified thy sisters.

  EZEK 16:53 When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom and her daughters, and the captivity of Samaria and her daughters, then will I bring again the captivity of thy captives in the midst of them:

  EZEK 16:54 That thou mayest bear thine own shame, and mayest be confounded in all that thou hast done, in that thou art a comfort unto them.

  EZEK 16:55 When thy sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall return to their former estate, and Samaria and her daughters shall return to their former estate, then thou and thy daughters shall return to your former estate.

  EZEK 16:56 For thy sister Sodom was not mentioned by thy mouth in the day of thy pride,

  EZEK 16:57 Before thy wickedness was discovered, as at the time of thy reproach of the daughters of Syria, and all that are round about her, the daughters of the Philistines, which despise thee round about.

  EZEK 16:58 Thou hast borne thy lewdness and thine abominations, saith the LORD.

  EZEK 16:59 For thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even deal with thee as thou hast done, which hast despised the oath in breaking the covenant.

  EZEK 16:60 Nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant.

  EZEK 16:61 Then thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou shalt receive thy sisters, thine elder and thy younger: and I will give them unto thee for daughters, but not by thy covenant.

  EZEK 16:62 And I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD:

 

EZEK 16:63 That thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord GOD.

NEVER, EVER FORGET THE LAST VERSE OF EZEKIEL 16!!!!!

Comment by Gerald Goldberg on 9/23/09 at 8:29 am

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