Hercolano2

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Joe Sobran-The Friends of Uncle Joe

The Friends of Uncle Joe
by Joe Sobran

(From SOBRAN'S, February 2000, pages 2-6)

     The year 2000 has brought a predictable flood of 
retrospection, with several equally predictable nominees for 
Man (or rather "Person") of the Century. These include Albert 
Einstein (chosen by TIME), Winston Churchill (the choice of 
THE WEEKLY STANDARD), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (the choice of 
several, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the NEW YORK 
DAILY NEWS).

     The gushing encomia deal very lightly, as one might also 
have predicted, with one fact common to all three: their 
fondness for Joseph Stalin, perhaps the Mass Murderer of the 
Millennium. TIME fails to mention that the saintly Professor 
Einstein, a man of "humane and democratic instincts," was a 
relentless fellow-traveler who defended even Stalin's macabre 
1938 Moscow show trials; the anti-Communist philosopher Sidney 
Hook recalled in his autobiography, OUT OF STEP, that getting 
Einstein to criticize the Soviet Union was like pulling teeth.

     Roosevelt's eulogists likewise avoid the subject of 
Stalin, for whom FDR had the highest regard, calling him "a 
Christian gentleman" during the Yalta conference. He had 
befriended Stalin from the first year of his administration, 
when he extended diplomatic recognition to the murderous 
pariah state. Time and again he chose to help "Uncle Joe" when 
he didn't have to, appeasing him from a position of strength. 
Even Neville Chamberlain never idealized Hitler as "Uncle 
Adolf." When FDR asked Pope Pius XII to condemn Hitler, Pius 
sent back word that if he did so he would also have to condemn 
Stalin; Roosevelt withdrew the request.

     As for Churchill, we are assured that he had no illusions 
about Stalin, which only makes his wartime indulgence of the 
tyrant harder to excuse. His 1946 complaint (in a famous 
speech in Fulton, Missouri) about the "Iron Curtain" falling 
on Eastern Europe after World War II is treated as prophetic, 
when it was just the opposite: a totally hypocritical gesture. 
Anyone who didn't know what to expect of Stalin by 1946 -- or 
who could believe his guarantees at Yalta in 1945 -- was a 
moron. And Churchill was no moron, only a cynic feigning alarm 
at the obvious.

     Stalin had shown his true colors long before Roosevelt 
and Churchill took on as their ally the brave, bluff "Uncle 
Joe." Had they never heard of the forced famine of Ukraine, 
the NKVD mass arrests, the Gulag camps, the purges and show 
trials, the murder of Trotsky, the invasions of Poland (with 
the Katyn Forest massacre of 15,000 Polish officers), Finland, 
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? All these things, and more, 
revealed not only the brutality of Stalin but the logic of 
Communism itself, which had begun its reign in Russia with the 
mass murder of Orthodox priests under Lenin. Communism was in 
essence a reversion to the principles of primitive warfare, 
directed not only against external enemies but against its own 
subjects if they resisted (or were even suspected of a 
disposition to resist) its tyranny.

     The alliance with the Soviet Union is a permanent 
bloodstain on the Western democracies. It was part of what 
F.J.P. Veale, a British jurist, called the Allies' "advance to 
barbarism" in his mercilessly trenchant book of that title. 
Long out of print, ADVANCE TO BARBARISM is now available only 
from the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, 
California. The book is both essential to read and difficult 
to obtain. It's remarkable for the iron logic with which Veale 
seizes on the damning casual admissions, and even the 
occasional twinges of conscience, of the victors of World War 
II. (He finds such twinges far more often in Churchill than in 
Roosevelt.)

     The exaltation of the three Stalin-lovers as the heroes 
of the century, and saviors of civilization, is almost 
incomprehensible. It's as if we were asked to believe that 
three of the greatest men of the Middle Ages -- say, Innocent 
III, Dante, and St. Francis of Assisi -- had been friends and 
admirers of Genghis Khan.

     The truth is that the Allied cause was as unholy as 
Hitler's. Veale ranks the Allies' policies of terror-bombing 
and "war-crimes" trials with Hitler's genocide as the 
distinguishing features of the "retrograde movement of 
civilization" that culminated in World War II. The readiness 
with which Churchill and Roosevelt embraced Stalin as an ally 
after Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 was only one signal of 
the new morality of warfare they were prepared to adopt; they 
so far forgave Stalin's part in the rape of Poland that began 
the war in 1939 as to entrust him, at the war's end in 1945, 
with control of Poland.

     War has always been terrible, of course, and mass 
extermination was a regular occurrence until the development 
of what may be called, without irony, the rules of "civilized 
warfare" late in the seventeenth century. At that time 
Europe's rulers, exhausted by bloody combat, came to agree on 
certain conventions: combat should be confined to soldiers in 
uniform; civilians and their property should be left alone; 
prisoners should be treated humanely; and defeated powers 
should be spared total devastation and indignity. These rules 
held until (and to some extent even after) World War I, 
replacing the logic of annihilation that governed primitive or 
"primary warfare" -- the unrestricted slaughter common between 
warring societies with no civilized principles in common.

     For more than two centuries after the age of Louis XIV, 
European civilians were so unmolested that they often barely 
realized that their rulers were at war, and ordinary travel 
and commerce between countries usually continued during 
hostilities. The courtliness between rulers and officers of 
opposing armies, like the jovial fraternization between common 
soldiers as soon as peace was restored, is often hard to 
believe now. A sort of golden rule prevailed; each victor 
realized that he might be tomorrow's loser, so everyone tried 
to avoid leaving a legacy of bitterness by treating the 
vanquished reasonably and often generously. Peace treaties 
politely avoided any tone of blame or recrimination.

     There were exceptions, of course. Napoleon's mass armies 
changed the character of war for a while; Lincoln's policy of 
waging war on civilian areas shocked European observers. 
Lincoln justified this on grounds that he was dealing not with 
a traditional war, but with a rebellion, in which the entire 
enemy population might be treated as criminals and traitors. 
The idealizers of Lincoln have blamed his policy on the 
generals who merely carried it out, especially Sherman and 
Sheridan. Of course even Lincoln was unable to apply this view 
consistently; to do so would have meant executing nearly every 
Southerner, soldier or civilian. But Lee's gallantry was more 
typical of the code of the professional man of arms. Veale 
notes that the South was more imbued with European culture, 
including military culture, than the North.

     According to Veale, World War I was not truly a world 
war, but only the last and worst of Europe's civil wars. There 
were serious lapses from the code of civilized warfare: the 
British naval blockade of Europe caused mass starvation, for 
example, and Allied propaganda diabolized the Kaiser and the 
"Huns" with wild atrocity stories of bayoneted babies. But in 
the end, as usual, the parties convened after the war to make 
a settlement among themselves, although, for the first time, a 
non-European power had a say: the United States, led by the 
blundering Woodrow Wilson.

     But in contrast to earlier peace settlements, Germany was 
unfairly blamed and cruelly looted, leaving Germans poor and 
starving. The bitter fruit of German "war guilt" set the stage 
for a far worse war, which would result in a settlement 
dictated, for the first time in European history, by non-
European powers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

     Shortly after World War I British military planners, 
contemplating war with France at the time, began to savor the 
possibilities of aerial warfare against civilian targets. By 
1936, well before World War II, the British started preparing 
for an aerial war -- a total break with the principles of 
civilized warfare. When the war came, they soon put this new 
idea into effect, catching the Germans unprepared. Such 
British military authorities as J.M. Spaight and Arthur 
"Bomber" Harris, looking back triumphantly at the success of 
terror-bombing, later wrote books gloating that the Germans 
had been caught flat-footed! Instead of adapting to the new 
technology of war, the Germans had continued to regard aerial 
bombing as mere tactical support for ground troops and the 
bomber as a form of airborne combat artillery; and because 
they didn't perceive the possibility of "strategic" bombing 
against the population and resources of an enemy country, the 
Luftwaffe had no heavy bombers with which to match the 
destructive fury of the Royal Air Force even for the purpose 
of retaliating against RAF strikes on German cities. Yet the 
boasts of men like Spaight and Harris didn't affect the 
popular view (and official story) that the Germans had 
originated the atrocity of bombing cities.

     Official American propaganda likewise used the Japanese 
bombing of Chinese cities as a justification for fighting 
Japan, until the United States itself adopted the policy of 
bombing Japanese and German cities. Since this policy was 
accepted as legitimate when employed against diabolical 
enemies, it's now difficult for most people to recall the 
nauseous horror that bombing cities used to inspire. As Veale 
says, we have all become inured not only to atrocities in a 
holy cause but to the sort of "doublethink" that reasons: "We 
must be willing to slaughter innocent people in order to 
defeat our monstrous enemies, who slaughter innocent people."

     The test came when, in 1940, Churchill's War Cabinet (in 
what Spaight would later praise as a "splendid decision") 
secretly adopted the policy of striking industrial areas of 
Germany outside the combat zone, vastly broadening the 
definition of "military objectives" and ensuring many civilian 
casualties. Two years later this policy was expanded under the 
Lindemann Plan to deliberately targeting the most thickly 
populated areas of industrial cities -- working-class 
neighborhoods near factories, where workers and their families 
lived in crowded tenements. Attacks on civilians were actually 
given priority over attacks on factories. Men, women, and 
children alike became "military objectives"; undefended cities 
like Hamburg and Dresden became furnaces in which people flung 
themselves into rivers to escape the terrific heat; old 
houses, churches, and other buildings that had survived from 
the Middle Ages were reduced to rubble by the latest methods, 
and oldest principles, of warfare. Even the confines of zoos 
were destroyed, and frantic wild animals roamed the streets. 
Burial of all the dead being impossible, funeral pyres 
disposed of bodies for weeks after the air raids.

     Meanwhile, Churchill and his cronies lied to Parliament, 
denying that they were practicing "indiscriminate bombing." In 
one sense the denials were true. The bombing was anything but 
indiscriminate, since killing and terrorizing civilians was 
not a side effect of error or carelessness but the fully 
conscious purpose of the Lindemann Plan. The full truth 
emerged only long after the war, in the early 1960s. But by 
then it all seemed ancient history to most people, few cared 
much about the truth, and the war's mythology was too firmly 
established to be shaken. Veale had already gathered the 
essence of the story before all the details were released, but 
even now his work is little known and the official wartime 
story is still vaguely accepted as essentially true.

     At the time it was happening, the British public thought 
German charges of deliberate bombing of civilians were the 
products of Joseph Goebbels's propaganda machine. And when the 
Germans retaliated with the infamous Blitz against British 
cities, as Churchill foresaw, the Englishman in the street was 
outraged at Germany's hideous violation of civilized rules of 
warfare, never dreaming that his own government had purposely 
provoked it.

     Hitler himself, according to his biographer John Toland, 
was so shocked by the British bombing of cities that he at 
first excused it as a mistake, due to the inexperience of 
British bomber pilots. He couldn't believe the British were 
capable of such savagery. It was three months before the 
Germans responded in kind. Even so, as Spaight later admitted: 
"Hitler assuredly did not want the mutual bombing to go on."

     Franklin Roosevelt and the Americans were quite willing 
to join in the new spirit of total war. Roosevelt, an acolyte 
of Wilson, had always yearned for war with Germany and the 
chance to build an American global empire; the American people 
had been roused to fury and race-hatred by the Japanese attack 
on Pearl Harbor, likewise never suspecting that it had been in 
any way provoked. "Sneaky Japs" seemed a sufficient 
explanation and no punishment seemed excessive.

     A new book, DAY OF DECEIT, by Robert B. Stinnett, argues 
that Roosevelt actually knew the attack was coming -- but 
excuses him anyway! After all, "the Pearl Harbor attack was, 
from the White House perspective, something that had to be 
endured in order to stop a greater evil -- the Nazi invaders 
in Europe who had begun the Holocaust and were poised to 
invade England." These words show how thoroughly the 
democracies still accept the notion that the end -- stopping 
Hitler (the "sneaky Japs" have receded from the picture) -- 
justified any and every means, including massive deception of 
the American public. As of 1941, of course, Hitler had not yet 
"begun the Holocaust"; besides, his persecution of Jews played 
no part in Roosevelt's callous calculations.

     Goaded by Einstein and others, Roosevelt also launched 
the quest for the ultimate bomb, one that would incinerate 
whole cities in a flash. This final nail in the coffin of 
civilized warfare was originally intended for German cities; 
one wonders whether Americans might feel somewhat more rueful 
about it today if it had been dropped on Berlin and Munich 
rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The use of this bomb -- 
more truly Roosevelt's bomb than Harry Truman's -- stands as 
the most inhuman act of the whole war, a fact that Allied 
harping on Nazi "war crimes" has successfully diverted most 
people from realizing.

     No American president has used power as ruthlessly as 
Roosevelt. His liberal admirers are somewhat embarrassed by 
his order to round up U.S. citizens of Japanese extraction -- 
a brazen violation of their constitutional rights -- but it 
was of a piece with his constant use of federal agencies to 
punish, smear, or disable anyone he deemed an enemy. The 
notion that FDR was somehow on the side of civil liberties is 
hard to fathom. His critics correctly sized him up as a 
dictator at heart. His affinity with Stalin was genuine. Both 
were exemplars of the total state and total war.

     In another breach of the rules of civilized warfare, 
Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on unconditional surrender by 
the Axis powers, thereby prolonging the war and immensely 
intensifying its bitterness. They made it clear that there 
would be no mercy for the losers.

     As the war drew to a close, Veale notes, Roosevelt and 
Churchill were eager to placate Stalin, who at the 1943 Tehran 
conference had urged that 50,000 German officials be 
dispatched à la Katyn Forest. This was a little more than the 
democratic leaders figured their people could stomach, so they 
proposed an alternative Stalinist method: postwar sham trials, 
observing the superficial forms of judicial process. Stalin, 
sighing at this bourgeois sentimentalism, for once yielded. In 
fact he eventually staged thousands of war-crimes "trials" of 
his own, in which there were, of course, no acquittals to 
speak of.

     When the trials began at Nuremberg, there were a few 
irregularities. The accusers (including Soviet "judges" with 
long experience in Stalinist jurisprudence) doubled as jurors; 
the court was never impartial; the accused were judged guilty 
before the proceedings began. The rules of evidence sharply 
limited the defense; the defendants were not permitted to 
argue that the Allies had committed the same acts they were 
being accused of.

     Even at that, the Germans were never tried for bombing 
civilian areas, because the Allies didn't want to risk calling 
attention to the fact that they themselves had initiated this 
particular "crime against humanity." The novel charge of 
"waging a war of aggression" was never defined, because no 
definition could be found that would cover the German invasion 
of Poland without also covering Soviet invasions of Poland and 
several other countries to boot.

     Such treatment of prisoners of war was also a novel 
departure from the old rules, which the Allies justified by 
arbitrarily declaring the captured German military officers to 
be civilians. This made them eligible to be tried as criminals 
under the inchoate new rules. The purpose of the trials was 
not to do justice or to determine guilt according to normal 
standards of law (which forbid ex post facto trials), but to 
give the Allies a propaganda victory on top of their military 
triumph.

     In essence, the Germans were convicted of losing the war. 
The only real "war crime," as Veale points out, was being 
defeated. The honorable German admiral Erich Raeder, for 
example, was convicted for invading Norway, though he had 
merely beaten the British to the punch on the eve of their own 
planned invasion. The whole thing was a shameless break with 
precedent, but it set its own precedents for the pursuit of 
aging "war criminals" that still continues. When similar 
trials were held in Tokyo two years later, an Indian jurist 
who participated decried the proceedings: "The farce of a 
trial of vanquished leaders by the victors was itself an 
offense against humanity." No Western jurist had found the 
courage to say as much at Nuremberg.

     Under the circumstances, it's easy to understand why some 
students of the war even doubt that Hitler's persecution of 
Jews, revolting as it was, amounted to a "Holocaust" or 
extermination program. It may have happened as the official 
story has it, and Veale, who questions most of the Allied 
claims, expresses no doubt of it; but if so, it's about the 
only thing the Allies told the truth about. At any rate, the 
story of the Holocaust is suspiciously convenient for those 
who were willing to commit such horrors that only something 
like an enormous program of mass murder could divert attention 
from their own guilt. With all due respect for those who 
really suffered at Hitler's hands, some skepticism is in 
order. Whatever the truth, Hitler is not the only one who 
deserves lasting infamy. So do several Persons of the Century.

     Veale deals lightly with the postwar mass deportation of 
large populations, including the "repatriation" of millions to 
the Soviet Union (and certain death) during what was later 
known as Operation Keelhaul. At the time when Veale wrote, 
shortly after the war, little had been published about these 
final Allied favors to Uncle Joe. Since then, James Bacque and 
other historians have concluded that the Allies also starved 
millions of Germans after the war, a policy that was 
interrupted only by the breach between the democracies and the 
Soviet Union; luckily for the surviving Germans, the Cold War 
necessitated a new alliance with what was left of Germany.

     Since the Cold War began, the democracies have repudiated 
Stalin and Communism. But that does nothing to remove the 
great bloodstain of World War II, still liberalism's holy war. 
The democracies were Stalin's eager partners in atrocity and 
mendacity, and they committed plenty of crimes of their own 
that can't be blamed on Uncle Joe. And for what it's worth, 
the Allied atrocities seem to have failed on their own terms. 
Most analysts agree that they intensified the war without 
really affecting the outcome. Veale argues that the diversion 
of RAF bombers to Germany may even have changed the outcome of 
the Battle of France in 1940, when one defeat might have 
toppled Hitler and cut the war short. In the end the victors 
succeeded chiefly in hardening their own consciences, while 
giving Stalin the spoils.

     Some sort of pragmatic defense of the war might have been 
made on the frank grounds of power: Churchill and the British 
wanted to oppose German power, which threatened their own 
global empire (while speaking frankly of "the British Empire" 
in private, for propaganda purposes Churchill called his cause 
"democracy" in public); Roosevelt wanted also to stop the 
Japanese, those insolent yellow dwarfs (as Veale caustically 
puts it) who dared to challenge the white man's rule in the 
Far East.

     But Roosevelt and Churchill chose to wage the war as a 
Manichaean crusade against evil, while cutting their cynical 
deal with the devil in the Kremlin (not to mention the one in 
hell). Their partnership with Uncle Joe, their resort to 
aerial mass murder, and their participation in postwar 
enormities destroyed any moral claim they made for the war. 
Sooner or later the accepted view of this heroic epic is going 
to have to be drastically revised, as Veale perceived 
immediately after the war ended.

     The Allied crimes have never been acknowledged, except as 
wartime necessities justified by noble ends; and the Allied 
criminals have never been brought to the dock. Instead, they 
are still honored as heroes of the twentieth century. (Even 
the memory of the odious "Bomber" Harris -- long ostracized 
with distaste and moral embarrassment by the British 
Establishment for his rather unseemly enthusiasm for killing 
civilians -- was recently honored by the erection of a statue 
in London.) And the entire American establishment still has a 
stake in the mythology of World War II; its legitimacy rests 
largely on its boast that it saved the world from Hitler. It 
can afford neither to disown its alliance with Stalin nor to 
face the implications of its having befriended him. It still 
condemns the "isolationists" who knew exactly what Stalin was 
a decade before Churchill acknowledged it at Fulton.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read this article on-line at 
"http://www.sobran.com/friends.shtml".

Joe Sobran-"For Fear of the Jews"

"For Fear of the Jews"
by Joe Sobran

(Expanded from SOBRAN'S, September 2002, pages 3-6, and 
taken from a speech given at the IHR Conference held in 
Los Angeles, June 21-23, 2002.)

[[ Text dropped from the print edition or modified solely 
for reasons of space appears in square double brackets. ]]


     The news that I would be addressing the Institute of 
Historical Review came to some people as ... well, news. 
It was mentioned in the Jewish newspaper FORWARD and on 
the Zionist WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE. The editors of 
two conservative magazines called and wrote me to express 
their concern that I might damage my reputation, such as 
it is, by speaking to "Holocaust deniers."

     I'm not sure why this should matter. Even positing 
that I was speaking to a disreputable audience, I expect 
to be judged by what I say, not whom I say it to. I note 
that my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet 
they rarely quote me directly.

     Why not? If I am so disreputable myself, I must at 
least occasionally say disreputable things. Is it 
possible that what I say is more cogent than they like to 
admit?

     My enemies are always welcome to quote anything I 
say, if they dare. I would say the same things to them, 
and they may consider my remarks to the IHR as addressed 
to them too. I wasn't just speaking to "Holocaust 
deniers," but also to Holocaust believers.

     Because I've endured smears and ostracism for my 
criticism of Israel and its American lobby, some people 
credit me with courage. I'm flattered, of course, but 
this compliment, whether or not I deserve it, implies 
that it's professionally dangerous for a journalist to 
criticize Israel. That tells you a lot.

     But if I'm "courageous," what do you call Mark Weber 
and the Institute for Historical Review? They have been 
smeared far worse than I have; moreover, they have been 
seriously threatened with death. Their offices have been 
firebombed. Do they at least get credit for courage? Not 
at all. They remain almost universally vilified.

     When I met Mark, many years ago, I expected to meet 
a raving Jew-hating fanatic, such being the generic 
reputation of "Holocaust deniers." I was immediately and 
subsequently impressed to find that he was just the 
opposite: a mild-mannered, good-humored, witty, scholarly 
man who habitually spoke with restraint and measure, even 
about enemies who would love to see him dead.  The same 
is true of other members of the Institute. In my many 
years of acquaintance with them, I have never heard any 
of them say anything that would strike an unprejudiced 
listener as unreasonable or bigoted.

     It was his enemies who were raving, hate-filled 
fanatics, unable to discuss "Holocaust deniers" in 
measured language, without wild hyperbole, loose 
accusation, and outright lies. I began to wonder: if they 
can't tell the truth about "Holocaust deniers," how can 
they tell the truth about the Holocaust itself?

     Even if the Holocaust had really happened, as I 
assumed, maybe it should be studied with a critical 
rationality most of its believers obviously lacked. After 
all, even Stalin's crimes might be exaggerated, quite 
understandably, by his victims. As Milton puts it, "Let 
truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to 
the worse in a free and open encounter?" Even those in 
error might have something to say, some marginal 
clarification to offer. Why stop our ears against them?

     Why on earth is it "anti-Jewish" to conclude from 
the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered 
are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was 
in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial 
extermination? Surely these are controversial 
conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage. There 
is no danger in permitting it to proceed. It might be 
different if denying the Holocaust could somehow affect 
the course of events, as the denial of Stalin's crimes by 
the NEW YORK TIMES in the 1930s helped him to continue 
committing them. Why is the Institute for Historical 
Review notorious, while the TIMES, despite its active 
support of Stalin at the height of his power, remains a 
pillar of respectability?

     The Holocaust has never been a consuming interest of 
mine. But as I read the JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL REVIEW over 
the years, I found in it the same calm virtue of critical 
rationality I'd found in Mark himself. And it was applied 
to many other subjects besides the question of whether 
Hitler had tried to exterminate the Jews.

     [[ I'm especially indebted to one fascinating 
article on another taboo subject: Abraham Lincoln's long 
pursuit of the policy of sending former Negro slaves 
outside the United States. This completely reshaped the 
book on Lincoln I was writing. I realized that you can't 
understand Lincoln unless you grasp that he waged the 
Civil War with a dual goal: to prevent the political 
separation of North and South, while achieving the racial 
separation of whites and blacks. His dream was a united 
white America. He was by no means the color-blind 
humanitarian we have been taught to revere. ]]

     The IHR's mission can't be fairly summed up as 
"Holocaust denial." Its real mission is criticism of the 
suffocating progressive ideology that has infected and 
distorted the telling of history in our time. But of 
course its specific skepticism of the standard Holocaust 
story is regarded as blasphemy, and has earned it the 
dreaded epithet of "anti-Semitism."

     Not long ago the only label more lethal to one's 
reputation was that of child molester, but, as many men 
of the cloth are now discovering, there is this 
difference: a child molester may hope for a second 
chance.

     There is also another difference. We have a pretty 
clear idea what child molestation is. Nobody really knows 
what "anti-Semitism" is. My old boss Bill Buckley wrote 
an entire book called IN SEARCH OF ANTI-SEMITISM without 
bothering to define "anti-Semitism."

     At the time I thought this was an oversight. I was 
wrong. The word would lose its utility if it were 
defined. As I observed in my own small contribution to 
the book, an "anti-Semite" used to mean a man who hated 
Jews. Now it means a man who is hated *by* Jews.

     I doubt, in fact I can't imagine, that anyone 
associated with the IHR has ever done harm to another 
human being because he was Jewish. In fact the IHR has 
never been accused of anything but thought-crimes.

     The same is true of me. Nobody has ever accused me 
of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew. My chief 
offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of 
Israel has been a costly and treacherous "ally" to the 
United States. As of last September 11, I should think 
that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single 
apology for having been correct.

     If I were to hate Jews en masse, without 
distinction, I would be guilty of many things. Obviously 
I'd be guilty of injustice and uncharity to Jews as human 
beings. I would also be guilty of willful stupidity. More 
personally, I'd be guilty of ingratitude to my 
benefactors -- which Dante, in his INFERNO, ranks the 
worst of all sins -- since many of my benefactors, in 
large ways and small, have been Jewish.

     Moreover, I would be becoming exactly the man my 
Zionist enemies would like me to be; a man like them, in 
whom ethnic hostilities take priority over all other 
values and considerations. I would justify them in 
treating me as an enemy. In fact I'd go so far as to say 
that I would be helping to justify the state of Israel. I 
consider that if I fight these people on their terms, 
they have already won.

 What, exactly, is "anti-Semitism"? One standard 
dictionary definition is "hostility toward or 
discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial 
group." How this applies to me has never been explained. 
My "hostility" toward Israel is a desire not for war, but 
for neutrality -- out of a sense of betrayal, waste, and 
shame. Our venal politicians have aligned us with a 
foreign country that behaves dishonorably. Most alleged 
"anti-Semites" would wince if Jews anywhere were treated 
as Israel treats its Arab subjects. Moreover, Israel has 
repeatedly betrayed its only benefactor, the United 
States. I have already alluded to the place Dante 
reserves for those who betray their benefactors.

     These are obvious moral facts. Yet it's not only 
politicians who are afraid to point them out; so are most 
journalists -- the people who are supposed to be 
independent enough to say the things politicians can't 
afford to say. In my thirty years in journalism, nothing 
has amazed me more than the prevalent fear in the 
profession of offending Jews, especially Zionist Jews.

     The fear of the label "anti-Semitic" is a fear of 
the power that is believed to lie behind it: Jewish 
power. Yet this is still pretty much unmentionable in 
journalism. It's rather as if sportswriters covering pro 
basketball were prohibited from mentioning that the Los 
Angeles Lakers were in first place.

     [[ In my 21 years at NATIONAL REVIEW, I had a front-
row seat. I watched closely as Bill Buckley changed from 
a jaunty critic of Israel to what I can only call a 
servile appeaser. In its early days, the magazine 
published robust editorials blasting politicians who 
sacrificed American to Israeli interests in order to 
pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it was con-
sidered risque to suggest that there was a "Jewish vote." 
Today Bill's magazine supports Israel with embarrassing 
sycophancy, never daring to intimate that Israeli and 
American interests may occasionally diverge. It has 
forgotten its own principles; today it would never dare 
to publish the editorials written by its great geopoliti-
cal thinker of those early days, James Burnham. ]]

     There has been a qualitative change that is 
downright eerie [[ -- not only in Bill Buckley and 
NATIONAL REVIEW, but ]] in American conservatism 
generally. The "fear of the Jews," to use the phrase so 
often repeated in the Gospel according to John, seems to 
have wrought a reorientation of the tone, the very 
principles, of today's conservatism. The hardy 
skepticism, critical intelligence, and healthy irony of 
men like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and the young 
Buckley have given way to the uncritical philo-Semitism 
of George Will, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and of course 
the later Buckley -- men who will go to any lengths, even 
absurd and dishonorable lengths, to avoid the terrorizing 
label "anti-Semite."

     It was once considered "anti-Semitic" to impute 
"dual loyalty" to Jews -- that is, to assert that most 
American Jews divide their loyalty between the United 
States and Israel. This is now passe. Today most 
politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel 
commands the *primary* loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they 
accused of "anti-Semitism" for doing so? Does this 
assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual 
loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!

     Once again, it's a practical necessity to *know* 
what it would be professional suicide to *say.* No 
politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving 
their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act 
as if this were the case. And they succeed.

     You can read Jewish publications like COMMENTARY for 
years, and you'll read interminable discussions about 
what's good for Israel, but you'll never encounter the 
slightest suggestion that what's good for Israel might 
not be good for America. The possibility simply never 
comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is 
to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between 
Israel and the United States. So much for the "canard" of 
dual loyalty.

     [[ The very word "anti-Semite" is reminiscent of the 
term "anti-Soviet." It serves a similar function of 
facilitating imputations of ill-defined guilt.

     [[ The strength of Western law has always been its 
insistence on definition. When we want to minimize an 
offense, say murder or burglary, we define it as clearly 
as possible. We want judge and jury to know exactly what 
the charge means, not only to convict the guilty but, 
also, just as important, to protect the innocent.

     [[ Clear definitions put a burden of proof on the 
accuser, and properly so. If you falsely accuse a man of 
murder or burglary, not only is he apt to be acquitted -- 
you may pay a heavy penalty yourself. As a result, few of 
us are afraid of being charged with murders and 
burglaries we didn't commit.

     [[ By contrast, the Soviet legal system left 
prosecutors with a wide discretion in identifying "anti-
Soviet" activities. Almost anything irritating to the 
Soviet state could qualify. An impossible burden of proof 
lay on the accused; guilt was presumed; acquittals were 
virtually nonexistent. To be indicted was already to be 
convicted. Since the charge was undefined, it was 
unfalsifiable; there was no such thing as a false 
accusation. As a result, the Russian population lived in 
fear.

     [[ The word "anti-Semitic" functions like the word 
"anti-Soviet." Being undefined, it's unfalsifiable. Loose 
charges of "anti-Semitism" are common, but nobody suffers 
any penalty for making them, since what is unfalsifiable 
can never be shown to be false. I once read an article in 
a Jewish magazine that called the first Star Wars movie 
"anti-Semitic." I was amazed, but I couldn't prove the 
contrary. Who could? And of course people in public life 
-- and often in private life -- fear incurring the label, 
however guiltless they may be.

     [[ If you want to distinguish between the innocent 
and the guilty, you define crimes precisely. If, however, 
you merely want to maximize the number of convictions, 
increase the power of the accusers, and create an 
atmosphere of dread, you define crimes as loosely as 
possible. We now have an incentive system that might have 
been designed to promote loose charges of "anti-
Semitism."

     [[ Silly as all this is from a rational point of 
view, the label of "anti-Semitism" is deeply feared. It 
does signify one thing: Jewish hatred. When I became a 
conservative as a college freshman, in 1965, nearly all 
Jews were liberals and Jewish intellectuals associated 
conservatism with "anti-Semitism." Bill Buckley was often 
depicted as a fascist or crypto-Nazi; given the smears he 
endured, it's understandable that he should go to great 
lengths to appear pro-Jewish, even if he somewhat overdid 
it by abetting smears of his fellow conservatives.

     [[ The situation changed somewhat when many Jewish 
intellectuals, upset by liberal criticism of Israel, 
became what were called "neoconservatives." This term 
implied no deep adherence to conservative principles, but 
only the adoption of a few ad hoc principles useful to 
Zionism, with no basic departure from New Deal liberalism 
insofar as it was useful to Zionism. "Neoconservatism" 
was really a sort of "kosher" conservatism.

     [[ A few incidents from my years at National Review 
may illustrate the point.

     [[ In the mid 1980s, the neoconservative Earth 
Mother Midge Decter, wife of Norman Podhoretz, accused 
Russell Kirk of "anti-Semitism." Kirk's offense? He had 
made a mild quip that some neoconservatives appeared to 
believe that the capital of Western civilization was Tel 
Aviv. Never mind that he had a point. Kirk had been a 
founding father of modern conservatism and a NATIONAL 
REVIEW columnist for many years, yet the magazine not 
only failed to rally to his defense against this smear -- 
it didn't even report the incident! Decter's attack was 
the biggest news of the season in the conservative 
movement, but Buckley was afraid to mention it. So was 
most of the conservative press.

     [[ At about the same time, Israeli troops shot up a 
Catholic Church on the West Bank during Mass -- a 
horrible sacrilege that sent worshipers fleeing for their 
lives and provoked an angry protest from the Vatican. 
(The congregation had planned a march after Mass to 
protest the beating of a Palestinian priest by Israeli 
soldiers.) I mentioned the incident to Buckley, a fellow 
Catholic, at an editorial meeting and gave him a news 
clipping describing the event in detail; as I expected, 
the magazine ignored this too. Even the violent 
persecution of Catholics by Jews was unmentionable -- in 
a "conservative" magazine owned and run by a Catholic.

     [[ When the Pollard spy case broke, the magazine 
called for the death penalty for Pollard -- but excused 
Israel for sponsoring him, on grounds that it's normal 
for friendly nations to spy on each other!

     [[ And so it went. I could have understood a 
favorable attitude toward Israel, having been pro-Israel 
for many years myself; but surely even this alliance must 
have occasional drawbacks. From time to time it's 
necessary to criticize even friends. If we criticized our 
own government every week, why not Israel once in a 
while? But the magazine consistently refused to find the 
slightest fault with Israel, and since I left in 1993 it 
has gotten much worse. Today it has become assertively 
slavish, to a comical degree.

     [[ By 1993 I'd had enough. I wrote a column 
correcting some of the things Bill had written about me, 
in which I mentioned his evident fear; I wrote that he 
was "jumpy about Jews." This was a pretty mild 
description of his terror, but the column got me fired, 
just as I expected. Since then it has become a 
neoconservative legend that I was fired for "anti-
Semitism," but the truth is that it was far more personal 
than that. Bill knew me too well to make such a charge. I 
was fired for making him look bad. He considered making 
others look bad his prerogative.

     Since then ]] I've noticed how eager and desperate 
mainstream conservatives are to avoid Jewish wrath. 
Again, they don't just speak favorably of Israel; they 
refuse to acknowledge any cost to American interests in 
the U.S.-Israel alliance. They treat the two countries' 
interests as identical; when they scold either 
government, it's always -- *always* -- the U.S. 
Government for failing to support our "reliable ally." 
They are in headlong flight from reality. They have none 
of the realism of James Burnham, whose writings and style 
of thought would be wholly unwelcome in today's 
conservative movement.

     They are frightened. You can sense this in their 
bluster, in the vicarious jingoism with which they 
address Israel. Their fear produces a peculiar 
intellectual thinness that pervades all their thinking on 
foreign policy. [[ Gone is the critical intelligence that 
used to set the tone for such earlier conservative 
writers as Burnham, Kendall, Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, 
Frank Meyer, Thomas Molnar, and the other distinguished 
names that used to grace the masthead of NATIONAL 
REVIEW. ]] Individualists have been replaced by 
apparatchiks. Zionism has infiltrated conservatism in 
much the same way Communism once infiltrated liberalism.

     [[ I notice that Bill Buckley's latest book is a 
novel about the Nuremberg trials. Over the past few years 
Bill has made a habit of commemorating the Holocaust with 
remarkable frequency. He has dropped references to 
Auschwitz into countless of his syndicated columns and 
interviews, as if compelled to banish the slightest 
suspicion that he has any doubts about the Holocaust or 
that he doesn't feel deeply about it. The Holocaust seems 
to have joined, or supplanted, the Gulag Archipelago in 
his historical memory.

     [[ Since I vividly remember the days when Bill 
regarded the Jews and Israel not with hostility, but with 
a healthy and playful irony -- the same attitude he 
brought to politics in general -- I find all this 
solemnity pretty cloying. ]]

     Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am 
not, heaven forbid, a "Holocaust denier." I lack the 
scholarly competence to be one. I don't read German, so I 
can't assess the documentary evidence; I don't know 
chemistry, so I can't discuss Zyklon-B; I don't 
understand the logistics of exterminating millions of 
people in small spaces. Besides, "Holocaust denial" is 
illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. 
For me, that's proof enough. One Israeli writer has 
expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing 
opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling 
too; but the state has spoken.

     Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know 
nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other 
pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have 
been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most 
people care much less for what the truth is than for 
which side it's safer and more respectable to take. They 
shy away from taking a position that is likely to get 
them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side 
were accused of war crimes after World War II, only 
people critical of Jewish interests are accused of 
thought-crimes in today's mainstream press.

     So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from 
this controversy. Of course I'm also incompetent to judge 
whether the Holocaust did happen; so I've become what 
might be called a "Holocaust stipulator." Like a lawyer 
who doesn't want to get bogged down debating a secondary 
point, I *stipulate* that the standard account of the 
Holocaust is true. What is undisputed -- the massive 
violation of human rights in Hitler's Germany -- is bad 
enough.

     What interests me is the growth of what Norman 
Finkelstein has called "the Holocaust Industry." True or 
not, the Holocaust story has been put to many uses, some 
of them mischievous. It is currently being used to extort 
reparations and to blacken reputations, for example. 
Daniel Goldhagen is soon to publish a book blaming the 
Holocaust on the central teachings of the Catholic 
Church. This is only the most ambitious project of a 
school of thought, largely but not exclusively Jewish, 
that sees Christianity as the source of all "anti-
Semitism."

     So if you want to avoid being called "anti-Semitic," 
the safest course is to renounce Christianity. Whether 
this is a safe course for your immortal soul is a 
question Goldhagen doesn't address. The important thing 
is to avoid Jewish censure. Obviously this sort of 
thinking presupposes Christian fear of the Jews. Jews 
themselves are not unaware of Jewish power; some of them 
have rather exaggerated confidence in it.

     But the chief use of the Holocaust story is to 
undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel. 
According to this view, the Holocaust proves that Jewish 
existence is always in danger, unless the Jews have their 
own state in their own homeland. The Holocaust stands as 
the historical objectification of all the world's 
gentiles' eternal "anti-Semitism." Jewish life is an 
endless emergency, requiring endless emergency measures 
and justifying everything does in the name of "defense." 
Jews and Israel can't be judged by normal standards, at 
least until Israel is absolutely safe -- if even then. 
Their circumstances are forever abnormal.

     But the daily news reports suggest that Israel may 
not really be the safest place for Jews. Theodore Herzl's 
original dream was of a Jewish state where Jews could at 
last live the normal lives they were denied in the 
Diaspora. Yet today it's Diaspora Jews who live 
relatively normal lives, at least in the West, while they 
must worry about the very survival of Israel. And far 
from being the independent state Herzl hoped for, Israel 
depends heavily on the support not only of Diaspora Jews 
but of foreign gentiles, especially Americans.

     Israel insists that its "right to exist" is nothing 
more than the right of every nation on earth to be left 
in peace. This right is allegedly threatened by fanatical 
Arabs who want to "drive the Jews into the sea," as 
witness the recent wave of Palestinian terror. But in 
truth, Israel's claimed "right to exist" is much more 
than it seems at first sight. It means a right to rule 
*as Jews,* enjoying rights denied to native Palestinians.

     We are told incessantly that Israel is a 
"democracy," and therefore the natural ally of the United 
States, whose "democratic values" it shares. This is a 
very dubious claim. To Americans, democracy means 
majority rule, but with equal rights for minorities. In 
Israel and the occupied territories, equal rights for the 
minority are simply out of the question.

     Majority rule itself has taken a peculiar form in 
Israel. The original Arab majority was driven out of 
their homes and their native land, and kept out. 
Meanwhile, a Jewish "majority" was artificially imported. 
Not only the first immigrants from Eastern Europe, but 
every Jew on earth was granted a "right of return" -- 
that is, "return" to a "homeland" most have never lived 
in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived. 
A Jew from Brooklyn (whose grandfather came from Poland) 
can fly to Israel and immediately claim rights denied to 
an Arab whose people have always lived in Palestine. In 
recent years Israel has been augmenting its Jewish 
majority by vigorously encouraging Jewish immigration, 
especially from Russia. Ariel Sharon has told a group of 
American senators that Israel needs a million more Jewish 
immigrants.

     [[ In recent negotiations, Israel has flatly 
rejected demands for a "right of return" for Palestinians 
exiled since 1948. It frankly gave as its reason that 
this would mean "the end of the Jewish state," since an 
Arab majority would surely vote down Jewish ethnic 
privileges. If Israel remained democratic, it wouldn't 
long remain Jewish.

     [[ This confirms the contention of hard-line 
Revisionist Zionists from Vladimir Jabotinsky to Meir 
Kahane that in the long run, Israel must be either Jewish 
or democratic; it can't be both. And in order to remain 
Jewish, it must reject the equal rights for its 
minorities that Jews everywhere demand where they are a 
minority. Israel must be the only "democracy" whose 
existence *depends* on inequality.

      [[ Put otherwise, Zionism is a denial of the "self-
evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence. To 
acknowledge those truths, and to put them into practice, 
would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Again, 
honest and rigorous Zionists have always seen and said 
this.

      [[ American gentiles, bemused by the propaganda 
claim that a beleaguered little democracy is fighting for 
its very right to exist, are vaguely baffled, unable to 
comprehend what is before their eyes. They still haven't 
figured out that Israeli "democracy" is essentially and 
radically different from -- even repugnant to -- what 
they understand as democracy. ]]

     With the verbal sleight-of-hand at which they are 
masters, the Israelis always appeal to the Holocaust. 
Maybe they have nuclear weapons, but their existence is 
threatened -- once more! -- by rock-throwing Arab boys. 
The Arabs are the new Nazis, repeating and perpetuating 
the eternal peril of the Jews. Israel is determined to 
prevent another Holocaust and must crush the Arab threat 
by any means necessary, including harsh measures.

     Israel without the Holocaust is hard to imagine. But 
let's try to imagine it.

     Suppose the Holocaust had never occurred, had never 
been alleged, had never been *called* "the Holocaust." 
Imagine that no great persecution had provided the Jewish 
state with a special excuse for oppressive emergency 
measures. In other words, imagine that Israel were forced 
to justify itself like any other state.

     In that case, Israel's treatment of its Arab 
minorities would appear to the world in a very different 
light. Its denial of equal or even basic rights to those 
minorities would lack the excuse of a past or prospective 
"Holocaust." Civilized people would expect it to treat 
those it ruled with impartial justice [[ -- like 
civilized states ]]. Special privileges for Jews would 
appear as outrageous discrimination, no different from 
insulting legal discrimination *against* Jews. The sense 
-- and excuse -- of perpetual crisis would be absent. 
Israel might be forced or pressured, possibly against its 
will, to be "normal." If it chose to be democratic, its 
Jews would have to take their chance of being 
outnumbered, just like majorities in other democracies. 
Nobody would suppose that losing elections would mean 
their annihilation.

     In short, the Holocaust has become a device for 
exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has 
authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and 
oppress. This is all quite irrational, because even if 
six million Jews were murdered during World War II, [[ it 
doesn't follow that the survivors are entitled to commit 
the slightest injustice. ]] If your father was stabbed in 
the street, that's a pity, but it's not an excuse for 
picking someone else's pocket.

     In a peculiar way, the Holocaust story has promoted 
not only pity, but actual fear of the Jews. It has 
removed them from the universe of normal moral discourse. 
It has made them victims with nukes. It has made them 
even more dangerous than their enemies have always 
charged. It has given the world an Israel ruled by Ariel 
Sharon.

     Benjamin Netanyahu has written that Israel is "an 
integral part of the West." I think it would be truer to 
say that Israel has become a deformed limb of the West.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read this article on-line at 
"http://www.sobran.com/fearofjews.shtml".

by Joe Sobran-The Cross and the Swastika

The Cross and the Swastika
February 5, 2002

by Joe Sobran

 When the Communist Party seized control of Russia 
more than 80 years ago, it tried to eliminate two things: 
Christianity and "anti-Semitism." Tens of thousands of 
priests and bishops were murdered, ancient churches were 
razed to the ground, believers were forced to worship 
secretly, and atheism was taught to children in the state 
schools. Though "anti-Semitism" was never precisely 
defined -- like many key terms in the Soviet vocabulary 
-- whatever it was, it became a capital crime.

 In the democratic West we are seeing a renewed 
conflation of Christianity and "anti-Semitism." A flood 
of books and articles have tried to blame anti-Semitism 
(still vaguely defined) on Christian doctrine, especially 
Catholic doctrine. Many of the attacks focus on Pope Pius 
XII, who has been called "Hitler's Pope." Some actually 
blame Christianity for the murder of six million Jews.

 The latest and most audacious entry in the 
campaign to equate Catholicism and anti-Semitism is that 
of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the forthcoming book 
A MORAL RECKONING: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH DURING THE 
HOLOCAUST AND TODAY, to be published by Knopf. A long 
excerpt has just appeared in THE NEW REPUBLIC.

 Goldhagen goes far beyond the now-routine charge 
that Pius XII was culpably "silent" during the Holocaust. 
This charge, by the way, falls under the heading of 
Virtual Truth -- a falsehood repeated so often that it 
becomes futile to refute it. During World War II, the NEW 
YORK TIMES praised Pius for being the only major figure 
in Europe who was *not* silent about racial persecution: 
"a lonely voice crying out in the silence of a 
continent." Today you get the impression that he was the 
only one keeping silent -- though "heroes" like Winston 
Churchill, who was silent on the subject even in his 
postwar memoirs, are given a pass.

 But Pius XII isn't Goldhagen's ultimate target; 
Christianity is. He contends that the central Christian 
doctrine -- the doctrine of the Crucifixion -- is anti-
Semitic! After all, the Gospels mention a Jewish role in 
that event. Goldhagen seems to imply, without 
explanation, that this is factually false.

 In Goldhagen's mind, the Cross begot the Swastika. 
Nazism was the updated spawn of the earliest Christian 
teachings and the Holocaust was their fulfillment.

 If this is true, it would seem that the Communists 
were right to try to eliminate Christianity. Goldhagen 
never quite says this, but it follows from what he does 
say. He notes that the oppression of Jews in Russia ended 
when the Communists came to power; but he also resents 
any suggestion that Jews played any role in Soviet 
Communism (that's anti-Semitic too). You get the 
impression that Communism was led by well-meaning 
gentiles. (One gets that impression about many things 
these days.)

 Goldhagen uses the word "anti-Semitic" so loosely 
that his charges can't be falsified. How can you disprove 
a charge when you don't even know what it means? This too 
is a principle of Soviet jurisprudence: an impossible 
burden of proof falls not on the prosecution, but on the 
defendant.

 If Christianity has always been anti-Semitic "at 
its core," as Goldhagen says, why didn't the Holocaust 
occur when Europe was still Christian? And if anti-
Semitism is a Christian doctrine, why was it so fervently 
embraced by people who rejected or were indifferent to 
all other Christian doctrines? The Church taught that 
fornication was immoral, but that didn't seem to stop 
people from fornicating, especially after they lost their 
faith.

 True, the Church also condemned murder, which 
would seem to rule out the mass murder of Jews, but 
Goldhagen actually says that this teaching was "barely 
known"! The Ten Commandments -- "barely known"? Some 
Protestant bigots have charged that Catholics are 
forbidden to read the Bible, but Goldhagen takes the cake 
for malicious ignorance.

 You would think that an anti-Semitic Church would 
at least censure the Jews in its creeds, its formal 
doctrines, its papal encyclicals. You would expect its 
leaders to warn the faithful against Jewish influence. 
You would certainly expect its official condemnations of 
Communism to mention the Jewish role in Bolshevism, as 
such Catholics as Hilaire Belloc and Father Charles 
Coughlin did.

 But none of this happened. In fact, the Second 
Vatican Council specifically repudiated the notion that 
all Jews bear the guilt of the Crucifixion. Goldhagen, a 
virtuoso of aspersion, finds even this anti-Semitic!

 Self-absorption can go no further. Goldhagen has 
produced a monument of intellectual ethnocentrism and 
paranoid slander.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read this column on-line at 
"http://www.sobran.com/columns/020205.shtml".

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

THE Bunche REPORT- PALESTINE 1944-1948

A Summary of Zionist Terrorism in the Near East — 1944-1948

Prepared for Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, UN Mediator for Palestine

Foreward: In view of the tragic assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte by identified Jewish terrorists on September 17 of this year, the following report has been prepared for the use of Dr. Bunche, Count Bernadotte’s immediate replacement.

The report is a compilation of all identified terrorist attacks on British, American and Arab individuals and entities from the assassination of the British Resident Minister in the Middle East on November 6, 1944 by members of the terrorist Jewish Stern gang to the assassination of Count Bernadotte on September 17, 1948 by members of this same gang of fanatics.

This information is compiled from reports of the US Department of State, the British Foreign Office and various American and British press services.

New York, October 1, 1948

Chronology

1944

November 6, 1944, Cairo. Lord Moyne, British Resident Minister in the Middle East, and his driver were assassinated outside the minister’s Cairo residence. Two murderers were involved. One was injured, and both were immediately arrested.

1945

January 10, 1945, Cairo. The British supreme military court today put on trial Eliahu Bet-Tsours from Tel Aviv and Eliahu Hakim of Haifa, both admitted members of the Jewish terrorist Stern gang.

January 18, 1945, Cairo. The British supreme military court sentenced the murderers of Lord Moyne to death. Both killers admitted their act and also admitted their membership in the Stern gang which they said ordered the killings as a warning to the British not to interfere with future Jewish immigration to Jerusalem.

March 22, 1945, Cairo. The two convicted Jewish Stern gang terrorists who murdered Lord Moyne and his driver were hanged today in the Cairo prison British authorities announced.

1946

January 12, 1946, Palestine. A train was derailed by Jewish terrorists at Hadera near Haifa by a bomb and robbed of £35,000 in cash. Two British police officials were injured.

January 18, 1946, Haifa. Over 900 Jewish immigrants were captured off Haifa by the British Royal Navy.

January 19, 1946, Jerusalem. Jewish terrorists destroyed a power station and a portion of the Central Jerusalem prison by explosives. Two persons were killed by police.

January 22, 1946, Palestine. Jewish terrorists launched an attack against the British-controlled Givat Olga Coast Guard Station located between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Ten persons were injured and one was killed. Captured papers indicated that the purpose of this raid was to take revenge on the British for their seizure of the refugee ship on January 18. British military authorities in Jerusalem questioned 3,000 Jews and held 148 in custody.

April 25, 1946, Palestine. Jewish terrorists attacked a British installation near Tel Aviv. This group, which contained a number of young girls, had as its goal the capture of British weapons. British authorities rounded up 1,200 suspects.

June 24, 1946, Palestine. The Irgun radio “Fighting Zion” warns that three kidnapped British officers are held as hostages for two Irgun members, Josef Simkohn and Isaac Ashbel facing execution as well as 31 Irgun members facing trial.

June 27, 1946, Palestine. Thirty Irgun members are sentenced by a British military court to 15 years in prison. One, Benjamin Kaplan was sentenced to life for carrying a firearm.

June 29, 1946, Palestine. British military units and police raided Jewish settlements throughout Palestine searching for the leaders of Haganah, a leading Jewish terrorist agency. The Jewish Agency for Palestine was occupied and four top officials arrested. At the end of June, 1946 2,000 were arrested and four Jews and one British soldier were killed.

July 1, 1946, Palestine. British officials announced the discovery of a large arms dump hidden underground at Meshak Yagur. 2,659 men and 59 women were detained for the three day operation in which 27 settlements were searched. Four were killed and 80 were injured.

July 3, 1946, Palestine. Palestine High Commissioner, Lt. General Sir Alan Cunningham commuted to life imprisonment the death sentences of Josef Simkohn and Isaac Ashbel, Irgun members.

July 4, 1946, Tel Aviv. British officers, Captains K. Spencer, C. Warburton and A. Taylor who had been kidnapped by the Irgun on June 18 and held as hostages for the lives of Simkohn and Ashbel, were released in Tel Aviv unharmed. At this time, Irgun issued a declaration of war against the British claiming that they had no alternative but to fight.

July 22, 1946, Jerusalem. The west wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed British Military Headquarters and other governmental offices was destroyed at 12:57 PM by explosives planted in the cellar by members of the Irgun terrorist gang. By the 26 of July the casualties were 76 persons killed, 46 injured and 29 still missing in the rubble. The dead included many British, Arabs and Jews.

July 23, 1946, Jerusalem. The Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist group takes responsibility for the King David bombing but blames the British, calling them “tyrants.”

July 24, 1946, London. The British government released a White Paper that accuses the Haganah, Irgun and Stern gangs of “a planned movement of sabotage and violence” under the direction of the Jewish Agency and asserts that the June 29 arrest of Zionist leaders was the cause of the bombing.

July 28, 1946, Jerusalem. The British Palestine Commander, Lt. General Sir Evelyn Barker, banned fraternization of British troops with Palestine Jews whom he stated “cannot be absolved of responsibility for terroristic acts.” The order states that this will punish “the race ... by striking at their pockets and showing our contempt for them.”

July 29, 1946, Tel Aviv. Police in Tel Aviv raided a workshop making bombs.

July 30, 1946, Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is placed under a 22-hour-a-day curfew as 20,000 British troops began a house-to-house sweep for terrorists. The city is sealed off from the rest of Jerusalem and troops are ordered to shoot to kill any curfew violators.

July 31, 1946, Tel Aviv. A large cache of weapons, extensive counterfeiting equipment and $1,000,000 in counterfeit Government bonds were discovered in Tel Aviv’s largest synagogue.

July 31, 1946, Haifa. Two ships have arrived at Haifa with a total of 3,200 illegal Jewish immigrants.

August 2, 1946, Tel Aviv. British military authorities ended the curfew in Tel Aviv after detaining 500 persons for further questioning. A second arms dump was discovered on July 1 in a school building.

August 2, 1946, Jerusalem. The Palestine Government disclosed that 91 persons were killed and 45 injured in the King David bombing.

August 2, 1946, Jerusalem. Jerusalem police announced the arrest of Itzhak Yesternitsky, second man in the Stern gang.

August 12, 1946, London. The British Government announced that it will allow no more unscheduled immigration into Palestine and that those seeking entry into that country will be sent to Cyprus and other areas under detention. Declaring that such immigration threatens a civil war with the Arab population, it charges a “minority of Zionist extremists” with attempting to force an unacceptable solution of the Palestine problem.

August 12, 1946, Haifa. Two ships carrying a total of 1,300 Jewish refugees arrived at Haifa. The port area was isolated on August 11 by British military and naval units. The first deportation ship sailed for Cyprus with 500 Jews on board.

August 13, 1946, Haifa. Three Jews were killed and seven wounded when British troops were compelled to fire on a crowd of about 1,000 persons trying to break into the port area of Haifa. Two Royal Navy ships with 1,300 illegal Jewish immigrants on board sailed for Cyprus. Another ship with 600 illegal immigrants was captured and confined in the Haifa harbor.

August 26, 1946, Palestine. British military units searched the coastal villages of Casera and Sadoth Yam for three Jews who bombed the transport “Empire Rival” last week. Eighty-five persons, including the entire male population of one of the villages were sent to the Rafa detention center.

August 27, 1946, Palestine. During the searches conducted on August 26, an explosive limpet mine similar to the one used on the “Empire Rival” was found.

August 29, 1946, Jerusalem. The British Government announced the commutation to life imprisonment of the death sentences imposed on 18 Jewish youths convicted of bombing the Haifa railroad shops.

August 30, 1946, Palestine. British military units discovered arms and munitions dumps in the Jewish farming villages of Dorot and Ruhama.

September 8, 1946, Palestine. Zionist terrorists cut the Palestine railroad in 50 places.

September 9, 1946, Tel Aviv. Two British officers were killed in an explosion in a public building.

September 9, 1946, Haifa. An Arab constable was killed.

September 10, 1946, Palestine. British troops imposed a curfew and arrested 101 Jews and wounded two in a search for saboteurs in Tel Aviv and neighboring Ramat Gan. Irgun terrorist groups took the action against the railways on September 8, as a protest.

September 14, 1946, Jaffa. Jewish terrorists robbed three banks in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, killing three Arabs. Thirty-six Jews were arrested.

September 15, 1946, Tel Aviv. Jewish terrorists attacked a police station on the coast near Tel Aviv but were driven off by gunfire.

October 2, 1946, Tel Aviv. British military units and police seized 50 Jews in a Tel Aviv cafe after a Jewish home was blown up. This home belonged to a Jewish woman who had refused to pay extortion money to the Irgun terrorist gang.

October 6, 1946, Jerusalem. An RAF man was killed by gunfire.

October 8, 1946, Jerusalem. Two British soldiers were killed when their truck detonated a land mine outside Jerusalem. A leading Arab figure was wounded in a similar mine explosion in Jerusalem and more road mines were found near Government House.

October 31, 1946, Rome. The British Embassy in Rome was damaged by a bomb, believed to have been planted by Jewish terrorists.

November 3, 1946, Palestine. Two Jews and two Arabs were killed in clashes between Arabs and a group of Jews attempting to establish a settlement at Lake Hula in northern Palestine.

November 4, 1946, Rome. Italian authorities released a letter in which the Jewish terrorist gang Irgun took credit for the October 31 embassy bombing.

November 5, 1946, Palestine. British authorities released the following eight Jewish Agency leaders from the Latrun concentration camp where they had been held since June 29: Moshe Shertok, Dr. Issac Greenbaum, Dr. Bernard Joseph, David Remiz, David Hacohen, David Shingarevsky, Joseph Shoffman and Mordecai Shatter. A total of 2,550 Haganah suspects have also been released as well as 779 Jews arrested in the wake of the King David bombing.

November 7, 1946, Palestine. Railroad traffic was suspended for 24 hours throughout Palestine following a fourth Irgun attack on railway facilities in two days.

November 9 through November 13, 1946, Palestine. Nineteen persons, eleven British soldiers and policemen and eight Arab constables, were killed in Palestine during this period as Jewish terrorists, using land mines and suitcase bombs, increased their attacks on railroad stations, trains and even streetcars.

November 14, 1946, London. The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned Jewish terrorist groups who threatened to export their terrorism to England.

November 18, 1946, Tel Aviv. Police in Tel Aviv attacked Jews, assaulting many and firing into houses. Twenty Jews were injured in fights with British troops following the death on November 17 of three policemen and an RAF sergeant in a land mine explosion.

November 20, 1946, Jerusalem. Five persons were injured when a bomb exploded in the Jerusalem tax office.

December 2 through December 5, 1946, Palestine. Ten persons, including six British soldiers, were killed in bomb and land-mine explosions.

December 3, 1946, Jerusalem. A member of the Stern gang was killed in an aborted hold-up attempt.

December 26, 1946, Palestine. Armed Jewish terrorists raided two diamond factories in Nathanya and Tel Aviv and escaped with nearly $107,000 in diamonds, cash and bonds. These raids signaled an end to a two-week truce during the World Zionist Congress.

1947

January 1, 1947, Jerusalem. Dov Gruner was sentenced to hang by a British military court for taking part in a raid on the Ramat Gan police headquarters in April of 1946.

January 2, 1947, Palestine. A wave of terror swept Palestine as Jewish terrorists staged bombings and machine gun attacks in five cities. Casualties were low. Homemade flamethrowers were used in several cases. Pamphlets seized warned that the Irgun had again declared war against the British and Arabs of Palestine.

January 4, 1947, Jerusalem. British soldiers have been ordered to wear sidearms at all times and were forbidden to enter any cafe or restaurant.

January 5, 1947, Egypt. Eleven British troops were injured in a hand grenade attack on a train carrying troops to Palestine. The attack took place near Benha, 25 miles from Cairo.

January 8, 1947, Palestine. British police arrested 32 persons suspected of being members of the Irgun terrorist gang’s “Black Squad” in raids on Rishon-el Zion and Rehoboth.

January 12, 1947, Haifa. A single terrorist drove a truck filled with high explosives into the central police station and exploded it, killing two British policemen and two Arab constables and injuring 140 others. The terrorist escaped. This action ended a 10-day lull in the violence and the Stern gang took the credit for it.

January 13, 1947, Haifa. British soldiers and police screened 872 persons in Haifa and detained 10 for further questioning as Arabs and Jews both condemned the bombing.

January 14, 1947, Jerusalem. Yehudi Katz is sentenced to life in prison by a Jerusalem court for robbing a bank in Jaffa in September of 1946 to obtain funds for the terrorists.

January 21, 1947, London. Dr. Emmanuel Neumann, vice president fo the Zionist Organization of America, declared U.S. Zionists would spend “millions” to finance illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine. A Haganah spokesman in Paris claimed that 211,878 Jews entered Palestine illegally during the past 15 months.

January 22, 1947, Palestine. Sir Harry Gurney, Chief Secretary, stated that the British administration was taxing Palestine $2,400,000 to pay for sabotage by the terrorists.

January 22, 1947, London. Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones informed the House of Commons 73 British subjects were murdered by Palestine terrorists in 1946 and “no culprits have been convicted.”

January 27, 1947, London. Britain’s conference on Palestine, boycotted by the Jews, reconvened. Jamal el Husseini, Palestine Arab leader, declared that the Arab world was unalterably opposed to partition as a solution to the problem. The session then adjourned.

January 29, 1947, London. It was officially announced that the British Cabinet decided to partition Palestine.

January 29, 1947, Jerusalem. Irgun forces released former Maj. H. Collins, a British banker, who they kidnapped on January 26 from his home. He had been badly beaten. On January 28, the Irgun released Judge Ralph Windham who had been kidnapped in Tel Aviv on January 27 while trying a case. These men had been taken as hostages for Dov Bela Gruner, an Irgun member under death sentence for terrorism. The British High Commissioner, Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham, had threatened martial law unless the two men were returned unharmed.

January 31, 1947, Jerusalem. General Cunningham ordered the wives and children of all British civilians to leave Palestine at once. About 2,000 are involved. This order did not apply to the 5,000 Americans in Palestine.

February 3, 1947, Jerusalem. The Palestine Government issued a 7-day ultimatum to the Jewish Agency demanding that it state “categorically and at once” whether it and the supreme Jewish Council in Palestine will call on the Jewish community by February 10 for “cooperation with the police and armed forces in bringing to justice the members of the terrorist groups.”

This request was publicly rejected by Mrs. Goldie Meyerson, head of the Jewish Agency’s political department.

February 4, 1947, Jerusalem. British District Commissioner James Pollock disclosed a plan for military occupation of three sectors of Jerusalem and orders nearly 1,000 Jews to evacuate the Rehavia, Schneler and German quarters by noon, February 6.

February 5, 1947, Jerusalem. The Vaad Leumi rejected the British ultimatum while the Irgun passed out leaflets that it was prepared to fight to the death against the British authority.

The first 700 of some 1,500 British women and children ordered to evacuate Palestine leave by plane and train for Egypt. British authorities, preparing for military action, order other families from sections of Tel Aviv and Haifa which will be turned into fortified military areas.

February 9, 1947, Haifa. British troops removed 650 illegal Jewish immigrants from the schooner “Negev” at Haifa and after a struggle forced them aboard the ferry “Emperor Haywood” for deportation to Cyprus.

February 14, 1947, Jerusalem. The British administration revealed that Lt. Gen. Sir Evelyn Barker, retiring British commander in Palestine, had confirrmed the death sentences of three Irgun members on February 12 before leaving for England. The three men, Dov Ben Rosenbaum, Eliezer Ben Kashani and Mordecai Ben Alhachi, had been sentenced on February 10 to be hanged for carrying firearms. A fourth, Haim Gorovetzky, received a life sentence because of his youth. Lt. Gen. G. MacMillan arrived in Jerusalem on February 13 to succeed Gen. Barker.

February 15, 1947, Palestine. The Sabbath was the setting for sporadic outbreaks of violence which included the murder of an Arab in Jaffa and of a Jew in Bne Brok, the kidnaping of a Jew in Peta Tikvah and the burning of a Jewish club in Haifa.

March 9, 1947, Hadera. A British army camp was attacked.

March 10, 1947, Haifa. A Jew, suspected of being an informer, was murdered by Jewish terrorists.

March 12, 1947, Jerusalem. The British Army pay corps was dynamited in Jerusalem and one soldier killed.

March 12, 1947, Palestine. British military units captured most of the 800 Jews whose motor ship “Susanna” ran the British blockade and was beached north of Gaza on this date. A British naval escort brought the “Ben Hecht,” the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation’s first known immigrant ship, into Haifa, and its 599 passengers were shipped to Cyprus. The British arrested the crew, which included 18 U.S. seamen.

March 13, 1947, Jerusalem. British authorities announced 78 arrests as a result of unofficial Jewish cooperation, but two railroads were attacked, resulting in two deaths, and eight armed men robbed a Tel Aviv bank of $65,000.

March 14, 1947, Palestine. Jewish terrorists blew up part of an oil pipeline in Haife and a section of the rail line near Beer Yakov.

March 16, 1947, Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency building was bombed.

March 17, 1947, Jerusalem. British authorities ended martial law which had kept 300,000 Jews under house arrest for 16 days and tied up most economic activity.

March 17, 1947, Palestine. A military court sentenced Moshe Barazani to be hanged for possessing a hand grenade.

March 18, 1947, Palestine. Terrorist leaflets admitted the murder of Michael Shnell on Mount Carmel as an informer.

March 22, 1947, Palestine. British officials announced the arrest of five known terrorists and the discovery near Petah Tikvah of the body of Leon Meshiah, a Jew presumably slain as a suspected informer.

March 26, 1947, London. Britain’s Privy Council rejected the appeal of the death sentence against Dov Bela Gruner.

March 28, 1947, Haifa. The Irgun blew up the Iraq Petroleum Co. pipeline in Haifa.

March 29, 1947, Palestine. A British army officer was murdered by Jewish terrorists when they ambushed a party of horsemen near the Ramle camp. A raid by terrorists on a Tel Aviv bank yielded $109,000.

March 30, 1947, Palestine. Units of the British Royal Navy, answering an SOS, took the disabled “Moledeth” with 1,600 illegal Jewish refugees on board under tow some 50 miles outside Palestinian waters.

March 30, 1947, Tel Aviv. The Stern gang killed the wife of a British soldier.

March 31, 1947, Haifa. Jewish terrorists dynamited the British-owned Shell-Mex oil tanks in Haifa, starting a fire that destroyed a quarter-mile of the waterfront. The damage was set at more than $1,000,000, and the British government in Palestine has stated that the Jewish community will have to pay for it.

April 2, 1947, Cyprus. The “Ocean Vigour” was damaged by a bomb in Famagusta Harbor, Cyprus. The Haganah admitted the bombing.

April 2, 1947, Jerusalem. A court in Jerusalem sentenced Daniel Azulai and Meyer Feinstein, members of the Irgun terrorist gang, to death for the October 30 attack on the Jerusalem railroad station. The Palestine Supreme Court admitted an appeal of Dov Bela Gruner’s death sentence.

April 3, 1947. The transport “Empire Rival” was damaged by a time bomb while en route from Haifa to Port Said in Egypt.

April 7, 1947, Jerusalem. The High Court denied a new appeal against the death sentence of Dov Bela Gruner, and a British patrol killed Moshe Cohen.

April 8, 1947, Jerusalem. Jewish terrorists killed a British constable in revenge for the Cohen death.

April 9, 1947, Palestine. The Palestine Government abandoned “statutory martial law” in the face of unfavorable publicity but granted itself military dictatorship powers in “controlled areas” it may impose.

April 10, 1947, London. The British Government requested France and Italy to prevent Jews from embarking for Palestine.

100

April 11, 1947, Jerusalem. Asher Eskovitch, a Jew, was beaten to death by Moslems when he entered the forbidden Mosque of Omar.

101

April 13, 1947, Jerusalem. Guella Cohen, Stern gang illegal broadcaster, escaped from a British military hospital.

102

April 14, 1947, Tel Aviv. A British naval unit boarded the refugee ship “Guardian” and seized it along with 2,700 passengers after a gun battle in which two immigrants were killed and 14 wounded.

103

April 16, 1947, Haifa. In spite of threats of reprisal from the Irgun, the British hanged Dov Bela Gruner and three other Irgun members at Acre Prison on Haifa Bay. Jewish communities were kept under strict curfew for several hours. Soon after the deaths were announced, a time bomb was found in the Colonial Office in London, but was defused.

104

April 17, 1947, Palestine. Lt. Gen. G. MacMillan confirmed death sentences for two more convicted terrorists, Meier Ben Feinstein and Moshe Ben Barazani, but reduced Daniel Azulai’s sentence to life imprisonment.

105

April 18, 1947, Palestine. Irgun’s reprisals for the Gruner execution were an attack on a field dressing station near Nethanaya where one sentry was killed, an attack on an armored car in Tel Aviv where one bystander was killed and harmless shots at British troops in Haifa.

106

April 19, 1947, Haifa. British naval units exploded depth charges in Haifa harbor to prevent an underwater assault by Jewish “frogmen” on three British deportation vessels that took the “Guardian’s” passengers to Cyprus.

107

April 20, 1947, Tel Aviv. A seies of bombings by Jewish terrorists in retaliation for the hanging of convicted terrorist Gruner injured 12 British soldiers.

108

April 21, 1947, Jerusalem. Meier Feinstein and Moshe Barazani, condemned terrorists, killed themselves in prison a few hours before they were scheduled to be hanged. They blew themselves up with bombs smuggled to them in hollowed-out oranges.

109

April 22, 1947, Palestine. A troop train arriving from Cairo was bombed outside Rehovoth with five soldiers and three civilians killed and 39 persons injured.

110

April 23, 1947, London. The British First Lord of the Admiralty, Viscount Hall, defended the Labor Government’s policy in Palestine and he acknowledged in the House of Lords that Britain would not “carry out a policy of which it did not approve” despite any UN action. He blamed contributions from American Jews to the Palestine terrorists as aiding terrorism there and cited the toll since August 1, 1945: 113 killed, 249 wounded, 168 Jews convicted, 28 sentenced to death, four executed, 33 terrorists slain in battles. Viscount Samuel urged increased immigration.

111

April 23, 1947, Palestine. The Irgun proclaimed its own “military courts” to “try” British troops and policemen who resisted them.

112

April 23, 1947, Palestine. Lt. General Sir Alan Cunningham, Palestine High Commander flew to Egypt and requested Lt. General Sir Miles Dempsey, Middle-East land-force commander, for more troops to be sent to Palestine.

113

April 25, 1947, Tel Aviv. A Stern gang squad drove a stolen post office truck loaded with explosives into the Sarona police compound and detonated it, killing five British policemen.

114

April 26, 1947, Haifa. The murder of Deputy Police Superintendant A. Conquest climaxed a week of bloodshed.

115

May 4, 1947, Acre. The walls of Acre prison were blasted open by an Irgun bomb squad and 251 Jewish and Arab prisoners escaped after a gun battle in which 15 Jews and 1 Arab were killed, 32 (including six British guards) were injured and 23 escapists were recaptured. The Palestine Government promised no extra punishment if the 189 escapees still at large will surrender.

116

May 6, 1947, Jerusalem. Former British Commando Sgt. Dov Bernard Cohen, head of the Acre bomb squad, was fatally wounded in the attack.

117

May 4, 1947, New York. The Political Action Committee for Palestine ran a series of advertisements in New York newspapers seeking funds to buy parachutes for young European Jews planning to crash the Palestine immigration barrier by air.

118

May 8, 1947, Tel Aviv. A Jew was ambushed and shot to death by an Arab group near Tel Aviv, and three Jewish-owned Tel Aviv shops whose owners refused to contribute money to Jewish terrorist groups were burned down.

119

May 12, 1947, Jerusalem. Jewish terrorists killed two British policemen.

120

May 12, 1947, Jerusalem. The British authorities announced that 312 Jewish political prisoners were held in Kenya, East Africa, 247 in Latrun and 34 in Bethlehem, Palestine.

121

May 15, 1947. The Stern gang killed two British lieutenants and injured seven other persons with two derailments and three bridge demolitions.

122

May 16, 1947, Palestine. On the fifth day of another terrorist drive, Haifa Assistant Police Superintendant, Robert Schindler, a German Jew, was murdered by the Stern gang, and a British constable was killed on the Mt. Carmel-Haifa road near Jerusalem.

123

May 17, 1947, Haifa. The 1,200-ton Haganah freighter “Trade Winds” was seized by the Royal Navy off the Lebanon coast and escorted into Haifa, and over 1,000 illegal immigrants were disembarked pending transfer to Cyprus.

124

May 19, 1947, London. The British government protested to the United States government against American fund-raising drives for Palestine terrorist groups. The complaint referred to a “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine” by playwright Ben Hecht, American League for a Free Palestine co-chairman, first published in the New York “Post” on May 15. The ad said, “We are out to raise millions for you.”

125

May 22, 1947, Palestine. Arabs attacked a Jewish labor camp in southern Palestine, retaliating for a Haganah raid on the Arabs near Tel Aviv May 20. Some 40,000 Arab and Jewish workers united the same day in a one-day strike against all establishments operated by the British War Ministry.

126

May 23, 1947, Palestine. A British naval party boarded the immigrant ship “Mordei Haghettoath” off South Palestine and took control of its 1,500 passengers. Two British soldiers were convicted in Jerusalem of abandoning a jeep and army mail under a terrorist attack.

127

May 27, 1947, Germany. Jewish underground migration officials in Frankfurt-am-Main declared they hoped to transport 1,000,000 Jews from Europe to Palestine, 30,000 of them this summer. The Costa Rican ship “Colony Trader” has been detained at Gibraltar under suspicion of its use for smuggling illegal immigrants into Palestine. London is investigating reports that non-Jewish Poles and Slavs in DP camps are being recruited for the Palestine army. Other investigations are being conducted into persistent reports that Soviet Russia has been supplying technical advisors to the Jewish terrorist groups.

128

May 28, 1947, Syria. Fawzi el-Kawukji, who spent the war years in Germany after leading the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine, told reporters in Damascus that an unfavorable decision by the UN inquiry group would be the signal for war against the Jews in Palestine. “We must prove that in case” of an Anglo-American war with Russia, “we can be more dangerous or useful to them than the Jews,” he added.

129

May 28, 1947, Haifa. Jewish terrorists blew up a water main and a shed in the Haifa oil dock areas and made three attacks on railway lines in the Lydda and Haifa areas.

130

May 31, 1947, Haifa. The Haganah ship “Yehuda Halevy” arrived under British naval escort with 399 illegal Jewish immigrants, the first from Arab territories. They were immediately transshipped to Cyprus.

131

June 4, 1947, London. The terrorist Jewish Stern gang sent letter bombs to high British governmental officials. Eight letter bombs containing powdered gelignite explosive were discovered in London. Recipients included Ernest Bevan, Anthony Eden, Prime Minister Attlee and Winston Churchill.

132

June 5, 1947, Washington. President Truman asked all persons in the U.S. to refrain from helping Palestine terrorists. The American Jewish Committee and Jewish Labor Committee condemned Ben Hecht’s campaign for Palestine terrorist funds.

133

June 5, 1947, Tel Aviv. Jewish terrorist mines wrecked two trains near Tel Aviv and Haifa and the Athlit railroad station but without casualties.

134

June 6, 1947, London. Scotland Yard official now acknowledge that a total of 20 letter bombs have been found.

135

June 6, 1947, New York. Secretary General of the UN, Trygve Lie has forwarded a request to all countries a request by the British that they guard their frontiers against departure of illegal immigrants bound for Palestine.

136

June 18, 1947, Tel Aviv. Haganah disclosed that one of its men was killed by a booby trap which foiled an Irgun plot to blow up British Military Headquarters in Tel Aviv.

137

June 18, 1947, Jerusalem. Major Roy Farran, held in connection with the disappearance of a 16-year-old Jew, managed to escape from custody in the army barracks in Jerusalem.

138

June 28, 1947, Palestine. The terrorist Stern gang opened fire on British soldiers waiting in a line outside a Tel Aviv theater, killing three and wounding two. Another Briton is killed and several wounded in a Haifa hotel. This action was claimed by Jewish terrorists to be in retaliation for British brutality and the alleged slaying of a missing 16 year old Jew, Alexander Rubowitz while he was being held in an Army barracks on May 6.

139

June 6, 1947, New York. The UN Committee votes 9-0 to condemn the acts of terrorism as “flagrant disregard” of the UN appeal for an interim truce as Stern terrorists wounded four more British soldiers on a beach at Herzlia. Major Roy Alexander Farran surrendered voluntarily after his escape from custody in Jerusalem on June 19. He had been arrested in connection with the Rubowitz case.

140

June 30, 1947, Jerusalem. The Palestine government permitted oil companies to raise prices of benzine nearly 10% to pay for $1 million damage suffered when Jewish terrorists blew up oil installations at Haifa on March 31.

141

July 1, 1947, Jerusalem. The British Government rejected the UN Commission’s move to halt the execution of three Irgun members convicted of terrorism and also said that the UN Assembly truce resolution of May 15 had no bearing on “the normal processes of the administration of justice” in Palestine.

142

July 2, 1947, Haifa. Irgun members robbed a Haifa bank of $3,200 while both the Stern gang and the Irgun warned the British that their “provocative” acts in Palestine must end before a truce can be effected. The Guatemalan and Czech members of the UN Commission visited two Jewish convicts in Acre Prison. In Pretoria, South Africa, Prime Minister Smuts, who was a party to the Balfour Declaration, said “the promise of a national home in Palestine never meant the whole of Palestine.” He favored partition into Arab and Jewish states.

143

July 12, 1947, Jerusalem. Dr. Arieh Altman, president of the United Zionist Revisionists, told a party rally in Jerusalem that the Revisionists would settle for nothing less than an unpartitioned free Jewish state in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Irgun announced in Jerusalem that two British sergeants kidnaped in Nathanaya are being held in Tel Aviv and have been sentenced to death by Irgun court-martial.

144

July 14, 1947, Nathanya. The British imposed martial law and placed the 15,000 inhabitants of Nathanya under house arrest. They made 68 arrests and sentenced 21 persons to 6 months each in the Latrun detention camp.

145

July 17, 1947, Nathanya. The Irgun in five mine operations against military traffic to and from Nathanya killed one Briton and injured 16.

146

July 17, 1947, Nathanya. Mines killed a second Briton and injured seven.

147

July 18, 1947, Haifa. The American-manned Haganah refugee ship “Exodus 1947” (formerly the “President Warfield”) was escorted into Haifa by British naval units after a battle in which the American first mate, William Bernstein and two immigrants were killed and more than 30 injured.

The blockade runner itself was badly damaged. The remainder of the 4,554 passengers, the largest group of illegal immigrants to sail for Palestine in a single ship, were put aboard British prison ships for removal to Cyprus. The American captain, Bernard Marks, and his crew were arrested. The ship sailed from France.

148

July 19, 1947, Haifa. Rioting, quickly suppressed, broke out among the passengers of the “Exodus 1947” when they learned they were to be returned to France.

149

July 19, 1947, Jerusalem. The Palestine Government charges that a Jewish “campaign of lawlessness, murder and sabotage” has cost 70 lives and $6 million in damage since 1940.

150

July 21, 1947, Jerusalem. Before officially admitting that 4,529 passengers of the “Exodus 1947” who had been transferred to three British ships, were being sent not to Cyprus but back to France, the Palestine Government took the precaution of first placing Jerusalem’s 90,000 Jews undr nightly house arrest.

151

July 23, 1947, Haifa. Haganah sank the British transport “Empire Lifeguard” in Haifa harbor as it was discharging 300 Jewish immigrants who had officially been admitted to Palestine under quota. Sixty-five immigrants were killed and 40 were wounded. The British were able to refloat the ship.

152

July 24, 1947, Amman, Trans-Jordan. Seven members of the UN Palestine Commission flew to Amman and were informed by Jordanian Premier Samir Pasha el Rifai that:

(1) Palestine belongs to the Arabs; (2) the Arabs never accepted the Balfour Declaration; (3) the Jews are imperialistic invaders whose immigration “must be stopped forthwith”; (5) Palestine should get unpartitioned independence under the Arab majority; (6) the plight of European refugees does not concern Palestine; (7) the Arabs will justly resist with force any unfavorable decision.

153

July 26, 1947. Jewish terrorists blew up the Iraqi Petroleum Co. pipeline 12 miles east of Haifa and destroyed a Mt. Carmel radar station.

154

July 26, 1947, Palestine. Two British soldiers were killed by a booby trap near Jerusalem, raising the week’s violence toll to 12 killed and 75 wounded.

155

July 26, 1947, Palestine. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, announced from his secret headquarters that Haganah had planned the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946 in which 91 persons were killed.

156

July 27, 1947, Palestine. An ambush and mines cost the British seven more casualties, all wounded.

157

July 28, 1947, Haifa. Two small Haganah ships loaded with 1,174 Jews from North Africa were intercepted by British naval units off Palestine and brought into Haifa. The illegal immigrants were transshipped aboard British transports and taken to Cyprus.

158

July 29, 1947, Palestine. The British authorities hanged three Irgunists in Acre prison despite appeals from Jewish leaders. The condemned, Myer Nakar, Absalom Habib and Jacob Weiss, had fought in the Czech underground during the war. They were convicted of blowing up Acre Prison on May 4 and liberating 200 Arabs and Jews.

159

July 29, 1947, France. The 4,429 “Exodus 1947” illegal immigrants who sailed from Sete, France, July 11 for Palestine only to be shipped back by the British aboard three transports, refused to debark as the vessels anchored off Port de Douc, France. Only a few who were ill went ashore. The French government informed the refugees that they do not have to debark but will be welcomed if they do. The transports are the “Runnymede Park,” “Ocean Vigour” and “Empire Valour.”

160

July 30, 1947, Palestine. Irgun terrorists announced that they have hanged two British sergeants, Marvyn Paice and Clifford Martin, whom they had held as hostages since July 12, for “crimes against the Jewish community.” The two were seized when death sentences on the three Irgun members were confirmed by the British authorities. Two more British soldiers were killed by a land mine near Hadera. British troops attacked the Jewish colony of Pardes Hanna in revenge for the murders.

161

July 31, 1947, Nathanya. The bodies of the two murdered British sergeants were found hanging from eucalyptus trees one and a half miles from Nathanya about 5:30 AM. A booby trap blew Martin’s body to bits when it was cut down. Enraged British troops stormed into Tel Aviv, wrecked shops, attacked pedestrians and sprayed a bus with gunfire killing five Jews: two men, two women and a boy.

162

August 1, 1947, Tel Aviv. Thirty-three Jews are injured in an anti-British riot at Tel Aviv during the funeral procession of five civilians killed by British soldiers on July 31. In Jerusalem a Jewish terrorist attack on the British security zone in Rehavia was repulsed with one attacker killed and two captured.

163

August 2, 1947, Tel Aviv. The body of an unidentified Jew was found on a road near Tel Aviv. He was believed to have been kidnapped by men in British uniforms two weeks ago. Total casualties in Palestine since mid-July: 25 persons slain, 144 wounded. The dead include 15 Britons, two Jewish terrorists, eight civilians. Anti-British slogans, swastikas and dollar signs are painted onto British consulates in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

164

August 3, 1947, Palestine. Haganah warned in Jerusalem that the Britons who killed five Jews in Tel Aviv on July 31 will be found and punished.

165

August 4, 1947, Paris. An Irgun leader in Paris states that his organization has sentenced high British military and civilian officials in Palestine to death “in absentia” and will hang them upon capture.

166

August 4, 1947, Palestine. British troops blew up a Jewish house in a Jerusalem suburb in which arms were found. Jewish terrorists robbed Barclay’s Bank in Tel Aviv of $5,200 and a Haganah member was killed.

167

August 5, 1947, Palestine. Striking at dawn, British security forces arrested 35 leading Zionists and sent them to the Latrun detention camp in an attempt to wipe out the Irgun leadership.

In reprisal, Irgunists blew up the Department of Labor in Jerusalem, killing three British constables. Those arrested included Mayor Israel Rokach of Tel Aviv; Mayor Oved Ben Ami of Nathanya; Mayor Abraham Krinitzki of Ramat Gan; Arieh Altman, president of the radical Revisionist Party; Menahem Arber, leader of the Revisionist youth organization, B’rith Trumpeldor, which is outlawed; Max Kritzman, Dov Bela Gruner’s attorney, and David Stern, brother of the late founder of the Stern gang.

All those arrested except the three mayors were Revisionists. Among many papers confiscated was correspondence from Soviet Russian agents in Italy and Bulgaria and extensive plans to poison the water supply of the non-Jewish parts of Jerusalem with botulism and other bacteria. Bacteria was supplied by Soviet sources through Bulgaria.

168

August 5, 1947, England. Anti-Semitic outbreaks slackened after five days of rock-throwing, window-smashing and other incidents including daubing Jewish businesses with swastikas and numerous assaults on British Jews.

These incidents occurred in Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff (Wales), Leeds, London and Birmingham as retaliation for the murder of two British sergeants in Palestine.

Thirty-eight persons were arrested in Liverpool but in the main, the British police ignored the rioters and permitted them to run their course.

169

August 8, 1947, Palestine. The Bank of Sharon in Ramat Gan was robbed by Jewish terrorists of $8,000.

170

August 14, 1947, Geneva. The UN Special Subcommittee on Palestine returned to Geneva after a seven-day tour of DP camps in Austria and Germany. The tour took the group to Munich, Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg. In Berlin it heard reports August 13 from General Lucius D. Clay, U.S. Military Governor. Clay testified that anti-Semitism is growing very sharply among the ranks of the U.S. military units in the U.S. zones of Austria and Germany because of the violent, asocial and criminal behavior of the Eastern European DPs, all of whom are Jewish. He recommended that these DPs be allowed to enter Palestine before some incident with American soldiers, who have been beaten, robbed and killed by Jewish DPs, leads to severe spontaneous reactions of the part of other soldiers. His views were seconded very strongly by Sir Brian Robertson, Deputy British Military Governor.

171

August 15, 1947, Palestine. A mine derailed a Cairo-Haifa troop train north of Lydda, killing the engineer, and Irgun terrorists claimed the incident was part of its campaign to disrupt all the Palestine rail traffic.

172

August 16, 1947, Palestine. Arab-Jewish clashes have brought death to 12 Arabs and 13 Jews and heavy property destruction this week in the regions of Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Interracial strife was renewed on August 10 when Arabs killed four Jews in a Tel Aviv cafe, in reprisal for the deaths of two Arabs in a Haganah raid in Fega two months ago. Haganah responded to the Arab actions by bombing a house in an Arab orange grove near Tel Aviv, killing eleven Arabs, including a woman and four children.

British military curfews imposed on August 13 on slum districts between modern Tel Aviv and Jaffa have failed to prevent mounting casualties. British military authorities, citing captured intelligence and statements from Jewish defectors from terrorists organisations, state that it now appears that the Jewish terrorists are beginning to attack Arabs where ever they found them because Jews wish the Arabs to be driven out of Palestine entirely.

173

August 18, 1947, Palestine. The shops of five Jewish merchants in Tel Aviv were destroyed by the Irgun because the owners refused to give money to that organization.

174

August 23, 1947, Jerusalem. British authorities reported that five Arabs in one family, two men, one woman and two children, were murdered by Jewish terrorists as retaliation for the British arrest of two Irgun leaders on August 15.

175

September 9, 1947, Hamburg, Germany. In a bitter three-hour fight aboard the “Runnymede Park,” 350 British troops completed a two-day forced debarkation of 4,300 “Exodus 1947” illegal Jewish refugees from three ships in Hamburg, Germany. First ashore yesterday were the “Ocean Vigour’s” 1,406; a few put up token resistance and five passengers sustained minor injuries. Early today, the “Empire Rival’s” 1,420 passengers debarked peaceably after a home made bomb was found in the ship’s hold.

Many of the “Runnymede Park’s” 1,485 passengers fiercely resisted the debarkation process and British military units had to use fire hoses and truncheons to rout resisters below decks.

The Jews were taken ashore screaming “Nazis” to the British. “Runnymede Park” casualties, officially, were 24 Jews and three Britons injured, with 50 leaders of the resistance on that ship taken to jail. German police broke up a Hamburg demonstration by 1,300 Jewish DPs from the Bergen-Belsen camp, where British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan was hanged in effigy on September 7. The debarked “Exodus” passengers were interned in Poppendorf camp near Luebeck for screening by nationalities and at first all of them refused to cooperate with British authorities until the passengers were threatened with a diet of bread and water.

176

September 10, 1947, Washington D.C. Secretary of State George C. Marshall disclosed that the U.S. had urged Britain to reconsider sending the “Exodus” group to Germany, but Britain replied that there were no facilities for housing them elsewhere because the French did not want them and there were a number of vacant detention camps in Germany.

177

September 10, 1947, Paris. The French government has now announced that it would admit the “Exodus” refugees if they were not forcibly deported from Germany and on the understanding that they will be admitted eventually to Palestine.

178

September 7, 1947, Paris. French police state a Stern gang plot to attack London with home-made fire extinguisher bombs from the air was thwarted through the cooperation of Reginald Gilbert of St. Lous, Missouri, a student and wartime RCAF and AAF pilot. He was taken into custody with Rabbi Baruch Korff, of New York, co-chairman of the Political Action Committee for Palestine, and Judith Rosenberger, Hungarian-born Stern gang member, as the three started to enter a private plane last night at Toussus-le-Noble field near Versailles.

Gilbert informed French police that Korff had approached him in Paris a week ago with an offer for flying a bombing mission over London the day of the “Exodus” illegal immigrant landings in Germany.

Gilbert accepted for some other pilot who would actually perform the mission. He at once notified Paris police, then worked with them and Scotland Yard while pretending to go through with the Stern gang’s plot. Korff was charged in Paris on September 9 with illegal possession of bombs he was intending to drop on London. He began a hunger strike. Paris police state that nine other conspirators were in custody.

179

September 12, 1947, Palestine. Irgun has threatened to assassinate British representatives in the U.S. Zone of Germany and all British delegations there are under 24-hour guard, the U.S. command announced in Frankfurt-on-the-Main. A probe of Irgun thefts from U.S. army ammunition depots in Germany was reported on September 7.

180

September 20, 1947, Jerusalem. British raids September 16-19 uncovered several arms caches and terrorist hideouts in the Jerusalem area.

The home of David Ben-Gurion, Jewish Agency executive chairman was robbed of important papers September 18. In Paris, Rabbi Baruch Korff, leader of a Stern gang plot to bomb London, ended a hunger strike in Sante prison on September 15.

181

October 13, 1947, Jerusalem. A terrorist bomb damaged the U.S. consulate general in Jerusalem, injuring two employees slightly. Similar bombinbs occurred at the Polish consulate general last night and at the Swedish consulate on September 27.

In Baghdad, the Iraq foreign office advised an American House Foreign Affairs Committee group not to make a projected visit there because of “high feeling” over U.S. endorsement of partitioning in Palestine.

The State Deparatment in Washington announced it will issue no passports to American citizens who want to take part in terrorism in Palestine. Americans so involved will forfeit protection normally due U.S. citizens abroad.

182

October 18, 1947, Palestine. The Palestine Government states that Palestine Arab forces have been sent from the Trans-Jordan frontier to the Syrian and Lebanon borders to replace a British brigade which recently left Palestine. Zionists protested having Arab troops on the border of northern Palestine.

183

November 14, 1947, Palestine. Jewish terrorists killed two British policemen in Jerusalem and two soldiers in Tel Aviv to raise the total casualties in three days of violence to 10 Britons and five Jews killed and 33 Britons and five Jews wounded. The outbreaks began after British troops killed three girls and two boys in a raid on a farmhouse arsenal near Raanana on November 12. The terrorists retaliated yesterday by throwing hand grenades and firing a machine gun into the Ritz Cafe in Jerusalem.

184

November 15, 1947, London. The British Foreign Office denied Jerusalem press reports that Britain planned to take over any financial surplus left in Palestine’s treasury in pay for the costs of evacuation and combating unauthorized Jewish immigration.

185

November 16, 1947, Palestine. About 185 European Jews landed near Nahariya from a small schooner and escaped before the British could intercept them. A larger vessel, the “Kadimah,” was seized and brought to Haifa where 794 Jews were transshipped to a British transport for Cyprus.

186

November 17, 1947, Jerusalem. The British administration disclosed that it will sell state-owned real estate along the Haifa waterfront, from which it expects to make $8 million. It will also invest in England about $16 million from bonds that had been sold to Palestinians. Zionists strongly protested this as they said it would denude Palestine of its assets. There was no comment from the administration to these charges.

187

November 22, 1947, Haifa. Another Arab was murdered in Haifa by the Stern gang following their execution of four Arabs near Raanana November 20 in retaliation for the British shooting of five Stern gang members on November 12. Arabs retaliated against this killing at Raanana by wounding five Jews on a bus near Tel Aviv on November 20.

188

November 30-December 6, 1947, Palestine. A week of disorders brought on by Arab wrath over the UN’s decision to partition the Holy Land ended with at least 159 killed in the Middle East, 66 in Palestine. While Jews in Palestine, Europe and the U.S. celebrated and began planning their new state and the UN moved to implement its plan, war talk was rife throughout the Arab world.

The Arab League announced on December 1 that premiers and foreign ministers of seven Arab states would meet in Cairo next week to plan strategy against partition.

In Palestine: Jerusalem and the Jaffa Tel Aviv boundary zone were centers of week-long strife which began when seven Jews were killed throughout Palestine on November 30 and the mayor of Nablus, Arab nationalist center, proclaimed jihad or a holy war. British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham warned the Arab Higher Command on December 1 that Britain was determined to keep order so long as it held its mandate, and police stopped Arab agitators from raising crowds in Jerusalem. But Jewish celebrations there were stoned.

Arabs looted and burned a three-block Jewish business district in Jerusalem on December 2, the first day of a three-day Arab general strike during which 20 Jews and 15 Arabs were killed. When British troops failed to intervene, Haganah (unofficial Zionist militia) came into the open for the first time in eight years to restrain large-scale Jewish retaliation and also guard Jewish districts. Some Haganah men were arrested for possessing weapons. The day’s strife cause $1 million worth of damage and resulted in a 24-hour curfew being applied to Arab Jerusalem for the rest of the week. The curfew was extended to outlying roads on December 3 to stop stonings of Jewish traffic and keep rural Arabs out of the capital. Max Pinn, head of the Jewish Agency’s Trade and Transfer Department was killed on December 2 when Arabs stoned his auto near Ramleh. On this day Jews stoned Arab buses in Jerusalem.

On the Jaffa-Tel Aviv boundary, which also is under around-the-clock curfew, the week’s heaviest battle was a six-hour clash between Haganah and Arabs on December 3 in which seven Jews and five Arabs were killed and 75 persons injured. On December 2, Haganah claimed to have mobilized 10,000 men in the intercity trouble zone, and the Arab Legion of Trans-Jordan reported on this date that it had reinforced Jaffa. Seven Jews were killed in Jaffa-Tel Aviv on this date. There were lesser attacks in Haifa this week.

It becomes clearly evident that the partition is not going as planned and that although the Jews are pleased, the Arabs are not. There appears to be no way to control the Jews or their determination to drive all of the Arabs out of Jerusalem by force if necessary. The Arabs, initially living in peace with the Jewish minority, have been increasingly victimized by the Jews who, now that the British are leaving, are turning their savage behavior against them.

The Jews have redoubled their efforts to build a military force and arm them. They claim that this force is to protect the Jewish population against attacks from the Arab countries as well as the Arab population of Jerusalem but an even stronger argument can be made that the Zionists are determined to drive out the Arab population by armed force. The initial Arab response to Jewish harassment over the past year has been very slow in coming but it seems to be quite inevitable and a terrible civil war is foreseen.

The United States Department of State announced on December 5, 1947 that they were placing an embargo on all American arms shipments to the Middle East. It appears that the Soviets have been sending weapons, mostly captured German pieces, to assist the Zionists and accompanying these clandestine arms shipments the Soviets have also sent a very sizable contingent of instructors and advisors to Palestine in months past.

As many of the Zionists are Russian or Polish in origin, these Communist Russians have been received gladly by the Jewish extremists and quickly blend in with the local populations.

Soviet interest in Middle East oil and an overriding interest in obtaining warm-water ports are a prime factor in their interest in a Jewish state in Palestine.

The most violent reactions in the Arab world to the UN partition idea are Syrian and Egyptian. However, it is noted that the worst outbreak of anti-partition violence outside Palestine occurred in Aden, a British colony at the entrance to the Red Sea. On December 5, British military reinforcements were sent to Aden after four days of Arab-Jewish fighting in which 50 Jews and 25 Arabs were killed.

In Syria, public demonstrations by the Arab population paralyzed business in Damascus earlier this week. The Soviet cultural center and Communist headquarters in Damascus were wrecked on November 30 with four persons killed. The Syrian Communist Party was officially disbanded by the government and the U.S. and British Embassy flags were torn down. On December 1, Syria introduced military training into all boys’ schools and on December 2, the Syrian Parliament enacted a draft law and voted $860,000 for the relief of Palestinian Arabs. On the same day Arabs attacked the Jewish part of Aleppo.

In Egypt the Chamber of Deputies resolved on December 1 to help keep Palestine a totally Arab state and to support the Arab population of Palestine against attacks by the Jewish minority. There were repeated anti-U.S. and British demonstrations in Egypt’s main cities, and the British Institute in Zagazig was burned on December 2. All public meetings were banned in Cairo after Egyptian police fought with 15,000 people on December 4.

In Lebanon, Arab students smashed the windows of the U.S. Legation in Beirut on December 1 and Lebanese Communists demonstrated against the partition of Palestine and all schools were closed to prevent student disorders.

In Iraq, students in Baghdad wrecked the U.S. Information offices on December 4.

In Saudi Arabia, anti-American demonstrations by Arabs in the oil fields were restrained by the government.

189

December 13, 1947, Palestine. Jewish terrorists shifted from defense to attack in the second week of conflict with the Arabs since the UN voted for partition of Palestine.

The death toll for the past 14 days was at least 220 in Palestine and 336 in the Middle East, including 111 in Aden in the previous week.

Arab retaliatory raids at Jaffa and Tel Aviv had killed 30 Jews and Arabs when local businessmen on both sides arranged a truce on December 10 to effect an orange harvest. On December 11, however, the Arabs renewed their assaults in the Old City of Jerusalem, which was the worst day of the current strife with 41 fatalities throughout Palestine. On December 12, Haganah launched attacks on both the Arabs and British with a death toll of 20 Arabs, five Jews and two British soldiers killed.

On December 13, bombings by the Irgun killed at least 16 Arabs and injured 67 more in Jerusalem and Jaffa and burned down a hundred Arab houses in Jaffa.

In Syria, an anti-Jewish attack in retaliation for the Irgun actions burned down a 2,750-year old synagogue in Aleppo and destroyed the priceless Ben-Asher Codex, a 10th century Hebrew Bible of original Old Testament manuscripts.

190

December 14, 1947, Lydda. Regular troops of the Arab Legion of the Trans-Jordan Army killed 14 Jews and wounded nine Jews, two British soldiers and one Arab when they attacked a bus convoy approaching their camp near Lydda. The Arabs said the Jews attacked them first.

191

December 17, 1947, Cairo. Premiers of the seven Arab League states called on the Arabs to “prepare for the struggle.” They promised to “prosecute the fight until victorious.” General Nuri as-Said Pasha, president of the Iraqi Senate, accused the U.S. of breaking a promise of neutrality.

192

December 17, 1947, Nevatim. British troops came to the aid of police standing off a raid by 100 Arabs on the Jewish settlement of Nevatim, seven miles west of Beersheba.

193

December 18, 1947, Khisas. Haganah killed 10 Arabs, including five children in a reprisal raid on Khisas in Northern Palestine.

194

December 19, 1947, Damascus. Reliable reports from Damascus state that Arab guerrillas are massing there in preparation to launching an attack into Palestine before the first of the year.

195

December 20, 1947, Palestine. Haganah carried out another raid on Arabs by attacking the village of Qazasa near Rehovoth. One Arab was killed and two were wounded.

196

December 21, 1947, Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency gave official approval for Haganah to make reprisal raids on Arab villages and “exterminate nests of brigands.”

197

December 25, 1947, Haifa. Emir Mohammed Zeinati, an Arab landowner, was killed in Haifa for selling land to the Jews.

198

December 25, 1947, Tel Aviv. Stern gang terrorists machine-gunned two British soldiers in a Tel Aviv cafe.

199

December 26, 1947, Palestine. Armed Jewish terrorists raided two diamond factories in Nazthaanya and Tel Aviv and escaped with $107,000 in diamonds, cash and bonds. The Stern gang distributed leaflets reporting that Israel Levin, a member, was murdered in Tel Aviv on December 24 for trying to betray a Stern gang member.

200

December 29, 1947, Palestine. Irgun members kidnaped and flogged a British major and three sergeants in retaliation for the flogging of Benjamin Kimkhim who was also sentenced to 18 years in prison on December 27 for robbing a bank. The major, E. Brett, was seized in Nathanya and the sergeants in Tel Aviv and Rishon el Siyon. Each got 18 lashes, the same number Kimkhim received.

201

December 29, 1947, Jerusalem. An Irgun terrorist bombing at the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem killed 11 Arabs and two Britons.

202

December 30, 1947, London. The Dollis Hill Synagogue in London was set on fire and 12 sacred scrolls were destroyed by angry British citizens who scrawled on the burned edifice “You whip—we burn.”

203

December 21-31, 1947, Palestine. Arab-Jewish conflict in the Holy Land increased the death toll to 489 from violence in Palestine in the 33 days since the UN decided on partition.

1948

204

January 3-10, 1948, Palestine. Extensive Jewish Agency purchases of U.S. war surplus high explosives with which to fight Arabs were disclosed in the New York City area. While 191 tons of TNT and the more powerful M-3 were seized before shipment, 73 tons cleared New York for Palestine.

The TNT shipment was accidentally discovered when longshoremen loading the American Export Lines freighter “Executor” in Jersey City on January 3, dropped a box marked “industrial machinery” and while attempting to repair the box, found cans of TNT bearing U.S. Army markings.

The “machinery” proved to be 32 1/2 tons of TNT, which the U.S. Customs impounded as contraband because of the ban on American arms shipments to the Middle East. On January 10, the FBI was attempting to trace the souce of the contraband.

The Jewish Agency for Palestine acknowledged on January 10 that it had purchased 199 tons of M-3 from the War Assets Administration at the Army’s Seneca Ordnance Depot near Romulous, New York.

Federal and state agents recovered 126 tons from a farmhouse and trucks near Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Barclay Heights and Saugerties, New York on January 8-9 but 73 tons were believed to be en route to Palestine.

The Jewish Agency called its transaction with the WAA legal, admitted having set up “Foundry Associates, Inc.” in New York with a Haganah agent in charge, to buy explosives for their war on the Arabs. The FBI said Leonard Weisman, president of three New York firms (Pratt Steamship Line, Material Redistribution Corporation and Paragon Design and Development Co.) gave the Haganah agent office space but did nothing illegal.

WAA stopped all deliveries on unfilled orders on January 9 in the New York area. It said Foundry Associates, Inc., had sworn that it was a normal trader in explosives, thereby qualifying to buy the M-3, and that the export question was a U.S. Department of State matter.

205

January 4, 1948, Jaffa. A series of Jewish terrorist bombings inflicted heavy Arab casualties. 14 were killed and 100 injured when the Stern gang destroyed the Arab National Committee headquarters in Jaffa.

206

January 5, 1948, Jerusalem. 15 Arabs were killed after Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel.

207

January 6, 1948, Jerusalem. The British Government denounced the Semiramis attack as “wholesale murder of innocent people” but the Jewish Agency alleged that “Arab gangs” used the hotel and asked why attacks on Jews had not been equally denounced.

208

January 7, 1948, Jerusalem. 14 Arabs were killed by two Irgun terrorist bombs at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate.

209

January 10, 1948, Jerusalem. The official death toll in Palestine since November 29 (when the UN voted for partition) had risen to 646.

210

January 12, 1948, Tel Aviv. Stern gang members looted Barclay’s Bank in Tel Aviv of $37,000.

211

January 13, 1948, Washington. The U.S. War Assets Administration received orders from Army Secretary Kenneth Royal to cancel its sale of 199 tons of M-3 explosive to a purchasing agent of the Jewish Agency, which got 73 tons out of the country before the rest was seized.

212

January 14-15, 1948, New York. The FBI arrested six New York men on charges of trying to ship Haganah 60,000 pounds of TNT, which was seized in Jersey City after having been bought from the Letterkenny Arsenal Ordnance Depot in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

213

January 16-17, 1948, Haifa. Zionists claimed they had murdered 82 Arabs, mostly civilians, in a 24 hour period. In retaliation for the massacres, Arabs machine-gunned 35 Haganah men who were en route to attack another Arab farming settlement.

214

January 17, 1948, Jerusalem. The official death toll of Arabs killed by Jewish terrorists since November 29 had risen to 831.

215

January 25, 1948, Jerusalem. Following the deaths of ten Jews and two Arabs killed in a battle outside Jerusalem, British authorities stated that 721 Arabs, 408 Jews, 19 civilians and 12 British policemen (a total of 1,160) had been killed in an eight-week period that 1,171 Arabs, 749 Jews, 13 civilians and 37 British officers had been wounded.

216

January 26, 1948, Palestine. Mrs. Golda Meyerson, Jewish Agency political director in Jerusalem, and Moshe Shertok, chief of all Agency political operations, told the UN Palestine Commission that Jews must arm against possible Arab threats and Shertok demanded a UN policy that would compel the U.S. to lift its embargo on arms destined for Jewish groups in the Middle East.

217

January 26, 1948, Jerusalem. Rabbi Hillel Silver, chief of the Jewish Agency’s American division, cut short a trip to Jerusalem to return to the U.S. and campaign for American public support of armed Jewish backing for partition and eventual Zionist control of all Palestine. On January 27, his agency called upon 15,000 young men and women to join Haganah by February 15. British intelligence reports indicate that Haganah had grown from 3,500 to 12,000 full-time members since December 1.

218

January 31, 1948, London. British Foreign Office officials revealed that over 1,000 Soviets, all Russian-speaking Communist military technicians, had been intercepted on the immigrant ships “Pan York” and “Pan Crescent.”

219

February 1, 1948, Jerusalem. Arab groups took credit for a bombing that destroyed the “Palestine Post” building. The newspaper had an extensive history of inciting the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem to “destroy Arabs and force them out” of Palestine.

220

February 1, 1948, Milwaukee. Moshe Shertok, Jewish Agency political director, stated that statements that Communist agents were among the intercepted “Pan York” and “Pan Crescent” immigrants from Bulgaria were untrue. Shertok cited a statement from Cyprus refugee camp commissioner, Sir Godfrey Collins, confirming his statement. Collins subsequently denied making such a statement. Shertok further said that the Jews of Palestine welcomed all Jews into their country and that Jewish Communists were equally welcome. He denied rumors of Soviet clandestine assistance to various Jewish terrorist groups.

221

February 3, 1948, Jerusalem. Stern gang terrorists killed two British policemen because the bombers of the “Post” had allegedly worn police uniforms. Arabs attacked the Jerusalem Central Prison but were driven off by the guards.

222

February 6, 1948, London. The British Foreign Office sent Bulgaria a note of rebuke for “deliberately conniving” in the transshipment of illegal Soviet immigrants to Palestine.

223

February 10, 1948, Jerusalem. British military units prevented Arabs from bringing dynamite and firebombs into Jerusalem’s Old City in an attempt to blow up its Jewish Quarter.

224

February 10, 1948, Palestine. Jewish terrorist groups murdered ten Arabs near an RAF camp in central Palestine. A further 23 Arabs were murdered by Jewish groups throughout Palestine.

225

February 11, 1948, Palestine. The British Royal Navy intercepted the ship “Beleaguered Jerusalem” off Nahariya and its 679 Jewish illegal immigrants were transshipped to Cyprus.

226

February 13, 1948, Palestine. A British Army sergeant was arrested in a probe of the death of four Jewish terrorists who were arrested at their sniper post and then released in an Arab neighborhood. The Jews were immediately stoned to death by the Arabs.

227

February 15, 1948, Galilee. Jewish terrorists raided an Arab settlement in upper Galilee, killing 30 Arabs, including 10 children, and blew up bridges.

228

February 16, 1948, New York. The UN Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council that it would take a UN military force to save the Palestine partition from “catastrophic” failure. The report criticized “[c]ertain elements of the Jewish community,” for “irresponsible acts of violence which worsen the security situation.”

The Commission quoted official British figures on Palestine casualties during November 30-February 1: 869 killed, including 427 Arabs, 381 Jews, 46 British and 15 of other nationalities; 1,909 wounded, including 1,035 Arabs, 725 Jews, 135 British and 14 others.

229

February 20, 1948, Jerusalem. Twelve Jewish terrorists, including Moshe Svorai, second in command of the Stern gang, escaped from the Central Prison in Jerusalem.

230

February 22, 1948, Jerusalem. Two truckloads of high explosives were detonated in Ben Yehuda Street in the Jewish section of Jerusalem.

The blast leveled a three block Jewish business center, killing at least 60 with 20 missing and 200 injured. Jews blamed the British because armored trucks with police insignia had escorted the truck bombs into the area.

231

February 23, 1948, Palestine. Northern Palestine Arabs took credit for the Ben Yehuda bombing and said they had carried out the attack as retaliation for a Jewish bombing that had killed seven Arabs in Ramleh.

232

February 27, 1948, Jerusalem. Two anti-Communist Polish residents of Jerusalem were murdered by Stern gang terrorists who claimed the Poles were “pro-Arab.”

233

February 29, 1948, Rehovoth. The British Mandate Government denounced the Jewish Agency after 28 British soldiers were killed and 35 seriously injured when a Haifa-bound train from Cairo was blown up. Stern gang terrorists took credit for the bombing of the British train as revenge for the Ben Yehuda Street bombing in Jerusalem.

234

March 1, 1948, Jerusalem. The British Mandate government accused the Jewish Agency of circulating false charges that Britons had committed the Ben Yehuda bombing and of tolerating Jewish terrorists “for political reasons.” It warned that “continuance of indiscriminate murder” would mean “forfeiture by the Jewish community of all right ... to be numbered among civilized peoples.”

Immediately after issuance of this statement, the car of British Commander Lt. Gen. McMillan was bombed near Jerusalem but the general was not in the car at the time.

235

March 2, 1948, Haifa. Stern gang terrorists detonated a truckful of explosives at an Arab office building in Haifa, killing at least 14 Arabs.

236

March 4, 1948, Ramallah. In retaliation for the Haifa bombing of March 2, Arabs ambushed and killed 17 Haganah youths near Ramallah.

237

March 5, 1948, Tel Aviv. Haganah killed 15 Arabs near Tel Aviv in revenge for the March 4 ambush of their members.

238

March 5, 1948, Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency stated that large-scale Jewish arms shipments were ready in various Mediterranean ports destined for the arming of Jewish partisans in Palestine to “fight and drive out” the Arab population of what the Agency stated “was eternal Jewish land” that could not be occupied by either the British or the Arabs.

239

March 11, 1948, Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency’s building in Jerusalem was bombed with 13 persons killed and 84 injured. An American car, believed to have been stolen from the U.S. consulate by an Arab chauffeur, was driven through the agency’s elaborate barricades with a load of explosives. The driver escaped.

240

March 11, 1948, New York. Communist and their left wing labor unions turned out over 10,000 persons in a protest rally against U.S. “betrayal” of partition.

241

March 12, 1948, New York. Columnist Drew Pearson said in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column that President Harry Truman had given Democratic party leaders the following reason for holding back on enforcement of Palestine partition after having championed this in the UN last year:

Russia was after a U.S. Army-built railroad north from the Persian Gulf, plus all Arab oil regions and the Eastern Mediterranean. On March, Pearson had stated in the same forum that President Truman had told a New York publisher that New York Jews were “disloyal” to the United States.

242

March 12, 1948, New York. An Arab Higher Command paper was issued that charged the Jewish Agency with massing Soviet trained and equipped illegal immigrants in Eastern Europe for war service in Palestine and had “set up laboratories for bacteriological warfare.”

243

March 17, 1948, Palestine. British authorities released the latest casualty figures:

In March, 566 persons, including 271 Jews, 256 Arabs, 39 British and others were killed.

244

March 30, 1948, New York. Soviet and Jewish groups informed the UN Security Council that they defended the UN’s previous decision for a separate Jewish state. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, told the Security Council that partition was “a just solution,” that he was not convinced that it could not be carried out peacefully and that by “wrecking” it the U.S. would have to take the full blame for “a serious blow upon the UN organization.”

245

April 1, 1948, New York. The UN found that it had transversed a circle—from one General Assembly session to another—in its year-long effort to solve the Palestine problem.

Britain referred the Holy Land dispute to the UN April 2, 1947, and asked for a special Assembly session. Events since then:

April 29-May 15, 1947, Assembly met, decided on special committee inquiry into the Palestine situation.

August 31, Special Palestine Committee (UNSCOP) recommended partition, internationalized Jerusalem.

November 29, Assembly approved partition, 33-13 (10 abstentions), U.S. led the fight for a separate Jewish state. Intensified Arab-Jewish fighting in Palestine.

December 11, Britain set May 15 as the date for surrender of its mandate over Palestine.

February 16, 1948, Assembly’s Palestine Commission asked for UN army to enforce partition over Arab resistance.

February 24, U.S. sidestepped endorsing forcible partition, asked the Council to seek Arab-Jewish agreement.

March 19, After the Big Five conciliation efforts failed, the U.S. abandoned its partition plan and proposed UN trusteeship over Palestine.

April 1, The Security Council agreed (Russia abstaining) to U.S. proposal for a special Assembly session to reconsider the Palestine problem and passed the U.S. resolution urging an Arab-Jewish truce.

246

April 4, 1948, New York. A Zionist rally in New York’s Madison Square Park was attended by 100,000 persons, including 40,000 Jewish war veterans.

247

April 6, 1948, Palestine. Jewish terrorists invaded the British Army’s largest camp near Pardes Hannan south of Haifa in a raid for firearms and murdered seven British soldiers.

248

April 9, 1948, Washington. The U.S. Department of State refused to lift its embargo on arms shipments to the Middle East.

249

April 9, 1948, Jerusalem. Irgun and Stern gang terrorists stormed an Arab suburb of Jerusalem, Dir Yashin, killing 250 Arabs, half of them women and children.

250

April 25, 1948, Jaffa. The Irgun launched an attack on Arab Jaffa claiming that it was a stronghold for Arabs. They also attacked Tel Aviv with 2,000 men, armored cars and mortars and captured the Arab district of Mansieh. Their advance was halted when British fighter planes and light artillery were used against the Irgun.

251

April 27, 1948, Palestine. Initially condemning the Irgun for its attack on Jaffa, the Haganah reached an agreement with Irgun and the latter agreed to operate under Haganah control. Both groups then attacked, Haganah seizing Jaffa’s eastern and southern suburbs. The Arab city was encircled by April 29, and all but 15,000 of Jaffa’s Arab inhabitants had been driven from the city, although the town was officially termed an Arab area. In Tel Aviv, the Stern gang robbed Barclay’s Bank of $1 million.

252

April 30, 1948, Jerusalem. Haganah scored victories against the Arab residents after fruitless UN efforts to arrange a truce that would protect historical shrines in the ancient Walled City. Jewish extremists threatened to dynamite the Arab Dome of the Rock Mosque unless all Arabs immediately evacuated Jerusalem. The British response was that if this happened, they would blow up the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the destroyed temple. The Haganah agreed to respect both Arab and Christan monuments but insisted all Arabs and Christians must leave Jerusalem. In a move they described as “defensive,” the Haganah overran the Christian Arab Katamon quarter in southwestern modern Jerusalem and captured most of the Moslem Mamilla cemetery. Jewish workers seized the general post office in Jerusalem. In Katamon, Haganah captured St. Simon’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, drove out the monks and vandalized the building. British troops stepped in to prevent further massacre of the Arabs.

253

May 2, 1948, Jerusalem. The British finally halted widespread strife in Jerusalem by rushing several thousand mechanized army units and Royal Marine commandos back to Palestine. Their primary purpose was to protect Arab civilians who were being slaughtered by rampaging Zionists.

254

May 5-8, 1948, Palestine. The Haganah, now styling itself a “Jewish Army,” struck Upper Galilee in northeastern Palestine and claimed to have crushed any Arab resistance by the end of the week. Safad, capital of Upper Galilee and normally a city of 15,000 Arabs, was reported by the Jewish Agency as having been “cleansed” of Arabs by May 6. The only remaining occupants of the town were 2,000 Jews. Haganah announced that all Arab property had been confiscated from the owners and would be given to Jewish settlers.

255

May 4, 1948, Tel Aviv. The 37-man Jewish Legislative Council met in Tel Aviv and heard Premier-designate David Ben-Gurion declare that 150,000 Arabs had been driven from their homes in the past five months but that the Jews “haven’t lost a single settlement.” The Stern gang resumed “direct war” against the British for protecting the Arab population in Jerusalem. Seven British soldiers were killed near Nethanya. At the same time, Stern gang took credit for a letter bomb which killed the young brother of a British army officer in England.

256

May 6, 1948, Jerusalem. Haganah was redesignated as the Jewish State Army and reported that 200 aircraft, later revealed by British authorities as having come from Czechoslovakia, whose new communist government is almost entirely composed of Zionists and who have been pouring weapons into Palestine, are slated to reinforce the new army. The army will be increased to 85,000 immediately.

257

May 16, 1948, New York. The number of states recognizing Israel increased to eight this week, and the new country applied for admission to the UN. Russia immediately granted recognition on May 17, implying that it recognized Israel’s government as the de jure (legal) government while the United States recognized Israel only as the de facto (in fact) government.

258

May 22, 1948, Jerusalem. Thomas Wasson, U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem and a member of the Council’s Truce Commission, was fatally wounded by a Stern gang sniper near the U.S. Consulate. Two other Consulate members were also assaulted, one dying the next day.

259

September 17, 1948, Jerusalem. Angered by his order to readmit 8,000 Arab refugees driven from three villages near Haifa by attacks of Jewish terrorists, the Stern gang assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, UN mediator for Palestine. Also killed in the attack was French Col. André Serot, chief of France’s 100-man contingent in the unarmed UN truce-observer team.

.

Labels