US Invested Heavily In Hitler Compensated Europe's Jews
With Arab Land - Therefore
By Jay Janson
09 June, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Israel is in bed with a US business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-semitic in outlook, and coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments made possible. A popular quip in Yiddish goes, “with such friends, who needs enemies?” Arabs saved Jews from Christian persecutions in 637, 1187, 1492. Now Christians are persecuting Arabs. Needed! Jewish-Arab Semitic solidarity. With the world evolving and changing, how long will Israel remain merely a U.S. outpost in the Middle East and servant of America’s business run foreign policy of world hegemony in disregard of its own safety and that of everyone else
Part One: HISTORY
Just as American capital is presently invested in low-wage Asia while much of the U.S. work force is unemployed, during the Great Depression, the rich and powerful of America invested in low-wage, highly productive, and financially poor Nazi Germany.
While this writer's dad sold apples on the street corner, and with no money to buy milk, mom kept him breast fed past three years, workers in Nazi Germany were increasingly employed thanks to America's wealthy, who were fully aware of Hitler's intentions toward Jews and the Soviet Union.
U.S. and European financiers made possible prostrate Germany's rise to #1 military power while listening to Hitler's speeches trumpeting the historic expansionist call "Drang nach Osten' ("Push to the East') - that would bring about the smashing of the USSR so desired by investors frightened by Soviet successes, successes that were making the Russia revolution a model for the socialist activism arising everywhere.
For much of the 1930s, approximately 60% of total U.S. investment abroad was in Nazi Germany - another substantial amount had been going into Mussolini's fascist Italy, an earlier darling of the U.S. Manufacturing Association.
Massive U.S. financial and industrial collaboration continued during the terrifying persecution of Jews, and to some extent through the giant investors' subsidiaries overseas even when the war in Europe was already underway.
Meanwhile, America, from top to bottom, was experiencing virulent anti-Jewish sentiment and discrimination that was in generally hardly undiminished by abominable acts in Germany like Kristallnacht that were bringing unimaginable terror and suffering to Jews.
Already in the early 1920s, Henry Ford, publishing his International Jew titled hate booklets, had become a hero for fledgling fascist Adolph Hitler, who was receiving Ford's financial support. At the same time, Rockefeller was funding Eugenics research at an institution in Cold Spring, Harbor, Long Island that inspired and predated Eugenics research in Germany - which Rockefeller also funded. In 1926. Hitler wrote a fan letter to California eugenics leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."[1]
Over fifty of America's largest corporations or companies were operating inside Germany when it declared war on the United States - General Motors, General Electric, Ford, Du Pont, Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Chase Bank, I.T. & T, IBM, Kodak, Coca Cola, etc.[2]. Throughout the war, the U.S. auto companies continued to be concerned Nazi Germany would nationalize American-owned factories. More than a few American companies were involved (some unknowingly) in the use of slave labor.
After the war, General Motors, I.T.&T. and received compensation for the damage done to their fighter plane and other military products factories in Germany by Allied bombing.[3]
Pro-Hitler and outspokenly anti-Jewish Joseph Kennedy and financial collaborator with Nazi banks Prescott Bush, both punished by the Roosevelt administration, were planning the creation their sons' presidential dynasties. While George Bush's maternal grandfather Walker had handled American investment, Prescott Bush had specialized in British investors in Nazi Germany. [4]
Britain was America's closest ally. During the year 1936, the King of England and British Empire was for certain a greater follower of Hitler than most Germans. During the occupation of France, he, then the Duke of Windsor,[5] asked the German forces to place guards at his Paris and Riviera homes - and they did. His pro-Hitler statements, while Governor of the Bahamas during the war had to be hushed up. Even as late as 1970 he spoke affectionately of Hitler.
American's rich and famous partnered with Nazi bankers and industrialists for personal profit, many seeing fascism as favorable to their security as rulers of society. Many sought to withdraw from financial relations with Nazi enterprises because of the persecution of the Jews, others carried on with business through subsidiary companies even after America was in the war. A callous, merciless hands of off policy was backed even when the Holocaust was well under way in preparation. This was certainly complicity and cooperation for the tight-lipped silence in high places. Enough news coverage had made everyone aware of what was being done to the Jews during most of the 1930s.[6]
Examples of this standing aside were everywhere. February, 1939, The Wagner-Rogers bill died in Congress. Roosevelt refused to take a position on it. It would have admitted 20,000 additional Jewish refugee children under the age of 14 into the United States from Germany and Austria above the immigration quotas. On May 18, 1942 - The New York Times reported, but on an inside page, that Nazis had machine-gunned over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia. By this date, millions had been gassed.
At the end of the war, when ghastly, spine-chilling photos of the internment and murder of Jews in concentration camps were revealed, the public was shocked into some self-awareness. The most violent persecution, brutal arrests and internment had been done openly in a world basically owned and run by the "democratically' elected legislatures of white industrialized nations, nations that had earlier used their edge in arms manufacture to conquer, colonize and exploit the whole non white population of the world.
When the difficult to behold newsreels and newspaper photos of the indescribably inhuman conditions inside the camps and of the cremation ovens, shame, guilt and agonized sympathy finally replaced a good deal of the long standing, pervasive, fierce antipathy and prejudice toward Jews.
This uncomfortable realization of the enormity of American and European society's complicity in the Holocaust formed a backdrop for more basic business considerations that U.S. politicians entertained in acceding to the plans of Zionist leaders among the wave of European Jewish immigrants pouring into the British governed "Protectorate' of predominately Arab populated Palestine - a Palestine, which three millennium earlier had been predominantly Jewish.
The colonial powers along with the Soviet Army had conquered Germany again. (Germany had ceased to be a colonial power after WW I) Only the U.S. emerged with its the industrial plant intact making it the single superpower. The American government with it's European allies created and controlled the sixty member small United Nations that would deliberate the fate of inhabitants of the British Protectorate of Palestine.
U.S. business saw the possibility of making inroads into British control over most of the Middle East's oil fields through a client European Jewish state. Stalin, in a last minute switch left the Arabs in the lurch, seeking, as well, to diminish British power and hegemony, hoping to have influence in the Jewish state for the substantial in numbers socialist wing of Zionism. By the time of the UN vote, there was no significantly powerful nation to protect the rights of a long occupied Arab Palestinian majority population of three to one over the Jews that didn't want to be partitioned.
No one, that is, except eminent but powerless Jewish intellectuals. Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Erich Fromm and a significant number of Orthodox rabbis, e.g. Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, "A Jewish Home in Palestine built up on bayonets and oppression is not worth having" The American Council for Judaism, an organization founded in 1942 by a group of Reform rabbis, was also against partition.
The partition barely carried the necessary 2/3rd majority vote in a United Nations that had no representation for nearly half the people on earth. Twenty-three of the thirty-eight non-industrialized nations, were unwilling to vote for partition.
Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke with anger and contempt for the way the UN vote had been lined up. He said the Zionists had tried to bribe India with millions and at the same time his sister, Vijayalalshmi Pandit, had received daily warnings that her life was in danger "unless she voted right". [7] Three countries -- Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines -- were persuaded to change their positions, which enabled the required 2/3rds majority to be reached. Liberia's Ambassador to the United States complained that the US delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries.[8].
The distributions of the patch quilt partition was pure insanity, not something unusual for the colonial powers to arrange for an occupied colony. Who did not expect terrible bloodshed. "It will thus be seen that the proposed Jewish State will contain a total population of 1,008,800, consisting of 509,780 Arabs and 499,020 Jews. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs will have a majority in the proposed Jewish State." How could it not have been a recipe for war? Arabs in Palestine could not agree to this, unless at the point of a gun.
The Arabs had not been consulted, nor their agreement sought. They were, in effect, British colonial subjects about to be divided up and half ruled by a new set of European colonizers. The Arab leadership, in and out of Palestine, opposed the partition plan.[8] The Arabs argued that ' it violated the rights of the majority of the people in Palestine, which at the time was 67% non-Jewish (1,237,000) and 33% Jewish (608,000).'[9]
"The Arab state was to receive about 43% of Mandatory Palestine consisting of all of the highlands, except for Jerusalem, plus one third of the coastline. The highlands contain the major aquifers of Palestine, which supplied water to the coastal cities of central Palestine, including Tel Aviv. The Jewish state was to receive 56% of Mandatory Palestine, a slightly larger area to accommodate the increasing numbers of Jews who would immigrate there." [10] The Arabs had pointed out that 56 percent of the land was to go to the Jews, who at that stage legally owned only 7 percent of it.
Hostilities broke out almost immediately upon the announcement of the UN vote. From 1947 through 2011 - almost constant bloodshed!
Seems almost like the same nations complicit in the Holocaust, whose investors indeed made the Holocaust possible and whose governments had closed their doors while observing the destruction of European Jewry, had afterwards arranged, through their UN tool, a new trap for Jews, by throwing them into a yet another fire - putting them in a no win situation with certain great violence about to happen along perhaps with a necessity to cause other people the kind of intense suffering so many Jewish arrivals had themselves so recently escaped from.
Sixty-three years of tragic loss of so many lives, the great majority of which Palestinian, but of no consolation for the families of Jewish victims of war. Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber before he died in 1965, wrote what must be still even more valid today, "Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred...It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the "People of the Book" and the "light of the nations"
Israelis recently celebrated their 63rd independence day anniversary ("Yom Ha'atzmaut') a day after its 63rd observance of Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron) and the lives lost. Arab Palestinians observing the day as "Nakba,' the Palestinian catastrophe or upheaval, violence and cataclysmic loss, the terror, which drove almost one million of them out of their homeland into perpetual suffering in exile, displaced, dispossessed, stateless, lost, forbidden to return and living under a multiplying injustice of collective persecution.
It coincided with what looks like the beginning of the Palestinian participation in what is being called "Arab Spring' with the usual result of unarmed protesters being shot dead as elsewhere.
Israel officially shrugs off the anger in the formerly European occupied third world for its treatment of Arab Palestinians, but even the nations of the first world do not vote against UN resolutions condemning Israeli policies. Over these sixty three years, the U.S. is more times than not the only nation voting with Israel.
Israel has been in bed with a U.S. business elite that had once backed and bankrolled the Jewish nemesis, Adolph Hitler, had itself been generally anti-Semitic in outlook, and was coldly indifferent, even complicit, during the Holocaust it helped make possible. There is a popular quip in Yiddish that would seem an appropriate comment, "With such friends, who needs enemies?" (The voice rises in pitch on the last word)
Greater Mankind is still in awe of America's power, wealth and technology, but no longer admires what Martin Luther King called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" that puts a commercial and cash value on life and living. Nevertheless, Israel, has long been, and probably was forced to be, in lock step with, and abetting, a homicidal foreign policy of a Christian U.S. superpower in Vietnam, Central America and Africa right on into to its ongoing wars in six Muslim countries.
With the majority of humanity sympathetic to the Palestinians, Israelis cling to the financial support from, and ideological association with, the Christian imperialism that persecuted Jews horribly over centuries culminating in the Holocaust. At the same time Israel sees much of its fellow Semitic Arab world as its enemy, though it was the Arabs that saved and protected Jews during three previous, infamous and dreadful mass persecutions by Christians.
Jews had been banned residence in Jerusalem for approximately 500 years by the Romans, and Byzantine Emperor Heraclius was forcing Jews to convert to Christianity when the Arabs took over in 637 and invited the Jews back into the Jerusalem to "worship freely in their holy city." Caliph Umar refused the Church request to continue the ban.
Upon the recapture of Jerusalem in 1187, (The Crusaders' had slaughtered the Jews and Muslims when they originally conquered Jerusalem), Saladin summoned the Jews and permitted them to resettle in the city - the residents of Ashkelon, a large Jewish settlement, were the first to responded to his request.
Disputes about Maimonides' books (which addressed the synthesis of Judaism and other cultures, published in Islam ruled Spain) provided a pretext for harassing Jews and, in 1242, the Inquisition condemned the Talmud, and burned thousands of volumes. In 1288, the first mass burning of Jews at the stake took place in France. In 1290, Jews were expelled from England, in 1307 from France, 1348 from Saxony, 1360 from Belgium, 1380, Slovakia, 1420, Austria, 1444 the Netherlands, etc. from other Christian nations. The most fortunate of those who suffered the great expulsion from Spain in 1492 succeeded in escaping to Islamic Turkey. Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly saying "they enrich our land" Most of the Sephardim found a home in North Africa and other Arab lands.
How many of Israel's citizens and the Palestinian Arabs know their history regarding each other. How many of Israel's elderly citizens have not forgotten the disdainful Anti-Semitism, prejudice, discrimination and exclusions in the U.S. during the years when the moguls of society, financiers and industrialists, were making fortunes in Hitler's rearming of Germany, and afterward blocking escape from the Holocaust, while Jews were thriving within the fabric of society in fellow Semitic Muslim nations and elsewhere.
... to be continued in Parts 2 & 3: DISTORTION and IMAGINING
FOOTNOTES:
[1]
http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html
See: The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics
By Edwin Black
"In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped funded the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind". Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."
[later on] Egenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption. They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934 display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought
By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed. Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
(2)
How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany throughout World War II
Excerpts from "Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949" by Charles Higham; Hale , London, 1983.
Behind the patriotic propaganda that encouraged the working class to slaughter each other in the interests of competing national interests, international capital quietly kept the commodity circuits flowing and profits growing across all borders, trading with the enemy - war means business as usual for international capital.
Higham starts with an account of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland - a Nazi-controlled bank presided over by an American, Thomas H. McKittrick, even in 1944. While Americans were dying in the war, McKittrick sat down with his German, Japanese, Italian, British and American executive staff to discuss the gold bars that had been sent to the Bank earlier that year by the Nazi government for use by its leaders after the war. This was gold that had been looted from the banks of Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia or melted down from teeth fillings, eyeglass frames, and wedding rings of millions of murdered Jews.
But that is only one of the cases detailed in this book. We have Standard Oil shipping enemy fuel through Switzerland for the Nazi occupation forces in France; Ford trucks transporting German troops; I.T.T. helping supply the rocket bombs that marauded much of London ; and I.T.T. building the Focke-Wulfs that dropped those bombs. Long and shocking is the list of diplomats and businessmen alike who had their own ways of profiting from the war."
What would have happened if American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan? Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel before and after Pearl Harbor. A presidential edict, issued six days after December 7, 1941, actually set up the legislation whereby licensing arrangements for trading with the enemy could officially be granted.
Often during the years after Pearl Harbor the government permitted such trading. For example, ITT was allowed to continue its relations with the Axis and Japan until 1945, even though that conglomerate was regarded as an official instrument of United States Intelligence. No attempt was made to prevent Ford from retaining its interests for the Germans in Occupied France, nor were the Chase Bank or the Morgan Bank expressly forbidden to keep open their branches in Occupied Paris. It is indicated that the Reichsbank and Nazi
And it is important to consider the size of American investments in Nazi Germany at the time of Pearl Harbor. These amounted to an estimated total of $475 million. Standard Oil of New Jersey had $120 million invested there; General Motors had $35 million; ITT had $30 million; and Ford had $17.5 million.
At the same time, the Du Ponts developed the American Liberty League, a Nazi organization whipping up hatred of blacks and Jews, love of Hitler, and loathing of the Roosevelts. Financed by Lammot and Irenee to the tune of close to $500,000 the first year, the Liberty League had a lavish thirty-one-room office in New York, branches in twenty-six colleges, and fifteen subsidiary organizations nationwide that distributed fifty million copies of its Nazi pamphlets. In September 1936, while Hitler at Nuremberg expressed his grand design for the Four-Year Plan, the Du Ponts and the American Liberty League poured thousands into backing Republican Alf Landon against Roosevelt in the election. Other backers were the American Nazi party and the German-American Bund.
The attempt to launch Landon failed, which made the Du Ponts hate Roosevelt even more. In outright defiance of Roosevelt's desire to improve working conditions for the average man, Knudsen of General Motors along with the Du Ponts instituted the speedup systems created by another prominent figure of The Fraternity, Charles Bedaux. These forced men to work at terrifying speeds on the assembly lines. Many died of the heat and the pressure, increased by fear of losing their jobs at a time when there were very few available. Irenee personally paid almost $1 million from his own pocket for armed and gas-equipped storm troops modeled on the Gestapo to sweep through the plants and beat up anyone who proved rebellious. He hired the Pinkerton Agency to send its swarms of detectives through the whole chemicals, munitions, and automobile empire to spy on left-wingers or other malcontents.
By the mid-1930s, General Motors was committed to full-scale production of trucks, armored cars, and tanks in Nazi Germany. The GM board could be guaranteed to preserve political, personal, and commercial links to Hitler. Alfred P. Sloan, who rose from president of GM to chairman in 1937, paid for the National Council of Clergymen and Laymen at Asheville, North Carolina, on August 12, 1936, at which John Henry Kirby, millionaire fascist lumbemman of Texas, was prominent in the delivery of speeches in favor of Hitler. Others present, delivering equally Hitlerian addresses, were Govemor Eugene D. Talmadge of Georgia and the Nazi Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith. Sloan frequently visited Berlin, where he hobnobbed with Goring and Hitler.
3]
Hitler's Carmaker: How General Motors helped jump-start the Third Reich's military machine , November, 2006
BY EDWIN BLACK
n 1960, GM received $33 million compensation in tax exemption on profits for damages caused to its aeroplane and motorized vehicle factories in Germany, Austria, Poland and China. ITT received $27 million damages, $5 million of which were for the Focke Wulff factory, American property bombed by allied planes. And Ford received just under $1 million for damage done to its military truck production lines in Cologne!
[4]
PRESCOTT BUSH & NAZIS , Boston Globe 4/23/2001
George Herbert 'Bert' Walker, a native of St. Louis, founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street .... "Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party. As mentioned in earlier chapters, there were American contributors as well.
...
"In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine... "In [1931], Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking.
"Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations ofthe Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. ... the 1930s, the Dulles brothers and the other pirates of Wall Street were making their deals with the Nazis...
[5]
"At the beginning of the First World War the British Royal family went by the name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Not only were the majority of the Royal Family of German descent but many of them preferred to speak German. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria's grandson and cousin of King Edward. (and yet Britain and Germany still go to war with each other...) In March 1917 as the people of Britain began to realize the German connection the Royal Family changed their name to Windsor - much more English sounding..."
[quoted in "Like All The Nations?", ed. Brinner & Rischin]
[6]
When the mass killings did start, these governments claimed that they couldn't be certain of what was happening. This was a lie. The code-breakers working for British intelligence had cracked the German police radio codes already by 1939 and this allowed them later to reveal large-scale massacres of Polish and Soviet Jews after the German Army had invaded Eastern Europe.
When the extermination camps in occupied Poland were in full steam from 1942, the code-breakers had already broken, two years earlier in December 1940, the more sophisticated Enigma codes used by the SS who were running the camps. Regular SS reports about hundreds of thousands of prisoners at camps like Auschwitz that showed the Holocaust to be in full swing were thus able to be decoded. By the same means they knew that German railway network was moving " special cargo" into the camps. [Information from eyewitnesses, refugees, the Polish underground and anti-Nazi Germans]
The United States' "closed gates" policy offered no hope to the potential victims of genocide. The story of the famous St Louis ship is known after a movie was made with the same name. In 1939, the St Louis ocean liner, carrying 1128 German-Jewish refugees, was turned back by US immigration officials because the immigration quota for Germany had been met. The mass graves and the gas chambers were not so discriminatory!
simple:
As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the US Congress proposed to set up a commission to merely "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principle American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.
This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge in the USA. He stated: "It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. (...) It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws."[-Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain's chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.]
If anyone has any doubts about this it is sufficient to quote Ben Gurion when he informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."[Lenni Brenner, Zionism, p., p. 149.]
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit: "The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No.'... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it."[Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. Ibid., p. 56.]
The cold-blooded stance of the Zionists in the face of the Holocaust by Yossi Schwarz
[7]
Heptulla, Najma, Indo-West Asian relations: the Nehru era, Allied Publishers . pp. 158, 1991
[8]
Quigley, John B. (1990). Palestine and Israel: a challenge to justice. Duke University Press . pp. 37.
and
The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA)
[9]
Report of UNSCOP -- 1949
[10]
UN Partition Plan
Part 2: DISTORTION
Confucius, was once asked, "What one thing, if it could be accomplished, would benefit society most?" The sage is said to have answered, "The rectification of names." ("Calling things what they really are.').
Now that there is so much hate and fear of Muslims and attacks on Islam in the Christian world, why not embrace the term 'anti-Semitism' in its clear, complete and useful meaning, rather than exclusively for hate and fear of Jews and attacks on Judaism. Such an corrected understanding and correct use of the word, "anti-Semitism' would put Jews and Muslims together in the same boat, both experiencing Christian racism and imperialism.
Yours truly believes another expression has come to need clarification: Years ago, before money became so important a consideration in career choice, we would often hear of people being "called' to a profession and dedication, to have felt "chosen' by God or destiny to be a musician, doctor, engineer, etc. When we heard that Jews thought of themselves as a 'Chosen people,' it sounded impressive, self-confident in dedication to be good, do good things, build hospitals, make discoveries to benefit everyone, play and write masterpieces in music, literature, the graphic and performing arts for all society to enjoy. "Chosen people' never sounded like "Master race' which brings to mind arrogance, contemptuous superiority, apartheid and brutality. "Chosen people' reminds one of the amazingly great number of revered and beloved inspiring heroes of great accomplishment for all Mankind throughout history, wise world citizens and Jewish.
Then there is that biblical excuse for oppression, 'God gave us the Land,' that needs rectification. It correlates somewhat with that "Lebensraum" excuse of another superiorly armed people who once caused Jews (among other peoples) untold suffering.
"God gave the land' in primitive times under primitive conditions and circumstances and the Jews took this same land from others and left no one alive in Jericho. Would God want the land retaken three thousand years later in the age of instant communication and abundance? Surely, a good amount of sacred ancient places could be purchased or designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In the space age, one need not own the land to enjoy it with others. Territorial imperative would seem to be a throw back to less learned times.
In the 1930s, fellow Europeans expelled the Jews from their homes. In the new millennium, a fellow Semitic people continue to expel Arabs from their homes. What a bizarre twist of fate.
Also, that concocted phrase used by imperialists to divide and conquer, "these two peoples just can't get along" needs to be debunked. Palestinian Arabs look up over the wall at their keepers and try to remember how it was to be free, come and go as one pleased. Israelis look down on the Palestinians and remember how it was like being walled in, despised, dispossess, exiled, poor, hungry and threatened, and they say to themselves "never again." Desperation on both sides.
Upon detailed investigation, this desperation is for someone else's benefit. Outside forces, have been inciting misunderstanding suspicion, enmity, fear, confrontation, violence and war between these two ancient peoples since before the end of WW II. First, the non-socialist Greater Israel Zionists made life difficult for the Zionist majority and the indigenous Jews of Palestine, convincing, frightened and provoking Jews and Arabs into unbridgeable mistrust. Partition did the trick of creating a war which U.S. policies have sought stoke violence and keep war smoldering until now. And always with the cover story "these people just cannot get along with each other."
How many dozen civil wars in the third world has the U.S. empire been purposefully involved in between the Korean and today's Libyan, its corporate mass media building support for intervention with the most preposterous of lies, disinformation and half-truths? No, if not for the intentions of dominating outside investment interests, Arabs and Jews and all the other peoples could "get along fine."
In our time, Confucius would have suggested 'terror' is a word that if rectified, would be of great benefit to society.
Those who fire rockets targeting randomly at whomsoever, or suicide themselves in in order to take "enemy,' civilian if not military, along, are certainly intending to terrorize a whole population including the innocent children of the enemy. What drives this calculated insanity?
The answer is an initial insanity! The insanity of being willing to kill anyone in the area of one's target. Collateral death over and over again is no longer accidental. It becomes intentional collateral killing. It is also random in nature. One may take care to "kill as few (collaterally) as possible', as opposed to the "as many as possible' of your enemy, but it is still terrorizing a whole population.
If over years, nine or ten times more people are killed collaterally than the other side kills intentionally, confusion arises over which is the greater crime, especially if those resorting to killing intentionally have not the weapons to kill collaterally, nor are able to defend themselves from the enemy that does have them and is using them.
Getting terror and counter terror understood will go a long way toward stopping the killing of each other's children, whether with warplanes accidentally in great numbers, or intentionally by random rockets or by making oneself into a human bomb to explode in suicidal retaliation.
In a hopefully not to distant future the two populations of Palestine will again recognize and appreciate each other's uniqueness, nobility and charm, as these two kindred peoples, did over centuries living next to each other as neighbors in their Middle East.
Now the sides are unevenly matched, with the European settlers far and away on top in every way, but there were centuries when Arabs were the technologically, militarily and culturally advanced civilization doing the conquering. Arabs introduced, to a Europe in the dark ages, the classical literature and philosophy of its Greek provinces that would spark Europe's Renaissance. Couldn't first world Jews in Israel be leading a Middle East Renaissance of technology?
Since there were those times during the Christian persecution of Jews when Arabs came their rescue, now when the Jews are now the stronger, might it not be a propitious moment for some pay back. To Use that power the U.S. gave Israel to do good things for the Palestinians. Share with them Israel's greatness. Allow them to prosper, allow them to be happy. Use the billions of dollars for weapons to pay well any Palestinian who will accept selling his land, and begin to give back the land to those who fled in terror in "47, or make restitution to their families.
.
Were Israel truly free, it would do this, in the long run, for its own benefit as well. Some of us have faith that Israel will someday be free, free from being forced to serve a global financial-military conspiracy that threatens all of us with privation and wars.
Having reviewed some truths that have been so fastidiously swept under the rug and forgotten or made inconvenient to remember, we turn, for happier thoughts in closing, to what well might have been, and finally, to what must eventually come to be, if the ever accumulating injustice, violence, hatred and homicide is to cease.
Part 3: IMAGINING
Let us seriously imagine that instead of the partition, which barely won UN approval, a plan that called for a single democratic state had won UN enactment.
The UN never reached a unanimous conclusion for partition. A strong minority had felt that nothing in the terms of the postwar treaties and the mandate precluded the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state denominated along the lines of a 'domestic dependent nation. [11]
Also, the wording in Balfour's 1917 letter, "His Majesty's government" views with favor a national home for the Jewish people," brought forth "The conclusion seems to be inescapable that the vagueness in the wording of both instruments was intentional. The term "National Home" was employed, not "State" or "Commonwealth." [12]
"There were, as well, important preliminary legal questions regarding the competence of the United Nations or its members to enforce a solution against the wishes of the majority of the existing population." The Colombian delegate had led this argument.[12]
Why was Balfour letter to Zionist organizations interpreted perforce to mean a completely separate state? Swiss Germans and Swiss French both have a home state within a larger single state. Not all that complicated, and eminently peaceful.
There could have been no bloodshed at all. If the U.S. and the hard line Zionist lobby had failed to push and pressure through partition, the British Mandate Government would not have fled irresponsibly in cowardly complicity, before the fully expected outbreak of bloody violence. Britain had announced it would accept the partition plan, but refused to enforce it, arguing it was not acceptable to both sides! [13 ]
A UN transition trusteeship would have to the establishment of a single democratic state, not frenetically in haste, but with calm deliberation in which all parties would have had participation. Menachem Begin's faction would of have held fast to the goal for somehow eventually arranging a separate Jewish political entity, but the stronger socialist faction Zionists, with its strong vibrant pioneering spirit among the Kibbutzim etc., would have worked to make a Jewish homeland within a new state of Israel-Palestine (Arabs going along with Israel-Palestine rather than Palestine-Israel out of respect for the ancient Kingdom of David and Solomon of the Bible described with reverence in the Qu'ran antedating Arab ancestors' arrival in the 7th century)
The partition plan made provision for a continuing influx of Jewish settlers. The UN interim authority would have surely also done so. As the constitution of the state was being planned, Arab opposition to substantial Jewish immigration would have been overcome by compensating factors of new wealth and investments coming in from abroad in support of Palestine Jewry building a better country for everyone.
Jews would have had the access to the entire Mandate of Palestine that militant Biblical devotees now seek encroaching kilometer by kilometer on what islands of land is presently left for the Arabs to call home - a blockaded and occupied home, at that.
In this kind of imagined format, how easy it might have been for Yehudi Menuhin's "only possible solution" to have developed , namely, the kind of federated republic that is French-German Switzerland (the Italian part comparable to Druze and Bedouin autonomous areas).
Given the strong tradition of Jewish cohesion and unity for maintaining customs and Jewish uniqueness, a single undivided Democratic Israel-Palestine eventually might have morphed peacefully and carefully negotiated into two such federated states within one united republic. This would have been extremely logical and entirely possible.
'Have your cake and eat it 'two.' ' One state solution and two state solution at the same time. Neither of them phony, like the present Swiss cheese mapped, unsustainable Arab state proposed that no one really wants, nor the now unrealistic, for being 63 years late, single democratic state proposal that Arabs, Ahmadinejad and moral Orthodox sects like Neutrai Karta call for - unacceptable for most all Israelis and unthinkable for its politicians.
On the other hand, with all the intellectual prowess that immigrating Jews were bringing as engineers, doctors, scientists and workers knowledgeable in advanced technology, and the international financial connections available to their leaders, both sides might have opted to stay mixed, legislating a great degree of regard for cultural, religious and distinctions that would see Jews sharing results with Arabs in a Israel-Palestine smack in a sea of Arab nations accepting a Jewish lead in the affairs of this one unique mixed Jewish-Arab state.
Instead of deepening animosity and hatred born in fear and violence, there could have been lots of trade offs - a huge market for a Jewish managed small powerhouse state in a greater Arabian community of nations enjoying the benefits of economic development spreading from a modern ethnically blended state within it, quickly sprung up their Middle East so long held down by colonialism and neocolonialism.
Arabs stopped the Christian persecution of Jews twice, now Jews would have been helping liberate Arabs from Christian exploitation while building a Jewish home in Israel-Palestine.
What is the point of bringing up all this largely blacked out history now? Well, if all the early support for Hitler and shutting the door on Jewish escape was just appropriate to business profit margins, then might we not assume the subsequent assuaging of conscience for feeling responsibility for the plight of Holocaust survivors, and arranging a war for the founding of Israel and defending Israel's every policy ever since, must have been just appropriate to business profit margins as well. In both cases, that of fomenting war in Europe and that of fomenting war in Palestine, the arms manufacturing industry reaped and is reaping an unsurpassed level of profits.
reconstruction flourished.
If 'good for business' always means persecution and war, maybe this thieving and chaotic rule by the wealthy we allow to be explained away as a rational economic 'system' (Capitalism) - now a globalized 'system' - needs to be thoroughly investigated and substituted by something more rational, sane, humane, peaceful, appropriate to life on earth, and less violent, destructive and murderous.
With the world evolving and changing, how long will Israel remain merely a U.S. outpost in the Middle East and servant of America's business run foreign policy of world hegemony in disregard of its own safety and that of everyone else?
FOOTNOTES:
[11]
AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION, REPORT OF SUB-COMMITTEE
[12]
The 1917 letter from Britain's Foreign Secretary Balfour to Baron Rothschild for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. in 1917 read, "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION, REPORT OF SUB-COMMITTEE had noted that the term "National Home" was employed, not "State" or "Commonwealth."
There were also suggestions that the Mandate should have been placed under the UN trusteeship program in accordance with the guiding principles contained in Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 of the UN Charter. All members were required to recognize the 'fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion' when dealing with non-self governing peoples. The Colombian resolution requesting an advisory opinion was defeated. Four days later, the plan of partition was approved with the provision that it be imposed by force [United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 November 29, 1947]
Yet the Palestine Mandate contained dispositive clauses that required the establishment of a perpetual system of safeguards for the religious rights and immunities which had been under international guarantee during the mandate period. Those provisions would become operative in the event that a decision was taken to terminate the mandate.[Article 28 of the Palestine Mandate]
The notion that a letter expression a view of His Majesty's government of Britain in 1917 should have been binding upon the UN in 1947 was disparaged. [UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON PALESTINE REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, A/364, 3 September 1947, II. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CONFLICT , para. 141]
[13]
Britain announced that it would accept the partition plan, but refused to enforce it, arguing it was not acceptable to both sides. In September 1947, before any plan for a smooth transition of power had been formed, the British government unilaterally announced that the Mandate for Palestine would end on May 14, 1948.. [Brooks, Stefan (2008). "Palestine, British Mandate for". In Tucker, Spencer C.. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. ]
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