Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (26 page)

President Wilson became deeply frustrated by the refusal of Britain and France to join him in issuing a common statement of war aims. On 8 January 1918, unable to contain his frustrations any longer, he decided to go—philosophically, politically, strategically and morally—for broke. On that day he delivered to Congress the most breathtaking of his pre-emptive policy strikes. This one in the form of an address on his Fourteen Points. They were his definitive statement to the people of America and the world of what he believed to be the essential basis of a just and lasting peace.

In point (1), which was about “the renunciation of secret diplomacy”, President Wilson was as good as reading the riot act to imperial Britain and France. How so?

He had been much influenced by the British radical tradition of the 19th century. Throughout it, British radicals had criticised secret diplomacy and called for a foreign policy based on morality rather than expediency, and on general ethical principles rather than short-term calculations about the balance of power. President Wilson shared the view of those who believed that old style secret diplomacy was the maker of sinister secret international agreements which committed their countries to war without the knowledge of their citizens. Thus, when he unveiled his Fourteen Points, President Wilson stressed the need for “open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
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President Wilson’s hope was that the League of Nations, when it came into being as envisaged in point (14), would oversee a new system of international relations in which diplomatic bargains and secret military agreements would be abolished, and international relations would be conducted by consensus before the eyes of the public and under their control. If that had happened, Zionism could not have triumphed.

For governments one of the good things about secret diplomacy was that their diplomats could make agreements and promises of all kinds which could be broken at will. The need, President Wilson was saying, was for a new style of open diplomacy that would leave no scope for disputes about what had been agreed, which in turn would mean that violators of agreements could be punished. (One of the small things Trotsky did as foreign minister, and which caused big embarrassment for Britain and France, was to order the publication of the secret treaties entered into by the Tsar’s regime with Britain and France).

For the Arabs the comfort and inspiration was in point (12). Included in it was the statement that those then under Turkish rule (the Arabs fighting on the side of the Allies) should be assured of an “absolutely unmolested opportunity of self government.”
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By definition though unstated that was “unmolested” by Britain-and-Zionism.

Then, on 4 July 1918, America’s own Independence Day, in a speech at Mount Vernon, Wilson said that one of America’s primary aims when it entered the war was: “The settlement of every question whether of territory, sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of political relationship, upon the basis of free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of a material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery.”
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That statement of magnificent and soaring idealism was regarded by many, not just the Arabs, as the signal that America had taken the moral high ground and was intending to use its power and influence on the world stage from that lofty position.

But even as President Wilson was unveiling his Fourteen Points and following up with the Mount Vernon speech, Britain was in the process of doing in secret its deal with France (over the carve-up of the Turkish empire), which would make a nonsense of the President’s principles.

With the passage of time and the release of classified documents, it is possible to work out when and how things went wrong for President Wilson in the Middle East.

At the start of the Paris Peace Conference President Wilson’s own first priority was the creation of the League of Nations as the world body to manage the peace and see to it that there would be no more major wars. He achieved an early triumph at the conference in winning acceptance of the principle that a League of Nations should be created, and that its Covenant would be an integral part of the peace treaties. But to get British support for the creation of the world body, President Wilson had to concede that Britain would not be prohibited from pursuing its interests in the Middle East, in part for the purpose of honouring its commitment to Zionism.

On the face of it President Wilson ought not to have made such a concession to Britain-and-Zionism because it was against the spirit of the fundamental principles of his Fourteen Points and his Mount Vernon speech. If his policy was to be consistent with them, the right of the “liberated people” of Palestine to self-determination could not be compromised by the imposition on them of the alien thing called Zionism. (At the time the Arabs were, of course, the overwhelming majority of the “liberated people” of Palestine and most of the minority Jewish community, by definition Palestinians too, were not supporters of Zionism).

The assumption has to be that President Wilson made the concession to Britain in the belief that he could prevent the doing of an injustice to the Arab majority in Palestine provided the League of Nations was established with America fully engaged in its business. On that basis he could have told himself that though he appeared to be giving in to Britain-and-Zionism, thereby making a nonsense of his own principles for the sake of getting the League of Nations up and running, he would not be doing so in practice. In other words, the problem of Britain’s commitment to Zionism, a commitment the President knew that Britain had had no right to make and was without legal standing, was manageable—provided, it bears repeating, that America had an appropriate say in determining and implementing the policies of the League of Nations.

In March, while the haggling at the Peace Conference was continuing, there were the first public signs (for the few who knew how to read them) of the struggle that was underway to determine who would have most influence on President Wilson—anti-Zionist Jewish Americans or Zionism’s American supporters and their British allies.

On the third day of the previous month, with Weizmann leading their delegation, the Zionists had formally presented their petition to the Peace Conference. Britain had guaranteed them their moment. The Zionist petition called on the victorious Allied Powers to recognise the “historic title” of the Jews of the world to Palestine. (It was then that Weizmann made his statement that “Palestine is to become as Jewish as England is English.”) In effect the Zionists were asking each and all of the victorious powers to endorse the Balfour Declaration and for it to be implemented without further undue delay, in accordance with a programme the Zionists would draw up for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. For public consumption Zionism’s official line (and lie) was still that it was seeking something less than an independent Jewish state.

Then, on 5 March, the
New York Times
revealed that 30 of the most prominent and outstanding Jewish Americans had signed a petition to President Wilson. It had been presented to him on their behalf—he also signed it—by San Francisco’s Congressman Julius Kahn.

Though the term was not used, it was a fiercely anti-Zionist petition. Those who signed it included Cleveland’s E.M. Baker, President of the Stock Exchange; Simon W. Rosendale, former Attorney General of New York; Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the
New York Times
; and Henry Morgenthau Senior, former Ambassador to Turkey.

These petitioners and their associates feared that Zionism’s presentation to the Peace Conference of its claim of “historic title” to Palestine might lead to a U.S. commitment to the Zionist cause. A fear that was to be reinforced by Balfour’s memorandum stating that the major powers were committed to Zionism “right or wrong”.

In their petition the anti-Zionist Jewish Americans warned against any U.S. commitment “now or in the future to Jewish territorial sovereignty in Palestine.” Such a demand, the anti-Zionists said, “not only misrepresented the trend of the history of the Jews who ceased to be a nation 2,000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claim of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those human rights are not yet secure.”
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Here again (echoing Montagu) was an expression of the gut fear that was the prime motivation of Jewish anti-Zionism. If a Jewish state did come into being in Palestine (or anywhere else for that matter), its very existence might provoke anti-Semitism everywhere else—i.e. by giving the non-Jewish majority peoples of the lands in which the Jews who had taken the Haskala route to salvation had settled the opportunity to say to the Jews among them: “We really didn’t want you here. We don’t want you to remain here. Now you’ve got no reason to stay here. Go to your state.”

The indication of the gut fear was the repudiation in the petition of “every suspicion of double allegiance which is necessarily implied in, and cannot by any logic be removed from, the establishment of a sovereign state for Jews in Palestine.”
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I do not mean to suggest that self-interest was the only motivation of those prominent Jewish Americans and Jewish Englishmen and others who openly opposed Zionism. I mean only to say that self-interest born of the gut fear was a prime motivation. The most prominent and the most informed anti-Zionist Jews were also deeply concerned by their knowledge that a Jewish state in Palestine could only be constructed on an injustice to the Arabs and was bound to be the source of great conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The anti-Zionist petition to President Wilson also contained this statement:

It is not true that Palestine is the national home of the Jewish people, and of no other people… To subject Jews to the possible recurrence of such bitter and sanguinary conflicts, which would be inevitable, would be a crime against the triumph of their whole past history and against the lofty and world-embracing visions of their great prophets and leaders... Whether the Jews be regarded as a ‘race’ or as a religion, it is contrary to democratic principles for which the World War was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.
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In effect the prominent anti-Zionist, Jewish Americans were saying to their President: “If you really believe in the principles you have proclaimed to be the guiding lights of your policy for changing the world for the better, there’s no way you can give Zionism the commitment it is demanding. If you are serious, and we think you are, you must tell the Zionists to go to hell.”

Doing so was, actually, President Wilson’s own personal and private inclination. And Zionism’s leaders knew that.

President Wilson took the anti-Zionist petition to Paris with the intention of making the best possible use of it.

The response of Zionism’s leaders was in the form of another newspaper story. According to it, President Wilson had “expressed his personal approval” of Zionism’s claim that the Jews of the world had “historic title” to Palestine and, furthermore, the President had been “persuaded” that the Allied nations, “with the fullest concurrence of the American government”, should “lay the foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”
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To those who understood the terminology, Commonwealth implied government. If the report was an accurate representation of President Wilson’s real position, he had made not only a complete nonsense of his own principles with regard to self-determination for liberated peoples (in this case the liberated people of Palestine), he had committed himself to the creation of a Jewish state.

In fact it did not matter whether the report was true or false. If the President did not publicly deny the pro-Zionist policy that had been attributed to him, the Zionists could assert without challenge that he had come down on their side.

In the light of subsequent events it is reasonable to assume that the Zionists had calculated that it would be difficult and probably impossible for President Wilson to deny the report, because to do so might create problems with Britain which could endanger the President’s priority—getting the League of Nations up and running.

Some of the Peace Commissioners in Paris were so amazed by President Wilson’s apparent reversal that they doubted the authenticity of the report; and through Secretary of State Lansing—Wilson had returned to Washington—they asked the President to make a statement about his real position on Palestine. Was it or was it not consistent with his Fourteen Points and his Mount Vernon speech? Was the report suggesting that he had changed his position, at least with regard to Palestine, authentic or not?

On 16 April President Wilson issued the following statement to the Peace Commissioners—a document that was not made public for 55 years.

Of course I did not use any of the words quoted in the enclosed, and they do not indeed purport to be my words. But I did in substance say what is quoted, though the expression foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth goes a little further than my idea at that time. All that I meant was to corroborate our expressed acquiescence in the position of the British government in regard to the future of Palestine.
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