Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (40 page)

Forty years on, with the British Empire in terminal decline, Zionism was about to demonstrate that it was not for use by any power on Earth (unless it was in Zionism’s interest to be used); and that it was capable, in defiance of international law, and against the wishes of the organised international community, of getting what it wanted. The means to the end it desired were the skilful playing of the Nazi holocaust card, about to be supported by a campaign of diplomatic subversion to bend the UN to Zionism’s will. And, in Palestine, terrorism and ethnic cleansing.

When Britain handed the problem of what to do about Palestine to the infant United Nations Organisation, there were two terrorist organisations in the Holy Land—both creatures of Zionism—the Irgun Zvei Leumi (National Military Organisation, NMO), which was founded by Jabotinsky, and Lotiamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel). The latter was better known as the Stern Gang.

The gang’s leader was Avraham Stern and his operations commander was Yitzhak Yzertinsky (
nomme de guerre
Rabbi Shamir) who, as Yitzhak Shamir, would emerge from Zionism’s in-Palestine underground to become, eventually, Israel’s foreign minister and then prime minister. The speciality of Shamir, the terrorist leader, was assassination. So far as is known he never pulled the trigger himself. He selected the targets and directed those recruited and trained to make the hits.

Stern, who called himself Yair (after Eleazer ben Yair, the commander at Masada during the revolt against Rome) had 18 “principles” of policy which defined his full objectives and included: a Jewish State with its borders as defined in Genesis 15:18—“from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates”; a “population exchange,” a euphemism for the expulsion of the Arabs; and the building of the Third Temple in Jerusalem.
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Stern and his followers were initially part of the Irgun but they broke with it in 1940 and went their own way as a consequence of Jabotinsky ruling that action against the British would be called off for the duration of the war. (Before the start of World War II the Irgun had conducted a few actions in response to Britain’s 1939 White Paper). When Jabotinsky then urged Jews in Palestine to join the British army for the purpose of getting the training and some of the weapons they needed for the war to come with the Arabs, Stern accused the revisionists of collaborating with the enemy. Stern had been willing to become an ally of the British but only on the condition that London would recognise the sovereignty of a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. Until it did, Stern said the struggle against the British would be continued. When he broke with the Irgun, the majority of its activists went with him and he and they looked upon themselves as the “real” Irgun.

Stern’s single-minded belief was that the only possible response to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe had to begin with the ending of Britain’s occupation of Palestine. But he was not crazy enough to believe that his forces could drive the British out. So he took what was for him a logical step. In return for their assistance for his cause, Stern offered his Zionist services to Britain’s enemies—first to Mussolini’s Fascists and then to Hitler’s Nazis. That ought not to be true but it is. In fact it was easy for Stern to contemplate such a course of action because he was an admirer of the totalitarian way. Like not a few of Zionism’s really hard men, he was, philosophically, without enthusiasm for the thing called democracy.

As documented by Brenner, Stern’s first approach to Mussolini’s Fascists was made in September 1940 through one of their agents in Palestine, an Italian Jew who also worked for the British police. The Italian agent and Stern drew up an agreement whereby Mussolini would recognise a Zionist state in Palestine in return for Sternist co-ordination with the Italian army. When it seemed that the initiative was going nowhere, Stern, according to one of his associates at the time, Baruch Nadel, wondered if the agreement he had offered to Mussolini was being used by the British to set him up for arrest and execution. It had to be possible, Stern thought, that the Italian Jew with whom he had made the agreement was a double-agent who was more loyal to the British than he was to his Italian intelligence handlers.

As a precaution Stern then sent one of his own trusted agents, Naftali Lubentschik, to Beirut. Lebanon was controlled by the Vichy regime which represented the French in Nazi-occupied France and the French empire who were collaborating with the Nazis. Lubentschik’s brief was to negotiate an agreement directly with Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis. He made no progress with the Fascists, but in January 1941 he met two very important Nazis. One of them was Otto von Hentig, the head of the Oriental Department of Nazi Germany’s Foreign Office. Von Hentig was regarded as a “philo-Zionist” on account of his preference for packing Jews off to Palestine in return for money as an alternative to slaughtering them. The outcome of the discussions they had was nothing less than a Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and Hitler’s Third Reich.

The document setting out Stern’s proposal—one of the most amazing and infamous documents in all of human history—was eventually discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Ankara, Turkey.
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Dated 11 January 1941, it was headed
PROPOSAL OF THE NATIONAL MILITARY ORGANISATION IRGUN ZVEI LEUMI CONCERNING THE SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE AND THE PARTICIPATION OF THE NMO IN THE WAR ON THE SIDE OF GERMANY.

This document—it was authentic, not a forgery—said in part the following (emphasis added):

The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries…

The NMO, which is well acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:

Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.

Co-operation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.

Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition of the above mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised on the side of the German Reich,
offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.

This offer by the NMO... would be connected to the military training and organising of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.

The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive solution of the European
Jewish problem in conformity with the above mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.

The Sternists also emphasised a statement that was a constant refrain of their dialogue with the Nazis: “The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.”
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Stern and his leadership colleagues, including Shamir, would not have been uncomfortable with what they proposed because they were aware that the WZO had made its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the
Ha’avara Agreement
. The offer to make a deal with the Nazis was not taken up, but it was an offer seriously made by deluded people.

Down the decades that followed, Zionism indignantly denied the Sternist attempt to do business with Hitler’s Germany (and Mussolini’s Fascists); and Zionism was very successful in getting the truth about that episode (and much else) suppressed. Goys who tried to tell the truth were denounced as being rabidly anti-Semitic; and Jewish writers who tried to tell the truth were condemned as “self-hating Jews”, the implication being that they were very sick people.

The most authoritative and irrefutable confirmation of the Sternist attempt to do a deal with Hitler’s Germany, and also confirmation of the authenticity of the Ankara document itself, is to be found in
Israel’s Fateful Hour
. Harkabi acknowledged the whole thing and added his own observations. Here are two of them.

It is doubtful whether the long history of the Jews, full as it is with oddities and cruel ironies, has ever known such an attempt to make a deal with rabid enemies—of course, ostensibly for reasons of higher political wisdom…
Perhaps, for peace of mind, we ought to see this affair as an aberrant episode in Jewish history. Nevertheless, it should alert us to how far extremists may go in times of distress, and where their manias may lead
.”
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(Emphasis added).

It was not, however, only Zionists who courted the Nazis. The exiled leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the time, Haj Amin Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, had conversations with Hitler himself. In one, on 21 November 1941, Hitler was said to have told the Mufti two things. The first was that Germany could not call openly for the independence of any Arab possessions of the British and the French, because Germany did not want to antagonise Vichy, which still ran North Africa. The second was that when the Germans had overrun the Caucasus, they would move swiftly down to Palestine and destroy the Zionist settlements there. Whether Hitler had any intention of honouring his promise to the Mufti is not known to me.

As it happened, internal knowledge of Stern’s offer to do a deal with Nazi Germany had a consequence that Stern himself did not foresee and showed how out of touch he was with the feelings of his rank and file. Most were so disgusted by what had been proposed that they drifted back to the Irgun, even though it amounted to nothing much after Jabotinsky’s death from a heart-attack in America in 1940. The Irgun was waiting for new leadership. It was to be provided by a recently arrived Jewish immigrant who had been the most zealous of Jabotinsky’s disciples and, in his Polish homeland, the leader of Betar, the Zionist Youth Organisation founded by Jabotinsky. (Betar was the name of a fortress where Bar Kochba made his last stand against the Romans). The name of this recently arrived Jewish immigrant from Poland was Menachem Begin who, when he eventually became prime minister, would do most to make stopping the countdown to Armageddon something close to a mission impossible.

On arrival in Palestine, and because of the split in its ranks, Begin found revisionist Zionism in a state of total disarray. He called for the reorganisation of the Irgun and was appointed its commander. The only thing he had going for him, initially, was the return to the Irgun fold of those of its former members who had deserted to follow Stern and who were then appalled by his offer to do a deal with Hitler’s Germany.

Begin’s analysis of the situation was correct. The British were not going to give all of Palestine to Zionism. It followed that a Jewish state in all of Palestine could not possibly be created by politics alone. Task number one therefore, by the use of whatever violence was necessary, was to break Britain’s will to stay.

As one would expect of the man who was to become the most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Begin was not bothered by the obstacles he faced. As Brenner noted, he was not bothered by the fact that most of the Jews then in Palestine regarded the Irgunists and the Sternists as “crazy fascists”. And he was not bothered by the small number of operatives he had available on both a full and part-time basis. Provided they were prepared to be ruthless enough, there were no limits to the amount of damage his fighters could inflict on the British and their installations.

In appearance Menachem Begin was not, to say the very least, an attractive man. He was as described on the British army’s WANTED posters of him. Underneath his picture was this description: “Height, 173 cms; Build, thin; Complexion, sallow; Hair, dark; Eyes, brown; Nose, long, hooked; Peculiarities, wears spectacles, flat-footed, bad teeth; Nationality, Polish.”

We have a very accurate and clear picture of Begin’s mindset from what he wrote in the Introduction of the English language edition of his book
The Revolt
, his own inside story of the Irgun.
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He opened by saying he had written the book primarily for his own people, but it was also for Gentiles “lest they be unwilling to realise, or all too ready to overlook, the fact that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born, a new specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, the FIGHTING JEW. That Jew, who the world considered dead and buried and never to rise again, has risen... never again to go down the sides of the pit and vanish from off the earth.”
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