Zionism & American Jews -- 1981

ALFRED M. LILIENTHAL

It had been a nasty, rainy night when an elderly, affluent Hartford couple made their way from their home to a meeting. As their car slowly turned left at the entrance to the Jewish Community Center, another automobile raced out of the fog and rammed into them. My cousin, whose countless civil and philanthropic deeds had endeared her to the community, was dead before she could reach the hospital; her husband seriously injured.

Ever since the appearance of my Readers' Digest article (Israel's Flag Is Not Mine in 1949), in which I crossed swords with Zionist Organization chieftain, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, my relatives in Hartford had looked upon me as a plain and simple nut, if not a traitor. Former close family ties had deteriorated to a point of near-total ostracism. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, and I rushed to Connecticut for the last rites of a wonderful woman, and was among the 800 to pay Sunday morning tribute to her in a packed synagogue-the very one from which, in the presence of many family members, I had been excoriated by the rabbi during the High Holy Days services thirty years earlier for daring to speak out publicly against Zionism.

Having flown up from Washington, I spent the night at the home of other cousins from whom my iconoclastic views had separated me even before the Digest piece appeared.

Cousin Bern and I stayed up reminiscing late into the night, and, of course, the Middle East crisis came into our conversation. "You know, I have never been a Zionist," he said. "But something had to be done to provide a home for Jewish refugees. That is why I have always supported the State of Israel, given substantially to the UJA, and even headed the Hartford drive." This reasoning, so typical of thousands of other Jews, has been responsible for the Zionist takeover of the American Jewish community-lock, stock and barrel.

My rejoinder, I feared, fell on ears as deaf as those I had encountered in my continual efforts to open doors to reasoning and to banish emotionalism. Americans of Jewish faith cannot visualize the extent to which their rabbis and secular leadership, operating through Organized Jewry, have totally deceived them into confusing humanitarianism with nation-building, religion and nationalism. A home could have been found in 1947 for the 285,000 survivors of Hitler's concentration camps without ever establishing a state; just as today security for the Jews of Israel can be obtained without the continued expansionism wrought by the West Bank settlements policy or the ruthless repression of the rights of the Palestinian people.

But only an ever-larger state will appease the hungry ambitions of Zionist leaders. Privately they have incessantly declared that they have no interest in refugees, only in creating a sovereign state. In their atheism and agnosticism, they have manifested even less concern for Judaism, the religious faith. Adroitly exploiting Nazi genocide, their propaganda has used the Holocaust to extract a blank check from Zionist and non-Zionist co-religionists which enabled them in 1948 to bet the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power politics.

Speaking unqualifiedly in the name of all Jews, Zionist acumen made certain that the politicians remained hypnotized more than ever by the "Jewish vote." All they had to do was to remind both political parties that their eloquent support of Israel was a prerequisite for their conquest of pivotal election states.

When so much is at stake in the Middle East, inevitably the question must arise: How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people? Far from all Jews believed in the concept of the Jewish state, and the Jews themselves constituted but a very small minority of the American population, less than three percent. Is it possible that Americans have been so apathetic that six million can manipulate 230 million?

But there are many compelling reasons why population figures are of little relevance to the Zionist success story. Mahatma Gandhi once remarked: "Numbers are not critical to any struggle. Strength and purpose are." This strength, matched by wealth and position, can be summed up in one word: power. The Zionists have been able to muster fantastic muscle at the right moment and at the right place, or instill the fear that it might be used.

The triumph of Zionism would never have been possible without the 20th century's Holy Trinity: Hitler, the supine politicians and the compliant media. By labeling those who opposed the course upon which Israeli leadership intractably committed their new state as "anti-Semitic," they crushed budding dissent. Without understanding the underlying reasons, the Jewish rank and file could point to the large number of prominent Christian supporters of the state and boast: "Just as it is not necessary to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread, so one need not be Jewish to be a Zionist." Everyone loves a winner. What little organized opposition there was to Zionism totally collapsed with Israel's stirring victory in the June 1967 six-day war. The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism all but vanished, and thereafter, even non-Zionists were not ashamed to be counted in Zionists ranks, as Commentary editor Norman Podhertz so loudly proclaimed in "Now, Instant Zionism."

A principal reason for the remarkable political success achieved by the Jewish connection and the Zionist connectors lies deep in the American political system. Our system of representative government has been profoundly affected by the growing influence and affluence of minority pressure groups, whose strength invariably increases as presidential elections approach. This makes it virtually impossible to formulate foreign policy in the American national interest. The Electoral College system has greatly fortified the position of the national lobbies established by ethnic, religious and other minority pressure groups-the Jewish-Zionist-Israel lobby in particular.

Under this anachronistic system, state votes go as a unit to the candidate winning a plurality of the vote, which endows a well-organized lobby with tremendous bargaining power. And the Jewish connection has been augmented by the Jewish location: seventy-six percent of American Jewry is concentrated in sixteen cities of six states -- California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Florida -- with 181 electoral votes. It only takes 270 electoral votes to elect the next President of the United States.

This explains why the politicians have been mesmerized by fear of the "Jewish vote" in a hotly contested state. The inordinate Israelist influence over the White House, the Congress and other elected officials, stems from this ability to pander bloc votes, as well as to fill the campaign coffers of both parties with timely contributions. The individual Jew who might not go along with Zionist ideology or Jewish nationalism is too cowardly to speak out and take the usurpers of his voice to task; and so the peddling goes forward.

Few Jews appreciate the methodology employed by the powerful Zionist lobby in Washington to keep the politicians in line. It's not exactly pretty, and even in the declining morality of our day, I am certain that many would be revolted by what is done in their name to help the Middle East's "bastion of democracy."

This lobby, fully integrated within our national elective process, has become intrinsic to the warp and woof of the U.S. political system for the past thirty-two years. Show me a man who is running for President, and I will show you invariably a politician who will not dare offend this potent lobby. Show me a legislator in either branch of the congress, and I will show you an office holder who invariably bows to this powerful pressure group. Whereas other pressure groups may have to comb

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Zionism & American Jews -- 1981

Ever since the appearance of my Readers' Digest article (Israel's Flag Is Not Mine in 1949), in which I crossed swords with Zionist Organization chieftain, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, my relatives in Hartford had looked upon me as a plain and simple nut, if not a traitor. Former close family ties had deteriorated to a point of near-total ostracism. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, and I rushed to Connecticut for the last rites of a wonderful woman, and was among the 800 to pay Sunday morning tribute to her in a packed synagogue-the very one from which, in the presence of many family members, I had been excoriated by the rabbi during the High Holy Days services thirty years earlier for daring to speak out publicly against Zionism.

Cousin Bern and I stayed up reminiscing late into the night, and, of course, the Middle East crisis came into our conversation. "You know, I have never been a Zionist," he said. "But something had to be done to provide a home for Jewish refugees. That is why I have always supported the State of Israel, given substantially to the UJA, and even headed the Hartford drive." This reasoning, so typical of thousands of other Jews, has been responsible for the Zionist takeover of the American Jewish community-lock, stock and barrel

But only an ever-larger state will appease the hungry ambitions of Zionist leaders. Privately they have incessantly declared that they have no interest in refugees, only in creating a sovereign state. In their atheism and agnosticism, they have manifested even less concern for Judaism, the religious faith. Adroitly exploiting Nazi genocide, their propaganda has used the Holocaust to extract a blank check from Zionist and non-Zionist co-religionists which enabled them in 1948 to bet the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power politics.