Zionism and American Jews

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, 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 Podhoretz 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 the congressional offices, arguing the merits of certain
proposals in order to gain the necessary affirmative votes, the
Israeli lobby channels information to its many allies in Congress,
rounds up scores of assured votes when they are needed, and has the
pleasant task of urging well-intentioned, overly eager members not to
wander off with their own competing legislation in support of Israel.

During the height of the 1973 war, a thirty-six hour phone blitz by
I.L. Kenen, the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC, the Israeli lobby), resulted, on 18 October, in the immediate
introduction of legislation in both houses to transfer "Phantom
aircraft and other equipment in the quantities needed by Israel to
repel aggressors in the amount of $2.2 billion." A massive campaign
prefaced the passage of this military aid bill, and an attempt to
strip $500 million from the legislation was defeated when Kenen fired
off ninety-five telegrams to House Appropriations and Foreign Affairs
Committee members.

When the influential chairman of the latter committee, Clement J.
Zablocki, sought across-the-board reductions in military exports to
Middle East countries, including Israel, he found himself forced to
bow to Zionist pressure. The "Israel-Firsters" and AIPAG moved to
block him from assuming the chairmanship of the committee in the 95th
Congress. Only after a bitter, behind the scenes, conference was an
amicable arrangement worked out. The Congressman has not since opposed
any of Israel's lofty ambitions on Capitol Hill.