Israel an American Catastrophe ebook

© Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa 2016

© Stash Pruszynski 2016

ISBN: 978-83-65304-49-0

Instytut Wydawniczy Książka i Prasa

ul. Twarda 60

00‍-818 Warszawa

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www.monde‍-diplomatique.pl

Skład wersji elektronicznej: Marcin Kapusta

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Table of Contents

For Cecilia, of the BBC and Darsie Gillie, of The Manchester Guardian, my father’s great wartime friends in London, who treated me like every son would love to be treated. Perhaps from them I learned not to pull punches when dealing with bullies and racists.

Acknowledgments

This book would have never seen the light of day without the encouragement, patience and editorial help of my wise, former Edinburgh University colleague, Professor David Simpson. No words can express my gratitude. Barbara Jordan, of Toronto, a copy writer and a dear friend came on board with a sharp pencil, when I thought my opus was ready for the masses, and eliminated countless adjectives and wise cracks which were close to my heart. Several distinguished former British and Canadian diplomats, provided me with priceless advice and newspaper clippings as well as texts of speeches and discussions that took place at Chatham House and other institutions to which I have no access. They prefer to remain anonymous. One retired British ambassador, while less critical of Israel than I am, was worried about my safety, after “Catastrophe” hit the book stands. But if far more distinguished targets of Israel’s official fury, Professors Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, as well as columnist Gedon Levy remain among the living…? I’ve heard banal reports that my days are numbered, but I dismissed them, of course.

My Warsaw friends, starting with Przemek Wielgosz, editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique and his colleagues, Kasia Drozdz, Aneta Jerska, Magda and Ala Qandil, and Ewa Jasiewicz never wavered in their encouragement and support, as well as good humor, when it was most needed.

* * *

My family, Ola and Ania, and especially my eagle-eyed son, Jan, showed infinite patience when reading the manuscript and recovering choice chunks of my work that kept being gobbled up by my computer.

God bless you all.

Page Zero

“We had to hate—as any nation worth of the name must and always will hate—the rule of the foreigner. If you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to annex it.”1

Menachem Begin

* * *

“Israel used its military power and its Shin Bet domestic intelligence service to disrupt any Palestinian attempts at mass organization and to arrest any Palestinian who remotely behaved like a local leader. Israel would tolerate Palestinian spokesmen, but any spokesman who got more than three people to follow him was eventually arrested, expelled, or harassed into submission.”2

Thomas L. Friedman

* * *

“An Israeli military court has convicted four soldiers of negligently shooting to death an 18-year-old Palestinian in the West Bank. Then it passed a sentence: one hour in jail, suspended, and a fine of one Israeli agora, just under one-third of a US cent.”3

Barton Gellman

* * *

The US-Israeli relationship “is a one way street, with America doing all the diplomatic heavy lifting while Israel limits its role to obstruction and whining—repaying Uncle Sam’s generosity with ingratitude and scorn.”4

Professor Avi Shlaim

* * *

“He who saves one life, saves the world entire”

Motto of Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem.

“And he who killed, maimed wounded and traumatized thousands of children in the summer of 2014, deploying artillery, bombs and rockets against the “largest open air prison on earth” simply because he craved their land?”

The Author

Personal NoteTo America With Love

In Poland presents are given to children and adults on Christmas Eve. America was my Christmas present when our tiny ship entered New York harbor on December 24th, 1945 following a bouncy journey across the Atlantic.

For the two years that followed I experienced only kindness and generosity from the people of America and often wondered why I was not born in Wellfleet, Cape Cod instead of Warsaw on the eve of WWII? Bad address, disastrous timing.

I was sure we would remain in America forever. But after two years at the UN my father, Xavier, who among other duties headed the Ad Hoc Commission on Palestine which decided the borders of the future Jewish State, was named Poland’s ambassador to the Netherlands. It was not America, but it was fun. It all ended in June 1950. My father died in a car crash in West Germany, when rushing to his wedding in Warsaw.

My life also crashed. At 14, from the luxurious life of a spoiled diplomat’s son in the west I landed in a model communist orphanage, in Poland; lots of indoctrination but a shortage of kluski (noodles).

Trapped behind a double Iron Curtain—we shared no border with a free country—I constantly plotted how to get out.

Miraculously, freedom came after five years.

To show our socialist “paradise” to the world, or at least selected chunks of it, the Party organized an International Youth Festival. Tens of thousands of smiling guests arrived in the grim city that saw no tourists since 1939. Most were communists or communist sympathizers, sometimes known as ”fellow travelers.”

Hours after the festival started I met Bridget Haines, a fascinating and outgoing student of literature from Newnham College, Cambridge and some of her smart male friends, eager for adventure, from the same university. None were communists. Two weeks later they smuggled me out by train through two closely guarded borders. Our successful adventure made the front pages. London’s Daily Express dubbed my friends “The Cambridge Pimpernels.” The label stuck.

At 19, an instant celebrity, a famous writer’s and diplomat’s son, I was hired by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for what today would be called a consulting job. The offices of the two radio stations were in Munich. America’s big hearted taxpayers paid for my fun in the city. Next, an American scholarship gave me six years of romance at Edinburgh University, after which I was hired by the most prestigious New York publishing firm, Harper and Row. And that was not all. In one shape or another gifts from America kept coming, including fabulous Thanksgivings, Merry Christmases and holidays with dear friends in New Canaan CT, Washington DC, Jefferson ME and elsewhere. Frankly, America was my first and most lasting love from the moment I stepped on its shore that Christmas Eve in 1945. And when I see it being double crossed by its own politicians, it’s ill prepared soldiers sent to fight other peoples’ wars and its black president regularly insulted by a racist Middle East warmonger, my blood boils…

Introduction

Who needs another book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, soon to be 70 years old? After all, countless excellent, scholarly books have been written on the subject, largely by Jews and Israelis, including The Zionist Connection, by the brave and eminent American scholar, Alfred M. Lilienthal, A Death in Jerusalem, by Kati Marton, The Terror of Zion, by J. Bowyer Bell, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians, by David Gilmour, One Palestine Complete, by Tom Segev, 1984: A Soldier’s Tale, by Uri Avnery, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, La Guerre israélienne de l’information, by Joss Dray and Denis Sieffert, Programmer le désastre. La politique israélienne à l’oeuvre, by Michael Warschawski, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter, the concise and excellent Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s guide, by Ben White, A New Voice for Israel, by Jeremy Ben-Ami, Gaza: A History, by Jean-Pierre Filiu and, above all, The Punishment of Gaza, by Gideon Levy. Oddly enough, the answer to this nagging question emerged by itself as I ploughed through mountains of notes, newspaper clippings, magazines and books, trying to extract valid information that would clarify my ideas, fortify my arguments and supplement my first hand observations.

Pig-headed as it may sound, I came to realize, very gradually, that I was doing something as simple and as natural as it was new. I was addressing my book not to the dedicated reading and writing crowd, the intellectuals and the politicians, nor even to those deeply interested in the Middle East. I was going over their heads, directly addressing the American people. Although as a Canadian newspaper reporter roaming around North America I assumed that I knew a fair amount about the world and could not easily be hoodwinked, on the Israeli question my mind was as effectively laundered as, I believe, are the minds of countless adult Americans. My book is directed at hardworking, tax paying and patriotic US citizens who, persuaded that one more war would bring permanent peace and security, were pushed into four insane conflicts and made to pay for them in trillions of dollars and at least a million extinguished, shattered or cruelly disrupted American lives. Of the three wars since Vietnam, the two against Iraq were aggressively promoted by Israeli leaders and their powerful lobbies. I am in effect addressing the people who have been taken for the longest, most costly and insane ride in the history of democracies. I am hoping to wake up the whole American nation, especially the Jews, who are so often violently targeted in the wake of nearly every major act of Israeli aggression against its Muslim neighbors.

But while focusing largely on the links between Israel and the United States (surely the most unusual in history), the book concerns much of the world. Since the start of the 20th century, the fates of America, Europe and the Middle East have been closely connected, first by oil, then by two World Wars and finally by the creation of the State of Israel on Arab lands.

The interdependence of United States, Europe, Israel and the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, was well reflected in the findings of a 2003 opinion survey conducted in 12 countries of the European Union. Most of the 17,000 persons questioned considered Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace. It was closely followed by the United States, North Korea and Iran.

Unlike nearly all other books on the subject, my work aims to show the incalculable harm done by the Israeli leaders and the Israeli Lobby to American interests, both at home and abroad, by pushing Washington into distant wars that were lost before they even started. It portrays the historically unprecedented bullying by a minute country of its 400 times larger victim. It describes how the selfish, short sighted, violent and racist treatment of their Muslim neighbors by successive Israeli governments became the greatest danger to the security of the United States, and a deadly threat to the totally innocent Jews of the Diaspora. I show how the Israeli Lobby has corrupted America’s political system, destroyed or arrested the careers of many brilliant and honest politicians, diplomats, public servants and university professors and undermined the freedom of speech guaranteed by the US Constitution. It has also sabotaged countless, immensely costly US efforts to win the good will of people worldwide, especially in the developing countries.

When starting to write this book, with my numerous American friends very much in mind, I often wondered what’s the point? The research and writing, and perhaps another visit to Israel and the occupied territories, could add up to another year or two. It seemed inconceivable that Israel’s blatant colonial and apartheid policies, far deadlier than those of the white South African regime in its final years, could keep flourishing another week, month, or year in the 21st century. That they would be tolerated and subsidized by western democracies and financed by US taxpayers. I wondered whether anything new could be said about Israel and the perennial Middle East crisis, the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews which started in Palestine more than 100 years ago and has since radiated to all neighboring countries as well as beyond.

I had doubts about my book’s title. Should it not be Israel: A Jewish Tragedy?

Hatreds rooted in the Holy Land have exploded in faraway places: Munich, Buenos Aires, New York, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Paris and elsewhere they have led to the deaths of innocent people, many of them Jews. But the media have carefully avoided exposing the common source of these events and linking Israel’s “wars” against its neighbors to the “anti-Semitic” attacks against Jews in Europe or elsewhere which immediately followed.

Somehow the motives for the 9/11 attacks, clearly stated immediately afterwards by Osama bin Laden, were drowned out by a massive wave of self-righteous propaganda and infantile trivia delivered practically non-stop by the media. The American public, which just a few years earlier remained riveted by the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of two people, showed no interest whatsoever in the motives behind the killing of 3,000 on 9/11. I have yet to meet an American who remembers what Osama bin Laden said about his motives in the days following the tragedy. In a video-taped recording shown on countless TV stations in Europe he claimed that America had been punished for the destruction of Iraq in the first Gulf War, the treatment of the Palestinian people by America’s “best friends” and the stationing of US troops on the holy soil of Mecca and Medina. Yet no mainstream US commentators or editorial writers I know of stated or even hinted, that there would have been no 9/11, and so no US invasion of Afghanistan and no Iraqi calamity, if America had not been identified as Israel’s chief partner in the ruthless dispossession of the Palestinian people.

If Osama bin Laden’s terrorist team targeted first of all New York City, was it not because it is the largest Jewish city on earth?

Hundreds of Israeli, Jewish and other scholars, journalists and commentators, as well as spiritual leaders and Nobel Prize winners have for years, denounced Israel’s expansionist and racist policies. Their brave, heartfelt and honest advice was either ignored or brutally attacked by Israeli leaders and their lobbies around the world.

“The Israelis in Gaza are behaving like the Nazis,” declared Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish member of the British Parliament as phosphorous and other bombs hit UN buildings, schools and other civilian targets in Gaza. At the end of 2009, Richard Falk, the UN’s special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestinian Territories, who also happens to be Jewish, urged Israel’s European and North American allies to press for an immediate end of the blockade of the Palestinian lands, “backed up by a credible threat of economic sanctions.”

Surely in the history of mankind there has never been a more unbalanced relationship between two formally independent countries as the one that has linked Israel and the United States since the days of Harry Truman. The US has a population 50 times that of the Jewish State, yet for decades Israel has had a stranglehold on the most vital policies of its mighty and obedient ally, especially those dealing with the volatile and oil rich Middle East nations (with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia). Hardly anyone in the US, especially in Washington, dares mention this, not even in a whisper. Can one imagine a bunch of Picts controlling the Roman Empire from the Scottish Highlands? And, at least distance-wise, the Picts were far closer to Rome than the Israelis are to Washington.

Meantime the violent harassment employed by the army, the bureaucracy, the courts and individual Israelis against their Arab neighbors never stops. The final aim of all these policies remains constant; to get rid of the Palestinians at any cost, by assassination, banishment, terror, torture, years of imprisonment without trial, by destroying their crops, homes, workplaces, schools and mosques, and refusing permits to repair them or build new ones. As the Israelis move into Palestinian lands, they level homes and orchards, terrorize, jail, exile or kill their owners.

According to the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique of June 2012, nearly 40% of adult Palestinian males have, since 1967 passed through Israeli jails. Was it worse in apartheid South Africa? One Palestinian who served as my guide in 2003 in the largely devastated Bethlehem told me it was much easier to get Israeli permission to go to Jordan than to go to Jerusalem, a few miles away. The Israelis hope that once someone leaves the West Bank or Gaza and tastes life without the daily harassments and humiliations, the checkpoints and the IDF snipers, they will never wish to return.

Palestinians, however, have proved far tougher than the rulers of Israel imagined. They take on tanks, armored vehicles and Caterpillars with stones, knowing only too well that there’s no penalty for those Israelis who pull the trigger. Israelis call this policy of expropriation and expansion their “struggle to survive.” Most Americans, Canadians and perhaps even Europeans believe these woeful fairy tales.

As an increasing number of scholars, historians, and Israel-friendly but sober commentators keep pointing out, the present policies of the Jewish State are highly destructive, too often crude, inhuman, racist and short sighted. They shame Jewish people worldwide, endanger their lives, are a threat to the very existence of Israel, stability in the area and world peace. Israel’s exhibition of arrogance will make few true friends for the Israelis and is certain to bring violent reactions from those who have been wronged.

“The Israelis are digging their own grave,” Mark Frankland5, a long time foreign correspondent of The Observer, said as the Israelis kept bombing civilian targets in Gaza, in January 2009. Blinded by their military power and control over their immensely resourceful ally, Israeli leaders and their lobbies act as if there was no tomorrow, as if they were unaware that every sixth person on our planet is a Muslim. What will it take before the Israelis realize that their leaders are pushing them towards a dead end, at best, or something so much worse that it’s hard to contemplate or imagine. Can the bullying of Americans, Europeans and others by constantly referring to a new Holocaust threat work forever? Will the Israelis open their eyes one day and realize that possessing an arsenal of nuclear weapons is not a license to kill defenseless civilians and to confiscate their lands?. Unfortunately, too often, the Israelis act as if they were both deaf and blind. As if they believed that the Holocaust on the one hand, and their 21st century weapons on the other, give them unique, superhuman rights. In effect, an ordinary Israeli has the right to decide which Palestinian should live and which should die.

Unfortunately, so far, America’s and Europe’s spineless leaders and yes-men do hardly anything to discourage these notions, and the resulting actions and land grabs that follow. Reports ordered by the European Union which documented Israeli crimes and excesses have been shelved or ignored by Brussels, so as not to “upset” the Israelis and endanger the “peace process.” For decades now, allied soldiers, civilians and United Nations employees, plus countless others have been paying, and are paying for the cowardice of their political leaders’ with sweat, blood, lost limbs and lost lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and countless other places. Most of these disasters and tragedies can be traced to conflicts that are rooted in America’s blind support for its “eternal”6, yet ungrateful and scornful friends in Jerusalem. Where will people be dying next so that American and European politicians can sleep soundly, keep their cushy jobs and the Israelis can continue enriching themselves by grabbing poor people’s land?

There will be more violence, more instability and accumulated hate as long as Washington keeps rubber-stamping whatever Israel does, vetoes every UN resolution - at least 37 so far - that concerns Israel, and the EU offers sweet trade deals and subsidies to the Jewish State, buys its arms, drones and technology and remains silent in face of its crimes.

While following the news and reading about Israel and the Middle East for more than 25 years, I came to realize that many events, most of them tragic, but all connected to Israel have been studiously ignored, neglected or mystified by the media, as well as by Israeli, US, Canadian and other politicians. In this book I am attempting to focus on some of them by “connecting the dots.”

● Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin—the unexpected, but true Godfathers of the Jewish State—and their decisions to vote in favour of creating a new country on someone else’s land. Truman did so against the advice of all his closest collaborators, including Secretary of State George Marshall and future Secretary, Dean Acheson. After weeks of indecision, Stalin, for different reasons did the same.

● The ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte, a nephew of the King of Sweden and a representative of the United Nations, by Israeli terrorists led by Yitzhak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel. Less than four years earlier the Count, risked his life and reputation when, as Allied bombs rained on Berlin, he successfully negotiated with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler the release of thousands of Jew and other prisoners from German death camps. Some gratitude. Count Bernadotte’s wife was American.

● The 5-year and the 60-year witch hunts, by Joe McCarthy’s gang and by the militants of The Lobby, respectively.

● The death of 34 US sailors and the wounding of 170 on the ship M.S. Liberty, on June 6, 1967, by Israeli bombs and rockets, the greatest US naval disaster in peace time, which the Congress refused to investigate and the Pentagon stonewalled. The commander in chief of the Israeli armed forces at the time was General Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister and Bill Clinton’s greatly admired friend.

● The killing of Senator Robert F. Kennedy who wished to put a quick end to the Vietnam War, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounded the probable reason for the assassination. How many Americans have been informed that the assassin was a young refugee from Jerusalem, victim of the ethnic cleansing?

● The death of 300 young US Marines, diplomats and CIA agents in Beirut in 1983, following the invasion of the country by the Israeli army under Ariel Sharon, later to be hailed as “a man of peace” by George W. Bush. The occupation of Lebanon lasted 20 years.

● By far the greatest, hardly ever mentioned as such, brain drain in history, or the exodus of one million Soviet Jews, engineered by top members of the Israeli Lobby in Washington.

● Israel’s support of apartheid in South Africa and the double crossing of the UN embargo imposed on the racist regime. Also, efforts to sell nuclear weapons to Pretoria and the resulting enmity of some black American leaders and their followers, hardly ever mentioned in the media. Did Israel’s close ties with the apartheid regime serve the interests of American Jews who are outnumbered by African-Amercians by 7 to 1?

● Nine/eleven and the conspiracy of silence surrounding Osama bin Laden’s clearly stated reasons for the attack. It was not “jealousy,” as countless US pundits kept claiming.

● The two insane wars that soon followed, against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and suffered most as result of these wars and will be suffering, and hating America for generations to come. Punishing the Iraqi and Afghani people for 9/11 can be compared to punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust.

● The corrupting of the American political system, its democratic values and institutions by agents and friends of the Israeli Lobby.

● The greatest spy calamity since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, was engineered by the Israeli government. It reportedly led to the deaths of at least 100 CIA agents, whose names were passed on by Jerusalem to Moscow at the end of the Cold War. While the US-born traitor, who did incalculable harm to his country, sat in an American jail (no water boarding on American soil), countless Israelis demanded the streets, squares be named after him in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Eilat. He was visited in jail by Israeli prime ministers and officials who who competed with each other in trying to get the spy released earlier. He was freed in November 2015.

Foreword

My father must be turning in his grave seeing what a vandal state he helped create. A life-long defender of all underdogs and advocate of minority rights in Poland and elsewhere, could he have predicted that in a land controlled by Jews there would be no penalty for killing unarmed Palestinian men, women and children, cutting them off from food and water and destroying tens of thousands of homes?

Such were my thoughts on January 3, 2009 after one week of “war” in Gaza. At least 450 civilians were dead, largely women and children.

As shocked medical workers, UN and Red Cross employees described the bloodshed to TV reporters and pleaded for international aid and intervention, Israel’s spokesmen claimed there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and boasted about the army’s “surgical strikes.”

That day in Warsaw, I was attempting in vain to write the foreword to this book, which was then far from finished.

True to form, President George W. Bush and State Secretary Condoleezza Rice condemned the Palestinians after 4 Israelis died, not the Israelis who killed hundreds and wounded thousands and made many more homeless in the first weeks of winter.

Mindful of The Lobby, Barack Obama, definitely a brilliant and compassionate person who in a fortnight would become the most powerful leader on earth, dared not open his mouth.

On January 16 newspapers reported that 155 caliber phosphorous shells hit the UNRWA7 building and large supplies of food and medicines for the population were destroyed. One could well wonder what other chemicals, arms and methods the Israelis would be employing if the world was not watching. But I will leave this bit of speculation to those better versed in chemistry, the art of mass destruction, hi-tech vandalism and state of the art terror. The BBC stressed that it was not showing the most bloody and shocking scenes.

With President Bush blocking any effective UN move towards peace, the Israelis felt that they could go on killing, destroying and terrorizing Gaza, claiming that Hamas fighters were hiding “among the people.” With equal logic they could have bombed a North Dakota turkey farm, claiming that they only targeted male turkeys.

On January 19th, on the eve of the Inauguration Day in Washington, the Israelis abandoned the ruined Gaza which became a graveyard for many. In three weeks they had killed more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians, largely women and children, and wounded thousands, many of whom would die in the following days, weeks or months.

According to Israeli leaders this was but fair revenge for the “rockets” aimed at Israel in the previous seven years. What they did not say was that approximately 7,000 of these “kitchen made” contraptions, called Qassams, managed to kill 14 Israelis8. In that period the Israelis killed, wounded and kidnapped thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and levelled countless homes.

When less than 3000 Americans died on the 11th of September 2001, the prestigious French daily, Le Monde, carried the headline “Nous Sommes Tous Des Americains.” We Are All Americans. How come there was no such headline anywhere following the slaughter in Gaza?

Yes, there were numerous demonstrations around the world protesting Israel’s “war” but most western leaders remained practically silent.

Must I remain silent too?

Israel’s senseless slaughter would have perhaps shocked me less if not for my father’s efforts at the UNO in 1947 to give the Jews a safe and permanent home that came to be known as Israel.

Most critics agreed that the assault on Gaza had been planned for months. So it was no accident that the Israelis hi-jacked our Christmas and New Year’s Eve festivities to use them as a smokescreen, convinced that we will be too busy celebrating to worry about the hungry and the thirsty, the homeless, the wounded and the dead in Gaza.

Had they accepted the minimum of everything, food and freedom, water and electricity, housing and education, surrounded by Israel’s ocean of plenty, the Palestinians would have been enjoying relative peace and quiet that winter. So, “the war” was their fault.

As Bush Jr. finally headed back to Texas on January 20, track-loads and tank-loads of smiling Israeli troops rolled back to Israel, feeling happy and rehabilitated after the Lebanon fiasco of 2006. The civilian deaths score this time was 10 to 1500. But for the Israelis public the armistice was a blunder. They protested, demanding more Palestinian blood.

When not applauding the killings of Palestinians, destruction of their properties and the misappropriation of their lands, the vast majority of Israelis embrace a willful silence. It has lasted for 70 years and has hardly any parallels in history. Has there ever been, in modern times a 70 year-period in which the Jews have been treated as badly as they have been treating the Palestinians since the 1940s? Was there a time when one and a half million, anywhere, were locked up in an outdoor prison and bombed from the air, the land and the sea?

For years now, harmless children, women and men are being slaughtered with total impunity by people who want them to die or to run so that they can misappropriate their land.

Protesting injustice in Ceausescu’s Romania, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union or Saddam’s Iraq would have led to imprisonment, years in a nut house or instant execution. The Israelis face no such threats.

As the world waited for the new President, some of us wondered whether he would have the balls to take on The Lobby which was hugely responsible for pushing Washington into two Iraqi wars, “to make the Middle East safer for Israel” and the carnage and misery that followed. And that was not enough. Since the destruction of Iraq and total destabilization of the Middle East it has been demanding another war, this time with Iran.

Is Israel safer today than it was before the two Bush Presidents, egged on by America’s “eternal friends” in the Holy Land, sent more than two million ill-prepared soldiers to bring new order to the Middle East? Is America safer? Is the world?

1My Father: Israel’s Forgotten Hero

It was the morning of Christmas Eve, 1945.

I was standing on the deck of a cargo ship that also took a few dozen passengers when I caught my first glimpse of the tips of Manhattan’s sky scrapers. As our ship slid smoothly through the water and the mist dissipated, the rest of Manhattan started emerging, shining in the sun, huge and majestic like nothing I had ever seen in wartime Europe.

With my father, Ksawery (Xavier) Pruszynski, we left the ruins of Warsaw several weeks earlier and after a few days in Paris we went on to London and to a diet of porridge and more porridge. I had no idea why we were going to America, but I knew it was better than Poland and it had Indians. It was the first time I was with my father who had left in 1939 and only returned in the late summer of 1945 in his British army uniform with Poland on his sleeve, a second lieutenant.

The joy of Christmas was in the frosty air, the cloudless, pale-blue sky, dotted with small planes writing in smoke words I could not understand. Perhaps “Coca Cola” or “Pepsi Cola,” maybe just “Happy Christmas.”

How could I not fall in love with America? It was dark by the time we got off the ship and we drove through the gloriously lit streets of New York to our hotel. Soon afterwards, in our rags we went to a truly heavenly reception with turkeys, bananas, oranges and pineapples in miraculous abundance in huge rooms full of happy people. Heaven could not have been better. I was dazzled by the food and the fruit and by the ladies with their low cut gowns, showing lots of flesh in the front and the back. Bye-bye forever, I hoped, to prim and proper and covered-up Poland. I had turned 10 just two months earlier.

Our host was Artur Szyk, the most famous and talented political cartoonist of the day and an enormously gifted painter, who was employed by Collier’s Magazine. Born in Poland, he fought for Poland’s independence against the Soviets in the 1920 war, emigrated to France and then to the US, just before WWII. Unfortunately this fine artist died young and is largely forgotten today. But there’s an Artur Szyk Society, based in Los Angeles, which keeps his name alive. A beautiful book with some of his work can be bought at the Holocaust Museum, in Washington, DC

At the age of 10, I knew nothing about my father’s work. I knew he had something to do with the Polish Embassy in Washington, which we visited often in 1946, and the United Nations. I was not much interested. I only hoped to see my father more often.

My own two-year stay in Washington DC, on a farm in Maryland, in Wellfleet, Cape Cod and Sloatsburg, near New York City, has little to do with the subject of this book. I had a typical, middle class American life, especially when I stayed with the Canby family on the farm in Maryland. I don’t recall ever learning English. It just rained down on me and I absorbed it like a sponge. I was sometimes embarrassed by my mother’s English. It was quite fluent but she used odd expressions, such as “one told me so,” which made me cringe. What I remember most fondly is the kindness of our neighbors wherever we lived, the abundance of food, the movie houses and the films. And, most of all, the freedom I enjoyed during my parents’ near constant absence. For me, there was no place like Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Why was I not born there instead of Warsaw? One of my dearest future friends, Frank Cabral, whom I met many years later at the Pamplona Fiesta de San Fermin, was born just up the coast. Why not me?

When we set out from New York harbor to return to Poland on the M.S. Batory after nearly two years of freedom and plenty, I looked at the brownish chilly waters below and thought of jumping overboard and swimming to shore. Perhaps I should have. I remember that moment as if it were yesterday.

It was only after moving to Poland in the 1990s that I learned the details of my father’s work at the UN and his dedication to a Jewish homeland and why we had to return to Poland when we did.

Much of this information I gleaned from a book written by my father’s brother, Mieczyslaw. In the volume Moses and Xavier, he tells the story of a close friendship between two law students at the famed Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Xavier, my future father, and Moses Pomerantz, a dedicated Zionist and the son of a prosperous Jewish businessman.

Moses was too busy to visit Palestine himself, but following long conversations with his friend during their last year at the university, my father decided to borrow some money and head for the Holy Land. Besides, he must have been tired of the Polish winter and wanted to spend early spring in the sun. His enthusiastic description of the new “Jewish homeland” under the title Palestine, The Third Time, was published in 1933. The title referred to the third Jewish effort in two thousand years to have their own state and to remain there.

My uncle Mieczyslaw Pruszynski, my father’s brilliant younger brother, fought the Germans at Narvik, in Norway’s Arctic Circle, in April and May 1940, and at Tobruk, in North Africa, in 1941, where he was seriously wounded. He ended his military career as a captain with one of the Polish squadrons that was part of the Royal Air Force. One of the most decorated Polish soldiers of WWII, he was more than 1.9 metres in height, had film star good looks, as well as lots of luck, charm and brains. After an international career in business he wrote history books until his death at 95.

In Moses and Xavier he traced not only the friendship between a Polish student and a Jewish one, but also the recent history of Palestine and of the Urgun terrorists in the 30s and 40s, which claimed 1000 lives. The terrorists led by Menachem Begin, a law graduate from Warsaw University and a future prime minister of Israel, blew up the Jerusalem King David Hotel in July 1945, killing dozens of civilians. They kidnapped and whipped British officers and hanged two innocent soldiers. It was well orchestrated terror. Begin was on the most wanted list with an 8,000 pound sterling price on his head, the price of a dozen fine automobiles. The British administration, with 100,000 troops, ruled the Palestine protectorate set up by the League of Nations after WWI. It was however unable to assure peace, public order and stability, as more and more weapons were supplied to the Jews by their supporters in the US and Europe and, later, the Soviet Bloc.

Practically bankrupt, exhausted after WWII and in the process of losing its colonies, Great Britain decided to transfer the Protectorate to the United Nations.

In the fall of 1947 two committees were established at the UN. These were to decide on the future of Palestine and the possible borders for two independent states, one Jewish and one Palestinian.

One committee was composed of Arab delegates who immediately decided against a Jewish State on Arab lands.

It was far more difficult to find someone to head the second committee, and give it a semblance of credibility and neutrality. The United Nations was frantically looking for a person who knew something about the area but had no connection to any of the colonial powers.

Oskar Lange, a well known professor of economics at the University of Chicago, who became Poland’s first post-war ambassador to Washington, recommended my father. He was not an expert but at least he had visited Palestine in 1932, written about it and was strongly supported by influential New York Jews.

When first published, 14 years earlier, my father’s book, Palestine: The Third Time, had been widely praised by Jewish intellectuals, many of whom claimed it was the best book written on the subject and untainted by heavy handed Zionist propaganda. Practically overnight my father became a hero to countless Polish Jews.

After its publication he was invited to speak to many Jewish Orthodox gatherings and various other organizations, all over Poland. His enthusiasm for the sun drenched land he visited that spring was contagious. He spoke of the vast capital that kept flowing from the United States, France and other countries, how new towns, irrigated farms and factories and workshops were created by the hard working newcomers. While Europe suffered the depression and mass unemployment, there was a shortage of skilled labour in the not so distans, sunny land.

No one can estimate how many Jews took my father’s advice, got off the fence, moved to Palestine and avoided nearly certain death by firing squads, in Nazi camps and gas chambers.

There were certainly dozens if not hundreds. Some were reluctant to trust their own, pushy Zionist persuaders. They trusted my father, a non-Jew and a member of an aristocratic family of landowners and soldiers.

Among those who left Poland for Palestine just before WWII was my father’s friend, Moses. Unfortunately, his prosperous parents, and his younger brother, refused to believe that the war was coming and that the horror stories, such as Kristallnacht, about the Nazis were true. After all, Germany had the best educated people in the world. It knew no recent pogroms; German textbooks were being used in Polish engineering, law and medical schools. Its universities were world-famous. So were its musicians, philosophers, poets, scientists and writers. There was surely nothing to fear…

Following the success of “Palestine,” my father embarked on a journalistic career that took him all over Poland as well as to other countries, including the US shortly before the outbreak of the war. With time he became famous or infamous, depending on the viewpoint, for defending Poland’s minorities when the official policy was to assimilate them. He never tired of attacking the Polish government, which was dominated by former generals and officers, very much like Israel is today.

He attacked the waste of money on keeping horses for our cavalry and transport when Germany started producing tanks and trucks by the thousand.

His book about Palestine was followed by one about the Spanish Civil War, which confirmed his reputation as a courageous and articulate defender of all oppressed and persecuted people. It was even-handed, but considered too pro-Republican by some of his employers and critics on the eve of WWII. On the other hand, it was never reprinted in communist Poland because it was regarded as too favorable towards Franco. En España Roja came out in Spanish, 70 years after the start of the civil war and was very well received.

But back to my father’s short career at the United Nations.

For lack of other viable candidates acceptable by most on the eve of The Cold War, my father was chosen to head the Ad Hoc Committee that was to fix the future borders of the Jewish State. One of its members was the future prime minister of Canada, Lester B. Pearson.

The committees worked hard for several weeks and finally came up with its recommendations.

Here are parts of my father’s speech at the United Nations in New York, after the committee came up with final proposals.

[Note from the Author, S.P.: This free translation, from Polish, is mine, like all the other translations from Polish or French.]

“…Palestine is unique. It cannot be compared to Korea or modern Greece or any other country. That is why arguments that are strictly formal and legal will fail to describe the entire complexity of this issue. There is something very special in this minute bit of soil, which is the land of the Bible, the most universally read book in our world, the cradle of three great religions, the fatherland of Christ. Yes, there is something absolutely exceptional, even in our sad world, in the history of this nation, never very numerous which, after contributing to the foundations of our civilization more than any other became an eternal wanderer, scattered around the whole alien world.”

“It is uncanny, the way this great nation, the Jewish nation, created a religion out of longing for its lost homeland. And there is also something unusual in its resurrection after two thousand years. One can call it reverie or fantasy or lack of realism. One is allowed to call it whatever one wishes. One can justly say that after two thousand years all the historical truths have been extinguished, but whatever one calls the rebirth of Jews as a nation in our modern world, it is a fact. It is a fact that for decades the followers of the religion of Moses, living in Vienna, the Balkans, in Germany, in Warsaw, in the Jewish quarters of London or Paris, Casablanca or Odessa, or wherever, felt that their life was not where they were born, where their fathers and ancestors were born and buried, but in a distant exotic land. They came to Palestine as persecuted or not persecuted people. They came, even though Paris, London, New York, or some other country on the other side of the seas offered them better material possibilities. They came to a poor, distant and neglected land to work hard, very hard, as no white man ever worked on lands known as colonial. People about whom it is said that they are totally incapable of any physical work, people who for hundreds of years gave us banks, pawnbrokers and shylocks—now moved to a sandy desert. They turned it into a blooming orchard; they came to a land that was a marsh infected with malaria and turned it into arable fields….”

My father’s enthusiastic support for the creation of a Jewish state was badly received by his superiors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw. Waiting for Stalin to tell them how to vote, for or against a Jewish state, they watched for a sign from the Kremlin. But no word came. So, to be on the safe side, they decided to recall my father. In the middle of November he was told to pack his bags and go back, to Poland.

In the meantime the United Nations was getting ready to vote on dividing Palestine into two countries, Arab and Jewish. The voting was postponed several times, finally it was set for November 27, 1947. Various Jewish organizations used the extra time to win or buy the votes of the undecided nations, especially in Central and South America. Sometimes they visited the delegations in their hotel rooms. What transactions were done behind closed doors remained more or less a secret. But there is little doubt that some of the delegates were bribed by members of the American Zionist lobby. The new Israel was not a divine creation as it has been portrayed too often. Heaven knows no kickbacks.

Until the last moment no one knew how the Soviet Bloc countries, including Poland, would vote. “Suddenly a bolt of lightning from the bright skies,” wrote my uncle in his book.

“Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet delegate, announced that he would vote in favor of the Jewish State.”

The minimum number of votes for the motion to pass was 32, but until the last moment only 30 votes were certain. At the very last moment France, mainly due to its prime minister, Leon Blum, a survivor of death camps, decided to vote in favor. The motion passed and the Arab delegates left the hall in silence. The Jews received more than one half of Palestine, although they were outnumbered 2 to 1 by the Palestinian population.

The next day Jews danced joyfully in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Their leaders prepared for war.

“If you came to Israel now,” wrote my father’s friend, Moses, by then a prominent solicitor in Jerusalem, “you would be welcomed like Arthur Balfour himself.” But we were returning to Poland. My mother wanted us to remain in the States. My father, a Polish writer and fierce patriot, was convinced that he could do more good for the country by going back. They were divorced soon afterwards.

* * *

Was my father aware of what was happening behind the scenes in New York, Washington and other capitals of the world, as the crucial date, the vote in favor or against the partition of Palestine was approaching? I assume that he was too busy doing his job and, unlike many prominent Jews, he was certain that a home for the Jewish people in Palestine would be a positive development. I am afraid his attitudes may have been strongly influenced by at least some his numerous Jewish friends and admirers, besides Moses.

Having read much about Israel over a period of some 20 years, I knew that the creation of the Jewish State was not a very kosher affair but I had forgotten many of the details. I recalled some rather sordid moves after I read a column by Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, in which he claimed that Israel’s borders were “sanctified” by the United Nations. In view of Israel’s hostile attitude towards the UN ever since the Jewish State was created, this was a bit much. After all, no country on earth had done more, and over a longer period of time, to undermine the prestige and power of the United Nations than Israel. It ignored dozens of resolutions which it found alien or unfair.

True, the United Nations is too bureaucratic, its officials too well paid, but if it is too weak its largely due to Israel and the United States. By far the biggest contributor to the UN budget, the US, tries too often to use it for its own short sighted interests and to protect Israel against condemnation.

Which were the “sanctified” borders, or “made holy” as the meaning of the word is described in my dictionary?

Which borders did Friedman have in mind? The borders decided by the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine and voted on at the UN in November 1947, or the much expanded borders after the wars of 1948? Or perhaps the “rubber band” frontiers that kept expanding since the war of 1967 and were still being stretched in 2015?

Wishing to know more, I reached for The Zionist Connection, by Alfred Lilienthal, which I had not consulted for much too long. This 1,000-page study remained the most scholarly work on the subject of the Israel, Palestine and US triangle until the publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, nearly 30 years later.

As described by Lilienthal, a religious American Jew and scholar, there was nothing “holy” about the blackmail and pressure which quite a few delegates at the UN were subjected to before the crucial vote on Palestine.

I will permit myself to quote a few fairly long passages form Mr. Lilienthal’s painstakingly researched book:

“When partition prospects looked particularly grim,” wrote Lilienthal, “Bernard Baruch was prevailed upon to talk to the French, who could not afford to lose interim Marshall Plan aid. Through former ambassador, William Bullitt, the advisor to Presidents passed a message in similar vein to the Chinese Ambassador in Washington. Other important Americans ‘talked’ to countries such as Haiti, the Philippines, Paraguay and Luxemburg, all dependent on the US.

“Drew Pearson, an old friend of the Zionists, told in his “Merry-Go-Round” column how Adolph Berle, legal advisor to the Haitian government, ‘talked’ on the phone to Haiti’s President, and how Harvey Firestone, owner of the vast rubber plantations in Liberia, ‘talked’ with the government.

“In discussing the partition vote at the Cabinet luncheon on December 1, 1947, Undersecretary Robert Lovell said that ‘never in his life had he been subjected to as much pressure as he had in three days beginning Thursday morning and ending Saturday night.9’

“Bribes as well as threats had been used. One Latin American delegate had changed his vote to support the partition in return for $75,000 in cash and another, a Costa Rican, declined $45,000 bribe but eventually voted for the partition in accordance with orders from his Government.

“And no pressure was sadder, or more cynical, than that put on the Philippines. War hero and head of the delegation, General Carlos Romulo, left the US for Manila shortly after delivering a fiery speech against partition on the floor of the General Assembly. Ambassador Elizalde had spoken by telephone to President Manuel Roxas and told him of the many pressures to which Romulo and the delegation had been subject. The Ambassador’s own view was that although partition was not a wise move, the US was determined to see it happen and it would be foolish to vote against a policy so ardently desired by the US Administration, a time when seven bills were pending in the US Congress in which the islands had a tremendous stake.

“A joint telegram from twenty six pro-Zionist US Senators, drafted by New York’s Robert F. Wagner10, was particularly important in changing the Philippine vote. The senatorial telegram was sent a few days before the decisive ballot to twelve other UN delegations, changed four votes to yes and seven votes form nay to abstention. Only Greece, despite pressures from prominent Greek-American businessmen, including film mogul Spyros Skouras, largely because of her traditional friendship with Egypt, risked antagonizing the US Senate and stuck to no.”

In the summer of 1948 my father was named ambassador to Holland, a position in which he would be unlikely to cause any trouble and could concentrate on writing, this time about our internationally famous heroes, including General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the military engineer who fortified Saratoga before the crucial battle of the American Revolution.

The Hague was great fun, to say the least. In fact, for me, with my father’s diplomatic privileges, it was another paradise, a short bicycle ride from the wide beaches of Scheveningen. But it all ended tragically when my father, who had learned to drive (in a manner of speaking) a year earlier, was killed rushing through Germany in a Citroën, on the way to his wedding in Poland. His bride to be was Julia Hartwig, a stunning young lady whom he met in Paris. She went to become a leading Polish poet and in 2015 is still with us, a much cherished friend.

Given no choice, at the age of 14, I was sent back to Poland, this time to an orphanage where, unlike Oliver Twist, one did not ask for more. Elbows were far more effective. But most days there were no second helpings of potatoes and noodles. I didn’t take to Communist Poland and it didn’t take to me.

Miraculously, just when the Polish People’s Army was eager to grab and train me to defend our “socialist fatherland” against imminent invasion by NATO armies, I was smuggled out of the country by group of brilliant and reckless Cambridge students. Mingling with the communist delegates to the International Youth Festival held in Warsaw in August 1955, they came to see for themselves what our socialist paradise was really like. And so Bridget Haines of Newnham College became my girlfriend and persuaded a group of fellow Cambridge students to help smuggle me out of Poland. On August 17, 1955, after five years and two months, at the age of 19, I was free again.

At that point I had absolutely no idea that my father had lots of friends and admirers in the west. Totally cut off from the outside world, none of us knew about my father’s laudatory obituaries which appeared in The Times, the Manchester Guardian and other western newspapers.

Hired immediately by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Munich, which needed “fresh blood,” I was convinced that the totally unexpected honors, parties and perks that came my way were due exclusively to my own unique brains and charm, as well as the unbelievably lucky dash through our double Iron Curtain. I am ashamed to say that it took me years to realize how many doors were open to me on both sides of the Atlantic and how many friends I managed to make largely thanks to my father’s name. The legendary “self-made man,” regularly hailed as an American hero is most often a person with a short memory. If a “self-made man” ever existed, I am certainly not one.

2Asylum On The Hill?(Madmen, robots or just traitors?)

In the early 1950s, when there was hardly a trace of a doubt in our minds that the communist planet with Generalissimo Joseph Stalin at its helm would last forever, I found myself occasionally at mass rallies in Poland where tens of thousands of people, herded into a stadiums for sporting or brainwashing occasions, usually both, were prompted over the loudspeakers to chant “Stalin, Stalin, Stalin…!” And they did, of course, very loudly.

After a while this would change to “Stalin niech żyje, Stalin niech żyje,” which meant “Stalin, let him live’’, presumably for eternity.

I and some of my friends chanted something else. “Stalin niech zgnije, Stalin niech zgnije,” which meant “Stalin, let him rot.”

We knew only too well what our fate would be if someone overheard and denounced us. But with 50,000 chanting it was safe to assume that no one would notice our childish and hopeless protest.

As the crowd kept chanting I began to wonder sometimes who was bonkers, I or the 50,000 faces around me. The madness of crowds, can be both infectious and bewitching, especially in a tightly controlled, totally isolated from the outside world, such as today’s North Korea. A similar, creeping process of like-mindedness can be observed today in a country which is not isolated at all and enjoys an unusually free press, Israel.

In these days that seem so far away that they appear almost unreal today, we were in effect a captive herd doing as told.

I recalled these grim years when I first learned, thanks to Richard Cohen of the International New York Times (INYT), that Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu received 29 standing ovations when, for a historic second time, he addressed a joint meeting of the US Congress. Hundreds of top United States politicians, without exception, rose to their feet 29 times to cheer “Bibi” as he claimed that Israel’s borders were indefensible.

“Israel will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967.”

He did not use more precise words for his plans, conquest and colonization, but that’s what he meant as he smugly hinted at America’s support for Israel’s constantly expanding frontiers.

“As President Obama said, the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”

The standing ovations greeting his claim that Israel cannot exist in its present borders, that it needs new ones which will provide it with more security, constituted a truly unique show of support for Netanyahu’s colonial plans, as well as a historic invitation for others, like Vladimir Putin, holding his horses in the wings, to follow Israel’s example. Cheering Netanyahu, the politicians undermined the unbelievably costly, decades-long American effort to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, where most of its oil came from. Not one of Bibi’s listeners, or commentators, cared to note that his arguments were infantile and poisonous at the same time. Not a single legislator in the chamber dared to remain seated or to protest by leaving. In the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles every country on earth can claim that its borders are indefensible. But does that allow it to take by force other people’s lands and properties, kill their owners or turn them into refugees? Stalin himself could have claimed, quite rightly, that the borders of the late Soviet Union, 50 thousand kilometers long, running through frozen oceans, 5,000 meter mountains, everlasting snows and scorching deserts, could not be effectively defended. But even he lacked the chutzpah to publicly claim that it gave him every right to expand by stealing choice chunks of Alaska, Afghanistan, China, or Iran. Yet such arguments coming from Netanyahu were accepted and cheered by the Congressmen and Senators, instead of being derisively booed.