Chapter Eight
ZIONIST COLONIZATION EFFORTS IN PALESTINE
As early Zionists in the U.S. and elsewhere pushed for the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists in
Palestine simultaneously tried to clear the land of Muslim and Christian inhabitants and replace them
with Jewish immigrants.
This was a tall order, as Muslims and Christians accounted for more than 95 percent of the
population of Palestine.[172] Zionists planned to try first to buy up the land until the previous
inhabitants had emigrated; failing this, they would use violence to force them out. This dual strategy
was discussed in various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli
historians.[173]
As this colonial project grew, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of
violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land.
When the buyout effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a
number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British. Terrorist and future
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the
Middle East and to the world at large.[174]
By the eve of the creation of Israel, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the
Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent[175] and land ownership from 1 percent to
approximately 6-7 percent.[176]
This was in 1947, when the British at last announced that they would end their control of
Palestine. Britain turned the territory’s fate over to the United Nations.
Since a founding principle of the UN was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have
expected to the UN to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own
independent country.[177]
Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution to give them a disproportionate 55
percent of Palestine.[178][179] (While they rarely announced this publicly, their plan, stated in
journal entries and letters, was to later take the rest of Palestine.[180])
U.S. Officials oppose creation of Israel
The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary
to both fundamental American principles and U.S. interests.
For example, the director of the State Department‘s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs
consistently recommended against supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. The director, named Loy
Henderson, warned that the creation of such a state would go against locals’ wishes, imperil U.S.
interests and violate democratic principles.
Henderson emphasized that the U.S. would lose moral standing in the world if it supported
Zionism:
“At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled
by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to
be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the
period of the [second world] war.”[181]
When Zionists pushed the partition plan in the UN, Henderson recommended strongly against
supporting their proposal, saying that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and
was “not based on any principle.” He warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine
problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future…”
Henderson elaborated further on how plans to partition Palestine would violate American and UN
principles:
“...[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the
[UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These
proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They
recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to
discriminate on grounds of religion and race…”[182]
Zionists attacked Henderson virulently, calling him “anti-Semitic,” demanding his resignation, and
threatening his family. They pressured the State Department to transfer him elsewhere; one analyst
describes this as “the historic game of musical chairs” in which officials who recommended Middle
East policies “consistent with the nation’s interests” were moved on.[183]
In 1948 Truman sent Henderson to the slopes of the Himalayas, as Ambassador to Nepal (then
officially under India).[184] (In recent years, at times virtually every State Department country desk
has been directed by a Zionist.)[185]
But Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were
not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the
Foreign Service or of the [State] Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near
Eastern problems.”[186]
He wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.
In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger
both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[187]
Ambassador Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a
critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for
Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on U.S. national interests.
“I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my
experience had ended,” wrote Grady. “I have headed a number of government missions but in no
other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty…. [I]n the United States, since there is no political
force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.”[188]
Grady concluded that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the
Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the soviets.”[189]
Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson‘s biographer
writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another author, John
Mulhall, records Acheson‘s warning of the danger for U.S. interests:
“...to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants
would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western
interests in the Near East.”[190]
The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported in late 1947, “A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision
were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and
Middle East” to the point that “United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which
could be maintained by military force.”[191]
The Joint Chiefs issued at least sixteen papers on the Palestine issue following World War II.
They were particularly concerned that the Zionist goal was to involve the U.S.
One 1948 paper predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a
continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish
objectives.”[192]
The CIA stated that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and
“the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”[193]
The head of the State Department‘s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned
against the partition plan on moral grounds:
“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the
basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination
which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United
Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations
determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and
violation of UN‘s own charter.” [194]
Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate
prediction.
An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through
armed aggression masked as defense:
“...the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that
they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN.… In the event of
such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their
state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own
armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”[195]
And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw one last outcome of the “partition“ plan:
that no Arab state would actually ever come to be in Palestine.[196]
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