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Is the US an ally of Israel?
A chronological look at the evidence

Historical and Investigative Research -- by Francisco Gil-White
[ this piece updated regularly ]
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/hirally.htm
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Introduction

Around the world, there is a striking convergence of opinion concerning the relationship between the US and Israel.

Supporters of the PLO - synonymous with "supporters of a Palestinian state", because the PLO will run any such state - are convinced that the US is an ally of Israel. Some believe the US employs Israel in order to expand the American empire, and others - echoing the claims of that infamous forgery, "The Protocols of Zion" - believe that history's greatest superpower, the US, is actually the pawn of tiny Israel. Either way, they are agreed that the US and Israel are supposedly 'a team.'

Supporters of Israel naturally disagree with supporters of the PLO about most things but not on this point, as they also believe that the US is a friend of Israel - perhaps its only real friend. Whereas those who are pro-PLO are especially infuriated by perceived US support for Israel, those who are pro-Israel are deliriously grateful for the same (especially so in the case of Zionist Jews).

Given that across the spectrum of those politically mobilized on this issue, from one pole to the other, everybody appears to have the same opinion on this, casual observers are naturally drawn into agreement as well, creating a crushing consensus all over the world: the US is an ally of Israel.

But is it true?

Let us first ask: what is an ally? My dictionary defines 'ally' as "one who is associated with another as helper."

Everybody knows that the US says it supports Israel. But actions speak louder than words. What is the evidence of US actions? In this piece I provide a chronological list of relevant US policies over the years.

I am hoping that this piece will begin a debate. It is not finished, and the research relevant to its claims is ongoing. I shall be updating the piece as I gather more data. But I have already assembled quite a lot, below, and what I have is certainly sufficient to challenge the common view. I believe, in fact, that what I have presented below is already sufficient to refute the common view many times over, and the compilation of these documented facts came as a big eye-opener. Hopefully this documentation will begin a serious debate on this question, rather than an automatic assumption based on official claims of US support for Israel - which claims are cheaply, and therefore easily, made.

It is important to remember that what is examined here is the behavior of the US foreign policy Establishment, which is secretive. The evidence therefore speaks to what is, and has been, the true position of the US ruling elite with regard to Israel and the Jewish people. It does not speak to the position of the American people, many of whom, I believe, will be outraged to find that, as I document below, the US specializes in attacking Israel. In fact the section on 1947-48 contains dramatic evidence that ordinary Americans tend not to favor the anti-Jewish policies of the US ruling elite.

The chronology already goes up to the year 2005, but I have yet to complete the research on some of the missing years in between.

[NOTE: In this document, when you see a red footnote this means that, in addition to giving the source and/or a link, there is extra material (sometimes relatively lengthy) that is worth reading and which provides additional context and clarification. Many of my sources are available on the web and I have provided the hyperlinks in the footnotes (whether red or not) so that readers may easily examine them.]

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Contents
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The 1930's -  Negative - The US Establishment helped sponsor the rise of the German Nazi movement.

1939-1945  -  Negative - This year's material is divided into the following sections:

Introduction

1. The general policy of the Allies towards the plight
of the Jews

2. No US visas for European Jews trying to escape the Nazi slaughter

3. The allies refused to sabotage Hitler's Final Solution by military means

1945 - Negative - After 1945, the US created US Intelligence by recruiting tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals.

1947-48 - Mixed to Negative - Forced by external circumstances, the US government gave lukewarm support to the creation of the State of Israel. But then it reversed itself and implemented policies designed to destroy Israel.

1949-1953 - Negative - In Israel's hour of supreme need, the US allied with Israel's mortal enemies.

1955 - Mixed - The US forces Israel to withdraw from Sinai, but makes some concessions to the Israelis.

1955-1965 - Positive (in one regard only) - Israel indirectly gets some US weapons.

1958 - Negative - Israel assists US military intervention in the Middle East; when this places Israel in danger, the US does...nothing.

1964 - Mixed - The US abandoned its previous official policy of trying to get Israel to relinquish the territories won in the War of Independence. Why had it been trying to do this?

1964-1967 - Negative - Although Israel suffered terrorist attacks from its Arab neighbors during these years, when they staged a full-scale military provocation, the US refused to help.

1967 - Negative - After the Six-Day War, the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish the territory gained, even though it knew it was indispensable to Israeli defense.

1967-70 - Negative - The Arabs attack the Israelis. The US response is to try and remove the Israelis from territory they need for their defense.

1970 - Positive - Washington temporarily abandons the diplomatic effort to make Israel withdraw from the territories.

1973 - Positive - The US assisted Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

1973-1975 - Negative - The US supported the election of a pro-PLO Nazi war criminal to the post of UN Secretary General.

1975 - Negative - The US reached an agreement with Israel not to have contacts with the PLO. The US immediately violated the agreement.

1977 - Negative - Jimmy Carter worked hard to give the terrorist PLO the dignity of a 'government in exile,' and then he teamed up with the Soviets to try and saddle Israel with a PLO terrorist state next door.

1978 - Negative - When Israel tried to defend itself from the PLO terrorists, the US forced Israel to stand back.

1979 - Negative - Jimmy Carter began large-scale US sponsorship of antisemitic Islamist terrorists, especially in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

1981 - Negative - The US pushed for a PLO state in the West Bank against Israeli objections.

1982-1983 - Negative - The US military rushed into Lebanon to protect the PLO from the Israelis.

1985 - Negative - 1985 includes more material than other years, so we have divided it into subsections.

1. Shimon Peres acted as a US agent, against Israeli interests.

2. Bettino Craxi and Giulio Andreotti (respectively, the Italian prime minister and foreign minister) committed political suicide for the sake of pushing the PLO. The US was behind them.

3. Ronald Reagan denied the Holocaust

4. Who was in charge of US covert operations in 1985?

1987-1988 - Negative - The 'First Intifada' was a US-PLO strategy used to represent the Arabs in West Bank and Gaza as supposedly oppressed 'underdogs.'

1989 - Negative - With Dick Cheney, the US began supporting a PLO state in the open as the 'only solution' to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

1991 - Negative - Bush Sr.'s administration forced Israel to participate in the Oslo process, which brought the PLO into the West Bank and Gaza.

1994 - Negative - Yasser Arafat was given a Nobel Peace Prize, and the CIA trained the PLO, even though Arafat's henchmen were saying in public, this very year, that they would use their training to oppress Arabs and kill Jews.

1996-1997 - Negative - The United States exerted such strong pressure on the Netanyahu government (including threats) that, even though Netanyahu had been elected on an anti-Oslo platform, he had the necessary cover to betray the Israeli public that had elected him.

2005 - Negative - Mahmoud Abbas, who will soon have total control over Gaza, is the one who invented the strategy of talking 'peace' the better to slaughter Israelis. The US ruling elite loves Mahmoud Abbas.

(I will soon post documentation for the missing years in between.)

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The 1930's [ negative ]

The US Establishment helped sponsor the rise of the German Nazi movement.
____________________________________________________________

The larger American Establishment cooperated extensively with the Nazi death machine. One particularly glaring example is the case of IBM, which knowingly helped automate the entire Nazi process of extermination.[1] Much of the money to finance the rise of the Nazi party came from wealthy Americans (including the current US president’s grandfather and great grandfather (Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker).[1a] Many influential Americans, both inside and outside of government, had Nazi sympathies. It is not an exaggeration to call Henry Ford an architect of the Holocaust, for example.[1b]

The following is an excerpt from the summary to the following book:

Black, E. 2003. War against the weak: Eugenics and America's campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/

From the Summary: In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior...

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins...

For a history of the American eugenics movement and how it went about creating "intelligence testing" (so-called "IQ research") in order to, with frauds, allege that certain people were genetically inferior, the better to exterminate them, read: Resurrecting Racism: The Modern Attack on Black People Using Phony Science, by Francisco Gil-White; Historical and Investigative Research (2004).
http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrcontents.htm

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1939-1945 [ negative ]

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James Carroll, who has written a history of Western antisemitism, comments,

"As late as 1938, in a furious public rebuttal by Hitler to the world leaders who had denounced the Kristallnacht pogroms, his decidedly unfinal solution to the Jewish problem was still 'Jews out!,' not 'Jews dead!' His proposal, at that point, was the moral and political equivalent of [Medieval Spain's] Queen Isabella's, the expulsion of all Jews from the lands controlled by the Reich. Jews were offered immediate exit visas -- but exit to where? The same world leaders, notably Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had denounced the anti-Jewish violence of the Nazis declined to receive Jews as refugees... Crucial to [the Final Solution] building to a point of no return was Hitler's discovery (late) of the political indifference of the democracies to the fate of the Jews..."[2]

It is certainly amazing that the US should not have received as refugees the very people whose extermination the US denounced in public. But what is most amazing is that, even though the above reads as an indictment of the US and Britain, in fact Carroll's statement covers up what really happened (perhaps unwittingly). The western democracies were not guilty of "political indifference…to the fate of the Jews," as Carroll claims. On the contrary, they were quite interested: the Allied governments eagerly cooperated with the Final Solution.

1. The general policy of the Allies towards the plight
of the Jews
___________

In a documented summary of Allied behavior toward the Jews in WWII, Kenneth Levin writes,

"State Department officials throughout this period typically held strong anti-immigration sentiments and seem to have been especially determined to block the immigration of Jews into the United States. Policies adopted by State regarding issuance of visas were in fact much more restrictive than even the strict immigration laws of the period. Thus, the number of visas issued to Jews during the war, including during the years when the Nazis' genocide program was fully known, was barely 10 percent of those potentially available to European Jews under the immigration quota legislation then in effect."[2a]

Levin explains that the British had an identical policy.

"The lengths to which the British Foreign Office went to prevent the rescue of Jews is indicated by an episode involving Japan. In 1940, the Japanese vice consul in Kovno, Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, issued several thousand visas to Jews desperate to escape Europe. Hillel Levine, a professor of sociology and religion at Boston University who was working on a book about Sugihara, did research in the archives of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo to investigate to what extent the Japanese government was aware of Sugihara's efforts to save Jews. He not only discovered documents there charting Sugihara's activities but also complaints from the British Foreign Office (this is, of course, before Britain and Japan were at war) protesting Sugihara's visas and warning that the rescued Jews would become a burden on Japan.

This policy of discouraging and obstructing rescue by other parties, and, of course, the Foreign Office's own eschewing of any rescue effort, persisted even after the Allies learned of the Nazis' extermination program."[2b]

This was not just a British policy, but American as well. In 1941, after "agents of the Rumanian regime, together with German death squads, had already slaughtered 200,000 of the approximately 800,000 Jews within Rumania's borders," the Rumanians apparently began having second thoughts about exterminating all of the Jews.

"The Turkish ambassador in Budapest then proposed to the American ambassador a plan for the orderly transport of 300,000 Rumanian Jews through Turkey to Palestine and urged the Americans to push the plan with the British. But the State Department objected to the plan and refused to present it to the British."[2c]

One of the excuses offered up by the Allies was that there wasn't enough shipping. It was bogus.

"...much neutral shipping was readily available and was, indeed, employed by the Allies throughout the war to rescue many thousand non-Jews -- from Greece and Yugoslavia, for example -- and transport them to safe havens. In addition, over 400,000 German prisoners of war were transported to the United States between 1942 and 1945."[2d]

In other words, the safety of genocidal Nazi soldiers was much more important to the Allies than the safety of their innocent Jewish victims. It is difficult to distinguish the attitude of the Allied ruling elites toward the Jews from that of the Nazi Third Reich.

"...in the first months of 1943 information reached the West from Rumania that, of 130,000 Jews earlier deported to the Transnistria region, 70,000 remained alive, although destitute and starving, and that Rumania, presumably for a price, was prepared to release these 70,000 to the Allies and even provide ships to transport them to Palestine or some other Allied territory. The State Department dismissed the offer out of hand, refusing to explore the proposal. It also refused to consider undertaking negotiations that may have led the Rumanians to extend protection for a time to the Transnistrian Jews even if State had no intention of supporting a rescue.

These patterns of obstruction to intervention continued to characterize the State Department's answer to the Nazi genocide throughout the war. It routinely deferred responses to plans for rescue, dismissed plans out of hand as impractical, and invoked bogus impediments to rescue, such as the supposed shipping problem... Another tack was State's persistent withholding of visas from Jews who had reached neutral countries and whose evacuation would have made those countries more amenable to admitting additional refugees. The State Department even sought to block broadcast of threats to bring to justice the perpetrators of the genocide, as well as broadcast of appeals for the people in occupied Europe to aid the Jews."[2e]

It has been common to blame the State Department and excuse Roosevelt. An absurdity: the State Department was composed of Roosevelt's employees. And "Some have argued that Roosevelt was too busy conducting the war to pay much attention to the Nazi genocide." Another absurdity.[2e] But to lay such issues to rest, let us consider in more detail the question of the "withholding of visas from Jews," for this policy had Roosevelt's explicit authority, so he paid attention to it.

2. The visa policy of the United States was designed to trap Jews in Europe, where Hitler would find them
____________________________________________

[My sources in this section come from a PBS documentation of the behavior of the United States toward the plight of the Jews in WWII with the title, America and the Holocaust.]

During the war,

"the US…erected a 'paper wall,' a bureaucratic maze that prevented all but a few Jewish refugees from entering the country. It was not until 1944, that a small band of Treasury Department employees forced the government to respond."[3]

In a memo by Randolph Paul for the Foreign Funds Control Unit of the Treasury Department (dated January 13, 1944), entitled Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews, he wrote:

"Frankly, Breckinridge Long, in my humble opinion, is least sympathetic to refugees in all the State Department. I attribute to him the tragic bottleneck in the granting of visas."[4]

Breckinridge Long was Roosevelt's Assistant Secretary of State. In 1943, he gave a statement before the US House of Representatives on the refugee question, in which Long expressed his supposed concern for the Jews, and boasted that the US had admitted 580,000 refugees. Congressman Emanuel Celler rebuked and refuted Long in the House of Representatives on December 20, 1943, and Randolph Paul quotes his remarks in the above-mentioned memo:

"***In the first place these 580,000 refugees were in the main ordinary quota immigrants coming in from all countries. The majority were not Jews. His [Long's] statement drips with sympathy for the persecuted Jews, but the tears he sheds are crocodile. I would like to ask him how many Jews were admitted during the last 3 years in comparison with the number seeking entrance to preserve life and dignity. *** One gets the impression from Long's statement that the United States has gone out of its way to help refugees fleeing death at the hands of the Nazis. I deny this. On the contrary, the State Department has turned its back on the time-honored principle of granting havens to refugees. The tempest-tossed get little comfort from men like Breckinridge Long. *** Long says that the door to the oppressed is open but that it 'has been carefully screened.' What he should have said is 'barlocked and bolted.' By the act of 1924, we are permitted to admit approximately 150,000 immigrants each year. During the last fiscal year only 23,725 came as immigrants. Of these only 4,705 were Jews fleeing Nazi persecution."[4]

In fact, as stated by Randolph Paul in the same memo, "According to Earl G. Harrison, Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, not since 1862 have there been fewer aliens entering the country." This, at a time when immigration to the US was the only way for so many Jews to escape a gruesome death.

But Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long's strategy was much worse than merely denying visas. Breckinridge Long explained to State Department officials, in a memo dated 26 June 1940, exactly how the visas would be effectively denied to the Jews trying to escape slaughter:

"We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas."[5]

It is important to see that a strategy of "postpone and postpone and postpone" is not at all the same as denying visas. As Emmanuel Celler complained: "It takes months and months to grant the visas and then it usually applies to a corpse." In other words, many Jews who were told repeatedly that they would get a visa, the issuance of which kept getting postponed, did not seek a safe haven elsewhere, and as a result were overtaken by Hitler's men. Long's strategy was therefore designed not merely to keep Jews out of the US, but to assist Adolph Hitler's Final Solution by corralling as many Jews as possible where Hitler could find them.

Although Randolph Paul accused, "I attribute to [Breckinridge Long] the tragic bottleneck in the granting of visas," his next sentences reveal that this was not a maverick policy of Long's, but in fact had the most widespread support in the Roosevelt administration:

"The Interdepartmental Review Committees which review the applications for visas are composed of one official, respectively, from each of the following Departments: War, Navy, F.B.I. State, and Immigration. That committee has been glacier-like in its slowness and coldbloodedness."

Nor were these various departments and agencies acting without the knowledge of President Roosevelt. Some time after Breckinridge Long's memo of June 1940, Margaret E. Jones, an American Quaker trying to help European Jews emigrate to the US, wrote to Clarence E. Pickett, a leader in the Quaker community,[6] telling him of her conversations with various US consular officials in Europe about the impact of this memo. As you will see from the quote below, Ms. Jones was under the impression that the US Congress wanted to stop immigration to the US completely and hypothesized that the State Department was acting in good faith, such that the new draconian restrictions on immigration were meant to mollify Congress and thus prevent it from prohibiting any immigration to the US. The consular officials in Europe disabused her of this notion and explained to her that it was not Congress but president Roosevelt himself who did not want "non-Aryans" entering the country. Here is an excerpt from Margaret Jones letter:

"Last July, en route from Geneva back to the Vienna Center, I stopped in Zurich and had an interview with Mr. Strom, at the U.S. Consulate. He told me of  recent orders from Washington [the Breckinridge Long memo] which would severely limit the number of visas ordinarily issued month by month from the various Consulates… Later in Vienna, Mr. Hohenthal told me too about the new stringent regulations, and was also obviously interested when I raised the same question with him. About the middle of August, the Consulate…telephoned to say [that] Mr. Warren, Mr. Morris and Mr. Hohenthal and I [talk] that afternoon about the new regulations concerning emigration. Mr. Warren began by saying, 'Miss Jones, you Quakers will be doing a straight relief job for the non-Aryans here from now on.' I said, 'No more non Aryans to go to the U.S.?' Warren replied- 'Not just non-Aryans - but no more aliens.' Then I asked him… was this an attempt to forestall Congress and prevent an out and out closing of immigration by making so severe a cut that the State Dept. could assure Congress they had the situation in hand. Mr. Warren said not Congress, but the President just did not want any more aliens coming to the U.S. and would like to have it closed especially for aliens coming from Germany."[7] (my emphasis)

We must take note not only of the fact that State Department officials appeared quite aware of all this being president Roosevelt's initiative, but that these same officials matter-of-factly used Hitler's racist language in reference to Jews ("non-Aryans"), and also that there was a special concern to prevent immigration from Germany (i.e. specifically to prevent Jews fleeing slaughter).

Additional evidence that Roosevelt was directly behind all this comes from Breckinridge Long himself, who made the following entry in his diary, dated 3 October 1940 (four months after his "postpone, postpone, postpone" memo):

"So when I saw him [FDR] this morning the whole subject of immigration, visas, safety of the United States, procedures to be followed; and all that sort of thing was on the table. I found that he was 100% in accord with my ideas… The President expressed himself as in entire accord with the policy which would exclude persons about whom there was any suspicion that they would be inimical to the welfare of the United States no matter who had vouchsafed for them and irrespective of their financial or other standing. I left him with the satisfactory thought that he was wholeheartedly in support of the policy which would resolve in favor of the United States any doubts about admissibility of any individual."[8]

Roosevelt had only one meeting with American Jewish leaders about the Holocaust. It was in 1942 and it lasted only 29 minutes, 23 of which were spent by the president lecturing his Jewish guests on various matters, including how unfair it was that Jews supposedly had more rights than Muslims in some parts of North Africa! Roosevelt explained that he knew about Hitler's mass killings, but he promised to do nothing for the Jews of Europe beyond issuing a statement.[9]

Another event also makes clear how Roosevelt felt about Hitler's Final Solution:

"Four months after the State Department confirmed the dimensions of the Holocaust, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden met in Washington with President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. At this meeting, Eden expressed his fear that Hitler might actually accept an offer from the Allies to move Jews out of areas under German control. No one present objected to Eden's statement."[10]

3. The allies refused to sabotage the Final Solution
by military means
________________

[My sources in this section come from a PBS documentation of the behavior of the United States toward the plight of the Jews in WWII with the title, America and the Holocaust.]

It would not have been difficult to bomb the concentration camps, and even less difficult to bomb the train tracks leading there. Train tracks, after all, stretch for hundreds of kilometers and simply cannot be everywhere protected. But the German trains ran on time, and delivered their human cargo to the camps without interruptions, because the Allies chose never to interfere with Hitler's genocide of the Jewish people.

That, in itself, is amazing. But what is truly spectacular is that the US refused to do this even in 1944, when

1)  it was well known that Hitler was about to murder the Jews of Hungary (400,000) at Auschwitz (to a close approximation, they were all murdered);

2)  many were begging the Roosevelt administration to bomb the camp and/or the train tracks.

Here is the story:

"On April 7, 1944, two Slovakian Jews escaped from Auschwitz. By the end of the month they had reached the Jewish underground in Slovakia, where they gave a detailed account of the mass murder operations at the camp. The two men also warned that preparations were underway to murder the Jews of Hungary. Their report initiated a series of requests that the U.S. bomb the crematoria at Auschwitz and key rail links that would be used to transport Hungarian Jews to Poland."[11]

On June 12 1944, the Agudas Israel World Organization received a cable from Switzerland describing the situation of the Hungarian Jews and calling for bombing the deportation railways.[12]

Jacob Rosenheim, from the Agudas Israel World Organization in New York, sent a letter to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, dated June 18, 1944, asking that deportation rail lines be bombed.[13] You may ask, why to Morgenthau at Treasury? Because, as we saw earlier, it is apparently only a handful of officers at the Treasury Department who were opposed to the Final Solution and considered it immoral that the US was cooperating with it.

On June 26, 1944, Thomas Handy, Assistant Chief of Staff at the War Department, sent a memo to the Director of the Civil Affairs Division, conveying the Operations Division's conclusion that bombing the deportation railways was 'impracticable.' This was

"In line with [the War Department's] undeclared policy not to aid in the rescue of refugees, the War Department routinely turned down requests to bomb deportation railways. No studies were ever conducted to check the feasibility of such bombing raids."[14]

No studies. In other words, requests to bomb the deportation railways were just rejected out of hand.

On June 29, 1944, an internal memo in the War Refugee Board from Benjamin Akzin to Lawrence S. Lesser urged the bombing of Auschwitz and Birkenau.[15] And on August 9 The World Jewish Congress in New York asked the War Department to bomb the crematoria at Auschwitz. The War Department turned down the request (August 14, 1944).[16]

On November 18, 1944, John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, explained to John W. Pehle, the Director of the War Refugee Board, that the War Department could not authorize the bombing of Auschwitz, the reason supposedly being,

"that the raid would divert air support from the war effort. The Department also claimed that the camp was beyond the maximum range of bombers located in Britain, France or Italy. [But] These assertions were false: In July of 1944, the Allies began a series of air raids on Germany's synthetic-oil industry which was based in Upper Silesia near Auschwitz. On August 20, 127 Flying Fortresses dropped thousands of pounds of high explosives on the factory areas of Auschwitz which were less than five miles from the gas chambers. Three weeks later, the U.S. targeted those same sites. This time two bombs accidentally fell near the killing installations and one actually damaged a rail line leading to the gas chambers."[17]

In other words, only one Allied bomb affected Hitler's Final Solution, and this bomb did so by accident.

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1945 [ negative ]

After 1945, the US created US Intelligence by recruiting tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals.
____________________________________________________________

In his history of Western antisemitism, James Carroll writes in passing:

"Croation clergy in Rome were part of the infamous ‘Rat Line’ through which numerous Nazi war criminals, with the collusion of the U.S. Army, escaped to Latin America.”[18]

Carroll was writing in 2001, and yet, already in 1988 it had been shown that the secret US protection for Nazi war criminals had been much more extensive than Carroll lets on. In 1988, the Washington Post wrote:

“It is no longer necessary -- or possible -- to deny the fact: the U.S. government systematically and deliberately recruited active Nazis by the thousands, rescued them, hired them and relied upon them to serve American interests and purposes in postwar Europe.”[18c]

The Washington Post was reviewing “the archival sleuthing of [historian] Christopher Simpson,” which involved poring over many “documents... declassified under the Freedom of Information Act”:

Simpson, Christopher (1988) Blowback: America’s recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Simpson shows that the US absorbed in secret almost the entire Nazi war criminal organization (tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, not "thousands"), and out of this formed the CIA, which then used its Nazi assets all over the world to destroy progressive movements and install right-wing repressive autocrats, and also to put Nazis back in power in various European countries under the cover that they were "Christian Democrats."

So what we learn is that it is, after all, possible "to deny the fact," because Carroll pretended later, in 2001, that this hadn't happened, and that the US military had merely helped escape some Nazi war criminals to Latin America.

To learn more about this, consult the following articles:
 

Though Germany may have lost the war, the Nazis, and their ideology, certainly appear to have done quite well. In context, this has certain implications for our interpretation of the twentieth century. Consider:

1)  The rise of Nazi ideology was initially sponsored from the US (see 1930's section)

2)  Its most important ideological component - the mobilization of antisemitic hatred and the creation of an infrastructure to exterminate the Jewish people - was eagerly supported by the US (see 1930's section and 1939-45 section);

3)  At the conclusion of WWII, Nazi war criminals were either used in place where they were, or given new identities and brought to the US by the thousands (above).

I note that even after the war there were restrictions on Jewish immigration to the US. By contrast, and at the same time, the US was pulling all the stops to get their murderers into the country, as documented by Christopher Simpson (see above).

From the perspective of these horrifying facts, it is obvious that US involvement in the World War had nothing to do with a principled opposition to Nazi ideology.

What was WWII really about? I shall not insist on one particular interpretation, but the following well-documented facts seem relevant.

First, it seems relevant that the eugenic US Establishment nurtured the German Nazis, and that the eugenicists were backed to the hilt by the US government, as Edwin Black documents in detail in War Against the Weak (see 1930's section).

One also has to consider that Winston Churchill had a very cordial meeting with the millionaire Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was Adolf Hitler's financier and spokesman, in 1932, on the eve of Hitler's coming to power. In this connection, it also appears relevant that just a few years earlier, in 1929, Churchill had become William Randolph Hearst's employee. Hearst happens to have been an intimate friend of the above-mentioned Putzi Hanfstaengl, and was called by his contemporaries “the most influential American fascist…the keystone of American fascism.”[18a]

It seems relevant also that Churchill was 1) a cheerleader for fascism who called Benito Mussolini "the greatest lawgiver among living men" in 1933, as Hitler was taking power, 2) an enthusiast of the same eugenics movement that produced German Nazism; 3) an advocate of mass extermination of non-whites; 4) a proponent of the idea that the countries of Europe should go to war in order to get rid of useless riffraff; and 5) a class warrior who loathed the lower classes and thought a good way to end a strike was to shoot the strikers dead.[18a]

Beyond that, it seems significant also that the Western Allies handed all of Western Europe to Hitler practically without firing a bullet. Then Hitler was nice enough to let the great majority of Allied soldiers evacuate from Dunkirk even though he could have massacred them. The Allies left their armament for Hitler on the beach.[18b]

There is also the fact that the Nazi occupation of Western Europe was for most people relatively gentle. The Jews in Western Europe were certainly hunted down and taken to the camps, and there was no pity for the few resistance fighters. But aside from that Western Europe was mostly calm and its cities survived for the most part untouched. By dramatic contrast, in Eastern Europe, where the overwhelming majority of the Jews lived, and where most of the politicized workers also lived, the Nazis carried out one unbelievable slaughter after another. During this time the policy of the Allies was one of studied non-interference with the mass killings, and an energetic visa policy designed to trap as many Jews as possible in Europe (see section 1939-45).

The Nazis were not able to reach Moscow and were trapped by the Russian winter. It is only when the victorious Soviets were clearly headed for the Atlantic that the Allies invaded Europe. By then, the European Jewish population had been exterminated.

The subsequent absorption of the Nazi war criminals as US Intelligence assets in 1945 (see above) is also food for thought. To see an example of how these Nazis were used, see 1985 section.

Then, in 1948, as the Israeli Jews were fighting for their lives in their War of Independence, fending off a combined Arab attack that had for explicitly avowed purpose the extermination of the Jewish people, the United States slapped an arms embargo against the Israeli Jews, and declared its opposition to the creation of the State of Israel (below). Meanwhile, Britain sent many captured Nazi officers to lead the Arab armies (below). But the US and Britain were not opposed to restoring Germany -- the country that had carried out the Final Solution against the European Jews -- to health. This they strongly endorsed, in what became the famous Marshall Plan.

____________________________________________________________

1947-48 [ mixed to negative ]

Forced by external circumstances, the US government gave lukewarm support to the creation of the State of Israel. But then it reversed itself and implemented policies designed to destroy Israel.
____________________________________________________________

Pro: At the UN, in 1947, the US voted in favor of partitioning the territory which the British had baptized "Palestine" in 1921. This partition would create an Arab state and a Jewish state in that territory. The US vote was crucial to the founding of the State of Israel.

Con: The US did not support partition. Although Truman ordered the US ambassador at the UN to vote in favor, the entire State Department was vociferously opposed to this, and there was zero US diplomacy to influence the votes of US client states to vote in favor of partition (with the consequence that many of them voted against).[19]

As a Jerusalem Post article of 1997 recalled,

"US secretary of state George Marshall, concerned about American interests in the Middle East, had recommended against partition [i.e. he recommended against the creation of a Jewish state] but had been overruled by Truman. A key factor was the support of the Soviet bloc."[19a]

A key factor was the support of the Soviet bloc. I shall return to this.
For now, however, notice that George Marshall, who opposed the creation of a state where the Jews could live safe from attempts to exterminate them, is also the man behind the celebrated "Marshall Plan," which had for purpose nursing to health the countries whose fascism had precipitated World War II: Germany and Japan. The British, too, loved the Marshall Plan - in fact, “Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin (1891-1951) predicted that [Marshall's] address [defending the Marshall Plan] ‘will rank as one of the greatest speeches in world history.’”[19aa]

So, immediately after the Final Solution was interrupted, the US State Department supported restoring Germany, but opposed the creation of a state where the special victims of the German Nazis, the Jews, could live safely. However, as we saw above, US President Harry Truman overruled the State Department and ordered the US delegate at the UN to cast the US vote in favor of partitioning the territory the British called "Palestine" into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. Why?

Gideon Rafael, at the time, was "a junior member of the Jewish delegation to the U.N. General Assembly in 1947," and moreover "responsible for 'keeping score' as 58 member nations voted on whether to partition British-controlled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states."[19b] The Jerusalem Post reports his recollection of these events:

"...it is presumed that Moscow was primarily interested in getting the British out of the Middle East. But there was also, [Gideon] Rafael believes, a measure of honest sentiment involved, a sense of identification with what the Jews had experienced in the war. 'We were some kind of companions in suffering,' says Rafael. 'Twenty million Russians had died in the war and a third of the Jewish people. In the deliberations in the General Assembly in the spring, (Soviet foreign minister Andrei) Gromyko had come out with a sensational statement. He said that six million Jews had been killed by the Nazi butchers and that the Jewish people had a longstanding association with Palestine and the right to independent status. I think that was an authentic sentiment. It was policy and it helped change the course of history.'"[19a]

For the full text of Andrei Gromyko's speech, 14 May 1947, to the UN General Assempbly, visit:
http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/d41260f1132ad6be
052566190059e5f0?OpenDocument

As Gideon Rafael says, Gromyko's speech changed the course of history, because if the Soviet Union had not passionately endorsed the creation of the State of Israel, Harry Truman would have certainly followed the recommendation of his Secretary of State, which was backed by the entire Department of State. Instead, he was placed in an impossible position.

In the end, though, Truman did follow the recommendation of his Secretary of State, when developments made it seem as though Israel would be destroyed. I turn to this next.

The 1947 UN vote partitioned the territory which the British, in 1921, had baptized "Palestine" into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews living there accepted this legally and internationally agreed-to partition proposal. The Arabs did not. The Arab population living in British Mandate "Palestine," under the leadership of the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini, declared war, as did the Arab states. And this was not to be just any war - the Arabs promised to finish Adolf Hitler's job and exterminate the Jews living in the Middle East. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, announced:

"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."[19c]

What did the US do? It slapped an arms embargo on "Palestine" which made it impossible for the Jews living there to get weapons with which to defend themselves from this genocidal attack; meanwhile, the Arabs in "Palestine" had no trouble getting weapons from the Arab states, in addition to which the Arab states sent their own troops. As the mayor of Tel Aviv, Israel Rokach explained at the time,

"The embargo is working a terrible hardship on the Jews of Palestine. It is the Arab followers of the Mufti [Hajj Amin], and not the Jews, who are engaged in a war of aggression, and who are defying the United Nations."[19cc]

That is not all. Simultaneously, Britain was doing everything in its power to help the Arab armies.

“The first large-scale assault began on January 9, 1948, when approximately 1,000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in northern Palestine. By February, the British said so many Arabs had infiltrated they lacked the forces to run them back. In fact, the British turned over bases and arms to Arab irregulars and the Arab Legion.

...The Arabs had no difficulty obtaining the arms they needed. In fact, Jordan’s Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British, and led by a British officer. At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949, British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Israel-Egypt border. On January 7, 1949, Israeli planes shot down four of the British aircraft.”[19d]

Never mind that it was barely three years since the Jews had finished suffering the Nazi Final Solution; the British aid to the Arabs included sending captured German Nazi officers to lead the Arab armies that had openly pledged themselves to wipe out the Israeli Jews. This was demonstrated in a detailed article, which quoted official British documents at length, and which appeared in The Nation in 1948:

This was not out of character for the British, who as colonialists in the Middle East encouraged many anti-Jewish Arab riots, by supporting, funding, and promoting the main instigator, Hajj Amin al Husseini, who was allowed to act with impunity. Things got so bad that "Lord Josiah Wedgwood, a fiercely pro-Zionist Member of Parliament, would call British-ruled Palestine 'the land of anti-Semitism par exellence.'"[19dd]

But though the US and British governments may have been attacking the Jews, it was not with the consent of the American people. It's just that the US government hardly ever does anything in foreign policy that the American people will agree with if they are properly informed. In this case, the American people were properly informed, and so the American workers rushed to defend the Israeli Jews with a declaration that stated that the following steps were "urgently" needed:

“‘A warning by the United States to Britain to stop arming and assisting Arab aggression.

‘A United Nations ban on the shipment of arms from all nations to Arab states who refuse to accept the United Nations Palestine decision.

‘A United Nations provision for supplying of arms and munitions to the Jewish people for self-defense.

‘Lifting of the State Department embargo on arms to the Middle East, which in effect discriminates against the Jewish people while Arab aggressors are free to obtain arms from neighboring Arab states.’”[19d]

The composition of the delegation making the above demands was as follows:

“The delegation included Leon Strauss of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union; Bruce Waybur of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, George Hanson of the United Office and Professional Workers of America; Fileno De Novellis of the United Shoe Workers, Joint Council 13; Jack Paley of the Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union 65, and William Levner of the American Jewish Labor Council.”[19d]

But it was not enough that the Arab armies were attempting to exterminate the Israeli Jews with the help of the US and British governments. On top of that, the US reversed itself on its earlier position approving the partition of "Palestine." That is, the US officially ceased to support the creation of a Jewish state even as thousands of Jews were dying to defend Israel and the very survival of the Jewish people.

A throng of enraged American workers then took to the streets of New York, and forced the US government to return to an official position endorsing the creation of Israel. As the New York Times reported,

"...a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 persons jammed Madison Square Park and surrounding streets yesterday in a mass protest against the United States reversal of its position on partition of Palestine."[19e]

That seems like a very large crowd. But in fact it may have been larger. Further down in the same article, the New York Times wrote that,

"The sidewalks of Fifth Avenue were lined solidly by a crowd estimated by the police at 250,000. The streets surrounding the speakers' stand, on the east side of the park, were packed so tightly that many of the parade spectators could not crowd in. Loudspeakers carried the talks to all corners of the square."[19e]

In any case, this was the largest crowd ever seen in the streets of New York. And, although it happened in New York City, it was not merely a New York phenomenon, but an American protest, as "There were representatives of 100 cities and fourteen states in the line of the march."

The marchers -- among whom were throngs of veterans from the World War -- were passionate:

"Banners proclaimed "We Fought for Peace, Not Arab Appeasement." "Oil or Honor?" "Save the U.N. - Uphold Partition." The marchers chanted "A Jewish State in Forty-Eight," or called the cadence to the words, "Lift, Lift, Lift the Embargo."

War-maimed veterans, heads lifted proudly, earned applause as they passed. Many of the marchers were in uniform - the blue of the Navy, gray green of the Marines, khaki of the Army, and dark blue of veterans' groups.

...[they] listened to the denunciations of American policy on Palestine. The crowd jeered and booed references to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem."[19e]

That's the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini, instigator of anti-Jewish riots in British Mandate Palestine, and later one of the great architects of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution against the European Jews.[19f] He was well known then, but seems all but forgotten now. That matters, because Hajj Amin was also the grandfather of Al Fatah, the organ that controls the PLO, and the mentor to Yasser Arafat. If ordinary Americans today understood the Nazi origins of the PLO, they would be just as opposed to current pro-PLO US foreign policy as their ancestors were in 1948 to the US's -- identical -- pro-Mufti policy.

To read the entire New York Times article reporting on the above-mentioned dramatic demonstration, and to see a photograph, visit:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/apr.pdf

____________________________________________________________

1949-1953 [ negative ]

In Israel's hour of supreme need, the US allied with Israel's mortal enemies.
____________________________________________________________

After the war of 1947-48, the fledgling Jewish state was in bad shape and needed to reconstruct after the terrible wartime sacrifices. But that was in fact only the first of Israel's problems. After the war, this diminutive strip of land also had to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazi slaughter. And yet this was not all. In addition there were also hundreds of thousands of suddenly impoverished Jewish refugees from the Mizrachim Diaspora, who had been chased out by the predominantly Muslim states of North Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and the Near East.

And yet..., and yet this was not all that Israel miraculously overcame. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains that,

"In the period 1949–53 Arab attacks killed hundreds of Israelis, four-fifths of whom were civilians."[20]

Hundreds of Jewish farmers living by Israel's borders were murdered by state-sponsored Arab terrorist attacks.

Obviously, no country that simply stood by and did nothing to help Israel while it faced all this could call itself her ally. And this is why many people, who believe the US has always been Israel's ally, believe also that Israel pulled through during this critical period thanks to massive US sponsorship. But are they right?

Notice what the Encyclopedia Britannica writes next:

"Israel’s potential allies, including the United States, were preoccupied with the Cold War and were willing to placate Arab leaders in order to limit Soviet influence among the Arab states, especially Egypt, which looked to Moscow for help against Britain and France, the remaining colonial powers in the region."[20]

In other words, the US did much worse than stand by and do nothing in Israel's hour of supreme need - it allied with Israel's mortal enemies, the same who had just tried to exterminate the Jews in the War of Independence.

And this was not just any alliance, for the US government sent some of the Nazis it was recruiting to create its intelligence services [see 1945 section] to Egypt, to train the Egyptian military and security services. The same Nazis would train in Cairo Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, as documented in the following piece:

The Encyclopedia Britannica therefore makes a logical error in the quote above, for it describes the behavior of an enemy state as the behavior of a "potential ally." This is a common error, and therefore a closer analysis of Britannica's behavior will help clarify why ordinary people have such a twisted understanding of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Why is the Encyclopedia Britannica calling the US
a "potential ally" of Israel?
_______________________

Would anybody refer to Egypt as a "potential ally of Israel"? Of course not - it is absurd to speak this way of an outright enemy. But since the US was allied with Israel's mortal enemies, why then call it a "potential ally of Israel" instead of what it obviously was - an enemy state?

Apparently, because 'everybody knows' that the US is supposed to be allied with Israel. So the words "potential ally" communicate to the Encyclopedia's readers that it was aberrant or at least atypical for the US, in the years 1949 to 1953, to support those seeking the extermination of the Israeli Jews. Britannica tries to back up its insinuation of a 'natural' US-Israeli friendship by 'explaining' that the US position supposedly resulted from real-politick considerations made 'necessary' by the Cold War, and thus by implication not (banish the thought!) from US enmity toward Israel or the Jewish people.

Britannica's readers will accept this argument only if they know nothing of the following:

1) that the US Establishment was in good measure responsible for the rise of the German Nazi party [see 1930's];

2) that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's government actively and enthusiastically cooperated with Hitler's Final Solution, even while fighting the German Nazi armies [see 1939-45];

3) that the US government absorbed thousands of Nazi war criminals from all over Europe - with the blood of millions of Jews, Russians, Slavs, Gypsies, and others on their hands - at the end of WWII in order to create US Intelligence, even as it continued its wartime policy of denying visas to desperate European Jews [see 1945];

4) that the US did not help the Israeli Jews in their 1947-48 War of Independence, but instead slapped an arms embargo on the Israeli Jews and declared it no longer supported the creation of the State of Israel, even as Israel defended itself from the Arab armies that proudly meant to exterminate her people [see 1947-48]; and

5) that neither did the US condemn its close ally, Britain, for exporting captured Nazi war criminals to serve as officers in the Arab armies that attacked Israel [see 1947-48].

In a world with truly independent academic and journalistic institutions, as opposed to covertly corrupted ones, the public would know that up to the year 1953 the US had been a major enemy of Israel, and of the Jews more generally. Run-of-the-mill skepticism would then make it impossible for people to accept the proposition that, in the period immediately following 1953, it was somehow obvious that the US would be Israel's "potential ally". However,

a) this is not a normal world - many crucial facts have been kept from ordinary people by a corrupt mainstream media, and corrupt academic institutions; and, therefore,

b) ordinary people are not normal skeptics - they routinely assume that anything in the Encyclopedia Britannica or the New York Times (etc.) is automatically authoritative and fair, and therefore does not deserve special scrutiny (as it has supposedly already been scrutinized by independent and objective historians and journalists).

Under such circumstances, when prestigious publications repeat, over and over again, and matter-of-factly, that the US supposedly supports Israel, that the US is supposedly Israel's only friend, that the US Congress is supposedly controlled by Israel, etc., etc., ordinary people end up concluding that it's simply true: just as the sky is the color blue and the Pope is a Catholic, the US is... the ally of Israel! Contrary facts - such as the US's alliance during the years 1949-53 with countries pledged to destroy Israel - will be discussed as fleeting aberrations. Not, in other words, as evidence that a skeptic may want to put on the table in order to determine fairly and scientifically whether or not the US ruling elite really is an ally.

But why are the Encyclopedia Britannica and the mass media distorting the truth in order to hide the fact that the US ruling elite attacks the Jews? You can get a clue by taking a look at Leslie Gelb, who is a) a high-powered US government operative involved with US Intelligence and US foreign policy, b) a New York Times journalist, and c) editorial advisor to the Encyclopedia Britannica[20a]:

"Gelb was director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, winning the Pentagon's highest award, the Distinguished Service Award. Robert McNamara appointed Gelb as director of the project that produced the controversial Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War.

He was diplomatic correspondent at The New York Times from 1973 to 1977.

He served as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration from 1977 to 1979, serving as director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and winning the Distinguished Honor Award, the highest award of the US State Department.

He returned to the Times in 1981; from then until 1993, he was in turn its national security correspondent, deputy editorial page editor, editor of the Op-Ed Page, and columnist. This period included his leading role on the Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1986 for a six-part comprehensive series on the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative).

Gelb became President of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1993 and as of 2005 is its President Emeritus."[20b]

Because mainstream news and academic publications, as we have seen, routinely employ Newspeak (the reality-inverting language of Orwell's 'Big Brother', where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and the US ruling elite is an ally of Israel), wool has been successfully pulled over the eyes of the citizenry, preventing political awareness. This has greatly endangered the survival of the Jewish state, for even Israeli Jews believe the US ruling elite is on their side, and an enemy that has not been recognized is not one that can easily be defended against.

____________________________________________________________

1955 [ mixed ]

The US forces Israel to withdraw from Sinai, but makes some concessions to the Israelis.
____________________________________________________________

In October 1955, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser beefed up his military considerably with help from the Soviet Union, and then announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran, Israel's only port south of Elat.

Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion decided to act.

Since Britain and France wanted to regain the Suez Canal from Egypt, the three countries reached an agreement under which IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) seized the Sinai. The British and French then invaded the canal zone under pretext of protecting it. An infuriated Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British and French to withdraw. Israel also withdrew, but not before extracting an agreement from the US to place a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai, and a written promise from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the Strait of Tiran would be treated as a protected, international waterway. On the face of it this looks positive, but it is worth pointing out that the Israeli military occupation of the Sinai is what gave Ben Gurion the bargaining leverage to force it.[21] The US's heart was not bleeding for Israel - certainly not the heart of John Foster Dulles, a Nazi supporter whose brother Allen Dulles had been responsible for creating the CIA out of escaped Nazi war criminals.[22]

____________________________________________________________

1955-1965 [ positive (in one regard only) ]

Israel indirectly gets some US weapons.
____________________________________________________________

For the next ten years, Israel received arms from France, and from West Germany. Since West Germany got its weapons from the US, this may be considered indirect US assistance.

Caveat: It is worth pointing out, however, that it wasn't the US selling weapons to the Israelis.[23]

____________________________________________________________

1958 [ negative ]

Israel assists US military intervention in the Middle East; when this places Israel in danger, the US does...nothing.
____________________________________________________________

1958 was a bad year for US and British influence in the Middle East. An army coup in Iraq toppled the pro-Western government there, and Nasser attempted similar subversion in pro-Western Lebanon and Jordan.

"President Eisenhower dispatched the Marines to Lebanon in order to forestall a possible collapse of pro-Western forces there. Israel was requested to allow British overflights for transporting troops to aid the Hashemite regime in Jordan."

Despite the fact that the Israelis obliged the Americans and the British, these latter

"refused to bargain with [Israeli prime minister David] Ben-Gurion about a military or political reward for his compliance with their requests."

But not only that:

"when the Soviets threatened Israel for having opened its airspace to Western forces, and Ben-Gurion, deeply distressed, tried to cancel the permission for overflights, he was strongly rebuked by [US Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles. The incident pointed up Israel's fundamental weakness, and its desperate search for allies against the threat posed by Nasser and Nasserism - and it pointed up also the exploitative attitude of the United States and Great Britain toward Israel..."[24]

____________________________________________________________

1964 [ mixed ]

The US abandoned its previous official policy of trying to get Israel to relinquish the territories won in the War of Independence. Why had it been trying to do this?
____________________________________________________________

Israeli historian Anita Shapira writes:

"It was not until 1964 that an Israeli prime minister was officially welcomed at the White House, when Lyndon Johnson received Levi Eshkol."[25]

This should be terribly surprising to anybody who was assuming that the US and Israel had been the best of friends since the founding of the state. But this is even more surprising:

"In their joint statement at the conclusion of the visit, Johnson proclaimed the need to maintain the territorial integrity of all the states in the region. ...this was the first time Washington abandoned the idea of changing the borders of the 1949 armistice line."

Shapira comments,

"If even a government as friendly to Israel as the government of the United States was not prepared during that perilous [pre-1964] time to guarantee the 1949 borders (what today is called the ‘Green Line’), then Israel’s situation was in truth fraught with great danger, and Ben-Gurion’s obsession with Israel’s fragility was not illusory."

Why does Shapira say the United States was so friendly? The points reviewed above in this chronology make it clear that the US had been an enemy state. Shapira's allegation of US friendship is therefore a gratuitous apology for the US.

It is not her only one. Notice that she first explains with candor that in 1964 "the US abandoned the idea of changing the borders of the 1949 armistice line," which means - what? That up until then, the US had been trying to change those borders. But then Shapira redescribes this policy as follows: "the United States was not prepared during that perilous [pre-1964] time to guarantee the 1949 borders." There is a very big difference between the first statement and the second. Not agreeing to guarantee somebody else's borders is to proclaim neutrality; trying to change Israel's 1949 borders - what the US in fact did - was an outright attack.

Let me explain why.

The 1947 partition line that created Israel had produced a country that was essentially a virtually indefensible (because very narrow) strip of coastline.[26] And yet the Israeli Jews accepted this partition. The Palestinian Arabs did not accept and, with the surrounding Arab states, and aided by Britain, attacked the state of Israel and boasted of the impending genocide of the Jews.[27]

But the Israeli Jews stunned the world by winning the war, and they marginally thickened their narrow strip of coastline as a result. This made it a wee bit easier to defend. The resulting border is what Shapira calls the "1949 armistice line" and also "the Green Line."

Now, an attacked state is under no obligation to give back territory that its enemies lost after launching an unprovoked war of aggression - especially when they made it very clear that they meant to commit genocide and, moreover, had not abandoned this insane goal. And the survival of the Jewish state required securing its borders against further such attacks, which the Arab states had promised would be forthcoming (and they made their aggressive promises entirely credible by directing continuous terrorist attacks against Jewish farmers on Israel's borders - see 1949-53 section). Thus, if it was only in 1964 that "Washington abandoned the idea of changing the borders of the 1949 armistice line," what follows? That up until 1964 the US had been waging a diplomatic attack against Israel, attempting to strip it of territory that Israel had legitimately won, and which was indispensable to its defense against terrorist states pledged to the extermination of the Jewish people.

By describing the US's behavior in a completely different way, as a failure to guarantee Israel's borders, Shapira is apologizing for the US.

I note that Anita Shapira is considered a Zionist. If you are an ordinary person - i.e. not a historian of Israel - and you come across her arguments, you will find yourself having to choose between the following two interpretations:

a) either Anita Shapira, an Israeli patriot, cannot reason about who Israel's friends are, or

b) since Anita Shapira is the historian, and you aren't, she must know a lot more about US policies over the years, and so you take what she says on her implicit authority that there are other facts which mitigate the impression of US enmity towards Israel.

Ordinary people are at a disadvantage in terms of access to information, and they are of a respectful and generous disposition towards figures of established authority, so they will tend to choose interpretation b.

The documentation in this piece is meant to empower ordinary people to ask the question: Where are those mitigating facts that supposedly establish the friendliness of the US towards Israel? Can anybody list them?

____________________________________________________________

1964-1967 [ negative ]

Although Israel suffered terrorist attacks from its Arab neighbors during these years, when they staged a full-scale military provocation, the US refused to help.
____________________________________________________________

For years prior to the 1967 war, there were terrorists attacks against Israeli civilians from the Jordanian and Syrian borders, while Nasser promised an impending Arab genocide of the Jews.

"…Syria used the Golan Heights, which tower 3,000 feet above the Galilee, to shell Israeli farms and villages. Syria's attacks grew more frequent in 1965 and 1966, while Nasser's rhetoric became increasingly bellicose: 'We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand,' he said on March 8, 1965. 'We shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.'"[28]

To get an idea of Nasser's mood and intentions immediately prior to the 1967 war, consider this speech which the Egyptian President gave to the Arab Trade Unionists on May 26, 1967

[Quote From Nasser To Arab Trade Unionists Starts Here]

"If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt, the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the Syrian or Egyptian borders. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel. I probably could not have said such things five or even three years ago. If I had said such things and had been unable to carry them out my words would have been empty and worthless.

Today, some eleven years after 1956, I say such things because I am confident. I know what we have here in Egypt and what Syria has. I also know that other States Iraq, for instance, has sent its troops to Syria; Algeria will send troops; Kuwait also will send troops. They will send armored and infantry units. This is Arab power. This is the true resurrection of the Arab nation, which at one time was probably in despair."[28]

[Quote From Nasser To Arab Trade Unionists Ends Here]

Then, in 1967, the Arab countries surrounding Israel mobilized, staging a provocation. Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban went on an emergency trip seeking French, British, and American aid. He got nothing.[29]

A short reflection on propaganda
_____________________________