Jewish leaders in the Diaspora are not better today than they were in World War II. A full documentation of their activities would keep us here forever, so I will focus on a number of prominent examples that will be sufficient to make my case.

Arthur Hertzberg
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“At one time or another, and often simultaneously, Stephen Wise was president or chairman of a bewildering number of organizations, among them: the American Jewish Congress, which he founded; the Zionist Organization of America; the United Palestine Appeal; the World Jewish Congress, which he co-founded with Nahum Goldmann; and the American Jewish Conference, an umbrella group of dozens of US Jewish and Zionist organizations.”[2]

“Among the members [of the proposed commission] were Hon. Elizabeth Holtzman, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Hon. Philip Klutznick, Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim, Dr. Martin Peretz, Judge Simon Rifkind, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum and Mr. Sol Chaikin.”[3]

Given that institutions survive the passage of time when the people in them recruit ideological bedfellows as replacements, it is not unreasonable to expect that Arthur Hertzberg will turn out to be like Wise and Goldmann, particularly when Hertzberg is given to bemoaning in print the supposed “scarcity of men such as Stephen Wise.”[6] With this in the background we may put on the table a hypothesis to explain why Jack Eisner protested that the commission he was to fund, and which contained Arthur Hertzberg, would “whitewash the truth” rather than expose it: Jack Eisner realized that Arthur Hertzberg would attempt a cover up.

In 1979 Arthur Hertzberg came out with a book titled Being Jewish in America (1979). Julius Weinberg, who read it and reviewed it, understood the author’s political position to be as follows:

“Hertzberg proposes that the Jewish community of this country [the United States] should have an equal voice in the political decisions to be made by the state of Israel -- including Israel’s foreign policy.”[7]

“[Nahum] Goldmann wanted total control of world Jewry concentrated in his hands, and said so unabashedly. The World Jewish Congress, which he had set up with [Stephen] Wise, was ‘the single address’ in his mind.”[8]

But this is not where the similarities end.

As we saw in Part 1, Goldmann and Wise did not defend the persecuted Jews; instead, they sabotaged Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was defending the persecuted Jews. So Goldmann and Wise were interested only in their own power. Arthur Hertzberg has likewise continued this World Jewish Congress tradition of criminal disregard for the security of the Jewish people, advancing his “equal voice” in the service of sabotaging the defense of Israel.

“In America, historian of Zionism Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, like philanthropists Edgar Bronfman and Marvin Lender, has also chosen sides by appealing to President George W. Bush to put sanctions on Israel and to view Israel and the PA [the ‘Palestinian Authority,’ run by the PLO] as equivalents.”[10]

Of course, Hertzberg sells his position as supposed compassion for the West Bank and Gaza Arabs (i.e. the so-called ‘Palestinians’), and various sources will echo this: for example, Wikipedia refers to his “outspoken criticism of the policies of Israel toward the Palestinians.”[13] But this is absurd. It is the PLO that has been oppressing the West Bank and Gaza Arabs, not Israel.[14] The serious problems for these Arabs began when, partly as a result of pressure coming from Hertzberg’s World Jewish Congress (more on this below), the PLO was imposed on the Arabs as ‘government.’ Since then, not only has the PLO been murdering innocent Israeli civilians, but it has also been murdering innocent West Bank and Gaza Arabs, sometimes executing them merely for selling land to a Jew, or for opposing the killings of Jews, when it is not murdering them for opposing the PLO on other grounds.[15] The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were treated infinitely better when the Israeli government was directly administering these territories,[16] so genuine compassion for these Arabs would require Hertzberg to be a vocal opponent of the PLO, not Israel.

What is the political effect of this spectacle -- of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg on the world stage behaving as if he has a rather special animosity against the Jewish state? Well, considering that the man has been “president of both the American Jewish Policy Foundation and the American Jewish Congress, [and] vice president of the World Jewish Congress,” the effect on ordinary people (Jewish and non-Jewish alike), who are poorly informed, is to make them think: “Gee, if a leader of something calling itself the ‘World Jewish Congress’ says that Israel is the bad guy, then it must be -- because, how can Israel be the good guy if even the Jewish leadership attacks it?” As we saw in Part 1, in World War II Rabbi Stephen Wise had a similar effect on many people who otherwise would have defended the Jews: he confused and demoralized them. It is impossible to know exactly how many lives were lost this way, but given that Peter Bergson’s movement managed to save some 200,000 people despite Wise’s repeated acts of sabotage, as we saw in Part 1, the cost could be a few million.

More consistency: Since Rabbi Stephen Wise was the enemy of Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), who was a founder of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi Jewish army, and who did his utmost to save Jewish lives in Europe while Wise sabotaged his every move, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Arthur Hertzberg was an enemy of the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, and like Bergson a Jewish patriot.[17]

When you put all this together, it is kind of obvious, isn’t it, that Arthur Hertzberg will not want the actions of Stephen Wise examined or publicized because, if this happens, a lot of people might notice that Arthur Hertzberg, Stephen Wise’s heir, is behaving very much like Stephen Wise, who betrayed the Jewish people when they most needed him. So this seems quite sufficient to explain the fact that Jack Eisner, who was to fund Arthur Hertzberg’s work reporting on Stephen Wise’s role, should have complained that Hertzberg’s commission was going to “whitewash the truth” (by the way, some of the other members of the proposed commission were also cause for concern[18]). And because Eisner’s effort fell apart, what we have on the response of American Jewish leaders to the Shoah is just the belated work, in the last few years, of a couple of historians.[19]

The same year, 1981, that Arthur Hertzberg was sabotaging the effort to understand what Wise and Co. did during World War II, Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress (so, Hertzberg’s boss), was working very hard to endorse US President Ronald Reagan’s radically anti-Israel policies, which had for goal the creation of a PLO state in the West Bank.[20] In 1982, Bronfman was at it again, using his perch as president of the World Jewish Congress to endorse Ronald Reagan’s plan for Middle East ‘peace.’ Reagan was using Bronfman as a ‘Jewish diplomat,’ as if all Jews were the same and the World Jewish Congress spoke for them all, including citizens of Israel. American newspapers dutifully carried the headline “Jewish Leader OKs Reagan Peace Plan.”[21]

But Bronfman did not speak for the Israeli Jews:

“the Israeli government. . .unanimously and totally rejected the American initiative.”[22]

Bronfman did the same in the mid-80s, when again as president of the World Jewish Congress, he acted as an informal diplomat for Shimon Peres, at the time Israel’s prime minister. The diplomacy Bronfman conducted (mind you, Bronfman is not an Israeli citizen) was meant to do an end-run around Yitzhak Shamir from the opposition party, who was the actual foreign minister. And the point of this diplomacy, according to some reports, was to give away the strategic Golan Heights to the Syrians![24] At the same time, Peres sent leaders of the American Jewish Congress, another organization founded by Stephen Wise, to be his private diplomats to Arab leaders with whom he wanted to legitimize the PLO as a political player.[25] Peres and Bronfman finally achieved their goals with the so-called Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, which empowered the PLO inside the Jewish state.

And Bronfman, like Hertzberg, has been consistent throughout. In the year 2003,

“Edgar Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress, ...suggested the [Jewish] settlements [in the West Bank and Gaza] were the key obstacle to peace and echoed [Hebrew University] professor [Ze’ev] Sternhell in advising the Palestinians that they would be wise to focus their terror attacks on settlers.”[27]

Abraham Foxman
________________

“The immediate object of the [Anti-Defamation] League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people.”[29]

“Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League told the Forward that it is too soon to call for a congressional investigation: ‘This is an institution that’s been around for a long time. They’ve established a credible reputation...’”[31]

“Speaking to an Anti-Defamation League delegation in Gaza, Arafat said his use of the word ‘jihad’ in his speeches not only meant a holy war involving fighting, but also can be used in terms of peace.

‘We asked the chairman to engage as much as possible in words of understanding and reconciliation,’ said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.

‘The chairman talked in terms of the jihad for peace so that the word jihad as we know it can be converted into the jihad of peace.’”[32]

“In 1980, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia gave a clear definition: ‘What is meant by jihad is a united, comprehensive, integrated Arab-Islamic confrontation in which we place all our resources and our spiritual, cultural, political, material and military potential in a long and untiring ‘Holy War’ against Israel, of course, who else?’”[34]

“Yasser Arafat, from his entry into the territories [of the West Bank and Gaza] in 1994, orchestrated a campaign of defamation and vilification against Israelis and Jews. He promoted in PA schoolbooks and media, over which he always maintained tight control, denigration of Jewish belief, classic anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews, claims of Jewish perfidy and godlessness, blood libels against Jews, assertions that Jews have no historical connection with the land of Israel, denial of any Jewish religious ties to the Temple Mount, denial of the Holocaust, and much else in the same vein. Yet the ADL’s response was ambiguous at best. In the fall of 1998 it published a report on anti-Semitic statements proffered by the Palestinian Authority over the previous year, and at various times it would put out press releases urging Arafat to change his ways. For example, one such release in November, 1998, called upon Arafat to remove anti-Semitism from official PA airwaves. Yet Arafat’s anti-Jewish campaign did not keep the head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, from leading American Jewish delegations in pilgrimages to the PA chairman or proffering Arafat ‘gifts of Jewish art.’”[35]

“At a meeting in Ramallah in September 2000, Foxman presented Arafat with a letter regarding recently introduced PA school texts...prais[ing] them for excluding ‘the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic passages prevalent in previous textbooks and curricular material.’ But, in fact, ...the new books denigrate Jews and Judaism and continue to teach that all of Israel rightly belongs to the Arabs.”[37]

AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)
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AIPAC is the most visible component of what people call the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States. A Google search on the ‘Jewish lobby’ or on AIPAC will quickly convince you that quite a lot of people believe this lobby to be terribly powerful, and to have great influence on what US foreign policy becomes. The same people matter-of-factly assume that what the ‘Jewish lobby’ does is produce pro-Israel US foreign policy. This is false. AIPAC in fact promotes pro-PLO US foreign policy, as the following HIR investigation has shown:

“...while some in the professional echelon of the organization seemed not only to embrace the Oslo agenda [the purpose of which was to bring the terrorist PLO inside the Jewish state] but to do so with conviction and aplomb, there were members of the lay leadership, the highest level of AIPAC’s financial supporters, who were unhappy with the organization’s stance, and many longtime contributors were so put off by AIPAC’s pro-Oslo activities that they withdrew their support.”[39]

I think I have given enough focused examples, but I nevertheless want to make it clear that the above American Jewish leaders just considered are in no way exceptions. Rather, they are the norm. So I will here give you a quick panoramic view, relying on Kenneth Levin, who, in his book The Oslo Syndrome, has already surveyed this landscape.

Kenneth Levin begins his chapter entitled ‘American Jews and Oslo’ with the following quotation plus explanation:

“Arafat is not going to be happy with that.

Sara Ehrman, board member of Americans for Peace Now, complaining that dovish American Jewish leaders had failed to press Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to treat Israel, led at the time by Ehud Barak, more harshly in order to extract additional Oslo-related concessions. (August 1999)”[42]

“Leadership of both Americans for Peace Now and its predecessor organization overlapped with the leadership of such groups as the Jewish Peace Lobby and CONAME [Committee on New Alternatives in the Middle East, founded by Noam Chomsky] (which had lobbied against US arms shipments to Israel during the Yom Kippur War)”[44]

In addition,

“Gail Pressberg, for a time president of APN [Americans for Peace Now] and then director of APN’s Center for Israeli Peace and Security, had a long history of involvement with anti-Israel organizations and events, including some marked by frank antisemitism, and in her earlier career had not notably demonstrated any concern for Israel’s security. Pressberg’s Israel-related activities have been documented by Rael Jean Isaac. In the late 1970s, as director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East ‘Peace Education’ program, Pressberg had organized anti-Israel conferences and called for a halt to US arms shipments to Israel. Pressberg had also signed ads making wildly untrue and defamatory claims about Israeli actions in Lebanon, opposing relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and demanding Israel’s return to its pre-1967 borders. From the 1970s onward, she was a consistent promoter and apologist for the PLO. When, in September, 1986, terrorists killed twenty-one Turkish Jews at a Sabbath prayer in their Istanbul synagogue, Pressberg characterized the slaughter as due to ‘the humiliation and dispossession felt by the Palestinians’ and used the occasion to urge again US negotiations with the PLO.”[46]

“The Jewish Peace Lobby after 1993 consistently argued that Israel would have to offer the Palestinians more and that peace would ensue once Israel had made concessions along the lines the Lobby demanded, including the division of Jerusalem. It persisted in lobbying Congress for support for its stances.

Leaders of the New Israel Fund continued to direct most of the Fund’s resources to groups in Israel advocating Arab views and opposing and challenging [Israeli] government positions. In 1997 the Smithsonian Institution planned a lecture series on ‘Israel at 50’ and agreed to have the New Israel Fund formulate the program. The scheduled list of speakers consisted overwhelmingly of critics of Israel, such as Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset who had recently paid homage at the grave of an Islamic Jihad murderer of Israelis...”[47]

“[the] Israel Policy Forum (IPF), [was] created in 1993 at the behest of Israel’s Labor-Meretz coalition government [Shimon Peres’ outfit] and placed under the leadership of a former APN [Americans for Peace Now] president, Jonathan Jacoby, who had earlier in his career signed a New York Times ad accusing Israel of ‘state terrorism.’

One of IPF’s early efforts, intended to convey to the American public and American leaders an impression of wide American Jewish enthusiasm for Oslo, was its sponsorship of a poll that ostensibly showed 87 percent of American Jews supporting the ‘peace process.’ The poll was grossly skewed in the framing of its questions, as, for example, in its asking: ‘As you may be aware, Israel agreed to recognize the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people after the PLO renounced terrorism, removed the clauses from its charter which called for the destruction of Israel, and formally recognized Israel’s right to exist. Do you approve or disapprove of the Israeli government’s decision to recognize the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinian people?’ Not surprisingly, 82 percent approved. The poll did not ask, for example: ‘Do you trust the PLO’s renunciation of terror?’ Also, it was, of course, dishonest in its assertion that the PLO charter had been changed.”[48]

“lobbied Congress in support of the [pro-PLO] Labor-Meretz agenda and sought to depict that agenda as enjoying wide American Jewish grassroots backing, with the skeptics among American Jews being a minority. Once more, those who challenged Labor-Meretz policies were smeared as opponents of peace. In 1997, Project Nishma merged with Israel Policy Forum.”[49]

“In December, 1996, during the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Center held a conference that was billed as a ‘Retrospective on the Peace Process’ but proved to be mainly, according to media reports, a sustained attack on the Netanyahu government. Guest speakers included PA [Palestinian Authority] general secretary Ahmed Abdul Rahman, former Secretary of State James Baker [who earlier had forced Israel to accept the PLO inside the Jewish state[50]], and columnist Thomas Friedman [a major critic of Israel, and Jewish]. Rahman excoriated Israel and its policies and insisted there were no Palestinian violations of Oslo. On the issue of Arafat’s agreement in several of the Oslo accords to change the Palestinian charter and its calls for Israel’s destruction, Rahman said, ‘We don’t want a new charter.’ Baker urged greater pressure on Netanyahu and suggested the United States had to get tougher on Israel. Friedman similarly advocated the administration forcing Israel to be more forthcoming and praised Baker and former Secretary of State Kissinger for having aggressively pressed Israel while they were in office.

Most of the other speakers as well focused their remarks on criticizing the Netanyahu government or Israel in general. Interestingly, the speaker apparently most willing to address Arab shortcomings vis-à-vis peacemaking was the Jordanian ambassador.

...the Center’s founder, S. Daniel Abraham, a frequent visitor to the [Syrian capital of] Damascus, became something of an apologist for [Syrian dictator and antisemite] Hafez al-Assad. In an interview in July, 1997, Abraham declared that Assad ‘wants to make peace with Israel...’ [and]...went on to observe, ‘Not all dictators are terrible people, and not all dictatorships are terrible forms in which to live.’ He added that most Jews in Syria live freely and ‘there was no anti-Semitism to speak of’; this after the great majority of Syrian Jews had fled the country and Secretary of State Warren Christopher had some months earlier protested ‘an anti-Semitic article published in the semi-official Syrian Times.’ A 1999 ad by the Center proclaimed, ‘President Assad has scrupulously kept all of his commitments in earlier disengagement accords with Israel. He possesses both the will and the ability to make peace with Israel and implement it throughout Syria.’ In contrast to his warm feelings for Assad, Abraham is reported to have asked President Clinton, ‘Do you really think Netanyahu wants peace.’”[51]

Now, nobody defended the Jews more bravely in WWII than the Serbs,[52] so some Serbs have come to believe that, in the civil wars that took place in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, they were betrayed by ‘the Jews.’ This is false. Most Jews -- due to the unfortunately dismal state of education about the Holocaust in the Jewish community -- are not even cognizant of what happened in Yugoslavia during WWII. And those Jews who demonized the Serbs in the 1990s were primarily some prominent leaders in the Jewish community, such as Bernard Henri Lévy -- i.e. not ‘the Jews.’

Those Jews who defended the Bosnian Islamists against the Serbs, were -- absurdly -- defending the legacy of Hajj Amin al Husseini, who created the SS Handzar division and organized the mass slaughters of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies) in WWII Yugoslavia, and who also mentored Yasser Arafat, moreover creating Al Fatah, Arafat’s organization, and the controlling core in the PLO.[11] Not coincidentally, those Jews who have promoted anti-Serb propaganda tend to be precisely the same Jews who defend Hajj Amin's heirs, the antisemitic PLO terrorists, against the Jewish state. Bernard Henri Lévy is a case in point. He accuses that criticism of Israel is too strong, but, all the same, in a trip to Israel, pretending that the suffering of the West Bank and Gaza Arabs is the fault of Israel rather than of the PLO, he declared:

"And if there is indifference here [in Israel] to the Palestinian suffering, it means Israeli society has problems with its memory. This is to be a terrible Jew."[52a]

Jewish officials in the US government are hardly better than Jewish leaders in non-governmental Diaspora Jewish organizations. Much more could be written than what I will here present, but what follows is more than enough because I have chosen to focus on those US officials responsible for crafting US policy towards the Jewish state.

In the year 1994, The Jerusalem Post wrote:

“...the trio that implements Middle East policy at the State Department [are] State Department planning director Dennis Ross, …and his two chief assistants, Dr. Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron Miller...”[53]

But the only question that matters is whether staffing such State Department positions with Jews in fact results in an unduly pro-Israel US foreign policy.

To answer this question, consider that it was in the year 1994 that the The Jerusalem Post made the above observation about Ross, Kurtzer, and Miller. Well, it was also the year 1994 when -- thanks to US government threats against Israel about what would happen if the Israelis did not accept this -- the PLO was brought to govern the West Bank and Gaza Arabs.[57] When the US began this remarkable bully diplomacy to force the PLO on the Israelis (which process was, in true Orwellian fashion, subsequently baptized the ‘Oslo Peace Process’), the terrorist PLO was actually languishing in Tunisian exile and had been essentially defeated back in 1982.[59] It was US pressure that allowed this organization to rise again from the ashes and nestle itself inside the Jewish state, from which position it has been easily murdering quite a few innocent Israelis, while extorting and murdering many innocents in the Arab population which it rules.[60] We are speaking, as mentioned before, of an organization whose controlling core, Al Fatah, traces its roots to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.[58]

“In 1974, when much of the world was promoting Arab-Israeli negotiations in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, Yasser Arafat, leader of Fatah and of the PLO, formulated what he called the ‘Plan of Phases.’ The plan declared that the Palestinian Arabs would seek to acquire territory by negotiations and would then use that territory as a launching pad for military pursuit of Israel’s annihilation. With this agenda as backdrop, Arafat offered to enter into negotiations with Israel.”[61]

“A tape-recording has surfaced of PLO leader Yasser Arafat speaking to Moslem followers… Mr Arafat was exhorting his followers to prosecute a ‘jihad ... to liberate Jerusalem’. Mr Arafat does not deny the tape’s authenticity… [His followers] would have taken it to mean that the peace process was just a stratagem: a Trojan Horse which should now be exploited with maximum violence.”[62]

“...Faisal Husseini, the top PLO official in Jerusalem...[was] quoted as likening the Oslo accords to a ‘Trojan horse.’ ...the weekly Al-Arabi quotes Husseini as calling the Oslo accords ‘just a temporary procedure, or just a step towards something bigger…the liberation of all historical Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.’”[63]

So, we can point to the fact that, in the year 1994, the three people making US foreign policy in the Middle East -- Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, and Aaron Miller -- are Jewish, as if this amounted to an analysis of US foreign policy; or...we can point to the fact that in 1994, US foreign policy in the Middle East is in fact to twist Israel’s arm in order (a) to revive the PLO (a defeated Nazi organization that desires land only as a platform towards the destruction of Israel), and (b) to give the PLO both proximity to its Jewish targets and power inside the Jewish state by making it the ‘government’ over the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza.

Or..., as I am required to do, given the topic of this article, I can point to both the Jewish identity of those crafting this policy, and to the policy itself, remarking that once again we have powerful Jews attacking the Jewish people. There really is a pattern, here. And -- I remind you -- Ross, Kurtzer, and Miller did everything they did knowingly, because if anybody has the motivation and means to discover the true intentions of the PLO it is the Middle East specialists at the top of the world superpower’s foreign ministry.

And how shall we describe the behavior of Dennis Ross, Daniel Kurtzer, and Aaron Miller? Would antisemitism be too strong a word?

In the case of Aaron Miller, there is also Seeds of Peace to consider. This is an organization that claims to be training the next generation of peacemaking leaders on both the Israeli and Arab sides by bringing teenagers of these populations to its camp in Maine, USA, and teaching them to dialogue with each other. The US government funds Seeds of Peace and, along with the Establishment media, goes quite out of its way to promote Seeds of Peace as a supposedly benevolent force. Kenneth Levin takes a different view:

“As reported in the Jerusalem Post in January, 2000, ‘A recent film called ‘Peace of Mind,’ produced by Seeds of Peace and intended for theater and television screenings around the world, casts doubt on the organization’s motives. It is so tilted in favor of Palestinian arguments, so unquestioningly sympathetic to Palestinian grievances, that it becomes a propaganda instrument rather than an ode to young friendship.

The film, in explicating the Arab-Israeli conflict as background to the students’ encounters at the camp, presents a doctored and bogus past and a similarly distorted present. While the film states that it was produced by the Arab and Israeli campers, three of the four Israeli students featured in it wrote to Seeds of Peace to protest its bias and to assert that ‘we did not make the movie, as the movie claims... The movie was only shot in part by us, and most of our footage, including its most significant statements from our point of view, were discarded.’

The mind set of the camnp’s organizers was further revealed in an incident recounted by the father of one of the camp’s Israeli students in a letter to the Jerusalem Post. ‘One morning, the camp assembly was told by the founder, John Wallach, that that morning a Palestinian had run down two Israelis and killed them and that he was subsequently killed. He asked for a moment of silence for the Israelis and the Palestinian. The Jewish campers immediately objected and refused to stand for the Palestinian. Apparently no one could explain to Mr. Wallach [who said he was Jewish until the day he died] that there is no moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims.’”[67]

The behavior of Jews today who have important positions in the US government is a repeat of what we saw, in Part 1, was the behavior of most Jewish US government officials during WWII: they sabotage the defense of the Jewish people.