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400 mostly Orthodox rabbis march to the White House on October 6, 1943. Roosevelt avoided meeting with them.

By Victor Rosenthal

It’s well-known that the Roosevelt Administration did little to help European Jews during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, part of the blame falls on American Jewry, which was sharply divided about how to respond — a fact which caused good men in the government to hesitate, while it gave antisemites an excuse to resist.

The NY Times has published a piece by Isabel Kershner that may bring more attention to the shameful stupidity of the Jewish establishment during that period:

The Bergson group formed in 1940 when about 10 young Jews from Palestine and Europe came to the United States to open a fund-raising and propaganda operation for the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist militia. The group was organized by Hillel Kook, a charismatic Irgun leader who adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson. [Samuel] Merlin was his right-hand man.

The group began by raising money for illegal Jewish immigration to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and promoting the idea of an army composed of stateless and Palestinian Jews. But the mission abruptly changed in November 1942 after reports of the Nazi annihilation of two million European Jews emerged. Like earlier reports of the mass killing of Jews, the news barely made the inside pages of major American newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Bergsonites were appalled by what they saw as the indifference of the Roosevelt administration and the passivity of the Jewish establishment, which staunchly supported the administration and largely accepted its argument that the primary American military objective was to win the war, not to save European Jews. The group embarked on a provocative campaign to publicize the genocide and to lobby Congress to support the rescue of Jews, roaming the hallways of Capitol Hill and knocking on doors, displaying a degree of chutzpah that made the traditional, pro-Roosevelt Jewish establishment uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable?

The establishment, led by Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, fought Kook’s group tooth and nail. Writer Ben Hecht, recruited by Kook to stage a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden in March 1943 (“We will never die”) to raise awareness and embarrass the government into action, described one encounter:

I first became aware that there was annoyance with me among the Jews when Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the Jews of New York, head of the Zionists and, as I knew from reading the papers, head of almost everything noble in American Jewry, telephoned me at the Algonquin Hotel where I had pitched my Hebrew tent.

Rabbi Wise said he would like to see me immediately in his rectory. His voice, which was sonorous and impressive, irritated me. I had never known a man with a sonorous and impressive voice who wasn’t either a con man or a bad actor. I explained I was very busy and unable to step out of my hotel.

“Then I shall tell you now, over the telephone, what I had hoped to tell you in my study,” said Rabbi Wise. “I have read your pageant script and I disapprove of it. I must ask you to cancel this pageant and discontinue all your further activities in behalf of the Jews. If you wish hereafter to work for the Jewish Cause, you will please consult me and let me advise you.”

Wise was a confidant of Roosevelt, and tried to use his influence to get the British to allow European Jews to enter Palestine, with no success. He was even unable to get Roosevelt to publicly speak out on the subject. According to Hecht, Kook told him that

The United States has a secret pact with Great Britain concerning the future of Palestine. It is intended to belong to the British. President Roosevelt will do nothing to violate that pact. He will not speak of Jews being massacred because that might excite popular opinion to rescue them–and result in their being sent to Palestine as a haven, which would be a violation of this pact [in December 1942, Roosevelt and allied governments did finally issue a declaration denouncing Hitler’s murderous project, but no concrete actions were taken — ed.].

When Kook organized a march of 400 mostly Orthodox Rabbis (but including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, z”l, who had been ordained as a Conservative rabbi some months before) to the White House, Roosevelt left before they arrived, on the advice of Wise and others.

In Louis Rappaport’s words (“Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the struggle to rescue the Jews of Europe,” p. xi),

During the era, Zionist leaders like Rabbi Wise and Nahum Goldmann told the State Department that Kook/Bergson was as big a threat as Hitler to the well-being of American Jewry.

Wise did his best, in the tradition of the medieval ghetto community leader who protects his people by virtue of his relationship with the goyische prince, but he failed utterly. And then he did his best to sabotage the more aggressive, public efforts of Kook. His publicly stated reason was that he feared that Kook’s actions (which included criticism of Christians who did not intervene) would stimulate an antisemitic reaction in the US.

But there was another motive, too. Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College (in part founded by Wise), explained it in a September, 2008, talk:

“In the 1930s, it was Wise who led the rallies against Hitler, so why did he fail so horribly in the 1940s?” Ellenson asked at a Holocaust conference organized by the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute …

He said part of the explanation lies in Wise’s “absolute and complete love” for president Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as his antipathy toward the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and toward the Bergson Group, whose leaders were followers of Jabotinsky, something that “helped blind him” to the need for more activism.

Ellenson said concerns of provoking an anti-Semitic backlash should not have thwarted the American Jewish leadership from actively working to prevent the extermination of six million Jews. “Jewish leaders have an obligation to be sufficiently flexible and imaginative to deal with unprecedented situations,” he said. He said he hoped that today’s leaders would respond more effectively to contemporary dangers facing the Jewish people, such as the Iranian nuclear threat.

“Stephen Wise spent too much time trying to protect FDR from criticism, and not enough time focusing on how to convince Roosevelt to help rescue Jews from Europe,” said Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff. “Rabbi David Ellenson is to be commended for acknowledging the mistakes of his predecessor and trying to ensure that the failures of the 1940s will not be repeated.”

It seems to me that this is almost exactly what is happening today, with the liberal Jewish establishment in America cleaving to its President, Barack Obama, while the latter pursues policies inimical to Jewish survival. It is ironic that Rabbi Ellenson criticized Rabbi Wise in this way, and then three years later viciously attacked opponents of the nomination of J Street and New Israel Fund activist Rabbi Richard Jacobs as head of the Union for Reform Judaism!

Kook and Merlin, by the way, both sailed to Israel in 1948 on the ill-fated Irgun arms ship Altalena, which was fired on by IDF forces on the orders of David Ben-Gurion (Merlin was wounded, as the Times article notes). Interestingly, later in life, Ben-Gurion said that he regretted the decision, which he would not have made had he known Irgun leader Menachem Begin as well as he had since come to know him.

I don’t know if Wise regretted his actions in regard to Kook, although he apparently understood that he had failed in his responsibility toward the Jews of Europe. Toward the end of his life, he wrote,

I have seen and shared deep and terrible sorrow. The tale might be less tragic if the help of men had been less scant and fitful.

Today’s establishment still has time to choose the right path.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Peter Bergson, Hillel Kook, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Holocaust

The New York Times publishes the columns of Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen regularly, and a disproportionate number of them can be called Israel-bashing. Sometimes they are quite ugly. But for sheer slimy dishonesty, nobody beats Nicholas Kristof when he aims his pen at Israel and her supporters.

Today’s column is representative. It starts mildly enough with a reflexive twitch at Jewish settlements:

Next month, Palestinians are expected to seek statehood at the United Nations. It’s a stunt that won’t accomplish much for anybody, but it’s more constructive than throwing rocks at Israeli cars — or, on the Israeli side, better than expanding illegal settlements.

Kristof and his ideological soulmates apparently think that if they say this enough, the way that Hamas says that Jews are descended from apes and pigs, it will become true. It’s not, and until Kristof and others can answer the arguments presented here, they should refrain from categorical statements like the above.

Yet the American House of Representatives voted 407 to 6 to call on the Obama administration to use its diplomatic capital to try to block the initiative, while also threatening to cut the Palestinians’ funding if they proceeded to seek statehood.

My goodness, imagine the power of that Zionist lobby who could pull the strings of 406 members of Congress! Of course, what Kristof leaves out is that the resolution threatens to stop funding the Palestinian Authority if it does not cut ties with the terrorist, antisemitic, genocidal Hamas!

So it isn’t a question of the poor, oppressed, third-world ‘Palestinian’ people of color being kept from self-determination and the state they ‘deserve’, it has something to do with not wanting to finance murderers. I wonder if he missed that point by accident?

Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, along with 13 Israelis, according to B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a vote of 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

This paragraph is so packed full of crap that I have to refute it in the form of a list:

1. B’Tselem is funded by European governments and left-wing US organizations like the New Israel Fund. It is in no way an impartial human rights group, but rather an extremist organization devoted to nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state. Do I go too far? Read this.
2. B’Tselem’s casualty numbers are wildly incorrect. IDF figures count 1,166 dead Gazans, of whom 709 were combatants and 295 civilians. A Hamas source later said that “about 600” of their fighters were killed. Considering the nature of urban warfare — and the fact that Hamas deliberately operated from civilian areas — this points to the exceptional care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties.
3. The fact that there were more Palestinians than Israelis killed does not imply that Israel did not have a right to defend itself, after thousands of rockets and mortars were fired into Israel, not to mention cross-border terror attacks like the one in which several Israelis were killed and Gilad Shalit taken hostage.

Such Congressional tomfoolery bewilders our friends and fritters away our international capital. It also encourages the intransigence of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reduces the chance of a peace settlement.

Kristof seems to suggest that Israel is responsible for the lack of movement in the ‘peace process’ — probably because it has returned to building inside of its ‘illegal’ settlements. But Israel stopped building for 10 months while the Palestinians found excuses to not negotiate. If ‘intransigence’ means conditioning negotiations on a particular outcome, then it’s the Arabs who are intransigent.

If you want to know what bewilders/fritters, it’s the Obama Administration’s focus on the Palestinian issue while Iran moves to get nuclear weapons and take over the region. But that’s another story.

In the last few years, a former government official named Jeremy Ben-Ami has been trying to change the political dynamic in Washington with a new organization — J Street — that presses Congress and the White House to show more balance.

From B’Tselem, Kristof moves on to cite another anti-Israel authority, this time the phony ‘pro-Israel’ J Street, a lobby financed by anti-Zionists (including George Soros and various Arab interests) which has called for Israel to be condemned in the UN Security Council, opposed sanctions on Iran, supported the Goldstone Report, etc.

But time out to resolve the dramatic tension that Kristof’s column turns on, to wit, how can a minority of Jewish fascists force the US Congress to abandon the struggling Palestinian people? Kristof’s answer seems to be that a minority of Jewish fascists speak louder than a great left-wing majority who agree with him about Israel.

American Jews have long trended liberal, and President Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Yet major Jewish organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, embrace hawkish positions.

(“Hawkish?” You mean like wanting the Palestinians to recognize that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, or not agreeing to the idea of settling millions of hostile Arabs who are descended (maybe) from 1948 refugees in Israel, to turn it into an Arab state?)

That’s because those Jews who vote and donate based on Israel are disproportionately conservative (the same is true of Christians who are most passionate about Israel issues). Ben-Ami argues that “the loudest eight percent” have hijacked Jewish groups to press for policies that represent neither the Jewish mainstream nor the best interests of Israel.

No, it’s because the American people are overwhelmingly pro-Israel — Jews and Christians alike — and members of Congress respond to their constituents. Not being one-issue fanatics more loyal to Israel than the US, the American Jews who voted for Obama did so primarily because of issues other than Israel (although as Obama’s tilt toward the Arabs becomes more and more evident, the Israel issue becomes more important and that support erodes).

Some see this influence of Jewish organizations on foreign policy as unique and sinister, but Congress often surrenders to loudmouths who have particular foreign policy grievances and claim to have large groups behind them.

I suppose it’s better to be a loudmouth than sinister. But it’s equally wrong. Nobody hijacked AIPAC and nobody fooled Congress. There is no anti-Israel silent majority — Jews are liberals, but they are also pro-Israel.

In the case of Israel, American Jewish opinion isn’t the monolith that many assume. A 2008 survey by the American Jewish Committee asked Jews what issue they most wanted presidential candidates to discuss. Most cited the economy; only 3 percent said Israel.

Agreed, Israel isn’t the top issue of Jewish voters. If it were, we would undoubtedly be hearing about our unique and sinister dual loyalties! But just because it is not their top issue, one can’t infer that it is not an important one. That same AJC survey showed that 67% of American Jews felt ‘very close’ or ‘fairly close’ to Israel.

There’s also some evidence that young American Jews are growing disenchanted as Israeli society turns rightward. (Palestinian extremism feeds Israeli extremism, which feeds Palestinian extremism, which feeds. …)

Kristof throws everything he can into the hopper, including this reference to the tendentious article by Peter Beinart, in which the latter displays equal ignorance about Israel and American Jews.

The Israeli electorate is moving to the right insofar as the policies of the peace movement since 1993 have brought only disaster. With regard to social issues, I suggest that Beinart and Kristof both commit the fallacy of assuming that Israel is America. It’s in the Middle East, and there are important differences in values and priorities. Hamas isn’t a bunch of 1960’s civil rights workers.

Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher standard — just as I do the U.S.

It’s not just because he doesn’t criticize Syria enough for its policy of raping, torturing and murdering people whose only crime is to complain about the dictatorial regime. It’s that he accuses Israel of similar crimes, when the accusations are not true — blindingly not true — and intended to help prepare the ground for Israel’s enemies to destroy her!

I am concerned about my tax dollars, too. In particular, I’m concerned that the US is funding the Palestinian Authority, which continues to pay its ’employees’ who are in Israeli prisons for terror-related offenses and in Gaza working for Hamas. I also don’t approve of stipends to the widows of ‘martyrs’, nor do I wish to pay for street signs bearing the names of famous terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi.

One of the interesting things about this article, in addition to the fact that almost every single proposition in it is either false or misleading, is that there is absolutely nothing new here. Kristof just rehashes a bunch of tired anti-Israel themes:

• The ‘illegality’ of the settlements
• The casualties of Cast Lead
• The power of the Israel Lobby, or at least the loudness of its mouth
• The pretense that J Street is anything but a mouthpiece for anti-Zionism
• The Beinart thesis that Israel is becoming anti-democratic and dangerously right-wing
• The application of the colonial paradigm where it doesn’t come close to fitting

That’s the best that a featured writer for the great New York Times can do!

Technorati Tags: Nicholas Kristof, Israel

Destroying Jewish history with a backhoe (2007).

Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the three terrorist attacks he worries about the most, and one of them is an attack by Jews on the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount:

There are still Jewish extremists roaming the Old City of Jerusalem, and some West Bank Jewish settlements are still home to men who believe they could hasten the coming of the messiah by igniting a cataclysmic war with Islam. I’ve met these men — rabbis among them — and they believe that God would save Israel if the Muslim world rose up in anger at the destruction of what one rabbi called “the abomination.”

They are right about one thing: The Muslim world would ignite if the Dome were attacked.

Ironies abound. Can I be excused for saying that the Muslim world is remarkably inflammable? Even a cartoon or two can light it up. If the IDF were to disappear tomorrow, don’t you think Hamas and Hizballah would ‘spontaneously combust?’

Goldberg correctly notes that Israeli authorities take the threat of Jewish extremism very seriously. Would that the Lebanese, Palestinian or Egyptian ones took a similar attitude to Muslim extremism! Instead, the Palestinian Authority pays stipends to the families of ‘martyrs’ and convicted terrorists.

But there is even a greater irony, which is that the Muslim waqf, to which Moshe Dayan foolishly ceded control of the Temple Mount in 1967, has been perpetrating a form of terrorism against the holiest place in Judaism for years. Here is a snippet from an article by former Mossad head Efraim Halevy, which fortuitously appeared today:

In the year 2000 I paid a clandestine visit to the Temple Mount, to what is called Solomon’s Stables, where I saw beautiful, 2,000-year-old columns. They do not exist anymore because they were destroyed by the Muslims, believing that if they destroyed the remnants of the Temple area, they would destroy Jewish rights there.

Herschel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Review has been writing about this for years:

Within the last few days [July 2007], a trench two-feet deep—starting from the northern end of the platform where Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock sits—has begun working its way toward the southern end of the Temple Mount. The work is being done without any regard for the archaeological information or treasures that may lie below. Destruction is particularly great in places where bedrock is no deeper than the trench. Some of the digging is being done with mechanical equipment, instead of by hand as a professional archaeological excavation would be conducted…

The Waqf is not acting illegally. According to one report, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has quietly granted permission for this destructive dig (otherwise the excavation would be a clear violation of Israeli law). The Israel Antiquities Authority, when queried about the matter, replied: “No comment.” So the dig is proceeding without interference from Israeli authorities. Perhaps their attitude is a product of fear; otherwise, it is inexplicable. Significant remains—pottery, tesserae from ancient mosaics, tiles and even architectural fragments—have already been observed in the soil from the excavated part of the trench.

As they have in the past, Palestinian leaders claim that neither Solomon’s Temple nor Herod’s Temple ever existed on the site. In a recent interview, Palestinian Justice Minister Taysir Tamimi stated: “About these so-called two temples, they never existed, certainly not on the Haram al-Sharif.”

The Waqf has a long history of ignoring Israel’s antiquities laws, and Israel has a long history of ignoring these violations. As early as 1970, the Waqf excavated a pit without supervision that exposed a 16-foot-long, six-foot-thick wall that scholars believe may well be the eastern wall of the Herodian Temple complex. An inspector from the antiquities department saw it and composed a handwritten report (still unpublished) before the wall was dismantled, destroyed and covered up…

In 1999, to accommodate a major expansion of an underground mosque into what is known popularly as Solomon’s Stables in the southeastern part of the Temple Mount, the Waqf dug an enormous stairway down to the mosque. Hundreds of truckloads of archaeologically rich dirt were dug with mechanical equipment and then dumped into the adjacent Kidron Valley. When archaeology student Zachi Zweig began to explore the mounds of dirt for antiquities, he was arrested at the behest of the Israel Antiquities Authority—for excavating without a permit.

For over two years Prof. Gabriel Barkay of Bar Ilan University (together with Mr. Zweig) has been engaged in a major sifting operation of this dirt, after he obtained a permit from the Antiquities Authority. Finds have included thousands of artifacts from all periods going back more than 3,000 years. They include a seal impression of a probable brother of someone mentioned in the Bible, Babylonian arrowheads dating to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C. (as well as other arrowheads from battles on the Temple Mount), thousands of coins (many dating to the Great Revolt against Rome), beautiful jewelry and even an ancient Egyptian scarab.

Infuriating.

Update [1304 PDT]: Victor Shikhman doesn’t like Goldberg’s article either.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Temple Mount, terrorism, archaeology, Waqf