From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  It is easy to imagine how President Wilson, an idealistic and naive scholar, was manipulated to drag America into war. But the hidden counselors’ grip on the president is only one aspect of the power that Zionism began to acquire over American foreign and military policy. Another important aspect is the manipulation of public opinion. It should be emphasized that while the overwhelming majority of Americans were opposed to entry into the war until 1917, American Jews who had been integrated for several generations were no exception. Among them, Zionism had only very limited and discreet support. They believed that Israel was doing very well in the form of a nation scattered throughout the world; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would attract a suspicion of “double loyalty” to their community; and they had no desire to emigrate to Palestine. Reform Judaism, the most visible current in the United States, had not officially denied its status as a religion or affirmed any nationalist aspiration. Chaim Weizmann explains in his autobiography that in order to obtain financial contributions from certain wealthy Jews, it was necessary to deceive them by evoking a “Jewish cultural home” (a university) in Palestine rather than a state: “To them the university-to-be in Jerusalem was philanthropy, which did not compromise them; to us it was nationalist renaissance. They would give—with disclaimers; we would accept—with reservations.”258 Moreover, the majority of American Jews from the old German and Dutch immigrants were rather favorable to Germany in the European conflict.

  The entry of the United States into the war was the result of a series of coordinated actions behind the scenes by a highly structured and powerful transatlantic network, including a core of bankers (some linked to the Rothschilds) and some influential newspaper directors, with those of The New York Times and The Washington Post playing major roles. One key player was Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential American journalists until after the Second World War. Lippmann was one of the craftsmen of the Committee on Public Information, the government agency charged in April 1917 with responsibility for war propaganda. Another leading thinker of the committee was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew (both by his father and mother), considered the first propaganda theorist with his book Propaganda (1928), which begins as follows: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. […] Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

  Militant Zionism was widespread among the recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe: between 1881 and 1920, nearly three million of them entered the United States legally (one million between 1897 and 1915). Established mainly in the large cities of the East, mostly poor but resourceful, they formed, from the beginning of the First World War, the majority of American Jews. Their influence on American society was still weak but would grow rapidly, thanks to their strong investment in the press and later in the cinema. At the beginning of the century, they had a hundred publications in English, Yiddish, and other languages. The Zionists could count on a large part of this press to mobilize the Jewish population in favor of war.

  The Treaty of Versailles

  After the defeat of Germany, the great powers met in Paris for the peace conference that began in January 1919 and closed in August 1920. The Treaty of Versailles, under the headline of “Minority Treaties,” placed Palestine under the provisional authority of the British, whose “mandate” included the terms of the Balfour Declaration, namely the creation of a “Jewish national home.” Making clear to the world that this was only the first stone of a much more ambitious edifice, Chaim Weizmann declared before the conference: “The Bible is our mandate.”

  Emile Joseph Dillon, author of The Inside Story of the Peace Conference (1920) wrote: “Of all the collectivities whose interests were furthered at the Conference, the Jews had perhaps the most resourceful and certainly the most influential exponents. There were Jews from Palestine, from Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania, Greece, Britain, Holland, and Belgium; but the largest and most brilliant contingent was sent by the United States.”259 Among the many Jewish advisers representing the United States was Bernard Baruch, a member of the Supreme Economic Council. Another was Lucien Wolf, of whom Israel Zangwill wrote: “The Minority Treaties were the touchstone of the League of Nations, that essentially Jewish aspiration. And the man behind the Minority Treaties was Lucien Wolf.”260

  The British government appointed Herbert Samuel, a Jew, as high commissioner for Palestine. The British mandate over Palestine was rightly perceived as a betrayal by the Arabs, who had revolted against the Turks in 1916 at the instigation of the British, weighing decisively on the outcome of the war. After holding a General National Syrian Congress in Damascus on July 2, 1919, they voted in favor of a United Syria with a constitutional monarchy that would include the territories currently occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. But when the decisions of the conference concerning the partition of the lands of the Ottoman Empire were made public, Syria was divided into three spheres of influence, while the future of Palestine remained suspended, vulnerable to Zionist ambitions. In his classic book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence, the famous British officer who had organized the Arab forces, acknowledged that the Arabs were betrayed, having revolted against the Turks based “on false hopes.” “If I had been an honorable adviser, I would have sent my men [Arabs] home and not let them risk their lives for such stuff.”261

  President Wilson had been persuaded to lead his country into war by the prospect of establishing, atop the heaps of corpses, a new world order of lasting peace based on the general disarmament of nations. His dream was enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations, signed June 28, 1919, and placed in the preamble of the Treaty of Versailles. The charter emphasized the need for general disarmament and provided for its implementation by a Disarmament Council in article 8: “The members of the Society recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the minimum compatible with national security and with the implementation of international obligations imposed by a joint action. The Council, taking into account the geographical situation and the special conditions of each State, shall prepare the plans for such reduction, in the light of the examination and decision of the various governments.” It was in this international perspective that “in order to make possible the preparation of a general limitation of armaments of all nations,” the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to rearm. The American Senate refused to ratify the US accession to the very League of Nations that had been Wilson’s fondest wish, and no country chose to set an example by reducing its armaments.

  Another problem, highlighted by Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, is that “the League of Nations was not simply to guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but could accommodate future territorial adjustments ‘pursuant to the principle of self-determination.’” But the Treaty of Versailles had excluded from the Reich about twenty million Germans, who now found themselves Polish—not counting the Germans in Alsace-Lorraine and the Soviet Union.262 When, taking note of this double hypocrisy, Hitler withdrew from the Conference of Disarmament and the League of Nations in October 1933 and committed to the remilitarization of Germany, his action was approved by ninety-five percent of Germans in a plebiscite.

  In 1914, Germany had the most flourishing culture in Europe and the most competitive industry in the world, qualitatively and quantitatively. The Treaty of Versailles imposed on it an astronomical debt of 132 billion gold marks, the catastrophic consequences of which were foreseeable. Renowned economist John Maynard Keynes warned against such an attempt at “reducing Germany to servitude for a generation”: “If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces
of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.”263

  In the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was the enemy of the British, Russia was allied with the United Kingdom and France through a complex set of alliances (the Triple Entente). But the Tsar had to face major revolutionary movements. In February 1917, he was forced to abdicate before the provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky. Kerensky yielded to British intimidation and decided to keep Russia in the war, an unpopular decision that seriously weakened him. That is when, on April 16, 1917, to get Russia out of the war, the Germans sent back home thirty-two exiled Bolsheviks including Lenin, soon joined by two hundred Mensheviks, and financed their propaganda organ, Pravda, in exchange for their promise to withdraw from the war if they seized power. A year later, they signed with Leon Trotsky (Bronstein by his real name) the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the Eastern Front.

  Thus, while the English were bringing America into war by supporting a Jewish movement (Zionism), the Germans managed to get Russia out of the war by supporting another Jewish movement (Bolshevism). Robert Wilton, the Times correspondent in Russia until 1920, writes in The Last Days of the Romanovs: “The Germans knew what they were doing when they sent Lenin’s pack of Jews into Russia. They chose them as agents of destruction. Why? Because the Jews were not Russians and to them the destruction of Russia was all in the way of business, revolutionary or financial. The whole record of Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien invasion.” The Bolshevik regime was predominantly Jewish from its inception. The Central Committee, which exercised supreme power, consisted of nine Jews and three Russians (Lenin was counted among the Russians, although his maternal grandfather, born Srul [Israel], was Jewish). Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918–1919, 458 were identifiable as Jews, according to Robert Wilton.264

  Chapter 7

  THE BIRTH PANGS OF ZION

  “The country which you are about to possess is a polluted country, polluted by the people of the country and their disgusting practices, which have filled it with their filth from end to end. Hence you are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, or let their daughters marry your sons, or ever concern yourselves about peace or good relations with them, if you want to grow stronger, to live off the fat of the land and bequeath it to your sons forever.”

  Ezra 9:11–12

  Marxism and Zionism

  By defining itself as a religion and officially renouncing any national or ethnic claim, Reform Judaism of the nineteenth century made itself vulnerable to the general decline of religious piety that also affected Christianity. Many emancipated Jews rejected not only the ethnic-national conception of Judaism, but also its religious conception. Some converted to Christianity, less to change their religion than to break with their inheritance and better assimilate. This was the case with Heinrich Heine in 1825. It was also the case a year earlier with Herschel Levi, who baptized his whole family and changed his name to Heinrich Marx. His son Karl was then six years old. Twenty years later, Karl Marx displayed a virulent hostility to Judaism, which he saw as the source of the capitalist spirit.

  However, in a notable and widely-noted paradox, the humanism of Marx remains imprinted with the very Judaism he execrated. Marx’s vision of world revolution painfully giving birth to the new world seems haunted by Hebrew messianism. In his Manifesto of the Communist Party cosigned by Friedrich Engels in 1848, the Communists “openly proclaim that their goals cannot be reached except through the violent overthrow of the entire social order of the past.” The proletariat, composed at that time of disinherited and uprooted peasants, became a new “chosen people” guiding humanity toward happiness. According to the Jewish journalist Bernard Lazare, the Jewish traditional denial of the spiritual world is the source of Marx’s philosophical materialism, in the name of which he ousted Gospel-friendly brands of socialism: “Having no hope of future compensation, the Jew could not resign himself to the misfortunes of life. [. . .] To the scourges that struck him, he replied neither by the fatalism of the Muslim, nor by the resignation of the Christian: he answered by revolt.”265

  It should be pointed out, however, that revolutions are not a Jewish specialty—the Jews have been more often the victims than the instigators of revolutions. According to the more detailed analysis of Hilaire Belloc, leader of the English “distributist” current, Marxism proves its filiation with Judaism by its determination to destroy three things valued by Europeans and traditionally despised by Jews: (non-Jewish) patriotism, (Christian) religion, and (landed) property.266 The first point is symptomatic of the failure of Jewish assimilation, since the aim of assimilation was to make Jews national citizens and not “citizens of the world,” that is, stateless internationalists. Marx’s internationalism is blind to the patriotic feeling of the working classes, and reproduces Jewish hostility to nations and nationalisms of all kinds.

  It is not the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century that is Jewish, but the Marxist ideology that gradually took control of it by merciless elimination of its competitors, derided as “nationalist,” “utopian,” “or “petit-bourgeois”—as Marx called Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, while shamelessly plagiarizing his work. Mikhail Bakunin, another member of the First International ousted by Marx, attributed Marx’s attachment to the state to his Jewishness, pointing out that the state is always the protector and best customer of the bankers: “What can Communism and the High Bank have in common? Ah! It is that Marx’s communism wants the powerful centralization of the State, and where there is a centralization of the State, there must necessarily be today a Central Bank of the State, and where such a Central Bank exists, the parasite nation of the Jews, speculating on the work of the people, will always find a way to exist.”267

  Marxism, at bottom, is still a Jewish response to Judaism. It is a crypto-Judaism that doesn’t know itself. And it is precisely because he had not left the mental matrix of Judaism that Marx was incapable of recognizing its real nature: “Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.”268 This thesis, taken up by the Marxist Abraham Léon who sees the Jews as a social class (un peuple-classe),269 is a decoy insofar as it underestimates, as belonging to the “superstructure” of Jewish society, what is rather its deep ideological foundation: the Jews are, foremost, an idea (un peuple-idée).

  The journalist Moritz Hess had long shared the vision of his friend Karl Marx. He even published calumnies against Bakunin after the General Congress of the International in Basel (September 5–12 1869), accusing him of being an agent provocateur of the Russian government and of working “in the interest of pan-Slavism.”270 Yet seven years earlier he signed his book Rome and Jerusalem under the name of Moses Hess. Hess is a precursor of Zionism, convinced that “the race war was more important than class struggle” in history. Marx and Hess have something in common: they both broke with religion. But while in Marx this was a divorce from Judaism (symbolized by his baptism), in Hess it was, on the contrary, a return to Judaism seen as an ethnic identity and no longer as a religion. Marxism is, in some way, an extreme extension of assimilation (a fusion of Judaism into humanism), while Zionism is an extreme reaction against assimilation (the return of Judaism to nationalism).

  Hess’s book Rome and Jerusalem (1862) had little immediate echo. Only after the outbreak of the Dreyfus affair in 1894 could a substantial portion of the European Jewish community be convinced of the failure of assimilation and the incurability of anti-Semitism—despite the fact that the mobilization of the Dreyfusards in 1899 and the final rehabilitation of Dreyfus in 1906 could logically lead to the opposite conclusion. The Dreyfus affair was what launched Zionism, by converting Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, cofounders
of the World Zionist Organization. Herzl writes in his Journal: “Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land. […] Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”271

  The term “anti-Semitism” was introduced by Wilhelm Marr, founder of the League of Anti-Semites (Antisemitische-Liga) in 1879 and journalist with the newspaper Antisemitische Hefte. It is based on an abuse of the word “Semite” forged by linguists for the purpose of language classification, just like its “Aryan” counterpart. Anti-Semitism designates a modern form of Judeophobia based on an ethnic conception of Jewishness, rather than the religious conception of traditional Christianity. It is therefore a mirror image of Jewish nationalism that, precisely at this moment, got rid of the religious definition of Jewishness to adopt an ethnic definition.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of Jews living in Germany for several generations remained as indifferent to the Zionist appeal as to the revolutionary appeal, cherishing above all their social success. It was among the Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Russian territory or had emigrated to Germany and Austria-Hungary that these movements would become tidal waves. These eastern European Jews formed the revolutionary vanguard that in March 1848 arose in the German Confederation and other regions under the domination of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. It was among them also that in 1882, the appeal of the doctor Leon Pinsker of Odessa for the Jews’ “return to the ranks of the nations by the acquisition of a Jewish homeland” was taken up. At the seventh World Zionist Congress (1905), young Jews from Poland and Russia took the lead. Among them were Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow, who later in London became key figures behind the Balfour Declaration. In 1922, as president of the Zionist Executive Committee, Sokolow made a strikingly prophetic declaration: “Jerusalem some day will become the capital of the world’s peace.”272 As for Weizmann, he remained until 1948 one of the most energetic promoters of Zionism in England and the United States, and ended his life as the first president of the State of Israel.