Nasser’s priority in 1952 was to ensure that the British withdrew from the Suez Canal in 1956, as provided for by the agreement passed twenty years earlier. He needed this diplomatic victory to obtain sufficient credibility in the eyes of his people to weaken his internal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus be in a position to negotiate with Israel. Israel’s hawks therefore decided to prevent this historic turn, with the aim of keeping Egypt cast as an enemy of the West. In the summer of 1954, four days before British Secretary of State for War Anthony Head traveled to Cairo to prepare for the withdrawal, Egyptian Jews trained in Israel committed several false flag bomb attacks against British targets, designed to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion’s hagiographer, sums up the logic of this psychological operation: “Why not blow up American and British property in Egypt ? Washington and London would think Nasser couldn’t control the extremist Moslem Brotherhood or the Communists. And if he cracked down on them, all the better. They would retaliate and there would be no end to violence in Egypt. Would Britain leave the strategic Suez Canal to a nation in flames? Would America let it? Presumably not.”380
Operation Susannah, the second confirmed case of false flag terrorism in modern history, failed due to the arrest of one of the bombers, leading to the apprehension of twelve other Israeli agents. The scandal came to be known as the “Lavon Affair,” named after the minister of defense Pinhas Lavon who took the blame. The goal, in the words of the head of Israeli military intelligence Benjamin Givli, was “to break the West’s confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime.”381 The scandal was played down in the Israeli and US media, and it was not until 2005 that the Israeli state recognized its responsibility. In the 1950s, however, Israel exploited the incident by making its population believe that innocent Israeli agents had been victims of Egyptian anti-Semitism.382
Moshe Sharett, minister of foreign affairs from 1948 to 1956 and prime minister from 1954 to 1955 (who grew up in contact with the Arabs and knew their language and culture, unlike the Ashkenazi who constituted the majority of the government) advocated moderate Zionism and respect for international law. He was opposed by Ben-Gurion’s hawks, who conceived of the Arabs as a primitive enemy that had to be crushed purely by force.383 This clan, Sharett wrote regretfully in his newspaper in 1955, wanted “to set the Middle East on fire,” “to frighten the West into supporting Israel’s aims,” and thus “raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle.” Sharett included in this condemnation Pinhas Lavon and Moshe Dayan, as well as Shimon Peres, who would eventually become president of Israel at the age of 84.384
There were no limits to what the Israeli hawks would do to sabotage the dialogue between Sharrett and Nasser and to prevent a lasting entente between Israel and Egypt. Using the pretext of the death of an Israeli during an infiltration operation by Palestinians—on land stolen from them—Ariel Sharon attacked Gaza on February 28, 1955, forcing Nasser to break off negotiations with Sharrett and driving the latter to resign. The hawks returned to power. Paradoxically, it was the Israeli attack on Gaza that caused the outburst of indignation necessary for the formation of a Palestinian nationalist movement: “The Israelis probably saved us from extinction with that attack,” said Yasser Arafat.385 The creation of Fatah (Palestine Liberation Movement) in 1958 complicated Nasser’s task, but, recognizing Arafat’s determination and political intelligence, as well as his uncontested leadership in the eyes of his people, Nasser became his protector and main supporter.
As a result of the Gaza attack, Nasser decided to arm Egypt appropriately, realizing that his only chance of peace rested on his ability to respond to Israel’s attacks. He therefore endeavored to convince the United States and Great Britain to sell arms to him, but rejected the condition imposed on him by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to engage in a formal alliance with the United States that would be unacceptable in the eyes of his people. Although ideologically anti-communist, Nasser was finally compelled to accept the competing offer from the Soviets, which was generous and theoretically unconditional. In September 1955 he signed a contract with the USSR for the purchase of arms through Czechoslovakia. It set off an intense Zionist campaign to discredit Nasser, in the eyes of the West, as a danger to the stability of the Middle East and, conversely, to present Israel as the only reliable ally in the region. On February 14, 1956, Ben-Gurion sent an open letter to Eisenhower, disseminated throughout the American Jewish community, demanding US arms aid for Israel.
On July 19, 1956, a month after the British withdrawal from Suez, the US government canceled financing for the Aswan Grand Dam, instantly destroying Nasser’s most ambitious project for modernizing Egypt. In response, Nasser nationalized the canal on July 26, compensating the shareholders. In October, the British and French signed the “Protocol of Sèvres,” a secret agreement with Israel to take back the Canal Zone from Nasser and, if possible, overthrow him. (France correctly saw Nasser as an ally of Algerian nationalists of the FLN.) The Machiavellian plan was as follows: Israel would attack Egypt and occupy the Sinai Peninsula; Britain and France would threaten to intervene, demanding that each side withdraw from the combat zone, while proposing an armistice that would be unacceptable to Nasser since it would leave Israeli troops inside Egypt. Nasser would have no choice but to refuse the ultimatum, and English and French troops could then launch a seemingly justifiable invasion.
The offensive began on October 29, 1956, with the Israelis, British, and French counting on the fact that Eisenhower was busy with his re-election campaign. Khrushchev vigorously protested and threatened to send troops against Israel. Eisenhower took Khrushchev seriously, and made the right choice by joining his protest, while publicly blaming the British and the French rather than the Israelis. (Ike’s popularity was such that no press campaign could prevent his re-election.) Israel withdrew from the Sinai, and an international peacekeeping force was stationed in Sharm El Sheikh until 1967.
Israel drew two lessons for the future: first, to arrange to never again appear as the aggressor, for the United States could not tolerate it; and second, to build a stronger influence over US domestic policy and place a more conciliatory man in the White House.
Chapter 8
THE INVISIBLE COUP
“I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous god and I punish a parent’s fault in the children, the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren among those who hate me.”
Exodus 20:5
John F. Kennedy, the Lobby, and the Bomb
In the 1960 presidential elections, Vice President Richard Nixon was in line to become Eisenhower’s successor. He was not regarded as a friend of Israel, and has even been suspected of anti-Semitism, on the basis of recently declassified White House recordings. On the Democrats’ side, the Zionist lobby threw their support to Lyndon Johnson, a longtime ally. As the Senate majority leader in 1957, Johnson had strongly protested against UN sanctions aimed at forcing Israel to retreat from the Sinai, with a letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles published in The New York Times (February 20, 1957).386 But John Kennedy won the primaries.
Kennedy was worse than Nixon for the Zionists. His Irish Catholic background was already a bad omen, and his father, while ambassador in London, had supported Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy toward Hitler. In September 1960, the Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party, voiced concerns about whether Joe Kennedy “did not inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s.”387 Referring to the traditionally Democratic “Jewish vote,” the author asks: “How can the future of Israel (sic) be entrusted to these men who might come to power thanks to Jewish votes, strange and paradoxical as this may seem.” In his Pulitzer prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances for the presidency, rather th
an build it on hypocrisy. Worse, as a senator, Kennedy had expressed sympathy for the Palestinian refugees, whose camps he had visited in 1956.388
Kennedy came to power at a time when the dismantling of the French, British, and Belgian colonial empires had led to the independence of twenty new African states. As a senator and while campaigning for the presidency, he had urged Washington to “recognize the force of Arab nationalism” so as to “channel it along constructive lines.” “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution. […] The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor or forever in bondage.”389 Kennedy felt no sympathy for Israel’s anachronistic colonial adventure, but great admiration for Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hero of Arab nationalism. Nasser was perceived by the Zionist leaders as the greatest obstacle to their secret expansionist agenda, especially because of his willingness to recognize Israel within the 1948 Partition borders.
As soon as it became clear that Kennedy would beat Johnson in the Democratic primaries, Zionists pressured him to pick Johnson as his running mate, rather than Adlai Stevenson, another unlucky contender for the presidential ticket, who was the preferred choice of the Kennedy team. (Kennedy would name Stevenson Ambassador to the U.N. instead). “You know, we had never considered Lyndon,” Kennedy once apologized to his assistant Hyman Raskin, “but I was left with no choice […] those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems.”390 It is on record, thanks to Kennedy insider Arthur Schlesinger (A Thousand Days, 1965), that it was in fact Philip Graham and Joseph Alsop, respectively publisher and columnist of The Washington Post, both strong supporters of Israel, who convinced Kennedy to take Johnson on his ticket, in a closed door conversation.391 Schlesinger doesn’t reveal Graham and Alsop’s arguments, and states that Kennedy’s final decision “defies historical reconstruction”—a curious statement for a historian so well informed, which can only be explained by Schlesinger’s refusal throughout his 872 pages to come to grips with Kennedy’s Middle East policy and his battle with Zionism. Alan Hart has convincingly filled in the blanks: both Graham and Alsop were strongly pro-Israel as well as pro-Johnson, and both could exert a huge influence on public opinion. So “Kennedy was forced by Israel’s supporters to take Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate.”392 Why would the Zionists want Johnson as vice-president, rather than keep him as Senate majority leader, a better position for blocking anti-Israel legislation? It can only be because they saw the vice-presidency as a step to the presidency. And the sooner, the better.
After the Press came the Bank: John Kennedy soon received a visit from Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg (who had already financed Truman in exchange for the recognition of Israel), who said to him, as Kennedy reported to his friend Charles Bartlett: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” Bartlett recalls that Kennedy was deeply upset and swore that, “if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it.”393 Thanks to his father’s fortune, Kennedy was relatively independent, but not to the point of being able to reject Feinberg’s offer. And so, after naming Johnson as vice-president, he appointed Myer Feldman as his special counsel on the Middle East. Born of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, Feldman was known as “a behind-the-scenes liaison to Israel,” and often met with Israel’s Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and Foreign Secretary Golda Meir, as The New York Times candidly remembers him.394
From 1962 to 1963, JFK submitted seven bills in an effort to reform the Congressional campaign finance system. All of them were defeated by the influential groups they sought to curtail. Meanwhile, with the support of the attorney general Robert Kennedy, Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, conducted an audit on the American Zionist Council (precursor of AIPAC), the concluding report of which recommended that it be registered as a “foreign agent” and therefore subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would considerably limit its influence.395
The Zionists’ worst fears proved justified. Historian Philip Muehlenbeck writes: “While the Eisenhower administration had sought to isolate Nasser and reduce his influence through building up Saudi Arabia’s King Saud as a conservative rival to the Egyptian president, the Kennedy administration pursued the exact opposite strategy.”396 During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself in letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of state to supporting UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Former Undersecretary of State George Ball noted in his book, The Passionate Attachment (1992), that Ben-Gurion reacted with “a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish-American leaders, in which he stated: ‘Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser’s missiles and his Soviet MIGs. […] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.’”397
But the greatest danger that Kennedy represented to Israel was his determination to stop its nuclear weapons program. By the early 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, both prime minister and defense minister, had entrusted Shimon Peres to nudge Israel toward the secret manufacture of atomic bombs, by diverting materials from the cooperation program Atoms for Peace, launched naively by Eisenhower, and by organizing industrial espionage and smuggling. Kennedy had made nuclear disarmament one of his grand missions on the international level. He had announced it at the General Assembly of the United Nation on September 25, 1961, with a powerful speech declaring his “intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race—to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.” The challenge had been well received by Nikita Khrushchev, and the first step was taken on August 5, 1963, with the signature of the first international Test Ban Treaty. In 1963, with only four countries in possession of nuclear weapons, nuclear disarmament was an achievable goal, and Kennedy was determined not to let this opportunity pass. “I am haunted by the feeling that by 1970, unless we are successful, there may be ten nuclear powers instead of four, and by 1975, fifteen or twenty,” he said prophetically during his press conference on March 21, 1963.398
Israel, however, was just as determined in its secret race to be the first and only country in the Middle East with the bomb. Informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, Kennedy did his utmost to force Israel to renounce it. He replaced CIA Director Allen Dulles by John McCone, who had, as Eisenhower’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), leaked to The New York Times the truth about Israel’s Dimona project; the story was printed on December 19, 1960, weeks before Kennedy was to take office. As Alan Hart writes, “there can be no doubt that Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb was the prime factor in his decision to appoint McCone.”399 Then Kennedy urged Ben-Gurion to allow regular inspections of Dimona, first verbally in New York in 1961, and later through more and more insistent letters. In the last one, cabled June 15, 1963, to the Israeli ambassador with instructions to hand it personally to Ben-Gurion, Kennedy demanded Ben-Gurion’s agreement for an immediate visit followed by regular visits every six months, otherwise “this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized.”400 The result was unexpected: Ben-Gurion avoided receiving the letter by announcing his resignation on June 16. As soon as the new prime minister Levi Eshkol took office, Kennedy sent him a similar letter, dated July 5, 1963, to no avail. Did Ben-Gurion resign in order to move into the shadows of the deep state? Eleven days later, his words showed the same commitment to provide Israel with the bomb: “I do not know of any other nation whose n
eighbors declare that they wish to terminate it, and not only declare, but prepare for it by all means available to them. […] Our numbers are small, and there is no chance that we could compare ourselves with America’s 180 million, or with any Arab neighboring state. There is one thing, however, in which we are not inferior to any other people in the world—this is the Jewish brain. And the Jewish brain does not disappoint; Jewish science does not disappoint. […] I am confident […] that science is able to provide us with the weapons that will serve the peace and deter our enemies.”401
The secret showdown between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion on the nuclear question was revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option in 1991, then Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb in 1998. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a review of Cohen’s book on February 5, 1999, which reads: “The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the US administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear program. Cohen demonstrates at length the pressures applied by Kennedy on Ben-Gurion. He brings the fascinating exchange of letters between the two, in which Kennedy makes it quite clear to [Ben-Gurion] that he [JFK] will under no circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state. The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option.”402 The subject has been taken up by Michael Karpin in 2007, in The Bomb in the Basement. Karpin writes: “Kennedy placed the limitation of the nuclear arms race at the center of American foreign policy. In his judgment the United States, as the leader of the free world, was responsible for restricting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Kennedy displayed great determination in his fight for disarmament and nuclear nonproliferation. Israel’s nuclear enterprise was in direct contradiction with the principles of his policy.”403
From Yahweh to Zion Page 31
