I often wondered at the bewildering manner in which fellow Jews embrace a foreign nation and act against their own and their native country’s interests. Growing up in the Bronx, New York, in one of the largest and most homogeneous Jewish neighborhoods in the world, I encountered minor attachment to Zionism, even after Israel became an entity, and little mention of the Holocaust. We lost much of my father’s family to the World War II violence, which I described in a book, “Not Until They Were Gone.” The book’s title reflected the realization that it was not until many years after the war, not until decades after meeting my Polish and French cousins that the WWII atrocities impacted me. I wrote the following in my book.
From my memory, the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank in 1947 did not stir the American conscience. The diary of a young and precocious Dutch girl and her family, living in Nazi-occupied Holland in World War II, and escaping sent to a concentration camp by hiding for two years in an attic, was only another war story. Anne Frank’s life was a foreign event, and Americans had no moral or personal attachment to the issue. This passivity lasted until the 1952 American publication of the diary, which received much publicity and superlative reviews. Eleanor Roosevelt’s introduction and the New York Times Book Review brought the diary to the attention of a vast audience. A successful play followed in 1955, and, from that time, Anne Frank became a legend. To the liberal, secular, and humanist Jewish society, which was the major components of Jewish life in the United States at that time, Anne Frank’s story was universal and not assigned to any particular ethnicity.
Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, wanted it framed in that manner. The play’s writers, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and its director, George Stevens, were carefully chosen to subscribe to his thoughts.
After the six-day war of 1967, a victorious Israel invigorated Jewish populations throughout the world into closer identification. Publicizing Israel as rising from the ashes of the Holocaust to creating a vibrant Jewish nation became a powerful theme for uniting the Jewish people and portraying Israel and Jews as a singular notion. Holocaust, in books, films, plays, and discussions became an essential part of Jewish American life, and Americans began to react to its tragic consequences.
I often wonder at my own passive attitude to the World War II genocide. Not that I was unaware; I had firsthand knowledge available to me from associates and people I met at work and at social gatherings.
I recall working with a Polish orthodox Jewish man, who had been sent to the Auschwitz labor camp. He was 15 years old at that time and sufficiently healthy to do rigorous labor, until he became injured. As for others at the camp, not being able to work meant being shot. Those no longer able to work were loaded into trucks that carried them to the execution grounds. Five times he was prepared to be shot; five times he escaped execution. He told me how he escaped; I recall three of the times.
One time, the truck driver, a Jewish acquaintance from his neighborhood, momentarily stopped the truck, and allowed him to escape. Another time he leaped off the speeding truck and ran away. The third time was macabre; the bullet missed him and he lay beneath the corpses until the executioners left. Freedom was always short-lived; available food was scarce, and he felt sick from hunger.
Each time he crept back to the Auschwitz labor camp; being permitted to enter by the Jewish Kapos, who controlled the activities of the interned Jews. Each time, when he could no longer work, he approached death. Each time he survived and returned. Finally, on January 27, 1945, the Russian army entered the camp and assured his survival.
Estelle Glaser Laughlin was a good friend of a friend of mine. A fellow Pole, she grew up a few blocks from my own cousins in Warsaw, Poland. Estelle wrote a captivating and inspiring book of her years in several concentration camps, Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust, and participated in many Holocaust Memorial Museum projects. I never spoke with her in detail about the years in the concentration camp but read her book; one episode explained my own, and my fellow Americans passive attitude to the Holocaust.
Estelle relates in her book that, “from the first day that letters began to arrive from the United States, Mama promised us, and herself, ‘Wait until we go to America and tell our family what happened here. They will understand.’” When they arrived in the United States as refugees and met her aunt in Long Island, she noticed they had little knowledge or interest in their wartime tragedies. Talking about them solicited a reply from her aunt that they also had difficult times in the United States during the war — nylon stockings were not available. American soldiers died.
When I was a young and available bachelor in New York City, I knew a Jewish woman, born in Czechoslovakia and then living in California. One aspect of her life deterred me; being Orthodox, which created problems, especially on Saturdays.
When the Germans invaded and incorporated Czechoslovakia into the Third Reich, her father owned a flourishing lumber factory. Somehow, through connections, the father delicately managed to maintain the lumber factory and supply the Germans with railroad ties. In the last months of the war, as the Soviet army approached Czechoslovakia, her entire family was sent to a concentration camp. They survived, but lost everything.
Her uncle had immigrated to the United States, and, after the war, established a successful real estate business in booming Southern California. Unable to immigrate to the United States, the woman’s family managed to enter Canada. After several years, the California uncle was able to bring his brother’s family to California. Brother followed brother in real estate, and, by mid-1950, her father was a well-known multimillionaire Californian.
She floated, not knowing what to do with her life, and travelled around the world before I met her in New York. This seems like a success story that has no significance; it was not a success and it had significance. She suffered from enormous depression and anxiety, undoubtedly due to her travails during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Financial independence could not give her life.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, I met a woman, who became a friend, allied to the Palestinian cause. Born in Warsaw, Poland, at the start of World War II, her divorced Jewish mother left her at the doorstep of a Christian neighbor and disappeared. The Christian family raised the child as their own, and the child knew them as her parents. After the war ended, her birth mother arrived at the home and demanded return of the child. Somehow, the Jewish woman had survived the war by working in a munitions factory in Germany.
This incident became a celebrated court case and the Polish court awarded the child to the family that raised her. Subsequently, the birth mother immigrated to the United States, where she pursued attempts to regain her child. An attempt proved successful, and she reappeared several years later with a New York court order that ruled the child must be given to the birth parent. In a final judgment, the Polish court allowed the birth mother to obtain the child. I’m not aware of the reason; I suspect it to be because those who raised her had not officially adopted her. The trauma of being torn from the parents she loved in a country she knew, and being sent to a mother she did not know and to a country that was foreign showed clearly in her expressions. Smiling on the outside, I sensed a deep grief on the inside.
Pondering about these episodes made me aware that most Americans had insulated themselves from foreign griefs, did not digest pessimistic news, and were skeptical that anyone’s pain was more extraordinary than other worldly pains. My family experiences might sound strange, but a child adapts to the world he/she sees and takes the happenings as normal.
One incident in my boyhood that bothered me was a visit to B’nai B’rith or, it may have been another Jewish organization that organized outdoor activities for youngsters. The activities proved to be an enticement to a subtle lecture of why we should be attached to the Zionist mission and work in its behalf. I am sensitive to hypocrisy and duplicity; when it happens, I search for a reason and the reason is usually that someone who is bad is trying to look good.
Most Jews whom I knew, including myself, did not engage in discussions of the Middle East, passively accepted Israel, even in the 1956 war, and were not Zionists nor ready to perform Aliyah. We were Americans and never thought of sharing our birthright or loyalty with another nationality.
At work and in social gatherings I began to meet and become friends with Palestinians. Gathered in my Manhattan apartment, we debated the Middle East issues, more for polemics than for convictions. Israel and the Middle East remained subdued to the attention we gave to the Vietnam War. I leaned toward favoring the Palestinian struggle but remained passive and silent to their plight. The six-day 1967 war abruptly changed my attitude.
Whereas Israel’s victory in the six-day war enraptured the Jewish community and brought a wholesale alliance from those in a new generation that visualized a strong Jewish state in which they could share, I saw a lying, cheating, devious Zionist entourage who could live anywhere and had one mission — steal land from native peoples and depict themselves as liberating Jewish people from their mansions in Beverly Hills, California, Greenwich, Connecticut, Palm Beach, Florida, and other wealthy enclaves. The Zionists had already destroyed centuries of Jewish life throughout the Middle East, including Iraq, where Jews had owned 70 percent of the industry.
The succeeding years kept me from knowing what was happening in the Middle East. Our new family moved to Seneca Falls, New York for four years and then to my wife’s hometown, Madrid, Spain. Using Madrid as a home base during the Franco transition, I consulted throughout Europe for six years and was crudely aware of the 1973 war and its aftermath. After returning to the U.S. in 1979, I again closely followed events in the Middle East and became more angered at Israel’s calculated oppression of the Palestinians and ever-growing grip on the Jewish people. In the mid-1980s, cadres of Jews began questioning Israel tactics. Their thrust was to achieve peace through a two-state solution. Other than arguing about it, the objectives were not clear. All remained Zionists.
Americans for Peace Now (AFP) took the original initiative as a look-a-like of Israel’s Peace Now and has closely followed its parent’s blueprints, which are driven from an Israeli perspective. I always viewed AFP with suspicion, as an organization only going so far and deterring Jews from going too far from Zionism.
At one meeting of a smaller group in 1989, I used the word genocide to describe the oppression of the Palestinians. This received a retort from a person who had never left American soil, that “I do not want my Holocaust to be demeaned by reference to a Palestinian genocide or any other genocide.”
Another group, while debating Israel’s oppression, was interrupted by three toughs, and I mean toughs — all of them strong weight lifters with appearances of bar bouncers, who physically threatened the group and asked them to disband. Calm was installed when a woman volunteered, “We can argue here among ourselves but outside let’s present a united front in favor of Israel.
Except for AFP Now, the Jewish groups for peace slowly disbanded, co-opted by the Oslo Accord, the September 13, 1993 signing of a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiator Mahmoud Abbas, by the 2000 Camp David accords, and the continuous promise of a two-state solution. Israel and its supporters, who envisioned only a “no-state” that united Jews throughout the globe, knew that the best way to silence critics is to give them something to dream about.
With no place to hang my hat, in 1999 I joined other critics of conventional media and started a website in the newly expanding Internet. I write this because some of my earlier articles, written 25 years ago, needed approval and action from Jews who sensed and cared about the destruction the Zionists were committing on the Jewish people. Nothing came but criticism for alternative thoughts that are embraced today.
Jerusalem, The Barrier to Mid-East Peace
Part III- The Hidden Agendas, August 2000
Israel is a physically small and new country with an eager population and big ambitions. It needs more prestige and wants to be viewed as a power broker on the world stage. To gain those perspectives Israel needs a capital city that commands respect, that contains ancient traditions and is recognized as one of the world’s most important and leading cities. Almost all of the world’s principal countries from Egypt to Germany to Great Britain have as capitals the great cities of the world. And to assure the objectives, there can be only one Jerusalem and it must be the one that contains the Holy City.
The Mid-East struggle, Trajectory to Catastrophe
Part I- The Fate of the Palestinian People, June 16, 2001
Unless the world quickly recognizes the dimension of the Mid-East struggle upon the Palestinian people, the pursuit by Palestinians for self-determination and common expression as a Palestinian nation is over.
Some groups, mostly antagonistic toward AIPAC and devoted to seeking peace, began to form and attract disaffected Jews. A 2017 article, Jewish Voices for Peace, summarized these efforts at that time. JVP has evolved into a leading and trusting voice for preventing the appropriation of the Jewish people, while JStreet remains an AIPAC foe and a Zionist apologist. These organizations have not solved the principal problem, which has a major part of the post 1967 Jews regarding Israel from a public relations efforts — the courageous state that overcame anti-Semitic enemies and would be able to defend Jews from the eternal oppression they suffered, the oppressed Jews who accumulated a highly disproportionate amount of education and financial assets in the countries in which they lived. The truth is that a mass of the Jewish population felt attached to a winner that only needed a slight massaging to become the “Light above nations.”
The slight jar toward reality became a blast of awakening as the genocide that had been going on for 75 years began to reach its climax. The Jewish people have been co-opted and what follows is a split between those who refuse to be co-opted and those who remain co-opted. The former will be citizens of the countries in which they were born and not citizens of an international conspiracy. The latter will play victim as they cause victims, in an endless cycle of death and salvation.
Too late. Rabbinical Judaism, and the humanist attachment that accompanied it are no more. The Jewish religion does not exist. In its place is an ethnocentric and nationalist movement, similar to the Nazi movement. Due to its international reach, intensive undermining of western governments, and disregard for human life, this movement is the most sinister and viral that post WWII life has witnessed.
Two incidents summarize the manner in which the Zionists co-opted American Jews.
Israel Finkelstein, an outspoken critic of Israel for decades, has been subjected to continuous abuse, culminating in his being denied tenure at DePaul University. At one event, where he spoke, I listened to several Israeli students at the Georgetown University discuss means of disposing with Finkelstein, which they eventually did. In all of his years of travail, I never noticed any Jewish group come to Finkelstein’s assistance.
In a casual conversation with a Jewish person I met and who knew I came from New York, the person asked my opinion of Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. I supplied a positive answer that drew the questioner into a tirade, “Don’t you know that Mamdani would not approve the purchase of Israeli bonds.” I could not understand how this American person could equate running U.S. largest city with the purchase of Israeli bonds. The lives of Israelis, right down to the last nickel, are more important to him than the struggling lives of his fellow Americans.
In every square inch of American territory, the Zionist war machine and its dedicated followers have co-opted the thoughts of American Jews. The pattern has been partly reversed and has slowed. Still a long way to go before control of the American Jews and control of the American governing system are given back to the Jews as Americans and Americans as Americans. We have come from there, from a faulty United Nations Declaration 181 to a recommended bizarre halt to Israel’s war on Gaza. In Gaza, the thrust is to have the Palestinians assume a new identity and have the words Palestine and Palestinian disappear. In the West Bank, a more silent genocide continues to eternity. For sure, the diabolical Zionist propaganda machine will find a new twist that cajoles Jews to follow Israel.