Summer 1981
Issue: Volume 2 number 2

It had been a nasty, rainy night when an elderly, affluent Hartford couple
made their way from their home to a meeting. As their car slowly turned left at
the entrance to the Jewish Community Center, another automobile raced out of
the fog and rammed into them. My cousin, whose countless civil and
philanthropic deeds had endeared her to the community, was dead before she could reach the hospital; her husband seriously injured.

Ever since the appearance of my Readers' Digest article, in which I crossed swords with Zionist Organization chieftain, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, my
relatives in Hartford had looked upon me as a plain and simple nut, if not a
traitor. Former close family ties had deteriorated to a point of near-total
ostracism. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, and I rushed to Connecticut for the last rites of a wonderful woman, and was among the 800 to pay Sunday morning tribute to her in a packed synagogue-the very one from which, in the presence of many family members, I had been excoriated by the rabbi during the High Holy Days services thirty years earlier for daring to speak out publicly against Zionism.

Having flown up from Washington, I spent the night at the home of other
cousins from whom my iconoclastic views had separated me even before the Digest piece appeared.

Cousin Bern and I stayed up reminiscing late into the night, and, of course,
the Middle East crisis came into our conversation. "You know, I have never
been a Zionist," he said. "But something had to be done to provide a home for
Jewish refugees. That is why I have always supported the State of Israel, given
substantially to the UJA, and even headed the Hartford drive." This reasoning,
so typical of thousands of other Jews, has been responsible for the Zionist
takeover of the American Jewish community-lock, stock and barrel.

My rejoinder, I feared, fell on ears as deaf as those I had encountered in my
continual efforts to open doors to reasoning and to banish emotionalism.
Americans of Jewish faith cannot visualize the extent to which their rabbis and
secular leadership, operating through Organized Jewry, have totally deceived
them into confusing humanitarianism with nation-building, religion and
nationalism. A home could have been found in 1947 for the 285,000 survivors of Hitler's concentration camps without ever establishing a state; just as today security for the Jews of Israel can be obtained without the continued expansionism wrought by the West Bank settlements policy or the ruthless repression of the rights of the Palestinian people.

But only an ever-larger state will appease the hungry ambitions of Zionist
leaders. Privately they have incessantly declared that they have no interest in
refugees, only in creating a sovereign state. In their atheism and
agnosticism, they have manifested even less concern for Judaism, the religious faith.

Adroitly exploiting Nazi genocide, their propaganda has used the Holocaust to
extract a blank check from Zionist and non-Zionist co-religionists which enabled
them in 1948 to bet the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power
politics.

Speaking unqualifiedly in the name of all Jews, Zionist acumen made certain
that the politicians remained hypnotized more than ever by the "Jewish vote."
All they had to do was to remind both political parties that their eloquent
support of Israel was a prerequisite for their conquest of pivotal election
states.

When so much is at stake in the Middle East, inevitably the question must
arise: How has the Zionist will been imposed on the American people? Far from all Jews believed in the concept of the Jewish state, and the Jews themselves
constituted but a very small minority of the American population, less than three percent. Is it possible that Americans have been so apathetic that six
million can manipulate 230 million?

But there are many compelling reasons why population figures are of little
relevance to the Zionist success story. Mahatma Gandhi once remarked: "Numbers are not critical to any struggle. Strength and purpose are." This strength, matched by wealth and position, can be summed up in one word: power. The Zionists have been able to muster fantastic muscle at the right moment and at the right place, or instill the fear that it might be used.

The triumph of Zionism would never have been Possible without the 20th
century's Holy Trinity: Hitler, the supine politicians and the compliant media. By
labeling those who opposed the course upon which Israeli leadership intractably
committed their new state as "anti-Semitic," they crushed budding dissent.

Without understanding the underlying reasons, the Jewish rank and file could
point to the large number of prominent Christian supporters of the state and
boast: "Just as it is not necessary to be Jewish to love Levy's rye bread, so one
need not be Jewish to be a Zionist." Everyone loves a winner. What little
organized opposition there was to Zionism totally collapsed with Israel's stirring
victory in the June 1967 six-day war. The anti-Zionist American Council for
Judaism all but vanished, and thereafter, even non-Zionists were not ashamed to be counted in Zionists ranks, as Commentary editor Norman Podhertz so loudly proclaimed in "Now, Instant Zionism." ...

....Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Hebrew University, Israel Shahak,
himself a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, maintains that undeviating devotion to the
State of Israel by Israeli and American Jews is "both immoral and against the
mainstream of Jewish tradition and is nothing but Jewish apostasy."

Dr. Shahak added:

Jews used to believe, and say it three times a day, that a Jew should be
devoted to God, and God alone. A small minority still believe it. But it seems to
me that the majority of my people has left God and substituted an idol in its
place, exactly as happened when they were devoted to the golden calf in the
desert and gave away their gold to make it. The name of this modern idol is the
State of Israel....