Memories and History

"Each moment in history flashes by us. Many are precious and unique, yet some are vile, some vulgar and some are ugly ones."

As I sit here in my #COVID-19 Safe-space, in front of the Facebook prompt "What is on my mind". I sit here in deep contemplation of human existence -mortality if you may-and the direct link between historical incidents and the human mind to remember those fleeting moments in History and the fickle memory of man

When I first sat down, after making my morning cup of coffee, in front of my computer. I had noticed a post on Facebook this morning regarding today being the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald near Weimar in Germany. A camp that was judged second only to Auschwitz in the horrors it imposed on its prisoners it was "Liberated" on the 11th of April 1945 the newspaper headlines glared at that time: "US Army reaches Buchenwald ... It was the very first camp to be liberated by American troops".

WOW...

And then I remembered as a historian that some four months before on January 27th, 1945, the horrific Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.

And as I sat there, with the coffee in front of my computer I began to contemplate just how many reading this post know this or even care to know this?

I then thought of the "first person human memory" link to Yom HaShoar (Holocaust Remembrance Day) and specifically those Holocaust survivors, who experienced first hand the horrors and how they are slowly dying away. That the physical link to the actual experienced events; the scenes, the smells, the emotions, the human touch those factors of humanity are being slowly lost to eternity.

As I was sitting here, I the son of a "baby boomer" a child of a GI who served his country in WWII, realized we are also getting nearer to VE Day. VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces on the 8th of May 1945.

THAT day that was the long anticipated day of the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was, according to the allowed Western point of view, what "ALL" the Allies aspired for in Europe in WWII.

For those Jews in hiding in Nazi Occupied Western Europe they prayed and looked forward to "D-Day", that needed first step to Victory in Europe and defeat of the dreaded Nazi Regime.

Those of occupied Europe especially the Jews lived day by day in deep and agonizing anticipation to their "deliverance". We can read these feelings expressed to "Kitty" in the "Diary of Anne Frank". For Anne and for very many other Jews regretfully D-Day was already too late.

For those too young to know, WE privileged Jews, the "baby boomers" the son's and daughter's of the greatest generation in America, Canada, Great Britain. WE can still hear the voices. Those voices of our Momma's or Dad's sometimes speaking in somber tones of "it". That "IT" which is mark of Cain on humanity.

As a young child I remember helping my grandfather with his millinery business and how one day I found him sitting in the office holding a letter sobbing. As he saw me quickly removed the letter and pictures and stuffed them in a drawer of his large roller top desk. When I asked him, "Why are you crying?" I never learned why but I can guess that like many of "US"-"WE" the "luckier" Jews, those whose grandparents who had left the "Pale of settlement" in the 1880's or before had family members somewhere in Europe whom our families never heard from again. Those family members who oh so desperately tried in vain to leave Europe but were not given visas to enter many countries and above all the Homeland promised to us in Eretz Yisrael, where the gates where sealed by Arab hatred and British complicity in their "White Paper".

As to history -You, our son's and daughter's and especially our grandchildren. YOU DO know the meaning of (...-) dot dot dot dash the 'V' for victory” motto derived from the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the famous message in two parts in the poem broadcast by the BBC to the FFI or French Forces of the Interior which referred to the French resistance fighters in France from Paul Verlaine's poem "Chanson d'automne."

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
"When a sighing begins / In the violins / Of the autumn-song".

Then, on June 5, to signal that sabotage efforts should begin, the next three lines were sent:

Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone
"My heart is drowned / In the slow sound / Languorous and long."

You may not or may never have heard the infamous line, "The Longest Day"; those words uttered by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel recalled in a book by Cornelius Ryan published in 1959, telling the story of D-Day, the World War II invasion of Normandy and later in the classic black and white movie.

Ask any millennial today, "What do you know about WWII? or What is the importance of June 6th? and at the most they will show an uncaring or unwillingness to listen...to grandpa....

With the wave of Jews finally allowed to leave Russia in 1990 the full extent of the Russian military's participating in the capturing and releasing of some of "OUR" family members became fully known. Very few are aware of the extent of the Jewish "Resistance"- the "Partisans" made famous recently in the 2008 movie "Defiance" with Daniel Craig.

For many of us raised in the school systems in the West we do not know of the contribution of our fellow Jews of the Soviet Union. We do not fully know the true importance of WHAT this day means to "US". Not just ALL freedom loving people but specifically to "US" ...."WE" Jews the wandering Jews.



What this day means is expressed here in this rare BBC recording from April 20th 1945, where inmates at Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp freed from death sing what they now longed for in OUR anthem of hope 'Hatikva' to finally have a land of our own.

Facebook and Our 41st Wedding Anniversary

Upon seeing the "Facebook" memory reminder of my wedding anniversary the first thing that came to my mind was how the wife Rena came into my life. 

I had been released from my unit  on a 72 hour pass from the IDF at 15:00 (3PM) near Tebnine in Southern Lebanon during "Operation Litani" in March of 1978. 

In my desire to "get out" and reach my empty "single soldier" apartment, I had grabed the first "Tramp" (ride) out which took me to Biranit an Israeli army base just over the northern border in Israel. Another ride took me to the crossroads and bridge near the Druze village of Hurfeish.  

In those days there was no means public transportation nor were there hardly any vehicles, especially at night! So in order to get "home" I walked in the moonlight for three hours along that very same long curving road from the crossroads near the Druze village of Hurfeish where just three years previously, the same three terrorists who committed the "Massacre in Maalot",walked and ambushed a Peugeot tender that carried eight Christian women back to their home in the Northern Arab Christian village of Fassuta murdering Hasibah  Shalala and six women who had sat in the rear of the tender were severely wounded and according to the forensic report the vehicle was it by over 170 AK-47 rounds.

As I walked home in the darkness on the moonlit road I knew of the imminent threat that still existed at that time from Palestinian Terrorists and despite my exhaustion I forced myself to remain awake and ready,

I finally reached my darkened 42 Square meter one bedroom "Amidar" read subsdized Government apartment. Having no money to pay the rent or electricity bill the power was shut off. I opened the door- at 1AM and "crashed out" on my "signed for" immigrant bed.

Around 9AM I awoke- still exhausted- and took a cold shower and gathered up my dirty laundry and went to the "WIZO" run laundrymat for our development town. 

The two women who ran the laundrymat Chassiya and Chana were two Holocaust survivors, some of the handful of "Ashkenazic" non Mizrachi Jews in our "development town" settlement "created from scratch" in the pherphical area of the Western Galilee in 1957 mainly for the tremendous influx of "Jews of Arab lands" who had been ETHNICALLY CLEANSED -deprived of all that that they owned and possessed by the vengeful Moslem world. 

When I arrived in Ma'alot in March of 1976 before entering the IDF as a "Chayal Boded" -single soldier. I had met Chassiya and Chana and they "adopted me" and helped me greatly as I struggled with my period of immigration after the collapse of my Garin for Kibbutz Ketura. 

Both of these women Chassiya and Chana went above and beyond to help me by allowing me to have my clothes cleaned. Before the IDF I found employment at several low paying jobs and did not have enough money for my bills -rent, city tax, water bill and electricity and food. There were many who tried to help and it was embarrassing to be poor. 

On that morning as I was returning from WIZO I encountered Chaya Sklar z"l another recent arrival to Ma'alot an American divorcee who worked at that time as a secretary to Elaine Kopp -later Levitt, also an American divorcee who had also recently arrived in Maalot and was in charge of a Jewish Agency Volunteer for Israel program.

Chaya, the omnipresent "Jewish mother", told me that there was a new single American Olah (Immigrant) named Rena who had recently arrived in Ma'alot and urged me that I should "Make an effort" to meet her.

I waited outside the old Aliyah Center on Ma'ale HaBenim Street since Rena was working the evening shift as an RN at Nahariyah Hospital. I saw her get off from the transport that brought her "home" at around 11PM+ that night. Since I was on a short leave and time was of importance and though the hour was now very late I waited until she entered the apartment before I went and knocked on her door. She answered who is it? I introduced myself she opened the door slightly and she replied; "Very nice my name is Rena and I am tired" and she then closed the door. That is how we met thanks to Chaya.

In this picture standing with me and the wife next to David's grave are the members of the IDF tank crew of David Sklar z"l  who come to every annual Memorial Day ceremony for fallen soldiers

I had written a previous post on David Sklar z"l who was the son of a divorced mother Chaya Sklar z"l who was mortally wounded on the outskirts of Beirut in 1982 in the "First War in Lebanon".

David was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on the 4th of June 1962 and at the age of 9 his family made Aliyah to Hertzliya. David and his family his older sister Deborah and his mother Chaya, who was divorced, arrived in Maalot a very short time before I had entered the IDF as a "Chayal Boded" in September of 1976.

David and his family lived in the "New Binyan HaMalit"-"the elevator building" near today's Shouk (Marketplace) and it was the only multi (8) storied building in Maalot. It was located below my small one room 42sqm apartment on the hill side. It's saving grace one can say or novelty, was that it had an elevator.

David had only recently entered Yad Netan Junior High School near Akko and he was like a little brother to me.David would relate to me his experiences and secrets in life as any younger brother would to an older one. Our friendship was close since it was quite evident he was badly treated and ignored as a child by his father who abondoned them and divorced Chaya. David was in need of an "older" brother to be there for him. And yes my being there also alone with no family drew me close to him as well.
As a 12 year old fatherless boy growing up in Ma'alot, David also drew close to me as though a "big brother" because of our background as Americans and of course the ability to converse in English. I also had a fairly extensive collection of books. David would come to visit, to talk and listen to my "extensive" album collection that I had brought from the USA.

My neighbor and good friend Kenny Sherman, who lived across the hall in our building, was also a Chayal Boded. We would sit and talk for hours drinking beer on leave listening to the music.
Upstairs in the same Amidar apartment building 431 Jabotinsky lived Ilana Black-the painter and her teenage daughter Sharon. Ilana would invite Kenny and me to share Shabbat evening meals with her.
On Shabbat our very small "Anglo -Saxon" community would meet for a football, softball or baseball game near the water tower (symbol of the township) of Ma'alot near the infamous Netiv Meir Elementary school -scene of the horrific Massacre in Maalot in May of 1974.

In April of 1982 the wife and I decided to go back to the USA for me to complete my University degree that I had stopped when I supposedly left for six-months as a volunteer for Israel in Sept. 1974.

The Shabbat before we left David came by our apartment he held our oldest son also named David on his knee, he loved the fact they had the same name and he once told me how he could not wait to play games like a "big brother" with him. Rena and I knew that "tensions were high" and we Israelis were embittered by the apparent failure of UNIFIL to prevent terrorist incursions into Israel. It was only a matter of time that something serious would occur because of the constant threats and intermediate mortar and artillery shelling from what was euphemistically called "Fatahland" the area south of the Litani river. The UN force failed in their mandate to prevent "Fatahland" and it had become a PLO "no-go zone" as Lebanese residents fled and the neutered Lebanese Government had given Fatah free run over the area.

As David Sklar z"l sat there on our couch with our son David, I could feel his deep sadness of our upcoming departure. My last words to him were like those of any "Older big brother" to watch out and I warned him to make sure and promise me that he would wear his body-armour vest!

As I mentioned we left Israel with our oldest son David in April of 1982 and moved in with my parents in Birmingham, Alabama, so I could restart University to complete my degree. We choose to go to Birmingham because of the expense of University and available housing. Rena was able to find employment as an RN in the Children's Hospital in the large Medical Center. And we were looking for an Apartment -which we finally did  and moved in. I had just started classes at a local Junior College and was not at home when the wife Rena received a phone call that June day. The call came from an ex-American friend Daphne Even-Zohar who was living in her father's apartment on the floor below in our old apartment building 327 Keren Hayesod. Daphne called to inform us of the sad news about David's death. I had just started my first semester in a local Junior College to "get back into the rut of learning" when the conflict began. At first, I had thought of going back to my unit, but my commanding officer said for me to stay in the USA. So when I came home from school and Rena told me that David was killed. At first I wanted to rush back but I realized that to do so would overturn all the plans we had made to improve our family. We stayed and we of course missed the burial and the"Shiva- mourning period" in Israel but I mourned together with Rena his passing. 

It was a hot July morning in Southern Beirut. There was a lull in the fighting. His tank was parked to guard a road block. He eagerly volunteered to be in "communication" -to listen to the radio chatter. The commander of the tank crew related to me that David sat outside on the engine cowling of the hot tank on the front near the driver seat.

The Palestinian "Alphabets"-various terrorist organizations- had been raining down mortar fire all day and all night. The tank crew was exhausted. They had been "buckled up" inside their old stifling humid modified US Made M-60 Abrams tank. Evidently the PLO terrorists had exhausted their supply of mortar rounds and they had to resupply. The firing suddenly ceased for several hours so the soldiers began to relax.

It was hot and very humid the soldiers became too lax. They opened or removed their old heavy Viet Nam War vintage surplus -read US AID - body Armor vests.... suddenly they could hear the echo of the "thump" sound as a mortar round is fired. David who was wearing the VRC helmet of the communications didn't. The round landed nearby throwing a long piece of shrapnel from the 122 Soviet made mortar round that pierced his body as he unsuspectingly sat there.
His fellow crew members rushed him across the crossroads underfire to the IDF medic unit casualty station the doctor immediately saw the long shard and how it had seared and cauterized in David's chest. He called for immediate air evac to Rambam in Haifa. A helicopter special medic evac that had been on standby in the air arrived.
David lingered on for another 24 hours or so...his mother and sister were able to see him before he died...and was buried in the Military part of the cemetary of Ma'alot which is between Tarshiah and Moshave Meona where the photo of his tank crew, Rena and I was taken.
Chaya angered over David's death argued with Debrorah the daughter and she left for America. Chaya died of cancer not long after and is also buried in the civilian part of the cemetary.
Because David has no family to represent him I notified the Organization for Fallen soldiers that I and my family would gladly "adopt" him and represent him at the ceremonies on Rememberance Day. All our children who have also served in the IDF have participated in the evening memorial day for the fallen ceremony by lighting his candle on the stage over the years. We did not want David's sacrifice to be forgotten and we as fellow American Immigrants took the mantle with pride to be his family.

As for our wedding in January of 1979:

Prior to our "big day" I had been on duty 24/7, four days before our wedding as second in charge of the Civil Guard in Ma'alot. I had left my bride to be Rena in our apartment and had answered the call for duty as a volunteer to help protect the residents as I had over the years since my arrival in Ma'alot.
Initially we were not told of terrorists in the immediate area by the police or the army because of the psychological effect that many residents had from the horror of the previous incident just five years before in May of 1974.

Two days before the attack, my in-laws Chaim z"l and Esther Brownstein boarded an EL AL flight from New York to come for our wedding, unknowing of the incident in progress.

I stayed at the roadblock at the single entrance to Ma'alot until around 6:45AM then I took the jeep and drove to the Synagogue, which at that time was located in the mid-sized building of the original "Yehiva Hesder" near what was then the edge of the townlet near "Schunat" Cohen.  I had been invited for the traditional "Aufruf"- Yiddish for “calling up” by Cyril Atkins and several young religious men affiliated with the new Ashkenazic Synagogue. The "Aufruf" is a pre-wedding "Aliyah" to the Torah by the groom to be on the Sabbath before a wedding.
Just as we finished the reading of the Torah we could hear the sound of rapid machinegun fire (M-16s and deep throated AK-47s) and then a massive explosion. I grabbed my M-1 carbine and ran to the jeep and sped to the Guest House.

The guest house at Maalot served both as a resort and as a convalescent home, which at that time was operated by Kupat Holim, the Histadrut sick-fund. It had been occupied by about 230 people, most of them elderly, and also by a group of IAI employees with their families who were spending the weekend there.
During the previous evening most of the Hotel guests were told to evacuate and they did so in buses to another in the chain of guest houses. Only the IAI group refused to leave.

During the night the three heavily armed terrorists from Naif Hawatmeh’s Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine entered the Histadrut guest house just before dawn.
Pictured here -above left- is the contents of the backpack of the terrorists. Notice the amount of RPG shells and grenades they carried.

As they had in previous incidents the terrorist seized hostages for the release of other terrorists imprisoned in Israel. Regretfully, the only casualty in the attack was Miriam Alfasi, 31, of Beersheba who was killed while trying to escape through a window.(see the photo below)

Cpl. Itzhak Ravivo; 20, who was the hero of the hour, gave this account of the action. Ravivo had been the radio man of the IDF unit assigned to Ma'alot.

At about 6:30AM the excutive officer of the battalion entered the local townlet Army post (HaMaarbach) and received the notification, of a sighting of shadows of figures that had crossed in the lone street light of the road that led to the Guest House from 02:30 that morning.

Angered by not being informed sooner the excutive officer ordered the "alert force platoon" to "mount up" on their truck while his jeep driver together with him and Ravivo raced up to the Guest House.
Upon arrival the executive officer had gone to a lower level of the rooms as Ravivo and the driver ascended to the hallway of the upper floor of rooms.

Upon entering the lower hallway the executive battalion commander noticed a dark faced man with a large handbag, and had asked him who he was and for his ID. The terrorist mumbled something in Arabic and drew the Kalatchnik of AK-47 he had over his shoulder. The excutive officer scuffeled with him and grabbed the rifle from him.

Simultaneously as this occured:

The two other terrorists luckily both came out of one of the rooms in the upper hallway where the hostages were being held and opened fire on Ravivo and the driver. who immediately returned the fire.
The first terrorist who was closest to them threw a hand grenade as he and his accomplice turned and fled. Ravivo smacked the grenade in mid-air with his hand back towards the fleeing terrorists.
It exploded near the attackers who had been racing downstairs and out of the building. Just as the two terrorist exited the stairwell and managed to get some meters from the building. They were gunned down by other soldiers about 150 yards from the door. One had an explosive suicide belt which he either set off or it was hit by the Alert force. That explosion was the explosion we heard in the Yeshivat Hesder.

Later that day exhausted I rode in the Subaru station wagon of Ron Soloman- an immigrant to Ma'alot from Australia, to Ben Gurion Airport to pick up my in-laws, who had been totally unaware of the drama that occured in Ma'alot until they saw the headlines of the Jerusalem Post; "Terrorist Attack in Ma'alot"

The next very next day, a Sunday-which is the first day of the new week in Israel it was a very unseasonably warm January evening. We had a very nice wedding with our new friends and co-workers that we had made in our short time in Ma'alot.
My parents had not come, so the Atkin's Cyrill and Flora kindly volunteered to stand in for them.
The two "Ashkenazic women" Hanna and Hasiyah, survivors of Aushwitz-Berkinau, who managed the WIZO center and had assisted me during my Army service like two doting Aunts by doing my laundry in the laundry center. They lovingly helped prepare the small hall of the center into a real "wedding hall".(As can be seen in the photos)
I had purchased the flowers and much of the food and decorations but it was

Hanna and Hasiyah's love that made it a real wedding.
My good young neighbor and friend Avi Peasch was the "DJ".

The Hupa was held outside the hall as the evening drew into night. It was an unseasonably warm January and a very pleasnt evening as our friends held candles Rena and I were married by HaRav Kaufman -a young English Rabbi from the all new Kiryat Chinuch religious boarding school and it was "watched over" by HaRav HaRashi of Ma'alot Yoseph Gabai.

As we danced -to the music of the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever and enjoyed the good company of our friends Shabbati Alon the commander of the Mishmar Azrachi notified me around 10PM that we would need to head for home since word had come down that there may be more terrorists in the area.

Chanah and Hasiyah had planted a pine tree where our chupa stood but a disease that effected several pine trees in the area killed it and all that remains is the stump.

Thus we began life in our new old home...some 41 years ago.

                                                                     

The Mendaciousness of the "Palestinians"

The word "mendacious" is THE word that best describes the spurious use by the "Palestinians", those "Arabs of the Mandated Areas"  who once overly identified themselves as "Syrians".

The name "Palestine" was given, in what many considered to be a malicious and malevolent manner, by Mark Sykes who was an astute student of Middle Eastern history. However this is may not be true for Sykes also showed interest in the Zionist cause as a way of improving life for the Arabs.

Sykes KNEW of the true meaning of the term "Palestine" from his studies at the Jesuit Beaumont College and Jesus College, Cambridge. He was fully aware of Hadrian's infamous speech in front of the Senate in Rome, where upon announcing the "Pyrrhic Victory" over Shimeon bar Kosiba in 135CE he forbade the mention of Judea. In it's stead referred to the area in the name of the peoples who were the ancient arch enemies of the Jews as mentioned in the Bible as the Philistines.

However that is NOT why Sykes referred to the future Mandated Area as "Palestine" he instigated the use of the term "Palestine" to designate the neutrality of British interests in the area.
So when he relayed to the Bunsen Committtee his findings, he deferred to designate the future British Mandated area as ""Palestine", since it was the wishes of  Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George who held sympathetic, as well as humanitarianism, messianic Protestantism and pro-Zionistic wishes towards the creation of a "Homeland for the Jews".

It is a historical fact that much of the geopolitical drive behind the Balfour Declaration can be traced back to long established British interest in the security of the Suez Canal and communication with India.
Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George believed they could successfully merge humanitarian philo-semitism with pragmatic geopolitics securing a better future for an oppressed people-the Jews of Eastern Europe by backing the new "Zionist movement" of Theodore Hertzl and their own empire simultaneously.
Another major factor was the news of the appallingly horrific pogroms in: Odessa and of Warsaw (1881), Kishinev (1903), Kiev (1905), and Białystok (1906) against the defenseless Jews which was foremost on their minds.

Leopold Amery, an Assistant Secretary of the War Cabinet who was involved in moving Lloyd George’s Eastern policy, once observed how:

“England was the only country where the desire of the Jews to return to their ancient homeland had always been regarded as a natural aspiration which ought not to be denied, if its fulfillment ever fell within the power of British statesmanship."

This is why Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George were adamant in retaining the area mandated to them in the San Remo Treaty of Serves.

Mark Sykes, who was a prodigy of Lord Kitchner, the Secretary of State for War, remained a purist who shunned democratic progress, instead he vested his energy in an indomitable Arab Spirit. He was a champion of the Levantine tradition, of a mercantile trading empire, finding the progressive modernisation in the West totally unsuited to the desert kingdoms.
Because of his knownledge of the Middle East he was a star member of the Committee, formed by Maurice de Bunsen on the orders of the British government. Sykes became the dominant person on the Committee, and so garnering great influence on British Middle Eastern policy, which came down in favour of long term partnership with the Arabs as opposed to that of Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur J. Balfour and the Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

It was on the suggestion of Mark Sykes that the Bunsen Committee assigned the label of the ancient Roman territory Syria-Palestinia; "in which both belligerents and neutrals are alike interested” in case of the partition or zones of influence options. The Committee defined a British sphere of influence that included "Palestine" while accepting that there were relevant French and Russian, as well as Islamic interests in Jerusalem and the Holy Places. The French sought to secure a Greater Syria and control over Maronite areas in Lebanon.

British attitude in Middle Eastern poloicy was influenced by former Viceroy of India Nathaniel Curzon and Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu along with several army officers in the Middle East who were not only skeptical but openly hostile to Zionism.  Gertrude Bell, the pro-Arab Foreign Office advisor and Middle Eastern traveller was an advocate of the Arab cause as well as her friends T. E. Lawrence and Sir Percy Cox in the "Arab Bureau", founded by Sykes in Cairo in January of 1916.

During the early years of the conflict in World War I, Britain had made deals with the Russians, Arabs and the French.

There was the "Istanbul /Constantinople" Agreement, which was a secret World War I agreement between Russia, Britain, and France made on March 18th, 1915 for the postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire. It promised to satisfy Russia’s long-standing designs on the Turkish Straits by giving Russia Constantinople (Istanbul), together with a portion of the hinterland on either coast in Thrace and Asia Minor. Constantinople, however, was to be a free port. In return, Russia consented to British and French plans for territories or for spheres of influence in new Muslim states in the Middle Eastern parts of the Ottoman Empire.

This first of a series of secret treaties on the “Turkish question” was never carried out because the Dardanelles campaign failed and because, when the British navy finally did reach Istanbul in 1918, Russia had made a separate peace with Germany and declared itself the enemy of all bourgeois states, France and Britain prominent among them.
The Sykes-Picot and Husayn-MacMahon correspondence (1915–16) clearly pulled in other directions from the Balfour Declaration in its pursuit of geopolitical objectives.

The failure in Gallipoli led to an increased desire on the part of the UK to negotiate a deal with the Arabs and because of this -Emir Faisal bin Hussein was presented with the Damascus Protocol in 1915 by the Arab secret societies al-Fatat and Al-'Ahd which declared the Arabs would revolt in alliance with the United Kingdom and in return the UK would recognize Arab independence in an area running from the 37th parallel near the Taurus Mountains on the southern border of Turkey, to be bounded in the east by Persia and the Persian Gulf, in the west by the Mediterranean Sea and in the south by the Arabian Sea.

During this troubled and difficult time during World War I -ten letters—five from each side—were exchanged between Sir Henry McMahon and Sherif Hussein.

However, in a private letter sent on 4th December 1915 by McMahon to Charles Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst,who was a British diplomat and statesman who served as Viceroy and Governor-General of India from 1910 to 1916 and later served as a permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, with Arthur Balfour, halfway through the eight-month period of the correspondence. We can see an inkling of possible machiavellian British duplicity that led to the failure of the 1919 agreement between Emir Feisal and Dr. Weizmann :

[I do not take] the idea of a future strong united independent Arab State ... too seriously ... the conditions of Arabia do not and will not for a very long time to come, lend themselves to such a thing ... I do not for one moment go to the length of imagining that the present negotiations will go far to shape the future form of Arabia or to either establish our rights or to bind our hands in that country. The situation and its elements are much too nebulous for that. What we have to arrive at now is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy and bring them on to our side. This on our part is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from academic haggling over conditions – whether about Baghdad or elsewhere.

Sykes agreement with François Georges-Picot, which was intended to be a "temporary arrangement" between two diplomats that sketched out vague ‘zones of interest’ should the Ottoman Empire collapse suddenly, as everyone expected it to do, in 1915.
Sykes believed his agreement with Picot to be a temporary wartime measure by designating areas of likely military occupation and control that would avoid disagreements between Britain and France over their areas of responsibility.

The French for their reasons wanted a sphere in Lebanon and Syria to extend eastward towards the rich oil fields in Mosul of Iraq.
The British on their part also were highly interested in Mesopotamia for the oil of Iraq and the port of Haifa as their sphere of influence. Britain was given control of Haifa and Acre and of territory linking the Mesopotamian and Haifa-Acre spheres. The "rest of Palestine was" to be placed under an international regime.

Over time Sykes came to feel that his "agreement" with Picot gave France a better deal than expected and it bothered him. The Sykes-Picot agreement did not create any firm borders but it left most of the region in Arab hands.

Mark Sykes, championed the "British Interests" and "Pan Arab cooperation" against the Turks, remained in favour of Arab autonomy under British supervision, with some regions fully independent.

There are some items that suggest that Sykes may have had a hand in promoting the Balfour Declaration to the Cabinet. In March of 1919 he had visited Palestine in regard to the tentative agreement made between Emir Feisal, leader of the Arab movement, in Aqaba with Dr. Chaim Weizmann.
Sykes may have been converted to the cause of Zionism at that time due to the provision included in the Balfour Declaration that stated that: "... it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..." and the feelings of Emir Feisal.
Feisal had written Felix Frankfurter, an associate of Dr. Chaim Weizmann in a lettter dated the 3rd of March 1919;

and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed, I think that neither can be a real success without the other. 

At the Versailles Peace Conference, in 1919, a junior diplomat present, Harold Nicolson, wrote in his diary the day after Sykes' death: "...It was due to his endless push and perseverance, to his enthusiasm and faith, that Arab nationalism and Zionism became two of the most successful of our war causes..."

"REAL Jews" with Kishkes -A Stone for His Slingshot -By Ben Hecht

What is in my mind is the infamous speech given by the famous Hollywood screen writer Ben Hecht in 1947 entitled A Stone for His Slingshot -By Ben Hecht which has parts very, very salient to what is occurring today in American Judaism. I will paraphrase him so it will be understood.

The Palestinian dezinformatsiya campaign (BDS) had brought my Jewishness to the surface several years ago because of their mass media campaign of lies and incessant attacks on “My Tribe,my people - Israel”. I feel a deep and sincere anger towards the Tragedy Tourists of the perpetual Nachba, their cronies and most of all to their JINO sympathizers.

I too have put my furious pen to work chastising “Americanized Jews” for their silence in the face of the growing Palestinian Negation of Israel dezinformatsiya campaign. These "JINOs" who support these haters all write that they are proud of being "Non-Zionist Americans" and that they are sick to death of Israel and the "Occupation" and "Settlements". These rabidly "Non-Zionistic" Joos hate Israel with a fervent passion in-order to achieve recognition and "love" from their fellow "PC" millennial's. They try their best to be even more extreme in their hatred of Israel to show just how far they ae willing to go to distance themselves from the mere mention of Israel or god forbid "Zionism".

So here I reprint the article I once saw regarding a famous incident in Zionist History when "REAL Jews" with Kishkes existed in America.

A Stone for His Slingshot -By Ben Hecht | Stuart Schoffman  Spring 2014

Intro:

Ben Hecht (1894–1970) was a noted journalist, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He worked extensively on behalf of Zionist causes and was the chairman of the American League for a Free Palestine.

Stuart Schoffman, was a former Hollywood screenwriter, journalist and translator that is living in Jerusalem. His most recent piece in these pages was “Hollywood and the Nazis” (Winter 2014).

Tucked amid the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago is an undated typescript of 21 pages, with a penciled heading: “Speech at dinner at Slapsy Maxie’s, L.A., financed by Mickey Cohen.”

Hecht was, of course, a fabled writer for stage and screen, Mickey Cohen was the notorious Los Angeles gangland boss (recently portrayed by Sean Penn in the movie Gangster Squad), and the speech, which has never before been published, is one of the most riveting and remarkable Jewish fundraising speeches ever delivered. What gives?
The outrageously prolific Hecht—writer of reportage, novels and short stories, Broadway theater and Hollywood movies, and eventually Jewish propaganda—was always attracted to outlaws. The first of his six or seven dozen produced (though not always credited) screenplays was Underworld, a 1927 silent film directed by the Austrian-Jewish immigrant Josef von Sternberg. In his freewheeling autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote:

I made up a movie about a Chicago gunman and his moll called Feathers McCoy. As a newspaperman I had learned that nice people—the audience—love criminals . . . It was the first gangster movie to bedazzle the movie fans and there were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director.

Hecht won an Academy Award for Underworld, at the very first awards in 1929. (He was nominated five more times but never won another.) In 1932, he wrote Scarface for Howard Hawks, proudly claiming that “two Capone henchmen” showed up after midnight demanding assurance (which he disingenuously provided) that Scarface was not about “the great gangster.”

Meanwhile, Hecht had established his own reputation as a literary outlaw, notably with his novel A Jew in Love, a rapier-sharp vivisection of a contemptible book publisher named Jo Boshere, Abe Nussbaum. Published in 1931, it sold some 50,000 copies and was voted best novel of the year by the senior class at New York’s City College, but influential Jews accused Hecht of self-hatred. The New York Times quoted Rabbi Louis I. Newman, of the Reform Congregation Rodeph Sholom, as saying that the book was “an atrocious malignment of the Jew.”

In A Child of the Century, Hecht tossed off the fictional Boshere as “this worthless fellow, who cost me much trouble with Jews who do not like the word ‘Jew’ used in a title.” Not quite. Hecht described one character as having “a face stamped with the hieroglyphic curl of the Hebrew alphabet” and elsewhere wrote of “that glandular degeneration that produces the Jew with the sausage face.” Writing for The Sentinel, a Chicago Jewish weekly, Bertha Loeb Lang wondered if Hecht was deliberately pandering to anti-Semites. Hecht, she wrote, “should seek something inspiring to wing his thoughts to higher realms.”

Such inspiration hit him hard in 1939, when Hecht, as he put it, “turned into a Jew.” As he recalled: “The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, had brought my Jewishness to the surface. I felt no grief or vicarious pain. I felt only a violence toward the German killers.” He put his furious pen to work in a daily column for P.M., the liberal New York newspaper, chastising “Americanized Jews” for their silence in the face of the growing massacre. In 1941 he wrote a column called “My Tribe Is Called Israel”: “My angry critics all write that they are proud of being Americans and of wearing carnations, and that they are sick to death of such efforts as mine to Judaize them and increase generally the Jew-consciousness of the world.”

Hecht’s two-fisted polemic caught the eye of a young Palestinian Jew living in America: Hillel Kook, a nephew of the great Rabbi Kook who went by the nom de guerre Peter Bergson, so as not to embarrass his family. Bergson was a disciple of the late Revisionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who had died in New York exile in 1940. He enlisted Hecht in a campaign to fight Hitler and promote militant Zionism in America. Hecht churned out caustic newspaper ads about American and British indifference to the plight of the European Jews. He crafted the 1946 Zionist stage play A Flag Is Born, which drew large crowds and made so much money for the right-wing Irgun that they named a ship for him. (While illegally transporting 600 Holocaust survivors to Palestine, the S.S. Ben Hecht was intercepted by the British in March 1947; the refugees were detained in Cyprus, and crew members were jailed in the Acre prison.)

Hecht’s advocacy for the outlawed Irgun reached a brazen climax with a broadside that ran in the New York Post and elsewhere in May 1947, called “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine.” “My Brave Friends,” he began, “the Jews of America are for you. You are their champions. You are the grin they wear. You are the feather in their hats . . . Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts. Not all the Jews, of course.” The dissenters, Hecht went on, “unfortunately” included “practically all the rich Jews of America, all the important and influential ones, all the heads of nearly all the Jewish organizations whom the American newspapers call ‘The Jewish Leaders.’ They’re all against.” Ben’s big finish: “Hang on, brave friends, our money is on its way.”

Hecht’s fierce embrace of Zionism is a by-now familiar story of Jewish return, akin to the classic trajectories of Herzl, Heine, and Moses Hess. But it also suited Hecht, the perennial contrarian, to poke a stick in the eye of “Jewish respectables,” as he called them. It seems almost inevitable that the next stage in his evolution as a Jew was a fundraising partnership with Mickey Cohen (1913–1976). Cohen “took to burglary and violence as a duckling takes to water,” as Hecht wrote of him in the 1950s. He was a prizefighter, armed robber, occasional killer, extortionist, and bookmaking czar; he was also a germ-phobic dandy who shunned alcohol, hobnobbed with Hollywood stars, and craved publicity.

Mickey and Ben were both tough Jews, born in New York to immigrant families, but their commonality ran deeper: “Story-telling is the chief social activity of the underworld,” wrote Hecht in his Cohen piece (published posthumously in 1970 as “The Incomplete Life of Mickey Cohen” in the short-lived Scanlan’s Magazine). “Nearly every heister and gunman I have known was eager to play Scheherazade.” As Cohen told the story in his autobiography, Hecht contacted him in 1947: “At first I thought the guy was conning me—playing on me being a Jew kid.” The gangster and his bodyguard Mike Howard went for dinner at Hecht’s house in Oceanside, north of San Diego. Also, present, says Cohen, was a representative of the Irgun:

This guy got me so goddamn excited. He started telling me how these guys actually fight like racket guys would . . . And then I threw a big affair to raise funds for the Irgun at Slapsy Maxie’s, which I had a piece of. There were judges there, people from all walks of life—every top gambler that was in the city or nearby.

Cut to Slapsy Maxie’s Cafe, a popular nightspot on Wilshire Boulevard, east of Fairfax, operated by a Hollywood haberdasher called Sy Devore and his brother Charlie. It was at least partly backed by Cohen and fronted by the eponymous Maxie Rosenbloom, a onetime light heavyweight boxing champion and B-actor (he played himself in the 1941 comedy Harvard, Here I Come!). The date of the big Irgun affair is not to be found in Cohen’s memoir, nor in Hecht’s version in A Child of the Century. As Saul Bellow deadpanned in his Times review of the book: “Hecht is a rather difficult man to pin down.” Cohen’s biographer Brad Davis says it was “in June 1947, just prior to Bugsy’s murder,” but incorrectly places Menachem Begin in the room that night, “on the lam for the King David Hotel bombing.” Elements of Hecht’s speech clearly point to 1948, shortly after the establishment of Israel.

Hecht described the scene: “I addressed a thousand bookies, ex-prize fighters, gamblers, jockeys, touts and all sorts of lawless and semi-lawless characters; and their womenfolk.” Imagine a huge smoky nightclub out of Guys and Dolls with Ben, still shaky after gall bladder surgery, reading out an impassioned 45-minute pitch for the soldiers of the Irgun. (He even has a good word for the rival Haganah.) Hecht is fast and loose with facts about the Warsaw ghetto, FDR, refugee ships, Lord Moyne, and more. He slides into hyperbole, soars over the heads of his audience, but also hammers home a core concept of classical Zionism: “A Jewish nation will remove our mystery and give us origins and permit us to thrive in the world—on an equal footing with other nationals.” And his grand peroration still stirs the Jewish soul, if only as nostalgia: “A David stands against Goliath. I ask you Jews—buy him a stone for his slingshot.”

The hat was passed. The Hollywood demimonde ponied up with cash and pledges. Cohen shoved Mike Howard to the stage, ordering him to demand that everybody give double. “Quit crabbing,” Hecht reports Howard as replying, before he took the microphone, “We raised two hundred G’s. Furthermore, we been here three hours and nobody’s taken a shot at us.” The take for the night, according to the journalist Sidney Zion in Scanlan’s, was “$230,000 and no welshers.” Cohen’s rival mobster, Jimmy Fratianno, later said it was a scam and Mickey kept the money. Then again, Fratianno tried to kill Cohen in a shootout on Sunset Boulevard only a year later, and his nickname was “The Weasel.” For his part, Cohen claimed in his memoir that it was he who urged the Irgun to hang British soldiers in Palestine in revenge for the hanging of Jews: “If you don’t, that’s going to be the end of my involvement . . . And they done it.” (Indeed so: in Netanya, on Begin’s orders, in July 1947, though whether he was heeding Cohen’s advice is another matter.)

Hecht made another, much shorter speech in November 1948, at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, at a big banquet in honor of Menachem Begin. This speech, too, may be found at the Newberry: “For some of us who are present here tonight,” Hecht began, “this fine scene is the ending of a story.” The Irgun, by the fall of 1948, had ceased to exist, along with its American arm, the American League for a Free Palestine. “Tonight,” said Hecht, “we scatter, we who rang doorbells, passed the hat, put on rallies, cheered the spectacle returned to Palestine of David standing against Goliath—we go back to smaller things.” For Hecht, who had recently written Spellbound and Notorious, “smaller things” included Hitchcock’s Rope and the film adaptation of Guys and Dolls, both as an uncredited “script doctor.” He published A Child of the Century in 1954, which, until now, together with Cohen’s memoir, constituted the only published evidence of the night at Slapsy Maxie’s. In 1961, he published Perfidy, a denunciation of Labor Zionist treachery that remains canonical in some right-wing circles.

Hecht’s last, unfinished project was a book called Shylock, My Brother, whose manuscript I also examined at the Newberry. “I have felt sorry that so many Jews . . . fail to recognize Shylock as their brother, and turn their backs on him,” he wrote. “I have never found Shylock to be the villain against whom Jews keep protesting as a libel of their kind. To the contrary, he is one of the few heroic Jews in classic literature, perhaps even the only one.” Jabotinsky, Hecht reported, had argued “that Shylock was a valiant vindicator of Jewish grievances.” But for the timid Jews who fear “unfrightened Jewish voices,”

Hecht scoffed, “the silent Ben-Gurion of Israel and not the cantankerous Shylock of Shakespeare is their idol.” He would have approved of Al Pacino’s recent aggressive portrayals of Shylock. To the end, Hecht was out to provoke. Speculating on Shakespeare’s motives, he concluded that the Bard was a crypto-Jew. Hecht died suddenly in April 1964, at the age of 70, in his apartment on West 67th Street in New York. Rabbi Louis I. Newman, his erstwhile antagonist, officiated at his funeral at Rodeph Sholom, and Menachem Begin flew in from Israel to deliver a eulogy.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Ben Hecht’s typed speech has been modified here only slightly in matters of punctuation and spacing to enhance its readability. Some idiosyncrasies of have been left in order to retain the feel of the original document.

I am going to speak of unhappy things tonight, things you will not be pleased to hear—and things I shall find no pleasure in saying. But Menachem Begin [sic], the Commander of the Irgun and military leader of the embattled Jews in Palestine, has cabled me from Tel Aviv asking of me a favor. He asks that I do what I can to arouse among the Jews who are not fighting in the Holy Land, the knowledge that without them the Holy Land will be lost. And with it will be lost forever the hope of the Jews taking their place as equals in the human family.

“We are fighting against great odds,” the Irgun commander says. “The enemy outnumbers us and is better equipped. His resources are unlimited. Great Britain is supplying him with its millions, its munitions, and its manpower. We have only ourselves. No nation will come to our side as ally or give us aid. We have only our brave soldiers and the long-dreaming soul of the Jews of the world. Speak to that soul wherever you can. If it can be awakened, we shall win.”

I shall speak to it tonight as well as I can. The soul of the Jew is an ancient and complicated business. It has been trained by disaster and calumny to live in caution, to hide itself cozily behind good deeds, to overlook insults, to charm its enemies, and to avoid getting its enemies angrier than they are. Thus hidden, thus full of cunning modesties and suicidal graces, it has remained nevertheless a brave soul—when destinies other than its own are at stake. It has fought and died valorously in defense of every cause but its own. Yes, it has the courage to fight and die for others. But it has hardly the guts even to speak in its own behalf. I know this soul of the Jew because I am part of it. And when the Irgun commander asks that it be wakened, he asks for a miracle. Awaken Jews into espousing their own cause—into believing in themselves—into grasping the battles of Palestine as their own bid for freedom; awaken them to knowing that victory in Palestine is a victory over anti-Semitism in every corner of the world. Commander Begin asks for this miracle because he is a part of this miracle himself. He is the leader of an army of liberation that all the military power and political bedevilments of Great Britain were unable to dislodge.

While all the other Jews of the world and all their various synods and agencies cooed and hobnobbed with the British betrayer and usurper of their homeland; while all the other small Jews of the world let themselves be hornswoggled out of their honor and their hopes, the fighting Jews of the Irgun and their brave youthful allies named the Stern Gang—stood undaunted and uncompromising and battling as heroically as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. With one difference. They did not lose—not yet. The British lost.

For twenty-five years the mighty nation of Great Britain sought to steal Palestine—and failed. Because of the Irgun. Because Irgun soldiers died in battle. Because Irgun soldiers went singing to the British gallows—to hang where all the world could see—and did see—not a terrorist punished for crime but the look and sight of a Jewish patriot dying for his country. Now the Irgun asks for more miracles. It asks for us.

Let me remind you—who we have been. A few years ago, in the days when the Germans were burning six million Jews in their lime pits and incinerators—a great and historic thing came to our ears. Thirty thousand Jews waiting in the ghetto of Warsaw to be taken off in the cattle cars to the German furnaces cried out to the world and to us, the Jews of the world—that they were not going to yield like sheep to the German butcher. They proclaimed that they were going to die in battle rather than let themselves be taken naked and unresisting to join the garbage pile of the Jewish dead. News of this event came over the radios of the world. It appeared in all the headlines. Thirty thousand Jews armed with pike poles, old guns and bombs made out of tin cans were giving battle to the German army in Warsaw. The German army marched upon the Warsaw ghetto with tanks, cannon, and flame-throwers. Outnumbered as in a nightmare, the Jews of Warsaw fought for twenty days, fought with wondrous valor—and with one eye on the sky.

They were waiting for help, for planes to appear and parachute weapons and supplies to them. No planes appeared. No weapons or supplies came out of the sky. No nation, fighting those same Germans, sent even a token pat on the back to these doomed warrior Jews. And from all the Jews of the world—from all of us—came not a single plane, a single gun, or a single loaf of bread to the thirty thousand who were battling not for their own survival—there was never any hope of that—but who were battling to bring a glow of human dignity to the pitiful and humiliated name of the Jews; our name as well as theirs. They were all killed—these men and women of Warsaw who fought for the honor of their kind. And the last of them who stood in the wrecked streets of their ghetto with their ammunition used up—and the German tanks and flame-throwers wiping them out—the last of them shook their fists at the sky; not at the Germans, but at the friendless sky.

Let me tell you why the sky under which the thirty thousand Jews died remained empty—why there was not a single package to fall from a single plane. Let me tell you also why none of the nation's fighting for democracy—not even our own country—spoke up as a government officially, spoke out officially as a nation to offer aid, hope, or even that recognition of valor for which the Jews of Warsaw fought and died. The reason is this. The Allies fighting for democracy had a policy toward the Jews, a very definite and strategic policy. This policy had one basic objective—a refusal to recognize the existence of the Jews of Europe whether they died in the Warsaw ghetto fighting or were burned by the millions in the German lime pits and incinerators.

It is unpleasant to hear this. It is unpleasant to say this. But it is the truth.

I am going to name a date and a fact. Write it in your Jewish memories. This is the Moscow conference of the Allies in 1943. A great document is being drawn up by Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. This document is called officially “Statement on the German Atrocities.” And it states that the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union have received from many quarters evidence of atrocities and cold-blooded mass execution done by the Germans. And in this Statement the Allies pledge themselves to avenge these monstrous deeds. They list—in their Statement—the wholesale massacres of Polish, French, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian hostages. They list the peasants of the island of Crete—as German victims. They list sixty-two different categories of German victims. Every name is listed but the name of Jew.

There is no reference in this Statement to the bloody fact that three million Jews have been murdered—for no other crime than that they were Jews—and that another three million are waiting to die in the German ovens. At the time this statement is being written—a genocide bloodier than any in history is taking place—a race of people is being exterminated. And this fact has been proclaimed by the German exterminators—who stand red-handed before the world boasting of their deed—that the Jews are being wiped out—because they are Jews.

This Statement ignoring the killing of three million unarmed Jews, and turning its back on the impending murder of three more million, was signed by Prime Minister Churchill, Premier Stalin, and President Roosevelt. I know of no political gesture in history as bold and inhuman as blissful silence. A silence that was like a door closing furtively and surreptitiously on the murderer and his victim—our Jewish people.

Let me tell you why this door was closed—why the word Jew was erased not only from the eyes of the world but from its own tomb. You will believe me when I tell you … because on my honor, I tell you the truth. And it is a truth you will recognize because it has always been in your mind—as well as my own—whether you spoke it or not. The truth was that Great Britain did not want any official recognition of the Jewish massacre to be put in the record. It did not want the desperate status of the Jews recognized officially. It did not want the conscience of the world stirred up by the foulest crime in history. It did not want this done because there was only one place for the doomed Jews of Europe to go—only one place eager to welcome them—Palestine.

Great Britain did not want the world’s attention called to the spectacle of a good and noble race being exterminated. This might undermine their shabby little plan to steal Palestine for themselves. Official acknowledgement that Jews had been killed and their killing would continue until they were a race reduced to bones and ashes might startle even the befogged mind of the world of 1943 and set it crying out for a remedy. And what might this remedy be? Only this—to open the ports of Palestine given to the Jews twenty years before—and let in the Jews not yet slaughtered. The British were opposed to this remedy. British policy preferred that all the Jews of Europe be murdered—and that they die incognito in the German furnaces rather than that a single Jewish refugee enter Palestine.

Here is another fact to keep in your memories. During the height of the German massacres, two ships carrying several thousand such refugees arrived at the Palestinian port of Haifa. A man named Lord Moyne, the British governor of Palestine, looked on the thousands of men, women, and children who had come crawling out of the pogroms, blackened by the smoke of massacres; looked and refused to allow these two ships to land, and their passengers to disembark. Lord Moyne ordered the two battered refugee ships—called the Struma and the Patria—to sail off. They sailed away. He sent them back into the Mediterranean. They were blown up by English or German mines. Every human being aboard them was killed. Lord Moyne had stood at the breach. He had kept British policy intact.

And where was American policy during those wild days of a people’s extermination? Let me tell you. It stood firmly, grimly, side by side with Great Britain. Mr. Roosevelt concurred in this British plot to lock the Jews away with their German murderers—and ignore the deed—and let them all be killed rather than let the ports of Palestine be opened. President Roosevelt concurred on the Struma and the Patria.

And here is another fact to hold in your Jewish memories. Let me tell you of another secret American agreement—of President Roosevelt’s and his State Department’s concurrence in the murder of three hundred thousand Jews of Romania [sic]. This is also not a pleasant thing to hear, nor yet to say. For Great Britain and the United States are both honorable countries—dedicated to honorable aims. And so far as it is possible for human masses to be kind and good, such kindness and goodness are to be found in the peoples of England and America. But—as always in history the Jews are the wrong yardstick with which to measure the virtues of nations, or of their leaders. But it is the only measure a Jew has—who kills him, who lets him live.

It was early in the war. Romania was not yet overrun by German troops and officials. The Romanian government sent out word that payment of fifty dollars apiece, it would release the Jews of Romania before the Germans came in and started their extermination. The fifty dollars a head was to cover transportation expenses to Palestine. We published and advertised this fact, in a score of newspapers. The American State Department branded our information as a lie. Mr. Roosevelt branded the Romanian government’s offer as a myth. There were no such Jews to be saved. And we who tried to rouse the conscience of the world to save them—we were liars and sensation makers. Pressed to take action, our government informed us angrily that it was unaware of this Romanian offer.

It was our government that lied—not we. The truth has come out in the published letters of the State Department. There was such an offer made by the Romanians. And our State Department wrote secretly to Arab leaders—Ibn Saud among them—not to fear an influx of Romanian Jewish refugees into Palestine. These letters assured the Arab leaders that the United States would secretly quash the rescue of the three hundred thousand Romanian Jews—among them fifty thousand children.

And it did. It held the breach—with Lord Moyne. It stood firm for five months—till the Germans swarmed into Romania. And then our State department relaxed. For the Germans took care of the rest of the job of keeping the Rumanian Jews—including their fifty thousand children—out of Palestine. They were all slaughtered.

All these unpleasant things I have said to you not to arouse futile angers against villainy past and gone. I have said them only to point out the danger in which the Jew stands today. In his hour of destruction, the Jew of Europe was without friends. Today in his desperate hour of rebirth the plot is still the same. The Jew is still without friends.

He fights alone in Palestine—against great odds, against increasing odds. And if we Jews whose souls are being fed and strengthened by his courage—whose status in the eyes of the world—is being forged by his valor—if we dreaming Jews of the four winds believe that any nation will ride to his aid—we are fools.

There will be no help from governments. The governments will continue to play their immemorial and secret games of sabotage against the Jews. In Palestine the outnumbered Jews battle today against an enemy officered, armed, and financed by the British. And like the Jews of Warsaw these Palestinian heroes battle with one eye to the sky. They wait for us. We are their arsenal. Not the Four Freedoms, not the good old U.S.A.—but we, the Jews of the four winds. But this you know, or you would not be here. And it is not to awaken you that I speak. You are awake or you would not be here. It is to arm your wakefulness and help you to waken others that I speak.

You will be asked—and you may even ask yourself—what is the stake of the American Jew in Palestine? What has he to gain by the birth and triumph of the new nation of Israel? I will answer this question, first, with another question. What did the American Jews lose in the mass murder of the six million Jews of Europe? That which he lost—he will never lose again if there is a nation in Palestine called Israel. For only a Jewish nation sitting among the other nations of the world will be able to prevent ever the mass executions of Jews that have been going on since the year Four Hundred.

In the fifteen hundred years of their wooing of Europe, the Jews have never been able to halt a pogrom. In fact, the more important, the more assimilated the Jews in a given country became, the more certain was their ultimate status in that country—disfavor and destruction. Out of this one fact—that they were a people who could be slaughtered with impunity—that there was even honor to be won in their slaughtering—has risen much of the anti-Semitism that hangs likes an ever-darkening cloud over the world’s Jewry. When the sky is clear above you, you may be sure the cloud is elsewhere. It shifts from nation to nation, from century to century. It does not go away. All the relationships made the Jews, all the honors won, all the medals hung on them have not been enough to move even our own most civilized of countries to raise a hand in their behalf—when the hour of doom struck in Europe.

Here is our record as American Jews—in that pogrom. We allowed ourselves to be bamboozled by the British policy in Palestine—which was also the American policy—of keeping the Jews out of the Holy Land. We went along with the delusion that the British and American governments were kindly governments and kindly friends of the Jews. We could not believe otherwise, being who we are and where we are, part of those governments.

We went along—cheering for those governments who with their mighty right hand were winning a war against the Germans—and with their sly left hand locking the Jews of Europe away with their exterminators—by closing the ports of their only refuge—Palestine. We cheered a war—and we cheered the extermination of six million Jews.

Behind the cloak of pretended military emergency, the British—and their American State Department conjurers'—plotted the future of Palestine—a Palestine to be held by the British as a military base—a Palestine to be handed over to an Arabian puppet king—already established in Trans Jordan [sic] by the British. And as a sop to what was known as Jewish world opinion the British explained that they could not let the Jews into Palestine during the war—and during their extermination—because German spies might come in with them—and German sympathizers.

These are the same British who whistled the Grand Mufti and his colleagues back from their Hitler honeymoon—and spread a red carpet for their re-entrance into Palestine. They were Nazis, they had fought on the German side in the war. But this was a minor facet of their natures—a peccadillo to be forgotten and condoned in the light of the more important fact that they hated Jews and were willing to help the British drive the Jews out of Palestine.

Only one group of Jews in the world did not concur in these secret plotting's and undermining's of Jews. This was the Irgun Zva Leumi—that fought and publicized with their blood each step of the robbery—whether it was robbery of honor, freedom, or land. And with their help, for they are now being forged into the fabric of the new Jewish state—the State of Israel will not, when the time comes again—be as daft and dizzy as we American Jews were. It will not be spun about by the fear of divided loyalties as we were. It will not be duped by the siren song of patriotism that ignore the carnage of the Jews.

However, muddled such a Jewish state of Israel may be, it will have a long memory—and a clear head toward Jews. And when the time of pogrom comes again—it will raise a clear voice, backed by a strong arm—for Jews. And this is the only weapon the Jews need to prevent another time of butchery. For the world is not a place of evil. The conscience of the world is a Godly and aspiring one. Its head is perpetually in a fog, but there is a light in its heart. A clarion voice such as will come from the nation of Israel—and such has never come from the scattered, duped, and bewildered Jews wooing their way in other lands—such a voice will halt the pogroms and mass executions of tomorrow.

Tonight, the battle rages in the land of Israel. Let us also look on our record as American Jews toward this present war. We Jews made this war possible. We concurred in it. Not only we American Jews who think only of America, but the Jews who were already planning the future of Palestine. They, too, concurred in this war and abetted the enemy. They did worse. They blessed it—to win a smile of approval from the British, their good friends. I will explain: Twenty years ago when the British held Palestine under a League of Nations mandate—to prepare a Jewish homeland in Palestine—that was their assignment and their sworn task—twenty years ago the British in defiance of that mandate sliced off a major chunk of Palestine—called it Trans Jordan and handed it over to a puppet king named Abdullah.

There was an outcry from the Jewish patriots of Palestine—from the Irgun Zva Leumi. But these were merely Palestinians. The great and important Jews who handled the future of Palestine were English citizens and American citizens. These accredited leaders of Jewry thought the rape of Palestine by the British and the lawless invention of an Arab state by the British—an unfortunate but an unpreventable thing. They protested—but never loudly enough to jeopardize their standing as British or American citizens. They protested—but they were good sports about it. And the warnings of the Irgun leaders that Great Britain was preparing a war against Palestine—the war that is going on now—were drowned in the polite concurrences of English and American Jews.

The British were able openly and lawlessly to finance this Arab state in Trans Jordan—on loans given them by the U.S.A. They proceeded openly to pour military equipment into the Arab state, to send thousands of British officers and strategists to King Abdullah’s side, to ship him planes, tanks, and all their latest military gadgets—and to pay the salaries of his army. This is the army—the Arab Legion—that fights the Jews today. Not the Palestinian Arabs who have lived in friendship with the Jews—but this British trumped up Legion—fattened by British gold and British propaganda for a generation.

And why did the British do this? Why this long and foresighted plan against the Jews? The answer is that the Arabs make better British Colonials than the Jews. The answer is that the Arabs, do they win Palestine, will not harass British trade and prestige in the east by building up a thriving industrial nation. The answer is that the Arabs will create a nation content to live off Great Britain, content to be its not too civilized vassal, cohort, and noncompetitive ally. And the Jews if they win—will not be that—despite the fact that an English citizen sits today as the first president of Israel. This is a hope for the British—but a small one. The Jews of Palestine—being shot down today by British guns, blasted by British planes, will be Jews when they win—a nation and not a vassal suburb of Downing Street, London.

And what have we American Jews to gain by the triumph of the Jewish nation now battling in Palestine? We are a happy people in the U.S.A. But we are happy as Americans, not as Jews. Not entirely happy—as Jews. The slaughter of our kind in Europe has left a wound in our spirits that our victory as Americans in the war has not entirely healed. It is a Jewish wound kept always open by the fear of the future. And despite the honors and positions we have won in America, we are no different as Jews than our fathers and grandfathers in Europe. We are like them, as Jews—uncertain, despairing, disenchanted, and always singing ourselves to sleep with the happy news that we have friends in court.

The Jews have always had friends in court—but they have never won a verdict. They have been always a noise without power, a talent without roots, a home lover without a doorstep of their own. They have worn fine clothes—and remained a fine nobody. They have always been going somewhere—but they have come from nowhere. And a man who comes from nowhere is a lesser man than one who comes from a place. There is always mystery and suspicion about such a man.

The nationalized soul of every nation, however civilized, abhors instinctively the nationalistic vacuum out of which the Jew is perpetually emerging. Having no land of his own, the Jew is looked on as a man who would—if given the chance—usurp the land of his host.

This has been true even of our own melting pot—a pot in which every immigrant has fused away his antecedents—except the Jew. A man from Sweden, Ireland, Luxembourg, Hungary, Italy—as soon as he loses the accents of those places—can become an American without suspicion or hyphen attached to him. The Jew, with or without accent—can become only an American Jew.

This is part of our stake in Palestine. A Jewish nation will remove our mystery and give us origins and permit us to thrive in the world—on an equal footing with other nationals. We can paradoxically become American then—for we will not be carrying around in our souls the confusion of what we are—and spreading this confusion among our always easily confused neighbors.

And we will not seem like the remnant of some stubborn religious sect given to weird and alien religious practices. Without losing our religion we will lose our two-thousand-year-old dangerous identity as religious fanatics—an absurd identity, but an identity ready made for the devilish schemes of bigots and rabble rousers; an identity that has brought intolerance and disaster down on us. We will lose that identity, for the land of Israel will have a flag, an army, and a congress to prove we are like other people—and that we stem from a normal state and not be black magic out of a hole in the past.

But there is a stake beyond these stakes of convenience and aggrandizement that we Jews have in the battle for Palestine. Is that battle lost—we Jews, all of us, are lost for another seven generations. We will have made our bid for human national status—whether we helped or hid our heads in a bag—and if this bid fails we will become a gabby and empty people, a gabby and defeated people—more so than ever in our history.

We will become losers. And this name will track us down in every city and village of America—and fasten itself to us. Not losers of a war—every nation has had that tag on it, but losers of the right to exist as anything but what we have been—the dubious guest in the house. If our bid for a flag and a homeland fails, we will all of us stand guilty before the world of an unworthiness. And this unworthiness we will, for a change, have deserved—if it comes to us. It is our duty to see that it does not come to us. It is in our power to prevent its coming. We will win—if the long dreaming soul of the Jew is wakened. Thus, speaks the leader of the Irgun forces.

Let me remind you—once more—who this leader is and who these Irgun fighters are. Menachem Begin and his troops are the Terrorists. That was what they were called when their stalwart hearts launched the battle against the British betrayers and invaders of their homeland. They are the same not-to-be-vanquished and not-to-be-silenced soldiers whose underground fight wrenched the Jewish situation out of the sly British hands; whose unceasing attacks and demands swept away the political fogs behind which the British were silently maneuvering the Jewish state into limbo.

These men and women of the Irgun stood alone. They had no friends in any court—not even the Jewish court. The common people of Palestine loved them, hid them, glowed with pride over them. But the accredited leaders of the long Jewish negotiations for a homeland looked with terrified eyes on this heroic spearhead of Jewish freedom—the Irgun. These leaders joined with all the other nervous, flag-frightened Jews of the world—in denouncing them. And for years the soldiers of the Irgun who fought with a British noose around their necks were called gangsters and terrorists, pirates and lawbreakers—as were the handful of intrepid folks who once rallied to the new flag raised above Lexington and Bunker Hill.

But this is past. The denunciations are done with.The accredited leaders of the world’s organized Jewry survive now or die forever behind the army that has come out of the Palestinian underground. And the Jews of the world who called names and were fearful, are proud today of these same Terrorists. For history has revealed them in their true guise—not that of Terrorists but of champions risen to restore the people of Israel to their lost estate as human beings. The Irgun is a dedicated army. It leads the fight. And beside it fights the brave army of the Haganah. They were political rivals of the Irgun. They are brothers in arms tonight.

Jewish money has poured into a thousand causes.But there was never any cause in Jewish history like this one. In Palestine,the ancient land of miracles—another miracle is happening; a miracle as sweet as any recorded in the Testament. A two-thousand-year-old dream of the Jews is coming true—a dream of manhood hidden away in the prayers and lamentations of two thousand years. [Two paragraphs in the original text crossed out by Ben Hecht.]

In these dark centuries that have never ended—the Jews carried the dream of Israel in their hearts. The Hebrew Nation of David and the Kings had been hammered to bits—but the bits refused to die. Every Jewish poet, every rabbi, and every worker at his bench kept alive this dream. In Spain after a thousand years of torment—the Jews still sang of their Jerusalem and their Holy Land. Yehuda Halevy [sic], the Hebrew poet of Spain, wrote of a homeland no Jew had seen for a thousand years:

Jerusalem, oh City of Splendor, oh bright home of the Jews—our spirit flies to you from many lands. In the East—in the far land of the cedar and the lemon trees our hearts lie. And our souls' dwell beside the sun gone down on Israel.

The sun is no longer down. A champion fight's in Palestine. He will not surrender. But he calls on us. He needs us. If he loses, he will lose because we did not put a gun in his hand. He will lose because we—and not he—were too small for the hour of Jewish destiny. He will lose because the Jews of the world dreamed away the days of battle. But these are only words I speak—words to wake up Jews if there are any asleep. He will not lose. No, cause that had behind it the sweet and powerful dream of freedom—has ever lost. This dream does not stand on the battlefields alone. It stands in us. There are twenty-eight million Arabs. There is British wealth and British officers—and British military equipment. There are eight hundred thousand Jews—besieged and encircled by this Goliath tonight. A David stands against Goliath. I ask you Jews—buy him a stone for his slingshot.