https://archive.org/details/One-Nation-Under-Israel
One Nation Under Israel By Andrew Hurley
Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss
9/6/03
My theory on book reviews is that 99 percent of
those who read the review will never read the book, no matter how strongly I
recommend it. So it’s okay to reprint as many of its salient facts and
conclusions as space permits. However author/historian Andrew Hurley has
packed so many facts and such sensible, cogently reasoned conclusions into this
book’s 307 pages that it’s impossible to just skim off the top. It’s
quotable from beginning to end.
Readers are best advised to get their own copy
and settle in for what will be a rewarding but not entirely easy read.
Hurley was a corporate lawyer for 40 years before he retired and brought out
the first edition of this book in
1990, just before the Gulf war rearranged the furniture on the deck of
America’s sinking “Israel, right or wrong” Middle East policy.
Accordingly, he has laid out each of his 14
chapters almost like legal briefs. He states the facts of each case as he sees
them, the opposing arguments where they exist, the counter-arguments, and then
what any sensible judge would conclude — unless that judge happened to be
running for elective office in the United States, and therefore was scared to
death of the Israel lobby.
There are problems to this approach, but before
getting into them let’s make one thing very clear. You should get this
book and read it. If you are well informed about the Middle East, you may
or may not learn much that is new. But it is certain you will find in
these pages many of those items you remember reading about and later wish you
had cut out and saved.
On the other hand, if you are clueless about
the Middle East, you may be exactly the kind of person for whom author Hurley
wrote the book. If, however, after reading the book, you still feel
uncertain about who is in whose space, and who is willing to compromise and who
is visibly delaying a peace settlement until there’s nothing left over which a
compromise can be reached, well, then, you really are clueless.
You also should get your public library to buy
it. And if the head librarian pleads budgetary problems, offer to donate
a copy.
Then, when the donated copy is stolen, buy the
library another one. You can rest assured that, unless the librarian attaches
it to a chain, the book will be stolen because this is a very, very subversive
document for those who would like the U.S. to go on paying Israeli bills and
using the American veto in the United Nations to frustrate Israel’s critics
(who, Hurley demonstrates, include every other sovereign nation on earth) for a
second half-century while Israel’s Likud leaders finish committing national
suicide (which, in Hurley’s opinion, probably won’t take anything like that
long).
This second, but unchanged, printing has been
issued nine years after the first, in the same year that Israeli voters have
turned out the Likud for the third time. But otherwise little has changed
in Israel, and little of that for the better. Israel has new “moderate”
leadership, which is reluctant to carry out the commitments of the previous
“extremist” leadership, and again Israel’s American apologists, whom Hurley blames
for much of its folly, are saying, as they always do, “Give the new man a
chance, don’t crowd him, or the extremists will come back.”
In fact, however, the significant change since Hurley finished his book nine years before the date of this review is that the moderates did come back for three of those years, from 1992 to 1995, but there still is no peace, and little certainty that new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is prepared to make the territorial withdrawals that will bring one about with the Palestinians.
Hurley clearly documents the futility of the
“peace process,” a term he attributes to Israel’s first Likud prime minister,
Menachem Begin, who, in this reviewer’s opinion, seized upon the “process” to
postpone the “peace.” Begin’s successor, Yitzhak Shamir, put it
succinctly: “What’s to negotiate? They think the land is theirs. We
think it’s ours.” Hurley also cites the prophecy of Israel’s first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion, in a May 31, 1963 letter to Moshe Sharett: “I have no doubt that Begin’s rule will lead
to the destruction of the state. In any case, his rule will turn Israel
into a monster.”
[All of this bodes the Questions ----
Why
did JFK's letter to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who had
direct ties to Mafia Chieftain Meyer Lansky, represent an existential
threat to the Jewish state, i.e. that the US was going to inspect Israel's
nuclear facilities in Dimona to ensure Israel was not developing nuclear
weapons?
Why
did PM Ben-Gurion quit, rather than comply?
Why did Jewish Mafia mobster
Mickey Cohen introduce JFK to Marilyn Monroe – at the direction of Mafia Chieftain Meyer Lansky and Israeli’s Menachem Begin?
Why did Israeli agent Arnon Milchan's first film feature a Boeing
747 crashing into the PanAm building in 1978?
Why was Oliver Stone’s famous movie "JFK" in
1991 highly accurate except for leaving out the Mossad connection, and despite Israel arms merchant, Arnon Milchan, being the
financial angel behind the JFK movie?
Why did JFK fire all of the top
high ranking CIA officials after the Bay of Pigs fiasco except mistakenly not
James Jesus Angleton who was the longtime director of counter intelligence for
the CIA and who simultaneously served as CIA liaison chief to the Mossad, and was highly regarded, very
capable of secretly “working” several convoluted intelligence operations and
investigations at once?
Why did Trump refuse to release all of the JFK Assassination files .
. . . just because Bush 41 is still alive? . . . . and/or now
it appears is it possibly because of a Mossad connection - ? ]
back to "One Nation Under Israel"
review ----
The reader is left to judge whether the return
of a Labor coalition government will halt, or at least slow, what Hurley calls
the “march of folly.” But I can think of few other volumes that would be
as helpful to readers for working that out for themselves.
I have to admit that I was presented a copy of
the first edition, entitled Holocaust
II: Saving Israel From Suicide, nine years ago but was turned off by
the title. (Then, as now, I was more worried about saving the U.S. when
Israel’s seemingly inevitable suicide occurs.) I knew, as Hurley makes
abundantly clear, that one thing upon which all Israeli nationalists agree is
that if Israel’s third brief sway over the Holy Land is to end badly, as did
the others in previous millennia, because of internal Jew-versus-Jew
dissensions, the Zionist state will not go out “Masada style” (with the
principals jumping off a cliff), but rather via the “Samson option,” with nuclear-armed Israelis
pulling the temple down around themselves and all of their neighbors as well.
I realize now, however, that Hurley, though
sincere in his humanitarian desire to prevent unnecessary harm to the Israelis
themselves, is as deeply motivated as most of his potential readers by the
desire to end the incredible suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli
colonialism, and to end the dangerous consequences for Americans of their
ever-increasing estrangement — on Israel’s behalf — from the rest of the world.
The second thing that put me off was the
contents of the first chapter, entitled “The March of Folly,” whose 14 pages
are devoted to the history of biblical Israel. I reluctantly grant the
validity of the judgment of many Christians, Muslims and Jews that “religion
has everything to do with the Israel-Palestine problem.” It’s been my
personal observation, however, that religion has had little to do with finding
a solution. But after reading Hurley’s book through to the end this time,
I realize that his approach is basically secular.
In fact, it’s clear that, like a good lawyer,
Hurley included that chapter, made up of both biblical references and a factual
account of Israel’s unhappy history in the ancient world, for a very good
reason.
As he points out in the book’s final chapters,
when rational solutions to the dispute are presented, Israelis of many stripes
fall back on selected biblical references to support their case that God has
willed otherwise. But not even these fall-back apologetics work if these
references are viewed as a whole, as Hurley’s book enables even the casual
reader to do.
Having progressed beyond my previous
annoyances, I was initially surprised at Hurley’s insistence on presenting his
historical chapters, covering “the Zionist Movement: 1887-1948,” “the
Arab-Israeli Wars,” and “the Search for Peace,” spanning events prior to and
during the Ford, Carter and Reagan years, almost exclusively through the words
of Jewish writers.
This has become possible in recent years with
the appearance of such Israeli “revisionist historians” as Gen. Yehosephat
Harkabi and Simha Flapan, from both of whom he quotes extensively, and
relatively objective American Jewish journalists such as David Shipler, from
whose book Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land Hurley also quotes at length.
For example, Hurley demolishes an over-used
Israeli rationale for violating the boundaries of the 1947 United Nations
partition plan by keeping Israel’s own 53 percent and seizing, in 1948, more
than half of the Arabs’ 47 percent as well. Afterward, Israelis said, “We
accepted the partition plan. The Arabs didn’t.” But Hurley supplies
this quote from Flapan’s The Birth of Israel, Myths and Realities: “Acceptance
of the U.N. Partition Resolution was an example of Zionist pragmatism par
excellance. It was a tactical acceptance, a vital step in the right
direction — a springboard for expansion when circumstances proved more
judicious.”
Is it really necessary to limit oneself to
quoting Jewish sources? Realistically, the answer is yes, as not only
Hurley but anyone who has written and spoken publicly on the problem
knows. The greatest triumph of “The Israeli Lobby,” the title of Hurley’s next chapter, has
been to brand any criticism of Israel, no matter how informed or
well-documented, “anti-Semitic,” and get away with it. A mere discussion
of the problem by non-Jewish sources has become “suspect,” not just to the
clueless but to anyone concerned with being duped by bigots or being mistaken
for one.
So Hurley has dutifully played by the rules
successfully imposed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
Israel’s potent Washington lobby, which adapts with chameleon-like ease to both
“extremist” and “moderate” Israeli governments. AIPAC makes pro forma
changes in its executive directors, while leaving in place the lobbyists who
can manipulate comfortable majorities in both Democratic and Republican
Congresses, and who can either formulate the Middle East policies to be
followed by U.S. presidents, or inhibit them from carrying out Mideast policies
of their own.
As Hurley explains: There is a “crucial
distinction between the Israel lobby and the typical lobby. If one disagrees
with or opposes the Farm Lobby, for example, he is free to say so… No such
freedom exists in America so far as opposition to Israeli policy or the Israeli
Lobby is concerned. It is simply ‘taboo.’ To do so automatically
exposes one to being branded ‘anti-Semitic,’ a ‘Fascist,’ a ‘Nazi,’ or part of
the lunatic fringe… Since there is absolutely no defense against the
charge of ‘anti-Semitism,’ most prudent people have long since preferred
silence on sensitive issues to the risk of exposing themselves to the accusation
of ‘anti-Semitism,’ with its inevitable ‘Hitler’ and ‘Holocaust’ associations.”
The author concludes his chapter on “The
Israeli Lobby” by quoting this complaint by General Harkabi, former chief of
Israeli intelligence and adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Begin, from
Harkabi’s 1988 book, Israel’s Fateful Hour: “I fail to understand why they
[American leaders] are so apprehensive of speaking out and saying that the
present [Israeli] policy of annexation will miscarry, that it is bound to fail,
that it will end in national bankruptcy or that it is suicidal — whatever is
their evaluation. By such diffidence Americans do a disservice to Israel
and to themselves.”
In his following chapter, “The Israeli Lobby in
Action,” Hurley quotes liberally from comments by former Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chairmen William Fulbright (D-AR) and Charles Percy (R-IL),
and from Sen. Adlai Stevenson III (D-IL), Representatives Paul Findley (R-IL)
and Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey (R-CA), for whose political defeats AIPAC takes
credit. Hurley also quotes George Ball, President John F. Kennedy’s under
secretary of state and President Lyndon Johnson’s ambassador to the United Nations,
who certainly would have been U.S. secretary of state but for the Israel lobby
opposition generated by his frank advice on the cost to the United States of
its persistent tilt toward Israel.
“Bad Use
of a Good Friend”
Fulbright, for example, pretty well summarizes
the contents of this book in a speech he delivered just before the end of his
Senate term: “Endlessly pressing the U.S. for money and arms — and invariably
getting all and more than she asks — Israel makes bad use of a good friend…
Israel’s supporters in the U.S…. by underwriting intransigency, are encouraging
a course which must lead toward her destruction — and just possibly ours as
well.”
And Ball summarizes the lessons learned by all
who have run afoul of Israel’s American lobby: “When leading members of the
American Jewish community give [Israel’s] government uncritical and unqualified
approbation and encouragement for whatever it chooses to do, while striving so
far as possible to overwhelm any criticism of its actions in Congress and in
the public media, they are, in my view, doing neither themselves nor the U.S. a
favor… They’ve got one thing going for them. Most people are
terribly concerned not to be accused of being anti-Semitic, and the lobby so often
equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. They keep pounding away
at that theme, and people are deterred from speaking out.”
In a chapter examining “Israel and the United
States,” Hurley notes Israel’s
success in preventing any congressional investigation of its 1967 attack on a
U.S. Naval ship, the USS Liberty, in which 34 Americans were killed and 171
injured. In partial explanation he quotes former chairman Admiral
Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I’ve never seen a president — I
don’t care who he is — stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles
your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what
is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything
down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have on
our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don’t have any
idea what goes on.”
In his chapter on “American Jewry and Free
Speech,” Hurley quotes the late Philip Klutznik, a former U.S. secretary of
commerce and mainstream U.S. Jewish leader who became a virtual non-person in
the U.S. Jewish community when he began to speak out against Israeli
extremism. Describing the reaction to his outspokenness by individual
American Jews, Klutznik reported: “They say to me, ‘You are absolutely right in
what you say and do, but I can’t. I can’t stand up as you do.’”
In a 1988 speaking tour, Shulamit Aloni, former
leader of Israel’s dovish Meretz Party, admonished North American Jewish
audiences: “If you have the right to speak out on human rights in countries all
around the world — including Jews in the Soviet Union — you certainly have the
right to speak out on human rights in Israel. How wrong does Israel have to be before you
speak up?”
Hurley devotes three chapters to the internal
stresses within Israel, religious versus secular, extremists versus moderates,
that propel Israel steadily toward the goal of the Ariel Sharon wing of the
Likud Party — expulsion of all of the Palestinian Arabs from all of Palestine.
It is this act, Hurley believes, that will lose Israel its American protection,
and thus seal its fate in an era when both Israel and its Arab neighbors will
have nuclear weapons and the will to use them.
Then, in lawyerly fashion, he cites the three issues
whose solutions could avert this nightmare scenario:
--- the problem of the Palestinian
refugees,
--- the return by Israel of the occupied
territories, and
--- the establishment of a Palestinian
state.
This chapter, like his final one, “A Plan for
Peace,” will be of less interest to those familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian
dispute. On the other hand, for newcomers to the issue who are less
interested in its history than its solution, they may be the most valuable 40
pages of the book.
Hurley’s work should be on the shelf of every
student of the Arab-Israeli dispute. It also is ideal for newcomers to
the problem who are sufficiently motivated to read it in its entirety. It
is extremely well footnoted, with every quote carefully sourced. To this
reviewer, the onlyweakness of the book
is its lack of an index which would enable readers to find, once
again, those quotes that are so valuable in getting the attention of the truly
perplexed.
This lack is particularly surprising because
the book, under two different titles, has had two separate publishers, and has
none of the typos, ambiguous sentences or incomplete footnoting that often mar
presentations by small publishers. Perhaps in its third printing, and I am sure there
will be one when the usefulness of this volume becomes more widely known, its
only flaw will be eliminated.
Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of
the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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