THE WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE FOR JEWISH SURVIVAL by Irving Kett

THE

WORLDWIDE STRUGGLE

FOR

         JEWISH SURVIVAL

Irving Kett

AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL

147 EAST 76th STREET NEW YORK, N.Y. 10021

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. living Kett served with the United States Army Corps of Engineers from World War II until his retirement, with the rank of Colonel, in 1982. His assignments in the Middle East included supervising the construction of two high performance airbases and serving as Chief Design Engineer for the Israel Department of Public Works, Division of Highways. The author of numerous published essays about engineering and transportation, Dr. Kett is presently Professor of Civil Engineering at California State University, Los Angeles.

His monograph, "The Military Factor in the Arab-Israeli Equation," was published by Americans For a Safe Israel in 1988.

No hatred in the recorded history of Western civilization has been as universal, as permanent, or as intense as antisemitism. The purpose of this essay is to review the Jewish condition today and to examine the analogy to the situation that prevailed between World Wars I and II. Unfortunately, hatred of the Jew is thriving throughout much of the world, including where there are no Jews to speak of, such as Japan or present-day Poland. What is more alarming is that antisemitic agitation appears to be resur­facing everywhere and gaining in respectability. In recognized universities, doctoral dissertations and other supposedly scholarly works are ap­pearing with increasing frequency, purporting to prove that the Holocaust was a fabrication of Zionist propaganda. Even while the survivors are still alive, we are witness to a burgeoning attempt to controvert this most abominable crime in the sordid annals of mankind.

Antisemitism persists because of a par­ticular, historical Jewish vulnerability and is liter­ally independent of the victim. What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant. The impetus derives from the needs of the persecutors and the specific political climate of the time. The perse­cuted cannot possibly influence the course of the events that engulf them.

ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM

Historically, antisemitism has undergone a number of transformations. Originally, the Jews were harassed and massacred for their refusal to accept, first, Christianity, and'then Islam. For Christians, up until the present time, the charge of deicide compounded the hatred of Jews. In the nineteenth century, when religion lost much of its hold upon the more educated elements of soci­ety, anti-Judaism was superseded by antisemi­tism, a racist doctrine of Western European ori­gin, that portrayed the Jew as an inferior human being who belonged in the Middle East. Since the foundation of the new Jewish State of Israel, antisemitism has taken a new complexion. It isnow euphemistically referred to as "anti-Zion­ism." Basically, this new antisemitism, while still maintaining the historic religious and racial hatred of the Jews, has added still another grievance: namely, that the Jews have no right to nation-

 

hood. Ironically, the new antisemitism (anti-Zion­ism) turns the previous antisemitism on its head by claiming that the Jews are a European people who have no place in the Middle East. When the United Nations General Assembly on November 10, 1975, passed resolution 3379 that equated Zionism with racism, few people grasped that an additional canard had been promulgated with which to persecute and to torment the Jewish people. Although the resolution was eventually repealed, in 1991, the damage was done.

The slander against the Jewish people equating Zionsm with racism can be compared to another major event that influenced and intensi­fied antisemitism throughout the world for the past one hundred years-the publication of The Proto­cols of the Elders of Zion. Although forged in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, the Protocols were not widely disseminated until the beginning of this century. This fabrication de­scribes an alleged international Jewish conspir­acy to control the world. It has caused inestimable harm to Jews despite its patent absurdity and the fact that it was proven to be a fraud. To this day, the Protocols are widely read and believed. The book is extensively distributed by the Arabs and consistently makes the best seller's list in, of all countries, Japan. In the 1920's, it was popular­ized in the United States by the immensely wealthy American industrialist, Henry Ford. It helped to facilitate a sharp rise in antisemitism in the United States, in evidence at least until the end of World War II.

Israel is today the focus of world con­demnation. This manifestation of hatred is a contemporary version of classical antisemitism. If we compare anti-Zionism, to antisemitism, we can only conclude that it is a distinction without a difference. Much of the world is sowing hatred against the Jewish people in the guise of anti-Zionism, an evil growth assiduously being wa­tered by the PLO. The Arab world is impatiently waiting to feast upon the harvest of its violence against Jews everywhere. The similarity to the worldwide Nazi movement, prior to World War II, is unmistakable.

The crucial point is that hatred of the Jews is a phenomenon that changes in relationship to the reality of world and Jewish conditions. The popular theory in vogue at any particular time is an adaptation of a deeply felt existing emotion to justify the hatred of Jews.

MOSLEM ANTISEMITISM

In the same way that the Jews, six centu­ries before, refused to accept the messianic claims that Christianity made for Jesus, the Jews of the Arabian Peninsula rebuffed Mohammed. Both the followers of Jesus and Mohammed expected and felt the need for Jewish approval and identification with their messages. Jewish leaders rejected both messianic claims'on the basis that what was valid in their revelations was merely a reaffirmation of Judaism, and those doctrines that were new con­tained no enhanced moral values and were, in some instances, incompatible with true monothe­ism.

Examination of Jewish existence under Moslem rule leads one to recognize the mendacity of claims put forth by Israel's enemies that prior to Zionism, Jews and Arabs in the Moslem world lived in harmony. The nineteenth and early twen­tieth centuries are replete with instances of Jews being massacred at the hands of Arabs. In the years between 1900 and the establishment of the State of Israel, hundreds of Jews were killed or wounded by Arab mobs in Fez, Morocco (1912), throughout the Arab world (1920-1921), Palestine (1929-1939), Algeria (1934), Egypt and Libya (1945), Syria, Aden, Libya, and Lebanon (1947-1948). In the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war, over half a million destitute Jews were forced to flee Arab countries that had been their homes for a thousand years or more. There is hardly an Arab country today in which a Jew is permitted to live. The same pattern held true in prior centuries. Only in relation to the horrendous Jewish suffering in medieval Christian Europe, does the persecution of Jews at the hands of the Arabs pale in compari­son. One should not forget that in contrast to Europe, Adolf Hitler occupies an honored niche in the Arab world to this very day. As recently as 1978, Anwar Sadat, interviewed on "60 Minutes," fondly recalled his affection for the Nazis.

All the Arab nations are governed by des­pots, semi-despots, or exist in a state of anarchy (Lebanon). Since Mohammed's conquering war­riors proclaimed "the true faith" beginning in the seventh century, those who resisted had the choice of conversion, death by the sword, or a status of submission (dhimmi) which was offered to Jews and Christians. However, since the latter were backed by the armed might of their coreligionists inEurope, the concentration of dhimmi-hatred was

 

directed against the Jews. That focus is now upon Israel, and by extension upon Jews everywhere. Israel is viewed as an intolerable foreign body that challenges Arab hegemony in the Middle East. From the Arab perspective, therefore, permanent war or Islamic jihad must be waged to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. No compromise is possible in this struggle, least of all permanent acceptance of an independent Jewish state whose very existence represents a devastating symbol of the failure of Islam.

Democracy and human values as accepted in the Western world are foreign to the Arab world. It is not accidental that cultural pluralism, individ­ual rights, freedom of religion, and political ex­pression are notable for their absence in the Arab world. Prior to and during World War II all the Arab states supported Hitler and the Nazi war machine. To this day they applaud the Holocaust. Arabs everywhere hailed Saddam Hussein's vow to"incinerate" the Jews of Israel with his Scud mis­siles and poison gas.

It is in this context that the perennial best seller in the Arab world is that hoary anti-Jewish forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The hatred against Jews and against Israel on the part of the Arab masses transcends the norms of political antagonisms. The Arab world has assimi­lated all the slander against Jews, whether from Christianity (such as the blood libel), from Nazism, or from their own theological roots. The result has been that the Arab states have consistently called not merely for the defeat of Israel but for its utter annihilation.

MARXIST AND NEW LEFT ANTISEMITISM

Marxist racism is one of the world's best-kept secrets. Marx equated Jews with "niggers," whom he looked down upon as subhuman. In keeping with his German background, Marx compared the Slavs to "barbarians." Although descended from distinguished rabbinic families on both sides, Karl Marx early in life developed an attitude toward Jews and Judaism that can only be described as intense self-hatred. Throughout his life, Marx bitterly resented any reference to his Jewish ancestry. The two articles that he wrote dealing specifically with his views on the Jewish people, one in 1844 entitled "On the Jewish Ques­tion" and the second in 1856 for the New YorkTribune, can only be described as Jew-baiting, similar to what one would likely find in Nazi

literature. Adolf Hitler himself said that reading Karl Marx deepened his understanding of Jews.

Marx's antisemitic diatribes intensified the existing hatred of the Jews on the part of Christian and Moslem Marxists, while among his many Jewish followers, Marx's venom against the Jews exacerbated their alienation from their own heri­tage. Michael Harrington headed the United States Socialist Party for many years. He was once asked why hatred of Israel and of Zionism was so strong among the politcal left at the same time that these same people actively support all other nationalist movements. Harrington said that based upon his observations it was because of the large numbers of Jews in the various socialist and Marxist movements who feel the need to prove their universalist credentials by engaging in self-denigration.

A similar story is told of Jewish revolution­aries in Czarist Russia. A particularly severe pogrom that lasted three days occurred in the city of Nicholayev in 1899, during the Easter festival. Thousands of rioters attacked the Jewish section of the city and caused untold suffering and de­struction. When Jewish radicals were asked why they too participated in the brutal attack, they retorted that their place as leaders of the proletar­iat was with the people.

It is unfair to single out Marxists alone for tneir strident antisemitism. As the Hebrew Uni­versity historian, Professor Edmund Silberner, has noted: "The doctrinaire may argue that it is absurd to speak about socialist Jew-hatred, since no 'genuine' socialist can be an antisemite. Yet whatever the doctrinaire may wishfully think, it is not in his power to alter facts that conclusively prove that many great socialists were antisemites." Professor Silberner added: "Socialist antisemi­tism is indeed almost as modern as socialism, and is not limited to any particular country."

The antisemitic attitude on the part of Russia and other regimes claiming allegiance to Marxism is too well documented to require further elaboration. However, it is worthwhile to empha­size a few especially blatant illustrations. During the Olympic games in Munich in 1972, eleven Israeli athletes were kidnapped from their Olym­pic Village hotel rooms and murdered in cold blood by PLO terrorists. Except for the euphoria of all the Arab nations at this great feat of "hero­ism" the world was generally shocked. But the Politburo of the North Vietnamese Communist Party hailed the murder of the Jewish athletes.

 

Until recently, the two foci of antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda in the West were Com­munist Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua. The only country besides the Arab states that af­forded the PLO full diplomatic status was Nica­ragua. When the Sandinista regime was thrown out by the Nicaraguan people, one of the first moves of the new government was to rees­tablish diplomatic relations with Israel. A simi­lar pattern developed in the Russian satellite states of Eastern Europe. As soon as they were able to throw off the yoke of Marxist tyranny, they also ceased to arm and train PLO terrorists, and recognized Israel.

The guru of the Jewish left is the M.I.T philologist,-Noam Chomsky. According to Professor Chomsky, the most evil, ethnocen­tric country in the entire world is Israel, with the United States a close second. Chomsky has carried his Jewish self-hatred so far as to write the introduction to a book by a French neo-Nazi, Professor Robert Faurisson, purporting to show that the Holocaust is a Zionist fabrica­tion. An article in the July 1990 issue of Bar-sam, an official publication of the PLO, en­dorsed the view that the Nazi extermination program was a Jewish hoax. The magazine, which is distributed throughout the Arab world, cited the 1976 work of Robert Faurisson in chal­lenging the existence of the Nazi death camps. Ironically, Chomsky's father, William Chomsky, was a recognized Hebraist and Jewish scholar.

Both in the Catholic and Protestant churches, radical Christian theology has gained prominence during the last thirty years. A prominent Catholic priest in this movement, Daniel Berrigan, speaking in Church phraseol­ogy, delegitimizes the State of Israel. The Prot­estant National Council of Churches and the American Friends Service Committee, repre­senting the Quakers, show their friendship for the Third World and the PLO, and are indiffer­ent, at best, to Israel's survival.

BLACK ANTISEMITISM

Historically speaking, American society developed differently from that of Europe for the Jews. Both Jews and non-Jews were free from the mutually abrasive socioeconomic re­lationship that characterized the status of Jews as middlemen. With the blacks, however, the image of the Jew could be construed on lines

similar to that of Europe. Moreover, just as Jewish revolutionary activity in Europe did not help en­dear the Jews to non-Jews, Jewish participation and leadership in the civil rights movement in the United States ironically aggravated relations be­tween the two groups. Jewish liberals, who founded the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1940's, soon found themselves insultingly booted out of the organization when James Farmer andother blacks took over. The causes of antisemi-tism in Europe and in the black ghettoes of this country are reminiscent of the traditional pattern of pre-Holocaust antisemitism. Back in 1970, a radi­cal black power leader declared: "I have never ad­mired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler."

The most outspoken antisemites in the United States come from the more educated ele­ments of the black community, such as Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, many of whom have ties to the PLO and the Israel-hating minions of the Third World. Of course, this does not mean to imply that all blacks necessarily harbor an active hatred of Jews or Israel. The late Reverend Martin Luther King was certainly an important exception. Shortly before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King excoriated a black student at Harvard University for denouncing Zionism. "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews," King said. "You're talking antisemitism."

In their antisemitic fulminations, blacks have also found a useful vehicle in two antisemitic tracts, The Protocols of the Elders ofZion and The International Jew. A recent article in Nommo, the black student newspaper at the University of Cali­fornia at Los Angeles (UCLA), defended the con­tents of the two works. As usual, the Jewish students on campus, despite their superior num­bers, have found themselves harassed and intimi­dated.

THIRD WORLD ANTISEMITISM

Probably no single event more clearly epito­mized the current mushrooming cancer of antis­emitism than the United Nations women's confer­ence in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1980. Sonia Johnson, a delegate from the U.S., recalled: "In Copenhagen, I heard people say 'the only way to rid the world of Zionism is to kill the Jews'. The antisemitism was overt, wild, and irrational. My roommate, an Israeli, came in every night in real pain."

 

Barbara Leslie, NGO Observer at the Conference from the International Council of Jewish Women, reported:

We organized a Jewish Women's Caucus to answer attacks. Everywhere we went we were scared to death. Each evening, the official American delegation briefed us on the conference proceedings. One night, an American black woman rose to accuse our delegation of deferring to the Jews. She said she couldn't understand what was wrong with saying Zionism is racism. Women of all races applauded her statement. The Jewish women in the room sat stunned. Then Bella Abzug (ordinarily scarcely pro-Israel) stood up. "I'll tell you what Zionism is," she said. "It's a liberation movement for a people who have been persecuted all their lives and throughout human history."

Another shocked Jewish woman who attended was Phyllis Chester, a psychologist and author who summed up her reaction: "American feminists may put down Israel for its macho men and patriarchal religion, as I do, but if you were a feminist in trouble where would you go for asy­lum, Israel or Saudi Arabia?" One night, Chester overheard a conversation between an Egyptian, a Thai, and a U.N. official. "You women should make peace for your countries," the U.N. official suggested. "Never," said the Thai. "The Israeli woman is not a human being. She is poisoned by the worm of Zionism. She can only be reached with the sword." The Egyptian woman agreed: "You must speak to an Israeli with the dagger. You stab her under the table. You stab her over the table. You do not sit down with her."

In 1982, Ms. magazine published the account of that largely Third World conference. The presence of such intense antisemitism in so much of the Third World is a frightening paradigm of what the Jewish people are facing. Many of these antisemites had probably never known a Jew since there simply are no Jewish communi­ties in their countries. Thailand is certainly a classic example of such a case. In all of recorded history, it has never had a significant Jewish community. Yet the intense hatred toward Jews evinced by the Thai woman delegate speaks eloquently of evolving Third World attitudes to Jews. Many women from the First and Second

Worlds shared these same sentiments. How­ever, from all reports the uninhibited tone of hatred toward the Jews was firmly established by the presence of numerous Third World women. The nations in which women aresubjugated-like the Arab countries-controlled the Conference. Although it was supposedly devoted to "peace," PLO terrorists Leila Khaled and Randa Nabulsi, implicated in the murder of many innocent people, were among the recog­nized delegates, it is ironic, too, that many of the tormentors of Jews were Western and Third World black women who sided with their Arab sisters despite the long history of black slavery in Arab countries.

By sheer numbers, the Third World coun­tries overwhelmingly dominate the United Na­tions General Assembly. In the vote that took place in November, 1975 equating Zionism with racism, seventy-two countries voted for the resolution. Only thirty-five opposed it, while twenty-six, mainly from Western Europe and Latin America, abstained. William Buckley noted that the United Nations had become "the most concentrated assembly of antisemitism since Hitler's Germany." Dr. Robert Moss, who was then president of the United Church of Christ, said of the anti-Zionist resolution: "We should not be deceived by the use of the term Zionism. The sponsors of this resolution mean by it Jews and Judaism as well as the State of Israel." Senator Daniel Moynihan, based upon his experiences as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., referred to antisemitism as "a unifying ideology of the totalitarian left." One may take this one step further: antisemitism, in the guise of anti-Zionism, has become a worldwide ideol­ogy.

ANTISEMITISM IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE

In September 1990, a committee headed by Elyakim Rubinstein, the secretary to the Israeli cabinet, submitted its third report on international antisemitism. The essence of its survey as it related to the Western world re­vealed a shocking rise in overt manifestations of hatred against Jews and Jewish institutions. The committee noted:

* France, with a long and ignoble history of antisemitism, is again experiencing a wave of its traditional malady. The desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras quickly led to

similar acts in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Sweden. About a year before the inci­dent at Carpentras, Jean Kahn, the president of the Council of French Jews, remarked that he did "not believe that antisemitism will be found to be deeply rooted in our country." After Carpentras, this same Jean Kahn told an interviewer for Le Figaro that antisemitism was a dangerous every­day phenomenon in France. Within five days of the Carpentras outrage, over two thousand Jews vis­ited local offices of the Israeli government's immi­gration agency. Abdel Aissou, a news commenta­tor, summarized the racist climate that gripped large segments of French society: "They want to kick the Arabs out of France. But when they speak of the Jews, they want to wipe them off the face of the earth." The speaker of the French Assembly pointed to the increasingly difficult position of Jews everywhere, caught between the antisemitism of the right and the anti-Zionism of the left.

Throughout much of the nineteenth cen­tury and right up to World War I, antisemitism in France was probably more virulent than in any nation in Western Europe. In 1855, Comte Joseph de Gobineau published his "Essay on the Inequal­ity of the Races," from which modern antisemitism drew heavily. During the 1880's, Edouard Dru-mont's two-volume antisemitic treatise, Jewish France, was a best seller. Should developments incontemporary France take anybody by surprise?

* In Japan, a nation with fewer than one thousand Jewish residents out of a total population of 140 million, antisemitism is finding a receptive audience. In one recent eighteen month period, no less than eighty-six antisemitic diatribes were published. Japan scrupulously observes the Arab boycott against Israel and limits trade with her. The Japanese have long suffered from a fear of, and obsession with, Jewish power. During World War II, Tokyo toyed with the idea of offering a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler, in the belief that Japan would then benefit from the mighty interna­tional influence of the Jews. A Japanese parlia­mentarian recently authored a tract entitled The Secret of Jewish Power to Control the World, while another antisemitic work, To Understand Jews Is to Understand the World, has been on the best seller list.

* In the United States, antisemitic senti­ment of varying intensity has always existed. At times, it has infected a significant segment of the population, including business, educational,

professional, and political leadership, resulting in significant disabilities and a feeling of insecurity for Jews. In his seminal study of the U.S. re­sponse to the Holocaust, Professor David Wyman of the University of Massachusetts, himself the grandson of two Protestant ministers, observed:

American anti-Semitism, which had climbed to very high levels in the late 1930's, continued to rise in the first part of the 1940's. It reached its historic peak in 1944. By the spring of 1942, sociologist David Riesman was describing it as 'slightly below theboiling point.' Three years later, public-opinion expert Elmo Roper warned that 'anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation and is particularly virulent in urban centers.'

Wyman's devastating book, The Abandonment of the Jews, documents this shameful episode in the history of the U.S. and reveals the complicity by inaction of the Roosevelt administration and the British government in the Nazi extermination pro­gram. Both Washington and London possessed full information about the systematic annihilation of European Jewry by mid-1942.

The past few years have brought height­ened warnings from Jewish defense organiza­tions such as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the American Jewish Congress, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, of a disturbing rise in antisemitism throughout the United States. Ac­cording to an ADL survey in 1990, no less than 1,685 antisemitic incidents were recorded nation­wide. That represented an increase of 18% over the total for 1989. Especially alarming is the ominous rise of antisemitic incidents on college campuses~an increase of 36% in 1990 over the previous year. It is impossible to forget that during the 1920's, German universities were the most important incubators of Nazism.

* As for Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe, the Israeli government report described a dangerous escalation of antisemitic sentiment and attacks throughout the entire region. The newly revived nationalisms that are sweeping the former Communist nations have antisemitic ele­ments. There have been numerous anti-Jewish outbreaks in Russia, Hungary, Poland,Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and even Bul­garia. Popular antisemitism, led by the Russian nationalist organization Pamyat, is making Jew­ish life in Russia dangerous. For that reason,

thousands of Jews each month have been fleeing Russia, mainly to Israel, where they are welcome. These are people who for the most part are devoid of Zionist or Jewish nationalist feeling. The much smaller Jewish communities in the former Iron Curtain countries are also under pressure to leave.

In a recent letter to the Los Angeles Times, Teodor Polak, leader of a prominent Polish-Ameri­can organization, charged that Polish Jews were historically responsible for forcing Communism upon Poland. One is reminded of the well-known aphorism about Leon Trotsky, who was born Leib Davydovitch Bronstein: "The Trotskys make the revolutions.and the Bronsteins pay for them." Along came the angel of death, Josef Stalin, whomade countless thousands of Trotskys pay for their imagined idealism with their lives.

WHERE ZIONISM FAILED

Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of modern political Zionism, was in many ways the archetypi­cal assimilated nineteenth century European Jew. Even as events drew him back to his people, Herzl, a product of the Enlightenment, maintained his loyalty to the culture and society of Europe. In establishing and devoting the last years of his brief life to the Zionist movement, Herzl felt that he was creating a symbiotic relationship of interestsbetween the Jewish people and European soci­ety. Western civilization, he reasoned, was peri­odically being destabilized and convulsed by antisemitism.

The fundamental Zionist thesis about an­tisemitism was that once a Jewish state was realized, the problems of antisemitism would be solved and the survival of the Jewish people would be assured. Since Jews would have their own homeland, they could no longer be perse­cuted as religious, national, or racial strangers. However logical, this reasoning has turned out to be flawed. Israel exists, as a strong and vibrant nation. But the problem of antisemitism has not been solved nor has Jewish survival been as­sured. The hatred of Jews has merely taken on a new character. Antisemitism in the latter half of the twentieth century is national antisemitism, as opposed to the more traditional theological antis­emitism. Since 1948, hatred of the Jew has focused upon the outstanding collective, histori­cal achievement of the Jewish people: the State of Israel.

Leon Pinsker, the assimilated Russian Jewish physician who became one of the precur­sors of the Zionist movement, maintained that Jews, as an identifiable group, should have dis­appeared from the landscape of history when ancient Israel was destroyed. He viewed antis-emitism as essentially irrational, dooming the Jew as long as he remained the eternal outsider and refused to disappear. Pinsker came to the conclusion, in the 1880's, that the Jewish prob­lem could be solved only after a Jewish national home had been established.

In contrast to Leon Pinsker, Herzl found antisemitism to be rationally comprehensible. Herzl was convinced that, for reasons of political and economic convenience, Europe would support the goals of Zionism. After all, the Zionists wished to end the exilic condition of Jewry, and the European nations wished to rid themselves of their Jews. Herzl went further, suggesting that once a Jewish state came into being, Jews would be left with only two choices: those who desired to remain Jews would go to reside in the Jewish homeland, and all others should make a conscious effort to end their existence as Jews. The well-known writer, Arthur Koestler, came to the same conclusion after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Di­aspora Jewry, he contended, was left with only two viable options-emigration to Israel or total assimilation.

The dynamics for Jews and their host-nations have not developed according to these theories. The haunting problem of antisemitism remains, despite the fact that Israel exists. In the main, Jews -except when under pressure- have elected not to go live in Israel. By the same token, while Diaspora Jews are assimilating, most are not consciously doing so, and, in my view, not rapidly enough to satisfy the driving forces of antisemitsm.

While analyzing this particular failure of Zionism, it is important to point out one of its pivotal historical miscalculations. I am referring to the injury done to the Jewish people by the Holocaust. The brutal amputation of more than one-third of Jewry has created a precarious condition of Jewish weakness, not merely in numbers but in human spirit and resources. It is certainly not an exaggeration to state that at the time of their destruction, the Jews of Eastern Europe constituted the heart and soul of Juda­ism and Jewish nationhood. The remainder of

the Jewish people were merely peripheral, ancillary communities. Jewish continuity could have been assured by East European Jewry alone, but may not be possible without it. At the outbreak of World War I, almost two-thirds of all Jews lived in Eastern Europe, constituting the center of Jewish national identity, of Judaism, of Jewish learning, and of Zionism. For one hundred years, up to the outbreak of World War II, East European Jewry provided in­fusions of Jews to every Western Jewish commu­nity and the nascent Jewish nation in Palestine. Whether the Jews of Israel can fulfill that crucial role in the saga of Jewish survival remains an open question. The remaining centers of the Diaspora today, including the large but dwindling community in the United States, face steady erosion due to as­similation and intermarriage. The prognosis for their future is uncertain at best.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

As we approach the twenty-first century, there is reason to fear for the future of the Jewish people. Tremendous hostile forces are gathering. While weak in numbers, Jews are nevertheless riven by internal dissension.

Except for the existence of Israel, the Jew­ish position is painfully analogous to the situation that prevailed in the 1930's. Nothing in the scenario has really changed. Instead of the Germans, we now have the Arabs. In place of Nazism, we face the ideology of the PLO and the radical left. If the Arabs have so far not succeeded in annihilating the Jews of Israel, it is not for lack of trying. The principles of Nazism have found their historicalcontinuity in the antisemitism, militarism, and even socialism in much of the Arab world.

Isi Liebler, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, placed the dilemma facing the Jewish people in a succinct perspective:

/ believe that it is high time for Jews to recognize that despite our eternal obligation to support universal issues such as peace, and the extension of human rights for all people, ultimately those who do not protect their own interests, and devote their entire efforts to reform the world, betray themselves.

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Seymour Hersh's Obsessions, by Rael Jean Isaac -$1.00 (non-members: $2.00)

The Hidden Alliances of Noam Chomsky, by Werner Cohn - $1.00 (non-members: $2.95)

The New Israel Fund: A New Fund for Israel's Enemies, by Joseph Puder - $2.00 (non-members: $3.95)

Order from: Americans For a Safe Israel, 147 East 76 St., New York, NY 10021