Background to Treason, Part 3:
Zionism Between the World Wars

Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky

3,630 words

Editor’s Note:

The following text by William Pierce is the last part of a longer text, “Background to Treason: A Brief History of U.S. Policy in the Middle East, Part 2: From the Balfour Declaration to the Roosevelt Era.” The subtitle is my own creation.

[A]s the 1920s dawned, everything seemed rosy for the Jews. At the same time that Jewish immigrants were pouring into Palestine to begin building a new world Jewish headquarters there, they were consolidating their grip on the two largest White nations in the world, the United States and Russia.

Then things began going wrong for them. In Russia, after Lenin’s death in 1924, the foremost Jewish Bolshevik, Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), lost a power struggle against a faction which, although mostly Jewish also, was headed by a non-Jew, Stalin (Iosif Vissarionvich Dzhugashvili). At the end of the decade Jews still filled nearly every top post in the Soviet power structure, but the viciousness and thoroughness with which Stalin had waged his fight against Trotsky and the latter’s followers had frightened many of the more far-sighted Jews, and they were filled with uneasy forebodings about their future in the Soviet Union.

In the next decade those forebodings were realized, as Stalin launched a massive purge of the Bolshevik power structure, sending whole armies of Jewish commissars to their deaths in prison cellars and slave-labor camps. The fact that many of the prison wardens and camp commissars in the 1930s were still Jewish was only a slight comfort, because a new generation of Gentile commissars was clearly on the rise, and the days of Jewish power in the Soviet Union were numbered.

Growing Jewish power in the United States also brought a reaction in the 1920s which made many Jews uneasy. Automaker Henry Ford was not the only influential Gentile who was busily alerting his fellow Americans to the Jewish danger. The major book-publishing firms, unlike the newspapers, were still free of Jewish control, and dozens of writers were producing books, for popular and semi-popular readerships, which attempted to awaken a sense of racial consciousness and racial solidarity among the White masses and the White leadership elite alike.[1]

It was in Palestine, though, that the Jews’ schemes seemed most in danger by the end of the decade. They had, for one thing, overestimated the power of the British government to protect Jewish immigrants from the wrath of the Palestinians who were being dispossessed. There were repeated outbreaks of violence between Jews and Palestinians during the 1920s, beginning with disturbances in March and April 1920 which took 13 Jewish lives.

On July 1, 1920, the British government ended its military rule in the mandated territory and set up a civilian administration there, headed by a High Commissioner for Palestine. He was Herbert Samuel, a member of a wealthy Jewish banking family and an outspoken Zionist.

Ten months later, during a communist May Day demonstration organized by recent Jewish immigrants from Russia, the Jews suffered their first major setback in Palestine. Moslem Palestinians, enraged by the Jews’ attempts to disseminate communist propaganda among them, killed 47 Jews, many of them Bolshevik demonstrators.

Samuel’s police in turn killed 48 Palestinians. No amount of repressive police action was able to pacify the Palestinians or make the Jews feel completely safe after that, however, and Jewish immigration statistics reflected this. After an initial influx of Zionist immigrants had raised the Jewish proportion in the population of Palestine from 8.1 per cent in 1918 to 16.6 per cent by 1926, the balance remained virtually static through the end of the decade.

In 1927 the number of Jews actually declined: the 2,713 immigrants were fewer than half of the 5,071 Jews who packed up and left Palestine. By 1930 the Jews still made up less than a sixth of the population. It was clear that the Zionist scheme for converting Palestine into a Jewish state was in serious trouble.

The Zionists had never contemplated that all of the world’s Jews, or even a majority of them, would move to Palestine, of course. Who would milk and fleece the goyim if that happened? The scheme was to maintain and even expand all of the existing Jewish colonies among the Gentile nations, in order that the Jews might continue to exercise their influence and collect their tribute there. But they also wanted an all-Jewish headquarters state, where there would be no prying Gentile eyes and to which all the Jews of the world could look for leadership.

The problem was that life was too good among the Gentiles. Why should Shlomo or David leave his plush sinecure in the Soviet bureaucracy and take up life on a Palestinian kibbutz, where he actually would be expected to work with his hands? Why should Israel and Sarah sell their nice, safe pawnshop in Brooklyn and face infuriated Palestinian mobs in Jaffa or Jerusalem?

During the first few years after the First World War the Zionist zealots who actually wanted to live in Palestine were joined by large numbers of Jews who had been displaced by the war and were willing to accept any haven. Later the only immigrants were the zealots, and there just weren’t enough of them. If the Zionists wanted a Jewish Palestine, they were going to have to find a way to shake many more Jews loose from their soft lives in Europe, America, and elsewhere and persuade them that they would be safer and more prosperous in Palestine than where they were. Perhaps another war would do the trick.

Another development during the 1920s which helped to turn the thinking of Zionist leaders toward the benefits which Jews might be able to reap from another major war among the goyim was the rise of Revisionism. In April 1925 Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a Soviet Zionist, founded the Revisionist Party. His aim was to persuade his fellow Jews to break with the policies of gradualism and compromise to which he felt the Zionist establishment had succumbed and which had led to stagnation in the takeover of Palestine; he wanted a return to the militant, uncompromising, political Zionism of Herzl.

Jabotinsky was furious with those Jews who were so concerned with world opinion that they paid lip service to the statements in the Balfour Declaration and in the subsequent League of Nations Mandate for Palestine which called for the protection of the rights of the Palestinian people. Had not the Jews’ god told them that the earth and all in it were created solely for the sake of the Jewish people? Had not he ordered them to exterminate without mercy everyone who stood between them and their rightful dominion over the earth? Why, then, should they not arm themselves and begin killing Palestinians immediately? That was the way to solve the Arab problem![2]

Bloodthirsty as he was, Jabotinsky was also a cunning strategist, and he was just as willing to sacrifice Jews to his ultimate goal of Jewish rule as he was to kill the enemies of the Jews. When he was unable to make his views prevail among the Zionist majority in 1925, he set about deliberately exacerbating the hostility between Jewish immigrants and Arabs in Palestine. His efforts came to fruition in August 1929, in a series of race riots which resulted in the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Palestinians, the bloodiest confrontation yet.

The bloodshed may not have been good for Jewish immigration immediately, but it did wonders for Jewish consciousness and militance. Jabotinsky and his followers organized and trained groups of armed Jewish thugs, whose role was as much provocation of the Palestinians as it was defense of the Jews. From these groups came the dreaded Irgun, specializing in assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1931 until September 1948. In 1943 the leadership of the Irgun fell to a young Zionist lawyer from Poland, Menachem Begin, under whose guidance the organization committed atrocities of such shocking sadism and bloodthirstiness that even many of his fellow Jews were embarrassed.

Jabotinsky was Begin’s spiritual father. He was a man of wider vision than Begin, however, and the scope of his activities extended far beyond Palestine. He recognized that two things were essential to Zionist success: The flow of Jewish immigrants to Palestine must be greatly increased, and the Jews of the diaspora must maintain their race consciousness and their solidarity, lest they lose the political influence they were able to wield over Gentile governments despite their small numbers. Both of these things required that the Jews of the diaspora not be permitted to be too comfortable. They must be kept on edge, militantly self-conscious and separated from their Gentile hosts by a barrier of fear and hatred.

Thus, as early as 1919-1921 he was in contact with the great Ukrainian patriot Simon Petlyura, who was organizing an anti-Bolshevik resistance in the Ukraine — and killing all the Jews he could get his hands on. Later Jabotinsky was a great admirer of Benito Mussolini and his Fascist movement.

Jabotinsky thought a man like Petlyura ultimately better for the Jews than Trotsky, because the former helped them maintain their Jewish consciousness and separateness — even if at the expense of a few Jewish lives — whereas Bolshevik policies would lead to assimilation and loss of Jewish identity. While Mussolini’s Fascists aroused a sense of ethnic consciousness in their fellow Italians — and a great feeling of unease in the Jews of Italy — Jabotinsky’s agents capitalized on this unease by organizing Italy’s young Jews into armed self-defense groups, part of his Betar movement. Throughout the 1930s the Revisionists resorted to assassinations and other provocations to fuel the growing anti-Jewish feeling in Europe, all the while urging the increasingly worried masses of Jews to organize for their own protection — and to go to Palestine.

From 1933 on, however, it was the establishment Zionists much more than the Revisionists who led the campaign for a new world war. Even without any prompting from Jabotinsky they were thoroughly frightened of what was taking place in Europe, especially in Germany, where Adolf Hitler, their sworn enemy, had become chancellor on January 30, 1933.[3]

Thirty-three days later their own man took office as president of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt differed in many ways from Woodrow Wilson. Although both seemed to have been born with large doses of lawyerly guile and glibness in their makeups, Wilson was essentially a weak, foolish, vain, and impractical man who was utterly dependent on his Jewish advisers throughout his career, while Roosevelt was strong, self-confident rather than vain, and utterly “street wise” in the sort of political maneuvering which eventually took him to the White House.

Roosevelt made much use of Jewish advisers — indeed, he was surrounded by even more of them that Wilson had been — but it was a matter of choice, not necessity. Wilson would have been helpless in the political arena without his Jews. Roosevelt probably could have managed well enough without them, but he was a man of great ambition and no principles, and he knew the power they wielded.

By 1933 that power was much greater than it had been when Wilson became President. For two more decades the Jews had been working on their takeover of Main Street, U.S.A., while they consolidated their earlier beachhead on Wall Street. Most significant of all, however, was their growing control of the news and entertainment media in America.

David Sarnoff, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, had become president of the Radio Corporation of America in January 1930. He was also chairman of the board of directors of its subsidiary, the National Broadcasting Company. Another Jew, William S. Paley, had been the president of the competing Columbia Broadcasting System since 1928. And just a few weeks after Roosevelt was inaugurated, Bernard Baruch’s old partner on the War Industries Board, Eugene Meyer (who was also appointed head of the War Finance Corporation by President Wilson), purchased the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction in the District of Columbia for a trifling $825,000.

Motion pictures were becoming an influential medium of persuasion, especially after the introduction of sound in 1926, and Hollywood was already solidly Jewish by 1933: there were the Warner brothers (Albert, Harry, Jack, and Sam) of Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn (born Goldfish) and Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, William Fox (born Fuchs) of Twentieth Century Fox, and many, many others, from chairmen of the boards on down to the directors and scriptwriters.

And so it went — in business, in finance, in the media, and increasingly in politics too. The Jews were already powerful in the Democratic Party in Wilson’s time, mostly behind the scenes. By 1933 they were coming out front, at least in those areas of their strongest influence: in that year Jews took over the governorships of two of the nation’s most populous states, New York (Herbert H. Lehman) and Illinois (Henry Horner).

What made this infiltration of America’s power centers possible for such a small minority — and made it enormously more effective after it had occurred — was Jewish organization and Jewish solidarity.

Many other groups of immigrants to America — Irishmen, Germans, Poles, Italians — felt a certain sense of solidarity with their own kind during the first few years after their arrival, especially those who settled in large cities among other immigrants of the same nativity, and they formed numerous ethnic organizations, mostly churches and cultural associations, but also political clubs. Even today in the large cities of the Northeast one finds such organizations. In nearly all cases, however, they exercise only a local influence.

More important, they lack any unifying principle. A Gaelic Society in South Boston or a Pulaski Club in a Polish neighborhood of Philadelphia may contribute to a sense of ethnic solidarity in the community, but neither has any millennial purpose; neither attempts to nourish ancient ambitions to despoil non-Irish or non-Polish citizens or to gain hegemony over them; neither preaches the “chosenness” of its members, rubs salt into the memory of imagined wrongs, and plots vengeance on the world; neither demands an exclusive loyalty or inspires a zeal to advance the interests of fellow Irishmen or fellow Poles at all costs. Belonging to such a group may or may not be of some benefit to one’s business or political ambitions, but the benefit, if any, is seldom decisive.

With the Jews it is altogether different. They are by far the most highly organized of ethnic groups. Every Jewish neighborhood in America has not only a synagogue, but also a staggering array of Jewish business, cultural, recreational, fraternal, youth, women’s, philanthropic, and political organizations.

Furthermore, each of these local Jewish groups is part of an international network, with hardly an individual Jew anywhere not tied into it, regardless of his particular circumstances, sympathies, and interests. If an earthquake in India leaves six Jewish families there homeless today, a relief fund for those six families will be on the agendas of thousands of local chapters of Jewish philanthropic societies all over America tomorrow; if a prominent Jewish racketeer is arrested by the police in Chicago, 16 different Jewish legal defense organizations in New York will know about it before he is even fingerprinted and photographed in the Chicago precinct station; if a tipsy Congressman is overheard making a less-than-adulatory remark about Jews at a Washington cocktail party, the Jewish War Veterans, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and 44 other national Jewish organizations will have angry letters denouncing him on the editorial pages of every major newspaper in the country the next morning, while the members of all 11 synagogues in his congressional district will be knocking on doors to collect signatures on a recall petition.

And, unlike nearly all non-Jewish organizations, every Jewish organization is wholly, enthusiastically, aggressively, self-righteously — often hysterically — ethnocentric. Beside this Jewish racism, those of the Mafia, the Black Muslims, and the Ku Klux Klan seem anemic. For the Jews are both more exclusive and more ruthless than the Sicilians in advancing their own kind, infinitely cleverer than the Blacks, and simultaneously more brazen and more subtle than most White racists.

Of all the causes which may be advanced to explain the unique Jewish solidarity, perhaps the most basic is the Jewish religion. Although it has, unfortunately, spawned religions which make claims to universality, Judaism itself is an entirely particularistic tribal religion, the central idea of which is an exclusive covenant between a materialistic, predatory people and their tribal god. It is short on theology and very long on tribal legend, chest-thumping self-glorification, and rules for racial survival in a hostile, race-mixing world. It is strictly a them-vs.-us religion, which draws the sharpest possible line between the Jews and everyone else.[4]

Another aspect of the Jews’ xenophobic attitude, which is held even by non-religious Jews, is a uniquely intense preoccupation with alleged past injuries done them by other peoples: Egyptians, Philistines, Persians, Romans . . . ; it is a very long list. Many other peoples nurse historic grievances — Armenians and Greeks against Turks, Blacks against Arabs and Whites, Koreans against Japanese, Irishmen against Englishmen, Southerners against Yankees — but only the Jews cherish their “persecution” to such an extent that it has been elevated to one of the determining features of their world view. They virtually define themselves in terms of their enemies, past and present. What would the Jews be today if they did not have the “Holocaust” of a generation ago to wail about? One can hardly imagine it.

In addition, there almost certainly must be genetic factors involved in such a deeply ingrained and persistent sense of tribal solidarity. Whatever its causes, it has always given the Jews a unique strength and made them a unique danger to other peoples.

Zionism added a new dimension to the danger, because it fired the imagination of the Jews, stimulated whatever latent idealism and spirit of sacrifice remained in an almost wholly materialistic race, and provided a common goal toward which they could direct their considerable energies. Although the Jewish colonization of Palestine was not going according to schedule in 1933, the Zionist idea was still very much alive among Jews in America; making them a more unified — and, therefore, more potent — political force than ever before.

Even then it was something which few dared to mention in public, but no knowledgeable politician remained unaware of the Jews’ power to help or hinder his career. Had the American people been blessed with a man of principle and responsibility, a patriot with a sense of racial consciousness and destiny, as a leader at that time, then, strong as the Jews were, he could have broken their power.

The Germans gained such a leader in 1933. But the Americans, mired in the democratic system for which Woodrow Wilson had made the world safe, got Franklin Roosevelt. Thus was the stage set for the Zionists’ realization of their dream.

Notes

1. Henry Ford spent millions of dollars during the First World War in a vain effort to keep America from becoming involved. During this effort he became aware of the Jews’ role in fomenting the war. After it was over he purchased a newspaper, theDearborn Independent, and over the next few years published hundreds of documented articles exposing the Jews’ destructive activities. Many of these articles were later reprinted in four bound volumes titled The International Jew, which were widely distributed during the 1920s.

Lothrop Stoddard’s books on race and politics, especially The Rising Tide of Color(1920) and Revolt against Civilization (1922), also sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies.

Another writer whose books (The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, was his best) were very influential during the 1920s was Madison Grant, then the chairman of the New York Zoological Society.

2. “But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.”

“But thou shalt utterly destroy them — namely, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites — as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee . . .” (Deuteronomy 20:16-17.)

3. In his personal political testament Adolf Hitler described his decision to devote his life to the fight to liberate his people from the Jews and Jewish influences. The decision was made in November 1918, when Hitler was lying in a German military hospital, blinded by a British poison-gas attack. There the 29-year-old corporal, who had spent four years fighting in the trenches and had received Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, heard of the mutinies and strikes organized throughout Germany by the Bolsheviks, crippling the German government and paralyzing the war effort.

Then news of the Kaiser’s abdication and the German surrender reached him. In Hitler’s own words:

“The more I tried to achieve clarity on the monstrous event in this hour, the more the shame of indignation and disgrace burned my brow. What was all the pain in my eyes compared to his misery?

“There followed terrible days and even worse nights — I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope in the mercy of the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.

“In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me….

“Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first German emperor to hold out a conciliatory hand to the leaders of Marxism, without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger.

“There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either-or.

“I, for my part, decided to go into politics.” (Mein Kampf, v. I, ch. 7.)

A little over 14 years later Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.

4. See “What Is a Jew,” National Vanguard, no. 90, pp. 3-7.