(Note: this article was originally written before the US assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani on January 2nd)
Trump kept the promise he made to AIPAC in March 2016: “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” Its fulfillment gave a timely support to Netanyahu, whose popularity in Israel is entirely based on his capacity to manipulate the United States, of which he brags. Commenting in May 2018 on Trump’s decision, Netanyahu paid him this compliment:
“This will be remembered the way we remember the Cyrus declaration of 2500 years ago, when he told the exiles of Babylon, ‘you can go back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.’ This is a historical moment and we will always remember.”
Cyrus is that Persian king whose spirit “Yahweh roused … to issue a proclamation” and “build him a temple in Jerusalem,” according to the Book of Ezra (1:1-2) A successor to Cyrus later appointed Ezra to oversee the building. For his decree, Cyrus is bestowed the title of Yahweh’s “Anointed” (Mashiah) by the prophet Isaiah:
“Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you.” (Isaiah 45:1-5)[1]
Yahweh, who “roused Cyrus’ spirit” and “grasped him by his right hand,” stands, of course, for “Jewish Power”.
Netanyahu hailed Trump as a modern-day Cyrus on several occasions, and his enthusiasm was echoed on Fox News, when Jeanine Pirro declared: “Donald Trump recognizes history. He, like king Cyrus before him, fulfills the biblical prophecy…”
Trump was like Cyrus again in March 2019, when he signed a decree recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights (top photo). It inspired Miriam Adelson, wife of Trump’s biggest donor, to comment that the President deserves his “Book of Trump” in the Bible.[2] Israel’s history is always biblical, one way or another.
I was made aware of this “Trump is Cyrus” meme by Adam Green’s impressive film “God’s Chosen People”. It seems that Trump was already promoted as a new Cyrus to Christian Zionists during the 2016 campaign. It has also been noted that, just a couple of months after taking office, Trump used the occasion of the Persian new year (Nowruz) to mention in a White House statement to the Iranian embassy that “Cyrus the Great, a leader of the ancient Persian Empire, famously said that ‘freedom, dignity, and wealth together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity.’” Using the name Cyrus rather than the form Koresch preferred by historians is an implicit reference to the Bible story. Zionists like Jonathan Cahn believe this was a cryptic message: “It was not only that the president had issued a public statement in which he spoke of Cyrus but that he spoke words attributed to the ancient king. In other words, he wasn’t only speaking of Cyrus; he was now speaking as Cyrus.”[3] Such interpretation tells us more about the Zionists’ wishful thinking than about Trump’s real intention (who wrote that statement anyway?). But then, the Zionists have proven very good at fulfilling their wishful thinking.
Of course, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem is not exactly like rebuilding of the temple. But Trump’s announcement nevertheless boosted messianic yearnings for the Third Temple. Plans, funds, and even cultic personnel are all ready. Prayers are sent to heaven that an Iranian missile would mistakenly, by Yahweh’s hand, find its way on the Al-Aqsa Mosque to get rid of the last obstacle. Confident that Trump is the new Cyrus, the Mikdash Educational Center has minted medals with Trump’s portrait superimposed on Cyrus’ on one side, and the future temple on the other. Of course, ecstatic Jews and Evangelicals have no clue that the so-called Temple Mount never supported a temple at all: what they take for the walls of Herod’s Temple is actually the remains of the Roman fort housing the legion that destroyed the Temple (as demonstrated archeologically in the documentary “The Coming Temple”).
It is not the first time that a Christian statesman is compared to Persian king Cyrus. It was said before of Lord Balfour and Harry Truman. Netanyahu actually referred to both of them when meeting Trump in the Oval Office in March 2018:
“I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory, so we remember the proclamation of the great king, Cyrus the Great, the Persian king 2,500 years ago. He proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem. We remember a hundred years ago, Lord Balfour, who issued the Balfour Proclamation that recognized the rights of the Jewish people in our ancestral homeland. We remember 70 years ago, President Harry S. Truman was the first leader to recognize the Jewish state. And we remember how a few weeks ago, President Donald J. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Mr. President, this will be remembered by our people through the ages.”
Zion is a biblical program
Netanyahu’s declaration provides a good opportunity for reflecting on the importance of biblical narratives in Israel’s national consciousness, propaganda, diplomacy, and geopolitical strategy, and to analyze the Cyrus pattern in the history of the relationship between Israel and imperial powers.
Netanyahu is certainly typical of Israeli leaders’ tendency to see history as a perpetual reenactment of Bible stories. In 2015, he dramatized his phobia of Iran by referring to the Book of Esther, in an allocution to the American Congress that he managed to program on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy ending of the Book of Esther—the slaughter of 75,000 Persians.
Esther’s story is not unlike Ezra’s: through her, Yahweh “roused the spirit” of another Persian king, Ahasuerus, to protect the Jews and hang their persecutors. This last December, Trump became a modern-day Ahasuerus when he signed an executive order against anti-Semitism and Israel-boycott in university campuses.
Actually, the Book of Esther, Netanyahu’s favorite, is the only book in the Tanakh that makes no mention of God, which proves that “biblical” does not necessarily mean “religious”. This is a point sadly misunderstood in the Christian world.
The biblical foundation of secular Zionism is underestimated, even denied, by critics of Zionism, even when it is affirmed by the Zionists themselves. It is true that Theodor Herzl did not argue in biblical terms for his 1896 program, The Jewish State. Yet he named his movement after the Bible: Zion is metonymic designation for Jerusalem used by biblical prophets, especially Isaiah. Later on, the pioneers of the Yishuv and the founders of the Jewish State were steeped in the Bible. Ben-Gurion, an avowed atheist, used to say: “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible.”[4] That statement should be taken seriously. If it is true for Zionists, then it is also true for the critics of Zionism: there can be no real understanding of Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible. The Tanakh is the alpha and the omega of Zionism. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, justified his annexation of new territory in a book titled Living with the Bible (1978).
One important thing that Ben-Gurion learnt from the Bible is that Israel’s destiny is not to be a nation like others, but the center of the world and the ruler of all nations. When asked in 1962 his prediction for the next 25 years, he declared that Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[5] He was referring to Isaiah 2:2-4, announcing the messianic Pax Judaica, when “the Law will issue from Zion” and Israel “will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.” Ben-Gurion’s prophetic vision, which may be called Universal Zionism (the title of a book by the director of a Jerusalem Summit that promotes that vision), has been shared more or less by all subsequent Israeli leaders up to Benjamin Netanyahu.
It should be evident, and it surely is to Netanyahu as it was to Ben-Gurion, that for Jerusalem to become the headquarter of a “Supreme Court of Mankind” that will replace the United Nations, another world war is necessary. The fall of the American Empire, or at least its total transformation into Zionist occupied territory, is also part of the plan.
The Tanakh does not just teach Zionists the ultimate goal, it also shows them the way to go: Cyrus’ edict reproduced in the Book of Ezra, whether genuine or fake, is the blueprint for Zion’s exploitation of the Empire’s foreign policy in modern times. Transforming Gentile leaders into Cyrus-like figures is the rule of the game. That is what I would like to illustrate below.
Jeremiah, Babylon and Persia
Before we recall the way the proto-Zionists Ezra and Nehemiah worked the Persian administration into giving them control over Jerusalem, let’s go back one century earlier. In 588 BC, to subdue the rebellious Judeans, Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged and finally burned Jerusalem, then deported some of its elites (Jeremiah 52:30 gives the plausible figure of 4,600 people). The exiles enjoyed broad autonomy in Babylon, and some acquired wealth and influence. Speaking on behalf of Yahweh, Jeremiah wrote to them, from Egypt: “Work for the good of the city to which I have exiled you; pray to Yahweh on its behalf, since on its welfare yours depends” (Jeremiah 29:7). Yahweh even asked Jeremiah to convey the following message to the kings of Syria-Palestine:
“For the present, I have handed all these countries over to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, my servant … Any nation or kingdom that will not serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and will not bow its neck to the yoke of the king of Babylon, I shall punish that nation with sword, famine and plague, Yahweh declares, until I have destroyed it by his hand.” (Jeremiah 27:6-8)
But twenty chapters later, Jeremiah announced the “vengeance of the Lord” on the Babylonians and called on their Persian enemies to “slaughter and curse with destruction every last one of them” (50:21). In the same spirit, the author of Psalm 137 wrote: “Daughter of Babel, doomed to destruction, […] a blessing on anyone who seizes your babies and shatters them against a rock!” The reason for this violent shift in Yahweh’s sentiment was that the situation had changed: in 555 BC, a prince named Nabonad seized power in Babylon. He made war against the Persian king Cyrus (Koresch). It is believed, by Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in particular, that the Judean exiles in Babylon sided secretly with the Persians, and perhaps “opened secret negotiations with Cyrus.” That would explain “the kindness shown later on to the Judeans by the Persian warrior, and their persecution by Nabonad.”[6]
In Babylon, the Jews had gained positions of economic influence, by specializing, already, in usury and tax collecting. Their influence was turned into political power under the Persians. From this period date the legendary stories of Joseph (Genesis 37-50), Daniel, and Esther. All are Jews who attain positions of influence in the royal court thanks to their practical intelligence or their charm, and use their power for the benefit of their people. Joseph advises the King of Egypt; Daniel, the King of Babylon; and Esther, the King of Persia.
As the king’s highest official, Joseph makes his brothers wealthy (even though they have conspired against him) at the expense of the Gentile people he is supposed to serve but enslaves by debt. (Modern equivalents are not hard to find, and Bible worshippers shouldn’t blame them for emulating the great biblical hero.)
Although placed in Egypt, the story of Joseph’s ascension from slave to vizier seems to fit the Babylonian situation. The persecution of the Jews by Nabonad is perhaps reflected in the Exodus story that follows immediately Joseph’s story in Genesis, where a new Pharaoh, seeing that the Israelites had become “more numerous and stronger than we are,” decided to take measures “to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies” (Exodus 1:9-10). Babylonian Jews, having increased in number and influence, did join Babylon’s enemy.
Interestingly, the situation was repeated in the 7th century AD, when Jews took advantage of the Byzantine-Sasanian wars to conspire against the Byzantine Empire. When in 614 the Persians besieged Jerusalem, they were assisted from within by the Jews, who then received governorship over the city and permission to build a temple. The Jews then committed one of the largest massacres of Christians in history (read “Mamilla Pool” by Israel Shamir). The Persians changed their policy within three months and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem.
Lessons from the books of Ezra and Nehemia
In exchange for their decisive support, Judeans (or Jews, the same word in Antiquity) were granted the right to return to Judea and rebuild their temple. Under King Cyrus’ protection, some of the exiles’ descendants (42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers, according to Ezra 2:64-67) returned to Jerusalem.
Under the next emperor Xerxes, the Palestinian locals tried to warn Persian authorities that the returned exiles are not just building a temple, but the city walls: “now the king should be informed that once this city is rebuilt and the walls are restored, they will refuse to pay tribute, tax or toll” (4:13). The emperor realized the abuse and ordered the walls pulled down. But Jewish Power suffered no reprisals, and their right to build the temple was confirmed by the next emperor Darius, who even ordered gigantic burnt offerings financed by “the royal revenue.” If anyone resists the new theocratic power backed by Persia, Darius allegedly decreed, “a beam is to be torn from his house, he is to be impaled on it and his house is to be reduced to a rubbish-heap for his offense” (Ezra 6:11).
Then another Persian king, Artaxerxes, is said to have granted Ezra authority to lead “all members of the people of Israel in my kingdom, including their priests and Levites, who freely choose to go to Jerusalem,” and to rule over “the whole people of Trans-Euphrates [district encompassing all territories West to the Euphrates]” (7:11-26). In 458 BC, eighty years after the first return of exiles, Ezra, proud descendant of Aaron, went from Babylon to Jerusalem, accompanied by some 1,500 followers. He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin, whose actions are told in the Book of Nehemiah, a sequel to the Book of Ezra.
The edicts of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes, as they are quoted in the Book of Ezra, are certainly not authentic. But the notion that Persian kings granted to a clan of wealthy Levites legal authority for establishing a theocratic semi-autonomous state in Palestine is probably historical. The manner by which these Judeo-Babylonian Levites maneuvered the Persians’ imperial policy in support of their theocratic project for Palestine is not explained in the Bible, but we can imagine it was not very different from the way the Zionists hijacked the Anglo-American empire’s foreign policy in modern times; the edict of Cyrus the Great is comparable to the Balfour Declaration.
Calling himself the “Secretary of the Law of the God of Heaven” (Ezra 7:21), Ezra carried with him the newly redacted Torah. Spinoza plausibly suggested in 1670 that he was the head of the scribal school that had compiled and edited most of the Tanakh as we have it today,[7] a thesis that is now getting the high ground.[8]
In ancient times, religion and politics were intertwined. Since the state religion of Persia was the cult of Ahura Mazda, the supreme God of Heaven, royal edicts were taken in his name. As I explained in “Zionism, Crypto-Judaism, and the Biblical Hoax,” a careful analysis of the wording of the Persian edicts in the Book of Ezra shows that the Judean exiles deceived the Persian authorities into believing that they intended to build a temple to the God of Heaven, and concealed the strictly national character of their cult. In all the edicts as they are quoted, Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes equate “Yahweh, the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem,” with “the God of Heaven”. But the expression “God of Heaven” is applied to Yahweh only by Persian authorities, or by Judeans addressing Persian authorities. Everywhere else, when Ezra, Nehemiah, other Judeans, or even Yahweh himself, speak to the Judeans, they only qualify Yahweh as “the god of Israel”. This pattern betrays a strategy of cryptism: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews, whereas Gentiles must be told that he is the supreme God—who happens to prefer Jews and has his main residence in the Jerusalem Temple, where non-Jews are forbidden to enter under penalty of death. This may be compared to the way the Holocaust cult is universalized today.
There is another important lesson to be drawn from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah: The capacity of Israel to hijack the Empire’s foreign and military policy requires that a substantial Jewish elite remain in the Diaspora. Ezra went back and forth from Persia to Palestine, and has his tomb in Persia. Nehemiah retained his principal residence in Babylon. For centuries after, the kingdom of Israel was virtually ruled by the Babylonian exiles, and after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Babylon remained the center of world Jewry. Likewise today, Israel’s survival is entirely dependent on the influence of the Zionist power complex in the United States (euphemistically called the “pro-Israel lobby”). The comparison was made by Jacob Neusner in A History of the Jews in Babylonia (1965), and by Max Dimont in Jews, God and History (1962). The American Jews who prefer to remain in the United States rather than emigrating to Israel are, Dimont argued, as essential to the community as the Babylonian Jews who declined the invitation to return to Palestine in the Persian era.[9]
Disraeli, Herzl, and the Ottoman Sultan
The way the wealthy and influential Judean exiles manipulated Persian foreign policy is the blueprint used for later Jewish attempts to recolonize Palestine. In the Middle Ages, there were already attempts at exploiting the holy wars waged by the imperial Roman Church in the Levant. Rabbi Moses Nachmanides declared in 1263: “When the end of times approaches, the Messiah will come to the Pope and will ask from him the liberation of his people” (liberation meaning the end of the dispersion). With this in mind, seventeen years later, Abraham Abulafia proclaimed himself Messiah and travelled to Rome in the hope of meeting Pope Nicholas III. A last attempt was made by Solomon Molcho (1500-1532) who, with the support of several bishops, tried to convince the Pope to raise an army of Marrano Jews to liberate Palestine.[10]
Jewish support soon shifted away from the Catholic Empire to its British enemy. Marrano Jews in Antwerp and Amsterdam supported the anti-Spanish Calvinist uprisings in 1566, and, under Cromwell, gained unprecedented influence in British political affairs. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), although the Jews remained officially banned from the kingdom, many of them penetrated into the higher spheres of the state under an (often perfunctory) Anglican or Calvinist disguise.
From then on, Jewish diplomacy focused simultaneously on the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Jerusalem. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) failed to convince the Ottoman Sultan to concede Palestine as an autonomous Jewish province at the Berlin Congress, but masterminded a successful strategy to tie British interests to the Middle East. He was a modern-day Ezra, capable of steering the Empire’s policy according to the Jewish agenda of the conquest of Palestine, a dream that he had cherished ever since his first trip to Palestine in 1830, at the age of 26, and that he had expressed through the hero of his novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy.
A quarter of a century after Disraeli, Theodor Herzl also turned first to the Ottoman Empire. He proposed to Sultan Abdul Hamid to use his Rothschild connections to set straight the bankrupt Turkish finances: “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey” (The Jewish State, 1896).[11] He also proposed to influence European press in favor of the Empire on the “Armenian question”. In his diary, he gives this version of his offer: “Let the Sultan give us that piece of land, and in return we shall set his house in order, straighten out his finances, and influence public opinion all over the world in his favor” (June 9, 1896). The Sultan told Herzl to go to hell, and, four years later, Herzl concluded (June 4, 1900):
“At present I can see only one more plan: See to it that Turkey’s difficulties increase; wage a personal campaign against the Sultan, possibly seek contact with the exiled princes and the Young Turks; and, at the same time, by intensifying Jewish Socialist activities stir up the desire among the European governments to exert pressure on Turkey to take in the Jews.”[12]
Turkey’s difficulties did increase, with a revolution coming from the Salonika crypto-Jews, followed by the First World War, which dismantled the empire altogether.
The Balfour declaration (to Lord Rothschild)
From the Zionist perspective, the purpose of the war was to shift the control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire to the British Empire, before forcing the latter to cede it to the Jews. The counterpart to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire was a short letter addressed by the British Foreign Minister Lord Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, president of the Zionist Federation. Prime Minister Lloyd George later explained the deal in those terms:
“Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to giving facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause. They kept their word.”[13]
It is little known that similar declarations were simultaneously obtained from other European powers, as explained by Martin Kramer:
“Britain could not have acted alone, because it belonged to an alliance. […] It would have been unthinkable for Britain to have issued a public pledge regarding the future of territory yet to be taken in war without the prior assent of its wartime allies—especially those that also had an interest in Palestine.”
Nahum Sokolow who had become the head of the World Zionist Organization in 1906, obtained from Jules Cambon, one of the great French diplomats of the day, a letter dated June 4, 1917, which not only anticipated the Balfour Declaration but cleared the way for it. It states that the French government “feels sympathy for your cause,” namely “the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.” Back in London, Sokolow deposited the Cambon letter at the Foreign Office, where it stimulated a spirit of competition. In January and February 1918, he returned to Paris, this time with the aim of securing a public French declaration in support of the Balfour Declaration.
In his History of Zionism, Sokolow praises, among the architects of the secret diplomacy leading to the Balfour Declaration, “the beneficent personal influence of the Honorable Louis D. Brandeis, Judge of the Supreme Court.”[14] It was Sokolow who converted Brandeis to Zionism. Brandeis was, with Untermeyer, one of the most powerful Zionist schemers, exercising an unparalleled influence on the White House. He established a formidable tandem with his protégé Felix Frankfurter, who would succeed him under Roosevelt. “Working together over a period of 25 years, they placed a network of disciples in positions of influence, and labored diligently for the enactment of their desired programs,” writes Bruce Allen Murphy in The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection.[15] Brandeis and Frankfurter belonged to a secret society dedicated to the Zionist cause and named the Parushim (Hebrew for “Pharisees” or “Separated”). Sarah Schmidt, professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described the society as “a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way.”[16] Brandeis and Frankfurter helped found the American Jewish Congress in 1918, with the aim of presenting a unified American Jewish position at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Thanks to the conspiracy of these modern-day Ezra and Nehemiah, the Treaty of Versailles placed Palestine under the provisional authority of the British, whose “mandate” included the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The Declaration was integrated in the preamble of the League of Nations mandate, acquiring then full legal standing in international law.
The story of the Balfour Declaration demonstrates the capacity of Jewish networks to capitalize on a single written statement in a way that its author—in this case Lord Balfour—probably never anticipated. Balfour probably thought that, after the war, his letter, prudently worded and typed on non-official paper, would be of little consequence and easy to dismiss. The key to the Zionists’ success in using this piece of paper as a cornerstone to their project is transgenerational persistency (see my article “Israel as One Man”). They never let go, and, when they suffer a setback, they persistently look for the next potential Cyrus and push him into power. When the British government proved reluctant to deliver after the Versailles Treaty, the Zionists found their perfect instrument in the ambitious, unscrupulous, and bankrupt Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
“An Old Zionist like me” (Winston Churchill)
Martin Gilbert, author of Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, documents Churchill’s intimate family ties with the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers. On the fourth anniversary of the independence of Israel, Churchill declared publicly that he had been “a Zionist from the days of the Balfour Declaration,” and he would write to U.S. President Eisenhower in 1956: “I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration.” Churchill entertained close ties with Chaim Weizmann from 1919 on, often consulting him in private meetings. Their thoughts, Churchill said, were “99 per cent identical”. In 1951, Churchill would refer to himself, in a letter to Weizmann, as “an old Zionist like me.”[17]
If Balfour was Cyrus, then Churchill was Artaxerxes. In his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Churchill had already affirmed the British Government’s responsibility “of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life.”
“if, as may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”
In 1922, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Churchill issued a White Paper aimed at reassuring the Arabs, but giving in fact carte blanche to the Zionists by imposing no limitation either to Jewish immigration in Palestine or to the purchase of lands by Jews, which were the two great concerns of the Arabs. It simply stated:
“it is necessary that the Jewish community in Palestine should be able to increase its numbers by immigration. This immigration cannot be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.”
In 1939, when a new Labour majority undermined Churchill’s influence in Parliament and voted a new White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 for the next five years, Churchill systematically “refused to allow the 1939 White Paper, despite its passage into law by an overwhelming majority of Members of Parliament, to come into effect. This was certainly unconstitutional,” comments Martin Gilbert. In a memorandum that he wrote for the War Cabinet on Christmas Day 1939, Churchill reminded his Cabinet colleagues that the Jews had fulfill their part of the deal for the Balfour Declaration in WW1, and that for winning WW2, “it was more necessary, even than in November 1917, to conciliate American Jewry and enlist their aid in combating isolationist and indeed anti-British tendencies in the United States.”
In 1945, Churchill was defeated by a Labour majority. The new Prime Minister Clement Attlee appointed Ernest Bevin, a man not well disposed toward Zionism, as Foreign Secretary. Churchill understood that the new British government would stick by the 1939 White Paper, and that the hopes of Zionism now rested on the USA. He argued for the U.K. to give up on “a responsibility which we are failing to discharge and which in the process is covering us with blood and shame,” and to return the Mandate to the United Nations. As soon as the British handed the Mandate back to the U.N., the Zionists declared the founding of the State of Israel, which the U.S. and the Soviet Union immediately recognized.
“I am Cyrus” (Harry Truman)
FDR was opposed to the creation of Israel, and more so after meeting King Ibn Saud of Arabia on the cruiser USS Quincy after the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Roosevelt gave him his word, confirmed by a letter dated April 5, that he “would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.” In describing his meeting with Ibn Saud, Roosevelt told Congress: “On the problem of Arabia,” he said, “I learned more about that whole problem—the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem—by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.”[18]
Roosevelt died on April 12. “If Roosevelt had not died, there might not have been a Jewish state,” has commented Nahum Goldmann, one of the most influential Zionists of the time. “Our great luck was that Roosevelt was replaced by Harry Truman, who was a simple and upright man. He said, ‘My friends are Jews; the Jews want the partition, so I am giving it to them.’”[19] David Niles, the gray eminence of Zionism in the White House under both Roosevelt and Truman, expressed the same feeling to Stephen Isaacs: “Had Roosevelt lived, Israel would probably not have become a state.”[20]
There are strong suspicions that FDR was actually poisoned. The case was first presented in 1948 by Emanuel Josephson in The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Less than four hours after his death, officially of a cerebral hemorrhage, FDR’s body had turned black, a reaction from arsenic poisoning. Although Georgia law demanded an autopsy, Roosevelt’s body was whisked out of the state and no autopsy was done. Emanuel Josephson, a Zionist Jew, blames Stalin, but others who have looked into the case smell a Zionist coup.
According to an anecdote recounted here:
“In November 1953, just a few months after leaving the presidency of the United States, Harry S. Truman was brought to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to meet a group of Jewish dignitaries. Accompanying him was his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a comrade from his Army days and former business partner in a short-lived men’s haberdashery 30 years earlier. Jacobson introduced his friend to the assembled theologians: ‘This is the man who helped create the State of Israel.’ Truman retorted, ‘What do you mean, ‘helped to create’? I am Cyrus. I am Cyrus.’”
Like most Cyrus figures, Truman became a Zionist partly by personal necessity. According to the Jewish World Review, based on documents revealed by the Truman Library in 2003, including Abraham Feinberg’s recorded testimony, “Truman did it to save his own skin.”[21] In December 1945, a few months after Roosevelt’s death, Truman was still opposed to the idea of a “Jewish state”, stating: “The Palestine Government […] should be the Government of the people of Palestine, irrespective of race, creed or color.”[22] But on May 15, 1948, he recognized the State of Israel ten minutes after its unilateral proclamation. This decision went against the recommendations of his Secretary of State George Marshall and his Defense Secretary James Forrestal, whom he would soon discharge. Moreover, it betrayed the Quincy Pact.
In his Memoirs published in 1956, Truman commented—in eloquent but somewhat hypocritical terms—on the circumstances of the vote:
“The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me. Some were even suggesting that we pressure sovereign nations into favorable votes in the General Assembly.”[23]
According to John Loftus and Mark Aarons, authors of The Secret War against the Jews (sic), the Zionists blackmailed Nelson Rockefeller, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Latin America, with information about his business dealing with the Nazis, to have him pressure Latin American dictators to vote for the Partition Plan.[24]
In a most interesting report written in 1975, Edwin Wright, member of the Near East-Africa Division (NEA) of the State Department from 1946 to 1966, minces no words about the way the Zionists manipulated Truman: “they threatened him, they put him under the most intense pressure he ever experienced and eventually he wilted and granted to the Zionists what they wanted.” Wright documents how the advice of the NEA was prevented to even reach Truman. In one report dated November 24, 1947, Loy Henderson, Director of NEA, wrote:
“It seems to me and all the members of my office acquainted with the Middle East, that the policy we are following in New York [at the United Nations, where the U.S. Delegation was favoring the establishment of a Zionist Jewish State on territory overwhelmingly Arab] is contrary to the interests of the United States and will eventually involve us in international difficulties of so grave a nature that the reaction throughout the world, as well as in this country will be very strong. We are incurring long-term Arab hostility, the Arabs are losing confidence in the friendship and integrity of the USA. [It will encourage] Soviet penetration into important areas as yet free from Soviet domination and as vast quantities of petroleum were being discovered in Arab lands, it was essential that normal and mutually advantageous relations with the Arab world should be preserved.”
“Before these memoranda could get to the Oval Office in the White House,” Wright explains, “they had to pass through the screening of Sam Rosenman, Political Advisor to the President, and David (Nyhus) Niles, Appointments Secretary, both crypto-Zionists. One of these memoranda was returned unopened with a notation, ‘President Truman already knows your views and doesn’t need this.’ That President Truman’s attitude toward the NEA had been poisoned is evident from his remarks in his Memoirs that he could not trust his advisors in the State Department because they were ‘anti-Semitic.’” These loyal servants of the country were insulted, muzzled or ousted for their loyalty, while Truman was held captive of advisors whose only loyalty was to the Jewish State.
David Niles, one of the few FDR advisors retained by Truman, had orchestrated the campaign of intimidation and corruption to obtain a two-thirds majority in favor of the 1947 Partition Plan at the General Assembly of the United Nations.[25] According to David Martin’s meticulous investigation into James Forrestal’s death, Niles is also the most likely mastermind of Forrestal’s assassination in the Navy Bethesda Hospital on May 22, 1949.
What about Trump?
Trump is certainly a very different kind of man from Truman. Truman is remembered for having dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima, marveled that “This is the greatest thing in history,” and dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki for comparison.[26] During his first three years in office, if nothing else, Trump should be credited for having ended to the insanity of the war on Syria, having stopped funding Islamic terrorism, and having, until January 2020, resisted the pressure to bomb Iran. He gave Russia the opportunity to restore a measure of multipolarity and security in the world.
Let’s be realistic: Trump had to pay Israel something in exchange for having deprived her of WW3, at least temporarily. He is certainly aware that, in the last 70 years, no U.S. president unfriendly to Israel has won a second term, and that some of them have been forcibly replaced by their Zionist vice-president (since Lyndon Johnson, this seems to have become the main purpose of the vice-president). By his recent pro-Israel decrees, he gained the gratitude of Netanyahu and the support of Sheldon Adelson for a second term. But that was not enough, it seems. With his recent strike against Iran’s military leadership, he may have finally caved in their most pressing demand. By doing so, he may have actually exhausted his usefulness for Israel, and at the same time, lost the support of a crucial part of his voters. If he loses in 2020, he will retire with his well-deserved Cyrus medal—and an Ahasuerus medal too.
Some people may be praying that a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar would arise. But then, more Cyruses would come again, anointed by Jewish Power. The Egyptians believed that Seth, the evil god of the desert, who is said by some to have fathered the Jews (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 31), will always be around anyway. Better get used to it.
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014
Notes
[1] As usual, I quote from the Catholic Jerusalem Bible, one of the rare translations that have not replaced the tetragram YHWH by “The Lord”, following Jewish custom.
[2] “A Time of Miracles,” July 9, 2019, on Las Vegas Review Journal
[3] Quoted in Jonathan Cahn, The Oracle: The Jubilean Mysteries Unveiled, Frontline, 2019, p. 206, on books.google
[4] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, p. 26.
[5] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
[6] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. 1, p. 343.
[7] Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-political treatise, chapter 8, §11, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 126-128.
[8] Thomas Romer, The Invention of God, Harvard University Press, 2016.
[9] Quoted in Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme, American Free Press, 2009, p. 27
[10] Youssef Hindi, Occident et Islam. Sources et genèse messianiques du sionisme, de l’Europe médiévale au choc des civilisations, Sigest, 2015, pp. 32-36, 137-142.
[11] Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, on http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
[12] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1 , pp. 362–363, 378–379, and vol. 3, p. 960.
[13] According to a report of the Palestine Royal Commission of 1937, quoted by Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, pp. 21, 18.
[14] Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism (1600–1918), vol. 2, 1919, pp. 79–80, quoted in Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, k. 387–475.
[15] Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 10.
[16] Sarah Schmidt, “The ‘Parushim’: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2, December 1975, pp. 121–139, on ifamericansknew.org/history/parushim.html.
[17] This section is based on Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt & Company, 2007, kindle ed.
[18] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, op. cit., k. 3705–53.
[19] Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), pp. 17–18.
[20] Stephen Isaacs, Jews and American Politics, Doubleday, 1974, p. 244.
[21] Sidney Zion, “Truman did it to save his own skin,” Jewish World Review, July 21, 2003, quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, op. cit., pp. xix–xx.
[22] Quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, op. cit., pp. xix–xx.
[23] Harry Truman, Years of Trial and Hope, vol. 2, Doubleday, 1956 (archive.org), p. 158.
[24] John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017, pp. 212-213, quoted in David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal, McCabe Publishing, 2019, p. 44.
[25] Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? op. cit., p. 50.
[26] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, Touchstone, 2008, p. 1.
Posted by Trump Green Lights Greater Israel on Tue, 04 Feb 2020 07:14 | #