The Antizionist Script Never Changed

As a documentary filmmaker I spend my life in archives, reading the paper other people have decided to forget. Most of it stays forgotten for a reason. Every so often a document comes up out of the box and stops you, because it is not describing the past. It is describing the room you are standing in.

I found one like that. It is called Truth about Palestine. It was published in January 1946 by the Christian Council on Palestine — a body of almost three thousand adherents, predominantly Protestant but including Roman Catholics — at the moment the ovens had just gone cold and the world was still counting. It is not a sermon. It is a rebuttal. Three American church bodies had circulated documents opposing a Jewish home in Palestine. The Council answered them. Thirteen arguments, taken up one at a time, and taken apart.¹

I read the table of contents and I recognized it. Not as history. As this week.

The pretense that Palestine had been promised to Arabs and Jews alike. The claim that the Arabs of Palestine were the original inhabitants, indigenous, rooted, while the Jews were interlopers. The charge that Jewish settlement displaced the Arab farmer. The insistence that the land was full, its capacity exhausted. The accusation that Jewish nationalism was a form of racism. The insinuation, aimed at Jews who supported a homeland, of divided loyalty. Every one of those is being said today, in English, in classrooms and city councils and on the platforms where the young perform their conscience. Every one of them was answered in 1946, before the State of Israel existed, by Christians who had just watched what the refusal to answer had cost.¹

I grew up under the Soviet system. I know how this works. The state does not need to invent a new lie every year. It keeps the old one and reprints it. It changes the letterhead. The script survives because nobody goes back to check whether it was ever true. I have spent five years filming the Baltic Holocaust, and the one thing I have learned that I did not expect to learn is that a lie, properly maintained, outlives every person who could contradict it. So when I tell you the antizionist script has not changed since 1946, I am not being rhetorical. I am reading the record.

Look at who signed this thing. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most consequential Protestant theologians America produced. Paul Tillich. William Foxwell Albright, who helped establish modern biblical archaeology. John Haynes Holmes. Norman Vincent Peale. Sponsored by a United States Senator and a member of Congress. This was not a fringe list. These were figures from the intellectual and institutional center of American Christianity, on the record, saying that support for a Jewish home was not a favor to the Jews but an obligation of conscience — and putting a number on the cost of delay. Had genuine help been given in building the Jewish national home, they wrote, hundreds of thousands — perhaps more than a million — of the Jews tortured and murdered in Europe would have been spared. They were not guessing about the future. They were assigning blame for the past. In writing. In 1946.²

Now here is the part I cannot get out of my head, because it is the part I have written about before under a different name.³

The church documents these clergymen were answering criticized the Zionists at length. Drastic criticism, the pamphlet says. And on the subject of the Mufti of Jerusalem — Haj Amin al-Husseini, by then, in the pamphlet’s own words, “a full collaborator of Hitler” — they said nothing. Nothing. The man who fomented the riots, who terrorized his own people’s moderates, who helped organize the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali rebellion in Iraq, and who ultimately revealed himself as Hitler’s collaborator. The pamphlet put his position on the page: testifying before a British Royal Commission, he said there were already too many Jews in the country and implied that, when the Arabs held power, the “surplus” would be removed through deportation. The prospect of removing Jews already living there was placed before an official commission without embarrassment. And the churches criticizing the Jews had not one word to spare for it.¹

I have said this sentence before and I will say it again, because it is the whole mechanism: silence is not neutral. It is functional. It tells the man with the program that the cost of the program is zero. The antizionist attacks the Jew who wants to live and omits the man who has promised to make him die. The omission is not sloppiness. The omission is the argument. Remove the Mufti from the story and Zionism looks like aggression. Put him back and it looks like what it was — the last exit.

The 1939 White Paper the pamphlet fought — it called it “an inhuman document” — reduced the Jews to what the Council explicitly described as permanent minority status. Britain had taken the condition from which Zionism was intended to free the Jews and converted it into policy. The clergymen understood that you cannot legislate a people into permanent minority, make its survival dependent upon the consent of those closing the gates, and call it peace.¹

And when those anti-Zionist churchmen reached for an authority, they reached — as their descendants still do — for the King-Crane Commission of 1919. The pamphlet ended that in a single footnote. Charles Crane, reputed to have been the commission’s dominating figure, was, in the words of Ambassador William Dodd’s own diary, a man to whom the Jews were anathema, and whose advice on the rise of Hitler was: let Hitler have his way. The neutral expert authority, examined, turns out to be an open antisemite who endorsed the murderer by name. In film, we have a rule: everything inside the frame is intentional. If it was in the frame, someone put it there. Crane was in the frame in 1919. He is still in the frame today, and the people citing him have never once turned around to see who is standing behind the camera.¹

There is one line in the pamphlet I read as a man who comes from a place where waiting was itself a method of killing. Facing yet another commission of inquiry, another respectable interval of study while the survivors sat in the displaced-persons camps, the Council wrote that whatever the commission concluded, one result was already certain: there would be fewer Jews alive in Europe at the end of the investigation than at the beginning. They were not describing a risk. They were describing arithmetic. The promises made to the Arabs, they noted, had been more than kept — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, independence delivered. The only promise not kept was the one made to the Jews.¹

I have seen this before. I watched a European Union member state, a NATO ally, use its institutions to fix an official version of the past and its criminal law to punish the citizen who challenges it.³ I have watched a newspaper choose which photograph marks a man as a Jew.⁴ I have watched Jewish families come home from the camps to be murdered on their own doorsteps by their neighbors.⁵ The letterhead changes. The script does not.

Truth about Palestine was not a prophecy. It was a diagnosis, written by men who could still be shocked, at the exact hour the price of the disease was being tallied in ash. The diagnosis was correct. The script they refuted was reprinted anyway, and it is being read aloud right now by people who have been told it is new.

It is not new. It was answered eighty years ago, by Christians, on the record, while the smoke was still in the air. The document is open. I have linked it. Read it yourself, and then listen to your evening news, and tell me what has changed except the year.

Notes

1. Truth about Palestine — A Statement by the Christian Council on Palestine, January 1946. The original pamphlet was 32 pages; the linked transcription renders as a 25-page PDF and states that no content, wording, names, quotations, statistics, or footnotes were abridged, reworded, or reordered. Reproduced in full: Truth_about_Palestine_1946.pdf. Original: Missionary Research Library pamphlets, Columbia University Libraries (Internet Archive ID ldpd_11077604_000). Public domain. In the linked reproduction, see pp. 4–5 for the contents and thirteen allegations; p. 22 for the “hundreds of thousands — perhaps more than a million” passage; pp. 3 and 11 for the Mufti’s collaboration, political violence, Royal Commission testimony, and proposed deportation; pp. 1–2 for the White Paper and permanent-minority language; p. 9 for King-Crane, Crane, and the Dodd diary; pp. 21–22 for the warning that fewer Jews would be alive after the investigation; and p. 23 for the kept and unkept promises.
2. Signatories and sponsors are listed in the pamphlet’s front matter, linked above, pp. 3–4. Reinhold Niebuhr served as treasurer; the signatories included Paul Tillich, William Foxwell Albright, John Haynes Holmes, and Norman Vincent Peale. The pamphlet was specifically sponsored by Senator Robert F. Wagner and Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas.
3. Eugene J. Levin, “I Have Seen This Before (Part 1),” The Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-have-seen-this-before-part-1/
4. Eugene J. Levin, “Delfi Chose the Kippah,” The Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/delfi-chose-the-kippah/
5. Eugene J. Levin, “They Came Home to Be Murdered,” The Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/they-came-home-to-be-murdered/