Upon my return to Paris, I was haunted by the mystery that had opened itself to me on the train into West Germany: What was the true story of Palestine? I was aware as never before that people in the West held a view that went something like this. The Jewish people, having suffered tremendous persecution, needed a haven—a national homeland. Their Zionist leaders had chosen the “uninhabited” land of Palestine. Supposedly, the surrounding Arab nations were naturally antagonistic and jealous that the Jewish settlers had turned a wasteland into a paradise. They had risen unprovoked against the Jews, forcing them to fight a valiant War of Independence in 1948.
But I had grown up in Palestine in those years, and that was not the full story, nor was it especially correct. I had witnessed a terribly ironic twist of history in which the persecuted became the persecutor. As one of its victims, I had seen the cruel face of Zionism.
Now I determined to find out how a peaceful movement that had begun with a seemingly good purpose—to end the persecution of the Jewish people—had become such a destructive, oppressive force.
Along with that determination, I was driven by a respect for history that Father had planted in me. Did the seeds of our future hope lie buried in our past, as he had so often said?
Aside from my seminary studies, I began to spend hours in the libraries of Paris, hunting down books and news reports on the true history of the Zionists and the Palestine disaster. Whole books and reports unifying these accounts would not be published until years later. Yet my study pieced together a startling, documented story.
In 1897, I learned, a conference had convened in Basle, Switzerland, to “lay the foundation stone of the house which was to shelter the Jewish nation.” The director of the gathering was a prominent writer named Theodor Herzl. He had fathered in Europe a new political movement called Zionism—an inspiring movement that hoped to rescue the downtrodden, impoverished and humiliated Jews in the big city ghettoes. By the end of the conference, the delegates had agreed on two points—a flag and an anthem, the symbols of their unity and purpose. Beyond the pomp and emotional fervor, the delegates were split on the location of this homeland that was being pushed by the leadership: Palestine.
Immediately, many disputed Herzl’s statement that Palestine was a “land without a people, waiting for a people without a land.” Though Herzl had been willing to contemplate settlement in Argentina or Uganda as alternatives, his sights were clearly set on the Middle East. It was to this proposal that many delegates primarily and strenuously objected. By what right could Zionists expect to create a state in Palestine? It was a land with established borders and, more importantly, it had long been inhabited by people of an ancient, respectable culture. A homeland in Palestine, they declared with the overtones of a heinous prophecy, would have to be forgotten—or else established by force.
Devout Jews within and without the movement—particularly the Orthodox—fervently argued that Zionism was a blasphemy, because the elite, nonreligious Jews felt that Zionism was the only Messiah Israel would ever have. Such talk incensed the religious, as did the hints of militarism that already colored the fringes of the movement. Others, less religious and more pragmatic, believed that Zionism would feed anti-Semitism since it underscored the long-criticized “exclusiveness” of the Jewish people. They saw clearly that no land could be simply, peacefully “resettled” without violence.
Therefore, to appease the religious consciences, the Zionist leaders adopted the principles of nonviolence embodied in the Jewish Havlaga. This helped to rally the support of the masses, the multiple millions who desperately hoped for an escape from the growing pogroms against them in Europe. Yet the leaders continued to formulate designs on Palestine. Though Herzl would not live much beyond the turn of the century, others would push his plans forward.
In Palestine, my own people were under too tight a thumb to take much notice of a conference in Basle, even if they had known of it. In the early 1900s, ours was also a downtrodden people, struggling and praying for freedom from our own oppressors. For hundreds of years, we had suffered under the iron heel of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. When World War I engulfed the Middle East, the empire had already begun to totter.
After the war, as the empire crumbled, the Palestinian people felt the first winds of freedom. The League of Nations bore their hopes aloft further by proposing a plan that would help “subject peoples.” Larger, powerful nations would assist weaker nations in establishing their own independent governments. This was known as the Mandate system.
The British, who desired a foothold of power in the Middle East, saw in the Mandate system a great opportunity. Secretly, they made a proposal to Palestinian leaders: the British would help oust the Turks; in return, they would set up a temporary Mandate government in Palestine with the promise that they would slowly withdraw, leaving an established, independent country governed by the Palestinians themselves. In desperation, the Palestinian leaders agreed to this strategy. Freedom was in sight—or so they supposed—and little notice was given to the tiny Jewish agricultural communities that were sprouting in a seemingly scattered fashion across the landscape.
What I learned next in my readings truly saddened me. Once the British rule was established, the story became convoluted with political intrigues and double-dealings.
Immediately, the British met in secret with the French and Russians to divide the Middle East into “spheres of influence” with Palestine to be governed, not by the people of Palestine as promised, but by an international administration. The secret agreement was uncovered several years later, in 1917, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the czarist regime and could not resist making public such “imperialist” duplicity. Palestinian leaders were dismayed at this news and at once sent delegates to the British to protest. They chose the diplomatic route while an elite group, whose sights were set on Palestine, had already begun influencing British bureaucrats.
The year 1917 will forever be scarred with the brand of infamy for the Palestinian people. The Zionists had aligned themselves with Great Britain’s Christian Restorationists, a group that believed they might bring to pass—by manipulating world events and reestablishing the nation of Israel—the second coming of Christ. The Zionists ignored this view, but the benefits of such a plan for them were obvious. They saw in Britain’s new hold on Palestine their secret inroad to the Middle East, and so began a strange marriage between Zionist and Restorationist. It was in 1917 that the British Lord Arthur Balfour made his famous declaration—not in public at first, but privately in a letter to the powerful Lord Rothschild.
Lord Balfour wrote that the cabinet “viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. And in the same letter, with a stroke of the pen, he reclassified the people of Palestine—92 percent of the population—as “non-Jewish communities.”[4] Not only did this renege on the promise of independence, but it effectively handed over Palestine to the Zionists. The prime mover behind the British decision was the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann.
If Lord Balfour was acting out of his own religious conviction or a love for the Jewish people, as some historians declared, I was unconvinced. In 1906, he had played a major part in passing the Aliens Act, which expressly sought to exclude Jews from Great Britain. Nor was Lord Balfour oblivious of the political treachery in which he was enwebbed. In 1919, in a memorandum to the British Cabinet, he declared:
In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. So far as Palestine is concerned, (we) have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which at least in the letter (we) have not always intended to violate.[5]
To me, it seemed that the Zionists had entered into an unholy marriage, an alliance motivated by power and convenience, consummated in treachery.
At once, Palestinian leaders were dismayed. For the next sixteen years, they continually presented their fears to the British through diplomatic channels, appealing continually to royal commissions while unrest grew throughout Palestine. And the Zionists, funded by international money collected by the Jewish Agency, rapidly settled kibbutzim in a clearer and clearer pattern throughout Palestine, slowly forming the skeletal outlines of the land they meant to declare as their own homeland.
Through the 1920s, European immigration to Palestine rose dramatically and the Zionist leaders became less and less guarded about their plan. Weizmann told an American secretary of state that he hoped “Palestine would ultimately become as Jewish as England is English.”[6] And thereafter, another Zionist leader told British officials, “There can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish predominance as soon as the numbers of that race are sufficiently increased.”[7]
Increasingly, many Zionists themselves were ill at ease with those who insisted on Jewish “predominance” in Palestine. Yitzhak Epstein, an agriculturist, had warned an international congress of the Zionist Party that they had wrongly consulted every political power that held sway over Palestine without consulting the Palestinians themselves. He feared the fact that Palestinian peasants had already lost so much land as a result of Zionist purchases from absentee landlords, and that this loss was sure to breed resentment. He argued that since the incoming Jews were bringing with them a higher standard of living, they ought to help the Palestinians to find their own identity, to open to them the new Jewish hospitals, schools and reading rooms that were already in existence or in planning stages. And when institutions for higher education were established, the Jews could strengthen their old fraternal bonds with surrounding Arab nations by opening these schools to their students as well.
Unfortunately, Epstein was staunchly opposed. His detractors shouted, “To give—always to give, to the one our body, to the other, our soul, and to yet another the remnant of the hope ever to live as a free people in its historical homeland!”[8]
And though Epstein’s vision of unity between Arab and Jew was overlooked by the Zionist main body, others would take up his cause until Zionism itself was riddled with factions. At the end of the 1920s, a group calling themselves Brit Shalom split from the Party because they could no longer go along with the tactic of disenfranchising the Palestinians from their land in order to set up a Jewish homeland. Sadly, this group was also largely ignored. I mentally underscored these crucial details, important clues from history that could not be overlooked. All Jews did not hate Palestinians. In fact, many recognized our brotherhood and had come to Palestine with hands extended in friendship. Were there any in the 1960s who wanted reconciliation and not war? Was this fact, somehow, one of the seeds of hope?
By the 1930s, with the influx of European settlers rising like a floodtide, with no intervention by the British, and with the plan to displace the Palestinian people in motion, what were their leaders to do? Diplomatically, they might as well have been mute. No one was listening. In 1935, in port cities like Jaffa, anti-immigration demonstrations erupted into violence and bloodshed in which both Jewish immigrants and Palestinian peasants died.
As I read about these demonstrations in the context of history, I was moved anew by the frustration the leaders of Palestine must have suffered. As a Christian, I could not condone the bloodshed—but it was suddenly sharply clear that their tension had built for almost twenty years before it reached the point of explosion. The demonstrations were an extreme measure born out of a desperation to be heard.
The following year, 1936, Palestinian leaders again tried a peaceful means of protest, calling for a general strike. Throughout Palestine, office and factory workers, taxi and truck drivers disappeared from their jobs for a full six months, crippling commerce. But violence, which had already crept into the conflict, increased. The powerful Histraduth trade union, established by the Zionists and led by David Ben Gurion, terrorized Jewish shop and factory owners who dared to employ Palestinians. Here and there, Jewish women were attacked in the marketplaces for buying from Palestinian merchants. Palestinian fields and vineyards were vandalized. Orchards were guarded to keep out all but Jewish workers. At the end of 1938, the protests were finally crushed.
By that time, the Zionists had behind them an overwhelming swell of world sympathy. This was true for two main reasons: first, Western nations were little concerned with events in the Middle East because they were fixated on the horror that was spreading from Nazi Germany; second, they were appalled at the insane hatred for the Jewish people propagated by Adolf Hitler. Rightly, the Jews needed somewhere to escape from this madman.
But if Western consciences were troubled, it did not translate into action. Throughout the 1930s, while Hitler’s pogroms thrived, no major Western nation increased its quota of Jewish immigrants. Was the tiny land of Palestine really expected to absorb millions of European Jews, its inhabitants giving up land and jobs while the large Western nations were comfortably silent?
To me, these terrified masses of Jewish immigrants were never to blame for our tragedy. They were dazed by fear, pathetically desperate to escape the heinous death camps. In this, they were to become the pawns of the Zionist leaders. Upon their arrival in Palestine, they were quickly indoctrinated against their so-called new enemy—the Palestinians.
Here was the second bastion of Zionist power: propaganda. Increasingly, they controlled all news emanating from Palestine. With the tongues of our leaders effectively “cut out,” it was easy to mold Western opinion through the press, obscuring the real issues. The protests of 1936–38 were renamed “The Arab Rebellion.” Palestinians, who in any other country being overtaken by a foreign force would have been called freedom fighters, were “terrorists” and “guerillas.” Hence, the widely used term “Palestinian terrorist” was ingrained in the Western mind.
Proof of the Zionist power hold in Palestine came in 1939. Suffering some belated pangs of conscience, Britain issued its “White Paper,” instructing its Mandate government to bar further land purchases and immigration. Immediately, the Zionists decried this move as a betrayal. Unfortunately for the British, they had effectively trained a strong Zionist underground—the Haganah—in special brands of violence that were now turned against British soldiers and government workers in Palestine. British General Wingate had trained the Haganah in the use of large, destructive barrel bombs and how to force Palestinian men to “confess” by shoving fistfuls of sand down their throats. Should it have surprised the British when the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, killing almost one hundred people?
World War II forced a lull in the struggle for Palestine. But for Zionist leaders, the outcome was never in question.
Following the war, the Zionists shifted their power push from Downing Street to the White House. Primarily, the British, who had now shown themselves reluctant to impose a Jewish state on Palestine, had been severely weakened. It was unwieldy and expensive to continue governing Palestine, and the Zionists had gained all but total control of munitions factories and industries there. More importantly, the United States had emerged as the new leader in determining the future of the free world. And in America a strong lobby of new Zionist supporters had emerged. What happened then, in the closed conference rooms of the White House, was no less scandalous than the British betrayal.
While President Roosevelt was in office, he had resisted the pressure of Zionists, unwilling to see the Palestinians displaced from their homeland. He felt tremendous compassion for the half million survivors who were expected to emerge from the Holocaust, but he had in mind a wonderfully humanitarian plan. He intended to open the free world to these pitiable victims, offering them passage to any free nation that rallied to his relief effort. However, when his emissary Morris Ernst was sent to sound out international opinion, Ernst was shocked to hear himself “decried, sneered at and attacked” as a traitor by Zionists who by then had raised $46 million to lobby for their own plan.[9]
When Truman took office after Roosevelt’s untimely death, the lobbyists had a fresh opportunity, pressuring the new president. They argued vehemently that admission to Palestine was “the only hope of survival” for the Jewish people. Could this have been true when millions of Jewish people had been sheltered and protected by free nations during the war? When, in fact, Jewish people throughout the free world moved easily in their societies, enjoying high standards of living in Western countries without discrimination? Nevertheless, when Truman was confronted by Arab leaders, the Zionist lobby had already done its job effectively. Truman’s response: “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands of those who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”[10]
Thus the vast majority of the Holocaust victims were never given a choice as to where they would live; only twenty thousand were admitted to large, free countries like the United States in the three years following the war. Thus the exhausted British found themselves pressured by the most powerful office in the world, the White House, even as they watched their Mandate government in Palestine be blitzed by a campaign of terror. Guns, grenades, bombs and tanks—all manufactured in factories the British themselves had built—were now used against them.
In April 1947, war-weary and unwilling to lose more young men to defend Palestine from the Zionist underground, the British announced the plan to surrender their Mandate in one year. They were beaten and humiliated. Relinquishing Palestine was their only solution to the double-dealings they had begun thirty years before.
And as the British washed their hands of the Palestinian people they had promised to protect, violence spread unchecked. To the world, the Zionists proclaimed that they were fighting a “War of Independence.” And the world, now penitent about the Holocaust, applauded. So the terror found its way into every village, even into the far hills of Galilee—and into my own home in Biram.
Sadly, the violence did not stop there.
In the years following the declaration of the State of Israel, its government needed desperately to flood the new land with settlers. Despite their claim that Israel was the one hope for Jewish survival, Jewish people in America were comfortable in their homes and businesses. Likewise, large Jewish communities in other countries showed no compulsion to uproot en masse and rush to the “promised land.” Something had to be done. While the offerings of romance and adventure had some drawing effect on pioneering minds in America, another more sinister technique was used elsewhere. I learned much later that the Jewish community in Iraq, for instance, became the victim of “anti-Semitic” violence of suspicious origin.
On the last evening of Passover in April 1950, some 50,000 Jewish people, celebrating an ancient tradition, were enjoying a stroll along the Tigris River in Baghdad. More than 130,000 Jewish people lived in Iraq, forming the oldest Jewish community in the world. Few of them had emigrated to Israel, though the way was freely open to them. Out of the darkness a car sped along the river esplanade and a small bomb was hurled, exploding on the pavement.
Though no one was hurt, shock waves of fear rocked the Jewish community. Rumors of uncertain origin spread: A new, fanatic Arab group was planning a Jewish pogrom. It seemed unreasonable to many, since Jews had lived undisturbed in Iraq for a long time. But leaflets appeared mysteriously the very next day urging Jews to flee to Israel—and ten thousand signed up for emigration immediately. Where had the leaflets come from? How had they appeared so instantly?
The mystery was forgotten when a second bomb exploded—then a third, killing several people outside a synagogue. The rumors flew. By early 1951, Jews fled Iraq in panic, abandoning homes, property and an ancient heritage until only five thousand remained in the country.
Some fifteen people were arrested in connection with the bombing—and the remnant of the Jewish community was outraged. The Haganah, it was discovered, had smuggled arms caches into Iraq and it was they who had thrown the bombs at their own Jewish people. Their plan to touch off a panic emigration to Israel had worked. The Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and Yigal Allon, later to become foreign minister, knew of the plot. It was their way of helping along the prophesied “ingathering” of the Jews—even if the method was anti-biblical. If the world press was given to believe that hateful Arabs were responsible, it simply bolstered public sympathy for the “struggling” nation.
Years later, no less a reputable leader than the chief rabbi of Iraq, Sassoon Khedurri, pleaded with an inquiring journalist to tell the world the truth about Zionism. Not only had Jews in Iraq felt sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, but they, too, had suffered at the hands of the Zionists. Khedduri stated:
By mid-1949 the big propaganda guns were already going off in the United States. American dollars were going to save Iraqi Jews—whether Iraqi Jews needed saving or not. There were daily “pogroms” in the New York Times and under datelines which few noticed were from Tel Aviv. Why didn’t someone come to see us instead of negotiating with Israel to take in Iraqi Jews? Why didn’t someone point out that the solid, responsible leadership of Iraqi Jews believed this [Iraq] to be their country? . . . The Iraqi government was being accused of holding the Jews against their will . . . campaigning among Jews was increased. . . . The government was whip-sawed . . . accused of pogroms and violent actions against Jews. . . . But if the government attempted to suppress Zionist agitation attempting to stampede the Iraqi Jews, it was again accused of discrimination.[11]
Amid the troubling facts, I thought I glimpsed more answers. I could not help but view the Zionists as victims, too—victims of something far worse than death camps. Beyond the hurling of bombs, the murder of innocents and bearing to the world false witness against their neighbor, the Zionists were stricken with a disease of the spirit. It was as if some demon of violence had been loosed and it whispered cunningly, Might is right. Achieve your own ends by whatever means necessary—all in the name of God. While the Church was sadly stumbling over its modern philosophies, this demon blinded the nations to the laws of the universe: peace can never be achieved by violence; violence begets more violence. For the first time, I saw clearly the face of my true enemy and the enemy of all who are friends of God and of peace. It was not the Zionists, but the demon of militarism.
At the same time, something seethed beneath my ribs. The thought of such betrayal raised in me a feeling I had squelched so long I could hardly admit to it—much less name it. I gritted my teeth and shook off the feeling as if it were a spider that had crept onto my hand.
A more pressing question helped to obscure my feelings—the stark question of my own future. It was spring 1965, the end of my years in seminary was fast approaching, and I was just about to reach the shining ideal for which Faraj and I had come to Paris. I had set out to serve God and man in quietness and simplicity, dispensing the routine graces of the Church. For a time, I had even tried to quell that outspoken nature of mine. Though I had done my best to feed my contemplative side, something like wildfire still burned through my sinews. It was as if I’d been driven to uncover this historical perspective—although Faraj had sometimes cautioned me not to be side-tracked. Had I angled onto another path—or was I slowly, truly finding the dead-center direction of my life’s calling? I was a little unnerved to realize that I could not now live as that parochial priest I had once dreamed of becoming.
When, one evening, I opened my thoughts fully to Faraj, I hoped he would immediately agree with me. Late April was upon us and we were sauntering along the elegant Rue De Rivoli where trees were in full bud and the boutiques were just lighting their neon signs against the dusk. We had been as close as brothers for more than fourteen years, and Faraj’s youthful charm had continued to mature into a quiet spirituality that I still admired. I hoped that he would help to sort out my conflicting thoughts.
“If I were merely railing against a political system, that would be one thing,” I explained as we walked through the thinning crowds of shoppers. “Then I’d become a politician, too. But I believe it’s more than that. It’s a spiritual sickness. There are unholy alliances between nations that talk about God while their true motives are purely military.”
“You can hardly expect to change what’s happened,” Faraj replied.
“But I do.”
“How? You don’t throw bombs,” he retorted.
“Of course not,” I said quickly.
“Then what? I’ll tell you. You must wait patiently, Elias. God will move in His time. We must accept all things as from His hand. It’s no good to try to upset a whole government. Even a repressive one.”
I stared at Faraj. For an instant, I saw the face of Father—the faces of the village elders of Biram. Here was that old question that had troubled me so long: As a Christian do you speak out against the actions of your enemies—or do you allow them to crush the life out of you? So many seemed to think that submitting to humiliation was the only Christian alternative. Should you not, sometimes, be stinging and preserving like salt?
Faraj was silent for a time. We had reached the Place de la Concorde where thousands of French people, including clergy, were guillotined for speaking against France’s revolutionary “freedom fighters.” Then he spoke firmly. “We must serve the Church quietly.”
In that moment, I understood a crucial lesson: Not all are called to the same task. Both Faraj and I were to be ordained—but each to a special calling. He had come to feel very strongly about the wealth and extravagance of the Church amid poor and hungry people. It was for them that he hoped to help reform the Church itself. And I—I would have to find my own calling on a lonelier path that would lead away from my closest friend. In more than six years in Paris, our paths, if not our spirits, had grown apart.
For me, a door seemed to stand wide open—to what end I was not sure—and unmistakably I was being beckoned to step through it.
It was during our final spring days at Saint Sulpice that my kindly mentor, Father Longère, touched a deeply resonant note, like a voice out of eternity. I had come to value his wisdom, his remarkable way of challenging us, spurring us to deeper thought on any subject in which we were certain of our opinion. During one of his final lectures, I found myself riveted to his words.
“If there is a problem somewhere,” he said with his dry chuckle, “this is what happens. Three people will try to do something concrete to settle the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analyzing what the three are doing. One hundred people will commend or condemn the ten for their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And one person—only one—will involve himself so deeply in the true solution that he is too busy to listen to any of it.”
“Now,” he asked gently, his penetrating eyes meeting each of ours in turn, “which person are you?”
Faraj and I were soon caught up in plans for our return trip home. I barely had time for one more trip to see Lony, Franz and Wolfgang. A letter had arrived from them in which they were insistent—politely demanding—that I not leave Europe without a final visit.
When I got to Germany, they surprised me with a “going away” gift: a brand-new white Volkswagen. I was fairly speechless at their tremendous generosity. Truly our love for each other, and my love for their beautiful blond son, had grown deep. But I had never expected such kindness.
Scarcely had I learned how to handle the Volkswagen, when it was time to drive to Genoa, Italy, where a ship would carry me and my car to Haifa. As I drove to the Italian coast, I had no idea how many nights I was to think of Lony, Franz and Wolfgang, nor how unusually thankful I would be for this vehicle.
As the ship slipped from its moorings, I watched the waving crowds on the dock alone. Faraj had made other travel plans, and we would meet again in Nazareth for our ordination ceremony in July.
Now my thoughts dwelt on seeing my family again, holding each one of them. I was bursting with eagerness.
For a brief moment, I was surprised by another feeling: I would miss Europe—miss the luxuries of the easy life. I admit the thought of remaining in Paris or Germany had tempted me at times. Having lived in a free land where I had studied, traveled and eaten in cafés without harassment, I was hardly ready to become a person without an identity again nor to face the creeping disease that sucked the spirit and hope out of my people.