An Interview With Alan Hart
I do not blame the Zionist lobby in America for exercising its awesome influence in a way that has contributed to the subversion of what passes for democracy. I blame America’s pork-barrel politicians including presidents. They always had a choice. I mean that they did not have to do the bidding of the Zionist lobby, especially when doing it was obviously not in America’s longer term and best interests. They chose to do Zionism’s bidding to serve their own short-term political interests and those of their parties. When pressed in private American politicians seek to excuse themselves by saying that it was, is, “political suicide” to oppose the Zionist lobby. For the few brave ones who did, it was; but that doesn’t change the fact that Congressmen and women, and presidents, always had a choice – doing Zionism’s bidding to protect their own interests and those of their parties or putting America’s best interests first.
It’s mainly because American politicians including presidents could not say “No” to Zionism at critical moments that the Middle East is in such a mess today, with terrifying and predictable consequences for all of us if a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem – one that provides the Palestinians with an acceptable minimum of justice – remains beyond the reach of diplomacy.
You really do believe that a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem is the key to averting a catastrophe for all?
Yes. In the Prologue to the book, which is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse, I make the point that if was possible for an American President to wave a magic wand and have Israel back behind its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war, with a Palestinian state in existence on the land from which Israel had withdrawn in accordance with the letter and spirit of Security Council Resolution 242 of the same year, and with Jerusalem the capital of Israel and Palestine, the U.S. would have, overnight (with one wave of the magic wand), the respect, support and friendship of not less than 95 percent of all Arabs and about the same percentage of Moslems everywhere. And that would create the environment in which Arab and other Moslem terrorism could be defeated by political means. (The idea that it can be defeated by military means is a form of madness, of the kind that prevails in the White House and Number Ten Downing Street. In my book I explain in a very few words – 147 to be precise – how terrorism can be defeated),
But let me return directly to your question about sympathy for Zionism… I don’t have any sympathy for it, but, I do understand why, because of the Jewish experience of persecution which climaxed with the genocide of the Nazi holocaust, Zionism felt compelled to lie in public to justify what had to be done to create the modern state of Israel and then to justify its behaviour. I am now in the deepest primordial water but, noting that what I am about to say has its complete context in my book, I’ll attempt to explain what I mean. If Zionism had been honest it would have made a public statement after the Nazi holocaust along something like the following lines.
Jews can never again trust Gentiles. We take it as a given that Jews will always be hated and that the monster of anti-Semitism will go on the rampage again. The Zionist state will exist to be the refuge of last resort for Jews everywhere and thus an insurance policy to guarantee the survival of the Jewish people. Zionism will do whatever if takes to secure and maintain this guarantee, and if what we do causes our state to be regarded as a pariah by the rest of the world, well, the rest of the world can go to hell!
That truth could not be told because telling it would have been to admit, even to proclaim, that Zionism had no time or need for, and was estranged from, the moral principles and teachings of Judaism. And that might very well have made it impossible for the majority of the world’s Jews to support Zionism in action after the birth of modern Israel, Zionism’s child. Unable to tell the truth, Zionism had to lie to justify Israel’s arrogance of power and to have Israeli aggression perceived in the Judeo-Christian world as self-defence. The lie being that Israel was in danger of annihilation. As I reveal in my book, it never was – except in Arab rhetoric, which made Zionism’s propaganda lie appear to be truth.
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