The World and Israel: Complicity in Zionism’s Crimes and Why
I must begin with a clarification. “The world” of my headline is inhabited only by our so-called leaders and their governments, not the civil societies of nations. And the complicity of our so-called leaders and their governments in Zionism’s crimes is in my view more by default out of fear of offending Zionism than design. But that doesn’t make the complicity any less real in effect.
The fear Western leaders and their foreign policy advisers have of offending Zionism is more complex than even some of the most informed and perceptive critics of Israel’s policies and actions seem to appreciate.
Yes, one part of the reason for the refusal of Western governments (the one in Washington D.C. especially) to use the leverage they have to try to cause Israel to end its defiance of international law and denial of justice for the Palestinians is fear of losing election campaign funding and votes and fear of being overwhelmed by false charges of anti-Semitism.
But the other, and in my view the biggest part of the reason, is fear of what Zionism’s nuclear-armed monster child might do if it was pushed further than its deluded leaders were prepared to go for the sake of peace based on an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all.
The leader who alerted me to this fear was President Jimmy Carter in a private conversation my wife and I had with him and Rosalynn after they were denied a second term in the White House. (Carter invited me to meet with him to brief him on my experience when in 1980 I accepted the challenge of being the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres. At the time Peres was Israel’s main opposition leader and believed that he would win Israel’s next election and deny Begin a second term by becoming prime minister himself. When Carter invited me to meet with him he asked me to bring my wife because, he said, he and Rosalynn worked as a team).
In this conversation, which has its context in CONFLICT WITHOUT END?, the sub-title of Volume Three of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy Of The Jews, I took Carter back to the early months of his first and only term in 1977 and his real determination then to construct and push forward a plan for a comprehensive and lasting Middle East peace.
I was aware that when on 20 May 1977 it became clear that against all expectations Menachem Begin (the most successful terrorist leader of modern times) would win a second term as Israel’s prime minister, Carter, who had privately welcomed my unofficial shuttle diplomacy, was in despair. He understood that he had no chance of overcoming the inevitable opposition from a Begin-led Israel and the Zionist lobby in America to his plan for a comprehensive peace and, first of all, the construction of a framework for negotiations.
And that was why Carter instructed Cyrus Vance, his cool and admirable secretary of state, to work with the Soviet Union on the production of a joint US-Soviet Declaration of Principles on which a comprehensive peace was to be based. Carter allowed himself to believe, or perhaps only to hope, that Zionism’s stooges in Congress, the Senate especially, would not dare to try to block a joint superpower initiative.
The joint US-Soviet Declaration of Principles was published on 1 October 1977. It was American and Soviet diplomacy at its best on paper. It was an outline plan for a comprehensive settlement of what was then called the Arab-Israeli conflict which not only contained all the necessary ingredients for peace. It presented them in a way that was calculated to prevent a knee-jerk rejection by any of the parties. The PLO was not mentioned by name – this was to make it easier for Israel to accept the declaration as a discussion document; and there was no reference to UN Security Council Resolution 242 – this to make it easier for Arafat’s PLO to give its seal of approval.
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