What Price Israel? 50th Anniversary Edition 1953 2003
by Alfred M. Lilienthal


From 1953:
In 1948, a new white flag with a single blue six-pointed star was hoisted to a mast on the East Coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Thus was born the national state of Israel, with its own government, army, foreign policy, language, national anthem, and oath of allegiance. The resulting confusion has seriously affected the position of the free world in the Middle East, has dangerously complicated the lives of Jews everywhere, and now endangers Judaism, the oldest monotheistic faith in the world.

The ancient cry next year in Jerusalem, resounding down the centuries, made Judaism indestructible. It held forth a perpetual goal not to be achieved through human intervention. Judaism's power to survive depended on its being unrelated to any particular geographic tract. States could come and go; but a set of beliefs, isolated from temporal happenstance, could forever endure. A "Kingdom of God" was never at the mercy of physical force.

Judaism has been a universal religious faith to which, loyal citizens of any country could adhere. By contrast, Zionism is a nationalist movement organized to reconstitute Jews as a nation with a separate and sovereign homeland. The establishment of the State of Israel has consequently freed the Jews to do what they could not do before. To use the words of Arthur Koestler in Promise and Fulfillment, to discard the knapsack and go their own way with the nation whose life and culture they share, without reservations or split loyalties, or else they could choose the only alternativeemigrate to the sovereign State of Israel.

But American Jewry has not accepted this one and only set of alternatives. For the mere declaration I am not a Zionist (while others in Israel and in the United States were continuing to speak and to act in the name of the Jewish people) has not constituted a decision. The word Jew is now being used simultaneously to denote a universal faith and a particular nationality; and the corresponding allegiances to religion and to state have become confused.

For centuries before he was granted political equality in Western Europe and in the United States, the Jew lived under the discipline both of the sovereign state in which he was physically located and of the religio-political community to which he belonged. In that past, religious ties were intimately linked with political status. And this past continues to cast its shadow, even on fully emancipated Americans, particularly those who have come from Eastern Europe.

During the events which altered the relationship between the Kremlin and Israel, the reaction in this country was to treat the Israeli crisis as if it were the crisis of the Jewish people all over the world. But if the political problems of Israel continue to be the political responsibility of Jews in the United States, disaster must follow. Innumerable situations will involve Israel in policies and politics which nationals of no other country may dare underwrite.


From 2003:

Fifty years have come and gone since the first publication of What Price Israel? in 1953. I was 39 then, and now I am 89. The long sad story over this half-century has been one of conflict, aggression, terror, war, occupation, resistance, and so-called peace processes guaranteed to fail over and over again. I have seen it alland yet I have hoped that somehow I would live long enough to finally see a just peace and true independence for the Palestinian Arab people.

Zionism has often been innocently defined as a movement to provide a homeland and refuge for Jews in need of safety in the land where their ancestors lived in ancient times. That definition only sounds good until we realize that almost a million Palestinian Arabs already living there had to be displaced and made homeless in the process. Incredibly, even today so many years later, many Americans and others worldwide still believe that it was a land without a people for a people without a land. It was not!

Any real chance for Middle East peaceas well as defusing the reasons behind our present American-led war on terrormust be based on fact and not on intentional or unintentional distortions of past events. As British historian, F.W. Maitland, once wrote: We study the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today, and that today may not paralyze tomorrow. The early history of the problem is therefore important. What really happened does matter. The true story, rather than slanted Zionist propaganda, about why a Palestinian Arab state did not come into existence at the same time as Israel can be found in the original text of What Price Israel? which has remained unchanged here in this 50th anniversary edition except for a few minor alterations in punctuation, spelling, and phrasing.

I do not know if I am the last, but surely I am one of the last living individuals who was at Lake Success, in the state of New York, on November 29, 1947 when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Prior to the passage of the Partition Resolution in 1947, I spoke to the representatives of every one of the fifty-seven (then) member states of the United Nations in behalf of the anti-Zionist organization, the American Council for Judaism.

In fact, I lobbied against the Partition Resolution 181 because it was our belief that the creation of a Jewish only Zionist enclave in that region could lead to insecurity and war which would endanger the lives of Arabs and Jews alike. Finally, as patriotic Americans, we believed this did not serve the long-term interests of the United States. A state based upon religious or racial exclusivity could, I argued, result in what actually has happened these last fifty-six years: misery for all peoples in the area and American involvement in the on-going conflict in ways that has undermined our own democratic principles and national security. We foresaw that the price of Israel would indeed be high.