Israel an American Catastrophe - ebook

Acknowledgments

This book would have never seen the light of day without the encouragement, patience and editorial help of my wise, former Edinburgh University colleague, Professor David Simpson. No words can express my gratitude. Barbara Jordan, of Toronto, a copy writer and a dear friend came on board with a sharp pencil, when I thought my opus was ready for the masses, and eliminated countless adjectives and wise cracks which were close to my heart. Several distinguished former British and Canadian diplomats, provided me with priceless advice and newspaper clippings as well as texts of speeches and discussions that took place at Chatham House and other institutions to which I have no access. They prefer to remain anonymous. One retired British ambassador, while less critical of Israel than I am, was worried about my safety, after “Catastrophe” hit the book stands. But if far more distinguished targets of Israel’s official fury, Professors Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, as well as columnist Gedon Levy remain among the living…? I’ve heard banal reports that my days are numbered, but I dismissed them, of course.

My Warsaw friends, starting with Przemek Wielgosz, editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique and his colleagues, Kasia Drozdz, Aneta Jerska, Magda and Ala Qandil, and Ewa Jasiewicz never wavered in their encouragement and support, as well as good humor, when it was most needed.

* * *

My family, Ola and Ania, and especially my eagle-eyed son, Jan, showed infinite patience when reading the manuscript and recovering choice chunks of my work that kept being gobbled up by my computer.

God bless you all.Page Zero

“We had to hate—as any nation worth of the name must and always will hate—the rule of the foreigner. If you love your country, you cannot but hate those who seek to annex it.”¹

Menachem Begin

* * *

“Israel used its military power and its Shin Bet domestic intelligence service to disrupt any Palestinian attempts at mass organization and to arrest any Palestinian who remotely behaved like a local leader. Israel would tolerate Palestinian spokesmen, but any spokesman who got more than three people to follow him was eventually arrested, expelled, or harassed into submission.”²

Thomas L. Friedman

* * *

“An Israeli military court has convicted four soldiers of negligently shooting to death an 18-year-old Palestinian in the West Bank. Then it passed a sentence: one hour in jail, suspended, and a fine of one Israeli agora, just under one-third of a US cent.”³

Barton Gellman

* * *

The US-Israeli relationship “is a one way street, with America doing all the diplomatic heavy lifting while Israel limits its role to obstruction and whining—repaying Uncle Sam’s generosity with ingratitude and scorn.”⁴

Professor Avi Shlaim

* * *

“He who saves one life, saves the world entire”

Motto of Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem.

“And he who killed, maimed wounded and traumatized thousands of children in the summer of 2014, deploying artillery, bombs and rockets against the “largest open air prison on earth” simply because he craved their land?”

The AuthorPersonal Note To America With Love

In Poland presents are given to children and adults on Christmas Eve. America was my Christmas present when our tiny ship entered New York harbor on December 24th, 1945 following a bouncy journey across the Atlantic.

For the two years that followed I experienced only kindness and generosity from the people of America and often wondered why I was not born in Wellfleet, Cape Cod instead of Warsaw on the eve of WWII? Bad address, disastrous timing.

I was sure we would remain in America forever. But after two years at the UN my father, Xavier, who among other duties headed the Ad Hoc Commission on Palestine which decided the borders of the future Jewish State, was named Poland’s ambassador to the Netherlands. It was not America, but it was fun. It all ended in June 1950. My father died in a car crash in West Germany, when rushing to his wedding in Warsaw.

My life also crashed. At 14, from the luxurious life of a spoiled diplomat’s son in the west I landed in a model communist orphanage, in Poland; lots of indoctrination but a shortage of kluski (noodles).

Trapped behind a double Iron Curtain—we shared no border with a free country—I constantly plotted how to get out.

Miraculously, freedom came after five years.

To show our socialist “paradise” to the world, or at least selected chunks of it, the Party organized an International Youth Festival. Tens of thousands of smiling guests arrived in the grim city that saw no tourists since 1939. Most were communists or communist sympathizers, sometimes known as ”fellow travelers.”

Hours after the festival started I met Bridget Haines, a fascinating and outgoing student of literature from Newnham College, Cambridge and some of her smart male friends, eager for adventure, from the same university. None were communists. Two weeks later they smuggled me out by train through two closely guarded borders. Our successful adventure made the front pages. London’s Daily Express dubbed my friends “The Cambridge Pimpernels.” The label stuck.

At 19, an instant celebrity, a famous writer’s and diplomat’s son, I was hired by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for what today would be called a consulting job. The offices of the two radio stations were in Munich. America’s big hearted taxpayers paid for my fun in the city. Next, an American scholarship gave me six years of romance at Edinburgh University, after which I was hired by the most prestigious New York publishing firm, Harper and Row. And that was not all. In one shape or another gifts from America kept coming, including fabulous Thanksgivings, Merry Christmases and holidays with dear friends in New Canaan CT, Washington DC, Jefferson ME and elsewhere. Frankly, America was my first and most lasting love from the moment I stepped on its shore that Christmas Eve in 1945. And when I see it being double crossed by its own politicians, it’s ill prepared soldiers sent to fight other peoples’ wars and its black president regularly insulted by a racist Middle East warmonger, my blood boils…Introduction

Who needs another book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, soon to be 70 years old? After all, countless excellent, scholarly books have been written on the subject, largely by Jews and Israelis, including The Zionist Connection, by the brave and eminent American scholar, Alfred M. Lilienthal, A Death in Jerusalem, by Kati Marton, The Terror of Zion, by J. Bowyer Bell, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians, by David Gilmour, One Palestine Complete, by Tom Segev, 1984: A Soldier’s Tale, by Uri Avnery, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, La Guerre israélienne de l’information, by Joss Dray and Denis Sieffert, Programmer le désastre. La politique israélienne à l’oeuvre, by Michael Warschawski, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter, the concise and excellent Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s guide, by Ben White, A New Voice for Israel, by Jeremy Ben-Ami, Gaza: A History, by Jean-Pierre Filiu and, above all, The Punishment of Gaza, by Gideon Levy. Oddly enough, the answer to this nagging question emerged by itself as I ploughed through mountains of notes, newspaper clippings, magazines and books, trying to extract valid information that would clarify my ideas, fortify my arguments and supplement my first hand observations.

Pig-headed as it may sound, I came to realize, very gradually, that I was doing something as simple and as natural as it was new. I was addressing my book not to the dedicated reading and writing crowd, the intellectuals and the politicians, nor even to those deeply interested in the Middle East. I was going over their heads, directly addressing the American people. Although as a Canadian newspaper reporter roaming around North America I assumed that I knew a fair amount about the world and could not easily be hoodwinked, on the Israeli question my mind was as effectively laundered as, I believe, are the minds of countless adult Americans. My book is directed at hardworking, tax paying and patriotic US citizens who, persuaded that one more war would bring permanent peace and security, were pushed into four insane conflicts and made to pay for them in trillions of dollars and at least a million extinguished, shattered or cruelly disrupted American lives. Of the three wars since Vietnam, the two against Iraq were aggressively promoted by Israeli leaders and their powerful lobbies. I am in effect addressing the people who have been taken for the longest, most costly and insane ride in the history of democracies. I am hoping to wake up the whole American nation, especially the Jews, who are so often violently targeted in the wake of nearly every major act of Israeli aggression against its Muslim neighbors.

But while focusing largely on the links between Israel and the United States (surely the most unusual in history), the book concerns much of the world. Since the start of the 20th century, the fates of America, Europe and the Middle East have been closely connected, first by oil, then by two World Wars and finally by the creation of the State of Israel on Arab lands.

The interdependence of United States, Europe, Israel and the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, was well reflected in the findings of a 2003 opinion survey conducted in 12 countries of the European Union. Most of the 17,000 persons questioned considered Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace. It was closely followed by the United States, North Korea and Iran.

Unlike nearly all other books on the subject, my work aims to show the incalculable harm done by the Israeli leaders and the Israeli Lobby to American interests, both at home and abroad, by pushing Washington into distant wars that were lost before they even started. It portrays the historically unprecedented bullying by a minute country of its 400 times larger victim. It describes how the selfish, short sighted, violent and racist treatment of their Muslim neighbors by successive Israeli governments became the greatest danger to the security of the United States, and a deadly threat to the totally innocent Jews of the Diaspora. I show how the Israeli Lobby has corrupted America’s political system, destroyed or arrested the careers of many brilliant and honest politicians, diplomats, public servants and university professors and undermined the freedom of speech guaranteed by the US Constitution. It has also sabotaged countless, immensely costly US efforts to win the good will of people worldwide, especially in the developing countries.

When starting to write this book, with my numerous American friends very much in mind, I often wondered what’s the point? The research and writing, and perhaps another visit to Israel and the occupied territories, could add up to another year or two. It seemed inconceivable that Israel’s blatant colonial and apartheid policies, far deadlier than those of the white South African regime in its final years, could keep flourishing another week, month, or year in the 21st century. That they would be tolerated and subsidized by western democracies and financed by US taxpayers. I wondered whether anything new could be said about Israel and the perennial Middle East crisis, the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews which started in Palestine more than 100 years ago and has since radiated to all neighboring countries as well as beyond.

I had doubts about my book’s title. Should it not be Israel: A Jewish Tragedy?

Hatreds rooted in the Holy Land have exploded in faraway places: Munich, Buenos Aires, New York, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Paris and elsewhere they have led to the deaths of innocent people, many of them Jews. But the media have carefully avoided exposing the common source of these events and linking Israel’s “wars” against its neighbors to the “anti-Semitic” attacks against Jews in Europe or elsewhere which immediately followed.

Somehow the motives for the 9/11 attacks, clearly stated immediately afterwards by Osama bin Laden, were drowned out by a massive wave of self-righteous propaganda and infantile trivia delivered practically non-stop by the media. The American public, which just a few years earlier remained riveted by the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of two people, showed no interest whatsoever in the motives behind the killing of 3,000 on 9/11. I have yet to meet an American who remembers what Osama bin Laden said about his motives in the days following the tragedy. In a video-taped recording shown on countless TV stations in Europe he claimed that America had been punished for the destruction of Iraq in the first Gulf War, the treatment of the Palestinian people by America’s “best friends” and the stationing of US troops on the holy soil of Mecca and Medina. Yet no mainstream US commentators or editorial writers I know of stated or even hinted, that there would have been no 9/11, and so no US invasion of Afghanistan and no Iraqi calamity, if America had not been identified as Israel’s chief partner in the ruthless dispossession of the Palestinian people.

If Osama bin Laden’s terrorist team targeted first of all New York City, was it not because it is the largest Jewish city on earth?

Hundreds of Israeli, Jewish and other scholars, journalists and commentators, as well as spiritual leaders and Nobel Prize winners have for years, denounced Israel’s expansionist and racist policies. Their brave, heartfelt and honest advice was either ignored or brutally attacked by Israeli leaders and their lobbies around the world.

“The Israelis in Gaza are behaving like the Nazis,” declared Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish member of the British Parliament as phosphorous and other bombs hit UN buildings, schools and other civilian targets in Gaza. At the end of 2009, Richard Falk, the UN’s special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestinian Territories, who also happens to be Jewish, urged Israel’s European and North American allies to press for an immediate end of the blockade of the Palestinian lands, “backed up by a credible threat of economic sanctions.”

Surely in the history of mankind there has never been a more unbalanced relationship between two formally independent countries as the one that has linked Israel and the United States since the days of Harry Truman. The US has a population 50 times that of the Jewish State, yet for decades Israel has had a stranglehold on the most vital policies of its mighty and obedient ally, especially those dealing with the volatile and oil rich Middle East nations (with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia). Hardly anyone in the US, especially in Washington, dares mention this, not even in a whisper. Can one imagine a bunch of Picts controlling the Roman Empire from the Scottish Highlands? And, at least distance-wise, the Picts were far closer to Rome than the Israelis are to Washington.

Meantime the violent harassment employed by the army, the bureaucracy, the courts and individual Israelis against their Arab neighbors never stops. The final aim of all these policies remains constant; to get rid of the Palestinians at any cost, by assassination, banishment, terror, torture, years of imprisonment without trial, by destroying their crops, homes, workplaces, schools and mosques, and refusing permits to repair them or build new ones. As the Israelis move into Palestinian lands, they level homes and orchards, terrorize, jail, exile or kill their owners.

According to the Polish edition of Le Monde diplomatique of June 2012, nearly 40% of adult Palestinian males have, since 1967 passed through Israeli jails. Was it worse in apartheid South Africa? One Palestinian who served as my guide in 2003 in the largely devastated Bethlehem told me it was much easier to get Israeli permission to go to Jordan than to go to Jerusalem, a few miles away. The Israelis hope that once someone leaves the West Bank or Gaza and tastes life without the daily harassments and humiliations, the checkpoints and the IDF snipers, they will never wish to return.

Palestinians, however, have proved far tougher than the rulers of Israel imagined. They take on tanks, armored vehicles and Caterpillars with stones, knowing only too well that there’s no penalty for those Israelis who pull the trigger. Israelis call this policy of expropriation and expansion their “struggle to survive.” Most Americans, Canadians and perhaps even Europeans believe these woeful fairy tales.

As an increasing number of scholars, historians, and Israel-friendly but sober commentators keep pointing out, the present policies of the Jewish State are highly destructive, too often crude, inhuman, racist and short sighted. They shame Jewish people worldwide, endanger their lives, are a threat to the very existence of Israel, stability in the area and world peace. Israel’s exhibition of arrogance will make few true friends for the Israelis and is certain to bring violent reactions from those who have been wronged.

“The Israelis are digging their own grave,” Mark Frankland⁵, a long time foreign correspondent of The Observer, said as the Israelis kept bombing civilian targets in Gaza, in January 2009. Blinded by their military power and control over their immensely resourceful ally, Israeli leaders and their lobbies act as if there was no tomorrow, as if they were unaware that every sixth person on our planet is a Muslim. What will it take before the Israelis realize that their leaders are pushing them towards a dead end, at best, or something so much worse that it’s hard to contemplate or imagine. Can the bullying of Americans, Europeans and others by constantly referring to a new Holocaust threat work forever? Will the Israelis open their eyes one day and realize that possessing an arsenal of nuclear weapons is not a license to kill defenseless civilians and to confiscate their lands?. Unfortunately, too often, the Israelis act as if they were both deaf and blind. As if they believed that the Holocaust on the one hand, and their 21st century weapons on the other, give them unique, superhuman rights. In effect, an ordinary Israeli has the right to decide which Palestinian should live and which should die.

Unfortunately, so far, America’s and Europe’s spineless leaders and yes-men do hardly anything to discourage these notions, and the resulting actions and land grabs that follow. Reports ordered by the European Union which documented Israeli crimes and excesses have been shelved or ignored by Brussels, so as not to “upset” the Israelis and endanger the “peace process.” For decades now, allied soldiers, civilians and United Nations employees, plus countless others have been paying, and are paying for the cowardice of their political leaders’ with sweat, blood, lost limbs and lost lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza and countless other places. Most of these disasters and tragedies can be traced to conflicts that are rooted in America’s blind support for its “eternal”⁶, yet ungrateful and scornful friends in Jerusalem. Where will people be dying next so that American and European politicians can sleep soundly, keep their cushy jobs and the Israelis can continue enriching themselves by grabbing poor people’s land?

There will be more violence, more instability and accumulated hate as long as Washington keeps rubber-stamping whatever Israel does, vetoes every UN resolution - at least 37 so far - that concerns Israel, and the EU offers sweet trade deals and subsidies to the Jewish State, buys its arms, drones and technology and remains silent in face of its crimes.

While following the news and reading about Israel and the Middle East for more than 25 years, I came to realize that many events, most of them tragic, but all connected to Israel have been studiously ignored, neglected or mystified by the media, as well as by Israeli, US, Canadian and other politicians. In this book I am attempting to focus on some of them by “connecting the dots.”

● Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin—the unexpected, but true Godfathers of the Jewish State—and their decisions to vote in favour of creating a new country on someone else’s land. Truman did so against the advice of all his closest collaborators, including Secretary of State George Marshall and future Secretary, Dean Acheson. After weeks of indecision, Stalin, for different reasons did the same.

● The ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte, a nephew of the King of Sweden and a representative of the United Nations, by Israeli terrorists led by Yitzhak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel. Less than four years earlier the Count, risked his life and reputation when, as Allied bombs rained on Berlin, he successfully negotiated with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler the release of thousands of Jew and other prisoners from German death camps. Some gratitude. Count Bernadotte’s wife was American.

● The 5-year and the 60-year witch hunts, by Joe McCarthy’s gang and by the militants of The Lobby, respectively.

● The death of 34 US sailors and the wounding of 170 on the ship M.S. Liberty, on June 6, 1967, by Israeli bombs and rockets, the greatest US naval disaster in peace time, which the Congress refused to investigate and the Pentagon stonewalled. The commander in chief of the Israeli armed forces at the time was General Yitzhak Rabin, later Prime Minister and Bill Clinton’s greatly admired friend.

● The killing of Senator Robert F. Kennedy who wished to put a quick end to the Vietnam War, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounded the probable reason for the assassination. How many Americans have been informed that the assassin was a young refugee from Jerusalem, victim of the ethnic cleansing?

● The death of 300 young US Marines, diplomats and CIA agents in Beirut in 1983, following the invasion of the country by the Israeli army under Ariel Sharon, later to be hailed as “a man of peace” by George W. Bush. The occupation of Lebanon lasted 20 years.

● By far the greatest, hardly ever mentioned as such, brain drain in history, or the exodus of one million Soviet Jews, engineered by top members of the Israeli Lobby in Washington.

● Israel’s support of apartheid in South Africa and the double crossing of the UN embargo imposed on the racist regime. Also, efforts to sell nuclear weapons to Pretoria and the resulting enmity of some black American leaders and their followers, hardly ever mentioned in the media. Did Israel’s close ties with the apartheid regime serve the interests of American Jews who are outnumbered by African-Amercians by 7 to 1?

● Nine/eleven and the conspiracy of silence surrounding Osama bin Laden’s clearly stated reasons for the attack. It was not “jealousy,” as countless US pundits kept claiming.

● The two insane wars that soon followed, against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and suffered most as result of these wars and will be suffering, and hating America for generations to come. Punishing the Iraqi and Afghani people for 9/11 can be compared to punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust.

● The corrupting of the American political system, its democratic values and institutions by agents and friends of the Israeli Lobby.

● The greatest spy calamity since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, was engineered by the Israeli government. It reportedly led to the deaths of at least 100 CIA agents, whose names were passed on by Jerusalem to Moscow at the end of the Cold War. While the US-born traitor, who did incalculable harm to his country, sat in an American jail (no water boarding on American soil), countless Israelis demanded the streets, squares be named after him in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Eilat. He was visited in jail by Israeli prime ministers and officials who who competed with each other in trying to get the spy released earlier. He was freed in November 2015.Foreword

My father must be turning in his grave seeing what a vandal state he helped create. A life-long defender of all underdogs and advocate of minority rights in Poland and elsewhere, could he have predicted that in a land controlled by Jews there would be no penalty for killing unarmed Palestinian men, women and children, cutting them off from food and water and destroying tens of thousands of homes?

Such were my thoughts on January 3, 2009 after one week of “war” in Gaza. At least 450 civilians were dead, largely women and children.

As shocked medical workers, UN and Red Cross employees described the bloodshed to TV reporters and pleaded for international aid and intervention, Israel’s spokesmen claimed there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and boasted about the army’s “surgical strikes.”

That day in Warsaw, I was attempting in vain to write the foreword to this book, which was then far from finished.

True to form, President George W. Bush and State Secretary Condoleezza Rice condemned the Palestinians after 4 Israelis died, not the Israelis who killed hundreds and wounded thousands and made many more homeless in the first weeks of winter.

Mindful of The Lobby, Barack Obama, definitely a brilliant and compassionate person who in a fortnight would become the most powerful leader on earth, dared not open his mouth.

On January 16 newspapers reported that 155 caliber phosphorous shells hit the UNRWA⁷ building and large supplies of food and medicines for the population were destroyed. One could well wonder what other chemicals, arms and methods the Israelis would be employing if the world was not watching. But I will leave this bit of speculation to those better versed in chemistry, the art of mass destruction, hi-tech vandalism and state of the art terror. The BBC stressed that it was not showing the most bloody and shocking scenes.

With President Bush blocking any effective UN move towards peace, the Israelis felt that they could go on killing, destroying and terrorizing Gaza, claiming that Hamas fighters were hiding “among the people.” With equal logic they could have bombed a North Dakota turkey farm, claiming that they only targeted male turkeys.

On January 19th, on the eve of the Inauguration Day in Washington, the Israelis abandoned the ruined Gaza which became a graveyard for many. In three weeks they had killed more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians, largely women and children, and wounded thousands, many of whom would die in the following days, weeks or months.

According to Israeli leaders this was but fair revenge for the “rockets” aimed at Israel in the previous seven years. What they did not say was that approximately 7,000 of these “kitchen made” contraptions, called Qassams, managed to kill 14 Israelis⁸. In that period the Israelis killed, wounded and kidnapped thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and levelled countless homes.

When less than 3000 Americans died on the 11th of September 2001, the prestigious French daily, Le Monde, carried the headline “Nous Sommes Tous Des Americains.” We Are All Americans. How come there was no such headline anywhere following the slaughter in Gaza?

Yes, there were numerous demonstrations around the world protesting Israel’s “war” but most western leaders remained practically silent.

Must I remain silent too?

Israel’s senseless slaughter would have perhaps shocked me less if not for my father’s efforts at the UNO in 1947 to give the Jews a safe and permanent home that came to be known as Israel.

Most critics agreed that the assault on Gaza had been planned for months. So it was no accident that the Israelis hi-jacked our Christmas and New Year’s Eve festivities to use them as a smokescreen, convinced that we will be too busy celebrating to worry about the hungry and the thirsty, the homeless, the wounded and the dead in Gaza.

Had they accepted the minimum of everything, food and freedom, water and electricity, housing and education, surrounded by Israel’s ocean of plenty, the Palestinians would have been enjoying relative peace and quiet that winter. So, “the war” was their fault.

As Bush Jr. finally headed back to Texas on January 20, track-loads and tank-loads of smiling Israeli troops rolled back to Israel, feeling happy and rehabilitated after the Lebanon fiasco of 2006. The civilian deaths score this time was 10 to 1500. But for the Israelis public the armistice was a blunder. They protested, demanding more Palestinian blood.

When not applauding the killings of Palestinians, destruction of their properties and the misappropriation of their lands, the vast majority of Israelis embrace a willful silence. It has lasted for 70 years and has hardly any parallels in history. Has there ever been, in modern times a 70 year-period in which the Jews have been treated as badly as they have been treating the Palestinians since the 1940s? Was there a time when one and a half million, anywhere, were locked up in an outdoor prison and bombed from the air, the land and the sea?

For years now, harmless children, women and men are being slaughtered with total impunity by people who want them to die or to run so that they can misappropriate their land.

Protesting injustice in Ceausescu’s Romania, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union or Saddam’s Iraq would have led to imprisonment, years in a nut house or instant execution. The Israelis face no such threats.

As the world waited for the new President, some of us wondered whether he would have the balls to take on The Lobby which was hugely responsible for pushing Washington into two Iraqi wars, “to make the Middle East safer for Israel” and the carnage and misery that followed. And that was not enough. Since the destruction of Iraq and total destabilization of the Middle East it has been demanding another war, this time with Iran.

Is Israel safer today than it was before the two Bush Presidents, egged on by America’s “eternal friends” in the Holy Land, sent more than two million ill-prepared soldiers to bring new order to the Middle East? Is America safer? Is the world?2 Asylum On The Hill? (Madmen, robots or just traitors?)

In the early 1950s, when there was hardly a trace of a doubt in our minds that the communist planet with Generalissimo Joseph Stalin at its helm would last forever, I found myself occasionally at mass rallies in Poland where tens of thousands of people, herded into a stadiums for sporting or brainwashing occasions, usually both, were prompted over the loudspeakers to chant “Stalin, Stalin, Stalin…!” And they did, of course, very loudly.

After a while this would change to “Stalin niech żyje, Stalin niech żyje,” which meant “Stalin, let him live’’, presumably for eternity.

I and some of my friends chanted something else. “Stalin niech zgnije, Stalin niech zgnije,” which meant “Stalin, let him rot.”

We knew only too well what our fate would be if someone overheard and denounced us. But with 50,000 chanting it was safe to assume that no one would notice our childish and hopeless protest.

As the crowd kept chanting I began to wonder sometimes who was bonkers, I or the 50,000 faces around me. The madness of crowds, can be both infectious and bewitching, especially in a tightly controlled, totally isolated from the outside world, such as today’s North Korea. A similar, creeping process of like-mindedness can be observed today in a country which is not isolated at all and enjoys an unusually free press, Israel.

In these days that seem so far away that they appear almost unreal today, we were in effect a captive herd doing as told.