Expert Explores the Palestine Dilemma

2006-09-23

Award-Winning Historian and International Relations Expert Explores the Palestine Dilemma

Robert John places the birth of Israel and the subsequent Arab/Israeli conflict in the context of international politics, world wars and terrorism in "The Palestine Diary."

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 2, 2006 -- In "The Palestine Diary, Vol. 1: Britain's Involvement 1914-1945," and "Vol. 2: United States, United Nations Intervention 1945-1948, Third Edition," author Robert John has crafted the most detailed history available of the thorny Palestine problem.

When the Jewish state of Israel was formed, it quickly became a battleground between Jews who felt it was their right to be there and the displaced Palestinians who did not. How did the situation in Palestine become so dangerous and how and why did it lead to terrorism in the United States, Britain and Israel? American international relations expert Robert John, after investigating the history of this Middle East powder keg, offers some very concrete and provocative answers.

In this fascinating book, world leaders -- Arabs, Jews, Russians, British, Prime Ministers and popes -- give their opinions about Palestine. From the intrigue of World War I to the actual words delegates spoke at the UN, "The Palestine Diary" is fraught with shocking revelations. The author offers proof that there was an economic agreement concluded between the Third Reich and Jewish agencies. The Jewish state of Israel was forced on the Arab people, John states, even as a promise to the Arabs for Palestine to be an independent Arab state was denied. This is a problem that won't go away, but a better understanding can perhaps lead to solution.

World historian Arnold Toynbee says of the book, "If the American people are willing to open their minds to the truth about Palestine, this book will help them to learn it and the situation in Palestine might quickly change for the better."

For more information please contact the author at 212-410-6560 and Ichee@aol.com. "The Palestine Diary, Vol. 1: Britain's Involvement 1914-1945," and "Vol. 2: United States, United Nations Intervention 1945-1948, Third Edition" is available for sale online at Amazon.com, Borders.com and through additional wholesale and retail channels worldwide.

About the Author

Diplomatic historian, writer, lecturer and broadcaster, Robert John is a member of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and an honorary life member of Yale University Political Union. Cited by the Military Order of the World Wars, he also received an award for his significant contribution to global education of people from the International Institute of Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, the second highest honor after the Nobel Prize. Dr. John lives in New York City, New York.

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THE PALESTINE DIARY - read the Foreword and excerpts

Foreword - Third Edition

By Robert John

The purpose of the Palestine diary is to make information from primary sources available to the public, which is otherwise only accessible to special researchers. To a subject heavy with special interests and special pleading, the Palestine diary allows readers to understand how policies that influence our world, our countries, ourselves, originated. How most of Palestine became Israel is a lesson for every generation in "the game of nations" for influence and power over others. One learns how fateful national and international decisions may be made by a very few people. But there may be critical times when an informed public could demand a different policy. That would be democracy. This is why Arnold Toynbee is recommending the Palestine diary in his foreword to the first edition. It is why it was recommended by the Christian Science Monitor reviewer to be in libraries and universities throughout the world.

World historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) who wrote the foreword to the first edition, had made history, serving in the British foreign office during World Wars I and II and was a delegate to the (1919) Paris Peace Conference. He drafted the document on British Commitments for the Inner Group - Britain, USA, France, and Italy, vol. 1 p. 146.

The late Sami Hadawi, MBE, suggested my interest in conflict resolution focus on Palestine. As a civil servant of the British administration in Jerusalem from age 16, Sami Hadawi had a personal collection of official documents relating to Palestine that he lent me. Why were documents like the Balfour Declaration ever issued? It took me years to dig out the artifacts. The Palestine Diary contains many quotations from these documents. When it was finished, he donated them to the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut. During the siege of Beirut in 1982, a special unit of Israeli Intelligence removed them and other documents.

William Yale, introduced to me by Hugh D. Auchincloss, a keen supporter of the American University of Beirut, annotated a copy of the manuscript and made suggestions that I incorporated.

I was invited to Stanford University and the Hoover Institution to research the papers left to them by Professor Westermann of Columbia University. He had been United States adviser on Turkish affairs at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Seated in the sepulchral library, and coming across the Secret document partly included in this edition, volume 1, page 146, I was suddenly angry. In time, in space, in circumstance, far away from the many men, including family members who had voluntarily fought, died or been wounded, believing in British integrity, dishonored by a Welsh demagogue, a legal solicitor for Theodore Herzl, author and promoter of a Jewish State.

I expected the Palestine diary to be published by the Hoover Institution or Stanford University. Recommendation of publication is required from the head of the appropriate department. George Rentz, curator of the Near Eastern section had been helpful and enthusiastic. The day I brought him the manuscript, he closed the door of his office - unusual in Palo Alto, and said, "If your manuscript is no good, there's no problem. But if it's good, and we publish it, this university may lose substantial support. And I like working here, I don't want to have to move to one of those eastern colleges. But leave it here and I'll look at it."

I still have that copy of the manuscript in the package that he sent back to me with his name on the label.

After Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (born Golda Mabovitz in Kiev, Ukraine) said, "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed," 23 year-old Leila Khaled, who had been driven from her home in Haifa at the age of four, hijacked a passenger airplane in 1969 to show the world there was! She became the example for individual action in an international armed struggle. A climate of opinion had been created so that the title of this book was the reason why the president of a great American corporation I advised asked me if it was anti-Jewish? "No." "Could it be thought of as anti-Semitic?" Anyone who knows Palestinians knows how careful and considerate they are in distinguishing between the Jewish religion and ethnicity and Zionism. Anti-Semitism condemns Jews because they are Jews.

There is a moment in the film Lawrence of Arabia when Peter O'Toole as Lawrence, asks General Allenby (Jack Hawkins) to confirm that he can promise Sherif Husein of Mecca independence in return for Arab support in destroying the Turkish army. For just a brief, devastating moment, Hawkins hesitates; then his face becomes all smiling benevolence: "Of course!" he says. Eventually shamed by what happened to his and British honor, Lawrence threw away his medals from the British government.

When I line up at an airport to be searched as a potential criminal, I know why this change in international relations has happened—and I am angry that the actions of others have subjected me to this indignity and inconvenience.

The peoples of the Middle East are affected everyday by its history of Anglo-American covert and direct political and military interventions. The Economist Oct. 15, 2001 edition about the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, noted, "the day a British mandate came into force in Palestine, over the heads of unyielding Arab opposition," quoted from a dispatch from Jerusalem to London's The Times of 1922. "The Arabs declared a day of mourning throughout the city and the shops were closed as a protest against today's formal proclamation of the Mandate, but no Jews were molested."—The day was September 11.

Lawrence of Arabia would understand US 911.

This third edition contains a clear definition of antisemitism (vol. 1 PREFACE)

Excerpts from official documents never before made public.

One is a facsimile of the critical page of the secret document of the British Foreign Office that promised independence for Palestine to the Sherif of Mecca in World War I.

EXCERPT

[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]

SECRET Political Intelligence Department,

Foreign Office.

Special 3.

Memorandum

on

British Commitments to King Husein//CUT vol. 1 p.146.

EXCERPT

A German document shows German intention in 1940 for a Jewish homeland in Madagascar:

Conference of the Commander -in -Chief, Navy, with the Fuehrer on June 20, 1940, at Wolfsschlucht.

also present: chief of staff, O.K. W.

General Jodl,

Commander von Puttkamer.

!, France. The armistice. -- The Fuhrer wishes to refrain from taking any measures which would affect French honour.. The fleet is therefore to be interned at Brest and Toulon according to peacetime disposition.//CUT

EXCERPT

In January 2006 British National Archives released these Cabinet notes:

2 July 1943. the Cabinet discussed the situation in Palestine. The Cabinet agreed that action was needed to damp down the existing agitation, which was being brought on by extremist statements. There was concern that the situation might lead to future military commitments. The Cabinet agreed a draft declaration by the UK and US governments, which said that no decision on Palestine should be reached without full consultation between both Arabs and Jews.

P.M. [Winston Churchill]

I´m committed to creation of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Let us go on with that; and at end/war we shall have plenty of force with which to compel the Arabs to acquiesce in our designs. Don´t shirk our duties because of diffies:

Wavell. [Field Marshal Archibald Wavell]

we have our obligations towards the Arabs : They all believe we gave a pledge for Arab Palestine. Also 2nd part of Balfour Declaration. Pledge in Nov. 1918. And final word in W. Paper. Thus, we have our obligations towards the Arabs. Fr. pt/view of security of B. Empire, present aspirations of Jews in Pal. are a real menace to our position in M/East & subsequently in India.

Most British people did not know that the prime minister, like Lloyd George in the Great War, was pro-Zionist. Questioning his philo-Semitism was publicly dismissed as being like Nazi propaganda. //CUT

[Field Marshal Archibald Wavell "After the 'war to end war' they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a 'Peace to end Peace.'" (commenting on the treaties ending World War I;)]

EXCERPT

Benjamin H. Freedman of the Speyer banking family, whose father was a founding member of the American Jewish Committee, and as a young man had been secretary of the "finance committee to elect Woodrow Wilson" in 1912, showed me a geological report on the estimated value of the mineral deposits of the Dead Sea prepared for Lord Rothschild, made available to him in 1923. It was a time when Lord Mond controlled nickel, the Guggenheims controlled copper, Lord Swathling (Montague) controlled Anglo-Dutch oil, and Oppenheimer monopolized De Beers diamonds and South African gold. President Franklin Roosevelt's son-in-law, Col. Curtis Dall, who had been with Wall Street's Lehman bankers in the 1930s, refers to this in his book, which he gave me, Israel's Five Trillion Dollar Secret, published privately in 1977. "The well-veiled objective of the Zionists backed by the Rothschild financial interests, was to acquire valid title to the Dead Sea, with its vast, inexhaustible deposits of potash and other minerals, estimated by experts to be worth several thousand billions of dollars" (p.11).

On 6 June 1995 Volkswagen motor company signed a contract in Israel for extraction of magnesium from the Dead Sea. vol. 1 p.196.

ORDER THE PALESTINE DIARY

from

http://www.ichee.org - the web site of The International Council for Human Ecology and Ethnology or www.amazon.com

The first edition of The Palestine Diary has been selling for from $200-$2000.

World historian Arnold Toynbee wrote for the first edition: of The Palestine Diary

"As an Englishman I hate to have to indict my country, but I believe that Britain deserves to be indicted, and this is the only personal reparation that I can make. I hope this book will be read widely in the United States, and this by Jewish as well as by non-Jewish Americans the United States government:

"if the American people are willing to open their minds to the truth about Palestine, this book will help them to learn it. If they do learn the truth, I hope this will lead them to change their minds, and if the American people do change their minds, I feel sure that that government will change its policy to match. If the American government were to be constrained by American public opinion to take a nonpartisan and line over Palestine, the situation in Palestine might quickly change for the better. Is this too much to ask for? We cannot tell, but at least it is certain that the present book will be enlightening for any reader whose mind is open to conviction."

Some comments On the Palestine diary:

William Yale, Special Agent of the Department of State in World War I, Adviser to the Department on the Near East in World War II and to the United Nations Organization -

"This book will make history."

David W. Littlefield, Library of Congress, The Library Journal -

"This is not a personal diary, but the most detailed history available of the Palestine problem . . .the book is so detailed, and the quotations and footnoting of the sources is so extensive that it is a valuable aid to researchers."

John K. Cooley, Middle East Bureau, The Christian Science Monitor -

"It is a most illuminating and useful book. It should be in universities and libraries, and especially in the hands of historians, throughout the world."

ENDS

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