Israel in the Mind of America
Isaac, Rael Jean
BOOK R E V I E W S Israel in the Mind of America by Peter Grose is a gracefully written history of the idea, in America, of a Jewish state and of the eventual response of a Christian political...
...ignored Syria, turning its entire efforts toward obtaining Israeli agreement to withdraw...
...Does it want to shore up Israel as a potential ally in the region against Soviet penetration...
...The war had come to s t a l e m a t e . . . " Actually, of course, Israel had trapped and encircled the Egyptian Third Army and the war did not "come to stalemate" by some military balance of forces...
...Dissent on Zionism was compounded by bitter differences in the early 1940s on how to react to the Holocaust, with establishment Zionists cooperating with U.S...
...The overwhelming preponderance of opinion was that in a battle between Arabs and Jews, the Arabs would carry out a repeat performance of the Turkish massacre of Armenians at Musa Dagh...
...had lost all its negotiating cards...
...Grose treats Kissinger's intervention as following the war (the famous shuttle diplomacy), but it was his intervention during the war that was decisive...
...As Ben Ami notes, he too sought to eliminate the Hebrew Committee for National Liberation (suggesting that its leader be expelled from the country), but also tried to undercut establishment Zionist Goldmann, arguing that as "an alien" he should not be recognized as a spokesman for American Jewry...
...A halt was forced upon Israel by the United States, in turn responding to Soviet threats of direct intervention...
...i THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 31 of State Dulles, in a major foreign policy address, suggested Israel give up the Negev...
...Nor were these views surprising...
...Niles was embarrassed: " I thought he was overdoing things," but on glancing at Truman saw to his amazement "tears were running down his cheeks...
...But by now, the U.S...
...And Harold Nicolson replied to his wife a few days later with the remark: I feel so much in the spirit of Winston's great speech that I could face a world of enemies...
...What the formula overlooks is the essential point that Arab opposition to the existence of Israel extends to her existence in any boundaries...
...Why not in good time negotiate the Syrians out of Lebanon...
...I n . . . Egypt, it is drained of its substance because Egypt obtained, thanks to Camp David, what it wanted...
...A Midwestern Baptist who became a reporter for the New York Times, serving as bureau chief both in Israel and in Moscow, Grose in 1977 joined the policy planning staff of the State Department...
...The Czechs rescued Israel from it...
...Moreover, once the state existed, Truman learned to appreciate both its historic and "romantic" dimension...
...The Defense Department saw Israel as a future Soviet stronghold: As late as March 1948, Grose points out, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman that the dominant Labor party of the Jewish Agency "stems from the Soviet Union and its satellite s t a t e s . . , and ideologically is much closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States...
...Israel, whose people were accustomed to fighting only wars of survival, was tired of its casualties and despaired of achieving the result it had hoped for--a stable, friendly northern neighbor...
...It retreated unilaterally from the Shouf mountain area, much reducing the threat to Syria...
...Accordingly, rather than seize the moment of Syria's defeat by Israeli forces and the presence of those forces in positions threatening Damascus to obtain a simultaneous Israeli-Syrian withdrawal, the U.S...
...But by 1956, as the threats to Israel mounted in the wake of heavy Soviet arms sales to Egypt, the U.S...
...Territories for peace" as the U.S...
...formula for the Arab-Israeli conflict may in fact go back to 1955, when Secretary "Essential Reading on War and Peace" This important volume, Out o f Justice, Peace and Winning the Peace, contains the complete text of both the Joint Pastoral Letters of the West German Bishops and of the French Bishops on war and peace...
...But "disenfranchised Arab Palestinians" were the product of Israel's War for Independence in 1948...
...In volume VI of the monumental biography of Churchill (which Randolph Churchill began) Martin Gilbert deals with this epic period...
...Hardcover, 600 pages $30.00 _9 Liberation Theology, by James V. Schall, S.J...
...In a remarkable feat of political rhetoric, Churchill's mind and the public life of Britain fused together in an act of psychic mobilization...
...Extraordinarily lucid and persuasive pastoral letters on war and peace...
...Bloomington, Indiana ascendancy over the British mind can be judged by the effect it had even upon somewhat ineffable aesthetes like the Nicolsons...
...legend had not been a living presence guiding them...
...In more than 1200 pages, Gilbert is able to open up the legend by an enormous expansion of its scale...
...Does it want to jeopardize Israel's survival by forcing her back to the old nine-mile waist at her heavily populated plain...
...The fashionable orthodoxy of liberal Western journalists that Israel has "lost its soul," endlessly trumpeted by G r o s e ' s book is marred by its Epilogue...
...Grose himself notes that David Niles, White House assistant first to Roosevelt and later to Truman, whom Grose credits with a major role in the behind-thescenes maneuvers that led to Truman's prompt recognition of Israel, said there are "serious doubts in my mind that Israel would have come into being if Roosevelt had lived...
...Nonetheless, the best part of the book remains the diplomatic history of the 1940s, as Grose examines the intense cross pressures under which American policy toward the creation of a Jewish state was fashioned...
...By January 1984 General Ibrahim Tannous, commander of the Lebanese army~ was quoted as saying that morale andqeadership was so bad "the army was starting over at less than zero...
...I t is thus evident that, despite all the talk of the forces that determine events, this was a case where the man made the mood, and the mood gave authority to the man...
...Vain about his personal charm, Roosevelt, as Grose says, "decided to try settling the whole problem of Palestine in a faceto-face meeting with Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud...
...Grose's description of the rise of the "Palestinian problem" is also wide of the mark...
...In the aftermath of Dunkirk, Churchill delivered in the Commons the famous speech declaring that Britain would fight on the beaches, and never surrender...
...Grose essentially ends his story in 1948 but the importance of his account stems from the continuity of America's contradictory behavior since then...
...decided to press only for an Israeli withdrawal--from the West Bank...
...The entire thrust of U.S...
...The United States gave generous economic aid to Israel in its first decade, but denied it permission to buy arms until the mid-1960s...
...The Rogers Plan of 1969, calling for Israel to return to her pre-1967 borders with "insubstantial changes," gave way in 1983 to the Reagan Plan which, mirabile dictu, called for exactly the same thing...
...The Haganah's leader Yitzhak Sadeh realized this, and Grose quotes him: " I f the vote [at the UN] is positive, the Arabs will make war on us...
...Pushed out of Lebanon, with no way to prevent Syria's de facto control of the country, the U.S...
...Conceding the difficulty of compressing what has happened into 17 pages, there is no excuse for what Grose does...
...Ben Ami points out that only 10 percent of the Jewish Agency's budget went to the Haganah, its military arm, and Golda Meir admitted that when independence was declared the Haganah had only "fourteen hundred guns all over the c o u n t r y . . . " But the Jews were stronger and the Arabs weaker than anyone realized, including the combatants themselves...
...gives every indication of not knowing what it wants or what it is doing...
...James V. Schall, S.J...
...The discussion of the Yom Kippur War is equally misleading...
...Syria could now 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 afford to wait out the Israelis and the Americans...
...for the Americans, Pearl Harbor and the Normandy invasions...
...Treasury Secretary Morgenthau recalled Roosevelt musing in 1942: "I actually would put a barbed wire fence around Palestine, and I would begin to move the Arabs o u t . . . " On the other hand, Grose notes that Zionism, as an idea, did not move Truman, and he shows clearly that Truman was irritated by the importunings and demands of Zionist pressure groups...
...It suited Arab purposes far better to speak of refugees, with Israel in the pre-1949 borders the place in which they were to be settled...
...British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who seemed rather to relish the prospect, informed Secretary of State George Marshall: "They [the Jews] would get their throats cut...
...Such things lie beyond the scope of a biography...
...While the government's motive was to avoid pressure for any actions to save Jews, many in the Jewish leadership went along out of fear that the war against the Axis might come to be perceived as a "Jewish war...
...State's Breckenridge Long is baldly described as "anti-Semitic" by Grose, who errs on the side of caution, not overstatement...
...Reflects the hard-sense practicality for which the French are famous...
...Among non-Jews opposition to Zionism was focused in the State Department (which in 1941 tried to issue a "reverse Balfour Declaration" promising the U.S...
...Once England, under military pressure from the dissident underground organizations, the Irgun and Lechi ("the Stern Gang," as it was known here), decided in 1947 to give up the Mandate, it was inevitable that the fate of Palestine would be decided by the force of arms...
...What happened after 1967 was that the Arabs adopted a new public relations strategy which had been suggested to them, but rejected, earlier...
...He ended by saying: _9 . . and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the world_9 Vita Sackville West wrote to her husband that, even repeated by the announcer on the radio, it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine...
...The present predicament of the United States in Lebanon is a product of the willful delusions of our policy makers...
...Roosevelt, Grose shows, was captivated by the Zionist idea and el, tertained ambitious plans for the transfer of Palestine's Arab population, chiefly to Iraq, the cost to be met by the United States, England, France, and wealthy Jews in the Western democracies...
...Roosevelt seems to have been persuaded by Ibn Saud's charm, for he told Stettinius that we must "reexamine our entire policy in Palestine" and informed Congress: "On the problem of Arabia, I learned more about that whole problem, the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters...
...With Britain and France, the U.S...
...Twenty-five years later, it was not clear that the historian's distinctions could be so readily drawn...
...The State Department had a realistic appreciation of Arab opposition to Zionism but predicted wrongly that a complete cut-off of Arab oil would follow Israel's creation...
...endorsed the Tripartite Declaration, which promised that if Israel or its Arab neighbors violated the armistice lines, the signers of the declaration would "act both within and without the framework of the United Nations in order to prevent such a violation...
...Perhaps the most salient theme of Grose's book is the confusion and cross purposes characterizing American policy toward Israel...
...And if the vote is negative, then it is we who will make war on the Arabs...
...For months the cautious Hussein dallied over the Reagan Plan (Israel rejected it outright) before rejecting it for lack of PLO support...
...Grose provides an absorbing account of the history of the Zionist idea in the United States, starting on the Christian side with Pastor John McDonald of Albany's Chapel Street Presbyterian Church in 1814 and among the Jews with Mordecai Noah, a flamboyant editor-diplomat who first offered his Zionist platform from the pulpit of New York's Shearith Israel synagogue in 1818...
...Accordingly, after Yalta (where, to judge from the agreement, Stalin did the charming), Roosevelt set out for the Great Bitter Lake, midway through the Suez Canal, where he met the King on the American cruiser Quincy...
...We follow Churchill day by day, and at times hour by hour, through the dangerous times...
...What then does the United States want...
...What we'd done with the PLO was a real stunt that no one believed we could accomplish...
...The groups were not wholly discrete: The children of missionaries, familiar with Arabic and the Arab world, to a conRael Jean Isaac's most recent book (with Erich Isaac) is The Coercive Utopians (Regnery-Gate~vay...
...armed forces to maintain readiness and of the intelligence services to accept information that contradicted the "doctrine" conceived by its head...
...California residents please add 6%% sales tax...
...When he left a year later, State Department archives for the 1948 period were being opened (as were those at the British and Israeli Foreign Offices), and Grose decided to take advantage of the newly available resources to study the circumstances surrounding the birth of Israel...
...Out of the inarticulacy of the many possible and conflicting emotions the British were then experiencing, Churchill was able to elicit heroic passions to serve the policy he thought necessary...
...For the sophisticated reader it is ironic to find Weizmann, whose willingness to compromise and aversion to force ultimately lost him the support of even the hesitant Labor leadership, quoted as the "authority" for Israel's conquest of Judea and Samaria...
...It is treated as the product of Israel's failure to make concessions, i.e., of policy failure, rather than a failure of the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 33 the likes of Anthony Lewis (whose endorsement of the book heads the encomiums on the back jacket), is echoed by Grose, although, as always, Grose conveys his message elegantly...
...and abroad, Fr...
...Heady with imagined triumph, American diplomats ~ere sure they could accomplish the same feat with Syria...
...For the British, it's Dunkirk, and a lone island standing against the unleashed forces of barbarism_9 And even to state the legend in that way is to invoke Winston Churchill, the legend's creator...
...There were establishment Zionists, again divided into those emphasizing behind-thescenes efforts and those scorning diplomacy in favor of mobilizing public opinion...
...OTHER IMPORTANT BOOKS ON SOCIAL ISSUES: _9 The Social Teaching of Vatican II, by Rodger Charles, S.J...
...Grose describes the war's end: "For nine more days the battles raged, until a ceasefire finally took hold on October 24...
...Oddly enough, after the British decision to leave, the most important decision for the birth of Israel taken outside the region was the Czech decision, with Soviet permission, to arm the infant state...
...According to Grose: "The Arab governments suffered defeat in 1967, and from that debacle came a national force of disenfranchised Arab Palestinians...
...They supported the underground Irgun, which was hunted not only by the British but by the Jewish Agencycontrolled Haganah...
...It was, he later reflected, the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion's heart...
...We usually think of legends as stories constructed long after the events that gave them birth, but this is one case where the events could not have happened the way they did if the Kenneth Minogue is Reader & Political Science at the London School of Economics and author o f The Liberal Mind...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...How unfortunate that Grose mars a book 1 would otherwise heartily recommend by such uncritical acceptance of a certain new orthodoxy regarding Israel...
...The U.S...
...would no longer flirt with "ill-considered Zionist aspirations"), the oil companies, and churches with missionary establishments in the Middle East...
...voting for international trusteeship instead...
...administration in a betrayal of its fundamental principles...
...His There i s opportunity In America...
...In 1944 the vice president of the American Jewish Committee made a pilgrimage to the State Department...
...administration openly welcomed the embrace, now counting on Arafat to help it secure its policy goals against Israel...
...Equally serious, the U.S...
...No doubt this was in part the mistrust of genius by the mediocre, but it also reflected the fact that Churchill was prone to entertain brilliant but unworkable ideas...
...Yet as Arafat, the symbol of world terrorism, emerged from yet another debacle in Lebanon (in violation of his original undertaking, Arafat returned to Lebanon, only to be expelled by a rebellion within his own ranks) to embrace President Mubarak in Egypt, the U.S...
...There were many British politicians of a pragmatic disposition who could see much smarter ways of navigating the ship of state than heading straight for what looked like the reefs of military defeat...
...It now looks inevitable that they should have signed up for the legend, but like most retrospections, this is profoundly mistaken...
...In its confused way, the United States voted for partition but then reversed itself (to Truman's fury, who had authorized the switch without realizing it...
...Archbishop Philip Hannan, ~100 or more $1.95) New Orleans, La...
...Instead of picking up the theme of the continued contradictions of American policy, Grose chooses to write a brief history of events since 1948...
...Meanwhile, the Jews' sense of weakness left them hesitant, but there were also internal pressures on the Jewish Agency to announce creation of the state...
...And Grose reports that when he was introduced at a meeting as "the man who helped create the State of Israel" Truman retorted: "What do you mean, 'helped create...
...Grose describes the disunity among Jews, but his probe is not as full as it might have been...
...His description of the 1967 war gives no hint that it was precipitated by the Arabs as Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, threw out the UN force, sent a huge army into the Sinai, and announced on May 27: "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel...
...diplomacy suggests that it does...
...or alternatively to open up the wider strategic issues...
...I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words' sake...
...Although the balance shifted sharply as the rise of Hitler, and the closed doors of the democracies, made the need for a haven obvious, important elements of the Jewish leadership, including the influential American Jewish Committee, remained staunchly anti-Zionist until Israel was afait accompli...
...He turned to a study of the assumptions that underlay the diplomatic exchanges and eventually to a historical exploration of American attitudes toward Jews, but especially toward the restoration of Jews to Palestine...
...Crucial months passed while the Soviet Union rebuilt Syria's forces...
...The Hebrew Committee had enlisted writer Ben Hecht, who produced an emotional pageant called "We Will Never Die" with the aid of a galaxy of top talent including Moss Hart and Kurt Weill...
...Its heavy commitment of economic aid and military hardware suggests that it does...
...Since agreement on Palestine was the purpose of the meeting, that was an important exception...
...The January 21, 1984 New York Times reports that Morocco's King Hassan quoted President Mubarak as saying: "Camp David remains alive only in the minds of the Arabs...
...Prior to 1967 this was seen as a dangerous strategy, for the West Bank was Arabcontrolled and the Palestinians could have assumed sovereignty over it...
...Rather than the 21,000 men it believed the army had the U.S...
...I had an exceedingly pleasant meeting with Ibn Saud," the President reported, "and we agreed about everything until I mentioned 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 Palestine...
...Grose has stated that the book was originally intended as a diplomatic history...
...It is easy to imagine that the national mood might have veered toward skepticism and defeatism, as it did in France, especially given the fact that Hitler's terms of accommodation were likely to be soft...
...BOOK R E V I E W S Israel in the Mind of America by Peter Grose is a gracefully written history of the idea, in America, of a Jewish state and of the eventual response of a Christian political leadership to the struggle of Jews to make the idea a reality in the immediate aftermath of World War II...
...Churchill faced a situation not altogether dissimilar to our own: A democratic way of life was challenged by a form of totalitarianism both 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984...
...Permanent soft-cover $12.95 | f l r ~ r ~ | ~ s p ~ s P.O...
...For the Russians, it is the grim attrition on the Eastern Front...
...Since 1967 the U.S...
...As head of the visa section, his philosophy, as Grose notes, was simple: "Keep them out...
...I n a recent talk, Grose said he was surprised reviewers had overlooked what he felt was the major contribution of his book: a revision of the conventional wisdom which has seen Harry Truman as more sympathetic to Jewish national aspirations than Franklin Roosevelt...
...And there were dissident Zionists, who identified with opponents of the Labor leadership in the Jewish community in Palestine...
...is falling back on its policy of sending Israel back to its pre-1967 borders...
...Gilbert does not evade the fact that Churchill was regarded by many of his fellow politicians as unsound...
...ProArab and pro-Zionist pressure groups engaged in their tug-of-war with policy makers trying to satisfy both...
...f o r t u n a t e l y , Churchill could be talked out of them when necessary...
...Grose makes no mention of the post-1967 Labor government's policy of territories-for-peace, which was met by the three "noes" of Khartoum: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace with Israel...
...Some of these ideas were dotty, some inspired...
...We learn much of the child's delight in clever toys: Projects to drop firebombs on the Black Forest or float mines down the Rhine from Strasbourg are understandable responses to the frustrations of the phony war, when all initiative rested with the Germans...
...Jewish leaders trying to undercut others conducted an unedifying parade to a State Department only too eager to find ammunition against any Zionist groups...
...This masterpiece is the fruit of twenty years of study and research...
...James Schall, S.J., and an appendix by Basil Cardinal Hume of England, these texts are essential for a thorough discussion on this vital issue...
...The Arabs' false sense of strength made the temptation irresistible to clear out the Zionists for good once the departure of the British opened the way...
...Truman made the United States the first country to recognize Israel, but approved an arms embargo which, since the Arabs had plentiful sources of supply, was equivalent to a death sentence...
...And if the conscience of the world was stirred after 1967 as it had not been before, it is surely misleading to leave out the rise of OPEC as a factor in stirring that conscience...
...Nor will this nor can this achieve anything of substance, for there is no way in which Arafat, given the nature of Arab politics, can even pretend to make peace with Israel...
...The bishops have given us remarkably sane statements on nuclear deterrence and its positive relation to keeping peace...
...The New York Times quotes a "senior official" conceding that American diplomats "had the feeling that we could do anything...
...and devoted to peace, Commager declared, the nationalism' of the surrounding lands was committed to "chauvinism, militarism, and territorial and cultural imperialism...
...For this, a reader will have to turn to the recently published Years of Wrath, Days of Glory', by Yitzhak Ben Ami, a leader of the dissident Zionists...
...This time the policy has had the most serious consequences to date in that it has involved the U.S...
...soon discovered the real figure was only 10,000 men and many of these had not been in uniform for years...
...explicitly renounced the declaration...
...government efforts not to draw public attention to these matters...
...From the habitual misreading of the Arab world have flowed consequences going well beyond those affecting Israel...
...It found what the Israelis had kept saying and our own intelligence should have confirmed: namely, that there was no Lebanese army...
...ISRAEL IN THE MIND OF AMERICA Peter Grose/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 Rael Jean Isaac siderable extent became State Department Arabists...
...As for Truman, Grose may be right in saying the " i d e a " of Jewish statehood had no romantic or religious appeal to him, but he also shows that Truman's instinct was to support a Jewish state, even though this brought Harry into sharp conflict with the bureaucracies at State and Defense...
...Those interested in the continuing dialogue on justice and peace should con- Permanent soft-cover $3.95 sider these documents as absolutely essential (10 or more copies $2.95) reading...
...has given Israel extensive military and economic aid, but has often sought to undermine her politically...
...I am Cyrus, I am Cyrus...
...had negotiated the PLO out of Beirut...
...Schall, an authority on the social issues, gives a thorough and concise treatment of this controversial subject...
...Liberation...
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...England's foremost Catholic scholar on the Church's social teachings gives us the most comprehensive and definitive work on this topic to date...
...Apparently still under the spell of the State Department's visions of Arab power, Eisenhower tried to persuade French Prime Minister Guy Mollet in 1956 that there was no point in selling arms to Israel because 1.7 million Jews could not possibly defend themselves against 40 million Arabs...
...I t is always tempting, and it sometimes illuminates a book, to read it through the lens of our own times...
...Today it is clear that the peace treaty with Egypt, which marked Israel's experiment with the formula, will have as its chief long-term result Israel's political weakening, i.e., the loss of oil, airfields, and strategic space...
...For a long time Zionism had little support among American Jews...
...Actually, for this reader, far from disturbing the conventional wisdom, Grose offers ample evidence to confirm it...
...This was to focus upon the Palestinian Arabs as a national entity...
...Roosevelt was prone to sweeping schemes, and quick to abandon them when practical impediments to their realization appeared...
...He describes a speech in 1958 by American historian Henry Steele Commager, in which he spoke of the differing qualities o f Jewish and Arab nationalism: While Jewish nationalism was "benign" Each of the wartime allies has a different epitome of the Second World War...
...Edited and with an introduction by Fr...
...While the story Grose tells is interesting and important, the decisive events in the creation of Israel did not, as Grose thinks, take place either in Washington or at Lake Success, where the UN voted to partition Palestine...
...Churchill was among the earliest to decide that the Nazi regime was an evil which would have to be fought and defeated, and when he became prime minister in May 1940 (he had previously been First Lord of the Admiralty) he was able to articulate this vision with such eloquence that it shaped the energies of the people he led...
...Ben Ami describes the incessant pressures that his Irgun supportoperation in the United States put on Menachem Begin to declare a provisional government and Begin's promise to do so if the Jewish Agency failed to act...
...For example, Grose reports that David Niles was present when Israel's chief rabbi told Truman: "God put you in your mother's womb so you would be the instrument to bring about Israel's rebirth after two thousand years...
...These were the words of an inspired director who assigns roles to a cast, and the cast responded with enthusiasm...
...To this unlikely ally Zionist leaders Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann turned in their efforts to stop the dissident Hebrew Committee for National ~Shengold, $17.50...
...In short, now as then, the U.S...
...But he discovered that the documents, as he puts it, were "quite meaningless...
...To talk of final victory, as Churchill insisted upon doing through the most massive disasters, was to fly in the face of common sense...
...This marked a collapse of the moral center of American policy...
...harbored the delusion that our diplomacy, rather than Israel's military force, is what dislodged the PLO from Beirut...
...Grose falls victim to the occupational hazard of the diplomatic historian in placing too much emphasis on the words and fancies of his protagonists, too little on their actions, too much weight on the diplomatic dimension, and too little upon other determinants of events...
...I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar...
...Inevitably, much of it leaps from one celebrated speech to the next...
...His title is taken from one of the most famous: Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years men will still say, "This was their finest hour...
...Grose treats the 1967 war as if it were an intentional working out by Israel of Weizmann's declaration that Israel could be "trusted to regain its territorial patrimony...
...The Zionists were themselves divided...
...Within American Jewry, the situation was more complex...
...And even after its disappointment with Jordan, the U.S...
...After all, the U.S...
...When Ronald Reagan became President he declared that he would make the battle against terrorism the centerpiece of his human rights strategy...
...And the legend is so much a part of the reality, that it would be wrong to expect Gilbert to treat it critically...
...Drawing on important ecclesiastical documents, as well as contemporary articles from experts in the U.S...
...Misunderstanding of the region abounded...
...sent its "peacekeeping force" in, after the massacre in the Palestinian camps by Phalangist forces, in order to give the Lebanese army a little time to take over internal security...
...It is quintessentially what is meant by all the cliches about the quality of leadership...
...San Francisco Examiner "These documents are distinguished by their wisdom and judgement in regard to the morality of defending national and international fights...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
