THE STATE DEPARTMENT VS. THE JEWS AND ISRAEL
Letter from Ruth Matar (Women in Green) Jerusalem
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Dear Friends,
A reply to last week’s Letter from Jerusalem entitled “WHAT IF?” made me feel quite upset. It seems that I give you, the readers of my weekly letter, the wrong impression of my true feelings.
My correspondent’s reply to me began as follows:
“I know you seem to hate the U.S., but don’t forget that there are many of us over here with you, not only in heart, but in prayers. We wish you well, and peace, and strength. G-d will take careof you. I am sorry if some of our leaders are not supporting you in your brave quest for sovereignty.”
Heaven forbid, I absolutely do not hate America! On the other hand, I have neither admiration for, or trust in the U.S. State Department.
One of the happiest days of my life was when I officially became an American citizen in the year 1952. This could have happened much earlier, if not for the animosity of the U.S. State Department toward the Jewish People.
My parents had gone through an arduous immigration process in order for our family to be able to immigrate to the U.S. They had had to obtain documents from relatives in the U.S. that they would not let our family become a financial burden to America, and that they would be completely responsible for us financially, and otherwise.
Our documents were finally in order. All that was missing were the entry visas. The U.S. State Department, via the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, denied these coveted visas. The reason given: my parents were born in Poland, and the Polish quota had long-since been filled, and would not be reopened again for a number of years.
You can imagine my parents’ desperation since everywhere in the world doors were being closed to the Jews. This was at the time in 1939 when the tragic affair of the S.S. St. Louis occurred.
The St. Louis, a Hamburg-American Line ship sailed from Germany on May 13, and headed for Cuba. Over 700 of the 900 passengers thought they were bound for the United States, having gone through a preliminary, intricate immigration process. To the horror of all the passengers, the ship was turned away, first by the Cubans, and then by the Americanscourtesy of the U.S. State Department. The ship had to return to Germany and most of the passengers eventually perished in Hitler’s death camps. A few American journalists and clergymen called it one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the so-called “haven for the oppressed”.
It was at this point in time that my parents decided to send us three children on a Kinder Transport to Sweden, and themselves to attempt to cross the border between Austria and Italy illegally in order to escape Hitler’s death machine.
The State Department certainly has never been friendly territory for Jews.
In August 1942, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva, Gerhart Riegner, received information “from a leading German industrialist, who had always proved to be a reliable source”, that Hitler had ordered the extermination by gassing of all European Jews. The State Department refused to pass the cable on to Jewish leaders, or to the President, this at a time when two million Jews were already dead and the Nazis planned to kill all of the remaining Jews of Europe.
The man who presided over the key Visa Division and “the Jewish problem”, as well as forty-three State Department fiefdoms, was the aristocratic Breckinridge Long, an FDR financial backer who had been Ambassador to Italy and who was a great admirer of Mussolini. Long was far more interested in his thoroughbred horses, in Pimlico and the Kentucky Derby than in the extermination of the Jews. In the detailed diary he kept throughout the war, he did not once refer to the genocide campaign, or to the death camps.
The State Department suppressed news of the Nazi extermination plan on the ground that it was “unsubstantiated”. Another argument used by State Department officials to block the entry of Jewish refugees to the United States was that Nazi agents might be among the Jews.
One of the reasons is that the people who man the State Department desks are almost all former Ambassadors to Arab states. After they cease being Ambassador, they maintain “friendly” and sometimes “lucrative” relationships.
We are here providing for your perusal a list of U.S. Secretaries of State since the rebirth of the State of Israel.
James F. Byrnes 1945-1947 Harry Truman
George Marshall 1947-1949 Harry Truman
Dean Acheson 1949-1953 Harry Truman
John Foster Dulles 1953-1959 Dwight Eisenhower
Christian Herter 1959-1961 Dwight Eisenhower
Dean Rusk 1961-1969 John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson
William P. Rogers 1969-1973 Richard Nixon
Henry Kissinger 1973-1977 Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford
Cyrus Vance 1977-1980 Jimmy Carter
Edmund Muskie 1980-1981 Jimmy Carter
Alexander Haig 1981-1982 Ronald Reagan
George P. Shultz 1982-1989 Ronald Reagan
James Baker 1989-1992 George H. W. Bush
Lawrence Eagleburger 1992-1993 George H. W. Bush
Warren Christopher 1993-1997 Bill Clinton
Madeleine Albright 1997-2001 Bill Clinton
Colin Powell 2001-2005 George W. Bush
Condoleezza Rice 2005-Present George W. Bush
Sadly, you might not find too many friends of Israel among them.
For instance, President Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marshall, and his crew of foreign service experts, strongly opposed the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. At the UN General Assembly, they were about to vote against the provisional Jewish government as the de facto authority of a new State of Israel, when President Truman released his recognition statement to the press. He did so after his former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, and Chaim Weizmann pleaded with him to recognize the new State of Israel.
Although, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall was extremely angry to be overruled by the President, in the end he did not dispute the President’s decision.
A veritable miracle!
With Blessings and Love of Israel,
Ruth Matar
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Women For Israel’s Tomorrow (Women in Green)
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