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“Ezra Pound Speaking” RADIO SPEECHES OF WORLD WAR II

Texts Pound prepared to be read on Rome Radio, and which according to Doob’s introduction Pound himself at the time of composition intended for collection and publication. The work is not fully indexed, though an appendix notes thirty references to Japan. Most of these are passing remarks about contemporary political issues.

By January 1941, his "Europe calling! Pound speaking! Ezra Pound speaking!" was on the air regularly. Paid for his services, he urged America to stay out of the war and concentrated on anti-Semitism as his chief message. "Clever ****s," he said, were "runnin’ ALL our communications system." After Pearl Harbor, he declared (early in 1942):
America COULD have stayed out of the war… IF America had stayed neutral the war would now be over… For the United States to be makin’ war on Italy AND on Europe is just plain damn nonsense … And for this state of things Franklin Roosevelt is more than any other one man responsible.

America heard Pound. Attorney General Francis Biddle had him indicted for treason, the only crime that is defined in the U.S. Constitution:

The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere — among those who support Israel but don’t really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel — and Zionism — often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.

I am one of those. I grew up listening to stories of a mystical, allegorical, spiritual Israel. This was before a modern political entity with the same name appeared on our maps. I attended Sunday School and watched an instructor draw down window- type shades to show maps of the Holy Land. I imbibed stories of a Good and Chosen people who fought against their Bad "unChosen” enemies.

In my early 20s, I began traveling the world, earning my living as a writer. I came to the subject of the Middle East rather late in my career. I was sadly lacking in knowledge regarding the area. About all I knew was what I had learned in Sunday School.

And typical of many U.S. Christians, I somehow considered a modern state created in 1948 as a homeland for Jews persecuted under the Nazis as a replica of the spiritual, mystical Israel I heard about as a child. When in 1979 I initially went to Jerusalem, I planned to write about the three great monotheistic religions and leave out politics. “Not write about politics?” scoffed one Palestinian, smoking a waterpipe in the Old Walled City. “We eat politics, morning, noon and night!”

As I would learn, the politics is about land, and the co-claimants to that land: the indigenous Palestinians who have lived there for 2,000 years and the Jews who started arriving in large numbers after the Second World War. By living among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims, I saw, heard, smelled, experienced the police state tactics Israelis use against Palestinians.

My research led to a book entitled Journey to Jerusalem. My journey not only was enlightening to me as regards Israel, but also I came to a deeper, and sadder, understanding of my own country. I say sadder understanding because I began to see that, in Middle East politics, we the people are not making the decisions, but rather that supporters of Israel are doing so. And typical of most Americans, I tended to think the U.S. media was “free” to print news impartially.

It shouldn’t be published. It’s anti-Israel.’

In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify "news" depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture.

Israeli police had come in the night, dragged them from their beds and placed hoods over their heads. Then in jails the Israelis had kept them in isolation, besieged them with loud, incessant noises, hung them upside down and had sadistically mutilated their genitals. I had not read such stories in the U.S. media. Wasn’t it news? Obviously, I naively thought, U.S. editors simply didn’t know it was happening.

On a trip to Washington, DC, I hand-delivered a letter to Frank Mankiewicz, then head of the public radio station WETA. I explained I had taped interviews with Palestinians who had been brutally tortured. And I’d make them available to him. I got no reply. I made several phone calls. Eventually I was put through to a public relations person, a Ms. Cohen, who said my letter had been lost. I wrote again. In time I began to realize what I hadn’t known: had it been Jews who were strung up and tortured, it would be news. But interviews with tortured Arabs were “lost" at WETA.

The process of getting my book Journey to Jerusalem published also was a learning experience. Bill Griffin, who signed a contract with me on behalf of MacMillan Publishing Company, was a former Roman Catholic priest. He assured me that no one other than himself would edit the book. As I researched the book, making several trips to Israel and Palestine, I met frequently with Griffin, showing him sample chapters. “Terrific,” he said of my material.

The day the book was scheduled to be published, I went to visit MacMillan’s. Checking in at a reception desk, I spotted Griffin across a room, cleaning out his desk. His secretary Margie came to greet me. In tears, she whispered for me to meet her in the ladies room. When we were alone, she confided, "He’s been fired.” She indicated it was because he had signed a contract for a book that was sympathetic to Palestinians. Griffin, she said, had no time to see me.

Later, I met with another MacMillan official, William Curry. “I was told to take your manuscript to the Israeli Embassy, to let them read it for mistakes,” he told me. “They were not pleased. They asked me, “You are not going to publish this book, are you?” I asked, "Were there mistakes?” “Not mistakes as such. But it shouldn’t be published. It’s anti-Israel.”

Somehow, despite obstacles to prevent it, the presses had started rolling. After its publication in 1980, I was invited to speak in a number of churches. Christians generally reacted with disbelief. Back then, there was little or no coverage of Israeli land confiscation, demolition of Palestinian homes, wan ton arrests and torture of Palestinian civilians.

The Same Question

Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same question, “How come I didn’t know this?" Or someone might ask, "But I haven’t read about that in my newspaper.” To these church audiences, I related my own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S. correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed out that I had not seen so many reporters in world capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980 population of only four million warrant more reporters than China, with a billion people?

I also linked this query with my findings that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post — and most of our nation’s print media – are owned and/or controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many reporters to cover Israel — and to do so largely from the Israeli point of view.

My learning experiences also included coming to realize how easily I could lose a Jewish friend if I criticized the Jewish state. I could with impunity criticize France, England, Russia, even the United States. And any aspect of life in America. But not the Jewish state. I lost more Jewish friends than one after the publication of Journey to Jerusalem — all sad losses for me and one, perhaps, saddest of all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, before going to the Middle East, I had written about the plight of blacks in a book entitled Soul Sister, and the plight of American Indians in a book entitled Bessie Yellowhair, and the problems endured by undocumented workers crossing from Mexico in The Illegals. These books had come to the attention of the “mother” of The New York Times, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Her father had started the newspaper, then her husband ran it, and in the years that I knew her, her son was the publisher. She invited me to her fashionable apartment on Fifth Avenue for lunches and dinner parties. And, on many occasions, I was a weekend guest at her Greenwich, Conn., home.

She was liberal-minded and praised my efforts to speak for the underdog, even going so far in one letter to say, “You are the most remarkable woman I ever knew.” I had little concept that from being buoyed so high I could be dropped so suddenly when I discovered — from her point of view — the “wrong” underdog.

As it happened, I was a weekend guest in her spacious Connecticut home when she read bound galleys of Journey to Jerusalem. As I was leaving, she handed the galleys back with a saddened look: “My dear, have you forgotten the Holocaust?” She felt that what happened in Nazi Germany to Jews several decades earlier should silence any criticism of the Jewish state.

She could focus on a holocaust of Jews while negating a modern day holocaust of Palestinians.

I realized, quite painfully, that our friendship was ending. Iphigene Sulzberger had not only invited me to her home to meet her famous friends but, also at her suggestion, The Times had requested articles. I wrote op-ed articles on various subjects including American blacks, American Indians as well as undocumented workers. Since Mrs. Sulzberger and other Jewish officials at the Times highly praised my efforts to help these groups of oppressed peoples, the dichotomy became apparent: most “liberal” U.S. Jews stand on the side of all poor and oppressed peoples save one — the Palestinians.

How handily these liberal Jewish opinion-molders tend to diminish the Palestinians, to make them invisible, or to categorize them all as “terrorists.”

Interestingly, Iphigene Sulzberger had talked to me a great deal about her father, Adolph S. Ochs. She told me that he was not one of the early Zionists. He had not favored the creation of a Jewish state.

Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many as a religion. While the ethical instructions of all great religions — including the teachings of Moses, Muhammad and Christ — stress that all human beings are equal, militant Zionists take the position that the killing of a non-Jew does not count.

Over five decades now, Zionists have killed Palestinians with impunity. And in the 1996 shelling of a U.N. base in Qana, Lebanon, the Israelis killed more than 100 civilians sheltered there. As an Israeli journalist, Arieh Shavit, explains of the massacre, “We believe with absolute certitude that right now, with the White House in our hands, the Senate in our hands and The New York Times in our hands, the lives of others do not count the same way as our own.”

Israelis today, explains the anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak, “are not basing their religion on the ethics of justice. They do not accept the Old Testament as it is written. Rather, religious Jews turn to the Talmud. For them, the Talmudic Jewish laws become “the Bible.” And the Talmud teaches that a Jew can kill a non-Jew with impunity.

In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from such Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to comfort the downtrodden.

The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that having made an icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of condoning whatever Israel does — even wanton murder — as orchestrated by God.

Yet, I am not alone in suggesting that the churches in the United States represent the last major organized support for Palestinian rights. This imperative is due in part to our historic links to the Land of Christ and in part to the moral issues involved with having our tax dollars fund Israeli-government-approved violations of human rights.

While Israel and its dedicated U.S. Jewish supporters know they have the president and most of Congress in their hands, they worry about grassroots America — the well-meaning Christians who care for justice. Thus far, most Christians were unaware of what it was they didn’t know about Israel. They were indoctrinated by U.S. supporters of Israel in their own country and when they traveled to the Land of Christ most all did so under Israeli sponsorship. That being the case, it was unlikely a Christian ever met a Palestinian or learned what caused the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is gradually changing, however. And this change disturbs the Israelis. As an example, delegates attending a Christian Sabeel conference in Bethlehem earlier this year said they were harassed by Israeli security at the Tel Aviv airport.

“They asked us,” said one delegate, “Why did you use a Palestinian travel agency? Why didn’t you use an Israeli agency?” The interrogation was so extensive and hostile that Sabeel leaders called a special session to brief the delegates on how to handle the harassment. Obviously, said one delegate, “The Israelis have a policy to discourage us from visiting the Holy Land except under their sponsorship. They don’t want Christians to start learning all they have never known about Israel.”

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BANGALORE – Israel’s relationship with its closest ally, the United States, seems to have hit a rough patch, with Washington apparently upset with Israel’s clandestine dealings with China. The spat is not new, however. It has its roots in a decade-old issue. Old suspicions have returned. It is an explosion into the public domain of a row that has been going on for a few years.

The quarrel is over Israel’s alleged concealing from Washington of an upgrade of a major weapons system it sold to China more than a decade ago. The United States claims that by upgrading the system, Israel violated its commitment not to transfer US technology to China without Washington’s permission. Israel, however, insists that the upgrade was really just routine maintenance of a system that had originally been sold to China with US approval.

What appears to have propelled this simmering tension into the open is a clash of personalities. According to reports in the media, US Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith believes that Israeli Defense Ministry director general Amos Yaron misled him on the arms sale to China. On Wednesday, Israeli media reported that Feith had demanded Yaron’s resignation (the Pentagon has subsequently denied this).

This clash of personalities is a minor matter and can be sorted out. That is not the case with the underlying issue of concern to the US – Sino-Israel military cooperation.

Israel is China’s second-largest arms supplier (the first being Russia). Although diplomatic relations between Israel and China were established only in 1992, military ties go back to the early 1980s. Until formal diplomatic ties were established, the military relationship was covert. Israel sold about US$4 billion worth of arms to China during the covert courtship. In the 1990s, the Sino-Israel military relationship grew rapidly. In fact, arms sales contributed to the strengthening of diplomatic engagement.

The military relationship hit a trough in 2000, however, when Israel came under pressure from the US to scrap a $250 million deal to sell China the Phalcon, an airborne radar system equipped with advanced Israeli-made aeronautics on board a Russian-made plane. Washington’s argument was that providing Beijing access to the technology would upset the military balance between China and Taiwan and threaten US interests in the region. When the US Congress threatened to cut the $2.8 billion it gives Israel annually if the deal went ahead, Israel buckled and scrapped it.

For years, the US government has expressed concerns over Israel illegally transferring technology to China. During the Gulf War, the US gave Israel Patriot missiles as protection against Iraqi Scud missiles. In 1992, a US intelligence report revealed that soon after the end of the Gulf War, Israel had sold Patriot anti-missile data to China. Israel denied the intelligence report.

Washington has also alleged on several occasions that Israel violated agreements by exporting restricted US technology it buys with yearly US subsidies. This was the case with the largely US-funded Lavi fighter-plane program. Israel, the Americans believe, passed on technology to Beijing. China’s F-10 fighter jet is believed to be almost identical to the Lavi.

Washington has also expressed concern from time to time that Israel’s arms trade with China could result in its military technology falling into the "wrong hands" – such as Iran‘s, for instance. But this argument rings rather hollow considering that the US itself supplies Pakistan with high-tech weaponry, despite Pakistan’s "all-weather friendship" with China and Islamabad’s abysmal record on the issue of nuclear and missile proliferation and its supply of military technology and know-how to Washington’s foes.

Israel’s damaged reputation
Unlike previous occasions when suspicions were expressed more quietly, with the Phalcon deal the issue erupted into the open. The cancellation of the Phalcon deal damaged Israel’s image and interests to a considerable extent. It eroded Israel’s credibility as a weapons supplier in the international arms market and it laid bare to the world Israel’s susceptibility to US pressure.

The cancellation of the Phalcon deal not surprisingly led to a chill in Sino-Israel relations. Israel subsequently forked out $350 million in compensation to China, and there were no known arms sales through 2003. Back in 2002, a deal for Israeli communication satellites was signed. Early this year, an Israeli delegation went to China for talks on rebuilding military ties. Reports suggested that Israel and China were even considering reopening the Phalcon deal.

The military relationship is important for both countries. China is keen to have access to Israel’s high-quality defense products and services, and the relationship with Israel has enabled it to acquire "dual-use technology" that the US and Europe have been reluctant to provide.

Israel, which is among the world’s top exporters of arms, is keen on its military ties with China for several reasons. According to Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at the Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and consultant to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Security Council, since Israel does not sell arms to the Arab countries or Iran, it has fewer potential markets than other major players in the high-tech arms market. (However, a look at Israel’s arms market over the past several decades indicates that the country has sold arms to regimes that other countries have been reluctant to trade with.)

Unlike most other arms manufacturers, Israel exports 75% of the total production of its military industries. Israel’s military industry is dependent on exports for its survival. And arms sales to China are among its most lucrative businesses. Therefore, arms trade with China is very important, providing contracts for jobs as well as income to offset the high costs of maintaining Israel’s technology and industrial base. Military trade has also paved the way for broader trade in other dual-use and high-tech goods. China’s immense value as a trade partner for Israel’s military industry is evident from Israel’s engagement with China and Taiwan. In the early 1990s, Israel passed up defense deals with Taiwan so as not to damage its fledging relationship with China.

Eugene Kogan, a defense-industry analyst, writes in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief that while Israel has rebuffed Taiwan’s repeated attempts to revive relations with it, "when it comes to contact with China, the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD) promotes a clear-cut policy. China is an extremely important trade partner for the Israeli defense industry. As a result, the MOD, which oversees the arms trade with China, has ensured that Israel maintains a positive relationship with the PRC [People's Republic of China], while avoiding any contact with Taiwan which might disrupt this partnership."

The Israel-China military relationship also contributed to China softening its anti-Israel stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. China’s policy moved from its pro-Arab tilt to a more nuanced appreciation of the Israeli position. (Chinese criticism of Israel increased markedly after the cancellation of the Phalcon deal.)

What is interesting about China’s military relationship with Israel is that Beijing has been able to increase engagement with Israel without alienating the Arabs. Even Iran hasn’t protested Beijing’s close military ties to Israel.

Israel has much to lose by angering the Chinese. But it has more to lose by angering the US. The cost of not complying with Washington’s demands could result in a cutback on the nearly $2 billion in foreign military assistance that the US provides Israel annually. It could result in political and diplomatic costs, too, for Israel. It will have to do a fine balancing act if it wants to maintain its military ties with China without provoking Washington’s ire.

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