Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel
(005320.38-E003569.93NHORLOSUC20V)
“Prodigiously documented… Alison Weir must be highly commended for throwing such a brilliantly hard light on the relationship between the United States and Israel. I hope this marvelous book gets all the attention it deserves.” – Ambassador Andrew Killgore
Soon after WWII, US statesman Dean Acheson warned that creating Israel on land already inhabited by Palestinians would “imperil” both American and all Western interests in the region. Despite warnings such as this one, President Truman supported establishing a Jewish state on land primarily inhabited by Muslims and Christians.
Few Americans today are aware that US support enabled the creation of modern Israel. Even fewer know that US politicians pushed this policy over the forceful objections of top diplomatic and military experts.
As this work demonstrates, these politicians were bombarded by a massive pro-Israel lobbying effort that ranged from well-funded and very public Zionist organizations to an “elitist secret society” whose members included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
AGAINST OUR BETTER JUDGMENT brings together meticulously sourced evidence to illuminate a reality that differs starkly from the prevailing narrative. It provides a clear view of the history that is key to understanding one of the most critically important political issues of our day.
“This provocative book documents a history that is essential in understanding today’s world. Scholarly, yet readable, it is a must for all Americans.” – Senator James Abourezk
“If you never read another book, read this one.” – The Daily Kos diaries
[I have a copy of this book. It was written in recent years by a serious White American woman scholar. Jan]
Price for Paperback: $11.00
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Prodigiously documented… Alison Weir must be highly commended for throwing such a brilliantly hard light on the relationship between the United States and Israel. I hope this marvelous book gets all the attention it deserves.”
– Ambassador Andrew Killgore
“This provocative book documents a history that is essential in understanding today’s world. Scholarly, yet readable, it is a must for all Americans. We all need to know what we have spent by coddling Israel and its aggressions, and why the cost has become more than we have bargained for.”
– Senator James Abourezk
“This book is the best history of the origin of big trouble for the United States in the Middle East. Author Weir is is a gifted writer who here illuminates neglected history.”
– Congressman Paul Findley
“Weir has indeed succeeded in her goal to provide ‘a concise, clear sketch of what has been going on’ in historical Palestine. Against Our Better Judgment is a brilliant introduction to Zionism, the Lobby, and Israel/Palestine.”
– Kim Petersen, co-editor of Dissident Voice
“Ms. Weir’s text is revelatory and articulate… Even those who are well read on the Israeli-Palestinian relationship have much to learn from this slender volume.”
– L. Michael Hager, cofounder of the International Development Law Organization
“Alison Weir’s study of U.S. engagement with Zionism, Against Our Better Judgment, includes a chapter on this little-known aspect of World War I history.”
– Dr George P. Smith, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, in an article about Palestine
“Its scholarly content makes it an indispensable tool for any researcher on the root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil… Meticulously researched, explosive”
– Ziad Hafez, Contemporary Arab Affairs
“This short book is quite powerful and displays historical accounts and analyses supported by a solid documentation showing scholarly knowledge and objective reporting.”
– Daily Times
“If you never read another book, read this one.”
– Daily Kos blogger
About the Author
Alison Weir is the president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew, a think tank that provides information on Israel-Palestine and the American connection. She is a former journalist. Upcoming book readings can be seen at againstourbetterjudgment.com/events/
Some Customer Reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars Pernicious Zionism revealed
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2014
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If Alison Weir has not driven a wooden stake through the heart of the modern grotesquerie know as Zionism, she has at least held a cross to its face with her short, tight, understated and heavily documented new book. Did we say documented? The text of the book proper only runs to a power-packed 93 pages while the supporting endnotes continue for another 108. Anyone wanting to know how the American democratic system was infiltrated and abused to further the interests of what was initially, even within the Jewish community, only a relatively small group of extremists could hardly find a better starting place than this book.
Weir, in her brief overview of Zionism’s beginnings, conventionally credits the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl as the founder of political Zionism in the late 19th century, a movement that sought a homeland, or state, for Jews somewhere in the world. “While Zionists considered such places as Argentina, Uganda, the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and Texas, they eventually settled on Palestine for the location of the proposed Jewish State, even though Palestine was already inhabited by a population that was 93-96 percent non-Jewish.”
In The Controversy of Zion the redoubtable British journalist, Douglas Reed, tells us that Herzl was little more than a front man for a group of Eastern European rabbis. Reed might still be a better source, but his book is almost 600 pages long, and it was published in 1978. Weir, with all her excellent references, doesn’t even find it necessary to refer to Reed, which, heretofore, this reviewer had considered to be the ultimate critique of Zionism. Weir has some important new revelations that, for all its brevity, push Against Our Better Judgment up to the head of the line of “must read” books on Zionism.
No more important new revelation, to this reader, is of the powerful role played in advancing the Zionist cause in the United States by Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter and the existence of a secret society for that purpose called the Parushim.
“A member swearing allegiance to the Parushim felt something of the spirit of commitment to a secret military fellowship. At the initiation ceremony the head of the Order informed him:
‘You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life. You will for one year be subject to an absolute duty whose call you will be impelled to heed at any time, in any place, and at any cost. And ever after, until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life-dearer than that of family, of school, of nation.’ ” (p. 12)
The source for the information is an Israeli professor, Sarah Schmidt. Justice Louis Brandeis was one of the most active members of the Parushim. Its primary purpose was the promotion of the Zionist cause, the creation of the ethnic-supremacist state of Israel on Arab land in Palestine, which it did all too effectively. Who all the members of the group were is not known, though Weir tells us that Brandeis was a key member and Frankfurter was likely a member as well. The organization was founded in 1913 by a University of Wisconsin philosophy professor by the name of Horace M. Kallen. It is of some interest that Kallen is also considered to be the father of cultural pluralism in the United States, concerning which we find this observation on Wikipedia:
“He advanced the ideal that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other and that ethnic and racial diversity strengthened America. His critics pointed out his disingenuousness since, as a Jewish intellectual and member of the Zionist Organization of America, his vision of multicultural America was quite the opposite of his vision of the Jewish state of Israel as a totally Jewish nation. Kallen is credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.”
Weir speaks of the Parushim completely in the past tense, giving the general impression that it worked most effectively in the 1920s and 30s. One must wonder, though, why such an effective organization would have been disbanded. How would we know if it has continued to operate right up to the present day? It was/is a secret organization, after all. And doesn’t it, with its oath, confirm all of our worst suspicions? We suspected that many powerful Jewish leaders in the United States were not really loyal to the country of their residence. What we did not suspect was that many of them, including two of the most influential Supreme Court justices of the 20th century, had actually taken a secret oath not to be loyal.
And if the organization, or something very much like it, continues to operate, would not the list of likely members be quite long? In politics, people like Joe Lieberman and Eric Cantor come readily to mind; in academia, Alan Dershowitz and Daniel Pipes; in the media Charles Krauthammer and Richard Cohen, and the whole neocon crowd in the think tanks and the national opinion molding community.
The oath also bespeaks a degree of fanaticism that is almost unfathomable to the average person. The mentality–or shall we say the psychological complex–is perhaps best explained by Eric Hoffer’s quote from Oliver Cromwell in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics), “No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.” Certainly as the most powerful country in the world, the United States was key for the Zionists to get their wishes, but it has never made much sense for any American, Jewish or otherwise, to be a fanatic for the Zionist cause. The founding principle of the movement, after all, is that Jews can never be accepted in any country and, therefore, must have a country of their own. It is a foolish notion generally, but nowhere is it more foolish than in the United States. The United States from its beginning has been the land of opportunity for Jews as much or more than for any other people. It is truly a supreme irony that precisely those who benefitted most from the opportunity presented by the United States should use the fruits of that opportunity to further a cause that denies that such opportunity for them is possible.
The reader may be excused at this point for noticing a great similarity between Zionism and the attraction toward it of a certain privileged group of people and another misguided but powerful ideology, Communism. Those who fall for it fall heavily and have a tendency to subordinate all questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and patriotism and disloyalty to the furtherance of this one “noble” cause. Not many people know it these days, but in the 1930s and early 1940s the Soviet Union itself got the sort of favorable coverage from America’s leading newspaper the Israel gets today across the board and numerous Americans were lured into betting their lives that Joseph Stalin’s fiefdom really was a workers’ paradise.
The biggest victims of the Zionist zealotry have certainly been those non-Jewish residents of Palestine whose forbears had lived there for thousands of years, but the price that has been paid by others, particularly in the United States is of no small consequence. Weir makes a strong case that American entry into World War I was the quid pro quo of powerful Zionists close to President Woodrow Wilson for the British Balfour Declaration promising a home (though not a homeland) for the Jews in Palestine should Britain and its allies win the war. She supports her argument without relying once upon the Jewish apostate Benjamin Freedman so, taken together, Weir and Freedman support one another.
The importance of the Balfour Declaration in bringing the United States into WWI against the Germans might not have been widely known in this country, but, according to Weir, it was well known in Germany and it engendered the sort of antagonism toward their resident Jews that one might expect. Opportunity for Jewish advancement had been greater in Germany than in any other European country.
It is hard to say which was the greatest big break for the Zionist cause, the persecution suffered by Jews under the Nazis, the Second World War’s creation of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees ripe for the peopling of Palestine, or the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had been completely against the Zionist cause. Harry Truman was weak and unpopular and needed all the help from powerful Zionists that he could get to be reelected in 1948. Surprisingly, Weir makes no mention of the negative reinforcement that Truman received in 1947 in terms of the attempt on his life by the Stern Gang, which sent a letter bomb to the White House. She also fails to mention the fact that Truman’s long association with the Kansas City political machine of the gangster Tom Pendergast made him eminently blackmailable, and something of an archetype for U.S. presidents in the Zionist-dominated era in which we live.
There are heroes in Weir’s book. They are the patriotic Americans within the foreign policy establishment of the U.S. government who energetically opposed the superimposing of what was essentially a European country upon Palestine, an act that these officials saw as in conflict with U.S. national interests and ideals. Theirs was the better judgment that Truman went against. A few names worthy of mention are State Department officers Edwin Wright and Loy Henderson and their superiors, Under Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett and Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Foremost among the patriots, though, would have to be Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, and Weir gives the courageous Forrestal his due. He foresaw the Middle Eastern mess in which the United States has become entangled, and the cost in blood and treasure and moral capital that it would entail, and he paid dearly for his efforts to prevent it.
Another reason for beginning with the more recent Weir book than with Douglas Reed’s is that Reed, deceived by the American press coverage and without the discoveries that this reviewer would later make, wrote that Forrestal had committed suicide. Weir is aware of our findings, however, and refers her readers to our “Who Killed James Forrestal?” She also strongly recommends Chapter 12, “The Forrestal `Suicide’,” of Vol. 1 of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Vol. 1: The False Messiah by prominent British journalist Alan Hart. Hart quotes this writer’s work on Forrestal’s death extensively.
Control of the molders of public opinion has been crucial for Zionist success in the United States. I recall that in my formative years in North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s it was almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing the evangelist Oliver B. Green. Like PBS when they do their fund-raisers, Green offered goodies to people who would send him money. The first goodie on his list was a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible. We wouldn’t have learned it from the Reverend Green, but the Scofield Bible pushes “what was a previously somewhat fringe dispensationalist' theology calling for the Jewishreturn’ to Palestine.” Cyrus Scofield, we learn from Weir, referencing primarily Joseph M. Canfield’s The Incredible Scofield and His Book, was something of a charlatan and a scoundrel who was heavily promoted by wealthy early Zionists. It explains a lot about America’s Christian Zionist movement and really makes one wonder who props up men like Green and Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. It also makes one wonder about the current pro-Zionist Pope, who is receiving such a glowing press in the United States.
Weir’s very informative short penultimate chapter,”Zionist Influence in the Media,” is almost worth the price of the book. Her concluding chapter, which is even shorter but just as powerful, is an example of that influence wielded in the nastiest sort of way. It is about the destruction of the career of the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, one of the earliest critics of Nazi Germany. Thompson had also been an early supporter of Zionism until she went to Palestine and reported honestly on what she saw. That was it for her.
Thompson’s experience is quite reminiscent of what happened to Eugene Lyons. Lyons was a young Jewish-American reporter and Communist sympathizer who covered the Soviet Union for United Press in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was among the few Western journalists to attempt to write honestly about what he saw and was forced to leave in 1934. His devastating exposé, Assignment in Utopia was generally ignored and his 1941 revelations of Communist Party power and influence in the United States, The Red Decade: The Classic Work on Communism in America During the Thirties, was greeted mainly with hostility. Lyons spent most of the rest of his career on the margins of American journalism.
Readers can learn more about Dorothy Thompson and her fate for crossing the Zionists by doing an Internet search for “The Silencing of Dorothy Thompson.”
5.0 out of 5 stars Based On The Zionist Backlash, Ms. Weir Should Watch Her Back
Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2021
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Much of the information in this well researched book I have read in several important books about political Zionism. Ms. Weir has condensed most of the information I had accumulated into this short, powerful, easily read and fact-based book. Of course she will be vilified for daring to speak the truth. One can count on their fingers the number of writers and books written that dare question the terror driven Zionist movement. I found no facts that differ, for example, from those written by ex-Mossad case manager Victor Ostrovsky in his autobiography’s co-written with Claire Hoy: By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception.
I admit I have found Zionists, even born in the U.S., to be one-minded about the world, it begins and ends with the state of Israel. Loyalty even to their own Nation oftentimes is 2nd to Israel. I have read several books of the Zionist Lobby. Despite being 10+ years old the only change is that their power and influence is even greater today. There are two excellent books, one by Former Republican Congressman Paul Findley: THEY DARE TO SPEAK OUT ($953.57! hardback on Amazon. THIS SHOULD TELL THE READER EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW) and THE ISRAELI LOBBY by British historians John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that document the overwhelming financial power of the Jewish Lobby. At the time of publication, it was reported that 65% of all political donations are by Jews. The Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was originally established to defend a Jewish man named Leo Frank in 1913 for the rape and murder of a white, Southern woman in the AmerIcan South. By any objective reasoning this organization has ballooned into a career- killing organization bent on destroying any allegations, right or wrong, of criticism against Zionism or the state of Israel. And for all the discussion of terrorism by Israel, they used it to squash the voices, and in too many cases the lives of those who might question the creation of the State of Israel.
You can use Ms. Weir’s book as a handy reference guide for research into the Middle East quagmire caused by the formation of the Zionist State.
There was one very disturbing fact I was not aware of. FDR was adamantly opposed to a Jewish State. Upon his death, Harry Truman of course, assumed the presidency. Unlike FDR, Truman was inexperienced with the ambitions of the Zionists. That would come along a couple years later. Truman was promised millions in untraceable money he desperately needed for his re-election campaign. After authorizing the formal recognition of the new Jewish State, those millions were just enough to clinch his re-election. David McCullough didn’t include this morsel of information in his otherwise excellent biography, TRUMAN. I named my late English Springer Spaniel after Harry Truman. Had I known of the dirty money and the debts owed for accepting that money, I would have never chosen Truman!
5.0 out of 5 stars Good wake up book to teach someone about the new world order conspiracy
Reviewed in Canada on April 18, 2024
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