Part II: A Personal Journey to Truth
[By Dr. Bill]
I always enjoyed looking through the NYTimes Book Review. One Sunday morning in 1978, I noticed a half page review on one of the front pages, meaning 2nd, 3rd or 4th page. It was a review of a book just released titled, “The Zionist Connection”, by Alfred M. Lilienthal. Prior to reading the review I had no idea what it was about and no idea who the author was. It was the title that caught my eye.
The review was quite favorable and stated that it was a history and opinion piece about the events beginning in the late 19th century that led to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and then events subsequent to that up until the time of writing.
Well… that sounded interesting. I never really studied the history of the Middle East; they certainly didn’t cover that in high school. I believe I took the two required history curriculum courses in college, which were called Contemporary Civilization, 1 & 2. Otherwise my bachelors degree was top heavy in the hard sciences.
On my next day off, I went into Manhattan to visit the major 5th Avenue bookstores. There were a good half dozen between 55th and 45th streets. Most of the names will be completely unfamiliar to anyone reading this who is under thirty-five years old. Amazon pretty much killed all of them off. I went into one after another. The replies ranged from “never heard of it”, to “it isn’t on order” to “check back next month” and so on. I finally reached the last store which was just south of Rockefeller Center and was the jewel of all of the bookstores: Skribner’s. They were a complete class act. They served free coffee. The salespeople all had backgrounds in some kind of literary discipline.
I entered and asked one of the salespeople if they had the book. He looked in new releases, general history, middle eastern history, political essays and more. Nothing.
But he said he recalled seeing it. He asked me to have a seat, offered a cup of coffee and please wait. He was going to look elsewhere. About ten or fifteen minutes later he came back up from the basement with three copies.
“He said all the copies were in the section where unsold books were to be returned to the publisher.”
At the time I figured it was just some kind of clerical error; I had no reason or experience to think otherwise.
When I got home I started to read it, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s approximately 800 pages and I finished it in under three days. I read it between patient visits. I was stunned, horrified, saddened and even ashamed. I never knew any of these things, except for the propaganda fed to preteen boys in afternoon Hebrew school. And at that age you believe what adult authority figures tell you, because you have no other reference point.
“And then without critical thought the same propaganda becomes the truth in adulthood.”
“It was a land without people, for a people without land”; “we made the desert bloom”; “it's our ancestral homeland since the exodus from Egypt”, And others but last but not least; the ultimate tribal unifier, “everybody hates the Jews.”
I could not put the book down. I read all the footnotes and cross references; I reread the text; especially some of the more compelling chapters, such as the one having to do with the infamous Balfour Declaration, and the one concerning the massacre at Deir Yassin. I decided I’d let the publisher know about my almost futile attempts to obtain the book, so I contacted them. They were very gracious and asked me if I’d like to talk to the author. I said sure. They gave me his phone number which had a DC area code. I called, told him who I was and what had occurred. I was just under 31 years old at the time, and we had just had our first child. I will never forget what he said to me;
“Thanks kid, I knew that would happen.”
Part III available next week!
