Influence and Pressure
The degree to which Israel will succeed in her objectives depends on the West, above all America. Left to her own resources Israel is not viable. Her prosperity, her existence as a State even, depend upon the sufferance of America and the West, and the reception of a vast amount of American aid. Oncz she forfeits the respect and support of Western public opinion, she is lost. Israel, therefore, cannot maintain for long a policy plainly repugnant to Western opinion. Lately she has been able to play a very free hand. 'Thanks to Hitler,' wrote Orwell,, 'you had a situation in which the press, was in effect censored in favour of the Jews.' And that has been true of both Britain and America through much of the Fifties. Through her influence on the Western press and through pressure on Western govern- ments, Israel has been able to reconcile Western public opinion to her policy instead of having to adapt her policy to Western opinion. After her savage attack on Qiby:, in 1953, American aid was cut off—for a few days. American Zionists dutifully began retailing the palpable falsehood that it was an unauthorised attack by nervous settlers, and the incident was forgotten. When Israel received unfavourably the British peace initiative of 1955, the British Government duly abandoned it. The Zionist lobby was consider- ably to blame for Mr. Dulles's disastrous refusal to finance the Aiwan Dam; but nobody dared blame it. Israel's attack on Egypt against Ameri- can warnings and duling the Presidential elec- tion when the fear of using the Jewish vote was at its most acute, was not a very graceful way of saying thank you for all the American aid she had received, but she was not made to suffer for long and Zionist influence on American policy is almost as great as ever.
The Israelis, tike other settlers. cannot cut themselves off completely from their mother countries until they are self-supporting. But un- like other settlers they have not been subjected— because of the strength of the Zionist lobby—to the restraints from their mother countries which usually accompany such a position. This unusual state of affairs may benefit Israel; it benefits nobody else.
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