An Argument against Ronen Bergman’s 'The Secret War with Iran' – 29

Iranian journalist and expert Abbas Salimi Namin has disproved the claims and opinions of Israeli analyst Ronen Bergman in the book ‘The Secret War with Iran’. ‘The Secret War with Iran’, written by renowned Zionist journalist Ronen Bergman, was published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster publishing company in the United States.

Born in 1972, Bergman is a graduate of Tel Aviv University in the Middle East political relations. He is a famous Zionist journalist and analyst in the military and security fields who has worked with Israeli newspapers ‘Haaretz’ and ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’, American dailies and weeklies such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘Newsweek’, ‘The Wall street Journal’, and British media groups including ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Times’.

Bergman has been interested in topics relating to the enemies of the Zionist regime (particularly Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance groups), as well as subjects on the history of the Israeli regime’s assassination operations, which are cited in his recent book ‘Rise and Kill First’.

In an interview with Persian TV channel ‘Iran International’, Bergman has pointed to the Iranian nuclear program and the issues surrounding it -particularly the Zionist regime’s secret attempts to halt the process of nuclear activities in Iran and assassinate Iranian scientists. He has also cited ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden as saying that the assassination of nuclear scientists is the best way to impede Iran’s growing process in that field, and has implicitly held Israel responsible for it.

In the book ‘The Secret War with Iran’, Bergman has written a history of encounters between Iran and the Zionist regime, while the bulk of the book relates to the Lebanese Hezbollah -Iran’s main ally in the battle against the Zionist regime since its formation until the 33-day War- focusing on the role of Martyr Imad Mughniyeh.

His book also includes sections about the final years of the Pahlavi regime and victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, short periods of the war imposed by the Ba’thist party of Iraq on Iran (focusing on the McFarlane affair), Iran’s role in supporting the Palestinian groups, and the Iranian nuclear program.

Bergman’s multiple undocumented and untrue comments as well as personal and purposeful analyses (with the main purpose of displaying Israel’s power, especially in a competition with the US) that have repeatedly come in his book make a critical review of the book necessary for Iranian readers.

Director of the Iran History Studies and Compilation Bureau, Abbas Salimi Namin, has written an extensive criticism in a book about ‘The Secret War with Iran’. Born in 1954, Salimi Namin is an experienced journalist and a renowned Iranian researcher in history and political sciences who has published many articles and books.

About ‘The Secret War with Iran’

Part 29:

That along with other corroborating evidence shows that Judaism was from the very beginning seriously opposed to Zionism because Judaism could never link the stain of racism and ethnic superiority to Judaism. Furthermore, although the Zionists’ primary objective was opposition to Muslims, Judaism was not spared either. Until before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Zionists had apparently managed to reduce everyone to silence. But it did not mean that the wounds caused by the Zionist crimes had been healed even among Judaists. How could Judaists forget the calamities they suffered for the forced migration of fellow Jews to occupied Palestine? For instance, as far as Iraqi Jews are concerned it has to be said that the forced migration of a small group resulted from the climate of terror created by Zionist criminals.

French Jew Elie Lobel puts it as follows: “One firm supporter of using violence to accelerate the flow of Jewish migration from their countries of origin to Israel – known as violent Zionism – we read as follows: “The Israeli government felt compelled to rush to save 130,000 Jews in a bid to increase the number of Jewish nationals in the country. Iraq’s Jewish community lacked a strong leadership. Iraqi Jewish leaders took no action; either they did not know what to do or they did not want to place a burden on themselves. One had to take action. He (Ben-Gurion) intervened at the right moment. Just an action like ‘unfortunate event’ could persuade Iraq’s Jews to migrate.” (S. Mendes, Migration from Iraq and Government of Israel, Haaretz newspaper)

The “unfortunate event” involved a series of provocative measures like the following: In Baghdad, some Jewish places like synagogues were bombed. These blasts left victims and the fear caused by these blasts forced them to migrate. A large number of Israeli secret agents and their Jewish mercenaries were detained. Two Israeli saboteurs were sentenced to death and executed. An Israeli magazine in its April 20, 1966 issue made revelations about this unfortunate event and anti-Semitic machinations in Iraq.” (Elie Lobel, Introduction to Zionism in Palestine, translated by Manouchehr Fekri Ershad, Tous Publications, Tehran, November 1971, pp. 132-133)

Quoting Israeli sources, Lobel proves how the Zionists massacred Judaists to force them to leave their homeland.

Lenni Brenner, another Jewish researcher, has highlighted the role of Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky who was instrumental in forcing Jews to move to Palestine. “Jabotinsky’s decision on January 18, 1923 to step down from the Zionist Executive Board is related to a significant issue…On that day, Jabotinsky was to appear before a special investigative committee to explain about his relations with Symon Vasylyovych Petliura (a key figure in the massacre and pillage of Jews in Ukraine).” (Herzl’s Daily Notes, vol. 4, p. 90)

American researcher Stephen Green explains in Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel as follows: “Subsequent OMGUS intelligence reports, however, returned again and again to the brutal tactics employed by the Irgun to raise funds and recruit soldiers for Palestine among DP's. In July, 1948, DP's in Berlin who claimed to have just arrived from Poland were found instead to have fled the American zone to avoid the Irgun "recruitment" drives. In Duppel Center DP Camp, Irgun recruiters beat some of those who refused to "volunteer" to fight the Arabs in Palestine, and others were threatened with death if they refused to go. While prospective recruits were being persuaded, the main gates to the camp were closed to prevent escape.”

He also quotes a US intelligence report in Germany, dated January 10, 1948, regarding tensions in camps, writing:  “Irgun, therefore, seems to concentrate on the DP police force. This is an old technique in Eastern Europe and in all police states. By controlling the police, a small, unscrupulous group of determined people can impose its will on a peaceful and inarticulate majority; it is done by threats, intimidation, by violence and if need be by bloodshed. . . . they have embarked upon a course of violence within the camps.” (Ibid)

Green, however, prefers to remain tight-lipped about the instances of massacre of Judaists by the Zionists. Ben-Gurion, who later became Israeli prime minister, has been more outspoken about his own role in killing Judaists in a bid to force them to migrate to occupied Palestine. The chief editor of Tammuz puts Ben-Gurion’s historic confessions as follows: “I intend to send young Jews to nations with majority Jews in a bid to fuel anti-Semitic tensions because it will be much more effective than the patriotists’ call for the Jewish migration to Palestine.” (Speech by Haroun Yashayaee, chief editor of Tammuz, at Forum on Zionism, University of Tehran, No. 12, 1986)

Such confessions openly show that many Judaists were moved to occupied Palestine for fear of life and under threat and intimidation. Such concepts as “ancient homeland” and “holy land” mean nothing for many Jews. Can Mr. Bergman claim today that those who were forced from their homeland in Europe, America and Asia among others to Palestine were in no conflict with the Zionists? In addition to that, all promises given to Jews were unreal. The promises were just a mirage. We ask our question more frankly: Given the Zionists’ background of sacrificing Judaists wherever their interests oblige, is it unlikely that they resort to assassination and bombing in occupied territories today to reduce their Jewish opponents to silence? No impartial researcher may answer negatively. The Zionists tried to blame Hezbollah for the bombing of a Jewish center in Argentines in a bid to counter Hezbollah’s influence in Latin America. A political scandal emerged when Argentines’ court dismissed the Zionists’ claim. Then, they pressured Washington to dismiss the judge. However, due to the similarity of this bombing with what already exists in the Zionists’ criminal record that their widespread propaganda to attribute these crimes to Hezbollah got nowhere. This issue will be studied more specifically in coming chapters. But as far as the conflict between Judaism and Zionism is concerned, which has given rise to many bloody incidents, the author has noted some points in another book.

“The idea that the return of the People of Israel to the Land of Israel could be achieved only by force was not born with Stern and his Lehi comrades. The roots of that strategy can be traced to eight men who gathered in a stifling one-room apartment overlooking an orange grove in Jaffa on September 29, 1907, exactly thirty-seven years before a fountain of blood spurted from Wilkin’s head, when Palestine was still part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The flat was rented by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, a young Russian who’d immigrated to Ottoman Palestine earlier that year. Like the others in his apartment that night—all emigrants from the Russian empire, sitting on a straw mat spread on the floor of the candlelit room—he was a committed Zionist, albeit part of a splinter sect that had once threatened to rend the movement. Zionism as a political ideology had been founded in 1896 when Viennese Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). He had been deeply affected while covering the trial in Paris of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer unjustly accused and convicted of treason. In his book, Herzl argued that anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained in European culture that the Jewish people could achieve true freedom and safety only in a nation-state of their own. The Jewish elite of Western Europe, who’d managed to carve out comfortable lives for themselves, mostly rejected Herzl. But his ideas resonated with poor and working-class Jews of Eastern Europe, who suffered repeated pogroms and continual oppression and to which some of them responded by aligning themselves with leftist uprisings. Herzl himself saw Palestine, the Jews’ ancestral homeland, as the ideal location for a future Jewish state, but he maintained that any settlement there would have to be handled deliberately and delicately, through proper diplomatic channels and with international sanction, if a Jewish nation was to survive in peace. Herzl’s view came to be known as political Zionism. Ben-Zvi and his seven comrades, on the other hand, were—like most other Russian Jews—practical Zionists. Rather than wait for the rest of the world to give them a home, they believed in creating one themselves—in going to Palestine, working the land, making the desert bloom. They would take what they believed to be rightfully theirs, and they would defend what they had taken. This put the practical Zionists in immediate conflict with most of the Jews already living in Palestine. As a tiny minority in an Arab land—many of them peddlers and religious scholars and functionaries under the Ottoman regime —they preferred to keep a low profile. Through subservience and compromise and bribery, these established Palestinian Jews had managed to buy themselves relative peace and a measure of security.” (Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman, pp. 32-33)

In explaining this brief background about the formation of Zionism, several points have been noted: 1. Jewish ethnicity and political Zionism are clearly different from Judaism. 2. The spirit dominating the central core of Zionism is much more extremist than what Herzl has noted in the official manifest. Yet, the Zionism introduced by its symbolic founder recognizes extremist racism, thereby threatening human security, but what lies behind this horrible appearance is much more catastrophic. It does not comply with any human, moral and religious fundamentals and principles, international obligations and even customs; rather it believes in an anarchism serving Jewish aristocracy as the figurehead of Capitalism. 3. The Zionists, who consider themselves superior to others, will not hesitate to occupy any part of the world under such titles as the ancient land, historical belongings and so on unless they face a Lebanon-style resistance and are forced to flee after 18 years. 4. The Zionists invest heavily in fabricating subjects to mislead the public opinion. A case in point is the Dreyfus treason, which Zionist media focused upon to make it, like the Holocaust, a symbol of injustice against themselves. 5. Judaists living in Palestine, constituting a minority, have lived peacefully alongside others in this country and they have never been in agreement with the Zionists in Palestine. Yet, the author seeks to use such words as flattery and bribery to play down the security that was long in place.  6. The Europeans’ deep-seated enmity with Jewish aristocracy is acknowledged openly. This fact is reflected clearly in The Story of Civilization, from William Durant. The Jewish aristocracy was indulged in the dirtiest activities with a view to achieving maximum gain and naturally it was hated. Most usurers, slaveholders, sex market promoters and international drug distributors were among Jewish aristocrats. Therefore, masses were right to show enmity with the harmful activities of this community. Of course the relationship between Jewish aristocracy and European monarchs and sovereigns have historically been good and even served as their commissioners. Even today, in light of such fabrications as the Holocaust and Dreyfus, were it not for the heavy penalties (meted out under such titles as anti-Semitism against opponents of Zionism in Europe and the US), ordinary people would openly expressed their hatred of these corrupters of human community health.