A few weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, Shepard Rifkin, executive director of the Stern Group, requested that representatives of the group meet with Albert Einstein in the United States, “the greatest Jewish figure of the time” according to I.F. Stone. Einstein’s response was unequivocal:
“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”[2]
To grasp Einstein’s prescience, one need only replace “the British” with “the Americans” and “terrorist organizations” such as the Stern Group and the Irgun group with the Netanyahu government, the political descendants of the leaders of these groups, Menachem Begin and Yihtzak Shamir.
Einstein said that his “life was divided between equations and politics.” Yet, among his biographers—there are hundreds of them—and in the mainstream media, his extensive political writings on Israel and Zionism have been, at best, swept under the rug, at worst, completely distorted making him a supporter of the State of Israel.
That is, until the late Fred Jerome sought them out, found them, had them translated, mostly from German, and published them in the book Einstein on Israel and Zionism. Unfortunately, the first edition of this book, published by a New York publishing house, had a very small print run, was never promoted or made into an e-book, and sold out in no time, the publisher having bowed to enormous pressure from the Zionists. That is why Baraka Books has published a new edition with the agreement of Jocelyn Jerome, the author’s widow.
It was in Germany in the 1920s, a time of rampant anti-Semitism when the theory of relativity was attacked as “Jewish science,” that Einstein was drawn to the Zionist movement. It was not until 1914, when he arrived in Germany, that he “discovered for the first time that he was a Jew,” a discovery he attributed more to “Gentiles than Jews.” Before that, he had seen himself as a member of the human species.
Hellbound and Down 