The Founding Myths of Modern Israel

Softcover book, 224 pages
ISBN: 0939484757
Stock Number: 0246


In this headline-making work, a prominent French scholar delivers one powerful blow after another to the pernicious historical myths cited for decades to justify Zionist aggression and repression, including the Israeli legend of a "land without people for a people without land," and the most sacred of Jewish-Zionist icons, the Holocaust extermination story. For financial gain, as an alibi for indefensible policies, and for other reasons, Jews have used what the author calls "theological myths" to arrogate for themselves a "right of theological divine chosenness." The wartime suffering of Europe's Jews, he contends, has been elevated to the status of a secular religion, and is now treated with sacrosanct historical uniqueness.

This readable, thoroughly documented study examines the brutal dispossession and mass expulsion of Palestine's Arabs, exposes the farce of the Nuremberg victors' show trial, and shows that the notorious German "final solution" term referred to a "territorial" program of resettlement, not extermination. Founding Myths details the secret collaboration fo prominent Jews with the young Nazi regime, and the 1941 offer by some Zionists, including a future Israeli prime minister, to join Hitler's Germany in a military alliance against Britain. The author presents a frank assessment of the powerful Jewish-Zionist lobby in the United States, showing how it effectively controls US policy regarding Israel, and plays a crucial role in shaping American public opinion.

For decades Roger Garaudy was prominent in the French Communist Party, making a name for himself as a Communist deputy in the French National Assembly, and as a leading Marxist intellectual and theoretician. Later he broke with Communism, eventually becoming a Muslim. When Founding Myths first appeared in France, it touched off a storm of controversy among intellectuals and a furious uproar in the media. Soon Garaudy was charged with violating France's notorious Gayssot law, which makes it a crime to "contest" the "crimes against humanity" as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46. A Paris court found him guilty and fined him $40,000. His trial and conviction for Holocaust heresy prompted wide international support, above all from across the Arab and Muslim world.

Relying on a vast range of Zionist, Soviet, American, and German source references, this well-documented study is packed with hundreds of eye-opening quotations, many by prominent Jewish scholars and personalities. Here, at last, this important work is available in a handsome, professionally edited English-language edition, with a valuable foreword by Theodore J. O'Keefe.