A disadvantage of living in what Australians call ‘the bush’ is there are no major libraries nearby. I try to ensure that my references are accurate and authentic, but without access to first class libraries there’s a limit to the checking I can do.
So if anyone ever notices bogus or innaccurate references cited in this website, please do let me know. I have no wish to recycle false information. When appropriate, I’ll correct the record.
Actually, correcting false historical memes is something of a hobby of mine.
With that proviso, here’s a quotation that’s widespread on the web:
David Ben Gurion
“The world Zionist movement should not be neglectful of the dangers of Pakistan to it. And Pakistan now should be its first target, for this ideological State is a threat to our existence. And Pakistan, the whole of it, hates the Jews and loves the Arabs.
“This lover of the Arabs is more dangerous to us than the Arabs themselves. For that matter, it is most essential for the world Zionism that it should now take immediate steps against Pakistan.
“Whereas the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula are Hindus whose hearts have been full of hatred towards Muslims, therefore, India is the most important base for us to work therefrom against Pakistan.
“It is essential that we exploit this base and strike and crush Pakistanis, enemies of Jews and Zionism, by all disguised and secret plans.
- David Ben Gurion (Israel’s first Prime Minister)
Jewish Chronicle, 9th August 1967
If genuine, Ben Gurion’s shocking remarks provide insight into the mindset of the Israeli leadership a generation ago – and important context for undertstanding the tumultuous history of Pakistan in recent decades.
[UPDATE, March 30th 2009: see Reality Check: Ben Gurion on Pakistan]
In any event, there’s no doubt about the authenticity of John Gunther Dean’s testimony. It’s available via the online Jimmy Carter Library; see Mr Dean’s narratives at his Oral History Contents Page.
John Gunther Dean
Mr Dean is a US citizen, raised in a Jewish family, who served with distinction as an American diploment over the course of a long career.
He had interesting adventures while in The Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 80s, described in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: American Ambassador Recalls Israeli Assassination Attempt—With U.S. Weapons.
Mr Dean’s final posting was to India, where he was US Ambassador between 1985 and 1988. It was to be a dramatic posting, to say the least. The Indian Prime Minister at the time was Rajiv Ghandi, with whom Dean was on friendly terms. General Zia was in power in Pakistan. Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988 under mysterious circumstances, along with the American Ambassador to Pakistan.
Barbara Crossette takes up the story in Who Killed Zia?, published in World Policy Review around the time Dean submitted his papers to the Carter Library (emphases added).
For almost two decades, John Gunther Dean remained silent about what had led him to suspect the Israelis in the Pakistani crash, and about the price he feels he has paid for trying to interest Washington in his suspicions.
But over the last few years, Dean, now 80 years old, has been collecting his papers and his thoughts for public consumption. He has been interviewed extensively for an official oral history, part of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training in Arlington, Virginia. A large collection of his diplomatic documents have been donated to the National Archives and deposited in the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta.
He is also seeking to reopen the question of his reputation within the State Department, where he was, in effect, declared mentally incompetent in 1988 on his visit to Washington following the crash. In diplomatic parlance, he lost his medical clearance. His security clearance was also lifted, and he ultimately resigned from the Foreign Service. He was 62.
The State Department produced as evidence that he was not in a fit mental state a letter from the department’s chief medical officer for the South Asian region, Dr. David Koch, who said that Dean appeared in late August 1988 to be “under stress.” Further neurological tests were done on Dean, with his cooperation, when he was in Washington. He also had his own tests done and has marshaled medical opinion to counter the official diagnoses.
A former foreign service officer who worked on the case said that it was Dean’s state of mind and not his suspicions of Israel that were, at least officially, always the key factor in the startling nonreception he received in Washington. Stephen J. Solarz, then a congressman who was a leading figure on Asian affairs on Capitol Hill—and a friend of both Israel and India—said he was given to understand that Dean had suffered a nervous breakdown.
In any case, Dean was ordered not to return to India. He was sent to his country home in Switzerland to “rest” for more than six weeks and then allowed to travel to New Delhi to pack and say his goodbyes. A successor had already been chosen for the Delhi ambassadorship well before Dean’s ill-fated trip to Washington, and he knew that there were plans to replace him, perhaps several months before Zia’s death.
Policy issues were also a factor in the way Dean was treated, other diplomats from that era say. Among some policymakers in the Reagan administration, Dean was thought to be too close to India and its then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and too willing to accept and explain away India’s persistent support for the Najibullah government in Kabul… India, echoing Moscow, wanted at the very least a coalition in Kabul with a pro-Soviet faction retaining some power in the capital. This was not in the American plan at that point, though there were proponents of a coalition solution in Washington.
Still, this doesn’t quite explain the timing, or the suddenness with which Dean was “drummed out” of the American diplomatic corps—or how quickly his medical clearance was reinstated before he retired formally and irrevocably from the diplomatic service in April 1989. “If I’m wrong,” he said to me recently, “I don’t mind people telling me I’m wrong. But don’t say I’m mentally deranged.”
General Zia-ul-Haq
…in seeking to reopen the case of what happened to General Zia, Dean also wants to remind policymakers and the public of the unanswered questions about the deaths of Pakistan’s president and an American ambassador beloved by his foreign service colleagues, deaths that should not so easily be written off.
Dean is eager to encourage a new look at the events surrounding the crash and more research into the possibility of American-Israeli collusion in effectively sinking the subsequent investigation.
Dean does not say that he believes Israel was totally to blame for the crash of the Pakistani C-130. Rather, he says that there could have also been other familiar hands sharing in the plot: India (whose relations with Israel have improved dramatically since then), the Afghans, perhaps some Pakistanis, or the KGB. It was the sophistication of the suspected plot’s execution that intrigues him, and points him to Israeli planning. If it was an assassination, it was a very neat job.
The only comprehensive American journalistic investigation into the mystery was written by Edward Jay Epstein and published in Vanity Fair in September 1989. (Epstein, who now writes mostly about Hollywood, did not respond to e-mails about whether he had continued to follow the story.) His account does not mention Israel, but does conclude that there was much more to investigate…
In two days of conversations in May in the Deans’ apartment in the fashionable 16th arondissement of Paris, (Dean) spoke of years of accumulated personal annoyances with Israeli diplomats abroad, pro-Israeli members of Congress, and the lobby group AIPAC—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—who seemed to assume that because he was a Jew born in Germany who fled the Nazis with his family in 1939 he would be an automatic supporter of Israeli governments and policies. He was disturbed that a small country like Israel seemed to have so much power in Washington, among both Democrats and Republicans. “I was AIPAC’s Peck’s bad boy,” he said.
Dean is on record as having blamed the Israelis of trying to kill him in Lebanon in 1980, when he was the American ambassador there and had been criticized in the Knesset for being too pro-Palestinian. He was dismayed to discover, with American government help, that the ammunition that struck his convoy of three cars coming down from the hills near Beirut was American, from a batch sold to Israel.
His ambassadorship in India appears to have been fraught from the start. He said that after arriving in New Delhi in 1986, he was frequently lobbied by congressional delegations or the State Department to intercede with the Indians on Israel’s behalf. (For example, to have Israel’s lone, low-level consulate in India, in Bombay, upgraded during a period when India fawned on Yassir Arafat and made life miserable for Israeli diplomats.)
Dean said he was also pressed to speak up in South Asia about Israel’s views on how dangerous General Zia was becoming to the region. Israel seemed intent on demonizing Zia. But did that mean they would be willing to eliminate him? “If you ask me,” Dean said, “do I have 100 percent proof? No. All I know is I had people from Congress coming to me and saying, John, a man of your background, you have to go and help on the Israeli issue. I said, What are you talking about? I’m the American ambassador [in India]. Whatever my religious views are, are between myself and my maker. I resent this. Go and talk to Arnie Raphel (and Arnie Raphel by the way was Jewish, and he got along great with Zia). Why did these Congress people come to me and say, John, you gotta help curb the Pakistani ambitions for a bomb? Why did they come to me to ask the Indians to be more forthcoming with Israel?“
So there we have it!
Ex-US Ambassador Dean suspects Israeli ‘Intelligence’ might murder a Jewish American Ambassador if it suited its geopolitical agenda. He thinks Israel could have co-ordinated the assassination of Zia and Raphel (although Raphel may have been an unintended victim). And he also offers evidence the Israelis took potshots at him during his earlier posting in The Lebanon.
The response of his superiors in the State Department when he voiced his concerns? Question his sanity!
You can read more about John Gunther Dean’s time in India in his rather gripping personal account [PDF document].
That was 20 years ago. Has anything changed in Washington since that time? One suspects it may have got worse.
The story highlights a few important ideas:
- Israel, a tiny country, behaves like an aggressive superpower
- Israeli ‘intelligence’ can be be utterly ruthless
- Zionist influence has run deep in Washington for many years
- Voicing suspicions about Israel can damage careers
- Honest, patriotic Jewish Americans do exist
These are important lessons. With the possible exception of the last of them, we can be fairly confident successful American politicians internalized these lessons long ago. That’s how they got the USA – and the world – into the terrible mess we’re in now.
Will the same forces now succeed in plunging the Indian sub-continent into chaos?
There are encouraging signs that the people won’t let that happen.
Rajiv Ghandi, Murdered Indian Prime Minister
Neither Indians nor Pakistanis were born yesterday, as the saying goes. They’re sophisticated people with long memories.
Both nations are still looking for the villains who planned the murders of popular former leaders including Rajiv Ghandi and more recently, Bhenazir Bhutto. Both nations gave rise to dynasties of progresive secular leaders. Both dynasties have been repeatedly and somewhat mysteriously ‘culled’.
Indeed, there are striking parallels between the Ghandi family, the Bhuttos and the Kennedy family in America.
Could the assailants of all three share a common instigator?
It may seem like a crazy question Then again, we live in crazy times.
