Woodrow Wilson’s Racism And His Support For Zionism

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by Lawrence Davidson 

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history emeritus at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

He has been publishing his analyses of topics in U.S. domestic and foreign policy, international and humanitarian law and Israel/Zionist practices and policies since 2010.

Part I— Woodrow Wilson’s Racism

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) was born in Staunton, Virginia, to Christian fundamentalist parents—his father was a Presbyterian minister—who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Thus, Wilson grew up and was educated in the segregated American South. This upbringing imbued him with both a literal interpretation of the Bible and a lifelong racist outlook which he brought with him to every position, every office he ever held. For instance, while he served as president of Princeton University (1902-1908), he refused to allow the university to admit African Americans. Despite his racist orientation, Princeton subsequently named a School of Public Policy and International Affairs, sub-colleges and buildings for Wilson. Today, in the wake of uprisings against not only police brutality toward African Americans and other minorities, but also America’s racist legacy, Princeton has removed Wilson’s name from these institutions and buildings. 

Wilson went on to become the 28th president of the United States (1913-1921). He led the United States into World War I, was instrumental in the founding of the League of Nations, appointed the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court and, notably, facilitated the eventual establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine through his support for the Balfour Declaration (1917). At the time he remarked, “To think that I, son of the manse [minister’s house], should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.” Subsequently, this decision made him as much a hero to Zionists, and American Zionists in particular, as he was a villain to African Americans. 

Part II—The Zionist Dilemma

Given today’s reaction against the country’s historical racism, American Jews’ understanding of Wilson’s legacy is being debated. The challenge for Zionists is to save Wilson’s heroic image without totally disregarding his racist record. An attempt to do just that came in an essay, recently published on 2 July 2020, in the American Jewish newspaper the Forward. The essay is entitled “Woodrow Wilson was a hero to Jews. What should we do with his racism?” and was written by Jonathan D. Sarna, a Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history.

Sarna notes both facets of Wilson’s career. On the one hand “The Jews of his day considered Wilson a hero and a savior, a man of principle and ethical uprightness.” On the other, African Americans “learn a totally different narrative” wherein “Wilson … staunchly defended segregation and characterized Blacks as an ‘ignorant and inferior race.’” 

Sarna seeks to square this circle by retreating to a frankly banal apologia: ”Many a flawed hero accomplished great deeds and changed the institutions and nations they led for the better. … They remind us that good people can do very bad things — and vice versa.” This is poor consolation for African Americans. It also turns out to be a shaky basis for Jewish admiration of Wilson. This is so because the alleged good Woodrow Wilson did for the Jews—his support for the Balfour Declaration—was based on the same racist foundation shaping his behavior toward African Americans.  

Part III—Wilson Supports the Balfour Declaration

What is the connection between Wilson’s racism and his support for the Balfour Declaration? The president was a European race supremacist, or what today would be called a “white supremacist.” As he saw it, African Americans were not the only “ignorant and inferior race” out there. All the non-European peoples, such as those of the Ottoman Empire, including Palestinians, qualified for this designation.

On 8 January 1918, in the run-up to America’s entrance into World War I, President Wilson announced his “Fourteen Points.” These were the nation’s war aims—notions around which to rally the American people. A major theme that runs throughout these “points” is the promise of self-determination for peoples then under the rule of the enemy Central Powers: Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Referring specifically to the last-mentioned, point twelve reads, “The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”

Such a promise, of course, included the Arabs of the Ottoman province of Greater Syria, which in turn included Palestine and its indigenous population. This pledge might seem to conflict with Wilson’s racist outlook, but one has to keep in mind that point twelve was meant as a propaganda piece in support of the broader claim that America was joining a war to make the world safe for democracy. As a vehicle for arousing the enthusiasm of the American people, it was effective. However, it transformed itself into something problematic as soon as Wilson got to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. U.S. allies Britain and France wanted to incorporate most of the Ottoman lands, which they considered the spoils of war, into their own existing empires, and so objected to point twelve. 

Because of his European supremacist point of view, Wilson really had no deep objections to this expansion. The question was how to go along with his allies’ wishes while still appearing to honor the Fourteen Points. He achieved this goal in a way that also meshed with his racist worldview. He and his allies established the Mandate System. Real self-determination was now to be reserved for the European peoples previously belonging to the German, Austrian and Russian empires. For instance, Poland and Serbia, among others, were to be “accorded the freest opportunity for autonomous development.” Non-European peoples were  viewed as unprepared for this reward. They were to be placed under the tutelage of a “mandatory power,” which in the case of most of the Arab lands meant either Britain or France. Such imperial powers, in turn, were to instruct these inferior peoples in the art of self-government. It should come as no surprise that Palestine was given over to the British as a “mandate territory.” Indeed, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the preamble and second article of the mandate document for Palestine.  

Part IV—Back to Sarna’s Suggestion

Woodrow Wilson supported the Balfour Declaration because he was a Christian fundamentalist who believed that God desired the Jews, whom Wilson understood to have been civilized through long residence in the West, to “return to their ancient home.” The instruments for that return were the Balfour Declaration and the British mandate. The Palestinians were not even relevant to the issue for Wilson.

Given this history, what do we learn when, as Sarna suggests, we “probe more deeply into [our hero’s] flaws”?

—It is now recognized that Wilson’s major flaw was his racist worldview and the behavior that flowed from it.

—This racism was the basis of his mistreatment of African Americans.

—As it turns out, that same racist outlook was part of the basis for his support of the Balfour Declaration—the very act that makes Wilson a hero for both past and present Zionists. 

Now we come to the second part of Sarna’s suggestion, that an examination of the hero’s flaws “invites us to think harder about our own flaws.” What are the resulting implications of such a self-examination for today’s Zionists?

—What sort of flaw in ourselves should an examination of Woodrow Wilson bring Zionist Jews to consider?

—The fact is that contemporary Israeli Jewish and Zionist attitudes toward the Palestinians in many ways mimic those of Woodrow Wilson toward African Americans. 

—If we are to consider Wilson’s racism a flaw from which Jews too can learn, the consequence must be a reconsideration of the inherently racist Zionist attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians.

I do not know if Jonathan Sarna really meant to inspire a serious assessment of Israel’s and Zionism’s flaws through the reexamination of those of their champion, Woodrow Wilson. However, such an assessment would certainly reveal a shared racism. Wilson never ceased to be a racist and, at least since 1917, the Zionists have been following his “heroic” model. How many of them can be counted upon to take up Sarna’s suggestion and look into this shared historical mirror in any honest way?

We are all ‘Jews’ in the eyes of today’s Nazis

JULY 07, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

An observation by Gilad Atzmon

Palestinians are ‘Jews’ in the eyes of those who plunder their land, their homes, fields and olive groves. They are ‘Jews’ to those who abuse their human rights and squash their hopes for peace and justice. 

Blacks are ‘Jews’ in the eyes of those who dare compare them to ‘monkeys.’ They are ‘Jews’ in the eyes of those who work hard to vet  (look here, here, here, here etc. ) their calls for equality and for a future of hope. 

The Muslims are ‘Jews’ in the eyes of those who call them ‘Islamo-Fascists’  and mobilize their influence  to decimate Arab and Muslim countries one after the other.

So-called ‘Whites’ are ‘Jews’ in the eyes of those who mock their culture, call for their elimination, burn their books and persecute their intellectuals, mock their heritage and desecrate their bronze heroes.

Maybe everybody is a ‘Jew,’ except the Jews, as no one, thankfully,  calls for punishment of Jews, no one plunders their homes, no one burns their books or silences their most famous Harvard lawyer; no one calls for the destruction of their institutions. 

Maybe in the eyes of the Nazis of our time everyone is a ‘Jew’ except the Jews.

This is the universal lesson we learned from the Holocaust: Nazis (racist, supremacist and authoritarian) must be exposed and fought against.

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It Is the Century of Falling Racism Statues…And White Supremacy

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By Elham Hashemi

George Floyd’s brutal killing was like a stone thrown into the pond, causing a non-stop ripple effect. For the first time in modern history, people across the United States and Europe sound their disgust and unease towards the racist policies carried out by the US administration and the systems across the Western part of the world.

It started with protests and riots, and so far has not come to an end. One interesting scene is how the streets began to fill up with people despite police violence and statues started to fall down; these are not any statues but are in fact statues of racism and white supremacy.

In the United States, more than a dozen statues have been toppled, including several Confederate figures. To begin with, a few statues of Christopher Columbus who is depicted as “THE hero” began to fall down. Rarely do educational texts or reports refer to Columbus’s true image.

Bartolemé de las Casas, who was said to have known Columbus in person, decried the brutality in his “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1552”. He described how Columbus and the conquistadors disfigured Native slaves and fed them alive to dogs.

 A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded in Boston. A Columbus statue was also destroyed and dragged into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia. After the figure was removed from its pedestal by protesters using several ropes in Richmond, a sign that reads, “Columbus represents genocide” was placed on the spray-painted foundation that once held the statue. In Camden, a New Jersey city near Philadelphia, protestors took down a statue of Christopher Columbus, joining others across the country.

A 10-foot bronze sculpture of Columbus was also toppled in Minnesota after a group of protests tied ropes around the neck of the statue and yanked it from its pedestal.

Theodor Roosevelt’s statue at NY museum of natural history was reported to be removed soon for its symbolism of the Native American man and the African man who stands beside him.

In Belgium’s Antwerp, thousands of protesters marching for Black Lives Matter filled the streets and demanded the removal of statues of King Léopold II, a brutal colonial ruler. The Belgian king statue who brutalized Congo was burned and ultimately removed.

It was the statue of King Léopold; infamous for genocide with his orchestration of mass violence against the people in the Congo, a large portion of which he considered his personal territory for cultivating and exporting rubber and ivory.

In Britain, a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled by protesters and dumped into the very same waters of the Bristol Harbor that launched slave ships centuries ago.

Protesters have also made threats against statues of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the architect of colonial policies that lead to the mass starvation of some four million Indians, the torture of Kenyans, and was in favor of using poisoned gas against “uncivilized” tribes.

Shamelessly, the British government sealed Churchill’s statue inside a protective steel barrier ahead of the massive London race protest which Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed has been “hijacked” by extremists. In this context, it is not surprising to hear the racist language of Johnson and his claims that the protests are hijacked.

At the University of Oxford, protesters have stepped up their longtime push to remove a statue of Rhodes, the Victorian imperialist who served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa. He made a fortune from gold and diamonds on the backs of miners who labored in brutal conditions.

Also in London, the statue of 18th Century slave trader Robert Milligan has been pulled down from outside the Museum of London Docklands after campaigners vowed to protest every day until it was removed.

New Zealand’s fourth-largest city removed a bronze statue of the British naval officer Capt. John Hamilton after a Maori tribe asked for the statue to be taken down and one Maori elder threatened to tear it down himself. The city of Hamilton said it was clear the statue of the man accused of killing indigenous Maori people in the 1860s would be vandalized.

The statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures are being boxed up, beheaded and sprayed in paint. It is not only because black lives matter, it is because the racist and white supremacist discrimination cannot be tolerated any longer. The New York Times reported that in dozens more cities across the US, statues that still stand have been marked with graffiti, challenged anew with petitions and protests, or scheduled for removal.

Among these statues, a “living statue” named Donald Trump must also be removed in order to preserve human dignity and freedom and end racism. White supremacists and other hateful actors attack immigrants, communities of color, and religious minorities with impunity — all under the Trump administration’s watch.

Tragedies during the Trump time have taken place across the US, targeting African Americans, immigrants and minorities, and these were encouraged by the same force of white supremacy. White supremacists including president Trump and his loyalists deploy disruptive rhetoric and enact racist policies like the Muslim Ban, family separation, attempts silence voters of color. At the end of the day, policies of violence and hate produce acts of violence and hate. The people of America, Europe and the world are rising in face of imperialism and white supremacy, it is no longer a time when the US administration can manipulate the free people of the world.