Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on Earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck. — President Harry S. Truman under pressure to recognize the newly announced Zionist state in Israel.¹

     For all its disappointments, Israel is who we are, uncamouflaged and unadorned.
      — Hillel Halkin²

     American Jews must have the courage to declare openly that they have a double loyalty — to the country in which they live, and to the state of Israel. The Jew must not let himself be talked into merely being a good patriot of a country in which he lives.³
     In the Zionist movement's new campaign to 'conquer the communities of Free Diaspora, the government of Israel will give every moral and political support...to the limits of its capacity.⁴

As I delved deeper into the Jewish question and Zionism, attempting to get a clear understanding of this enigmatic people, I realized that exploring the foundations and policies of the modern nation of Israel would answer some of my questions. For the first time in over 2000 years, Jews had their own sovereign state, a nation created entirely in their own image.

By the time I began my inquiry, it was obvious to me that the press and the entertainment industry were very pro-Israel. They had induced in me an early prejudice in favor of Israel. I now noticed that the reporters covering the stories for the TV networks and for the major newspapers are usually Jewish. Suspecting that much of my pro-Israel sentiment had come from biased sources, I sought to learn the undisputed basics of the Mideast conflict, and I first turned to my encyclopedias.

I found in my encyclopedias, information similar to what one will find today in the "Israel" article in the very popular Encarta Encyclopedia.

     Of the more than 800,000 Arabs who lived in Israeli-held territory before 1948, only about 170,000 remained. The rest became refugees in the surrounding Arab countries.⁵

In 1948, the year the Israeli nation was set up, more than three-fourths of the entire Palestinian population living in the Israeli-held territory had become refugees. According to Encarta, 630,000 people were no longer able to dwell in their homes and to work on the land where their families had lived for thousands of years. Since then, Israel expanded its borders in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, and in the Lebanon invasion in 1982 — creating hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinian refugees.

Would people voluntarily leave their homes, their businesses, their farms? I asked myself. Would they freely choose to live as penniless, stateless people in squalid refugee camps? Obviously, the Zionists had driven them from their homes and property; and furthermore, the expulsion had obviously been intentional, for the Palestinians were forbidden to return to their homes after the fighting ended.