Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 52

Bookburners and Their Victims: First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism

How Israel’s Brutal Birth “Disappeared” From a Pioneer American Christian’s Modern History Saga

By Andrew I. Killgore

Mrs. Bertha Spafford Vester had lived and worked in Jerusalem for nearly 70 years when her book Our Jerusalem was published in London in 1948. Our Jerusalem recounted an American saga that began with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The fire ignited, according to legend, when a cow belonging to Mrs. O'Leary, mother of a Chicago political figure, kicked a lighted lantern into a pile of hay.

The Spaffords of Chicago were a distinguished family. Bertha's father was a successful lawyer whose work took him frequently to Europe and who had extensive real estate holdings at home. But the Great Fire destroyed much of his property.

A far greater tragedy followed when Mrs. Spafford and her three young children set out to cross the Atlantic to join her husband in England. En route, the ship sank and all three children were lost at sea.

"Saved Alone"

"Saved alone," was the two-word telegram Mrs. Spafford sent her husband after she was rescued by a passing ship. Reunited, the couple pondered the significance of the twin tragedies that had so altered their lives. What was God's will for them?

In the end, the Spaffords, members of a large family named Larsen, and some other Swedish Americans left Chicago to settle in Jerusalem. Later some said they had made the move in anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ.

Soon after, about 1878, Larsen family relatives from Sweden joined the group in the Holy City and, together, they became known as "the American Colony." The name is perpetuated in the stately old limestone building which was one of their Jerusalem residences and which now forms the main section of the American Colony Hotel. The hotel, with additions and extensively refurbished interior rooms, is still the favorite of "old Middle East hands" and the headquarters and meeting place of the international press corps in East Jerusalem.

The settlers turned their hands to shoemaking, carpentry, mechanics and humanitarian works that eventually included the establishment of a hospital for children inside the Old City's walls. Meanwhile the Spaffords were blessed with the birth of another child, Bertha.

Bertha Spafford married Frederick Vester, son of a German missionary family in Jerusalem. The old Vester home is today the main office and residence of the American Consul General in Jewish West Jerusalem. Through the years Bertha met, and later depicted in Our Jerusalem, many of the world-famous personalities who visited or lived in Jerusalem. Among these were Lord Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and the first British High Commissioner to Palestine; British General (Lord) Allenby, whose World War I army took Jerusalem from the Turks just before Christmas, 1917; future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; future first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann, whose compelling personality she captured brilliantly in her word portrait; famous American journalist Lowell Thomas; the legendary Lawrence of Arabia whom Thomas helped to make world-famous; King Abdallah of Jordan; British writer/poet/explorer/intelligence officer Gertrude Bell; Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and many others. She also described in her book the American Colony's many hard times during Palestine's more turbulent eras. The hard times included the imprisonment in World War I of Mrs. Vester's German husband as an enemy alien by the incoming British army.

Despite the ups and downs of her family history, Bertha Spafford Vester herself was one of those rare persons who seemed to have everything. A great beauty of high intelligence and personal charm, she was a natural leader. It was her will, drive, and talent for fund-raising that held the American Colony together through thick and thin, and it was her natural writing skill that preserved this multi-cultural saga for history in Our Jerusalem.

As she saw the manuscript off to its British publisher, one of her chapters vividly but honestly described Israeli brutalization of the resident Palestinians as the Jewish State was being established and consolidated in 1948 and 1949.

When she received the first few copies of Our Jerusalem back from the publisher, however, she was distressed to discover that the chapter critical of Israel had been totally omitted. A greater shock followed. She soon learned that her book had never become available to the public at all. The Israeli Embassy in London had bought up all the copies printed to prevent their distribution.

Her book had never become available to the public at all.

Around 1960 Bertha Vester managed to have Our Jerusalem republished, including the chapter on the establishment of Israel. However, illustrating the maxim that 'history is written by the victors," for more than a decade, while the world's images of the Jewish inhabitants and their Christian and Muslim rivals in Palestine were being formed, the Israeli government had managed to suppress an informed account by a Christian American eyewitness to this hotly contested chapter of history.

By the time her book finally moved into the public domain, the stereotypes had been created, not by the participants but by paid propagandists like Leon Uris. A Hollywood screenwriter who was nowhere near the events when they took place, Uris was commissioned by the Zionist propaganda organization in the United States to write a work of fiction, entitled Exodus, which subsequently became a best-selling novel in the U.S. and was turned into a feature film. To this day, its one-sided depiction of events remains the version of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute believed, at least subconsciously, by most Americans. On the other hand, Mrs. Vester's first-hand and informative account remains virtually inaccessible. This triumph of propaganda is a tragedy for the truth.