United Israel

As we slowly work through the thousands of pages of documents in the David Horowitz archive there are multiple surprises around every corner. What we are uncovering is truly amazing. Mr. Horowitz never discarded anything and we have his papers going back to about 1924, with a few things earlier. He was in touch with just about every President, King, diplomat, and world leader you can name, and often worked behind the scenes in ways that are only now coming to light. We are carefully copying and filing all the materials and putting them into topical and chronological order. I would estimate there are at least 100,000 separate items.

What we have found so far seems to easily lend itself to a biography that someday should be written. A good title might be:The Life of David Horowitz: The Untold Story. Back in 1949 David did publish an early autobiography titled Thirty-three Candles that covered his life up to the founding of UIWU in 1944. Copies are still available from our office for a modest donation to the David Horowitz Memorial Library. However, David lived through the end of the century, past his 99th year, so that volume covered only “half” his story. The best was yet to come.

There is a “behind the scenes” tale that has never been told. We recently came across this letter, written in August 1948, to Abraham Fuhrman, who was a loyal supporter of UIWU and David’s work in the early days. We found this profoundly moving and inspiring. The biblical Hebrew Prophet Joel speaks of the former and latter rains, prophetically, as does Hosea (see Joel 2-3; Hosea 5-6), and he says “afterwards” it will be that “your old men will dream dreams and your young men will see visions.”

David fervently believed that the inauguration of the prophetic “last days,” the “footsteps of the messiah,” as the rabbis call it, did indeed begin in the late 1880s with the “return to Zion,” and more particularly in 1927 with various prophetic events in the Holy Land. David recorded hundreds of his dreams and we are collecting them as we work through the archives, but dreams are dreams, often vague and subject to varied interpretation. Rarely does one get as clear as this one. And notice the date of the dream–the 9th of Ab!–an historically fateful day in Jewish history.

This was months before the November, 1948 election, where everyone predicted Republican Thomas Dewey as the winner. Horowitz had already been involved in the Spring of 1948 in some behind the scenes moves in both the newly constituted UN (influencing three Central American votes) and with President Truman via his staff, to influence things in favor of the establishment of the State of Israel. President Truman recognized the fledgling “State” the morning after its declaration of Independence, to the chagrin of most of those in his State Department.

We hope you will find this dream, which came on the “9th of Ab,” as significant as we have. For those too young to remember or who have forgotten their history you might want to refresh your memory on the Presidential election of 1948 when even major newspapers, such as the New York Times declared, “Thomas E. Dewey’s Election as President is a Foregone Conclusion.” Top pollsters predicted a Dewey win, as did leading national political writers. In fact, with the exception of Truman, everyone else was certain Dewey would be elected. Months before the election, Life magazine ran a cover of a picture of Dewey with a caption that read, “The Next President of the United States.” Headline after headline screamed Dewey as President. The election became known as “The Great Truman Surprise.”