The U.N. decisions to partition
Palestine and then to grant admission to the state of Israel
were made, on one level, as an emotional response to the horrors
of the Holocaust, Under more normal circumstances, the compelling
claims to sovereignty of the Arab majority would have prevailed.
This reaction of guilt on the part of the Western allies was
understandable, but that doesn't mean the Palestinians should
have to pay for crimes committed by others—a classic example
of two wrongs not making a right.
The Holocaust is often used as
the final argument in favor of Zionism, but is this connection
justified? There are several aspects to consider in answering
that question honestly. First, we will examine the historical
record of what the Zionist movement actually did to help save
European Jewry from the Nazis.
Shamir proposes an alliance
with the Nazis
"As late as 1941, the Zionist
group LEHI, one of whose leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, was later
to become a prime minister of Israel, approached the Nazis,
using the name of its parent organization, the Irgun(NMO)...[The
proposal stated:] 'The establishment of the historical Jewish
state on a national and totalitarian Pd bound by a treaty with
the German Reich would be in the interests of strengthening
the future German nation of power in the Near East...The NMO
in Palestine offers to take an active part in the war on Germany's
side'...The Nazis rejected this proposal for an alliance because,
it is reported, they considered LEHI's military power 'negligible.' " Allan
Brownfield in "The Washington Report on Middle Eastern
Affairs", July/August 1998.
Wasn't the main goal of Zionism
to save Jews from the Holocaust?
"In 1938 a thirty-one nation
conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the
victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to
participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states
would reduce the number available for Palestine." John
Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"It was summed up in the
meeting [of the Jewish Agency's Executive on June 26, 1938]
that the Zionist thing to do 'is belittle the [Evian] Conference
as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing...We are
particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations
to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees,
and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts'...Ben-Gurion's
statement at the same meeting: 'No rationalization can turn
the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and
should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'" Israeli
author Boas Evron, "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?"
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"[Ben-Gurion stated] 'If
I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany
by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting
them to Palestine, I would choose the second—because we face
not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical
reckoning of the Jewish people.' In the wake of the Kristallnacht
pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that 'the human conscience' might
bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees
from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: 'Zionism
is in danger.'" Israeli historian, Tom Segev, "The
Seventh Million."
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"Even David Ben-Gurion's
sympathetic biographer acknowledges that Ben-Gurion did nothing
practical for rescue, devoting his energies to post-war prospects.
He delegated rescue work to Yitzak Gruenbaum, who [stated]...'They
will say that I am anti-Semitic, that I don't want to save
the Exile, that I don't have a varm Yiddish hartz...Let
them say what they want. I will not demand that the Jewish
Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling
to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such
things is performing an anti-Zionist act.'
"Zionists in America...took
the same position. At a May 1943 meeting of the American Emergency
Committee for Zionist Affairs, Nahum Goldmann argued, 'If a
drive is opened against the White Paper (the British policy
of restricting Jewish immigrants to Palestine) the mass meetings
of protest against the murder of European Jewry will have to
be dropped. We do not have sufficient manpower for both campaigns.'" Peter
Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life."
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"The Zionist movement...interfered
with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish,
whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian,
was at variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them,
even when these might be helpful to Jews, even when it was
a question of life and death...Beit Zvi documents the Zionist
leadership's indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace
except in cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine...[e.g.]
the readiness of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael
Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand refugees and the sabotaging
of this idea—as well as others, like proposals to settle
the Jews in Alaska and the Philippines—by the Zionist movement...
"The obtuseness of the Zionist
movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not prevent
it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole
world for its indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or
from pressing material, political, and moral demands on the
world because of that indifference." Israeli author
Boas Evron, "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?"
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"I have already gone exhaustively
into the reason for our being here, reasons that I as a pioneer
of 1906 can affirm have nothing to do with the Nazis!...We
are here because the land is ours. And we are here because
we have again made it ours in this time with the work we have
put into it. Nazism and our history of martyrdom abroad do
not concern our presence in Israel directly." David
Ben-Gurion, "Memoirs."
In hindsight, it is easy to say
that the millions of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust
could have been saved if Palestine had been available for unlimited
immigration. The history of this period is not so simple, however.
First, keep in mind that other realistic resettlement plans
were proposed but actively opposed by the Zionist movement.
Second, the great majority of Jews in Europe were not Zionists
and did not try to emigrate to Palestine before 1939. Third,
after the start of the war, as the Nazis occupied various countries,
they refused to let the Jews leave, making emigration virtually
impossible. And Palestine, as we have shown, was already occupied;
the indigenous Arabs had more valid reasons than any other
country for wanting to limit Jewish immigration. Read on:
~ ~ ~ ~
Emigration to Palestine before
World War II
"In 1936, the Social Democratic
Bund won a sweeping victory in Jewish kehilla elections in
Poland...Its main hallmarks included 'an unyielding hostility
to Zionism' and to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish emigration
from Poland to Palestine. The Bund wished Polish Jews to fight
anti-semitism in Poland by remaining there...The Zionist goal
was also opposed, as a matter of principle, by all the major
parties and movements among pre-1939 Polish Jewry..."Elsewhere
in eastern Europe...Zionist strength was weaker still." Prof.
William Rubinstein, "The Myth ofRescue."
Emigration to Palestine before
World War II - continued
"In fact, Zionism suffered
its own defeat in the Holocaust; as a movement, it failed.
It had not, after all, persuaded the majority of Jews to leave
Europe for Palestine while it was still possible to do so." Israeli
historian, Tom Segev, "The Seventh Million."
Emigration during World War
II
"[With the start of the war,
Nazi] edicts forbidding emigration followed in all countries
under direct Nazi control: after 1940-1 it was in effect impossible
for Jews legally to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe to places
of safety...The doors...were firmly shut: by the Nazis, it
must be emphasized." Prof William D. Rubinstein, "The
Myth of Rescue.
Palestine was not necessarily
a safe haven either
"In September 1940, the Italians,
at war with Britain, bombed downtown Tel Aviv, with over a
hundred casualties...As the German Army overran Europe and
North Africa, it appeared possible that it would conquer Palestine
as well. In the summer of 1940, in the spring of 1941, and
again in the fall of 1942 the danger seemed imminent. The yishuv
panicked...Many people tried to find a way out of the country,
but it was not easy...Some...were taking no chances; they carried
cyanide capsules." Israeli historian, Tom Segev, "The
Seventh Million."
In any case, Palestine was
not Britain's to give away; it was already occupied.
"We came to this country
which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing
a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here...Jewish villages were
built in the place of Arab villages...There is not a single
community in the country that did not have a former Arab population." Israeli
leader, Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi's "Original
Sins."
Already occupied, continued
"One can imagine an argument
for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another
country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however,
to imagine an argument for the right of a peaceful minority
to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous
population of another country. Yet...the latter was the actual
intention of the Zionist movement." Norman Finkelstein, "Image
and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict."
The use of the Holocaust for
political gain
"[In 1947] the U.N. appointed
a special body, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine
(UNSCOP), to make the decision over Palestine and UNSCOP members
were asked to visit the camps of Holocaust survivors. Many
of these survivors wanted to emigrate to the United States,
a wish that undermined the Zionist claims that the fate of
European Jewry was connected to that of the Jewish community
in Palestine. When UNSCOP representatives arrived at the camps,
they were unaware that backstage manipulations were limiting
their contacts solely to survivors who wished to emigrate to
Palestine," Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe in "The
Link," January March 1998.
Political gain - continued
"Inside the DP camps, emissaries
from the Yishuv organized survivor activity—crucially, the
testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry
and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they
wished to go...The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that
they had been successful in preventing the appearance of 'undesirable'
witnesses at the hearings. One wrote his girlfiend in Palestine
that 'we have to change our style and handwriting constantly
so that they will think that the questionaires were filled
in by the refugees.'"Peter Novick, "The Holocaust
in American Life."
Roosevelt's advisor writes
on why Jewish refugees were not offered sanctuary in the
U.S. after WWII
"What if Canada, Australia,
South America, England and the United States were all to open
a door to some migration? Even today [written in 1947] it is
my judgement, and I have been in Germany since the war, that
only a minority of the Jewish DP's [displaced persons] would
choose Palestine...
"[Roosevelt] proposed a world
budget for the easy migration of the 500,000 beaten people
of Europe. Each nation should open its doors for some thousands
of refugees...So he suggested that during my trips for him
to England during the war I sound out in a general, unofficial
manner the leaders of British public opinion, in and out of
the government...The simple answer: Great Britain will match
the United States, man for man, in admissions from Europe...It
seemed all settled. With the rest of the world probably ready
to give haven to 200,000, there was a sound reason for the
President to press Congress to take in at least 150,000 immigrants
after the war...
"It would free us from the
hypocrisy of closing our own doors while making sanctimonious
demands on the Arabs...But it did not work out...The failure
of the leading Jewish organizations to support with zeal this
immigration programme may have caused the President not to
push forward with it at that time...
"I talked to many people
active in Jewish organizations. I suggested the plan...I was
amazed and even felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried,
sneered, and then attacked me as if I were a traitor...I think
I know the reason for much of the opposition. There is a deep,
genuine, often fanatical emotional vested interest in putting
over the Palestinian movement [Zionism]. Men like Ben Hecht
are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own." Jewish
attorney and friend of President Roosevelt, Morris Ernst, "So
Far, So Good."
Victimology
"Jewish proponents of the
'victim' card are aware not only of its social effectiveness
but of its usefulness as a means of insuring Jewish solidarity
and, hence, survival. If we were forever hated by all and are
doomed to be forever hated by all, then we'd best stick together
and make the best of it...Personally, I have never found this
view of the eternally-hating gentile to have any resemblance
with reality. It seems a myth, pure and simple, and an ugly
one at that.
"Is it a good means of social
control? Perhaps, but at what cost? It strips the faith and
history of Jew and gentile alike of all but their months of
antagonism. It wallows in evil imagery and postulates a forever
morally superior Jew, victimized by the forever morally inferior
'goy'...I have spent most of my adult life among Hasidic Jews,
almost all of whom were Holocaust survivors, and I've heard
almost nothing of the of the relentless harping on victimology
and our need to forever memorialize it...(Victimology) allows
Jews to bypass their own faith and offers the national allegiance
of Holocaust/Israel in its place." Rabbi Mayer Schiller,
quoted in "Issues of the American Council for Judaism," Summer
1998.
