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 inAlaska 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.