The Arabs and the Holocaust Read online

  ‘Holocaust,’ indeed, has the same function in present-day usage. It is derived from a Greek word, holokaustos, that means ‘entirely consumed by fire’. More precisely, it comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 1:3) and has entered the Western languages by way of Church Latin. The word refers to the ancient Israelites’ practice of burning sacrificed animals as an expiatory offering. The Hebrew text has no equivalent for the Greek word, utilizing only the term olah, which means ‘ascension’ or ‘elevation’ (the word aliyah has the same root) to designate ‘immolation’ – probably because what is burned rises towards heaven in the form of smoke. The burnt offering, or olah, is a variant of qorban, which means ‘sacrificial offering’. In the Bible, the word olah is used only to describe animals that were to be entirely consumed by fire, which is why it was translated as ‘holocaust’. Other offerings, such as ‘meal-offerings’ of flour or cakes, were only partially burned; the rest had to be given to ‘Aaron and his sons’, that is, the priests.

  In view of its original meaning, the use of the word ‘holocaust’ to designate the Jewish genocide is eminently contestable and a subject of fierce controversy. The criticism focuses above all on the fact that its etymological meaning makes its utilization as a name for the Jewish genocide – and in particular for the funereal sequence of gas chamber/crematorium – macabre if not indeed reprehensible. Moreover, the very idea that the victims of the Jewish genocide might be considered ‘expiatory offerings’ is quite simply appalling.

  The website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, offers an account of the historical development that has led to this incongruous use of the term:

  In secular writings, holocaust most commonly came to mean ‘a complete or wholesale destruction,’ a connotation particularly dominant from the late nineteenth century through the nuclear arms race of the mid-twentieth century. During this time, the word was applied to a variety of disastrous events ranging from pogroms against Jews in Russia, to the persecution and murder of Armenians by Turks during World War I, to the attack by Japan on Chinese cities, to large-scale fires where hundreds were killed.

  Early references to the Nazi murder of the Jews of Europe continued this usage. As early as 1941, writers occasionally employed the term holocaust with regard to the Nazi crimes against the Jews, but in these early cases, they did not ascribe exclusivity to the term. Instead of ‘the holocaust,’ writers referred to ‘a holocaust,’ one of many through the centuries …

  By the late 1940s, however, a shift was underway. Holocaust (with either a lowercase or capital H) became a more specific term due to its use in Israeli translations of the word sho’ah. This Hebrew word had been used throughout Jewish history to refer to assaults upon Jews, but by the 1940s it was frequently being applied to the Nazis’ murder of the Jews of Europe. (Yiddish-speaking Jews used the term churbn, a Yiddish translation of sho’ah.) The equation of holocaust with sho’ah was seen most prominently in the official English translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, in the translated publications of Yad Vashem throughout the 1950s, and in the journalistic coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961.5

  It was, however, Elie Wiesel who definitively established the use of the term by insistently designating ‘The Holocaust’ a unique event. And he did so in full awareness of the implications, as Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman have shown in a remarkable critical discussion of the use of this term as a proper name for the Jewish genocide:

  While it is certainly true that the vast majority of people (Jew and Gentile) continue to use ‘The Holocaust’ without understanding its religious/sacrificial connotations, it strains credulity to argue that those Jewish thinkers and writers who first adopted this term and even more importantly, allowed it to flourish, totally ignored information that could easily be found simply by opening a dictionary. … there is little doubt that the one man who has done the most to establish ‘The Holocaust’ in the modern consciousness was well aware of what he was doing and well aware of what the term ‘holocaust’ meant in all its nuances. … And the motivation for Wiesel’s use of ‘The Holocaust’ has unmistakable religious/sacrificial overtones, as his own writings reveal.6

  We believe that he well understood all of the factors that could come into play … he chose this term nonetheless to preserve the specialness of the tragedy as a Jewish tragedy.7

  Arno Mayer, for his part, contests the term ‘holocaust’ on the grounds that this ‘religiously freighted’ word takes its place in an ‘overly sectarian’ cult of the memory that has spawned, in his estimation, ‘a collective prescriptive ‘memory’ unconducive to critical and contextual thinking about the Jewish calamity’.8 For the Durkheimian reason evoked earlier, Mayer’s argument is legitimate insofar as it aims to challenge the use of the term in scholarly studies of the Jewish genocide. However, usage has ultimately conferred on ‘Holocaust’, as on other terms, a meaning that transcends its origins: it now names the Jewish genocide in particular, as Michael Marrus has stressed.9 Furthermore, Mayer himself has forged a term, ‘Judeocide’, which, unlike Hilberg’s, puts the Jewish genocide as a whole in a category of its own, much more, indeed, than the word ‘holocaust’, which continues to be used as a generic term to designate a considerable number of other tragedies – a circumstance that Elie Wiesel deeply deplores.

  Thus, if the aim is to name the Jewish genocide in its singularity while also communicating the emotional force with which its memory is fraught, the term ‘Shoah’ is certainly far more appropriate. Indeed, the website of Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based Israeli institution created to memorialize the Holocaust (its official English name is The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority), today advocates the use of Shoah.10 Yet ‘Holocaust’ has come into general use in most Western languages, including English and German, whereas Shoah has gained wide currency in French and, albeit to a lesser extent, Italian. The latter term is, however, gaining ground in Europe as well as in the United States. This book thus uses both terms, depending on the context as well as the languages in which it is published.i

  Zionism, Colonialism, Uprootedness

  Zionism, considered as the political movement to create a Judenstaat (‘state of the Jews’) in the title of the famous book by its principal founder, Theodor Herzl, was first and foremost a reaction to anti-Semitism that envisioned an ethnic-nationalistic segregation and regrouping of Jews on a territory of their own. It often found itself in virulent opposition to competing options that promoted the individual and collective rights of Jews, where they already resided, whether via autonomy or social integration.

  The beginnings of the Zionist colonization of Palestine considerably antedate Hitler’s assumption of power, as do the first hostile Arab reactions. The Arab inhabitants of Palestine perceived the Zionist undertaking there as one more avatar of European colonialism, particularly since it mostly unfolded under the post-First World War British colonial mandate. In his famous 1917 letter addressed to the Zionist movement, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour declared His Majesty’s government favourable to ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.

  From the inception of European-Jewish colonization in Palestine in the latter half of the nineteenth century – a movement accelerated above all by pogroms in Russia – to the outbreak of the First World War, Arab peasants squared off with Jewish settlers in repeated and sometimes bloody confrontations. These were not xenophobic or even anti-Jewish reactions on the part of the Palestinian villagers, at least initially, but rather altogether predictable reactions by farmers who had been expelled from their lands. The clearest proof is that when the settlers allowed the peasants to remain on the land and gave them the opportunity to continue working it, they acquiesced in the new arrangements. When, in contrast, the new owners sought to expel them or to induce the Ottoman authorities to do so, as they increasingly did after the turn of the century, the farmer
s rebelled.11

  The hostility of the native population, both Muslim and Christian, would increase over the years in direct proportion to the expansion of this colonization and to the growing awareness that the Zionist movement was seeking to create a state in Palestine. Thus, well before the First World War, opposition to Zionism was a key component in the formation of a Palestinian identity and of an Arab nationalistic consciousness. Witness the articles published from the late nineteenth century on – with greater frequency after mid-1908, thanks to the political liberalization in the Ottoman Empire at that time – in newspapers in not only Palestine but Cairo, Beirut and Damascus as well.12

  The number of Jews living in Palestine doubled between the dawn of the twentieth century and the First World War. It increased by a factor of ten under the British mandate, rising from 61,000 in 1920 (out of a total population of 603,000) to more than 610,000 (of a total population of nearly 1,900,000) on the eve of the proclamation of the state of Israel.13 In the early 1920s, Jews were migrating to Palestine at an average annual rate of 8,000; this migration then intensified, cresting at 34,000 in 1925.14 Inevitably, the first major anti-Jewish Arab riots broke out shortly after the de facto establishment of the British mandate. Beginning in Jerusalem in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921, the initial violence culminated in the riots of 1929.15

  The fact remains, however, that the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933 and its aftermath were much more than a mere stimulant to Jewish immigration to Palestine. They were the decisive factor lending credence to the views of the Zionists and leading ultimately to the realization of their project – as the immigration statistics make clear. After the 1925 peak (a result, in particular, of both the Depression and of anti-Jewish measures in Poland coinciding with new restrictions on immigration to the United States) the number of immigrants sank to fewer than 20,000 for the entire five-year period 1927–31 – that is, an annual average of fewer than 4,000. In 1931, Jews made up one-sixth of the population of Palestine: according to the British census, the country counted 175,000 Jews and 880,000 Arabs that year.16 Immigration levels rose to higher than 12,500 in 1932, then shot up to more than 37,000 in 1933, 45,000 in 1934, and 66,000 in 1935. The influx was then slowed by the 1936–9 Palestinian uprising, after which the British colonial administration imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration.17

  Over the forty-year period 1882–1931, a total of nearly 187,000 immigrants arrived in Palestine. Between 1932 and 1938, a period of only seven years, more than 197,000 people poured into the country, followed by 138,300 more in the ten years between 1939 and 1948. In sum, a total of nearly 313,000 immigrants settled in the area between Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 and the end of the British mandate in 1948, according to official Israeli statistics.18 One hundred and fifteen thousand of them came illegally.19 In the three years between the end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the proclamation of the state of Israel in May 1948, 80,000 Holocaust survivors came to Palestine illegally, according, once again, to official Israeli figures.20

  In 1932, the Jewish population of Palestine – almost 181,000 – constituted 18.3 per cent of the total population. By 1946, it represented more than 35 per cent,21 reaching 37 per cent at the moment the state of Israel was proclaimed two years later. Of the 716,700 Jews living in the new state six months after it declared its independence, 463,000, that is, nearly two-thirds, had been born abroad, according to the 11 November 1948 census.22

  Thus the ‘state of the Jews’ plainly owes its creation to the Holocaust, for more than one reason. The Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies were initiated with the expulsion, under increasing duress, of German Jews.23 Until 1939, the Nazis preferred that these Jewish émigrés leave Germany for Palestine:

  Jewish emigration to Palestine … is a lesser evil for Germany. ‘I know from my own experience,’ wrote an official of the Auswärtiges Amt [the German Foreign Office], ‘how unusually unpleasant the influx of Jewish intellectuals is for us.’ He pointed out that the emigration of Jews to the United States, Turkey and Iran influenced intellectual life in the direction of strengthening anti-German feeling, and that Jewish immigrants in Latin America caused the Germans much economic, propagandistic and political harm … But in Palestine, argued that official, the Jews are among themselves and cannot harm the Third Reich.24

  Within Germany, Hitler actively intervened in the debate over Palestine in 1937 and early in 1938. He insisted on the stepped-up promotion of Jewish emigration and deportation by all possible means, regardless of destination. According to Hitler, Palestine was to continue as a prime destination for German Jewish refugees, and became an even more significant factor in Nazi emigration policies in 1938 and 1939 as the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst collaborated with underground Zionist organizations in the ‘illegal’ immigration of Jewish refugees past the British blockade into Palestine.25

  Nearly 53,000 Jews from Germany alone left for Palestine between 1933 and 1939, taking only legal emigration into account. German Jews represented one-quarter of all legal Jewish immigrants in 1933; by 1939, the proportion had risen to 52 per cent.26 Their emigration was facilitated by a 25 August 1933 agreement between German Zionists and representatives of the Jewish Agency, on the one hand, and the Nazi government on the other. Known as the Haavara (‘transfer’ in Hebrew), it authorized German Jews emigrating to Palestine, and these Jews alone, to transfer part of their assets there in the form of goods exported from Germany.27 The agreement was the more controversial in that it subverted the economic boycott of Nazi Germany which many believed capable of precipitating the downfall of the Hitler regime, which at that time was still being put in place. On the other hand, the Haavara agreement shored up the then almost bankrupt Jewish Agency for Palestine,28 the institution responsible for organizing Jewish immigration and overseeing the Yishuv.ii

  In spite of all the Zionist movement’s efforts, a majority of the German and Austrian Jews who left continental Europe by September 1939 went to the Americas – 95,000 of them to the United States and 75,000 to Latin America, over against the 60,000 who emigrated to Palestine.29 Yet the fact remains that, in 1948, 170,000 Jews from Poland constituted the largest segment of the Yishuv.30 When all is said and done, it is obvious that National Socialism, by substantially boosting Jewish emigration to Palestine, allowed the movement to attain the critical mass that enabled it to triumph politically and militarily in 1948. ‘The rise of the Nazis thus proved advantageous for the Zionist movement,’ Tom Segev has accurately pointed out.31

  History was thus confirming Herzl’s vision – in a way that he could not have imagined in his worst nightmares. ‘The present scheme’, Herzl had declared in the preface to his 1896 manifesto in book form, ‘includes the employment of an existent propelling force … And what is our propelling force? The misery of the Jews.’32 This vision underlies the same ‘philosophy of the beneficial disaster’ that Shabtai Teveth, the biographer of the president of the Jewish Agency’s executive committee and the most important of the founding fathers of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, attributes to the man whom he knows better than anyone else does. Teveth cites Ben-Gurion: ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.’33, iii

  This philosophy explains, in Teveth’s view, Ben-Gurion’s relative indifference to the Holocaust, for which he has been much criticized: ‘Two facts can be definitely stated: Ben Gurion did not put the rescue effort above Zionist politics, and he did not regard it as a principal task demanding his personal leadership … ’35

  The head of the Jewish Agency gave stark expression to the implacable logic of Zionist priorities when he declared, in December 1938, not long after the Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht: ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in 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 these children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.’36 He added: ‘Like every Jew
, I am interested in saving every Jew wherever possible, but nothing takes precedence over saving the Hebrew nation in its land.’37, iv

  In the opposing camp, the most eminent members of the Brit Shalom and, later, Ihud circles, both of which rejected Zionist statism in favour of a binational state in Palestine – Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Henrietta Szold – waged, unsurprisingly, a desperate struggle to persuade the Yishuv to put rescuing Europe’s Jews ahead of all else. Late in 1942, when news of the ‘Final Solution’ began to reach the Yishuv, members of these circles played a pivotal role in founding an association called Al-domi (biblical Hebrew meaning ‘do not remain silent’) that worked actively, albeit in vain, to attain this end. The very existence of this association appears to have been blotted from memory.39

  The American Council for Judaism (ACJ) followed an equally consistent line. An anti-Zionist organization founded by Reform rabbis and lay-people in the 1940s,40 the ACJ favoured a single democratic, secular Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights. The UN Special Commission on Palestine took note in 1947 of the ACJ’s position that ‘proposals to establish a Jewish State … are a threat to the peace and security of Palestine and its surrounding area, are harmful to the Jews in Palestine and throughout the world, and are also undemocratic’.41

  The ACJ, which boasted more than 14,000 members at its apogee, fought energetically to open America’s doors to the displaced. This was the logical corollary of its opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine in a context of solidarity with European Jews. Its attitude was not unlike that of the British writer Israel Zangwill who broke with the Zionist movement when it opted for Palestine as the only territorial objective of the future ‘state of the Jews’ – this despite the fact that Zangwill is said to have been the author of the notorious phrase that has it that Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ (an attribution that is imprecise and has been contested).42 Zangwill – who knew well that, unless the Arabs were driven from Palestine, creating a Jewish state in this country implied domination of an Arab majority by a Jewish minority43 – militated in favour of ‘territorialism’, the project of regrouping Jews on a territory better suited to the purpose than Palestine, wherever it might be – preferably in the United States. ‘America,’ he wrote,