The Arabs and the Holocaust Read online

  has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale [i.e. the Pale of Settlement, home to most of Russia’s Jews]; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution.44, v

  Conversely, the Palestinian project determined the American Zionists’ position on the question of immigration to the United States by Holocaust survivors. The extraordinary Congress that brought American Zionists together with leaders of the world movement in New York’s Biltmore hotel in May 1942 demanded only that the doors of Palestine be opened to Jewish refugees – not those of every country at war with the Axis, beginning with the United States.46 As Aaron Berman has shown, this stance was not modified – quite the contrary, in fact – when it was learned that the Nazis were carrying out a systematic genocide:

  American Zionist leaders decided that their primary task had to be the building of support for the immediate establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Their decision did not reflect a callousness about or disinterest in the terrible fate of the European Jews. Rather, American Zionists believed that there was nothing unique about Hitler’s plan for genocide … Believing that Jewish homelessness was the basic cause of all anti-Semitism, American Zionists resolved to put a final end to Jewish statelessness …

  Sadly, the American Zionists’ calculation was faulty. … once the Nazis embarked on their program of genocide, the American Zionist decision to make the establishment of a Jewish state their primary goal handicapped any attempt to build a powerful lobby to force the American government to undertake the rescue of European Jewry.47

  David Wyman, who can hardly be accused of hostility to American Zionists, has drawn up a balance sheet of their actions in this field: ‘An unavoidable conclusion’, he writes, ‘is that during the Holocaust the leadership of American Zionism concentrated its major force on the drive for a future Jewish state in Palestine. It consigned rescue to a distinctly secondary position.’48 However, he adds, ‘substantially more was possible than they recognized’.49

  Of all the arguments invoked to justify the Zionists’ undeniable lack of enthusiasm for the demand that the United States, Great Britain and the other allied countries open their gates before continental Europe’s Jewish refugees, even the most reasonable constitute mitigating circumstances at best. The political motivation for this lack of enthusiasm is equally undeniable, as is indicated by a comment of Ben-Gurion’s that Segev cites: ‘In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms,’ Segev reports, ‘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!”’50

  Francis Nicosia sums up the consequences of the Zionists’ attitude towards Nazism:

  If, as the Zionists had always claimed, the assimilationists had been living an illusion, the Zionists had undoubtedly lived one of their own. It was rooted in the fallacy that if anti-Semitism was natural and understandable, as Herzl and others had insisted, there was room for its accommodation to the principles and goals of Zionism. Herzl and others believed that anti-Semites would accept Zionism, even if they disliked or hated Jews, and that they might indeed do everything necessary to support Zionist efforts until Jews and non-Jews reached their common goal of removing Jews from Germany. What they had not understood, and what post-World War I German Zionists apparently would not understand until after 1933, was that whatever appeal Zionism had for most anti-Semites, even for the Nazis after World War I, it was of a purely pragmatic nature, and therefore problematic. Indeed, an understanding of National Socialism and precisely how Zionists should respond to it seemed to elude the entire Zionist movement, including the Yishuv, until well into the Second World War.51

  The fact remains that responsibility for the failure to grant haven to European Jewish refugees ultimately lies with the governments of the allied countries that were in a position to do so. Although Berman’s judgement can seem excessively severe, he is not wrong that ‘while Germany was primarily responsible for the Holocaust, the democratic governments of the United States and the United Kingdom must be considered at least accomplices in genocide’.52 Nothing is more revealing in this regard than the international conference held in Evian, France, from 6 to 15 July 1938. Initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, its mission was to reflect on the fate of the Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, whose numbers had increased considerably as a result of the Anschluss and the intensification of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic program. Thirty-two countries sent delegations.

  As the conference proceeded, delegate after delegate excused his country from accepting additional refugees. The United States delegate, Myron C. Taylor, stated that his country’s contribution was to make the German and Austrian immigration quota, which up to the time had remained unfilled, fully available. The British delegate declared that their overseas territories were largely unsuitable for European settlement, except for parts of East Africa, which might offer possibilities for limited numbers. Britain itself, being fully populated and suffering unemployment, also was unavailable for immigration; and he excluded Palestine from the Evian discussion entirely. The French delegate stated that France had reached ‘the extreme point of saturation as regards admission of refugees.’ The other European countries echoed this sentiment, with minor variations. Australia could not encourage refugee immigration because, ‘as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.’ The delegates from New Zealand, Canada, and the Latin American nations cited the Depression as the reason they could not accept refugees. Only the tiny Dominican Republic volunteered to contribute large, but unspecified areas for agricultural colonization.53

  It was due to this set of historical circumstance that the Jewish tragedy, which peaked in the Shoah, also culminated in the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba. In a pivotal essay, Edward Said underscored the ‘link to be made between what happened to Jews in World War II and the catastrophe of the Palestinian people’,54 going so far as to add that ‘the Jewish tragedy led directly to the Palestinian catastrophe by, let us call it, “necessity” (rather than pure will).’55 Of course, the Holocaust was incomparably crueller and bloodier than the Nakba. This consideration, however, in no way diminishes the tragedy of the Palestinians, particularly since they did not, as a people, bear any blame for the destruction of European Jewry.

  In an attempt to show conversely that ‘the Jewish tragedy did not create the Palestinian catastrophe’, Joseph Massad criticizes Said’s contention. The Zionist project, he argues, antedated National Socialism and the Holocaust; furthermore, ‘only one-third of holocaust survivors ended up in Palestine, mainly because they could not go to the United States.’56 His argument, however, is aimed at the wrong target. When Said speaks of ‘the Jewish tragedy’ he obviously means the Holocaust in the broad sense of the tragedy spawned by the Nazis’ accession to power and its aftermath, not in the narrow sense of the 1942–5 ‘Final Solution’.

  Moreover, the direct relationship between the Palestinian drama and the Jewish tragedy was inscribed in the fact that Zionism was first and foremost a reaction to anti-Semitism. Certainly, if one takes the Holocaust in the narrow sense of the ‘Final Solution’ initiated in 1942, it becomes harder to maintain that the state of Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust. And it is indeed primarily pro-Zionist authors who have combated such a thesis.57 Yehuda Bauer, who, like Massad, reformulates the idea in narrow terms (‘Israel was created by the Holocaust’), advances the opposite thesis:

  On the contrary, if the German Reich had held out one more year, it is doubtful whether there would have been any survivors at all … The Holocaust prevented a Jewish State from coming into existence with, as new-minted citizens, the millions of Jews who were murdered. Indeed, beca
use of the Holocaust, the attempt to establish a state almost failed. There were almost not enough Jews left to fight for a state. The ones who survived the Holocaust were central to that effort, and had there been more, the effort would have been easier and the outcome more certain. My answer, therefore, is unequivocal: The view that Israel was created by the Holocaust is erroneous. The opposite is true.58

  Bauer’s contention is the more surprising in that a few lines earlier he declares: ‘If the United States had opened its gates to Jewish immigration … it is highly probable, in my view, that a much larger proportion of Jewish D.P.s would have gone to the United States than did.’59 The notion that the ‘millions of Jews who were murdered’ might have constituted ‘new-minted citizens’ of the state of Israel, many of whom would have fought for its creation, is of a piece with the one that led Mordecai Shenhabi – the man credited with the idea of founding Yad Vashem – to propose in 1950 that Israeli citizenship be posthumously conferred upon all Holocaust victims.

  Discussing the debates that this proposal touched off, Segev describes it as ‘utterly spurious’: ‘There is no way of knowing which, or how many, of the Holocaust’s victims considered themselves “potential citizens” of Israel. Many of them died precisely because they had preferred not to move to Palestine when that option was opened to them. And most of the world’s Jews, Holocaust survivors among them, chose not to come to Israel even after the state was founded.’60

  It remains true, however, that Holocaust survivors in the strict sense made up about one-third of the Zionist forces who fought in the 1948 war.61 Nevertheless, the motive common to the authors just cited, over and above the fundamental differences dividing them, is their legitimate rejection of the idea that the creation of Israel was an answer to the Jewish genocide. Bauer passionately disputes it: ‘I do not think I have to deal with this because the very line of thought is so repugnant. I think most Jews would have preferred saving the lives of the Jews who died in the Holocaust to establishing the state.’62

  Said’s thesis is no different. His recognition of the ‘necessity’ informing the historical process that culminated in the creation of the state of Israel by no means implies approval or legitimization of its creation or of the ways in which it was achieved: ‘I do not accept the notion that by taking our land Zionism redeemed the history of the Jews, and I cannot ever be made to acquiesce in the need to dispossess the whole Palestinian people.’63 Historical ‘necessity’ implies no political or moral justification for such acquiescence. Nor does it imply any imperative reason to endorse Zionism. As Isaac Deutscher explained in 1954:

  From a burning or sinking ship people jump no matter where – on to a lifeboat, a raft, or a float. The jumping is for them an ‘historic necessity’; and the raft is in a sense the basis of their whole existence. But does it follow that the jumping should be made into a programme, or that one should take a raft-State as the basis of a political orientation?64

  The rising tide of refugees to Palestine was not Nazism’s only contribution to the creation of the state of Israel. In 1947 there also existed a mass of concentration-camp and other Jewish survivors of Hitler’s genocidal enterprise who had been reduced to a state of extreme poverty and profound distress. Supporting the creation of the state of Israel was the way that North America, Europe and the Soviet Union solved, on the cheap, the embarrassing problem represented by this multitude of unfortunates whom neither the Americans nor the Europeans nor the USSR wished to take in.

  While the Soviet authorities encouraged illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine from the Central and Eastern European countries under their control,65 Washington asked London to allow Jews to immigrate legally into the country, which was still under British mandate. ‘On June 6, 1946, President Truman urged the British government to relieve the suffering of the Jews confined to displaced persons camps in Europe by immediately accepting 100,000 Jewish immigrants [in Palestine]. Britain’s Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, replied sarcastically that the United States wanted displaced Jews to immigrate to Palestine “because they did not want too many of them in New York.”’66 Long before Bevin, Mussolini had responded in much the same vein to Truman’s predecessor, who asked him, in 1939, to grant the Jews refuge in Italian colonies: ‘President Roosevelt asked Benito Mussolini to allow Jews to move to Ethiopia, which was under Italian rule; Il Duce wondered why the refugees could not be settled in the United States.’67

  Once the war had ended and the horror of the camps had been fully revealed, the desire to get rid of the devastated Jews by sending them elsewhere persisted. The foundation of the state of Israel directly served that end: 200,000 Holocaust survivors settled there in the year following its creation.68 According to the official statistics, more than 76,500 immigrants arrived there from Europe between 15 May 1948 and the end of the year, followed by another 122,000 in 1949.69 In addition to the sordid fact that certain states sought to resolve the problem of the Holocaust survivors at the Palestinians’ cost – as some states nowadays seek to rid themselves of their radioactive waste by exporting it to poor countries – the Zionist movement naturally tried to exploit the shock waves that followed the liberation of the camps in 1945. A former foreign minister of Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami, has explained this stratagem:

  The target of Zionist diplomacy was no longer Britain but the United States and international opinion. There was little hope of averting an open clash with the mandatory power now entangled in the conflicting pledges and promises to Arabs and Jews. And as has happened frequently in the history of Zionism, the cause was enhanced by the Jewish catastrophe. It was the full truth and the awesome impact of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as it was exposed worldwide after the war, that served now as the platform upon which Zionist diplomacy could mobilise governments and international opinion in order to attain its major political objective, a Jewish state in Palestine. Once again, Jewish catastrophe was the propellant of the Zionist idea and a boost to its prospects.70

  Finally, the National Socialist enterprise steeled the Yishuv for war in both the physical sense, since Palestinian Jews took part in the British war effort, and also the psychological sense, since it imbued Zionist militants with great determination, born of the feeling (the illusion, in the view of critics and sceptics) that they were fighting to establish the definitive response to the Holocaust. From the moment it was proclaimed, the state of Israel laid full claim to its legitimization based on the Holocaust and the anti-Nazi struggle. The terms of the ‘declaration of independence’ read out by David Ben-Gurion on 14 May 1948 are well known:

  The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations.

  Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

  In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.71

  The subsequent war between the new state and the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries ended with the defeat of the Arab camp and the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem.72 The two narratives of these events, Israeli and Palestinian-Arab, inevitably turned, from the outset, on two very different sequences. The Israeli narrative featured extermination – the Shoah – and rehabilitation by the state. The Palestinian and Arab narrative revolved around the usurpation carr
ied out by the state and the attendant expulsion – the Nakba.73

  Nakba

  Few people know, and even fewer point out, that the Arabic word nakba, which has been circulating in the Western languages for a few years now, is one possible equivalent of Shoah in Arabic. The other is karitha, a word that is today employed as the Arabic translation of Shoah as distinct from Holocaust, translated mahraqa. Nakba means ‘grievous catastrophe’. The term has been in use in the Arab countries since 1948 to describe the foundation of the state of Israel and its consequences: the first Arab–Israeli war, the defeat of the Arab armies, the massive exodus of the Palestinians from the territories that came under the control of the new state, and that state’s refusal to allow Palestinians back to their homes and lands after the cessation of hostilities.74

  Among the most powerful illustrations of the tragic nature of the conflict in the Middle East is that a state created as a refuge for persecuted Jews who had been reduced to the condition of refugees or ‘displaced persons’ in turn created the problem of the Palestinian refugees. The Law of Return, by which anyone recognized as a Jew has the right to settle in Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship, became a cornerstone of the legitimization of the new state, which simultaneously denied Palestinian refugees the right to return that they have not ceased to demand ever since.