Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by Lenni

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Thu Feb 26, 2015 12:37 pm

Part 2 of 2

'Trying to Derive the utmost Advantage from it in the Zionist Sense'

The Zionist leadership still had to face one last internal battle over the Ha'avara and their general stance toward the Nazis. Jabotinsky and his Revisionists had split off from the WZO, but a remnant of his followers -- now called the Judenstaat Partei (Jewish State Party) -- had stayed loyal to the WZO and still demanded repudiation of the Transfer. Several journalists described the short but ferocious debate at the 1935 Congress. The Canadian Zionist reported that:

A vote was taken and resulted in Mr. Grossman's motion [for a debate on whether the Anglo-Palestinian Bank had caused the arrest of picketers who had protested the use of German cement] being defeated. Whereupon there were loud derisive cries of 'Heil Hitler!' on the part of some of Mr. Grossman's supporters. This caused pandemonium. [149]


Paul Novick, the editor of the American Communist daily newspaper, the Morgen Freiheit, related that the 'Histadrut delegates answered in kind, shouting towards the Judenstaat people: ''Schuschnigg agents" (meaning agents of Italo-Austrian Fascism).' [150]

The Executive's policy toward Hitler had stout defenders at the Congress. A theoretical defence was presented by Moshe Shertok, who had succeeded Arlosoroff as the organisation's Political Secretary (their equivalent to Foreign Minister). The man who later became the second Prime Minister of Israel sternly told the delegates, and the listening Jewish world, that they just had to realise that:

The Jewish people had no greater hope for success in the struggle for existence than through the upbuilding of Eretz Israel, and they must, therefore, be willing to draw the consequences. They imitated the protests and boycotts practised by other peoples, but forgot that those measures were expressions of the force possessed by those peoples, whereas the Zionist movement had yet to create such a force for itself. [151]


Beyond the Congress some of the most important propagandists of the WZO's strategy were the shliachim or emissaries sent out worldwide by the Labour Zionists in Palestine. Enzo Sereni, another graduate of the accommodationist Italian movement, had been the emissary in Germany in 1931-2, but he had done nothing to either mobilise the German Jews or assist the SPD in their fight against the Nazis. Sereni was one of those who saw Hitler as a scourge driving Jewry toward Zionism. He once informed Max Ascoli, an Italian anti-Fascist activist, that 'Hitler’s anti Semitism might yet lead to the salvation of the Jews'. [152] At the Lucerne Congress he was the vigorous exponent of the primacy of Palestine:

We have nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that we used the persecution of the Jews in Germany for the upbuilding of Palestine. That is how our sages and leaders of old have taught us… to make use of the catastrophes of the Jewish population in the Diaspora for upbuilding. [153]


But by far the best example of the leadership's unwillingness to resist the Nazis was Weizmann's statement:

The only dignified and really effective reply to all that is being inflicted upon the Jews of Germany is the edifice erected by our great and beautiful work in the Land of Israel… Something is being created that will transform the woe we all suffer into songs and legends for our grand-children. [154]


The presidium manoeuvred to keep any serious discussion of resistance off the Congress floor, and Wise's name was struck from the speakers' list for fear that he would denounce Hitler. He threatened to walk out of the Congress if he was not allowed to speak and, as the Congress knew they could not afford to have the most famous Zionist in America walk out on such a controversial issue, they finally gave way and let him speak. He duly got up, said that he was opposed to Hitler -- hardly a statement that would have attracted attention in most other company -- and sat down. He and Abba Hillel Silver had never really done much more than talk about boycott, and by 1935 there was nothing in America that remotely resembled an effective boycott organisation. In practice, they had no alternative programme for effective resistance; now, primarily focusing on Palestine as a refuge for German Jewry, they capitulated to Weizmann and endorsed the Ha’avara, and after the Lucerne Congress there were no longer any serious differences between them and the international movement. In the end the only official protest against Hitlerism made by the assembly was a half-day cancellation of one of their sessions, a meaningless gesture.

Weizmann had little real difficulty getting the Congress formally to endorse the Ha'avara, but the opposition was able to curb one of its activities. A Ha'avara subsidiary, the Near and Middle East Commercial Corporation (NEMICO), had been set up to solicit new customers for Germany throughout the Middle East. The Egyptian Zionist Federation had threatened to expose the scandal if the world organisation did not put a stop to it, and in the interests of preserving the larger scheme the leadership reluctantly had to sacrifice the NEMICO operation.

The capitulation of the Americans did nothing to quieten Jewish opposition elsewhere. Press criticism was immediate. London's World Jewry, then the best Zionist magazine in the English language, excoriated their own World Congress: 'Dr Weizmann went as far as to state that the only dignified reply the Jews could give was a renewed effort for the upbuilding of Palestine. How terrifying the proclamation of the Congress President must have sounded in the ears of Herren Hitler, Streicher and Goebbels!' [155]

The unofficial Zionist press in Britain shared the growing public feeling that war with Hitler was inevitable, and it could not understand the total lack of serious discussion of Nazism at the Congress. The magazine's correspondent described the meeting as strangely depressing: 'We have an agenda more suitable for a board of directors of a limited liability company than for a national conclave with the national destiny in its hands.' [156] Even the Jewish Chronicle, always the mouthpiece of the Jewish establishment, complained in the same vein: 'the proceedings were almost as dull as a debate on the Colonial Office in the House of Commons on a Friday morning'. [157] It felt compelled to condemn the decision on the Ha'avara:

The spectacle is puzzling to the world, whose sympathy we bespeak and disheartening to Jews for whom the boycott is one of the few weapons to their hand and who now see themselves deserted by the Movement which they most have a right to claim as an ally in their fight. [158]


In America the opposition to the Ha'avara was particularly intense in the garment industry trade unions, with their hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers. Most of the Jewish labour leaders had always looked upon Zionism with contempt. Many of them were from Russia and knew about the fateful Herzl-Plevhe meeting and how their old enemy Zubatov had backed the Poale Zionists against the Bund. As far as they were concerned the Ha'avara was just Zionism up to its old tricks, and in December 1935 Baruch Charney Vladeck, the Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, and himself an ex-Bundist from Poland, debated Berl Locker, the organisational head of the Palestinian Poale Zion, before an overflow crowd in New York.

Locker was compelled to take a defensive position, insisting that the agreement was purely in the interest of the German Jews. Besides, he argued, they would have brought the goods into the country on their own if there were no treaty. Why, if it had not been for the pact, he maintained, the situation would have been far worse in this regard: 'Palestine was presented by a fait accompli… The Transfer agreement prevents the country from being flooded with German merchandise, since goods come in only as there is need of them.' [159]

Vladeck was not to be put off by Locker's obvious subterfuge, and he continued the attack. In New York the local Labour Zionists were simultaneously supporting the boycott in the United States while apologising for the Ha'avara in Palestine, and the old Bundist ridiculed their attempt to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds:

You may argue from now till Doomsday, but this is double bookkeeping of the most flagrant sort. That nobody should break the boycott but the Jews of Palestine! And nobody deal with Germany but the Zionist organisation!… It is my contention that the main purpose of the Transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine… Palestine thus becomes the official scab-agent against the boycott in the Near East… When the news of the Transfer Agreement first came out… Berl Locker said: 'Not a single Zionist agency has the slightest connection with the Transfer'… From this I can conclude in only one vein: The Transfer Agreement is a blot on the Jews and on the world. [160]


If the majority of Jews did oppose the Ha'avara as treason, there was one at least who was willing to go on record as complaining that Weizmann and his friends were not going far enough. Gustav Krojanker, whose views on the Nazis were discussed in Chapter 3, was now one of the leaders of the Hitachdut Olei Germania (the German Immigrants Association in Palestine), and in 1936 the association published his pamphlet, The Transfer: A Vital Question of the Zionist Movement. To him Zionism was stark calculation, nothing more, and he was more than willing to draw the logical conclusions already inherent in the Zionist-Nazi pact. He claimed to see Nazism and the opportunities it opened up for Zionism in the authentic Herzlian manner:

His survey of the situation was devoid of any futile grudge-bearing; he perceived two political factors -- an organisation of the Jewish people on the one side, and the countries concerned on the other. They were to be partners in a pact.


Krojanker berated the leadership for not having the courage to formally endorse the Ha'avara back in 1933. To him this was merely a capitulation to what he considered the 'Diaspora mentality'. He wanted them to go much further:

The Zionist Movement should have endeavoured… to influence the German Government to enter into a statesmanlike treaty, accepting the situation and trying to derive the utmost advantage from it in the Zionist sense.


He insisted that the necessary next step was to help the Nazis break the boycott in Europe itself through an extension of the Ha'avara. Germany 'might even be ready to conclude agreements -- if we… prepared to extend the ''Ha'avara'' system to other countries'. [161] But the WZO leadership needed no such coaching from Krodanker. He did not know that, secretly, they had already decided to do just that and now, in March 1936, Siegfried Moses's negotiations had finally created the International Trade and Investment Agency (INTRIA) bank in London to organise sales of German products directly in Britain itself. [162] The Nazis had to content themselves with the satisfaction of the further demoralisation of the boycott forces, as fear of Jewish and general British hostility to boycott -- scabbing made it impossible for INTRIA to go so far as to allow British currency to come directly into German hands. Instead, the goods were bought in Germany for marks and their value was credited to Jewish capitalists needing the £1,000 entry fee required of over-quota immigrants into Palestine. Zionist-Nazi trade relations continued to develop in other spheres as well. In 1937, 200,000 crates of the 'Golden Oranges' were shipped to Germany, and 1/2 million more to the Low Countries under the swastika flag. [163] Even after Kristallnacht -- 11 November 1938, the terrible night of the broken glass, when the Nazis finally unleashed the brownshirts to smash Jewish stores -- the manager of Ha'avara Ltd, Werner Felchenfeld, continued to offer reduced rates to would-be users of Nazi boats. His only concern was to reassure the squeamish that 'competition with British vessels does not arise, as this transfer arrangement is valid for citrus being shipped to Dutch and Belgian ports, British ports being expressly excluded'. [164]

'What Matters in a Situation of this sort is a People's Moral Stance'

Of course it was the Nazis who were the prime gainers from Ha'avara. Not only did it help them push out a few extra Jews, but it was of immense value abroad, providing the perfect rationale for all those who still wanted to continue trading with the Germans. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley's newspaper, the Blackshirt, loved it:

Can you beat that! We are cutting off our nose to spite our face and refuse to trade with Germany in order to defend the poor Jews. The Jews themselves, in their own country, are to continue making profitable dealings with Germany themselves. Fascists can't better counter the malicious propaganda to destroy friendly relations with Germany than by using this fact. [165]


The final evaluation of the WZO's role during the Holocaust cannot be made until the other interrelationships between the Zionists and the Nazis are properly dealt with; however, a preliminary appraisal of Ha'avara can now be safely attempted. All excuses that it saved lives must be strictly excluded from serious consideration. No Zionist in the 1930s thought that Hitler was going to try to exterminate the Jews of either Germany or Europe, and no one tried to defend Ha'avara during its operation in those terms.

CHAPTER FIVE: The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought

As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics -- literally, 'well born' or 'good stocks' -- was the height of sophisticated, 'progressive' thought. Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler's novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that 'You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don't deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.' He went on to say that 'You needn't be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that's certainly what my programme leads to.' Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged, from 'positive' measures such as the encouragement of 'hygienic marriage', that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to 'negative' measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one....

It is true that the Nazi path to the gas chamber was a twisted one, a path which (once the actual murder process started) began with the face-to-face shootings of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing squads which accompanied the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union), 'progressed' through the gas-vans of Serbia and Chelmno, and then into the carbon monoxide gas chambers of the Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka), based on those used in the 'euthanasia' programme, before ending with the most technologically sophisticated version in Auschwitz, the zyklon B gas chamber.

As if this history, which is well known, were not horrific enough in itself, it seems that we must question the extent to which such a thing was, in fact, unimaginable to the minds of civilised Europeans. For in the English literature on eugenics there existed for some forty years before the Holocaust a notion -- the 'lethal chamber' -- which can be differentiated from the Nazi gas chambers 'only' in the fact that the English versions never went into operation. In the rest of this chapter I will defend this claim, and think about whether the time difference between the first mention of the 'lethal chamber' in England and the operation of the Nazi gas chambers in occupied Poland confounds normal historiographical suppositions of change over time, and whether the English idea and the German actualisation of it are in any way related.

-- Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, by Dan Stone


To the end, Schnitzler remained convinced that there are no universal panaceas or quick solutions to a problem like anti-Semitism, which is so deeply rooted in the human psyche. Neither socialism, Zionism, liberal assimilation, conversion or Jewish self-rejection were likely to eliminate Jewish insecurities or put an end to real persecution, delegitimization or attempts at annihilation. Only a painfully slow process of enlightenment and self-critical reflection could, in Schnitzler's somewhat pessimistic view, eventually bring about an improvement. Political activism -- including Herzl's Promethean Zionism -- remained fundamentally alien to him.

-- Playwright Arthur Schnitzler Was Everything His Friend Theodor Herzl Hoped to Be, by Robert Wistrich


The excuse was that it saved wealth, not lives. In fact, at the very best, it directly helped a few thousand Jews with money, by allowing them to enter Palestine after the British quotas had been allocated and indirectly it provided an opportunity for others by boosting the Palestinian economy. But every genuine opponent of Nazism understood that once Hitler had taken power and had German Jewry in his claws, the struggle against him could not possibly be curbed by an over-concern for their fate; they were essentially prisoners of war. The battle still had to go on. Naturally no one wished those unfortunates any more grief than necessary, but to have brought the campaign against Nazism to a standstill out of concern for the German Jews would only have accelerated Hitler's further march into Europe.

Some sadistic characters I’ve encountered have even lied about or exaggerated adverse circumstances in their background to engender sympathy and to make their innate heartlessness seem more understandable and even palatable. And most of these individuals actually come from unremarkable backgrounds and simply see themselves as superior to those whom they perceive as weaker. In their disgust of weakness and desire to feel superior, they take a sordid delight in belittling, demeaning, and torturing others. It simply makes them feel good to make someone else feel bad. And to make others feel small and ineffectual makes them feel large and powerful. All of the research over the past several years on bullying in schools bears out all I’ve been saying here. Within the traditional models, bullies used to be seen as “cowards underneath,” compensating for feelings of low-esteem by bullying only the weak and steering clear of the strong. I always thought such views were flawed, and now, thanks to some good research, we now know better. Bullies simply like to hurt people and target those they perceive as weaker, not only because such folks make easy targets, but also because bullies have a natural internal revulsion to such personalities. And when a young bully gets chronologically older but still hasn’t grown any emotionally, what you’re likely to get is a sadistic-aggressive personality of one degree of severity or another.

It’s dangerous to think there’s any way to be truly safe in any kind of relationship with a sadistic-aggressive personality or immune from the effects of their abuse. Some folks tell themselves they have sufficient strength to endure the torment they experience. Others allow themselves to think that as long as they’re appeasing their sadist, they’re safe. But even though sadists have much more respect for strength than they do for perceived weakness, there’s really no way to be completely safe with them or to be unaffected by the psychological damage they can inflict. And sometimes sadists develop a special fascination with a particular “target,” taking a sense of “ownership” over that target and exacerbating the risk associated with trying to break free of their grip. Moreover, sadists can have other aggressive personality traits as well, making them even more dangerous (sadistic predatory aggressives [alt: sadistic psychopaths] are without question the most dangerous people on the planet). So it’s very important to recognize these personalities early on and do your very best to stay clear of them.

-- Demeaning as a Lifestyle: The Sadistic Aggressive, by Dr. Simon


While the WZO was busy saving the property, or, more properly, a piece of the property of the German Jewish bourgeoisie, the '£1,000 people', thousands of Germans -- including many Jews -- were fighting in Spain, against Hitler's own Condor Legion and Franco's Fascist army. The Ha'avara certainly assisted the Nazis in that it demoralised Jews, some of whom were Zionists, by spreading the illusion that it was possible to come to some sort of modus vivendi with Hitler. It also demoralised non-Jews to know that a world-wide Jewish movement was prepared to come to terms with its enemy. Certainly the Ha'avara removed the million-strong Zionist movement from the front line of anti-Nazi resistance. The WZO did not resist Hitler, but sought to collaborate with him and, as can be seen in the proposals of Arlosoroff and Weizmann for a liquidation bank, only Nazi unwillingness to extend their linkage prevented the development of an even greater degree of co-operation. Those Zionists, as with World Jewry, who tried to oppose Hitler, must also be severely faulted for their own failure to create an effective Jewish, or even Zionist, boycott machine, but at least they must be credited with some moral stature in that they tried to do something to attack the Nazis. By comparison Weizmann, Shertok and their co-thinkers lose our respect, even if we only set them against their Zionist critics and ignore all other Jewish opinion. At best, it can be said of Weizmann and his ilk that they were the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain; moral and political failures. After the war and the Holocaust, a contrite and remorseful Nahum Goldmann, mortified at his own shameless role during the Hitler epoch, wrote of a dramatic meeting he had with the Czech Foreign Minister, Edvard Benes, in 1935. Goldmann's vivid account of Benes's warning to the Jews says all that will ever need to be said on the Ha'avara and the abject failure of the WZO to resist the Nazis:

'Don't you understand', he shouted, 'that by reacting with nothing but halfhearted gestures, by failing to arouse world public opinion and take vigorous action against the Germans, the Jews are endangering their future and their human rights all over the world?'… I knew Benes was right… in this context success was irrelevant. What matters in a situation of this sort is a people's moral stance, its readiness to fight back instead of helplessly allowing itself to be massacred. [166]


_______________

Notes:

114. Carl Voss, 'Let Stephen Wise Speak for Himself', Dimensions in American Jewry (Fall 1968), p. 37.

115. Moshe Gottlieb, 'The Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement in the American Jewish Community, 1933-1941', PhD thesis, Brandeis University 1967, p. 160.

116. Meyer Steinglass, 'Emil Ludwig before the Judge', American Jewish Times, (April 1936), p. 35.

117. 'Palestine and the Press', New Palestine (11 December 1933), p. 7.

118. Chaim Bialik, 'The Present Hour', Young Zionist (London, May 1934), p.6.

119. Abraham Jacobson, 'The Fundamentals of Jewish Nationalism,' New Palestine (3 April 1936), p. 3.

120. David Yisraeli, 'The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement', Journal of Contemporary History, vol. Vl (1971), p. 131.

121. Ibid.

122. 'Palestine Drive to Continue', Israel 's Messenger (Shanghai, 1 May 1933), p. 2.

123. Werner Braatz, 'German Commercial Interests in Palestine: Zionism and the Boycott of German Goods, 1933-1934', European Studies Review (October 1979), p. 500.

124. Yisraeli, 'The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement', p. 132.

125. 'Dr Arlosoroff's Plan', Jewish Economic Forum (London, 1 September 1933), p. 9

126. Chaim Arlosoroff, 'What can Palestine offer to the German Jew?', Labor Palestine ( June 1933), p. 9.

127. Yitzhak Lufban, 'Arlosoroff's Last Period', Labor Palestine (June 1934), p.6.

128. 'Zionist Congress in Prague', Zionist Record (South Africa, 1 September 1933), p. 5.

129. 'The 18th Zionist Congress', NewJudaea (London, September 1933), p. 193.

130. Jewish Daily Bulletin (29 August 1933), p. 4.

131. 'Zionist Congress Votes Inquiry Commission for Palestine Terrorist Groups', Jewish Daily Bulletin (1 September 1933), p. 4.

132. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety, p. 212.

133. David Rosenthal, 'Chaim Arlosoroff 40 Years Later', Jewish Frontier (August 1974), p. 23.

134. 'Reflections', Palestine Post (14 November 1938), p. 6.

135. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, p. 129.

136. 'Justification of the Zionist Congress', Zionist Record (South Africa, 4 October 1933), p. 5.

137. Moshe Beilenson, 'The New Jewish Statesmanship', Labor Palestine (February 1934), pp. 8-10.

138. 'Untermyer, Rabbi Silver Denounce Deals Reported Negotiated with Germany', Jewish Daily Bulletin (30 August 1933), p. 4.

139. 'The Palestine Orange Agreement', Jewish Weekly News (Melbourne, 10 November 1933), p. 5.

140. Clarence Streit, 'League Aid Asked for German Jews', New York Times (9 September 1933), p.5.

141. 'Dr Stephen Wise on Policy of World Jewry', World Jewry (London, 24 August 1934), p. 395.

142. Braatz, 'German Commercial Interests in Palestine', p.504.

143. Chaim Weizmann, 'To Arthur Ruppin', 3 July 1935, in Barnett Litvinoff. (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. XVI, p. 464.

144. Ibid., pp. 465-6.

145. Arthur Ruppin, The Jews in the Modern World (1934), pp. 256-7.

146. Nahum Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 112.

147. Ruppin, Jews in the Modern World, p. xiii.

148. Weizmann, 'To Lewis Namier', 1 October 1933, Letters, vol. XVI, p. 54.

149. 'Nineteenth Congress Report', Canadian Zionist (September 1935), p. 8.

150. Paul Novick, Zionism Today (1936), p. 4.

151. 'Executive Defines its Policies in Reply to Opposition', New Palestine (20 September 1935), p. 24.

152. Ruth Bondy, The Emissary: A Life of Enzo Sereni, p. 141.

153. Novick, Zionism Today, p. 5.

154. Barnett Litvinoff, Weizmann - Last of the Patriarchs, p. 182.

155. 'Kiddush Hashem', World Jewry (6 September 1935), p. 1.

156. 'Has Congress a Message to Deliver?', World Jewry, (30 August 1935), p. 1.

157. 'Reflections on the Zionist Congress', Jewish Chronicle (London, 20 September 1935), p. 24.

158. 'Zionists close their Ranks', Jewish Chronicle (London, 6 September 1935), p. 9

159. 'Debating the Issues of the Transfer', Call of Youth (January 1936), pp. 3-12.

160. Ibid., pp. 34.

161. Gustav Krojanker, The Transfer: A Vital Question of the Zionist Movement, pp. 7-10 and 15.

162. Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, p. 129.

163. 'Reflections', Palestine Post (14 November 1938), p. 6.

164. Werner Felchenfeld, 'Citrus on German Ships', Palestine Post (Letters) (17 November 1938), p. 6.

165. 'Blackshirts Peeved at Reich-Zion Trade', Jewish Daily Bulletin (6 February 1935), p.5.

166. Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 148.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Thu Feb 26, 2015 12:54 pm

7. HITLER LOOKS AT ZIONISM

Hitler's view of the Jews and the Jewish problem is sharply expressed in Mein Kampf. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that his Jew-hatred was quite reasonable, that it flowed from experience and the logical inferences to be drawn from clear evidence. He always insisted that his first thoughts towards the Jews were all benign. His father, 'the old gentleman', looked upon anti-Semitism as a left-over religious prejudice and so, we are told, did the enlightened young Adolf. It was only after his mother died, and he moved from provincial Linz to Vienna, that Hitler found occasion to question the glib assumptions of his youth. For there he wandered through the old inner city and encountered a Galician Hasid, 'an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.' But the more he thought about what he had seen, the more his question assumed a new form: 'Is this a German?' [167] It is in the context of his earliest ruminations on what was, for him, the central question of existence that he introduced Zionism into his opus.

And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the Zionists.

It looked, to be sure, as though only a part of the Jews approved this viewpoint, while the majority condemned and inwardly rejected such a formulation. But… the so-called liberal Jews did not reject the Zionists as non-Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness. [168]


There is no better proof of Zionism's classic role as an outsider to anti-Semitism than Hitler’s own statement. What more, the reader was to ask, could any reasonable person need? However, before 1914 Hitler had no need to concern himself further with Zionism, as the prospects of a revived Jewish state seemed very remote. It was the Balfour Declaration, Germany's defeat and the Weimar revolution that made him think again about Zionism. Naturally he rolled all three events together. The treacherous Jews showed their true colours in the way in which they welcomed the Balfour Declaration, and it was the Social Democrats, those servants of the Jews, who brought down the Kaiser; but for them Germany would have won. In 1919 Hitler joined the tiny National Socialists and became their inspired beer-hall rabblerouser, but the dominant ideologist on the finer points of the Jewish question was the Baltic German refugee Alfred Rosenberg, who had developed his theories while still in his native Estonia. By 1919 Rosenberg had already explained Zionism in his book, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Trace of the Jews in the Wanderings of Time). It was just another Jewish hustle; the Zionists only wanted to create a hide-out for the international Jewish conspiracy. Jews were, by their racial nature, organically incapable of building a state of their own, but he felt that Zionist ideology served wonderfully as a justification for depriving Germany's Jews of their rights and that, perhaps, there was the possibility of future use of the movement for the promotion of Jewish emigration. Hitler soon began to touch on these themes in his talks, and on 6 July 1920 he proclaimed that Palestine was the proper place for the Jews and that only there could they hope to get their rights. Articles supporting emigration to Palestine began appearing in the party organ, the Volkischer Beobachter, after 1920, and periodically party propagandists would return to the point, as did Julius Streicher in a speech given on 20 April 1996 before the Bavarian Landtag. [169] But for Hitler the validity of Zionism only lay in its confirmation that the Jews could never be Germans. In Mein Kampf, he wrote:

For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks. [170]


Jews lacked the essential racial character to build a state of their own. They were essentially leeches, lacking in natural idealism, and they hated work. He explained:

For a state formation to have a definite spatial setting always presupposes an idealistic attitude on the part of the state-race, and especially a correct interpretation of the concept of work. In the exact measure in which this attitude is lacking, any attempt at forming, even of preserving, a spatially delimited state fails. [171]


In spite of any early musings about Zionism's efficacy in eventually promoting emigration, the Nazis made no effort to establish any relationship with the local Zionists. On the contrary, when the Zionist Congress met in Vienna in 1925, the Nazis were among those who rioted against their presence. [172]

Nazi Patronage of Zionism

Did Hitler always plan to murder the Jews? He set down some early thoughts in Mein Kampf:

If in 1914 the German working class in their innermost convictions had still consisted of Marxists, the War would have been over in three weeks. Germany would have collapsed even before the first soldier set foot across the border. No, the fact that the German people was then still fighting proved that the Marxist delusion had not yet been able to gnaw its way into the bottommost depths. But in exact proportion as, in the course of the War, the German worker and the German soldier fell back into the hands of the Marxist leaders, in exactly that proportion he was lost to the fatherland. If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain. [173]


However, these thoughts were never the basis of the Nazis' popular agitation prior to the 1933 take-over. Instead, the Nazis primarily focused on denouncing the Jews, rather than explaining what they would do about them after they won. However, for decades 'Kikes to Palestine!' had been the slogan of European anti-Semitism, and the Nazi propagandists used it in their own agitation. In June 1932 the centrepiece for one of their largest anti-Jewish rallies, in Silesian Breslaw, was a huge banner telling the Jews to 'get ready for Palestine!' [174] During the anti-Jewish boycott on 1 April 1933, pickets at the department stores handed out an imitation 'one-way ticket to Palestine' to Jewish-looking passers-by. [175]

Image

[Intercom]A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. Let's go to the colonies. This announcement has been brought to you by the Shimago-Dominguez Corporation. Helping America into the new world.

-- Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos


The official Nazi manifesto proclaiming the anti-Jewish boycott declared that anti-Nazi feeling abroad was due to international Jewry's 'trying to act on the program announced in 1897 by the Zionist Leader Herzl' to stir up foreign states against any country that opposed the Jews.' [176] However, none of this was very serious; it was just another expression of rabid anti-Semitism. Until he achieved power, Hitler had not given any serious thought to what he would do with the Jews. Beyond his statement in Mein Kampf, there is no evidence to prove that he told even his closest subordinates what he ultimately planned. After all, as he always privately complained, the average SS man was, at bottom, soft -- and a blabbermouth. If you talked about killing all the Jews, he was sure to make excuses for his own 'good Jew' and then where were you? Besides, the capitalists had their Jewish business connections abroad, and there were the churches and their scruples about murder. Hitler solved his problem by just ignoring it, leaving every department in the party and government to feel its way to a suitable policy. There were inevitably conflicting schools. Straight terror always had its devotees, but these were more than countered by others who saw the Jews as deeply rooted in the domestic economy as well as having many contacts abroad. Immediate imposition of a ghetto had its partisans, but this was met with the same objections. Emigration was the obvious solution, but where to? Not only would wholesale Jewish emigration make Berlin unpopular among other capitals, but what would happen after the arrival of large numbers of Jews in any of the major cities of the world? They would incite others, and not just Jews, against the Reich and the effect they could have on Germany's trade might well be devastating. It was within this context that the Zionists, Sam Cohen of Ha Note'a and the ZVfD in Germany, first appeared with their proposals.

Ha'avara had several obvious advantages to the Nazis. If Jews went to Palestine, they would only be able to complain to other Jews. In fact, they would even be a moderating influence there, since the fear of worse consequences for their relatives in Germany, if anything were done to make the Nazis cancel the Transfer, would make them reluctant to agitate on a large scale. But the most important use of the Ha'avara agreement was for propaganda. The Nazis now had something to show their foreign detractors who said they were incapable of any policy toward the Jews other than physical brutality. In a speech on 24 October 1933, Hitler crowed that it was he, not his critics, who really was the Jews' benefactor:

In England people assert that their arms are open to welcome all the oppressed, especially the Jews who have left Germany… But it would be still finer if England did not make her great gesture dependent on the possession of £1,000 -- England should say: 'Anyone may enter’ -- as we unfortunately have done for 30 years. If we too had declared that no one could enter Germany save under the condition of bringing with him £1,000 or paying more, then today we should have no Jewish question at all. So we wild folk have once more proved ourselves better humans -- less perhaps in external protestations, but at least in our actions! And now we are still as generous and give to the Jewish people a far higher percentage as their share in possibility for living than we ourselves possess. [177]


Nazi Germany regarded the will of the Fuhrer as having the force of law, and once Hitler had pronounced, an avowedly pro-Zionist policy developed. Also in October Hans Frank, then the Bavarian Minister of Justice, later the Governor-General of Poland, told the Nuremberg parteitag that the best solution to the Jewish question, for Jews and Gentiles, alike, was the Palestinian National Home. [178] Still in October, the Hamburg-South American Shipping Company started a direct service to Haifa providing 'strictly Kosher food on its ships, under the supervision of the Hamburg rabbinate'. [179] Jews could still leave for any country that would have them, but now Palestine became the propagandists' preferred solution to the Jewish question. However, Zionists were still just Jews, as Gustav Genther of the German Education School very carefully spelt out:

Just as we now have friendly relations with Soviet Russia, though Russia, as a Communist country, represents a danger to our National Socialist State, we shall take the same attitude toward the Jews, if they establish themselves as an independent nation, although we know they will always remain our enemies. [180]

If this was not enough, a children's game, Juden Raus! (Jews Out), left no illusions as to how the Nazis saw Zionism. The pieces were little pawns wearing pointed medieval Jewish hats; the players moved them by rolling dice; the child winning was the one whose Jew first scurried out, 'off to Palestine!' through the gates of a walled city. [181] Zionism was despised in Nazi Germany, but the Zionists desperately needed Nazi patronage if they were to get the capital they required in Palestine and they allowed themselves to believe that the Ha'avara and all the Palestinian talk that followed it would lead to a statesmanlike pact.

‘Our Official Good Will Go with Them’

By 1934 the SS had become the most pro-Zionist element in the Nazi Party. Other Nazis were even calling them 'soft' on the Jews. Baron von Mildenstein had returned from his six-month visit to Palestine as an ardent Zionist sympathiser. Now as the head of the Jewish Department of the SS's Security Service, he started studying Hebrew and collecting Hebrew records; when his former companion and guide, Kurt Tuchler, visited his office in 1934, he was greeted by the strains of familiar Jewish folk tunes. [182] There were maps on the walls showing the rapidly increasing strength of Zionism inside Germany. [183] Von Mildenstein was as good as his word: he not only wrote favourably about what he saw in the Zionist colonies in Palestine; he also persuaded Goebbels to run the report as a massive twelve-part series in his own Der Angriff (The Assault), the leading Nazi propaganda organ (26 September to 9 October 1934). His stay among the Zionists had shown the SS man 'the way to curing a centuries-long wound on the body of the world: the Jewish question'. It was really amazing how some good Jewish boden under his feet could enliven the Jew: 'The soil has reformed him and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.' [184] To commemorate the Baron's expedition, Goebbels had a medal struck: on one side the swastika, on the other the Zionist star. [185]

In May 1935 Reinhardt Heydrich, who was then the chief of the SS Security Service, later the infamous 'Protector' of the Czech lands incorporated into the Reich, wrote an article, 'The Visible Enemy', for Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the SS. In it Heydrich assessed the various tendencies among the Jews, comparing the assimilationists quite invidiously with the Zionists. His partiality towards Zionism could not have been expressed in more unmistakable terms:

After the Nazi seizure of power our racial laws did in fact curtail considerably the immediate influence of Jews. But… the question as he sees it is still: How can we win back our old position… We must separate Jewry into two categories… the Zionists and those who favor being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.


Heydrich wished them a fond farewell: 'The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.' [186]

'It was a Painful Distinction for Zionism to be Singled out for Favors'

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, the finishing touches of Germany's pre-Second World War anti-Jewish legislation, were defended by the Nazis as an expression of their pro-Zionism. They had at least the tacit approval of the wiser heads amongst the Jews themselves. As it happened -- and naturally it was more than mere coincidence -- every nationwide Jewish organ in Germany was under temporary ban when the laws were promulgated -- except the Rundschau. It published the codified restrictions with a commentary by Alfred Berndt, the editor-in-chief of the German News Bureau. Berndt recalled that, only two weeks before, all the speakers at the World Zionist Congress in Lucerne had reiterated that the Jews of the world were to be correctly seen as a separate people unto themselves regardless of where they lived. Well then, he explained, all Hitler had done was to meet 'the demands of the International Zionist Congress by making the Jews who live in Germany a national minority'. [187]

One aspect of the laws, now long forgotten but which attracted considerable attention at the time, was the fact that from then on only two flags were to be permitted in the Third Reich, the swastika and the blue-and-white Zionist banner. This, of course, greatly excited the ZVfD, who hoped that this was a sign that Hitler was moving closer to an accommodation with them. But for many foreign Zionists this was a searing humiliation, well-expressed in the anguish of Stephen Wise's own organ, the Congress Bulletin:

Hitlerism is Satan's nationalism. The determination to rid the German national body of the Jewish element, however, led Hitlerism to discover its 'kinship' with Zionism, the Jewish nationalism of liberation. Therefore Zionism became the only other party legalized in the Reich, the Zionist flag the only other flag permitted to fly in Nazi-land. It was a painful distinction for Zionism to be singled out for favors and privileges by its Satanic counterpart. [188]


The Nazis were as thorough in their philo-Zionism as in other matters. Now that the Jews were established as a separate people with a separate soil, should they not also have a separate language? In 1936 they added a new 'nach Palastina' ingredient to their repressive measures. Jewish Frontier had to inform its readers distressfully that:

The attempts to seclude the Jews in the cultural ghetto have reached a new height by the prohibition to rabbis to use the German language in their Chanukah [6 December] sermons. This is in line with the effort made by the Nazis to force the German Jews to use the Hebrew language as their cultural medium. Thus another 'proof' of Nazi-Zionist cooperation is seized eagerly by the Communist opponents of Zionism. [189]


Nazi leniency towards Zionism

In spring 1934, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS, was presented with a 'Situation Report -- Jewish Question' by his staff: the vast majority of Jews still considered themselves Germans and were determined to stay on. Since force could not be used, for fear of potential international repercussions, the way to break down their resistance was to instil a distinctive Jewish identity amongst them by systematically promoting Jewish schools, athletic teams, Hebrew, Jewish art and music, etc. Combined with Zionist occupational retraining centres, this would finally induce the recalcitrant Jews to abandon their homeland. However, this subtle formula was not enough, for whenever pressure against them began to subside the stubborn Jews would start to dig in again. The Nazi policy was therefore to increase support for the Zionists, so that the Jews would plainly see that the way to ward off worse troubles was to join the movement. All Jews, including Zionists, were still to be persecuted as Jews, but within that framework it was always possible to ease the pressure. Accordingly, on 28 January 1935, the Bavarian Gestapo circularised the regular police that henceforward: 'members of the Zionist organisations are, in view of their activities directed towards emigration to Palestine, not to be treated with the same strictness which is necessary towards the members of the German-Jewish organisations [assimilationists]. [190]

The Nazis created complications for themselves with their pro-Zionist line. The WZO needed German-Jewish capital far more than it ever wanted German Jews. It also operated under the immigration quotas set by the British. Its largest following was in Poland, and if it gave out too many certificates to Germans, there would not be enough for its support base in Poland and elsewhere. Therefore the Zionists gave only 22 per cent of the certificates to Germans throughout the 1930s. Furthermore the WZO were not interested in the vast majority of Germany's Jews, since these were not Zionists, did not speak Hebrew, were too old and, of course, did not have the 'right' trades. Either Jewish emigration had to be organised to other countries as well, or Germany would be stuck with the Jews neither it nor the Zionists wanted. Nazi discrimination against anti-Zionists led to problems for those world-based bodies like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which tried to provide havens for Jews in countries other than Palestine. Yehuda Bauer, one of Israel's most widely known Holocaust scholars, has written of a discussion of the ensuing difficulties between two leading officials of the Joint Distribution Committee:

[Joseph] Hyman thought that a statement should be made by the German Jews that Palestine was not the sole outlet which of course, frankly speaking, it wasn't. [Bernard] Kahn agreed, but explained that the Nazis supported Zionism because it promised the largest emigration of Jews from Germany; hence German Jewish leadership could not make any public statements about other outlets. Still less could they mention the decision to maintain Jewish institutions in Germany. The Nazis had dissolved one meeting in Germany simply because the speaker had said 'we have to provide for the people who go away and for the Jews who must stay in Germany'. [191]


In practice, the Nazis' concern about where the Jews should go disappeared with the Austrian anschluss, which brought so many Jews with it that further attention to their destination would have crippled the expulsion programme. In October 1938 the Nazis discovered that the Poles were about to revoke the citizenship of thousands of their Jewish citizens resident in Germany. They therefore decided to deport the Jews to Poland immediately so that they would not be stuck with thousands of stateless Jews. It was this cold pogrom that led to the massive violence of Kristallnacht in November 1938.

The story was told, many years later, on 25 April 1961, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann. The witness, Zindel Grynszpan, then an old man, was the father of Herszl Grynszpan who, in despair at the deportation of his father back to Poland, had assassinated a German diplomat in Paris and provided the Nazis with the pretext for their terrible night of broken glass. Old Zindel told them of his deportation from his home in Hanover on the night of 27 October 1938: 'Then they took us in police trucks, in prisoners' lorries, about 20 men in each truck, and they took us to the railway station. The streets were full of people shouting: "Juden raus! Auf nach Palastina!" [Google translate: Jews out! On to Palestine!"] [192]

The significance of Zindel's testimony was utterly lost in the welter of detail in the Eichmann trial. But those Jews were not being sent to Palestine, as the Nazi mob cried; the prosecutor in that courtroom in Jerusalem never thought to ask the elderly Grynszpan a question that we would think to ask: 'What did you think, what did the other Jews think, when they heard that strange cry coming up from the savage mob?' Zindel Grynszpan is long dead, as are most if not all the others who suffered there that hellish night; we have no answer to our query. But what really matters was what was shouted, rather than what was thought about it in that police van. However, we can reasonably suggest that if the ZVfD had resisted Nazism's rise, if the WZO had mobilised Jewry against the New Order, if Palestine had been a bastion of Jewish resistance to Nazism, the Nazis would never have told the Jews, and that mob, that the place for a Jew was in Palestine. Perhaps, then, that Friday night in Hanover the cry would have been 'Jews to Poland', even a straight 'kill the Jews'. The sombre fact is that the mob screamed what had been screamed at them by Hitler's minions: 'Jews to Palestine!'

The Nazis asked for a "More Zionist Behaviour"

That the Nazis preferred the Zionists to all other Jews is a settled point. Even though Joachim Prinz may have winced when he wrote his 1937 article, he was only being honest when he sorrowfully had to admit that:

It was very difficult for the Zionists to operate. It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a 'more Zionist behaviour'. [193]


The Zionist movement was always under severe restriction in the 1930s in Germany. The Rundschau was banned on at least three occasions between 1933 and November 1938, when the regime finally closed down the ZVfD's headquarters after Kristallnacht. After 1935 the Labour Zionist emissaries were barred from the country, but even then Palestinian Zionist leaders were allowed to enter for specific meetings; for instance Arthur Ruppin was granted permission to enter Germany on 20 March 1938 in order to address a mass indoor rally in Berlin on the effects of the 1936 Arab revolt in Palestine. Certainly, the Zionists had far less trouble than their bourgeois assimilationist rivals at the CV, and it was nothing compared with what the Communists had to face in Dachau at the same time the Rundschau was being hawked in the streets of Berlin.

However, the fact that the Zionists became Adolf Hitler’s 'favoured children' hardly qualified him as a Jewish nationalist. Even von Mildenstein, for all his Hebrew records, accepted the party line when it turned to outright murder. Throughout the period, the Nazis toyed with the Zionists as a cat would play with a mouse. Hitler never thought he was letting anyone get away from him because he was encouraging Jews to go to Palestine. If the Jews went to far-away America, he might never be able to get at them and they would always remain the foes of the German Empire in Europe. But if they went to Palestine instead? 'There,' as a Gestapo agent told a Jewish leader, 'we will catch up with you’. [194]

The Zionists could not even claim that they were duped by Hitler; they conned themselves. Hitler's theories on Zionism, including the Jews' alleged inability to create a state, had all been there, in plain German, since 1926. The Zionists ignored the fact that Hitler hated all Jews ...

In contrast to the new, growing, Anglo-Saxon race, look, for instance, at the Sephardim, the so-called "Spanish Jews"; here we find how a genuine race can by purity keep itself noble for centuries and tens of centuries, but at the same time how very necessary it is to distinguish between the nobly reared portions of a nation and the rest. In England, Holland and Italy there are still genuine Sephardim but very few, since they can scarcely any longer avoid crossing with the Ashkenazim (the so-called "German Jews"). Thus, for example, the Montefiores of the present generation have all without exception married German Jewesses. But every one who has travelled in the East of Europe, where the genuine Sephardim still as far as possible avoid all intercourse with German Jews, for whom they have an almost comical repugnance, will agree with me when I say that it is only when one sees these men and has intercourse with them that one begins to comprehend the significance of Judaism in the history of the word. This is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful figures, noble heads, dignity in speech and bearing. The type is Semitic in the same sense as that of certain noble Syrians and Arabs. That out of the midst of such people Prophets and Psalmists could arise -- that I understood at the first glance, which I honestly confess that I had never succeeded in doing when I gazed, however carefully, on the many hundred young Jews -- "Bochers " -- of the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain


Chamberlain joined the Nazi Party and contributed to its publications. Its primary journal, the Völkischer Beobachter dedicated five columns to praising him on his 70th birthday, describing The Foundations as the "gospel of the Nazi movement."

-- Houston Stewart Chamberlain, by Wikipedia


and that he specifically condemned their own ideology. The Zionists were simply reactionaries, who naively chose to emphasise the points of similarity between themselves and Hitler. They convinced themselves that because they, too, were racists, against mixed marriage, and believed that the Jews were aliens in Germany; because they, too, were opposed to the left, that these similarities would be enough to make Adolf Hitler see them as the only honest partners, for a diplomatic détente. [195]

_______________

Notes:

167. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 56.

168. Ibid.

169. Francis Nicosia, 'Zionism in Nationalist Socialist Jewish Policy in Germany, 1933-9', Journal of Modern History (on-demand supplement), (December 1978), pp. D1257-9.

170. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 324-5.

171. Ibid., p. 302.

172. F.L. Carsten, Fascist Movements in Austria, p. 96.

173. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 679.

174. Donald Niewyk, Socialist, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 149.

175. Elizabeth Poretsky, Our Own People, p. 134.

176. 'No Violence Urged', Israel 's Messenger (Shanghai, 10 April 1933), p. 19.

177. Norman Baynes (ed.), Hitler 's Speeches, 1922-1939, vol. I, p. 729.

178. Nicosia, 'Zionism in Nationalist Socialist Jewish Policy'' p. D1263.

179. 'Hamburg-Haifa Direct Shipping Line', Zionist Record (20 October 1933), p. 15.

180. 'Members of Pro-Palestine Committee in Germany put on Anti-Semitic Blacklist', Jewish Weekly News (Melbourne, 30 March 1934), p. 6.

181. Jewish Central Information Office -- The Weiner Library -- Its History and Activities 1934-45 (photograph between pp. 212-13).

182. Jacob Boas, ‘The Jews of Germany: Self-Perception in the blazi Era as Reflected in the German Jewish Press 1933-1938', PhD thesis, University of California, Riverside (1977), p. 110.

183. Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, p. 333.

184. Leopold von Mildenstein (pseudonym von Lim), 'Ein Nazi fahrt nach Palastina', Der Angriff (9 October 1934), p.4.

185. Jacob Boas, 'A Nazi Travels to Palestine', History Today (London, January 1980), p. 38.

186. Hohne, Order of the Death's Head, p. 333; and Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, pp. 1934.

187. Margaret Edelheim-Muehsam, 'Reactions of the Jewish Press to the Nazi Challenge', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. V (1960), p. 324.

188. 'Baal is not God', Congress Bulletin (24 January 1936), p. 2.

189. Abraham Duker, 'Diaspora', Jewish Frontier (January 1937), p. 28.

190. Kurt Grossmann, 'Zionists and Non-Zionists under Nazi Rule in the 1930s', Herzl Yearbook, vol. VI, p. 340.

191. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, p. 136.

192. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 228.

193. Joachim Prinz, 'Zionism under the Nazi Government', Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p. 18.

194. Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, p. 115.

195. Boas, The Jews of Germany, p. 111.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 5:56 am

8. PALESTINE: THE ARABS, ZIONISTS, BRITISH AND NAZIS

It was the Arabs, not the Zionists, who compelled the Nazis to reexamine their pro-Zionist orientation. Between 1933 and 1936, 164,267 Jewish immigrants poured into Palestine; 61,854 came in 1935 alone. The Jewish minority increased from 18 per cent of the population in 1931 to 29.9 per cent in December 1935, and the Zionists saw themselves becoming the majority in the not-too-distant future.

The Arabs reacted first to these statistics. They had never accepted the British Mandate with its declared aim of creating a Jewish National Home in their land. There had been riots in 1920 and 1921; in 1929, after a series of provocations from Zionist chauvinists and Muslim fanatics at the Wailing Wall, the Muslim masses rioted in a wave of atrocious massacres which culminated with 135 Jewish deaths and almost as many Muslims killed, primarily by the British.

Palestinian Arab politics were dominated by a handful of rich clans. The most nationalistic were the Husaynis, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Intensely pious, his response to the Zionist provocations at the Wall was to raise the faithful against the Zionists as infidels rather than as a political enemy. He was suspicious of any social reform and quite unprepared to develop a political programme which could mobilise the largely illiterate Palestinian peasantry. It was this lack of a programme for the peasant majority which guaranteed that he could never create a political force capable of coping with the numerically inferior, but vastly more efficient Zionists. He was compelled to look abroad for a patron to give him some of the strength that his reactionary politics prevented him from generating from within Palestinian society. His choice fell on Italy.

The deal with Rome was completely secret until it was accidentally revealed in April 1935, since it could hardly be justified in the Arab world. Mussolini had used poison gas against the 1931 Senussi uprising in Libya, and was, moreover, openly pro-Zionist. However, Rome was anti-British and was willing to subsidise the Mufti on that account. The first payment was made in 1934, but little was achieved for either the Palestinians or the Italians. Some years later Mussolini’s Foreign Minister -- his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano -- had to confess to the German ambassador that:

for years he maintained constant relations with the Grand Mufti of which his secret fund could tell a tale. The return of this gift of millions had not been exactly great and had really been confined to occasional destruction of pipelines, which in most cases could be quickly repaired. [196]


'The Haganah's Goal—A Jewish Majority in Palestine'

Because Hitler did not believe that the Jews could create a state of their own, it did not follow that he would be pro-Palestinian. They too were Semites. In the 1920s many right-wing German political groups began to express sympathy for the oppressed nations of the British Empire as fellow victims of perfidious Albion. However, Hitler would have none of this; the British, after all, were white.

I as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under English rule than under any other. Just as lamentable are the hopes in any mythical uprising in Egypt… As a volkish man, who appraises the value of men on a racial basis, I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called oppressed nations, from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs. [197]


However, the revolt of the Palestinian Arab masses in 1936 made Berlin rethink the implications of their pro-Zionist policies. Intense unrest had been aroused in October 1935 by the discovery of weapons in a cement cargo bound for Tel Aviv, and the situation became feverish in November when Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a popular Muslim preacher, took to the hills with a guerrilla band. British troops soon killed him, but his funeral developed into a passionate demonstration. The crisis dragged on for months before it finally exploded on the night of 15 April 1936, when a remnant of Qassam's band stopped traffic on the Tulkarm road, robbing travellers and killing two Jews. Two Arabs were slain in reprisal the next night. The funeral of the Jews turned into a right-wing Zionist demonstration and the crowd started marching on Arab Jaffa. The police opened fire, four Jews were shot and, again, Arabs were attacked on the streets of Tel Aviv in retaliation. A counter-march soon started for Tel Aviv. The revolt was on. A spontaneous general strike developed and the pressure from below forced the rival cliques within the Arab establishment to unite in an Arab Higher Committee under the leadership of the Mufti. However, the Higher Committee feared that the continuation of the rising would put the peasantry permanently beyond its leaders' control, and finally prevailed upon the strike committees to call off the protest on 12 October, pending the outcome of a British Royal Commission's investigation.

Until the Arab revolt, the Nazis’ patronage of Zionism had been warm but scarcely committed, as we have seen. However, with the political turmoil in Palestine and the appointment of the Peel Commission, the WZO saw their chance to persuade the Nazis to make a public commitment to them in Palestine itself. On 8 December 1936 a joint delegation of the Jewish Agency, the highest body of the WZO in Palestine, and the Hitachdut Olei Germania (the German Immigrants Association), went to the Jerusalem office of Doehle, the German Consul-General. The Zionist scholar, David Yisraeli, has related the incident.

They sought through Doehle to persuade the Nazi government to have its Jerusalem representative appear before the Peel Commission, and declare that Germany was interested in an increased immigration to Palestine because of its eagerness to have the Jews emigrate from Germany. The Consul, however, rejected the proposal on the spot. His official reasons were that considerations of increased immigration from Germany would inevitably bring out the matter of the transfer which was detrimental to British exports to Palestine. [198]


Characteristically, the Zionists were more eager to extend their relationship than the Nazis, but Doehle's rejection of their request did not stop them from further approaches. The outcome of the Peel Commission's expedition was thought crucial to the Zionist endeavour and it was therefore the Haganah, then the military arm of the Jewish Agency (de facto the Labour Zionist militia), that obtained Berlin's permission to negotiate directly with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Security Service of the SS. A Haganah agent, Feivel Polkes, arrived in Berlin on 26 February 1937 and was assigned Adolf Eichmann as his negotiating partner. Eichmann had been a protege of the pro-Zionist von Mildenstein and, like his mentor, had studied Hebrew, read Herzl and was the SD's specialist on Zionism. The Eichmann-Polkes conversations were recorded in a report prepared by Eichmann's superior, Franz-Albert Six, which was found in the SS files captured by the American Army at the end of the Second World War:

Polkes is a national-Zionist… He is against all Jews who are opposed to the erection of a Jewish state in Palestine. As a Haganah man he fights against Communism and all aims of Arab-British friendship… He noted that the Haganah's goal is to reach, as soon as possible, a Jewish majority in Palestine. Therefore he worked, as this objective required, with or against the British Intelligence Service, the Surete Generale, with England and Italy… He declared himself willing to work for Germany in the form of providing intelligence as long as this does not oppose his own political goals. Among other things he would support German foreign policy in the Near East. He would try to find oil sources for the German Reich without affecting British spheres of interest if the German monetary regulations were eased for Jewish emigrants to Palestine. [199]


Six definitely thought that a working alliance with the Haganah would be in the Nazis' interest. They still needed the latest inside information on the various Jewish boycott groups and on Jewish plots against the lives of prominent Nazis. He was eager to allow the SS to help the Zionists in return.

Pressure can be put on the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany in such a way that those Jews emigrating from Germany go exclusively to Palestine and not go to other countries. Such measures lie entirely in the German interest and is already prepared through measures of the Gestapo. Polkes' plans to create a Jewish majority in Palestine would be aided at the same time through these measures. [200]


Six's enthusiasm was not shared at the German Foreign Ministry, which saw Palestine as a British sphere. Berlin's prime interest was in an understanding with London on the crucial question of the Balkans; nothing must interfere with that. The officials were also concerned about how Italy would react to German intervention in Mediterranean politics. Therefore, on 1 June 1937 the Foreign Minister, Konstantine von Neurath, sent cables to his diplomats in London, Jerusalem and Baghdad: neither a Zionist state nor a Zionist political structure under British rule would be in Germany's interest, as it 'would not absorb world Jewry but would create an additional position of power under international law for international Jewry, somewhat like the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Comintern'. Germany therefore had 'an interest in strengthening the Arab world', but 'it is not to be expected, of course, that direct German intervention would influence essentially the development of the Palestine question'. Under no circumstances were the Palestinians to get more than token support: 'understanding for Arab nationalist aspirations should be expressed more clearly than before, but without making any definite promises'. [201]

Zionist Notions of the Future Israel

British policy towards Palestine at this stage was elegantly expressed in the memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, the first military governor of Jerusalem, the Zionist 'enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ''a little loyal Jewish Ulster" in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism'. [202] This was the spirit of the Peel Commission's proposal in July 1937 that Palestine be divided into three parts. All of it would stay under British overlordship; Britain would directly retain a strip from Jerusalem to Jaffa, and would hold Haifa for ten years, after which it would be seconded to a Zionist statelet of two pieces with a combined area the size of the English county of Norfolk. The tiny Zionist entity would contain an enormous Arab minority, some of whom the Commission contemplated moving to the Arab state which would get the rest of the country.

Opinion within Zionism was sharply divided. The 'Jewish Ulster’ differed from the original in that the Zionists would never see themselves as fulfilled by the partition. Their Eretz Yisrael included all of Abraham’s biblical patrimony. In the end the World Zionist Congress's position was a carefully qualified no, meaning a yes: that particular partition was rejected, but the Executive was empowered to haggle further for a better deal.

What kind of state did the Zionist movement envision for itself, and for millions of Jews, in 1937? The Labour Zionists were by far the strongest force in the movement and there was no greater protagonist of acceptance of the partition than its leader, David Ben-Gurion who, in the summer of 1937, solemnly reassured a Zurich session of the World Council of the Poale Zion that they need have no fears in this regard: later they would definitely expand.

This Jewish state which is now proposed to us, even with all the possible reparations and improvements in our favor, is not the Zionist aim -- in this territory one cannot solve the Jewish problem… what will happen, in another fifteen (or any other number of) years, when the proposed territorially limited state reaches the point of saturation of population?… Anyone who wants to be frank to himself should not prophesy about what there will be in another fifteen years… the adversaries of Partition were right when they claimed that this country was not given for us to partition it -- for it constitutes a single unit, not only historically, but also from the natural and economic standpoint. [203]


The Labour Zionists certainly realised now that if a Jewish state was going to be achieved, it would inevitably be against the powerful opposition of the Palestinian people. Although they were basically always Jewish nationalists, they had turned resolutely away from their own past socialist rhetoric, as well as their previous, feeble, efforts to organise Arab workers, and started driving them out of their traditional seasonal jobs in the Jewish orange groves. In general, their thinking had become morbid, and they now consciously looked for their own success to come out of the ruination of the European Jewish middle class. It was to be their flight capital that would build Zion. Enzo Sereni, now an emissary to the USA, was quite correct in assessing the attraction Zionism now held for a portion of the Jewish middle class in Central and Eastern Europe:

Two souls dwell within the breast of the Jewish bourgeoisie, one striving after profits, the other seeking for political power… As a political group, the Jewish bourgeoisie cannot really live without the Jewish masses. Only on them can it hope to build its political supremacy. Also, in order to exercise its eventual control over the Arab workers, the Jewish bourgeoisie needs a Jewish proletariat, precisely as the great European powers need a national proletariat for the exercise of their imperial plans.

What separates the Jewish Zionist bourgeoisie from the non-Zionist members of the same class is really only the fact that the Zionists are clearly aware that they can attain their interest as a class only in the domain of a unified people and no longer as mere individuals, as Jewish assimilationists believed. [204]


Anti-Semitism was now conceded to be the main force of Zionism but, in addition, there were also positive attractions in the establishment of a Zionist ministate. Moshe Beilenson, then editor of Labour's daily newspaper, Davar, naively expressed these hopes for an Israel as the locus of the future capitalist exploitation of the hinterland:

Great perspectives will open before the 'Greater Zionism’ that now only a few among us dare to fight for, a Jewish state in Palestine, leading the East… The Jewish state built on such foundations will have the full right, both socially and spiritually, to claim the title of leadership, the title of being the vanguard of the new world in the East…


He qualified the realities behind his rhetorical flourish:

Of what value is our closeness of race to the Arab people compared to the great distance between us in ideas, in existence, in our scale of values? In all these matters we are many degrees closer to the Europeans or Americans despite the existing 'racial differences'… We want peace with the Arab Yishub… with no false philanthropy, and with no make-believe missionaryism. Not for any Revolutionary approach in the Awakening of the East, be it a 'national’ East or a 'class' East or a 'religious spiritual' East… Not to free others have we come here, but to free ourselves. [205]


These theoreticians were in the process of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. By talking so determinedly of the inevitable expropriation of European Jewry, to be followed by the exploitation of a Jewish and Arab proletariat, these self-styled socialists were doing nothing to mobilise the Europeans and everything to arouse the wrath of the Palestinians.

Nazi Admiration for Zionist Efforts in Palestine

The Nazis were quite resigned to the partition of Palestine and their main concern became the fate of the 2,000 Germans then living in the country. A few were Catholic monks, a few were mainline Lutherans, but most were Templars, a nineteenth-century sect of pietists who had come to the Holy Land for the shortly expected return of Jesus. They had eventually settled in six prosperous colonies, four of which would be in the Zionist enclave. No matter how much the WZO leadership wanted to avoid antagonising Berlin over the Templars, now almost all good Nazis, the local Nazi party realised that any spontaneous Jewish boycott after partition would make their position totally impossible. The German Foreign Ministry wanted either to have the colonies under direct British control or, more realistically, to have them moved into the Arab territory.

"Religion of the heart"

Religion mated with German nationalism in the eighteenth century and produced a fever in the people called Pietism. Schleiermacher had been visited by this fever in his youth, and although he forged his own path as a theologian and philosopher, he said his ideas remained closest to this "religion of the heart." To Schleiermacher, the highest form of religion was an "intuition" (Anschauung) of the "Whole," an immediate experience of every particular as part of a whole, of every finite thing as a representation of the infinite. This was the perfect theology for an age of nature-obsessed Romanticism, and at times Schleiermacher's rhetoric, adorned with organic metaphors of the whole derived from nature, shaded into pantheism and mysticism. By 1817, he most certainly infected Karl Jung with it, as he did that entire generation of young patriots through his sermons, his writings, and especially his revisions of the Reformed Protestant liturgy, making it more simple, festive, and Volkish. Additionally, in the decade before he met Jung, he had published translations of Plato and, by his own admission, had become quite influenced by Platonism. This, too, must be remembered when we fantasize about what the older spiritual adviser imparted to the enthusiastic young convert.

German Pietism was loosely related to contemporaneous religious movements, such as Quakerism and enthusiastic Methodism in England and America and Quietism and Jansenism in France. Pietism, however, was to play a key role in developing Volkish self-consciousness and a sense of nation in the politically fragmented German lands. In the spirit of Luther, Pietism was born of disgust with orthodoxies, dogmas, and church hierarchies in the traditional Protestant denominations, making it a form of radical Lutheranism. Pietists dared to question authority and to be suspicious of foreign interpreters of Christianity. They called it a Herzensreligion, a "religion of the heart," a spiritual movement that emphasized feeling, intuition, inwardness, and a personal experience of God. [15] The function of thinking, indeed reason itself, was disparaged and could not be trusted. To experience God, the intellect must be sacrificed. (For example, according to Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a prominent eighteenth-century Pietist who influenced Schleiermacher and twentieth-century figures Rudolph Otto and Hermann Hesse, only atheists attempted to comprehend God with their mind; the True sought revelation.)

Pietists' mystical enthusiasm is reflected in some of their favorite incendiary metaphors for their ecstatic experiences. It was the fire of the Holy Spirit that must burn within; indeed, it was often said that "the heart must burn." They emphasized the burning experience of "Christ within us" instead of the inanimate, automatic belief in the dogma of a "Christ for us." Such subtle distinctions had profound implications for German nationalism, for the belief arose in the feeling of group identity bound by common inner experience, a mystical blood-union of necessity, rather than as something external existing for an individual. Hence, the Pietist emphasis on service to others as a method of serving God.

Prussia, the most absolutist of the many German political entities, welcomed the Pietists to Berlin. Attracted to Pietism's rejection of the Lutheran clerical hierarchy -- which threatened the overriding legitimacy of the state -- the eighteenth-century rulers of Prussia adopted Pietism's religious philosophy and offered sanctuary to many of its exiled leaders. As populist movements, Pietism and pan-German nationalism were as threatening to the royal rulers of the dozens of German states as to Lutheran clerics, for they challenged the political status quo. Prussia, however, as the strongest of the German states, already presaged its manifest destiny as the unifier of Germany, and so its short-term goals coincided with those of such movements. Nicholas Boyle, one of Goethe's biographers, described the immense significance of this convergence of affinities for the next two centuries of German religious life and political history:

The particular feature of Pietism which makes it of interest to us is its natural affinity for state absolutism. A religion which concentrates to the point of anxiety, not to say hypochondria, on those inner emotions, whether of dryness or abundance, of despair or of confident love of God, from which the individual may deduce the state of his immortal soul; a religion whose members meet for preference not publicly, but privately in conventicles gathered round a charismatic personality who may well not be an ordained minister; a religion who disregards all earthly (and especially all ecclesiastical) differentiation of rank, and sees its proper role in the visible world in charitable activity as nearly as possible harmonious with the prevailing order ... such a religion was tailor-made for a state system in which all, regardless of rank, were to be equally servants of the one purpose; in which antiquated rights and differentiae were to be abolished; and in which ecclesiastical opposition was particularly unwelcome, whether it came from assertive prelates or from vociferous enthusiasts unable to keep their religious lives to themselves.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, German nationalism had become so intertwined with Pietism that the literature of the time blurs distinctions between inner and outer Fatherlands. The "internalized Kingdom of Heaven" became identical with the spiritual soil of the German ancestors, a Teutonic "Land of the Dead." In these patriotic religious tracts the sacrificial deaths of Teutonic heroes such as Arminius (Hermann the German, who defeated the Romans in the Teutoberg forest) and the mythic Siegfried are compared to the crucifixion of Christ, thus equating pagan and Christian saviors. By the early 1800s, this identity became even more explicit. To Ernst Moritz Arndt, the subjective experience of the "Christ within" was reframed in German Volkish metaphors. In his 1816 pamphlet Zur Befreiung Deutschlands ("On the Liberation of Germany"), Arndt urged Germans, "Enshrine in your hearts the German God and German virtue." They did. By the end of the nineteenth century the German God had reawakened and was moving to reclaim his throne after a thousand-year interregnum.

The primary literature of Pietism consisted of diaries and autobiographies, most driven by the psychological turn inward so valued as the path to reaching the kingdom of God. These confessional texts emphasize the spiritual evolution of the diarist. Each account peaks dramatically with the description of what Schleiermacher called the "secret moment," the tremendous subjective experience that completely changed the life course of an individual and became the central, vivid milestone of his or her faith. This experience was known as the Wiedergeburt, the "rebirth" or "regeneration." Sometimes this experience was preceded or accompanied by visions. Several of the more famous texts, such as the autobiography of Heinrich Jung-Stilling, became part of the canon read by educated nineteenth-century Germans.

Several of these spiritual autobiographies were in the library in C. G. Jung's household when he was growing up, and he cites some of them (such as the work of Jung-Stilling) in MDR and in his seminars. While MDR is highly unlike usual biographies or autobiographies, its story of Jung's spiritual journey is similar in many ways to the Wiedergeburt testimonies of the Pietists. MDR is indeed the story of Jung's rebirth, but the book diverges from the tradition in one uncanny respect: Rather than recording the renewal of Jung's faith as a "born-again Christian," MDR is a remarkable confession of Jung's pagan regeneration.

--The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, by Richard Noll


Popular Arab opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to partition, although the Nashishibis -- the clan rivals of the dominant Husaynis -- would have accepted a smaller Jewish state. They very reluctantly opposed the British proposal and their evident lack of zeal in opposing the partition, coupled with an intense factional hatred for the Husaynis, led to a ferocious civil war within the Arab community. Outside the country the only ruler who dared to hint at acceptance of the scheme was Abdullah of Trans-Jordan, whose emirate was to be merged with the Palestinian statelet. Ibn Saud in Arabia remained silent. Egypt and Iraq's ruling cliques publicly lamented, while privately their only concern was that the partition would arouse their own people and trigger a general movement against them and the British. Understandably, the Germans were completely unconvinced of the Arabs' ability to stave off partition, and when the Mufti finally appeared at their consulate on 15 July 1937, Doehle offered him absolutely nothing. He immediately notified his superiors of the interview: 'The Grand Mufti stressed Arab sympathy for the new Germany and expressed the hope that Germany was sympathetic toward the Arab fight against Jewry and was prepared to support it.' Doehle’s response to the proffered alliance was virtually insulting. He told the supplicant that: 'after all, there was no question of our playing the role of an arbiter.. I added that it was perhaps tactically in the interests of the Arabs if German sympathy for Arab aspirations were not too marked in German statements.' [206]

In October it was the Zionists' turn to court the Nazis. On 2 October 1937, the liner Romania arrived in Haifa with two German journalists aboard. Herbert Hagen and his junior colleague, Eichmann, disembarked. They met their agent, Reichert, and later that day Feivel Polkes, who showed them Haifa from Mount Carmel and took them to visit a kibbutz. Years later, when he was in hiding in Argentina, Eichmann taped the story of his experiences and looked back at his brief stay in Palestine with fond nostalgia:

I did see enough to be very impressed by the way the Jewish colonists were building up their land. I admired their desperate will to live, the more so since I was myself an idealist. In the years that followed I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable. [207]


But the two SS men had made a mistake in contacting their local agent; the British CID had become aware of Reichert’s ring, and two days later they summarily expelled the visitors to Egypt. Polkes followed them there, and further discussions were held on 10 and 11 October at Cairo's Cafe Groppi. In their report on their expedition Hagen and Eichmann gave a careful rendering of Polkes's words at these meetings. Polkes told the two Nazis:

The Zionist state must be established by all means and as soon as possible. When the Jewish state is established according to the current proposals laid down in the Peel paper, and in line with England's partial promises, then the borders may be pushed further outwards according to one's wishes. [208]


He went on:

in Jewish nationalist circles people were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs in Palestine. [209]


During his February visit to Berlin, Polkes had proposed that the Haganah should act as spies for the Nazis, and now he showed their good faith by passing on two pieces of intelligence information. He told Hagen and Eichmann:

the Pan-Islamic World Congress convening in Berlin is in direct contact with two pro-Soviet Arab leaders: Emir Shekib Arslan and Emir Adil Arslan… The illegal Communist broadcasting station whose transmission to Germany is particularly strong, is, according to Polkes' statement, assembled on a lorry that drives along the German-Luxembourg border when transmission is on the air. [210]


Next it was the Mufti's turn to bid again for German patronage. This time he sent his agent, Dr. Said Imam, who had studied in Germany and had for a long time been in contact with the German consulate in Beirut, directly to Berlin with an offer. If Germany would 'support the Arab independence movement ideologically and materially', then the Mufti would respond by 'Disseminating National Socialist ideas in the Arab-Islamic world; combatting Communism, which appears to be spreading gradually, by employing all possible means'. He also proposed 'continuing acts of terrorism in all French colonial and mandated territories inhabited by Arabs or Mohammedans'. If they won, he swore 'to utilize only German capital and intellectual resources'. All of this was in the context of a pledge to keep the Semitic and Aryan races apart, which task was delicately referred to as 'maintaining and respecting the national convictions of both peoples'. [211]

Palestine was now getting intense scrutiny from every relevant branch of the German state and party bureaucracy. The pro-Zionists still had their telling arguments, particularly the economists, who saw the Ha'avara as helping German industry. The critics of the Nazi-Zionist relationship were concerned that the proposed Jewish statelet would be recognised internationally and begin to be seen as a Jewish Vatican, which could create diplomatic problems for the Germans over their treatment of the Jews. This was the main argument of Hagen and Eichmann in their report on their trip.

It was the British who solved the Nazis’ dilemma. They had begun to ponder upon what would follow if they created a Zionist statelet. The possibility of a world war was evident and the creation of a Zionist state was guaranteed to drive the Arabs into Hitler’s arms. The further possibility of war with the bellicose Japanese made it crucial to maintain the ability of moving troops through the Middle East, by land and via the Suez Canal, without violent native opposition. Peel’s partition was therefore hastily buried and the British determined that the Arab revolt was to be extinguished before the emerging Axis alliance could profit from it. The revolt was savagely crushed by the British Army and then Zionist immigration, the cause of the revolt, was curtailed.

Hitler now no longer had to trouble himself over the possibility of a Jewish Vatican, but the fact that the British had actually proposed it made the future possibility of a Jewish state a serious consideration. Long-term German military calculations now made concern for Arab opinion a factor in foreign policy. Many German diplomats insisted that the Ha'avara agreement guaranteed the eventual creation of the state, and Foreign Office opinion began to turn against it; however, it was saved by the intervention of Otto von Hentig, a career diplomat who had dealt with the Zionists under the Kaiser and Weimar. According to Ernst Marcus, Ha'avara's Berlin representative, von Hentig 'with his deep love of his nation and its spirit… appreciated the driving forces of Zionism as an element akin to his own feelings'. He therefore worked with his Zionist associate to try and keep 'preferential treatment of Palestine' alive.

He advised me to prepare suitable material in order to prove that the number of Jewish emigrants from Germany to Palestine as well as their financial contribution to the upbuilding of the Jewish homeland were far too small to exert a decisive influence on the development of the country. Accordingly, I compiled a memorandum which emphasised the share of Polish Jews in the work of reconstruction in all its important phases, described the financial contribution of American Jewry and contrasted it with the small effort made by the Jews of Germany. [212]


Von Hentig knew that the task of persuading Hitler to help Zionism had to be done in person and at the 'favourable moment', when he was laughing and jolly and full of his customary goodwill toward Jews. One day in early 1938, von Hentig called with the good news: 'The Fuehrer had made an affirmative decision and that all obstacles in the way of emigration to Palestine had now been removed.' [213]

The Zionists could not even claim that they were duped by Hitler; they conned themselves. Hitler's theories on Zionism, including the Jews' alleged inability to create a state, had all been there, in plain German, since 1926. The Zionists ignored the fact that Hitler hated all Jews ...

-- Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by Lenni Brenner


At first the Nazis had tried to stay neutral during the Arab revolt. On Coronation Day in 1937 all the Templar colonies flew the swastika in sympathy with Britain and they were under strict orders not to solicit the British troops nor to have anything to do with the Mosleyites. [214] But Berlin kept the pressure on and, while Jewish money and emigrants were still pushed towards Palestine, in 1938 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr Intelligence Division, put the Mufti on his payroll. However, the Mufti showed no signs of political or military competence and the money, which was always irregular, finally stopped. [215] Further military noninvolvement in the Arab revolt remained strict policy until the Munich Conference in September 1938, and arms shipments were prepared only in late 1938. Even then the desire not to antagonise London with threats to the British Empire led to the sudden cancellation of the first shipment via Saudi Arabia when the Germans became convinced that the Saudi Foreign Minister was a British agent. [216] With the aborting of the arms shipment, German concern for the Arab revolt ceased.

The Failure of the Mufti's Collaboration with the Dictators

The Mufti gained nothing, then or later, from his collaboration with either Rome or Berlin, nor could the Palestinian interest ever have been served by the two dictators. When the Mufti approached the Nazis, they were encouraging Jews to emigrate to Palestine; yet not once in all of his pre-war dealings with the Nazis did he suggest that they stop the very emigration which was the source of Zionism's new strength. Later, during the Second World War, his Jew-hatred and his anti-Communism persuaded him to go to Berlin and to oppose any release of Jews from the camps for fear that they would end up in Palestine. He eventually organised Muslim SS troops against the Soviets and the Yugoslav partisans.

The Mufti was an incompetent reactionary who was driven into his anti- Semitism by the Zionists. It was Zionism itself, in its blatant attempt to turn Palestine from an Arab land into a Jewish state, and then use it for the yet further exploitation of the Arab nation, that generated Palestinian Jew-hatred. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner of Aguda Yisrael gave a perceptive explanation for the Palestinian's career.

It should be manifest, however, that until the great public pressures for the establishment of a Jewish state, the Mufti had no interest in the Jews of Warsaw, Budapest or Vilna. Once the Jews of Europe became a threat to the Mufti because of their imminent influx into the Holy Land, the Mufti in turn became for them the Malekh Hamoves -- the incarnation of the Angel of Death. Years ago, it was still easy to find old residents of Yerushalayim who remembered the cordial relations they had maintained with the Mufti in the years before the impending creation of a Jewish State. Once the looming reality of the State of Israel was before him, the Mufti spared no effort at influencing Hitler to murder as many Jews as possible in the shortest amount of time. This shameful episode, where the founders and early leaders of the State were clearly a factor in the destruction of many Jews, has been completely suppressed and expunged from the record. [217]


If the Mufti’s collaboration with the dictators cannot be justified, it becomes absolutely impossible to rationalise the Haganah's offers to spy for the Nazis. Given the outcry against the Ha'avara and the servile posture of the ZVfD, it seems certain that, at the very least, a significant minority of the WZO would have voted with their feet had they known of the Haganah’s subterranean betrayal.

_______________

Notes:

196. ‘Hitler's Friends in the Middle East', Weiner Library Bulletin, vol. XV (1961), p. 35.

197. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 658-9.

198. David Yisraeli, ‘Germany and Zionism', Germany and the Middle East, 1835-1939 (1975), p. 158.

199. David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics 1889-1945 (Hebrew), Bar-Ilan university, Appendix (German): ‘Geheime Kommandosache Bericht’, pp. 301-2

200. Ibid., p. 304

201. Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, vol. V, (Washington, 1953), pp. 746-7.

202. Ronald Storrs, Orientations, p. 405.

203. The Voices of Zionism (Shahak reprint), p. 18.

204. Enzo Sereni, ‘Towards a New Orientation', Jews and Arabs in Palestine, pp. 282-3.

205. Moshe Beilenson, 'Problems of a Jewish-Arab Rapprochement', Jews and Arabs in Palestine, pp. 193-5.

206. Documents on German Foreign Policy, pp. 755-6.

207. Adolf Eichmann, ‘Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story', Life (28 November 1960), p. 22.

208. Klaus Polkehn, ‘The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany 1933-41', Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring 1976), p. 74.

209. Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Death's Head, p. 337.

210. Polkehn, ‘The Secret Contacts', p. 75

211. Documents on German Foreign Policy, p. 779.

212. Ernst Marcus, ‘The German Foreign office and the Palestine Question in the Period 1933-39', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 11, pp. 187-8, 191.

213. Ibid., pp. 192-3.

214. H.D. Schmidt's 'The Nazi Party in Palestine and the Levant 1932-9', International Affairs (London, October 1952), p. 466.

215. Yisraeli, 'The Third Reich and Palestine', Middle East Studies (May 1971), p. 349.

216. Documents on German Foreign Policy, p. 811.

217. Yitzhak Hutner, ‘Holocaust’, Jewish Observer (October 1977), p. 8.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:14 am

9. THE WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS

Although the WZO permitted the ZVfD to seek collaboration with Nazism, and its leaders were eager to sell Hitler's wares abroad and even spy for him, they did not want the menace to spread. Even the Zionist movement in Palestine realised that fund-raising from a universally ruined Jewry would hardly be the same as collecting for the victims in Germany alone. Not willing to fight Hitler themselves, for fear that he would abrogate the Ha'avara agreement and outlaw the ZVfD if they gave him any trouble, Sokolow and Weizmann dreamt of a great power alliance that would hold Hitler back, but this was always an empty fantasy. Those in the WZO led by Goldmann and Wise, who wanted to struggle, invariably found the two presidents either indifferent or opposed, but Hitler's growing strength compelled the more militant faction to establish a World Jewish Congress (WJC) as a Jewish defence organisation.

Both Goldmann and Wise were themselves deeply committed to Zionism; Goldmann had even opposed inviting any assimilationists -- that is to say, the majority of Jewry -- to their preliminary conference in 1932. [218] Furthermore, they did not think to challenge Weizmann's right to retake the WZO presidency in 1935. Nevertheless, the WZO was determinedly opposed to the new initiative, for fear that it would deflect energy away from Palestine back toward world Jewry. In February 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, Sokolow, who was then still the WZO President, was reported speaking against the World Jewish Congress:

Doubt as to the wisdom of convening the World Jewish Congress tentatively scheduled for this summer was expressed by Nahum Sokolow, President of the World Zionist Organization… the Zionist veteran regards the fact that, at the Geneva Jewish Conference last summer where the World Jewish Congress was discussed, some question was raised as to whether or not Palestine should be included in the program of the World Jewish Congress, to be an indication of the disagreements and party battles which might take place in calling the parley… Mr Sokolow presents an alternative plan, according to which all shades of Jewry would be called upon to construct a Jewish body for Jewish self-defense, the execution of well considered, carefully formulated plans of such a body, which would include all Jewish groups with the exception of the avowed assimilationists, would bring much good, Mr. Sokolow believes. [219]


Sokolow was also stalling because he was afraid of the attacks on the Ha'avara agreement that were sure to be made at a broad World Jewish Congress. Stephen Wise returned fire:

We were given warnings that support would be alienated for the World Jewish Congress if the [Geneva] Conference adopts a resolution against the Palestine-German transfer agreement. I do not fear this threat. The Jewish people are prepared to accept the guidance of Eretz Israel, but not commands or threats, when they conflict with the interests of all Jews. [220]


The conflict was painful to Wise; he had once thought along similar lines to Sokolow, but although he still thought of Palestine as the most positive side of Jewish life, he simply could not put Zionism so far ahead of the danger that threatened European Jewry.

I know very well some Zionist will say: only Eretz Israel interests me. Palestine has the primary place. I was the one who first used the word 'primary' some years ago; I had to withdraw the word 'primary' when I had the courage to say that though Palestine has the primary place in Jewish hopes, I cannot, as a Jew, be indifferent to the Galuth… if I had to choose between Eretz Israel and its upbuilding and the defense of the Galuth, I would say that then the Galuth must perish. But after all, the more you save the Galuth, the more you will ultimately do for Eretz Israel. [221]


The WJC movement continued to gain strength in spite of Sokolow's opposition; the Nazi pressure was too great, the ranks wanted their movement to do something, and when Wise reluctantly endorsed the Ha'avara at the 1935 World Zionist Congress, the idea of the WJC finally received formal sanction from the WZO. However, there was never much enthusiasm for the WJC within the WZO. Chicago's Jewish Chronicle, itself an opponent of the WJC movement, accurately described the lack of serious interest in the idea of a defence organisation, even as late as May 1936, almost three and a half years into the Third Reich:

individual leaders of the Mizrachi and the Jewish State Party have no faith or interest in the Congress… Hadassah is not roused on the matter, and the poll of the members of the Executive Committee of the Zionist Organization of America revealed… the majority is overwhelmingly opposed to the Congress. [222]


Despite the hostility of the right wing, the WJC had to come. This was now the period of the Popular Front; the Social Democrats and the Stalinists had finally learned the necessity for unity against Fascism in the wake of disaster, and the Zionists had to come up with a Jewish, equivalent or lose their small following among the Jewish workers, particularly in Poland, who were influenced by Popular Front notions. Labour Zionist support for Wise and Goldmann was enough to overcome the right wing, but the paradox was that the WJC was doomed to fail precisely when it suddenly threatened to turn into a genuine Popular Front.

'Centers about the Anti-Fascist Struggle Alone'

The American Communist Party (CPUSA) decided to back the World Jewish Congress as their leaders believed that once inside the movement they would not have any problem getting the honest Zionist ranks to focus their primary attention on the Nazi menace rather than Palestine. But admitting the pro-Arab CPUSA was out of the question for Wise. The fight against Hitler was important, but Palestine and Zionism were ultimately more important. His Congress Bulletin came out flatly against letting the Communist Party in:

Although the struggle against anti-Semitism and Fascism will, of necessity, be one of the chief issues on the agenda of the Congress… the problems with which the World Jewish Congress will deal… will also include the upbuilding of Palestine and the struggle for religious and cultural freedom for Jews in all countries… The instructions under which the American Jewish Communists are trying to find their way into all coordinated Jewish efforts, centers about the anti-Fascist struggle alone… the 'Morning Freiheit' could easily spare itself the trouble of even considering the question of the participation of the Jewish Communists. [223]


The World Jewish Congress finally held its foundation congress in Geneva in August 1936. A pro Communist American delegation attended, in the hope that they would win last minute admittance in a floor fight, but it was to no avail. The meeting passed a boycott resolution against the Nazis, but there was never any serious effort to establish it. Weizmann's loyal lieutenant in the USA, Louis Lipsky, the President of the Zionist Organisation of America, had only reluctantly agreed to the idea of holding the Congress; taking real action against Hitler was far more than he and his cohorts were prepared to accept. A correspondent for World Jewry described Lipsky's scuttling of the one anti-Nazi action that the Congress thought to take:

The general boycott resolution… was adopted unanimously… but when it came to the question of giving practical effect to the resolution, then it was that the opposition made itself felt. The Commission had drawn up a resolution demanding the creation of a special department for boycott work… To this certain American delegates, led by Louis Lipsky, strongly objected… it is clear that the responsible authorities are not enamoured of the proposal and I am inclined to doubt if they really intend to give it practical effect.


The observer went on to describe the Congress as 'confused as to its means and lacking just that touch of inspired leadership that might have made its advent a turning point in Jewish history’. [224]

The magazine’s gloomy description was fully justified. This was a conclave primarily of professional Zionist leaders; these were not the people to build a serious boycott or do anything else to fight Hitler. Without unity with the assimilationalist Jews, including the Communists, as well as Gentile anti-Nazis, they could never begin to harm the Nazis either through the boycott or any other way. Their refusal to work with the Stalinists was not because of hostility to the regime in the Soviet Union. Zionism was banned there, the Hebrew language was seen as alien to the real lives of the Jewish masses, but none of them saw the Soviet Union as anti-Semitic; on the contrary. When Stephen Wise was asked to join John Dewey’s commission to investigate Stalin's charges that Trotsky was a Nazi agent, he declined. Trotsky had called Stalin an anti-Semite and that, Wise insisted, was so obviously untrue that it made everything else he said equally suspect.

Who was Trotsky? According to MacLean, Trotsky was not Russian, but German. Odd as this assertion may appear it does coincide with other scraps of intelligence information: to wit, that Trotsky spoke better German than Russian, and that he was the Russian executive of the German "Black Bond." According to MacLean, Trotsky in August 1914 had been "ostentatiously" expelled from Berlin; he finally arrived in the United States where he organized Russian revolutionaries, as well as revolutionaries in Western Canada, who "were largely Germans and Austrians traveling as Russians." MacLean continues:

Originally the British found through Russian associates that Kerensky, Lenin and some lesser leaders were practically in German pay as early as 1915 and they uncovered in 1916 the connections with Trotsky then living in New York. From that time he was closely watched by ... the Bomb Squad. In the early part of 1916 a German official sailed for New York. British Intelligence officials accompanied him. He was held up at Halifax; but on their instruction he was passed on with profuse apologies for the necessary delay. After much manoeuvering he arrived in a dirty little newspaper office in the slums and there found Trotsky, to whom he bore important instructions. From June 1916, until they passed him on [to] the British, the N.Y. Bomb Squad never lost touch with Trotsky. They discovered that his real name was Braunstein and that he was a German, not a Russian.

Such German activity in neutral countries is confirmed in a State Department report (316-9-764-9) describing organization of Russian refugees for revolutionary purposes.

Continuing, MacLean states that Trotsky and four associates sailed on the "S.S. Christiania" (sic), and on April 3 reported to "Captain Making" (sic) and were taken off the ship at Halifax under the direction of Lieutenant Jones. (Actually a party of nine, including six men, were taken off the S.S. Kristianiafjord. The name of the naval control officer at Halifax was Captain O. M. Makins, R.N. The name of the officer who removed the Trotsky party from the ship is not in the Canadian government documents; Trotsky said it was "Machen.") Again, according to MacLean, Trotsky's money came "from German sources in New York." Also:

generally the explanation given is that the release was done at the request of Kerensky but months before this British officers and one Canadian serving in Russia, who could speak the Russian language, reported to London and Washington that Kerensky was in German service

Trotsky was released "at the request of the British Embassy at Washington ... [which] acted on the request of the U.S. State Department, who were acting for someone else." Canadian officials "were instructed to inform the press that Trotsky was an American citizen traveling on an American passport; that his release was specially demanded by the Washington State Department." Moreover, writes MacLean, in Ottawa "Trotsky had, and continues to have, strong underground influence. There his power was so great that orders were issued that he must be given every consideration."

The theme of MacLean's reporting is, quite evidently, that Trotsky had intimate relations with, and probably worked for, the German General Staff. While such relations have been established regarding Lenin — to the extent that Lenin was subsidized and his return to Russia facilitated by the Germans — it appears certain that Trotsky was similarly aided. The $10,000 Trotsky fund in New York was from German sources, and a recently declassified document in the U.S. State Department files reads as follows:

March 9, 1918 to: American Consul, Vladivostok from Polk, Acting Secretary of State, Washington D.C.

For your confidential information and prompt attention: Following is substance of message of January twelfth from Von Schanz of German Imperial Bank to Trotsky, quote Consent imperial bank to appropriation from credit general staff of five million roubles for sending assistant chief naval commissioner Kudrisheff to Far East.

This message suggests some liaison between Trotsky and the Germans in January 1918, a time when Trotsky was proposing an alliance with the West. The State Department does not give the provenance of the telegram, only that it originated with the War College Staff. The State Department did treat the message as authentic and acted on the basis of assumed authenticity. It is consistent with the general theme of Colonel MacLean's article.

-- Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony C. Sutton


There is no doubt that Wise and his associates thought there would be war and they wanted to see the United States, Britain and the Soviets united against Hitler; they had no confidence in the masses stopping Nazism and, consistent with their reliance on the ruling classes to solve the Jewish question, they saw an alliance of the Great Powers as the only possible weapon against Hitler. Despite their enthusiasm for an alliance between their ruling-class patrons and Stalin, the members of the American Jewish Congress were not economic radicals and had no desire to involve themselves with their own local Communist party. That and the pro-Arab Communist line ruled out any association with the CPUSA. The lack of political realism in the World Jewish Congress flowed out of the marginal nature of Zionism in the real life of world Jewry. The more the Zionists worked for remote Palestine, the less they involved themselves in the real struggles of the Jewish masses. When a mass street movement became imperative, the WJC had neither the desire nor the experience to run such a struggle nor the willingness to learn.

Between the 1936 World Jewish Congress and the Stalin-Hitler pact, the CPUSA membership increased to 90,000 and had a union following of over a million. It became politically much more important than Wise’s American Jewish Congress or the American Zionist movement. Certainly the Communists and the Zionists had great differences. Each had severe limitations, and clearly much more than a boycott was required to beat Hitler, but there can be no doubt that an alliance between the two forces would have galvanised the Jewish community in America, and many non-Jewish anti-Nazis would have moved together with them. Whether such a coalition would have been effective is another matter, but the WJC's refusal to take in the Communist Party was a tremendous blow to the Jewish struggle against Hitler. The desperately needed united Jewish front became another tragic sacrifice to Zionism.

_______________

Notes:

218. Shlomo Shafir, 'American Jewish Leaders and the Emerging Nazi Threat (1928-1933)', American Jewish Archives (November 1979), p. 175.

219. 'Doubt Wisdom of Convening World Congress', Jewish Daily Bulletin (11 February 1934), pp. 1, 12.

220. 'Jewish World Conference', South African IvH (September 1934), p. 1.

221. 'Rabbi Wise', New Palestine (14 February 1934), pp. 5-7.

222. 'Foredoomed to Fail', Chicago Jewish Chronicle (1 May 1936), p. 8.

223. 'Communists Take Note', Congress Bulletin (13 March 1936), p. 2.

224. 'Was the Congress Worthwhile?', World Jewry (21 August 1936), p. 67.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:22 am

10. ZIONIST-REVISIONISM AND ITALIAN FASCISM

Menachem Begin's surprising rise to power in 1977, after a lifetime of opposition within the Zionist movement, quite naturally created considerable interest in his personal career. However, Begin himself, for all his present fame and power, would still refer to himself as nothing more than a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of his tendency and the man he considers the greatest Jew since Herzl.

The creator of the Jewish Legion and the founder of the Haganah (Defence), Jabotinsky is the Revisionists' acclaimed hero. Yet at his death in New York's Catskills in August 1940, he was the most despised ideological thinker in the Jewish political world. Typical of the style of the man was the extraordinary Ukrainian pact he engineered in a hotel room in Prague in August 1921. He had travelled to Prague for a World Zionist Congress, and he had a visitor there, an old friend, Maxim Slavinsky, Simon Petliura's ambassador. The regime in the Ukraine had collapsed. Petliura, caught between Polish imperialism and Bolshevism, had let Poland take Ukrainian lands in return for arms against the Red Army, but the aid was to no avail and the remnants of his army had to flee into Polish-occupied Galicia. Slavinsky told Jabotinsky of the latest plan: the 15,000 remaining troops would attack the Soviet Ukraine in 1922. The ambassador of the notorious pogromist Petliura government and the organiser of the Haganah worked out a secret agreement. Jabotinsky, on his own, without reference to the WZO, pledged to work within his movement to organise Zionist police to accompany Petliura's troops in their raid. They were not to fight the Red Army, but would guard the Jews of the towns captured by the very soldiers that would bring them into the region.

The pact was disclosed by the Ukrainians to prove that they had changed their ways. The WZO was aghast, and Jabotinsky had to defend himself against all Jewish opinion, which could not stomach any association with the discredited murderer. In the end the incursion never came off; France withdrew its subsidy, and the nationalist force disintegrated. Jewry divided between those who regarded Jabotinsky as a fool or a villain; everywhere the Communists used the pact to discredit Zionism among Jews, but Jabotinsky was unrepentant. He would have done the same for the Leninists, if only they had asked:

A Jewish gendarmerie with the White Army, a Jewish gendarmerie with the Red Army, a Jewish gendarmerie with the Lilac and Peagreen Army, if any; let them settle their quarrels, we shall police the towns and see to it that the Jewish population should not be molested. [225]


The Poale Zionists demanded an investigation, as they claimed the agreement had endangered the legality of their own barely tolerated organisation in the Soviet Union, but Jabotinsky had travelled to the United States on a seven-month lecturing tour and the investigating panel could not be scheduled until 18 January 1923. In the end the hearing was never held, as Jabotinsky suddenly resigned from the WZO the night before he was to testify. He always claimed that his resignation had nothing to do with the pending inquiry, and insisted that he resigned due to a running dispute concerning relations with Britain, but few believed him. He reentered the ranks shortly after, but his opponents saw no further point in officially pursuing the matter as he no longer had any position within the movement. When he began to organise his new tendency the attacks resumed, and for the rest of his life he had to defend his escapade. But throughout his career Jabotinsky was noted for his imperious contempt for his critics; he simply told the hostile world that 'When I die you can write as my epitaph -- ''This was the man who made the pact with Petliura".' [226]

'We Want a Jewish Empire'

Jabotinsky returned to the now wary WZO in 1923 as the far-right opponent of the leadership, determined to 'revise' their stance; he denounced Weizmann for not demanding the reconstitution of the Jewish Legion. He had also seen Churchill separate Trans-Jordan from the Jewish 'National Home' in Palestine, and when the WZO reluctantly accepted Churchill's decision he had only gone along out of a sense of discipline but thenceforward the claim that Jordan was eternally Jewish became the idee fixe of his new programme: 'One side of the Jordan is ours—and so is the other'. So goes Shtei Gadot, the song still most commonly identified with the Revisionist movement.

Jabotinsky never shared the naive illusion that the Palestinians would some day welcome foreign domination of their country. At a time when Ben-Gurion and his friends still thought they could convince the Palestinian masses to accept Zionism as in their own interest, Jabotinsky developed his own blunt thesis in an article, The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), written in 1923:

Zionist colonisation must be either terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population -- an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs… A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future. [227]


He had nothing but ridicule for the Zionist leaders who mouthed peace while demanding that the British Army protect them; or their hope of an Arab ruler (the favoured candidate was Faisal of Iraq) who would deal with them over the heads of the Palestinians and impose them on the natives with an Arab bayonet. He repeated over and over that there could be only one way to a Zionist state:

If you wish to colonise a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some 'rich man' or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else -- or else, give up your colonisation, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonisation, colonisation is impossible, not 'difficult,' not 'dangerous', but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot -- or else I am through with playing at colonisation. [228]


Jabotinsky understood that, for the moment, the Zionists were too weak to hold off the Arabs without the backing of the British, and Revisionism became loudly Empire loyalist. In 1930 Abba Achimeir, the ideologue of their Palestinian branch, proclaimed their interest lay 'in expanding the British empire even further than intended by the British themselves'. [229] However, they had no intention of hiding behind the British any longer than necessary. In 1935 a Jewish Communist journalist encountered Jabotinsky on board an ocean liner on his way to the United States and obtained an interview with him. Robert Gessner's article in the New Masses became the talk of Jewish America.

He announced he would speak frankly, so that Revisionism would be made clear… 'Revisionism', he began, 'is naive, brutal and primitive. It is savage. You go out into the street and pick any man -- a Chinaman -- and ask him what he wants and he will say one hundred per cent of everything. That’s us. We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or French on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire.’ [230]


'He had Caught a Glimpse of the Great Secret of Politically Minded Peoples'

Despite its members' enthusiasm for the British Empire, eventually Revisionism had to look elsewhere for a new imperial protector. Britain was not willing to do more than guard the Zionists, and not too effectively at that, and the Zionists had to buy land inch by inch. Nor could anyone seriously believe that Britain would ever give Trans-Jordan to the Zionists. The Revisionists therefore began to look for a new Mandatory firmly committed to a more ruthless policy towards the Arabs and therefore willing to back the construction of a Zionist garrison-state. Italy seemed the obvious answer, not because of any sympathy for Fascism, but because of Italy's own imperial aspirations. Jabotinsky had been a student in Italy and he loved the old liberal-aristocratic order. In his own mind he was the Jewish Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi all rolled into one, and he could not see anything wrong with the liberal traditions that Mussolini so thoroughly repudiated. In fact he sneered at Fascism. In 1926 he wrote:

There is today a country where 'programs' have been replaced by the word of one man… Italy; the system is called Fascism: to give their prophet a title, they had to coin a new term -- 'Duce' -- which is a translation of that most absurd of all English words—'leader’. Buffaloes follow a leader. Civilized men have no leaders. [231]


Yet, despite Jabotinsky's broad-mindedness, his own style came to mimic the militarism of Mussolini and Hitler. His novel Samson, published in 1926, remains one of the classics of totalitarian literature.

One day, he was present at a festival at the temple of Gaza. Outside in the square a multitude of young men and girls were gathered for the festive dances… A beardless priest led the dances. He stood on the topmost step of the temple, holding an ivory baton in his hand. When the music began the vast concourse stood immobile… The beardless priest turned pale and seemed to submerge his eyes in those of the dancers, which were fixed responsively on his. He grew paler and paler; all the repressed fervor of the crowd seemed to concentrate within his breast till it threatened to choke him. Samson felt the blood stream to his heart; he himself would have choked if the suspense had lasted a few moments longer. Suddenly, with a rapid, almost inconspicuous movement, the priest raised his baton, and all the white figures in the square sank down on the left knee and threw the right arm towards heaven -- a single movement, a single, abrupt, murmurous harmony. The tens of thousands of onlookers gave utterance to a moaning sigh. Samson staggered; there was blood on his lips, so tightly had he pressed them together… Samson left the place profoundly thoughtful. He could not have given words to his thought, but he had a feeling that here, in this spectacle of thousands obeying a single will, he had caught a glimpse of the great secret of politically minded peoples. [232]


The wish for a more determined Mandatory easily overcame Jabotinsky's distaste for Italy’s internal regime, and many of his recruits had never had any difficulties with Fascism’s domestic style. By the mid-1920s he had attracted several ex-Labour Zionists who turned savagely on their former comrades and Mussolini became their hero. In August 1932, at the Fifth Revisionist World Conference, Abba Achimeir and Wolfgang von Weisl, the leaders of Palestine's Revisionists, proposed Jabotinsky as Duce of their one faction of the WZO. He flatly refused, but any contradiction between himself and the increasingly pro-Fascist ranks was resolved by his moving closer to them. Without abandoning his previous liberal rhetoric, he incorporated Mussolini’s concepts into his own ideology and rarely publicly criticised his own followers for Fascist-style assaults, defending them against the Labour Zionists and the British.

The argument has been made that Revisionism as such was not Fascist because there were legitimate differences within the ranks and that ultimately decisions were made by vote at conventions or by means of the plebiscite. In reality, it is difficult to think of how much more undemocratic the movement could have been without it formally becoming a proper Fascist grouping. By 1932-3 Jabotinsky had decided that it was time for them to withdraw from the WZO, but most of the Executive of their world union were opposed as they saw nothing to be gained by splitting. He suddenly cut the debate off by arbitrarily taking personal control over the movement and letting the ranks choose between him and the superseded Executive in a plebiscite. A letter written in December 1932 demonstrates that he knew full well in what direction he was leading the organisation: 'The time has apparently come when there must be a single, principal controller in the movement, a "leader”, though I still hate the word. All right, if there must be one, there will be one.’ [233]

Jabotinsky knew he could not lose the vote; to the tens of thousands of youthful Betar brownshirts he represented the militarism they wanted against an Executive of the same genteel bourgeoisie as the Weizmann clique. It was always the Betar youth group that was the central component of Diaspora Revisionism. The semi-official History of the Revisionist Movement declares that, after a discussion of whether to set up on a democratic basis, the decision was taken for a 'hierarchic structure of a military type'. [234] In its classic form the Betar chose its Rosh Betar (High Betar), always Jabotinsky, by a 75 per cent majority vote, he picked the leaders of the national units; they, in turn, selected the next lower leaders. Opposition was allowed, but after the purge of the moderates in the early 1930s the only serious internal critics were sundry 'maximalists', extremists who would complain, at various times, that Jabotinsky was not a Fascist, or was too pro-British or was insufficiently anti-Arab. When the average Betari put on his brownshirt he could be forgiven if he thought he was a member of a Fascist movement, and that Jabotinsky was his Duce.

The Jewish Bourgeoisie—the Only Source of our Constructive Capital

From the beginning the Revisionists saw the middle class as their clientele and they had a long hatred of the left. In 1933 a youth wrote to Jabotinsky asking why he had become so vehemently anti-Marxist; Jabotinsky wrote a remarkable article, 'Zionism and Communism', explaining their total incompatibility. In terms of Jewry, 'Communism strives to annihilate the only source of our constructive capital -- the Jewish bourgeoisie -- because their foundation is our root, and its principle is the class struggle against the bourgeoisie.’ In Palestine Marxism, by definition, meant the sharpest opposition to Zionism:

the essence of Communism consists in that it agitates and must incite the Eastern Nations against European dominance. This dominance in its eyes is 'imperialistic' and exploitative. I believe otherwise and think that European dominance makes them civilized, but that is an incidental question and does not belong to the matter. One thing is clear: Communism incites and must incite the Eastern Nations and this it can do only in the name of national freedom. It tells them and must tell them: your lands belong to you and not to any strangers. This is how it must speak to the Arabs and the Arabs of Palestine… For our Zionist lungs, Communism is suffocating gas and this is how you must deal with it. [235]


Typically for him, he jumped from a correct premiss to an incorrect conclusion. In logic, Zionism and Marxism are indeed incompatible, but it did not follow in life that those who did try to mix the two were really in the enemy camp. In practice, the Socialist-Zionist sacrifices socialism to Zionism, not the other way around, but Jabotinsky maintained that there was no substantive difference between the Communists and the Poale Zionists:

I do not believe that there is any difference between Communism and other forms of Socialism based on class views… The only difference between these two camps is one of temperament -- the one rushes ahead, the other is slightly slower: such a difference is not worth the value of the ink-drop necessary to describe it in writing. [236]


Jabotinsky's mind always ran to the linear. The capitalist class was the main force of Zionism; it followed, logically, that strikes repelled investment in Palestine. They might be acceptable in advanced industrial countries, their economies could take them, but not where the foundations of Zion were still being laid brick by brick. In exact imitation of the Italian Fascists, the Revisionists opposed 'both' strikes and lock-outs, with strikes being seen as the highest of crimes:

And by 'obligatory' arbitration we mean this: after the election of such a permanent board, recourse to it should be proclaimed as the only legitimate way of settling industrial conflicts, its verdicts should be final, and both strike and lockout (as well as boycott of Jewish labor) should be declared treasonable to the interest of Zionism and repressed by every legal and moral means at the nation's disposal. [237]


The Revisionists were not about to wait until they took state power to break their Labour rivals. Achimeir, their leader in Palestine (Jabotinsky had been barred from Palestine by the High Commissioner after Revisionist provocations had triggered the 1929 Arab explosion) flagrantly ran his Yomen shel Fascisti (Diary of a Fascist) in their paper. He had his equivalent of the Italian squadristi, the Brith HaBiryonim (Union of Terrorists), so styled after the ancient Sicar Si -- the dagger-wielding Zealot assassins active during the Judaean revolt against Rome -- and he whipped up the Revisionist youth for a final showdown with the Labour Zionists:

We must create groups for action; to exterminate the Histadrut physically; they are worse than Arabs… You're no students; you're just so much molasses… There isn't one among you capable of committing murder after the fashion of those German students who murdered Rathenau. You are not possessed of the nationalist spirit that dominated the Germans… Not one of you is capable of murder after the manner in which Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered. [238]


Palestine now witnessed the Zionists, in the shape of the Histadrut, driving thousands of Arabs out of their seasonal jobs in the Jewish orange groves and the Revisionist Fascists descending upon the Histadrut. But although the Arab workers still lacked the leadership to defend themselves the Histadrut was well organised. After a series of sharp clashes, including a decisive battle in Haifa, on 17 October 1934, when 1,500 Labour Zionists stormed the Revisionist headquarters and injured dozens of the Fascists, the Revisionist campaign withered away. The Histadrut ranks were quite willing to respond to the Fascist onslaught by carrying the fight to the enemy and crushing them, but the Labour Zionist leadership was as unwilling to fight Fascism in Palestine as anywhere else and let them escape their defeat out of fear that a serious battle would alienate Diaspora Zionism’s middle-class following.

The Revisionists' Relations with the Italian Fascists

In the early 1930s Jabotinsky decided to set up a party school in Italy and the local Revisionists, who openly identified themselves as Fascists, lobbied Rome. He knew well enough that picking Italy as the locale for a party school would only confirm their Fascist image, but he had moved so far to the right that he had lost all concern for what his 'enemies’ might think and he even emphasised to one of his Italian followers that they could set up their proposed school elsewhere but 'we… prefer to have it established in Italy’. [239] By 1934 the Italians had decided that, for all their friendliness to them, Sokolow and Weizmann and the WZO leadership had not the least thought of breaking with London. Nor were the Italians pleased at the growing ascendancy within the WZO of the Social Democratic Labour Zionists who were affiliated, however distantly, to their own underground socialist enemies. They were therefore quite willing to show support for the Revisionists who were evidently the Fascists of Zion. In November 1934 Mussolini allowed the Betar to set up a squadron at the maritime academy at Civitavecchia run by the Blackshirts.

Even after the Arlosoroff assassination in 1933 and the strike-breaking campaign organised by Achimeir against the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion still worked out a peace agreement with Jabotinsky in October 1934, but the Histadrut ranks rejected it and the Revisionists finally set up their own New Zionist Organisation (NZO). Jabotinsky asked his Italian supporters to arrange to have the first NZO world congress in Trieste in 1935, flaunting the fact that he did not care what people would think of his movement holding its foundation congress in Fascist Italy. [240] In the end the event was held in Vienna, but Jabotinsky visited the Civitavecchia academy after the Congress. Curiously, he never met Mussolini -- perhaps he was concerned to prove he still was not just another 'head buffalo'.

Although there is not one statement by Jabotinsky in which he called himself a Fascist, and innumerable proclamations of his Gladstonian credentials, every other major political tendency saw the Revisionists as Zionism's Fascists. Weizmann privately attributed Arlosoroff’s murder to their Fascist style; Ben-Gurion routinely referred to 'Vladimir Hitler' and even went so far as to call the Nazis the 'German Revisionists'. [241] Von Mildenstein told his readers of his encounter on board a ship with 'ein judischer Faschist', a Betari; he described the youths as 'the Fascist group among the Jews. Radical Nationalists, they are adverse to any kind of compromise on the questions of Jewish nationalism. Their political party is the Revisionists.’ [242]

The highest such accolade was from Mussolini who, in 1935, told David Prato, later to become chief rabbi of Rome, that: 'For Zionism to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky.' [243]

The majority of the movement thought of themselves as opponents of democracy and as Fascists or near sympathisers. Jacob de Haas, an intimate of Herzl’s, had converted to Revisionism in the mid-1930s and, to show that they were not 'just Jabotinsky’, he had presided at the Vienna NZO Congress. When he returned to America he gave his impressions of the gathering in his column in Chicago's Jewish Chronicle. After hastily reassuring his readers that he really was not defending Fascism, he told them they had to:

realize that democracy is a dead issue in most of Europe. Its chief exhibition in the common mind is the bluster and contrivance of endless parties and subparties… The delegates were not fascists, but having lost all faith in democracy they were not antifascist. They were however very anti-Communistic. [244]


If de Haas, in America, had to ease his sceptical readers into awareness that the majority of his movement had nothing but contempt for democracy, Wolfgang von Weisl, the financial director of the Revisionists, had no such hesitation about telling a diplomatic newspaper in Bucharest that 'although opinions among the Revisionists varied, in general they sympathized with Fascism’. He was positively eager to let the world know that 'He personally was a supporter of Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia as a triumph of the White races against the Black.’ [245] In 1980 Shmuel Merlin described his own feelings toward Mussolini in the mid-1930s, when he was the young Secretary-General of the New Zionist Organisation.

I admired him but I was not a fascist. He idealized war. I felt war was necessary, but to me it was always a tragedy… I did regret that Achimeir titled his column 'Diary of a Fascist', it just gave an excuse for our enemies to attack us, but it certainly did not break up our friendship. [246]


Whatever Jabotinsky might have thought he was leading, there can be no doubt that these three prominent members of the Revisionist movement were talking about a Fascist grouping. Von Weisl's evaluation seems quite reasonable; the Fascist component within the leadership was massive and it was they, not Jabotinsky, who ran the movement in Palestine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Latvia and Manchuria, at least. At the very best Jabotinsky must be thought of as a liberal-imperialist head on a Fascist body. Present-day Revisionists do not deny the presence of avowed Fascists in their movement in the 1930s; instead they overemphasise the distinctions between Jabotinsky and the Fascists. The academy at Civitavecchia, they allege, was but mere Mazzinism. Nationalists are allowed, they claim, to seek the aid of an imperialist rival of their own oppressor; surely, they insist, that does not therefore imply endorsement of the internal regime of their patron. They then point to Jabotinsky's admonition to the Betarim at Civitavecchia:

Do not intervene in any party discussions concerning Italy. Do not express any opinions about Italian politics. Do not criticize the present regime in Italy -- nor the former regime. If you are asked about your political and social beliefs answer: I am a Zionist. My greatest desire is the Jewish state, and in our country I oppose class warfare. This is the whole of my creed. [247]


This most diplomatic formula was calculated to please the Italian Fascists without antagonising any conservative supporters of the old regime whom a Betari might chance to encounter. Opposition to the class struggle was the litmus test for Mussolini, who was never particularly concerned whether his foreign admirers specifically thought of themselves as pure Fascists. However, Jabotinsky's letter to the Betarim was not the end of the story. His apologists omit the actual situation at the school where his strictures were ignored. The March 1936 issue of L'Idea Sionistica, the magazine of the Revisionists' Italian branch, described the ceremonies attendant to the inauguration of the Betar squad's new headquarters:

The order -- 'Attention!' A triple chant ordered by the squad's commanding officer -- 'Viva L'Italia! Viva Il Re! Viva Il Duce!' resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for the king and for Il Duce… 'Giovinezza' [the Fascist Party's anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm by the Betarim. [248]


We may be sure that the same chants were cried when Mussolini himself reviewed the Betarim in 1936. [249] Jabotinsky knew that his Italian followers were admirers of Mussolini, but when he was sent a copy of Mussolini's Dottrina del fascismo all he could say in rebuke was a mild: 'I am permitted to hope that we have the capacity to create a doctrine of our own, without copying others.' [250] And, for all his personal reservations about Fascism, he definitely wanted Mussolini as the Mandatory for Palestine, writing to a friend in 1936 that his choices ran to:

Italy or some condominium of less anti-Semitic states interested in Jewish immigration, or a direct Geneva [League of Nations] Mandate… Before June 30—July 15 I sounded alternative no. 1. Result: not yet ripe, not by a long shot. [251]


The Apocryphal Fascist Catechism

Five years in the penal islands is the usual punishment for political activity against Fascism. For smaller offenses, one to three years. Thus, one year in prison is the penalty for everyone found possessing the following satire which is being secretly circulated by the many thousands in Italy. It is called the "Catechismo fascista," the ten questions and answers being:

1. Who has created you?

Mussolini created me.

2. Who is Mussolini?

He is the eternal father.

3. Where is Mussolini?

Mussolini is in heaven, on the earth, in every part, and he resides in the Viminale.

4. Does Mussolini know everything?

Mussolini knows everything. He is omniscient.

5. Can Mussolini do everything?

He can do everything. He is omnipotent.

6. For what purpose did Mussolini create you?

Mussolini has created me to fight the Bolsheviki.

7. What are the verities revealed by Mussolini?

They are comprised in the Credo.

8. Do you know the Fascist Credo?

May I be damned if I don't.

9. Recite it.

"I believe in Mussolini, the almighty father, creator of Fascism and the Black Shirts, conceived post-bellum, born of Karl Marx and Gabriele d'Annunzio, came into this world under the Red Flag, was crucified, died and was buried, descended into hell, but on the third day was resurrected with a blackjack (manganello) in his right hand and a bottle of castor oil in his left. He conquered Rome and now sits on the Viminale to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the holy ghost Michele Bianchi, in the holy church of the seat of Fascism, and in the remission of the blackjack on the heads of the Bolsheviki, in the resurrection of the ax in the heads of the Socialists. I believe in the eternal life of Fascism. Amen."

10. Recite the Fascist paternoster.

"Our Mussolini who is on the Viminale, thy Will be done in the Montecitorio as in the Quirinal. Give us this day our daily squadristi and remit us our blackjacks as we remit them on the heads of our enemies. So be it.

"Blessed be the squadristi because theirs is the kingdom of Montecitorio. Blessed be the Fascisti, because theirs is the kingdom of the manganello. Blessed be those who accept Fascism because theirs is the kingdom of castor oil. Blessed be those who do not mingle in politics because they will never see the hospitals.

-- Sawdust Caesar, by George Seldes


Jabotinsky became Mussolini's defence attorney within the Jewish world. While he was visiting America in 1935 on a lecture tour he wrote a series of articles for New York's Jewish Daily Bulletin, a short-lived English-language Zionist paper devoted exclusively to Jewish affairs. In the 1930s, most Jews followed the common usage and referred to the fight against Hitler as part of the 'anti-Fascist struggle'; Jabotinsky was determined to put a stop to that, since he understood too well that as long as the Jews saw Hitler as another Fascist, they would never approve of the Revisionist orientation towards Mussolini. His brief for the Italian Fascist regime shows us exactly how he put his personal objections to the politics of a 'buffalo herd' far behind his growing commitment to his hoped-for Italian Mandatory:

Whatever any few think of Fascism's other points, there is no doubt that the Italian brand of Fascist ideology is at least an ideology of racial equality. Let us not be so humble as to pretend that this does not matter -- that racial equality is too insignificant an idea to outbalance the absence of civic freedom. For it is not true. I am a journalist who would choke without freedom of the press, but I affirm it is simply blasphemous to say that in the scale of civic rights, even the freedom of the press comes before the equality of all men. Equality comes first, always first, super first; and Jews should remember it, and hold that a regime maintaining that principle in a world turned cannibal does, partly, but considerably, atone for its other short-comings: it may be criticized, it should not be kicked at. There are enough other terms for cussing use -- Nazism, Hitlerism, Polizeistadt, etc. -- but the word 'fascismo, is Italy’s copy right and should therefore be reserved only for the correct kind of discussion, not for exercises in Billingsgate. Especially as it may yet prove very harmful. That government of the copy right is a very powerful factor, whose sympathy may yet ward off many a blow, for instance in the League of Nations councils. Incidentally, the Permanent Mandate Commission which supervises Palestinian affairs has an Italian chairman. In short -- though I don't expect street-urchins (irrespective of age) to follow advise of caution -- responsible leaders ought to take care. [252]


The Revisionists Rationalise their Links with the Fascists

The orientation towards Mussolini ended in total debacle. Blindly groping for a hammer against their Arab, British and Jewish foes, the Revisionists were the only ones who did not see what was coming. A photostat of a letter from Emir Shekib Arslan to the Mufti, concerning the spreading of pro-Italian propaganda, had appeared in the Palestine press in 1935 and by 1936 Radio Bari was blaring anti-British broadcasts at the Arabs. By then the Revisionists were so used to defending Mussolini that they simply would not acknowledge his collaboration with the Mufti and the Palestinian cause. As late as 1938 William Ziff, an advertising executive who headed American Revisionism, tried to play down the Italian involvement with the Mufti in his book, The Rape of Palestine.

In beautifully chosen words which inferred an anti-Jewish as well as an anti-British plot, the British Foreign Secretary pinned the whole blame on the Italians. The entire liberal press rose to the bait so dexterously flicked upon the water. Like a pack of dogs hot after game, the Marxist press aggressively took up the cry. [253]


Despite the fact that the Revisionists had clearly backed the wrong horse he continued:

There can be no doubt that Mussolini, a hard-fisted realist, would have considered it good business if he could have disengaged the Jews from the British orbit. A powerful independent Zion with which he was on a friendly footing would have suited him perfectly. The Jews themselves eliminated this prospect by their persistent Anglophilism, and Mussolini had come to regard Zionism as merely a mask for the creation of another zone of English political and economic expansion in the Mediterranean. It hence looms in the Italian mind as an anti-Italian force. Nevertheless, not a shred of real evidence has ever been offered to substantiate the charge that Italian intervention was a factor in the recent Arab revolt in Palestine. [254]


Eventually it was Spain, not Palestine, that persuaded Mussolini to support Hitler. Mussolini grasped that he and Hitler now had to stay united to ward off revolution elsewhere, and that it was only through an alliance with the German power that he could hope to expand his empire. But he also knew that it was impossible to be Hitler's ally and have Jews in his own party. He therefore concocted a Latinised Aryanism, expelled the Jews from the party and the economy, and geared up for war. The Revisionists declared that they were wrong for the right reasons.

For years we have warned the Jews not to insult the fascist regime in Italy. Let us be frank before we accuse others of the recent anti-Jewish laws in Italy; why not first accuse our own radical groups who are responsible for what happened. [255]


With Mussolini’s turn toward Hitler, the Revisionists’ own Fascism became an impossible liability in the Jewish world and when Jabotinsky died in New York in August 1940 they hastily dropped the title of Rosh Betar, which had become redolent of Fascism. They would not admit that they had been Fascist themselves, merely that no one could possibly fill Jabotinsky's shoes. Recent Revisionist choniclers naturally tend to avoid or play down the role of their internal Fascists, such as Achimeir, and Civitavecchia is usually passed over with little more than an exonerating 'the founders of the Israeli navy were trained there'.

'Among the most Disturbing Political Phenomena of our Time'

It is impossible to end a discussion of Revisionism and Fascism without mentioning briefly Begin's role during these events. His post-war books, The Revolt and White Nights, omit his own activities in the 1930s, and Jabotinsky is portrayed as a misunderstood exponent of military defence. But at the age of 22 Begin was prominent enough in the Polish Betar to sit with Jabotinsky on the presidium of the 1935 Polish Revisionist conference in Warsaw. By 1938 he was the dominant figure at the Betar's Warsaw world conference, and by 1939 he had been appointed head of Polish Betar. But, despite the fact that he has been called a Fascist by innumerable opponents, no specifically pro-Mussolini writings by him are ever cited and, by now, it must be presumed that none exist. However, if it is true that he never openly expounded Fascism, Yehuda Benari, director of the Jabotinsky Institute, and the author of the article on Begin in the Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, categorically states that in 1939 'he joined the radical wing of the Revisionist movement, which was ideologically linked with the B'rit HaBiryonim'. [256] Begin was a personal friend of Achimeir, who had been deported to Poland in 1935, as well as von Weisl, who frequently came to Warsaw to negotiate with the Polish government on behalf of the NZO. He was an intimate friend of Nathan Yalin-Mor and at that time an admirer of Avraham Stern, both committed totalitarians. Even after the Second World War, as the leader of the Herut Party in the new Israeli state, Begin had both Achimeir and von Weisl writing for their daily newspaper.

In December 1948, on the occasion of his first visit to the United States, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and others sent a letter to the New York Times exposing Begin’s politics.

TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants "240 men, women, and children" and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

(signed)

Isidore Abramowitz, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Brick, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Albert Einstein, Herman Eisen, M.D., Hayim Fineman, M. Gallen, M.D., H.H. Harris, Zelig S. Harris, Sidney Hook, Fred Karush, Bruria Kaufman, Irma L. Lindheim, Nachman Maisel, Symour Melman, Myer D. Mendelson, M.D., Harry M. Orlinsky, Samuel Pitlick, Fritz Rohrlich, Louis P. Rocker, Ruth Sager, Itzhak Sankowsky, I.J. Schoenberg, Samuel Shuman, M. Znger, Irma Wolpe, Stefan Wolpe

New York, Dec. 2, 1948

--New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachen Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed, Letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Isidore Abramowitz, Hannah Arendt, et al..


Given the record of his movement and his intimate associations with the openly Fascist elements of pre-war Revisionism, their evaluation of Begin's ideological commitment bears quotation:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the 'Freedom Party' (Tnuat HaHerut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties… They have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority… they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model… In the light of the forgoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts. [257]


_______________

Notes:

225. Joseph Schechtman, 'The Jabotinsky-Slavinsky Agreement', Jewish Social Studies (October 1955), p. 297.

226. Ibid., p. 306.

227. Marie Syrkin, 'Labor Zionism Replies', Menorah Journal (Spring 1935), p. 72.

228. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'The Iron Law', Selected Writings (South Africa, 1962), p. 26.

229. Yaacov Shavit, 'The Attitudes of the Revisionists to the Arab Nationalist Movement', Forum on the Jewish People, Zionism and Israel (Spring 1978), p. 102.

230. Robert Gessner, 'Brown Shirts in Zion', New Masses (19 February 1935), p. 11.

231. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Jewish Fascism', The Zionist (London, 25 June 1926), p. 26.

232. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Samson (American edn, entitled Prelude to Delilah), pp. 200-1.

233. Joseph Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p. 165.

234. Yehuda Benari and Joseph Schechtman, History of the Revisionist Movement, vol. 1, p. 338.

235. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Zionism and Communism', Ifadar (February 1941), p. 33.

236. Shlomo Avineri, 'Political Thought of Vladimir Jabotinsky', Jerusalem Quarterly (Summer 1980), p. 17.

237. Vladimir Jabotinsky, State Zionism, p. 10.

238. Syrkin, 'Labor Zionism Replies', p. 79.

239. Jabotinsky, letter to Leone Carpi, 7 October 1931, in D. Carpi, A. Milano and A. Rofe (eds.), Scritti in Memoria Di Leone Carpi, p. 42.

240. Ibid., 21 May 1935, pp. 54-5.

241. Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion (American edn), p. 67.

242. Leopold van Mildenstein, 'Ein Nazi fahrt nach Palastina', Der Angriff, (Berlin, 27 September 1934), pp. 3-4.

243. Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion -- The Armed Prophet, p. 46.

244. Jacob de Haas, 'New Struggles in an Old World', Chicago Jewish Chronicle (18 October 1935), p. 9.

245. 'Dr von Weisl Believes in Fascism', World Jewry (London, 12 June 1936), p. 12.

246. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980.

247. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Letter to Plugat Civitavecchia', Selected Writings (USA)

248. 'Supplemento al no. 8 di L'Idea Sionistica' (March 1936), p. 2.

249. Mussolini, My Husband (Italian film documentary).

250. Jabotinsky, 29 January 1934, Scritti, p. 52.

251. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p. 304.

252. Jabotinsky, 'Jews and Fascism -- Some Remarks - and a Warning', Jewish Daily Bulletin (11 April 1935), p. 3.

253. William Ziff, The Rape of Palestine (1938), p. 428.

254. Ibid., p. 429.

255. Paul Novick, Solution for Palestine (1939), p. 18.

256. Yehuda Benari, 'M'Nahum Begin', Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, vol. l, p. 116.

257. 'New Palestine Party', New York Times (4 December 1948) (Letters), p. 12.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:24 am

11. REVISIONISM AND NAZISM

Early in 1932, Norman Bentwich, the former Attorney-General of Palestine, and a Zionist, was honoured by the Hebrew University with a chair in International Law and Peace. As he started his inauguration lecture, shouts suddenly came out of the audience: 'Go talk peace to the Mufti, not to us’. He began again, but this time he was bombarded with a shower of stink bombs and leaflets announcing that the Revisionist students were opposed to both him and his topic, and the hall had to be cleared by the police. [258] At the very time that Hitler's brownshirts were breaking up meetings, it was inevitable that Jerusalem's Jewish public should see the brownshirted Betarim as their own Nazis. By 1926, Abba Achimeir had already written about the necessity of murdering their opponents, and when the students came up for trial, their barrister, a prominent Revisionist, cheerfully took on their characterisation of Jewish Nazism.

Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Otherwise it would have perished within four years. And if he had given up his anti-Semitism we would go with him. [259]


Certainly many of the Revisionist ranks throughout the world originally looked upon the Nazis as akin to themselves: nationalists and Fascists. In 1931 their American magazine, the Betar Monthly, had openly declared their contempt for those who called them Nazis.

When provincial leaders of the left-wing of petty Zionism like Berl Locker call us Revisionists and Betarim –Hitlerites, we are not at all disturbed… the Lockers and their friends aim to create in Palestine a colony of Moscow with an Arab instead of a Jewish majority, with a red flag instead of the White and Blue, with the 'Internationale' instead of the 'Hatikvah,… If Herzl was a Fascist and Hitlerite, if a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan, if a Jewish State in Palestine which will solve the economic, political, and cultural problems of the Jewish nation be Hitlerism, then we are Hitlerites. [260]


The Revisionists were Zionists and as such shared their movement's fundamental agreement with the Nazis that the Jews could never be real Germans. Nazism was inevitable and understandable. This view was well expressed by Ben Frommer, an American Revisionist in 1935. To Frommer, the Jew:

No matter what country he inhabits… is not of the tribal origins… Consequently the Jew's attempt at complete identity with his country sounds spurious; his patriotism despite his vociferousness, hollow even to himself; and therefore his demand for complete equality with those who are of the essence of the nation naturally creates friction. This explains the intolerance of the Germans, Austrians, Poles and the increasing tide of antagonism in most European countries… It is presumptuous on the part of a Jew to demand that he be treated as lovingly as say a Teuton in a Teutonic country or a Pole in a Polish country. He must jealously guard his life and liberty, but he must candidly recognize that he does not 'belong'. The liberal fiction of perfect equality is doomed because it was unnatural. [261]


Revisionist Flirtation with the Nazis

Like the other German Zionists, the Revisionists were exclusively concerned with Palestine, and during Weimar they made no effort to organise Jewish resistance to Hitler. When the Nazis finally came to power, the Revisionists interpreted the victory as a defeat for their own Jewish ideological rivals and a vindication of their own ideas, both Zionist and Fascist. They went one stage further than the rest of the ZVfD and the Rundschau and imitated the Nazis' style. The banker Georg Kareski, seeing his rich Catholic associates in the Centre Party working with or joining the triumphant Nazis, decided to show Hitler there were Zionists who shared the Nazis' ethos. He joined the Revisionists and quickly became a leader of the German movement and attempted a putsch at the Berlin Jewish community centre in May 1933. This has been described by Richard Lichtheim in his history of German Zionism. Kareski:

thought the Zionists had missed the opportunity to place themselves at the head of German Judaism through a revolutionary act. With the aid of a number of young people from 'Betar'… he 'occupied' the building of the Jewish community in 1933. He was quickly forced to clear out, however, since the members of the community refused to go along with this. The result of this foolish action was his expulsion from the ZVfD. At the outset Kareski probably believed that the spirit of the times demanded such an act and that the outmoded conceptions of the bourgeois-liberal Jews had to be altered in favor of national-Zionist views in this violent fashion. In the following years he fell into a rather questionable relationship of dependency on the Gestapo, to whom he sought to recommend himself and his Betar group as the real representatives of the radical Zionist point of view corresponding to National Socialism. [262]


This was too much for Jabotinsky. He had not paid much attention to Germany in the final Weimar years. Throughout the 1929-33 period his prime concern was dealing with the British proposals on Palestine which were a response to the brief but bloody massacres of 1929, largely triggered by Revisionist provocations at the Wailing Wall. As with many right-wingers, Jabotinsky did not think that Hitler in power would be quite as anti-Semitic as he seemed in opposition. Shmuel Merlin, Secretary-General of the NZO, has explained that: 'He was not panicky, he thought that Hitler would either reform or yield to the pressure of the Junkers and Big Business.' [263] However, by March 1933 Jabotinsky grasped that Germany was now the implacable foe of Jewry and he was appalled at the antics of Kareski. [264] He hastily wrote to Hans Block, Kareski's predecessor as Chairman of the German Revisionists:

I do not know exactly what happened, but any flirting with the Government or its representatives and ideas I would consider simply criminal. I understand that one can silently bear schweinerie; but to adapt oneself to schweinerie is verboten, and Hitlerism remains schweinerie in spite of the enthusiasm of millions which impresses our youth so much in a manner similar to that in which Communist enthusiasm impresses other Jews. [265]


'The Triple Alliance of Stalin-Ben-Gurion-Hitler'

Jabotinsky also had to deal with the problem of Achimeir’s Fascism in Palestine. Flirting with Mussolini had been acceptable, but a pro-Nazi line was an outrage. He wrote to Achimeir in the strongest terms in 1933,

The articles and notices on Hitler and the Hitlerite movement appearing in Hazit Ha'am are to me, and to all of us, like a knife thrust in our backs. I demand an unconditional stop to this outrage. To find in Hitlerism some feature of a 'national liberation' movement is sheer ignorance. Moreover, under present circumstances, all this babbling is discrediting and paralyzing my work… I demand that the paper join, unconditionally and absolutely, not merely our campaign against Hitler Germany, but also our hunting down of Hitlerism, in the fullest sense of the term. [266]


Jabotinsky had supported the anti-Nazi boycott from the beginning, and his denunciation of his followers in Palestine brought them into line; soon they, who had been praising Hitler for saving Germany, began to denounce the WZO for its refusal to take part in the boycott. The prime target of their attacks was Chaim Arlosoroff, the Political Secretary of the Jewish Agency, who was known to be negotiating with the Nazis. On 14 June 1933, Arlosoroff returned from Europe. On 15 June, Hazit Ha'am ran a furious attack on him by Yochanan Pogrebinski, The Alliance of Stalin-Ben-Gurion-Hitler. The curious title interconnects two of the central themes of the Revisionist line: the Labour Zionists were really plotting to set up a pro-Communist Arab regime and, at the same time, sell out the Jews to the Nazis. It is necessary to quote Pogrebinski's article at length, as it illuminates all subsequent events:

We have read… an interview with Mr. Arlosoroff… Among other meaningless words and stupidities in which this red mountbank excels, we find that the Jewish problem in Germany can be solved only by means of a compromise with Hitler and his regime. These men… have now decided to sell for money the honor of the Jewish People, its rights, its security and standing in the whole great world, to Hitler and the Nazis. Apparently these red charlatans were disturbed by the success of the boycott against German goods which was proclaimed by the great leader of the Jews in our generation, V. Jabotinsky, and which was supported by the Jews of the whole world…

The cowardice to which the Palestine Labor Party has stooped in selling itself for money to the biggest Jew-hater, has now reached its lowest point, and has no parallel in all Jewish history… Jewry will welcome the triple alliance of 'Stalin-Ben- Gurion-Hitler' only with repulsion and detestation… The Jewish people has always known how to deal with those who have sold the honor of their nation and its Torah, and it will know today also how to react to this shameful deed, committed in the full light of the sun, and before the eyes of the whole world. [267]


On the evening of 16 June, Arlosoroff and his wife took a stroll along Tel Aviv’s beach. Two young men passed them twice. Mrs. Arlosoroff became worried and her husband tried to calm her: 'they are Jewish, since when are you afraid of Jews?' Shortly afterwards they appeared again. “What time is it?" — one of them asked. A flashlight blinded us, and I saw a pistol pointed at us.’ [268] A shot rang out and Arlosoroff fell dead.

The British police had little difficulty with the crime. The murder took place on a beach; bedouin trackers were soon set to work. Two days later Avraham Stavsky and Zvi Rosenblatt, both Revisionists, were brought in for an identity parade. Mrs. Arlosoroff nearly fainted when she recognised Stavsky who, she claimed, held the flashlight. The police raided Abba Achimeir and found his diary. One of his notes told of a party held in his home immediately after the killing to celebrate a 'great victory’. This prompted the police to arrest him as the mastermind behind the assassination. [269]

The prosecution case was so strong that the defence was forced to resort to desperate measures. While the trio were in jail awaiting trial, an Arab, Abdul Majid, jailed for an unconnected murder, suddenly confessed the slaying, by claiming that he and a friend had wanted to rape Mrs. Arlosoroff. He soon recanted his confession, made it again and retracted it for a second time; he claimed that Stavsky and Rosenblatt had bribed him to make his statement. The case came to trial on 23 April 1934. Achimeir was acquitted without having to present a defence; the diary was not enough to prove prior conspiracy. After hearing Rosenblatt's defence, the court cleared him. Then, by 2 to 1, Stavsky was found guilty, and on 8 June was sentenced to be hanged. On 19 July the Palestine Court of Appeal acquitted him on a combination of technicalities. There had been procedural errors pertaining to the tracking. Once that evidence was thrown out, there was no longer any material corroboration to support Mrs. Arlosoroff's accusation. Palestine law, unlike British law, demanded such verification to corroborate the testimony of a single witness in a capital offence. The Chief Justice was plainly displeased; 'in England… the conviction would have to stand', and he denounced the defence for the bogus confession,

The whole interposition of Abdul Majid in this case leaves in my mind a grave suspicion of a conspiracy to defeat the end of justice by the suborning of Abdul Majid to commit perjury in the interests of the defence.' [270]


It was not until 1944 that new evidence turned up, but this was not made public until 1973. When Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner for the Middle East, was assassinated in Cairo in 1944 by two members of the 'Stern Gang', a Revisionist splinter group, a Palestinian ballistics expert, F.W. Bird, examined the murder weapon and found it had been used in no less than seven previous political slayings: two Arabs, four British police and the Chaim Arlosoroff murder. Bird explained, in 1973, that he: 'did not give evidence of the Arlosoroff connection at the time of the trial of the two murderers of Lord Moyne as the chain of evidence of the Arlosoroff exhibits had been broken during the eleven year gap’. [271]

The entire Revisionist movement, including Jabotinsky, categorically denied that any Revisionists were involved in the crime, but the Labour Zionists never doubted their guilt and when the Court of Appeal released Stavsky, a riot broke out between the two factions in the Great Synagogue of Tel Aviv which Stavsky attended. Throughout the Holocaust period the Arlosoroff murder was one of the Labour Zionists' principal reasons for denouncing the Revisionists. As Arlosoroff was a prime mover in establishing the Ha'avara agreement, the foundation of WZO policy towards the Nazis’ responsibility for the murder has important implications in considering relations between the Nazis and the Zionists. From the evidence in the case there seems little doubt that Stavsky and Rosenblatt did assassinate Arlosoroff, although in 1955 Yehuda Arazi-Tennenbaum, a former Labour Zionist, and a former Mandatory policeman who had worked on the case, announced that Stavsky was innocent and that the Arab was pressured to recant his confession. However, this testimony was extremely suspect, not least for the fact that it had taken him 22 years to come forth with it. [272] It is much less clear whether Achimeir plotted the murder. Certainly there is not the slightest evidence that Jabotinsky knew about the crime in advance. He claimed to believe in Abdul Majid's inherently improbable confession, but it is highly significant that in 1935 he insisted on inserting a clause into Betar’s fundamental principles: 'I shall prepare my arm to defend my people and shall not carry my arm but for its defence.’

Jabotinsky's Efforts to Maintain the Boycott

The immediate impact of the murder was to make a nonsense of Jabotinsky's efforts to sustain the anti-Nazi boycott at the August World Zionist Congress held in Prague. During the Congress, Jewish Telegraphic Agency despatches reported the police discovery of his letter to Achimeir, which threatened to expel him if he continued to praise Hitler. [273] This episode and the fact that he appeared in the Congress hall with a squad of brownshirt Betarim discredited Jabotinsky as some kind of Jewish Nazi. The Congress's decision to reject the boycott was moulded by several factors but, in general, the delegates felt whatever was wrong with Weizmann, Revisionist opposition to the WZO's German policy was deeply suspect and tarnished by their raving about the 'Stalin-Ben-Gurion' cabal to turn Palestine into an Arab Communist state.

However, Jabotinsky spoke for many besides his own narrow following when he argued for a struggle against Hitler. He knew there was never the remotest possibility of a modus vivendi between the Jews and Adolf Hitler. Jabotinsky understood that the German Jews were prisoners in Hitler's war against world Jewry. 'If Hitler's regime is destined to stay, world Jewry is doomed,' German Jewry was 'but a minor detail,' he wrote. [274]

After the congress defeated his resolution, 240 to 48, Jabotinsky held a press conference to denounce the Ha’avara and to announce the Revisionist Party as a temporary central body to run a world-wide anti-Nazi campaign. He expressed his willingness to work with the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League and other boycott forces, but he never contemplated any sort of mass mobilisation. He opposed what he called a 'negative’ boycott. His would be positive, emphasising 'buying… from more acceptable origins’. His office would give out 'exact descriptions of all articles recommended… addresses and telephone numbers of the shops where these articles are to be found’. [275] The Revisionists dutifully set up a 'Department of Economic Defence, in their Paris headquarters, but by 6 February 1934 Jabotinsky was already lamenting that he had to do all the work himself as:

the executive committee members shrank from saddling themselves with a job which could not be done without a fattish budget… all the work has been done by an unpaid secretary plus a half time typist lad.


Until he got some cash there would be no 'big public gestures (which would be very easy): the Jewish world has had enough of big appeals of this kind, unfollowed by systematic action'. [276] On 13 September 1935, at the New Zionist Organisation's founding congress, Jabotinsky was still talking about a boycott, but in the future tense: 'a Jewish Boycott Organisation, headed by himself is to be created'. [277] Jabotinsky's 'commercial advertising agency' could never inspire anyone as, at best, it would have produced a paper mountain. However, the Revisionists did do boycott work all over the world, but as classic sectarians they held their own anti-Nazi rallies in their stronghold in Eastern Europe. Alone they could accomplish nothing and inevitably they turned to more congenial activities directly pertaining to Palestine.

'There will be no War'

For all his subjective anti-Nazism, Germany was never Jabotinsky's prime focus. According to Shmuel Merlin, 'Jabotinsky did not feel that the Hitler regime was permanent or stable.' [278] There is a legend that he warned Jews of the coming Holocaust, and some of his statements do have a prophetic ring until closely scrutinised: 'it Hitler's regime is destined to stay, world Jewry is doomed'; but he thought the regime was unstable and was certain to collapse if it ever went to war. [279] His admirers quoted his constant theme: 'Liquidate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will liquidate you.' For all its oracular quality, he did not mean that Germany would conquer Europe or massacre the Jews. Merlin is accurate: "'Liquidate the Diaspora" did not refer to Hitler at all. Our main focus was always Poland and Eastern Europe.' [280] The slogan referred to the destruction of the economic position of the Jewish middle class in Poland, where it was being squeezed out by the spreading peasant co-operatives and driven out by pogroms organised by the Christian nationalist middle class.

In the 1930s, Jabotinsky never understood that Nazism was produced by an age of war and revolution, and had to go down in war and revolution. He convinced himself that the capitalists would never allow themselves to be dragged to their destruction in another war, and in 1939 he wrote to his sister: 'There will be no war; the German insolence will soon subside; Italy will make friends with the British… and in five years we will have a Jewish state.’ [281] He was living in Pont d’Avon in France in the summer of 1939, and in the last week of August he still was writing: 'There is not the remotest chance of war… The world looks a peaceful place from Pont d'Avon, and I think Pont d'Avon is right.' [282]

The Revisionist response to the Nazi take-over of Austria and Czechoslovakia had been feverish. At the Warsaw Betar World Congress in September 1938, 25-year-old Menachem Begin demanded the immediate conquest of Palestine. Jabotinsky knew this was impossible; they could never beat the British, the Arabs or even the Labour Zionists, and he ridiculed his over-zealous disciple, comparing his words to the 'useless screeching of a door'. [283] But by August 1939, reflecting the same desperation as the ranks, Jabotinsky concluded that, if the Revisionists could not immediately save the Jews in Europe, at least they could go down nobly and perhaps inspire the Jews by their gesture; thus he decided to invade Palestine, landing an armed boatload of Betarim on the beach at Tel Aviv. His underground force there, the Irgun (the organisation, from Irgun Zvei Leumi, National Military Organisation), would rise and seize Government House in Jerusalem, and hold it for 24 hours, while a provisional Jewish government was proclaimed in Europe and New York. After his own capture or death, it would operate as a government-in-exile. [284] The adventure's model was the 1916 Easter Monday rising in Ireland. There the leaders were executed after capture, but ultimately the rising triggered a British withdrawal from the southern part of the country. However, it is impossible to see how Jabotinsky's invasion could have convinced the Jewish population in Palestine, the majority of whom were his enemies, to rise up after his defeat. The sheer fantasy of the plan was revealed on the night of 31 August/1 September 1939. The British CID arrested the entire command of the Irgun while they sat debating whether to take part in the scheme and, within hours, Hitler’s armies marched into Poland, starting the war that Jabotinsky had just insisted would never happen. [285]

_______________

Notes:

258. Norman and Helen Bentwich, Mandate Memories, 1918-1948, p. 150.

259. Elis Lubrany, 'Hitler in Jerusalem', Weltbahne (Berlin, 31 May 1932), p. 835.

260. 'Jerusalem or Moscow—Herzl or Lenin', Betar Monthly (15 August 1931), pp. 2, 5-6.

261. Ben Frommer, 'The Significance of a Jewish State', Jewish Call (Shanghai, May 1935), pp. 10-11

262. Richard Lichtheim, Die Geschichte des Deutschen Zionismus, pp. 258-9.

263. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin 16 September 1980.

264. Ibid.

265. Joseph Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p. 217.

266. Ibid., p. 216.

267. Eliazer Liebenstein, The Truth About Revisionism (1935), pp. 51-3.

268. Sraya Shapiro, 'Arlosoroff Planned Revolt in 1932', Jerusalem Post (11 June 1958)' p. 4.

269. 'Revisionists in Palestine seek to explain away incriminating Testimony', Jewish Daily Bulletin (29 August 1933), p. 4.

270. 'Stavsky Appeal Allowed', Palestine Post (22 July 1934), p. 8.

271. 'Trace 1933 Murder Weapon to Stern Group Death Squad', Jewish Journal (10 August 1973).

272. 'Stavsky was Framed', Jewish Herald (South Africa, 24 February 1955), p.3.

273. Jewish Daily Bulletin (24 August 1933), p. 1.

274. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p. 214.

275. Ibid., pp. 218-19.

276. Ibid., pp. 219-20.

277. 'New Zionists Vigorous Policy', World Jewry (London, 13 September 1935), p. 13.

278. Interview with Merlin.

279. Jacob Katz, 'Was the Holocaust Predictable?', Commentary (May 1975), p. 42.

280. Interview with Merlin.

281. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, p. 366.

282. Ibid.

283. Daniel Levine, 'Dand Raziel, The Man and his Times', PhD Thesis, Yeshiva University, 1969, pp. 80, 2451.

284. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet, pp. 482-3.

285. Nathan Yalin-Mor, 'Memories of Yair and Etzel', Jewish Spectator (Summer 1980), p. 36.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 6:44 am

12. GEORG KARESKI, HITLER'S ZIONIST QUISLING BEFORE QUISLING

The fact that Jabotinsky opposed Hitler, and was able to convince Abba Achimeir to stop praising him, did not mean that all Revisionists accepted this position. Some Revisionists were still convinced that collaboration was the way forward for Zionism. The most notorious of these was Georg Kareski, whom (as we have seen) Jabotinsky tried to curb in 1933.

By 1919-20 Kareski had already disregarded the ZVfD's preoccupation with Palestine work and concentrated on Jewish community politics. In an age of declining faith, when many German Jews were opting for mixed marriages and atheism, those who clung to the sectarian Jewish community became even more inward-looking. In 1926 Kareski's introverted Zionist Judische Volkspartei, in alliance with other religious isolationists, was able to upset the reformed 'Liberal' German-nationalist leadership, and in January 1929, he became Chairman of the Berlin Jewish community. But his success was short-lived, and the liberals defeated him in November 1930. Kareski had entered German politics in the September 1930 Reichstag elections as a candidate of the Catholic Centre, which was attractive to him both for its concern for religious education and its social conservatism. With Hitler's coming to power, Kareski joined the Revisionists, which he now saw as the potential Jewish equivalent of the successful Nazis. They had been an insignificant faction within the ZVfD, gaining only 1,189 of the 8,494 votes in the delegate election for the 1931 World Zionist Congress. By 1933 the Revisionists were reduced to further futility by their division into rival cliques. Kareski, with his prestige as a notable member of the community, had no difficulty in becoming the leader of these dispirited forces and merging them into a new Staatzionistische Organisation.

In May 1933 he attempted his ludicrous putsch at the Berlin Jewish community centre and was expelled from the ZVfD. His career and his association with the Nazis developed further after the Revisionist split from the WZO, following the defeat of the anti-Nazi boycott at the Prague Congress. As the Revisionists were no longer de-facto a part of the WZO, the Palestine Office in Berlin was ordered to exclude Betarim from consideration for immigration certificates. The Revisionists responded by starting brawls at ZVfD meetings, shouting: 'You Marxist swine! You are all sympathizers of the Histadrut which belongs to the Second International!’ [286] As a result of this the ZVfD headquarters were temporarily closed in June 1934. By 6 August, one of the State Zionist leaders, Dr Friedrich Stern, sent the Nazis a letter explaining that the growth of their anti-Marxist youth group, the Nationale Jugend Herzlia, was stunted by their exclusion from emigration by the Palestine Office staffed by allegedly pro-Marxist Histadrut supporters from the ZVfD. Stern proposed that the Palestine Office be turned over to them. The ZVfD found out about the plot through Hechalutz spies in the Herzlia and through their own contacts in the regime and hence the scheme failed. [287] The Nazis quickly realised that if they gave the Palestine Office to the State Zionists the WZO would not give out any certificates in Germany. As long as the Nazis needed the WZO and the Jewish charities to organise the emigration, they could not impose a collaborator on the Jewish community. Kareski's campaign put Jabotinsky in an impossible position: while he was denouncing the WZO for the Ha'avara, his own movement in Germany was working for the Nazis, and he soon had to announce that from then on 'the wing of Zionism who share our Herzlian views also know that "Marxist" is a word never to be used in polemics'. [288]

The Nazis had decided on a general policy of favouring Zionists over non-Zionist Jews, and within that line they decided that open encouragement of the State Zionists rather than suppression of the 'Marxists' of the ZVfD would have to be their strategy. On 13 April 1935, the Gestapo notified the regular police that, henceforward, the State Zionists would receive:

exceptionally and always revocably, permission to let its members belonging to the 'National Youth Herzlia' and 'Brith Hashomrim' wear uniforms indoors… because the State Zionists have proven to be the organisation which had tried in any way, even illegally, to bring its members to Palestine, and which, by its sincere activity directed towards emigration, meets half-way the intention of the Reich Government to remove the Jews from Germany. The permission to wear a uniform should spur members of the German-Jewish organisations to join the State Zionist youth groups where they will be more effectively urged to emigrate to Palestine. [289]


Despite the relationship between the State Zionists and the Gestapo, Kareski was still welcome at the NZO Congress in Vienna in 1935.

When the Revisionists had decided to support the anti-Nazi boycott, they had formally disaffiliated their German unit in an effort to protect it; thus it was obvious that Kareski was there with the encouragement of the Gestapo to lobby against the boycott. The uneasy ranks wished to distance themselves from the State Zionists and they compelled a resolution that, under the circumstances, there was not and could not be a Revisionist movement in Germany. [290] Kareski made the mistake of travelling to the following Betar Congress in Cracow in the company of a known Jewish Gestapo agent, and some German Betarim reported them to Jabotinsky. [291] He was asked to leave, and Jabotinsky was compelled to call on him to defend himself publicly and deny any connection to the Nazis. [292] However, later, in 1936, he used Kareski as his go-between with the German publishing house holding the copyright to one of his books. Jabotinsky assumed no further responsibility for Kareski after Cracow, but as long as he remained in Germany Kareski was in contact with the minority within the world Revisionist movement, notably those around von Weisl in Vienna, who continued to agree with his pro-Nazi line.

'The Zionists as the "Racial Jews" have at least Given us a Formal Guarantee'

Kareski's repeated failure to get the German Jews to accept his approach never discouraged the Nazis from trying to impose him on the community. In late 1935, they forced him on the Reichsverband judischer Kulturbunde. These Culture Leagues had been set up to provide jobs for Jewish musicians, writers and artists who had been thrown out of their positions, and the Gestapo had decided that a genuine Zionist spirit would do the Leagues some good. [293] Benno Cohen of the ZVfD had been appointed assistant to their director, conductor Kurt Singer, but that was not enough: the performers were still really cultural assimilationists, and in October 1935 Kareski, who had nothing to do with the arts, was appointed to a more senior position than Singer, and Cohen was dismissed. The conductor told the Nazis that he would resign rather than work with Kareski, and the Leagues were closed down in an attempt to force them to accept Kareski. The refusal of the Jews to concur with Nazi policy gained attention in the Nazi press, and Hans Hinkel, the bureaucrat in charge of the Leagues, publicly explained his choice of a new director.

I have consciously allowed the Zionist movement to exert the strongest influence upon the cultural and spiritual activities of the Kulturbund because the Zionists as the Racial Jews, have at least given us formal guarantees of cooperation in acceptable form. [294]


The Zionists to whom Hinkel referred were the State Zionists, even less popular at that time than in 1931; realistically they did not number much more than a few score adult party members and 500 youth. [295] However, the Nazis made much of Kareski in their propaganda. As the former head of the Berlin Jewish community, the head of the State Zionists, and now the head of the Culture Leagues, he sounded a very impressive figure. Der Angriff interviewed him on 23 December:

I have for many years regarded a complete separation between the cultural activities of the two peoples as a condition for a peaceful collaboration… provided it is founded on the respect for the alien nationality… The Nuremberg Laws… seem to me, apart from their legal provisions, entirely to conform with this desire for a separate life based on mutual respect. This is especially so when one takes into account the order for separate school systems which has been issued previously. The Jewish schools fill an old political demand of my friends, because they consider that the education of the Jew in accordance with his traditions and his mode of life is absolutely essential. [296]


However, the Culture Leagues were too important to the Nazis as a model of cultural separatism to be abandoned because of Kareski, and eventually the Nazis allowed them to be reorganised without him. By 1937 Kareski and the Gestapo were ready for another manoeuvre. This time their target was the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (the Reich Representation of German Jews). Kareski formed an alliance with discontented conservative assimilationists within the Berlin community, and they proposed a programme whereby the State Zionists would take over the political work of the organisation and the religious congregations would run the charitable functions. Max Nussbaum, rabbi of the Great Jewish Congregation of Berlin, later told of the Nazi pressure for the Revisionist line. The Gestapo’s Judenkommissar, Kuchmann, took it into his head to become an expert on the Jewish question, reading every available book on modern Jewry. Now determined to do the right thing by his charges, he summoned Nussbaum.

As a result of his diligence, he suddenly fell in love with Revisionism, asserting to each of us who had the misfortune to be summoned to his office, that this was the only solution of the Palestine problem and constantly blaming official Zionism for being 'red’ and ‘left’. One day in the Spring of 1937, he called me to his office and told me bluntly that I had to take over the leadership of the Revisionist group, to make Revisionism more popular with German Jewry, to drop my propaganda for the 'Meineckestrasse-Zionism’ [ZVfD]… When I refused… he 'punished' me by a speaking and writing prohibition for one year. [297]


Again the attempt failed; foreign Jews could not be made to subsidise a German Jewish central organisation run by a traitor, and the Nazis backed down. As a consolation prize the Nazis, in spring 1937, made the Staatzionistische Organisation the only authorised Jewish representative for dealing with the German public-relief agencies. [298]

Kareski’s usefulness to the Nazis came to an end in July 1937, when a scandal was uncovered in his Iwria bank. He had been making illegal loans to members of its board and his personal friends, and he tried to cover himself with a cheque on the account of the Berlin Jewish community, making one of his clerks accept it with only his signature in violation of the requirement that it be countersigned. The cashier took the cheque under protest and notified the Berlin congregation. There is no evidence that Kareski personally profited from his manipulations –he used the loans as chits to gain allies within the Jewish community– but in the end the bank failed and Kareski decided to visit Palestine. [299]

His visit was not a success. On 6 October 1937, the German Jewish community in Haifa discovered that he was there and a large mob turned out to greet him, chasing him through the streets. He finally had to barricade himself into a house until he was rescued by the police. [300] The German Immigrants Association (the HOG) publicly accused him of seeking to be appointed leader of German Jewry with the aid of the Nazis, of trying to incite the murder of the ZVfD's chairman, of trying to destroy the Zionist organisation, and of corruption in his bank. Kareski made the mistake of denying the charges and insisting on a trial in the rabbinical courts. In June 1938 the court, headed by the chief rabbi, found the HOG's charges to be fully borne out by the evidence. [301] The decision effectively ended his active political career.

'A Jewish Legion to Protect the Jews in Palestine from Attack'

Despite Jabotinsky's disowning him, Kareski always had his apologists within the Revisionist movement. There had always been those who disagreed with Jabotinsky's anti-Nazism. If it was permissible for Jabotinsky to try to deal with Simon Petliura in the Slavinsky agreement when the Ukrainian Army had already butchered 30,000 Jews, why was a deal with Hitler unacceptable? Prior to Kristallnacht Hitler had killed no Jews as Jews. These Revisionists were convinced that Hitler's victory foretold a Fascist age and that the Jews simply had to understand that and come to terms with it. The circle around von Weisl, who was Jabotinsky's negotiator with the other authoritarian dictatorships in Eastern Europe, agreed with Kareski's approach. In 1936, von Weisl, apparently acting on his own, contacted the British Fascists and proposed a fantastic wartime alliance between Britain, Japan, Poland and Germany, together with a future Revisionist state, against the Soviets and the Arab and Asian colonial revolutions. [302]

It would be pleasant to report that the rabbinical court's decision finally ended Kareski's career, and that he died alone and hated, but on 2 August 1947, the 68 year-old Kareski was the chairman of a Revisionist health fund in Palestine. Some friends even tried to have a street named after him in Ramat Gan. [303] He even has his latter-day apologists who suggest that, given what we know of the abandonment of the Jews by the rest of the world, as soon as Hitler took over rapid emigration was the only solution.

Kareski, a classic Revisionist, albeit of an extreme brand, was a traitor to the German Jewish community. His vision ran to nothing more prophetic than a Revisionist state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates with Mussolini as its Mandatory protector. [304] He certainly did not foresee the Holocaust. In 1935 he was proposing a 25-year evacuation plan from Germany with 20,000 emigrants per year. His concern was to use the Jugend Herzlia as 'a Jewish Legion to protect the Jews in Palestine from attack' (my emphasis). [305]

It is not surprising that the Nazis used Kareski as their collaborator in Germany. His rival amongst the assimilationists, Max Naumann, was totally unacceptable for his insistence on full Jewish participation in the Third Reich. Kareski appeared before the Nazis as if sent by central casting: the caricature of the stage Jew, a crooked usurer, as zealous as any medieval rabbi to keep the Jews apart from unbelieving humankind, and at the head of a brownshirted emigrationist movement.

_______________

Notes:

286. 'Revisionists Cause Crisis in German Zionism', Palestine Post (25 June 1934), p. 1.

287. Herbert Levine, 'A Jewish Collaborator in Nazi Germany: The Strange Career of Georg Kareski, 1933-37', Central European History (September 1975), p. 262.

288. Vladimir Jabotinsky, 'Jews and Fascism', Jewish Daily Bulletin (11 April 1935), p. 2.

289. Kurt Grossmann, 'Zionists and non-Zionists under Nazi Rule in the 1930s', Herzl Yearbook, vol. IV (1961-2), pp. 341-2.

290. Author's interview with Shmuel Merlin, 16 September 1980.

291. Author's interview with Paul Riebenfeld, 17 January 1978.

292. 'See Kareski's Hand in Leader's Ousting', Congress Bulletin (24 January 1936), p. 4.

293. Levine, 'Jewish Collaborator in Nazi Germany', pp. 266-7.

294. 'Kareski Again', American Hebrew (21 February 1936), p. 406.

295. Solomon Colodner, Jewish Education under the Nazis, p. 111.

296. 'Georg Kareski Approves of Ghetto Laws -- Interview in Dr Goebbel's "Angriff '", Jewish Chronicle (London, 3 January 1936), p. 16.

297. Max Nussbaum, 'Zionism under Hitler', Congress Weekly (11 September 1942), p. 13.

298. A.M.H., 'The Jewish Year in the Diaspora', Palestine Post (5 September 1937), p. 5.

299. Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain, p. 213.

300. 'Mr Kareski Abused by Haifa Crowd', Palestine Post (7 October 1937), p. 3.

301. 'Kareski's Charge Dismissed,' Palestine Post (10 June 1938), p. 8.

302. Levine, 'Jewish Collaboration in Nazi Germany', p. 272.

303. Ibid., p. 253.

304. Ibid., p. 272.

305. Jacob de Haas, 'The Sharp End of the Axe', Chicago Jewish Chronicle (15 November 1935), p. 9.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:03 am

13. CHOOSING THE CHOSEN PEOPLE—THE DOCTRINE OF 'ZIONIST CRUELTY’

The statistics on Jewish emigration from Germany vary to some degree, depending on the authority, but broadly speaking they tally. Herbert Strauss, for one, estimates that there were 270,000-300,000 émigrés in all, of whom 30,000 perished in their presumed countries of refuge. [306] Yehuda Bauer reckons there were 44,537 legal emigrants to Palestine from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1938 – 'about 20 per cent' of all Jewish immigrants. [307] The Encyclopedia Judaica reckons 55,000 went to Palestine by 1939. [308] Fawzi Abu-Diab lists only 39,131 German immigrants from l919 to 1945, but his low German listing is qualified by Mandate and Jewish Agency categories of 'authorised travellers', 'stateless’ and 'unspecified’, many of whom were German domiciled in those years. [309] In comparison the Encyclopedia Judaica estimates 63,000 emigrants went to the United States, 40,000 to the United Kingdom, 30,000 to France, 25,000 to Belgium and 25,000 to Argentina. [310] The International Settlement in Shanghai took in about 16,000 from 1938 to 1941, and South Africa let in 5,000. [311]

It was the British, not the Zionists, who determined the immigration policy for Palestine, using a combination of political considerations –for example, an evaluation of the reaction of the Arabs, and relatively objective computations related to the absorptive capacity of the Jewish economy. Each year a quota would be set and the precious immigration certificates were given to the WZO. There were always political criteria for would-be immigrants. Communists were always barred and 6 per cent of the certificates had to be given to the anti-Zionist Agudaists but, on the other hand, £1,000 capitalists were always allowed entry over the quota. Until the 1936 Arab revolt compelled the Mandatory to drastically lower immigration, the Jewish Agency never seriously challenged London over the proposed figures or the economic rationales behind them.

The WZO's own immigration policy had slowly evolved. Before the First World War, most immigrants came from Russia, but the Bolshevik revolution eventually closed that source; in the post-war era it was Poland that provided the largest contingent of settlers. The anti-Semitic line of the Polish Endek government encouraged thousands of artisans and lower-middle-class Jews to consider emigration. Refused entry to America because of its new immigration restrictions, they turned to Palestine, and their capital influx soon produced a land boom as Tel Aviv lots were hawked in the market-places of Warsaw. The Jewish National Fund, which organised the agricultural colonies of the WZO, was also compelled to pay exorbitant prices for its own land requirements. Tel Aviv did expand as a result of the new immigration, but primarily as independent Polish artisans moved in: the old patriarch with his extended family working a few handlooms. The Poles were solving their own problems, but their tiny establishments could never become the basis of a Zionist economy, an absolute essential if they were ever to wrest the country from the Arabs. Eventually the land boom collapsed, leading to the ruin of many of the little shopkeepers and large unemployment in the building trades; although the fall in prices suited the JNF, they now had to cope with the needs of the unemployed.

The experience produced drastic policy changes, and it was determined that they could not afford the social costs of petty-bourgeois immigration. As early as 1924 Weizmann began to denounce the new settlers, whom he saw as carrying with them 'the atmosphere of the ghetto’, and he warned that 'we are not building our National Home on the model of Djika and Nalevki… here we have reached home and are building for eternity'. [312]

It was the policy of 'no Nalevki' –the great ghetto of Warsaw– that turned Zionism away from the mass of ordinary Jews, who were not Zionist for the most part, and even from the ranks of the Diaspora Zionist movement. They lacked the skills and resources needed in Palestine, and henceforward Zionism would no longer serve them; immigrants would be selected strictly to the advantage of Zion. In Palestine itself the WZO decided that the unemployed should be encouraged to reemigrate so as to save the outlay on unemployment benefits. [313] Strong preference began to be shown for the collectivist kibbutzim of the Labour Zionist tendencies as an alliance developed between Weizmann's circle, who, though bourgeois themselves, were desperately looking to cut the costs of colonisation, and the leftists who had a vision of a generation of 'healthy' Jews, no longer in 'Diaspora' occupations, building a socialist nation on its own land. Their youthful pioneers had turned their backs on the values of their middleclass families and would endure great economic privations for the good of the cause. Zionism became a tough-minded utopia which helped the image of the Jew, but did not attempt to solve any of the problems of the Jewish masses in Europe.

'The Cruel Criteria of Zionism'

The week of terror unleashed against the Jews by the Nazis' victory in the elections of March 1933 had brought thousands on to the streets outside the Palestine Office in Berlin, but there was still no desire to turn Palestine into a genuine refuge. Emigration had to continue to serve the needs of Zionism. Only young, healthy, qualified and committed Zionists were wanted. The German HaChalutz Pioneers declared unrestricted emigration to Palestine to be a 'Zionist crime'. [314] Enzo Sereni, then the Labour Zionist emissary in Germany, laid down their criteria:

Even in this difficult hour we must allot most of the 1,000 immigration certificates to pioneers. This may seem cruel, but even if the British were to grant 10,000 certificates instead of the 1,000 they are giving us now, we would still say: Let the young people go, for even if they suffer less than the older ones, they are better fitted for the task in Palestine. Children can later bring their parents, but not the other way around. [315]


Weizmann had overall charge of emigration from Germany between 1933 and his re-election to the presidency in 1935. His report in January 1934 listed some of the standards used for choosing prospective immigrants. Those who were 'over 30, and possess no capital and no special qualifications cannot be absorbed in Palestine unless specific openings for the work they did in Germany are found'. [316] On 26 April he specifically excluded several important groupings from serious consideration as immigrants: 'former businessmen, commercial travellers, artists, and musicians will this time hardly be eligible for certificates'. [317] Most German Jews were simply not wanted in Palestine, they were either too old, or their occupation did not fit the country's needs, or they spoke no Hebrew and were not committed ideologically. Among themselves the Zionist leadership was quite frank about what they were doing. In 1933 Berl Katznelson, then editing the Histadrut's daily newspaper, Davar, reflected their mentality: 'we know that we are not able to transfer all of German Jewry and will have to choose on the basis of the cruel criteria of Zionism’. In 1935 Moshe Sharett (Shertok) again declared that circumstances obliged them to treat Diaspora Jewry with a degree of cruelty.' [318] The Israeli scholar Abraham Margaliot has written about a speech given by Weizmann before the Zionist Executive in 1935:

he declared that the Zionist movement would have to choose between the immediate rescue of Jews and the establishment of a national project which would ensure lasting redemption for the Jewish people. Under such circumstances, the movement, according to Weizmann, must choose the latter course. [319]


The British – reacting to Arab pressures against all immigration, and diplomatic interventions from Poland, Romania and other anti-Semitic regimes in Eastern Europe in favour of increased quotas, as well as the economic needs of the country – determined just how many and what economic categories of Jews could enter in any given year. However, the British never required anyone to know Hebrew, nor did they care if a would-be immigrant was a non-Zionist. Nor did they concern themselves with where the immigrants came from; London would have been pleased if the WZO had chosen fewer Americans and more Germans. Given the political realities of the Mandate, Zionist emigration could never have been the way out for the entire German Jewry but, within the strictures imposed by the British, Zion did not ever want to be the salvation of German Jewry.

Who, then, were given certificates by the fourteen Palestine Offices around the world? According to Abu-Diab’s statistics, 27,289 Jews entered Palestine as legal immigrants in 1933; 36,619 in 1934; and 55,407 in 1935, making a total of 119,315 for the three-year period. Of these 18,206 were listed as German. [320] Additional immigrants who had been domiciled in Germany came in as Poles and other nationalities. There were 1,979 of these in 1935. [321] During those three years the largest national component of Jewish immigration was Polish, 42.56 per cent in 1934 and 44.12 per cent in 1935. [322] Polish anti-Semitism was chronic during those years, and the decision to give Poles more certificates than Germans can be rationalised; but during those same years no less than 3,743 immigrants came from the United States and an additional 579 from the rest of the western hemisphere. British Jewry's contingent was 513 and Africa sent 213 immigrants. [323] Turkey provided 1,259 in 1934-5. The combined figure for Britain, the western hemisphere, Africa and Turkey during those years was 6,307. Even if the Polish statistics can be defended, these cannot. Not one of these Jews required rescue and, indeed, no one pretended that rescue played any part in their selection. They were picked because they were Zionists, and primarily because of their youth and training. During those same three years, two-thirds of all German Jews who applied for certificates were turned down. [324]

'No Jewish Organisation would… Sponsor a Bill'

Since they did not want the bulk of German Jewry in Palestine, it might be assumed that the Zionist movement, at least in America, tried to find other havens for their brethren, but this is not so. Throughout the world, the Jewish bourgeoisie acted timidly out of fear that 'too many refugees in any country would unleash local anti-Semitism. Sending the refugees to Palestine seemed to be the perfect answer and the American Jewish press condemned the British quotas in Palestine, although it maintained a discreet silence about America’s own tight restrictions.

It was the Austrian anschluss in March 1938 that finally unleashed Nazi violence against the Jews. Two Democratic congressmen, Dickstein and Celler of New York, each proposed bills slightly liberalising the US immigration laws, but they were both dropped, without a hearing, in April 1938, after the Jewish, Christian and non-sectarian refugee agencies decided that the right wing would use the occasion to propose yet worse restrictions. The word went out to politicians: if hearings are held we might have to testify against reform. [325] A Communist Party front, the Jewish People's Committee, obtained a copy of one of Stephen Wise's epistles on behalf of the Jewish refugee groups, through the office of Brooklyn Democrat, Donald O'Toole. The Communists published the document in a pamphlet, Jews in Action, in an attempt to discredit their pro-British Zionist rivals at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. However, there is no doubt that the letter is genuine and it gives a clear indication of the mood of the Zionist movement.

I wish I thought that it were possible for this measure to be passed without repercussions upon the Jewish community in this country. I have every reason to believe, unfortunately, that any effort that is made at this time to waive the immigration laws, however humanitarian the purpose, will result in serious accentuation of what we know to be a rising wave of anti-Semitic feelings in the country… It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organisations met in conference to discuss the President's proposal and other proposals which have been made to waive the immigration barrier. It was the consensus of opinion that such bills at this moment in the light of present unemployment in this country and in the light of the inspired propaganda directed against the Jewish people, and circulated throughout the country, would be injurious to the purposes which all of us would like to serve. For that reason it was decided that no Jewish organisation would at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the present immigration laws. [326]


Could the American Zionist movement have done more to try to obtain refuge for the German Jews? The answer is clearly yes. The immigration laws had been passed in 1921-4, during a wave of xenophobia, and were designed to exclude practically everyone apart from the old settler stock: the British, Irish and Germans. That actually meant a relatively high German quota, but reactionaries in the State Department and the Democratic Party deliberately misinterpreted the regulations to create barriers to Jews fully utilising the allotment. Had any kind of resolute effort been made to mobilise the Jewish masses, and the larger liberal community, there can be no doubt that Roosevelt could not have withstood that pressure. The Jews and the liberals were simply too important in his party to be refused, if they had seriously demanded proper enforcement of the regulations. However, the Zionists never launched a national campaign and only worked on individual injustices; no Zionist organisation ever did more than call for the smallest amendments to the immigration laws. Only the left, notably the Trotskyists and the Stalinists, ever demanded that the gates be thrown wide open to the Jews.

There were several reasons for the American Zionists' response to the refugee problem. In the early 1920s they had never thought of organising the Jews, together with the other ethnic communities that were discriminated against in the proposed restrictions, for a struggle against the quotas. They knew that as long as America was open to immigrants, the Jews would continue to turn their backs on poverty-stricken Palestine. In the 1930s many American Zionists still saw sanctuary in any other country but Palestine as offering little more than a 'nachtasylum'—a palliative at best, a danger at worst, since they believed that the Jewish immigrant always brought anti-Semitism in his wake and they feared for themselves. Anti-Semitism was quite widespread in America at that time, although, of course, the Zionist movement never sought to organise any kind of defence against physical assaults. However, it must be emphasised that American anti-Semitism was never out of control and the Jewish community as such was never in danger. No Jew was ever killed in anti-Semitic incidents at a time when the lynching of Blacks was not uncommon in the American South. Additionally, the vast majority of Zionists, and most other Jews as well, supported Roosevelt's domestic reforms and feared that raising the refugee and immigration questions would work against the Democratic Party. Assisting some of the German Jews to settle in Palestine became a convenient substitute for a genuine effort to combat anti-Semitism within the capitalist establishment in America.

'We Are Risking the Existence of Zionism'

Could Palestine ever have been the solution to the plight of the refugees? With the report of the Peel Commission in July 1937, London had seriously considered creating a Jewish statelet, but even if the British had carried this through, it would not have resolved the desperate situation, nor did the WZO pretend it would. Weizmann testified before the Commission, telling them that he was a scientist; he knew Palestine with its backward economy could not possibly sustain all of Central and Eastern Europe’s Jews. He wanted two million youth, and he later told the Zionist Congress in 1937 of his testimony before the Commission:

The old ones will pass; they will bear their fate, or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world… Two millions, and perhaps less; 'Scheerith Hapleta’ – only a branch will survive. They had to accept it. The rest they must leave to the future – to their youth. If they feel and suffer, they will find the way, 'Beacharith Hajamin' [at the end of times]. [327]


With the abandonment of the Peel proposals, Zionism ceased to have any real relevance for the Jews of Europe. The British had cut immigration in an effort to placate the Arabs, and only 61,302 Jews were allowed entry to Palestine from 1936 to 1939; the WZO allowed entry to only 17,421 from Germany. However, not even the terrible danger to the Jews of Central Europe, nor their own abandonment by their imperial patron could shake the determination of the leaders of the WZO: under no circumstances was Zionism to be shunted aside in the now frantic scramble to find havens for the desperate Jews. When, after Kristallnacht, the British, in the hope of easing the pressure for increased immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of children be admitted directly into Britain, Ben-Gurion was absolutely against the plan, telling a meeting of Labour Zionist leaders on 7 December 1938:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel. [328]


Britain's policy was firmly fixed; there was not the slightest chance of London suddenly allowing any mass immigration into Palestine, yet Ben-Gurion persisted, refusing to contemplate other sanctuaries. On 17 December 1938 he warned the Zionist Executive:

If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism. [329]


Weizmann's immediate response to Kristallnacht was to propose a plan to the British Colonial Secretary that Iraq allow in 300,000 Jews for £20 million or £30 million or, better, take in 100,000 Palestinians 'whose land would then pass to Jewish immigrants'. [330] To use his own words on Herzl's famous negotiations with von Plevhe in 1903: 'unreality could go no further': that Iraq should let in 300,000 Jews at the behest of the Zionists and the British, or take in Palestinians so that they could be displaced by Jews! Britain had sanctioned Zionism in the Balfour Declaration for its imperial purposes; those interests had shifted, and Zionism was impotent and totally unwilling to look for alternatives for the Jewish masses in their hour of destruction.

It is in the nature of things that Zionists today should put the blame on the British, and through them the Arabs, for the low number of refugees admitted into Palestine during the 1930s. But this is a self-serving argument; if the Zionists were never interested in turning Palestine into a genuine refuge, why should such a sanctuary have been any concern of either the British or the Arabs? The Palestinian attitude toward Jewish immigration into their country is easily understood. Although Britain must be condemned for abandoning the Jews of Europe, it is not for the Zionists to do it. They knew full well that imperial interest had always been behind London's patronage of their movement. They were warned repeatedly by the left that the interests of the Jewish masses and the British Empire could never be reconciled. The WZO must be held responsible for its own betrayal of German Jewry: it turned its back on them in the cause of what has been so perfectly described as their 'Tiffany's window for glittering Jews'. [331]

_______________

Notes:

306. Herbert Strauss, 'Jewish Emigration from Germany -- Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. XXV, p. 327.

307. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, pp. 156-63.

308. 'Germany', Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 7, col. 491.

309. Fawzi Abu-Diab, Immigration to Israel, p. 6.

310. Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 7, col. 491.

311. David Kranzler, 'The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938-45', Weiner Library Bulletin, vol. XXVI, nos. 34 (1972-3), p. 28.

312. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 301.

313. Walter Laqueur, History of Zionism, p . 317.

314. Abraham Margaliot, 'The Problem of the Rescue of German Jewry during the Years 1933-1939; the Reasons for the delay in the Emigration from the Third Reich', Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust (Israel), p. 249.

315. Ruth Bondy, The Emissary, p. 116.

316. 'Weizmann makes first Report on German-Jewish Settlement in Palestine', New Palestine (31 January 1934), p. 6.

317. Chaim Weizmann, in Barnett Litvinoff (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Letters, vol. XVI, p. 279.

318. Margaliot, 'Problem of the Rescue of German Jewry', p. 255.

319. Ibid.

320. Abu-Diab, Immigration to Israel, p. 6.

321. American Jewish Yearbook, 1936-37, p. 585

322. Ibid.

323. Abu-Diab, Immigration to Israel, p. 6.

324. Margaliot, 'Problem of the Rescue of German Jewry', p. 253.

325. David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-41, pp. 67-8.

326. Jews in Action -- Five Years of the Jewish People's Committee (undated), p.7.

327. 'Dr Weizmann's Political Address -- 20th Zionist Congress', New Judaea (London, August 1937), p. 215.

328. Yoav Gelber, 'Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 199.

329. Ari Bober (ed.), The Other Israel, p. 171.

330. Martin Gilbert, 'British Government Policy toward Jewish Refugees (November 1938-September 1939)', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XIII, p. 130.

331. Ben Hecht, Perfidy, p. 19.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:05 am

14. THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANISATION AND ITALIAN FASCISM, 1933-1937

In 1933 Mussolini was well regarded by conservatives. He was thought to be the only one to have the ear of his wild disciple in Berlin, and the Zionists hoped that he would advise Hitler that to antagonise the Jews unduly could only cause needless problems. They also believed that Mussolini might be prevailed upon to join London and Paris in guaranteeing Vienna against a Nazi take-over.

Nahum Sokolow, then President of the WZO, saw Mussolini on 16 February 1933. Sokolow was not a strong figure; he had only been elected in 1931 on Weizmann’s resignation after losing a vote of confidence on his policy of accommodation to the British, and he made no requests of Mussolini. However, Mussolini spoke of his 'cordial sympathy’ for the Jews. When the Nazis announced their anti-Jewish boycott for 1 April, Mussolini sent his ambassador to see Hitler on 31 March, urging him to call it off. At this meeting the Fuhrer heaped praise upon the Duce, but Adolf Hitler was the world’s greatest expert on the Jews and needed no lecture on how to deal with them. Was it his fault that the leading Marxists were Jews? And what excesses had he perpetrated on the Jews that his name should be so maligned abroad, he retorted. No, his admirers might thank him if he called off the boycott, but his many enemies would all take it as a sign of weakness. Hitler asked that the next time the ambassador saw Signor Mussolini:

Add this: That I do not know whether in two or three hundred years my name will be venerated in Germany for what I so ardently hope to be able to do for my people, but of one thing I am absolutely certain: that five or six hundred years from now, the name of Hitler will be glorified everywhere as the name of the man who once and for all rid the world of the plague of Judaism. [332]


The Italians, who were concerned about Germany’s designs on Austria, were on relatively good terms with the British as a result and gave London a report on the Hitler interview, but there is no reason to believe that Mussolini ever passed on these ominous words to the Zionists, nor is there evidence that the WZO ever presumed to request that the Italians pass them such information on Hitler's intentions. The WZO's interest lay in getting Mussolini to support them on Palestine, ally with the British on Austria, and lobby on behalf of German Jewry within the Nazis' parameters. There was an old tradition in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe of the shtadlan (the interceder), the rich Jew who would go to the resident Haman and bribe him to call off the mob. But Hitler was not the ordinary Jew-hating king, or even a Petliura, and no Jew was allowed in his presence. Although Zionism had to fight the traditional shtadlinim for power within the Jewish communities and made much of the timidity of these people, the WZO looked to Mussolini to be their proxy intercessor with Hitler. Getting Mussolini to whisper into Hitler's ear was but the latest form of shtadlinut.

'My Third and Last Interview with Mussolini'

Though his prophesy to Mussolini's ambassador was awesome, Hitler was acutely aware of his weakness in early 1933. The opposition to stepping up the persecution of the Jews, as witness both Mussolini's intervention and the pleas of the German bourgeoisie, who were concerned for their export markets in the United States, compelled him to restrict the boycott to a one-day warning to the Jews. But Mussolini took this caution to mean that some form of modus vivendi was possible. He had tried to help the Jews; now he had to do likewise for Hitler. He asked Angelo Sacerdoti, the chief rabbi of Rome, to put him in contact with the heads of Jewry, suggesting that Hitler could scarcely be expected to stop his activities, if he did not have prior guarantees from world Jewry that they would call off their own demonstrations against him. Weizmann was already scheduled to visit Rome on 26 April 1933, and the rabbi suggested him as the logical contact; thus the third Weizmann-Mussolini meeting was quickly arranged.

Their discussion is shrouded in obscurity. Nahum Goldmann, Weizmann's long-standing associate, has remarked that anything unpleasant 'simply put his memory out of action'. [333] The record in Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, is inconsistent. He wrote of 'My third and last interview with Mussolini', and then discussed their fourth conference. [334] Was it ever possible to forget a meeting in Mussolini's famous office? The reception at the Palazzo Venezia was meant to be memorable: a bell opened a window and an officer loudly announced that dottore Weizmann was there to see il Duce; a row of soldiers ushered him to the next floor, where he was again heralded; this was repeated four times. After a wait in a splendid Renaissance drawing-room, Weizmann was announced by a final footman and he stepped into the fabled chamber. It was huge, at least 40-50 paces long; at the far end of the almost empty hall was Mussolini, sitting alone, the only light coming from a lamp on his small desk.

Other Italian and Zionist documents reveal some of the content of their conversation. Mussolini made his proposition that the heads of Jewry should declare that they were willing to call off their demonstrations and negotiate with Hitler. He had his own anti-Semitic notion of Jewry as a collective body, and Weizmann had to explain that he had no control over the non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, nor even over his own movement which had compelled his own retirement from active office. He was now organising the immigration of German Jews into Palestine and would not take on further assignments; later, he said that he told Mussolini he did not negotiate with 'wild beasts'. [335] The curtain over the meeting prevents us from hearing more of their dialogue, but 26 April was still prior to Sam Cohen's deal with the Nazis in May; even if Weizmann had had knowledge of Cohen's discussions in Berlin, he could hardly have raised this still vague project. But by 17 June, when he wrote to Mussolini asking for another meeting in July, Arlosoroff had returned home from his own parleys with the Nazis over the terms of the extended Ha'avara and it is reasonable to think that Weizmann wanted to discuss the proposed Fascist participation in the Political Secretary's liquidation bank. Weizmann could now prove to the Italians that the WZO was willing to come to terms with Hitler, even if that organisation could not order all Jewry to stop demonstrating. Although there is no evidence that the April conversation resulted in Weizmann’s trying to get the pledge out of the world's Jewish leaders, rabbi Sacerdoti did attempt to carry out Mussolini's urgings. On 10 July he reported to the Duce that he had met five Jewish leaders, the chief rabbi of France, the President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Neville Laski, head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Norman Bentwich and Victor Jacobson of the WZO. They had all agreed to call off demonstrations, if Hitler would restore the Jews’ rights. [336]

'I shall be Able to Place at your Disposal a whole Team of Chemists'

Although Weizmann wanted a quicker meeting, his fourth conversation with Mussolini could not be arranged until 17 February 1934. Through the reports he gave at the time to the British and the report of Victor Jacobson of the Zionist Executive, in addition to Italian documents, the record of the fourth meeting is fairly complete. Mussolini asked if he had tried to deal with Hitler; Weizmann, who, through his friend Sam Cohen, had just asked to be invited to Berlin to discuss the liquidation bank proposal, told him, again, that he did not negotiate with wild beasts. [337] They changed the subject and went directly to the topic of Palestine; Mussolini supported Weizmann's idea of partition and an independent Zionist ministate with the proviso that it should be independent of Britain. Mussolini also told him that he would help the Zionists establish their new merchant marine, although it is doubtful if Weizmann knew anything about the Revisionists' planned school at Civitavecchia.

Weizmann was a politician and he knew he had to give as well as take. His own rather unreliable autobiography tells that Mussolini 'talked freely of a Rome-Paris-London combination, which, he said, was the logical one for Italy. He spoke also of the chemical industry, and of the Italian need of pharmaceuticals, which we could produce in Palestine'. [338]

He wrote those words in 1947; after the war the President of the WZO could scarcely admit that he had offered to build a pharmaceutical industry in Fascist Italy, but the record is clear. Victor Jacobson, the WZO’s representative at the League of Nations, had accompanied Weizmann to Italy and sent a detailed report of the interview to the Zionist Executive. Weizmann told Mussolini:

I shall be able to place at your disposal a whole team of chemists of the highest scientific standing; expert, trustworthy and loyal men with only one desire –to help Italy and harm Germany. If necessary, we will also be able to find the necessary capital. [339]


The Italians appointed Nicola Paravano to meet Weizmann the next day. Marquis Theodoli, the Chairman of the League of Nations Mandate Commission, was present and his memoirs record that Weizmann and the Fascists reached complete agreement on the plan. In the end nothing came of the arrangement, and in his autobiography Weizmann blamed the British:

I repeated the substance of this conversation to my British friends in London but it had no consequences… I do not know whether detaching Rome from Berlin would have prevented the outbreak of the war, but it certainly might have made a great difference to the war in the Mediterranean, might have saved many lives and shortened the agony by many months. [340]


Certainly the British were not interested in his scheme; furthermore, it is highly unlikely that he could have raised the capital to support his offer of direct economic collaboration with Fascism. He was always a diplomatic speculator; later he would make an equally fantastic offer of a $50 million Jewish loan to the Turks, if they, too, would ally with London. He worked on a principle that, if he could generate interest at one end of an alliance, something might happen at the other. It is doubtful if any of his pre-war diplomatic ploys, which were always tailored to suit the interest of the other side, but carefully designed to make Palestinian Zionism a central pivot of Britain's Mediterranean defence, were accepted by his negotiating partners.

Goldmann's Secret Diplomacy

Zionist diplomacy continued to lean on Mussolini to ward off future catastrophes, and Nahum Goldmann was next to visit the Palazzo Venezia on 13 November 1934. Goldmann cherished secret diplomacy, and he later vividly described the encounter in his Autobiography. He had three concerns: Hitler was about to take over the Saar, the Poles were about to rescind the minority-rights clauses in their constitution imposed at Versailles; and the Austrians were blatantly discriminating against Jews in their civil service. Since an Italian happened to be the chairman of the League of Nations Saar Commission, he had no difficulty in persuading Mussolini to agree to force the Germans to permit the Jews to take out all of their wealth with them in francs. He also persuaded him to agree that, if the Poles came to him, which, of course they did not, he would say 'no, no, no’ [341] The Austrian situation was that over which Mussolini had the most control, as the Christian Social government was dependent on the Italian Army at the Brenner Pass to protect it against a German invasion. Goldmann told Mussolini that American Jews were proposing public protests, but that he was discouraging this for the time being. Mussolini replied:

That was very wise of you. Those American Jews and gentiles are always ready to make protests and outcries and meddle in European affairs, which they don't understand at all.


Goldmann continued:

I said that while I agreed this was not the moment for public protest against the Austrian government, we must nevertheless demand a change in its attitude to the Jews and here we counted strongly on him.


Mussolini responded:

Herr Schuschnigg will be here next week, sitting in the chair you're sitting in now, and I'll tell him I don't want to see a Jewish problem created in Austria. [342]


Mussolini was in an anti-Nazi phase in late 1934. Perhaps the WZO could act as a bridge between him and the British; he no longer talked of a German-Jewish compromise. He told Goldmann:

You are much stronger than Herr Hitler. When there is no trace left of Hitler, the Jews will still be a great people. You and we… The main thing is that the Jews must not be afraid of him. We shall all live to see his end. But you must create a Jewish state. I am a Zionist and I told Dr Weizmann so. You must have a real country, not that ridiculous National Home that the British have offered you. I will help you create a Jewish state. [343]


The Fascist leader was gulling the Zionist in every respect. As early as June 1933 he had given up any hope of convincing Hitler to compromise with the Jews, and he told the Germans that they should persist, as any retreat would be dangerous: 'certainly there had been much clumsiness and exaggeration at the beginning, but on no account must weakness be shown'. [344] He was also partly responsible for the discrimination in Austria, since he had told the Prime Minister to throw a 'dash of anti-Semitism' into his politics as the way to keep the Christian Socials' following away from the Nazis. [345] Also, he certainly did not tell Goldmann that he had just started subsidising the Mufti. But Goldmann was the perfect foil for an intriguer like Mussolini. In 1969, after he had stepped down from twelve years as President of the WZO, he was to write in his Autobiography that:

foreign affairs are so lacking in elegance in a democratic age when governments depend upon the mood of the people. There is something undeniably right in the principle of secret diplomacy, even if it is hardly feasible today. [346]


'Jewry Remembers with Thanks the Loyalty of the Fascist Government'

With the Ethiopian war Mussolini sought to call in his marker with the WZO. In autumn 1935, the League of Nations was about to impose sanctions and the Italian Foreign Ministry hastily commissioned Dante Lattes, the Italian Zionist Federation's representative in its dealings with the regime, and Angelo Orvieto, a prominent Zionist literary figure, to convince the European Jewish bourgeoisie to oppose an embargo. They had two arguments: sanctions would drive Mussolini to Hitler and, in addition, he was outspokenly in favour of an immediate Jewish state and a practical friend of the Zionist movement. They saw Weizmann and the leaders of official Anglo-Jewry, but to no avail. The Jewish leaders had to back Britain, if for no other reason than the fact that Italy was no match for Britain in the Levant. [347]

Rome sent a non-Zionist Fascist Jew, Corrado Tedeschi, a journalist, to Palestine to contact the broad Zionist right-wing. Arguing the same case, he added that the Zionists would improve their own position vis-à-vis Britain by taking a pro-Italian stand, as London would then be compelled to buy them off. He found little support outside Revisionist circles. Ittamar Ben-Avi, the famous 'Zionist baby’, the first child in centuries whose earliest words were all in Hebrew, ran a pro-war piece in his sensationalist daily paper, Doar Ha'Yom, on 21 February 1936. [348] But from Italy's practical point of view, Ben-Avi's eager cooperation meant nothing. His paper had been a Revisionist organ, then he drifted away from them, and now had no personal following. Other rightists listened to Tedeschi's appeal, but the Ethiopian campaign was so clearly another sign of the coming world conflict in which the two Fascist regimes seemed certain to ally that there was no chance of the non-Revisionist right supporting the Italian position.

Hitler always saw Mussolini in more realistic terms than any wing of the Zionist movement. They had all thought that the Austrian question would keep the two dictators apart, but Hitler understood that their common hatred of Marxism would eventually draw them together. The Ethiopian conquest gave Hitler a chance to show that he would stand by his fellow authoritarian, but it was the Spanish Civil War that finally convinced Mussolini that he had to ally with Hitler; the workers' takeover in Madrid and Barcelona in the wake of the military's rising heralded a major left-wing victory, unless there was massive foreign assistance to Franco's forces. Mussolini began to appreciate that he could neither afford to have Hitler lose the next war nor win it without his assistance. Zionism henceforward could no longer be of service to Fascism. If Italy lined up with Germany, the Jews would become Mussolini’s enemies regardless of anything he would say or do about a Jewish state. Nevertheless the Zionists sought to restore good relations. In March 1937, Goldmann's Geneva office still chose publicly to:

emphasise that world Jewry as a whole, or through its various organisations, never opposed the Italian government. On the contrary, Jewry remembers with thanks the loyalty of the fascist Government. [349]


Goldmann came to Rome for one last discussion with Count Ciano, the Duce's son-in-law and Foreign Minister, on 4 May 1937. Ciano assured him that Italy was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Zionist, and proposed another visit by Weizmann. [350] But the comedy was over and Weizmann never bothered to come again.

'So? Is it Good for the Jews?'

No Zionist element, right or left, understood the Fascist phenomenon. From the first, they were indifferent to the struggle of the Italian people, including progressive Jews, against the blackshirts and Fascism’s larger implications for European democracy. Italy's Zionists never resisted Fascism; they ended up praising it and undertook diplomatic negotiations on its behalf. The bulk of the Revisionists and a few other right-wingers became its enthusiastic adherents. The moderate bourgeois Zionist leaders –Weizmann, Sokolow and Goldmann– were uninterested in Fascism itself. As Jewish separatists they only asked one question, the cynical classic: 'So? Is it good for the Jews?' which implies that something can be evil for the general world and yet be good for the Jews. Their only concern was that Rome could be either their friend or enemy at the League of Nations and Mussolini was allowed to become their friend and patron. Given his importance in their cosmos prior to the Nazi triumph, it was hardly surprising that they should have continued to court him blindly after 1933.

_______________

Notes:

332. Daniel Carpi 'Weizmann's Political Activity in Italy from 1923 to 1934', Zionism (Tel Aviv, 1975), p. 239.

333. Nahum Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 111.

334. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 372.

335. Carpi, 'Weizmann's Political Activity in Italy', p. 217.

336. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 64.

337. Carpi, 'Weizmann's Political Activity in Italy', p. 217.

338. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 372.

339. Carpi, 'Weizmann's Political Activity in Italy', p. 220.

340. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 372.

341. Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 161.

342. Ibid., p. 159.

343. Ibid., p. 160.

344. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 72.

345. Ibid., p. 67.

346. Goldmann, Autobiography, p. 105.

347. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 84, and Michael Ledeen, 'The Evolution of Italian Fascist Anti-Semitism', Jewish Social Studies (Winter 1976), p. 13.

348. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, pp. 86-7.

349. Leon Harris, 'Mussolini in Hitler's Footsteps', Jewish Life (September 1938), p. 17.

350. Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 136.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal, by L

Postby admin » Fri Feb 27, 2015 8:10 am

15. AUSTRIA AND THE 'GENTILE FRIENDS OF ZIONISM'

The First World War destroyed four empires and created a string of new states in Central Europe. Of all these the one with the least rationale was Austria. Its population was virtually entirely German and, in 1919, the Austrian Parliament, with only one dissenting vote, voted for union with Germany; the Allies, however, refused to countenance the merger and the Social-Democratic-dominated coalition reluctantly continued to rule. In the summer of 1920, the anti-Semitic Christian Socials took control of the national government, although the leftists were able to maintain a grip on the Viennese city administration.

Three ideological currents competed for power in the truncated republic. The Communist Party was one of the weakest in Europe, and the Social Democrats saw their enemies to the right in the Catholic Christian Socials –the party of the peasantry and the urban lower middle class– and the anti-Semitic German nationalists, with their base in the professions and the white-collar workers. Although both bourgeois groupings were hostile to democracy, the enormous strength of the Socialists in Vienna and Austria's financial dependence on Britain and France, precluded any coup d'Etat. But both the Social Democrats and the Christian Socials were careful to maintain substantial party militias.

'This Great Patriot and Leader of his Country'

The Social Democrats' first major leader, Victor Adler, was a Jew; so was its leading theoretician, Otto Bauer, and Jews comprised almost half of the party leadership. Inevitably, the movement always saw threats to the Jews as a mortal danger to itself and acted accordingly. The worker ranks were extremely loyal to their Jewish comrades and had not the least hesitation in physically combating the anti-Semites, as Hitler records himself in Mein Kampf, writing of his experiences in his first job, on a construction site in pre-war Vienna:

These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the 'capitalistic’ (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means of oppressing the proletariat… There was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud… I tried to keep silent. But at length… I began to take a position… one day they made use of the weapon which most readily conquers reason… A few of the spokesmen on the opposing side forced me either to leave the building at once or be thrown off the scaffolding. [351]


From the beginning the Social Democratic workers fought the Nazis when the first signs of the new party appeared in Vienna in 1923. Bands of hoodlums carrying the swastika flag had started to beat up Jews and on one occasion they killed a worker; this brought the Social Democrats out for battle by the thousands. A writer for the American Menorah Journal, one of the leading Jewish magazines of its day, described the result:

No pogrom meetings can now be held undisturbed. The organised workingmen, social democrats and communists, frequently storm the meetings of the anti-Semites, not because of their friendship for the Jews, but because they believe the life of the republic at stake. [352]


The vast majority of Austrian Jews identified with the Social Democrats. Amongst the few who did not were the Zionists of the Judischenationale Partei (JnP). But the Jews were only 2.8 per cent of the entire Austrian population, and no more than 10 per cent of Vienna's voters, and the tiny JnP succeeded only once in electing a candidate to the Austrian Parliament. It was he, Robert Stricker, who cast the sole vote opposing unity with Germany in 1919, a move which guaranteed his defeat in 1920. Three more Zionists were elected to the city council in the early 1920s; in 1920 the Zionists polled 21 per cent of Vienna’s Jewish vote and in 1923 their percentage even increased to 26 per cent, but after that the Zionist vote fell away strongly, and by 1930 it polled a mere 0.2 per cent of the total vote. [353] Although the JnP's role in Austrian political life was insignificant, its short career is illustrative of the insularity and the petty-bourgeois character of European Zionism. Most of the JnP’s supporters never thought of themselves as emigrating to Palestine. Many of Vienna's Jews had only recently arrived from Galicia. The Zionism of the JnP represented the last vestige of their ghetto mentality. It was not a protest against the anti-Semites; that cause was fought out in the streets in the Social Democratic militia. Austrian Zionism was a petty-bourgeois protest against socialism, and the Christian Socials were always delighted to see the JnP draw some votes away from their radical foes. In turn the Zionists did not see the Christian Socials as their enemies. Sokolow was in Durban, South Africa, in 1934, when he heard of the murder of Austria’s Prime Minister, Engelbert Dollfuss, during the Nazis' unsuccessful putsch of 25 July; he asked his audience at the Jewish Club to rise in the memory

this great patriot and leader of his country, whom I knew very well and met very often… was one of the friends of our cause. He was one of those who established, with my help, the organisation of Gentile Friends of Zionism in the Austrian capital. [354]


The Gentile Friends had been set up in 1927. In 1929 Fritz Lohner Beda, the former president of the Zionist Hakoah Athletic Club, warned the Jews that they would be punished for their support for the Social Democrats when the reactionaries finished off the socialists. He continued with a promise that Jews would support the Fascist Heimwehr militia, if the rightists would only give up their anti-Semitism. He claimed that the socialists, as atheists, anti-nationalists and anticapitalists were really the Jews’ greatest enemies. [355]

Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.

-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain"


'We Condemn Dissemination of Atrocity Stories from Austria Abroad'

While the Christian Socials feared Nazism as a threat to their own power, Hitler's success convinced Dollfuss that dictatorship was the coming thing, at least in Central Europe, and he finally heeded Mussolini's constant advice and provoked the Social Democrats into a rising in February 1934, which he crushed in a three-day battle. Over a thousand workers were murdered when the Heimwehr shelled the famous Karl Marx housing project. The Zionists' response to the massacre was quite clear. Robert Stricker, in a talk on the events before a party gathering, denounced the reports circulating abroad concerning persecution of Jews. He insisted this was false, saying that during those fateful days Austria had manifested a high level of culture rarely found elsewhere. [356]


Image
[Pat Warren, Action 6 News] There had been much concern on the part of many people that the police would make a violent assault on the MOVE members. As it turned out, the police acted with precision and restraint.

-- Let The Fire Burn, directed by Jason Osder (MOVE)


In fact the Dollfuss regime embarked on a policy of severe discrimination against the Jews, particularly in government employment, and many professionals were dismissed. However, the Zionist antagonism against the assimilationist socialist Jews made them the local and international apologists for the Christian Socials. In 1935 the government announced plans for segregating Jewish students in cases of 'overcrowding'. While the assimilationist Jewish leaders naturally opposed the scheme as the first step towards total school segregation, Stricker welcomed the new ghetto schools. [357] That same year, when the Austrian Foreign Minister inveighed against 'atrocity stories’ appearing in the world press, Der Stimme, the organ of the Austrian Zionist Federation, hastened to explain that:

It is impossible nowadays to seal hermetically any country and hide events including anti-Jewish agitation. We condemn dissemination of atrocity stories from Austria abroad. This however, has never been done by Jews but by Austrian newspapers which are read abroad. [358]


The Christian Socials knew that they were no match for Hitler without foreign guarantors. While they looked to Mussolini to protect them militarily, they also required loans from the London and Paris banks and they had to persuade potential foreign backers that they were not an imitation of the Nazis. In May 1934 Dollfuss appointed Desider Friedmann, a veteran Zionist and head of the Viennese Jewish community organisation, to the State Council. There were other similar gestures by the regime towards Zionism. The Revisionists were permitted to use an estate given to them by a rich member as a training centre. A Revisionist writer later remembered the scene at the spacious country seat as taking on 'the appearance of a disciplined military camp' and, in September 1935, the government allowed the Revisionists to hold the founding congress of the New Zionist Organisation in Vienna. [359]

For reasons of foreign policy the regime always denied that it was discriminating against the Jews while coming up with absurd pretexts, as with the alleged overcrowding, to justify its anti-Semitism. Jews were even legally entitled to join the Fatherland Front which had replaced all the political parties including, technically, the Christian Socials after 1934. However, once Mussolini had decided to ally with Hitler, and it was clear that he was not prepared to protect Austria any longer, the regime had to desperately struggle to ward off a Nazi take-over. In January 1938 the Austrians tried to prove to Hitler that, although they were determined to stay independent, nevertheless they were still a 'German-Christian' state, and they established a segregated section in the Fatherland Front for Jewish youths. The Encyclopedia Judaica remarks laconically that 'the Zionists accepted willingly, but it angered those in favor of assimilation'. [360] However, although it was thus becoming more anti-Semitic in its efforts to keep the German Nazis out, the regime had no hesitation in using the Zionists to seek foreign financial support. Desider Friedmann was rushed abroad in early 1938, in the last weeks before the anschluss. [361] Dollfuss's successor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, tried a last ploy, announcing on 9 March a plebiscite on independence for 13 March, and the Zionist-dominated Jewish community organisation hastened to draw up a list of every Jew in Vienna to contribute to a fund to pay for Schuschnigg's campaign. Hitler had a much more realistic measure of Herr Schuschnigg and simply commanded him to resign, which he did on 11 March, and the German Army moved into Austria on 12 March.

The Folly of Zionist Reliance on the Christian Socials

Was the Zionists' support for the Austrian right ever justified? One might claim that the Christian Socials were the only barrier between the Jews and a Nazi takeover, but the alliance with them had begun in the 1920s when Hitler was not yet a threat. The establishment of the Gentile Friends cannot be defended in anti-Nazi terms. In fact the Austrian right, Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, were never an obstacle to a German take-over, but were a guarantee of a final Nazi victory. Joseph Buttinger, in the 1930s the leader of the Social Democratic under-ground, described the reality in his book, In the Twilight of Socialism. There was an anti-Nazi majority in Austria, but Schuschnigg was 'unable to use the political opportunity inherent in this circumstance'. He had to prevent any 'mass mobilisation against the brown fascism, because in a true fight for freedom he himself would inevitably be crushed'. This mass mobilisation was what mattered, said Buttinger, writing at that time, 'in so far as Austria matters at all, for in the final analysis the fate of Austria will be decided by international forces'. Hitler would attack Austria at a favourable moment, which he was cheerfully awaiting, with the Schuschnigg regime 'as his guarantee against the organisation of a defense in the meanwhile'. [362]

Austrian Jewry had only one hope: a resolute alliance, locally and internationally, with the Social Democrats. Unlike the discredited German socialists, the Austrian Social Democrats remained largely intact after their heroic, if poorly organised, resistance in 1934. Dollfuss's regime was the weakest of the Fascist states, and even after the massacre of the socialists on 12 February the new government was sustained, not so much by its own police power, as by the overawing presence of the Italian and Hungarian Armies on the borders that would fight for Dollfuss, and the equal certainty that the German Army would intervene rather than see the Social Democrats come to power. Clearly, neither the difficult international setting nor the strength of the Austrian regime can be minimised, but there were giant socialist demonstrations about Austria in Europe and America. However, instead of looking to the socialists, in Austria and abroad, for succour, the local Zionists looked to the regime, which was ultimately to surrender to Hitler without firing a shot. Nahum Goldmann, the representative of the WZO, consciously discouraged foreign Jews from demonstrating over Austrian anti-Semitism, choosing instead to place reliance on backstage whispers from Benito Mussolini.

________________

Notes:

351. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 40.

352. Eugen Hoeflich, ‘Morale in Austria’, Menorah Journal (August 1923),

353. Walter Simon, 'The Jewish vote in Austria', Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, vol. XVI (1961), p. 114.

354. ‘Sokolow Honours Memory of Dollfuss', Palestine Post (13 August 1934) p.4.

355. Herbert Solow, ‘Unrest in Austria', Menorah Journal (February 1930),

356. 'Austria -- the Key to Jewish Politics', South African Ivri (March 1934), p. 1.

357 'Austria', American Jewish Year Book (1935-6), p.189.

358. 'Vienna Papers take Issue on Press Threats', Jewish Daily Bulletin (11 January 1935), p.1.

359. Otto Seidman, ‘Saga of Aliyah Beth’ Tagar (Shanghai, 1 January 1947), p. 7.

360. ‘Austria’, Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 3, col.898.

361. ‘Desider Friedmann', Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 7, col. 191.

362. Joseph Buttinger, In the Twilight of Socialism, p. 427.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Political Science

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 15 guests

cron