"THE ACCUSED"On a December morning of 1953, Malchiel Greenwald, age seventy-two, a neatly trimmed goatee, a tilted fedora, a bright muffler with mittens to match, a seedy overcoat, holes in his shoes, a cigar stub threatening to ignite the tip of his nose, and a walking stick swinging briskly -- this jaunty old Jew is looking for a lawyer -- in Jerusalem. His daughter, Rina, a blonde out of the Psalms, walks beside him.
As is his daily habit, Malchiel has had a satisfactory conference with God in his synagogue. Whatever else you can say about Israel, it is a satisfactory thing to be able to stand in practically the same place in which your forefathers stood twenty-five hundred years ago and offer God unchanged hallelujahs.
But now for a lawyer -- an inexpensive one who will take the case for other considerations than money. After all, how many lawyers get the opportunity to defend a man who has been sued for criminal libel by the government of Israel itself!
Yes, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, Mapai leader David Ben-Gurion, Attorney General Chaim Cohen, and all the other renowned chieftains of the State of Israel have summoned Malchiel Greenwald to the bar of judgement. There were even a few lines about it in a newspaper, on an inside page. Granted, a few lines do not make a man famous, but he is no longer a nobody.
"How much further?" Greenwald asks.
"Three minutes," says daughter Rina.
"Maybe I can offer him my stamp collection," says Greenwald.
"He is not the kind of a man who collects stamps," says Rina.
The goatee points forward. Lawyer, lawyer -- find me a lawyer who is not afraid and who also, God grant, cares almost nothing about money.
Thus on this chill December day, Malchiel Greenwald walks into the history of Israel.
WHAT GREENWALD? WHAT HISTORY?I shall tell you in my own way. For though I write a history I am not an historian; that is, if an historian is a man full of facts and with an objective attitude. Facts I have, but I am not objective. I put this down so that if my book disturbs any reader, particularly a Jewish reader, too much, he can solace himself with the thought -- how can you believe a writer who confesses he is not objective? So you see how sentimental I am about Jews. I think of solacing them even when I have set out to condemn much that they hold dear.
Malchiel Greenwald is one of the three heroes whom I shall do my best to celebrate in my history. There are other heroes and heroines who will emerge to beam on the reader, but these three will be my central ones. My history deals with the astonishing revelations of the Kastner trial that smote Israel with shame and disillusion for four years beginning in this December 1953; and shook a Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, out of his Jerusalem swivel chair.
Among the astonishments of these events is that a man like Malchiel Greenwald started them. In Israel you expect a Samson to tumble the pillars of the false temple, not an elderly stamp collector without muscles. A simple man, pious, hard-working. Granted, a busybody, but a busybody with an unauthoritative face. The home orator who makes his family sigh, "Malchiel, Malchiel -- how many times are you going to say that?" But there is also this about Greenwald. He is not only a stamp collector, he has another hobby. He likes to write.
And there is another fact. Long before the British picked out the Lion as a symbol of how brave they were, there was the Lion of Judea, who still crouches in Jewish hearts. Not all of them. Courage is a special thing in any people. I do not mean the courage to die. The Jews have had good training in that, better than most. But the courage to protest, to stand up against the fearful odds of authority -- there's a rarer quality, and a more mysterious one. The mystery here is how did it come to roost in seventy-two-year old Greenwald? How did Voltaire and Tom Paine leak into his Talmudic soul, and the sword of Spartacus find lodging under his tallith?
Malchiel Greenwald hails from Hungary, where he married, sired a son and a daughter, and, until his fifties, worked there and in Vienna as a part-time journalist who had frequently to stoop to unliterary labors.
This was a time, after World War I, when geniuses, as often as not Jewish, filled the cafes of Budapest and Vienna, and showered Europe with tunes, bon mots and witty dramas. But there were also Jews who were not geniuses -- among them, Greenwald.
I will not lie about my hero. Even in his heyday he lacked style and the proper connections.
Nevertheless, he kept on writing, rushing his copy to the editor in person, and watching it usually flutter into the waste basket. But disasters are more likely to create journalists than stop them. Greenwald persisted. And he had a certain following. Fifty-two close relatives bought newspapers every day to see if the name Malchiel Greenwald was signed to something.
Then one day an event occurred. A pack of citizens, Christian ones, came running into a Vienna street and started killing Jews. They used big cudgels and long knives, and they shouted the battle cry of the renaissance that had come to Europe -- "Death to all Jews."
Greenwald happened to be in the street with his young daughter, Rina. Run, he said to her and she made fleetly for a synagogue, two patriots after her. Greenwald had less speed in his legs. As a result, everyone of his teeth were knocked out of his mouth; his tongue was slashed, his legs and arms were broken, and he was cracked over the head with cudgels until he fell unconscious to the ground. This was a lucky thing. For, believing he was dead, the patriots lost interest in him and gave their attention to Jews who were still standing, or leaning.
When he was able to walk again and use his tongue once more, Greenwald decided to migrate with his family to Palestine. At that time (early in 1938) you could still go to Palestine without being shot or drowned by the British Protectorate Policy -- or was it Protective Policy? Whatever it was, you can be sure it had a soothing name.
"KNOW YOU THE FAR LAND WHERE THE LEMON TREES BLOOM?"Come to Jerusalem with his head of false teeth, his wife, son, daughter, and stamp collection, Malchiel Greenwald bought a small hotel with his life's earnings. A few hundred pounds down, no more. Hotel Austria, not far from where Solomon once reigned. It could accommodate twenty-five guests a night if you put three or four in one room. Rate, 25 piasters a head ($1.00).
For a few years Greenwald helped his sturdy wife make beds, sweep floors, fill kerosene stoves, and journalism was a dream on a shelf.
Then other chores came to hand. The big killing of Jews started in Europe. The British stepped in, first with a quota cutting down immigration to Palestine, then with a new policy called the White Paper. What it amounted to was that the Palestine ports were now closed and the doomed Jews had to outwit not only their German killers but the British authorities guarding the shores of Empire.
Greenwald busied himself in the tricky business of illegal immigration to the Holy Land. He had helped his two brothers to organize illegal immigrant runs to Palestine.
Greenwald's activities subsided, however, when his fifty-two relatives were shipped off to Auschwitz and put to death in the German ovens.
In the meantime a sort of war had been going on in Palestine. An underground army of young Jews had come into existence. In 1937 this army startled everybody by announcing it was going to drive the British forces out of Palestine and set up an independent State of Israel. The name of this first army of Jewish fighters for freedom was the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Hebrew words meaning Organization, Military, National. Its insignia was the map of an Israel on both sides of the Jordan, over which was a hand holding a rifle and the Hebrew words, "Only Thus."
The most startled were the Jewish leaders of Palestine. The idea of a war of liberation to win an independent Israel had never been in any of their heads. Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Greenbaum, Dov Joseph and all the Jewish factotums in Palestine had limited their dream of Zion to a British-Jewish suburb.
The Irgun seemed an old story to the British -- Fuzzy Wuzzy all over again -- a few hundred "terrorists" against the might and right of Empire. The British took the usual measures: death or life imprisonment to any Jew caught carrying arms. Not too difficult to handle. Particularly, since the British had all the fiery leaders of the Jewish Agency on their side. Not to mention all the potent and esteemed Semites of the United States and everywhere else.
Led by Weizmann, the chieftains of Jewry pledged allegiance to the British war on the young Hebrews fighting for freedom. Later they were to offer more than lip service to their British masters. They proved their loyalty daily by helping the British to capture, torture, hang, and imprison hundreds of young Jews fighting under the first independent Hebrew flag since Bar-Kochba.
Malchiel Greenwald's young son Itzhak joined the Irgun and was killed fighting in the Battle of Mount Zion. Greenwald put away the Irgun medal his brave son had won and changed the sign of his Hotel Austria. The new sign read, "Mount Zion Hotel."
Greenwald's daughter, Rina, was also in the war that the small Irgun army was fighting against the British and the Jewish Agency Policy. During the day she was respectably employed as a nurse in a Hadassah Hospital. But at night she worked among the wounded of the Irgun.
It finally all ended with the British decamping and the Arabs taking to cover, and the State of Israel being established, and all the Jews of the world (or nearly all) blowing grateful kisses and offering massive donations to the great heroes of Israel-Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Sharett, Greenbaum, etc.
And Malchiel Greenwald, confronted by this topsy-turvy denouement of lambkins crowned as lions, grew a goatee, bought a walking stick, and decided to become a journalist again.
But who would hire a seventy-two-year-old man unable to write Hebrew? Nevertheless, Greenwald became a journalist -- by himself. Every week or so he composed an article, had it translated into Hebrew, and had it mimeographed into a three-page pamphlet. The pamphlet carried a chronic headline, "Letters to My Friends in the Mizrachi." This is the name of a religious party of Israel. Journalist Greenwald spent his last nickels mailing out one thousand copies of each issue. The pamphlet was free. All the reward Greenwald asked for his hard work was that somebody read it.
Fifty pamphlets -- and nothing happens. Supper eaten, dishes washed, Greenwald hurries to his chief news source, in quest of hotter items. His "beat" is the Cafe Vienna, opposite his hotel. It is practically the only cafe in Jerusalem that stays open after supper.
Here journalist Greenwald consumes a great deal of tea as he table hops among the town's gossips. They all know Malchiel Greenwald, and have a tolerant smile for him. They say, "Thank you, much obliged," when he hands them his latest pamphlet. And they leave it behind on the table, unread, when they go home.
What is it Malchiel Greenwald writes in his pamphlets? Nothing anyone hasn't heard a hundred times before better written and better printed. It takes a strong pair of eyes to distinguish the smeared lettering in Greenwald's mimeographed gazette. It needs an equally sharp vision to pick out Malchiel Greenwald, himself, from the hundreds of ancient nobodies, full of hair-raising pasts, who chatter, pray and scribble in the new Jerusalem.
Then comes Pamphlet number 51. Another letter to his pious "Friends of the Mizrachi." The same length, three pages of smeared type. But this time the pamphlet is a success. It produces a case of criminal libel -- the State of Israel versus Malchiel Greenwald.
And I am up to my hero again as he walks with his daughter beside him, looking for a lawyer who is not afraid.
I am impressed by Malchiel Greenwald, and I would not be too surprised to hear from some Jerusalem rabbi that God, as much as daughter Rina, guided him on this walk. Not because of what he dared to write in his pamphlet about an esteemed government official named Rudolf Kastner. But for another reason.
Malchiel Greenwald, whose teeth were all knocked out of his mouth, whose tongue was slit, whose arms and legs were broken and whose head bashed in, who was left for dead in a street of murdered Jews; whose fifty-two close relatives were all incinerated by the Germans, whose son died fighting on Mount Zion -- now at seventy-two this Malchiel Greenwald walks under a tilted fedora, briskly swinging a cane, unafraid of any authority but the truth in his own heart. That such a man exists impresses me.
HOME IS THE WANDERERThe headlines have gotten us used to the State of Israel as if it were an old story. Headlines can get us used to everything, including the patriotic necessity for putting an end to the world in order to save it from something or other.
Nevertheless, my eyes remain widened. "The State of Israel versus Malchiel Greenwald." Fifty years ago a Jewish nation called Israel was as eerie a prospect as a colony of Martians laying down sidewalks on our planet.
Since the Greenwald-Kastner trial will uncover the roots of the new nation, I pause to make an interlude about Israel. About Israel and Jews in general.
They are not one and the same; in fact, they are bewilderingly different. I mean the Jews of the world and the Jewish leaders of Israel. But a sort of courtship goes on between them, a half-sincere courtship, because both parties are married to somebody else. Yet they woo each other, the Jews, Israel; and Israel, the Jews.
First, about Israel. Who made this unexpected land that owns a fine army today, roaring cities, burgeoning farm lands, strong youths and beautiful girls, a machine for splitting the atom, and at least five thousand gabbling politicians; that waves a flag of world power? Who concocted this land, midget in size, but undisputed champion of its neck of the woods?
Was it the seventeen million Jews of the world holed up in a hundred nations? The answer is no. Hardly two per cent of them were involved, and not many more were aware that anything was going on.
It was a handful that created Eretz-Israel, just as a handful of Irgun and Lehi fighters won its independence from the British. The creators were mostly European Jews-pick-and-shovel dreamers, gun-toting visionaries who beheld Jewish cities where there were only Arab, Turkish and English sands.
They were Jews of all kinds -- dumb ones, smart ones, rich, poor, some pale with learning, some muscled like gladiators. They came out of Polish tailor shops and Polish social soirees, out of Russian synagogues and counting houses, out. of Ukrainian farms, German universities, Hungarian salons, out of Europe's back roads and boulevards. No more than a trickle, but what a trickle! Who would have suspected that international Jewry was full of Davy Crocketts and Daniel Boones, with talliths in their saddle bags? Or that so many statesmen, philosophers and "Hatikva" singers could come tumbling out of the Jewish cornucopia almost overnight? But tumble and come they did, and whatever the print on their visas said, they came seemingly out of the Old Testament. Where else were there Jews with Jewish anthems in their eyes!
The rebirth of the Jews as a nation began in Jerusalem. For hundreds of years there had been a sparse Jewish population in the old city of Jerusalem, and in ancient Tiberias, Safad, and other cities left over from the past. After ages of inertia, these sons and daughters of Abraham began saying goodbye to Jerusalem's ghetto walls, and moving into the land to till and plant. An urge was in them. Who or what put it there, I don't know. It may have been God renewing His interest in His once favorite children, and bidding them to make the land of David bloom again with Jewish orange trees. Whoever told them, this is what they did. They established small colonies on the desert edges. They were a hardy, tenacious people. And they plunged into a love affair 'with the land of their fathers.
There were several waves of "aliya" (literal translation, "ascension"), first in the eighties and nineties of the last century, of Jews fleeing persecution in Rumania and Russia. Baron Edmund de Rothschild helped settle a swarm of Jews, mainly from Rumania. These also started colonies and sang around new Hebrew camp fires.
At the opening of the century came the nrst large Hocks of the original "Zionists," most of them from Russia. They brought with them intellectual ferment. Many of them were Tolstoyan socialists, and all of them were full of dreams of a new Zion. Out of these bands of settlers came the future ruling clique of Israel.
In the beginning most of these adventurers to Palestine had forthwith to learn to ride horses better than the Arabs, which was difficult; and to shoot straighter, which was easy. And to become lumberjacks, well diggers, plow hands, cowboys, scouts, sentinels. And to sleep without roofs, battle malaria, suffer thirst, hunger, sunstroke and harassments equal to the Seven Plagues; and remain, the while, full of joy and hope. This, too, was easy, for they were half daft with old dreams.
In the thirties came a great surge of Jews out of Poland. These were chiefly workmen and their families, more tools in their kits than dreams; house builders and plow hands. They came to Zion as its people, and remained its people.
The advent of Hitler in 1933 brought a massive wave of immigrants from Germany. Hitler's oratory had uprooted them from their long-beloved German cities and villages. They brought with them the German talent for music, philosophy, and truth-telling, the German pedantry and respect for the law -- all the things that the new Third Reich had decided to jettison. There were also among them people of financial talent.
The next wave was the "illegal" immigration, beginning in 1937.Defying the quota and later the White Paper, in ships of every size, tens of thousands from Central Europe and the Balkans came flocking to Palestine. Most of them were young Jews.
The last wave was the million from everywhere, including the concentration camps, who hied them to Israel when it became an independent state. The dam was broken. Israelis poured in.
And what bright leaders hopped around the world playing Pied Piper for this dream and passing the hat for the new land of Zion. The first of these was the Hungarian literary light, Theodor Herzl. Into his worldly, witty head came full-blown the plan for a Jewish nation.
He created this nation in the pages of a book. The book done, he wrote in his diary that the Land of the Jews would become a reality in fifty years. And off he went to buttonhole kings and queens, prime ministers and plutocrats, asking for a bit of territory that might become a homeland for the Jews.
"My dear Herzl, not a bad idea," said Prime Minister Gladstone of England, "Why don't you try Egypt?"
'We've been there," said Herzl.
The dour Gladstone, warmed by Herzl's wit, became an ally.
Max Nordau, a practising psychiatrist and famed author, whose works were translated into many languages, was among Herzl's first converts. It befell this way. One of Herzl's elegant friends, a fellow champion fencer, was concerned over his lapse into the parochial fogs of Jewish affairs. He explained Herzl's plan for a Jewish nation to Nordau and asked, "Will you talk him out of it, Doctor?"
Nordau, an atheist who wrote in German and held himself apart from Jewish life, agreed.
Herzl came, talked, and conquered. Thereafter, Max Nordau's eloquence spread the Herzl dream through Europe.
There were also the brilliant Dr. Aaron Aaronson and his lovely sister, Sarah. They lived in a Palestine still under Turkish rule. Dr. Aaronson was a brilliant scientist, and as witty and attractive as Herzl. He fished for Jewish homeland converts in the salons and government offices of Europe.
Sarah was one of the great beauties of her day. Around her in Palestine swarmed the first handful of Jewish homeland patriots. World War I was on. Aaron and his sister organized an underground to work behind Turkish lines for the British, and for the Jewish homeland Britain would gratefully set up in Palestine after winning the war and ousting the Turks.
From the night-black shores of Palestine, Sarah and her followers signaled information to the British. Sarah was caught. The Turkish police tried to torture the names of her Jewish followers out of her. Sarah pretended to faint under the torture. The ruse worked. Released for a moment, Sarah shot herself and died, with the names of her disciples locked in her skull.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the soldier-novelist, was another drum beater for the coming land of the Jews. I shall write more of him later. Here only that in the 1930's he raised his voice in the ghetto towns of Poland, Hungary, and Rumania, warning of the annihilation tomorrow held for the Jews of Europe, and urging them to trek by the millions to Palestine while they could still get in.
Another Zionist Pied Piper was Louis Brandeis, to become Supreme Court Justice in Washington. Brandeis was one of the few American Jews of stature who looked beyond assimilation as a future for Jewry. I interviewed him in my young reporter days in Chicago. He was attending a World Zionist Congress. I remember a few of the things he told me, also that he told them with gusto and irony. "Jews? They keep disappearing from the world. Disaster re-invents them. There are better mothers than disaster. A native land is the best of all mothers. We American Jews have a native land we love. But it is even better to have a native land who loves us."
There were scores of these dream salesmen, all men and women of purity of mission. They were out to change the identity of the Jews from a people of the Torah, to a people of Zion, a nation. There was much outcry from the orthodox at this seeming demotion. During the centuries in which other peoples had taken turns riding in armadas of power, the Jews had remained forever bobbing along on a raft of a book, their Torah. They were reluctant to leave the raft, to exchange the only greatness they had known -- the words of God -- for some dubious political status.
The dream of a new land of Israel had flickered in the Jews for the nineteen centuries of their search for unmenacing places to live. They sighed the phrase, "Land of Israel," during this long time, and felt refreshed. And certain that God would return them to their original habitat and make them a great nation again.
I have sometimes wondered, while reading their histories, how the Jews could believe themselves the Favored of God despite the calamities that endlessly fell on them. But it is not a Jewish quirk, alone. Christianity is based on the belief that the crucifixion of Jesus proved Him the beloved Son of God. By a similar logic the Jews have remained convinced that the crucifixion of their kind was proof that they were very dear to God.
A small account of the dream and birth of Israel. Next, about the Jews of the world outside it -- I have a briefer summary than they usually receive from their generalizers. But I have written of Jews before and have learned how to be precise about them. Also how to love them without lying about them; how to smile at their brick-bats, and how to remain dreamily on their side while they are denying me burial in holy ground. These things have happened to me. Enough now, that if I have any enemies they are mainly Jewish ones. And, as I used to sign all my letters to my mother, "I remain, your loving son."
During the creating of Palestine by the Herzl Zionists, the Jews of the world heard rumors. Their basic reaction was that something absurd and a little sad was going on in Jerusalem. And possibly a little dangerous. This reaction was only natural, for there had been no good tidings for Jews out of Jerusalem since the crucifying of one of their young rabbis -- by the Romans. The Jewish hell born of that misreported incident had never cooled off.
Hearing dimly of a new Zion being hatched in that same territory, and of the trickle of settlers heading for the new Zion, the Jews of the world stuck to their troubles at hand. They remained steadfastly in all the cities of the world where they were not too wanted or too esteemed. They were content to accept the inferiority or unpopularity of Jewishness, rather than to go wrestling with deserts.
I say this with no derogatory overtone. You can't blame Jews for fancying themselves part of the human family, despite its inhuman protests now and then. Protest, pogrom, ostracism, disdain -- the Jews accepted these gentile tricks and manners with an indifference that was a gift of time.
I understand these Jewish world squatters, for I was born one of them, and remain one. I was for the first forty-five years of my life as unaware of Jewishness as I am now of space problems. Happily preoccupied elsewhere, I stayed out of synagogues, lodge meetings, and the philanthropy get-togethers dear to Jews.
But even in that time of pleasant Jewish anesthesia, I noticed some Jewish matters. I noted that there were Jews around me fleeing from their Jewishness as a man trying to run away from his shadow. And there were Jews pooling their Jewishness into ghetto oases. And Jews rising above their Jewishness with the aid of ego, talent and wealth. Or so these believers in levitation thought. I noted also a small change over into Christianity going on -- Abraham's elite tiptoeing out of Jewishness as out of a sick room.
And there were Jews like myself, immune to the critical attitudes of our neighbors, for we had attitudes twice as critical. For us anti-Semitism was a target, if we were lucky enough to catch sight of it, and never a menace. This, of course, was in the United States, where anti-Semitism is considered officially a neurosis. Although Americans suffering from it more often get sent to Congress than to a hospital.
If I write truthfully of American anti-Semitism, I must put down that I have found it, on the whole, either pleasing or stimulating. It is pleasing to be disliked by obvious fools, and it is stimulating to knock such dunderheads off their perches, even if nowhere else than in one's own soul.
Actually, anti-Semitism is among the lesser hatreds I have noted in the United States. Hating Jews has remained a furtive American pastime with a sickly sound to it, and no responsible leaders of Church and State have given it sanction.
God forgive me if I am too optimistic. I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News in 1919, 1920. Any German in that time, sad and bleak though it was, would have sworn passionately on the heads of his children that mass murder could never become a German political ideal.
One has to think of such things when making pronouncements. There was never any doubt about the status of Jew-hatred in Europe. In nearly all its countries, anti-Semitism was esteemed as a patriotic necessity or a religious must. There were a few minor areas of tolerance -- Scandinavia, Holland and Italy, after it stopped producing saints.
Nevertheless, European Jewry continued to thrive on the world's displeasure as if it were a Christmas plum pudding. And it remained, as a whole, indifferent to the Covered Wagon Days in Palestine, endorsed by the Balfour Declaration in 1917 -- "Let us give the Jews a homeland," and by the pact of 1925 -- "Let Britain prepare a homeland for the Jews in Palestine."
Here is the point of my interlude. How different it is now! With all the Jews of the world who were unaware of Eretz-Israel, who made no personal sacrifices for it, and who denounced the fighters for its freedom-patting themselves on the back for the State of Israel. Their baby!
I have heard them in London, Paris, Rome, North Africa. I hear them constantly in New York, Chicago, Hollywood and wherever else I run into Jews. And not religious or "organization" Jews, but assimilated American ones who usually go to Temple only in a coffin. They boast of having been to Israel as they used to boast of having basked on the Riviera. Their eyes gleam. They used to feel this way when a Jew became a World's Ring champion or when Einstein's name appeared in the newspapers.
It is a new high in diplomatic representation. Although the State of Israel is a strip of land hardly big enough for a railroad line, it has some eleven million ambassadors-at-large. This is, roughly, the number of Jews the Germans left on the planet, counting the dark ones of Africa. And all as ignorant of what is going on-or went on-in Israel as if it were a foothold on the moon. But still, ambassadors.
Here is a problem. Is it better to let illusion thrive than (try to) expose it? Plato wrote that the only sound way to ensure people's happiness was to let them sup on sweet lies rather than bitter truth.
It is not entirely bad advice. But it is like a medicine that permits the patient to die without too much pain.
I vote otherwise. I end my interlude with the hope that a fraction of the myriad ambassadors may get a clearer line on their duties after attending the case of "The Government of Israel versus Malchiel Greenwald."
THE GLORY THAT WAS BRITAINIf it were only wicked people who kept hounding Jews from century to century, it would be an easier history to understand. You could say then, the Jews have a little too much virtue in them, which seems to be a constant irritant for baser folk. But the Jews have not too much virtue and their enemies include the elite of Christendom -- its finest kings, its noblest humanitarians and philosophers, and even its holiest saints.
Now we come to one of the most honorable of its enemies, Great Britain. Not only honorable, but the gallant defender of civilization, 1939-1945; nevertheless, an enemy of the Jews. This is what makes a Jewish historian seem hard to please. He has to scowl when all other historians look happy.
Luckily, I write no history of the Jews, just the bit of it that is relevant and material to the trial of Malchiel Greenwald.
The Greenwalds arrived in Palestine. Here they felt was an end to their Jewish unpopularity. For in 1923 Britain accepted the mandate from the League of Nations, [1] countersigned by the non-member United States, to convert Palestine into a homeland for the Jews.
This magnanimous project was the result of World War I, which was fought by our side to rid the world of militarism, power politics, and human injustice, generally. Our side won. A homeland for Hebrews was one of the proofs of virtue's victory. Another such proof was World Disarmament, which also got happily under way in the 1920's.
The English, in their best Galahad manner, accepted the job of fixing up the new Promised Land for the Jews. But after a breather, they secretly proceeded to do just the opposite -- began to turn it into a British-Arab dominion. There was no anti-Semitism involved. It was practical Empire building. Fifty million Arab allies and their inexhaustible oil wells were a brighter prospect than a handful of Jews with nothing but gratitude to offer the Crown. To achieve this altered project it was necessary to keep the Jews from overrunning Palestine.
After nearly two decades, the British finally put their Colonial cards on the table and stopped pretending they were the fairy-godmother for the Jewish "homeland." In 1939, Great Britain issued the famous White Paper on the Palestine situation. [2]
This royal document contained two major points. One, Jews were almost completely barred from buying any more land in Palestine. Two, the White Paper proclaimed a last limited immigration for Palestine and then ordered its ports closed as soon as this last handful had passed the Customs. The "Protectorate Policy" then warned any Jews who might try to evade extermination at Nazi hands by sneaking into the Holy Land that they would be treated as enemies of the Crown.
A clever phrase, White Paper. Wrap evil in righteous words and who will examine the package? Statecraft is as simple as that, and so are the multitudes who buy its wrappings. All they ask is assurance from the proper authorities that black is white.
There was debate in the British Parliament whether this right-about-face of barring the Jews from their new homeland was the proper thing to do. The pro-White Paper statesmen had luck on their side. The famous Jews most involved in the new Homeland business were too full of loyalty for England to do anything about being swindled out of Palestine. There was also the lucky fact that World War I was over, and any pro-Jewish public opinion in the United States was no longer of any importance.
Among the strongest argufyers against the White Paper was Winston Churchill. Minus government post of any sort at the time, but bright with vision, Churchill denounced the White Paper as a shameful document; a crime, indeed, against the menaced Jews of Europe. [3]
The debate was brief. In a short time, despite the press and public, the government of England proceeded under the White Paper to keep the Jews out of Palestine.
And the statesman actively in charge of this anti-Jewish policy was Winston Churchill, become now Prime Minister. I make no criticism of this. What a man feels as a human being and what he feels as a politician are bound to be different.
The English, themselves, are much inclined toward decency. But that never helps. Authority knows how to take decency out of play. There is no devilish deed that cannot be shined up into a patriotic necessity by the right propaganda. All that is needed is for people to believe in their duly elected leaders.
This they have always done. The talent for believing in authority is the backbone of every civilization. Even though our present civilization consists of nations red-faced with hate and threatening fiercely to destroy each other and the planet to boot, this belief does not waver.
Should our planet go up in smoke on some tomorrow, such a finale will not lessen the status of authority. I feel sure the last hundred million earthlings to expire in the hydrogen blasts will do so with unshaken faith in the correctness of their leaders.
"JUST FOR A RIBBON TO PUT IN HIS COAT"I must ignore Malchiel Greenwald for another few pages in favor of further matters, relevant and material to his trial. The first of these is his accuser, the Government of Israel.
To understand the malignant drama soon to erupt in a Jerusalem court room, it is necessary to know the character of the accuser as well as the accused. The character of Israel's bosses who are suing Greenwald is not the traditional Jewish character of the past. The piety and sorrow of the Dispersed Ones, the humorous and exotic brotherhood of the unwanted, have given way to a political mentality. The Jewish leaders in the 1930's had begun to feel their oats as the rulers of a new Zion.
Rulership produces a character of its own -- the unbending Ego. This certainty -- drunk figure has dominated history since the dawn of government. And he is no different as Jew than he was as Roman, Greek, Vandal, Norman, etc.
He knows what is best for the people -- his continuation in power. He knows what is right -- the ruses and shenanigans that keep him in power. And he knows what is wrong -- anything that endangers his power.
It is these politicalized princes of Jerusalem of whom I shall write with a cold pencil. They will not think of Jews dying in Europe, but of government thriving in Palestine, and they thriving with it. And when their behavior becomes too wanton to seem human to me, the Jews of Palestine and of the world will still be looking on them with love and pride. For that is the way of people (Jewish and non-Jewish) toward authority. They are loyal to it even when it is not loyal to them. Just as they are loyal to God when He strikes them down. It is a human instinct -- this loyalty to destroyers. But it is not the only human instinct. (I haven't got it.)
The British know every bit as much as I do about the character of rulership. They were aware in the 1920's that the Jewish rulers of Palestine were to be regarded not as Jews but as politicians. And they had taken the measure early of these great ones who had emerged in the Holy Land. They found them a bit gabbier than most Colonials, but they noted in them the proper bend-the-knee philosophy toward the source of their power, England. Naturally, they were not all to be trusted, but the top boys proved to be stout British loyalists. These were "Zionists" with a mania chiefly for prestige. Since no prestige was possible without a British ribbon on it, you could wager -- come what might -- on their loyalty to the Crown.
Thus for years before legally closing the ports of Palestine, the British had relied on two factors to further their secret plan for an Arab Palestine: the apathy of Jewry to pull up stakes for the Holy Land; and the eloquence of the official Zionist leaders, who were currently urging an "elite immigration" to Palestine and deploring any wholesale movement of the Jewish masses into Eretz-Israel.
The meaning of all this to the Jews of Europe was, "Stay home!"
The spokesman for the scuttling of the old Jewish dream of a homeland in Zion for the six million Jews of Europe was Dr. Chaim Weizmann. Born in the ghetto of Pinsk, Russia, Weizmann had migrated to London and become, magically, an Englishman. I say magically because that is the way ghetto Jews once felt, and possibly still do, when they passed from being lowly undesirables into being high-class social figures. They felt that a good-fairy wand had been waved over their heads.
In no time at all our undesirable Weizmann from the ghetto of Pinsk became a socially esteemed English Jew. Wherefore a reverence for everything English salaamed in his soul.
This understandable human fact of Jewish gratefulness is important to my story. It is, in fact, one of the basic issues in the trial of Greenwald, this gratitude to England versus concern for the lives of millions of Jews.
THE RELUCTANT MOSESThis was Chaim Weizmann, the new type of leader produced by modern Jewry, the Englishman with Jewish leanings. He is another character in Malchiel Greenwald's trial. His ghost is now the Government of Israel.
That Weizmann, first president of Israel, was a man of greatness is obvious. He was a winsome man of talent; persuasive, apparently modest and, to boot, as bull-headed as any Caesar. When he died he left an illusion in the world that he personally had created the new State of Israel.
The truth of Weizmann is that he was stirred by the Jewish dream of a New Zion, which somehow did not include the Jews of reality -- of Petticoat Lane, Hester Street, the Warsaw Nalevki, and the ghetto of Pinsk.
In the 1930's, Dr. Weizmann made many eloquent speeches explaining the aims of his Zionism. He offered the world a picture of a Zionism toiling to turn Palestine into a Tiffany's window for glittering Jews, and not another ghetto for pushcart vendors and lowly tallith-wearers.
In August, 1937 Dr. Weizmann, as leader of World Zionism, addressed a Zionist convention in London. Hitler at the time was sowing their new mission into German souls, the extermination of the Jews of Europe. This new factor in "Jewish affairs" did not alter Weizmann's blueprint for a selective Jewish homeland; neither did it move him to urge the six million Jews of Europe to save themselves by coming to Palestine. Dr. Weizmann remained loyal to his "idealistic" concept of the Promised Land -- that it was no place to crowd up with Jews.
Of the six million Jews who were in a few years to be exterminated by the Germans, Dr. Weizmann, addressing the 480 Zionist delegates, fifteen hundred visitors, two hundred press correspondents from all corners of the earth, and official foreign representatives from a score of nations, had this to say:
"I told the British Royal Commission that the hopes of Europe's six million Jews were centered on emigration. I was asked, 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No.' ... 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. . . . Only a branch shall survive. . . . They had to accept it . . . If they feel and suffer they will find the way -- beachareth haiamin -- in the fullness of time ... I pray that we may preserve our national unity, for it is all we have." [4]
In Jewish tradition the Hebrew phrase Weizmann used, "beachareth hajamin," meant that ''When the Messiah comes, all the Dead will be revived."
At the close of Dr. Weizmann's speech, as reported in the New Judea, official gazette of the Zionist organization, "The assembly rose and sang the Jewish anthem, the 'Hatikvah,' the Song of Hope."
In 1939 at the outbreak of the war, Dr. Weizmann, the uncrowned king of Jewry, announced he was taking a recess from all Jewish activities. He was going to concentrate on the scientific war effort.
Here is another pen picture of this Jewish leader at the time of the beginning of the Jewish disaster, reported by one of his most talented admirers, the American playwright S. N. Behrman. The piece appears in a book called Chaim Weizmann -- the Builder of Zion, published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The dramatist reports:
Somebody has turned on a radio. 22nd of June, 1941.The radio brought the news. Germany has launched an offensive on Russia. The Germans have already marched through the border. I watched Weizmann. His eyes were dark.
"This is the second time," he said.
He recalled that when the First World War broke out, two years after the death of his father, his mother still lived in Pinsk and had to escape from the fear of German invasion.
And now they come again -- the Germans. What will be the fate of all these people? I saw in his eyes the tragic vision of what has really happened to them. There was a silence in the room. "Yes," he said, "For our people there, for millions of them, a horrible and monstrous fate is waiting." But after a moment his eyes lighted, his body leaned forward. '''At the end -- and this is the most important thing -- this war is bound to bring about a blessing to England," he added. [5]
Dr. Weizmann's Anglophilism never wavered to his death. [6] There were those who noted that Weizmann's speech to the World Zionist Congress proclaiming the Jews as the "dust of Europe" was virtually a plan to abandon them in their danger. Jabotinsky noted this, and barnstormed the ghettos of Europe telling his people that they were sitting on a powder keg, and urging them to flee before they were wiped out.
He and his Irgun comrades were attacked by official Zionism as dangerous trouble makers.
I do not cry villainy at the Zionists, not now. But there is a puzzle here. The British wanted no more Jews in Palestine. The Zionists wanted "only the best Jews." [7] I do not know whether the Zionists cooked up their selectivity policy to coincide with British aims in Palestine, or whether the British took advantage of the Zionist Jew-snobbery to slap their ban on the Holy Land. Very likely both factors were mutually involved.
Footnote 7. The following letter was written by Henry Montor, Executive Vice-Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. It states the official attitude of the Jewish leaders of Palestine toward the rescue of the six million European Jews whose extermination was well under way.
February 1, 1940
Rabbi Baruch E. Rabinowitz
Congregation B'nai Abraham
Hagerstown, Maryland
Dear Rabbi Rabinowitz:
· . . I am enclosing herewith two items which may be helpful in revising your judgment on several aspects of the situation relating to the refugees on the Danube ....
The United Palestine Appeal is a fund-raising instrument of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, as well as the Jewish National Fund. Whatever may be the attitude of the Jewish Agency toward unregistered migration [the refugees from Nazi persecution] to Palestine, it cannot, as a legally constituted body, publicly emphasize any interest in or sympathy with such immigration as it may and does have.... As you know, provisions of the White Paper provide for an annual immigration schedule of 10,000 a year .... Public emphasis on unregistered immigration and acknowledgment by such a body as the Jewish Agency that it not only endorses, but finances, such unregistered immigration can only strike a disastrous blow at the possibility of facilitating the entry of legal, properly qualified immigrants into Palestine. . . .
· . . "Selectivity" is an inescapable factor in dealing with the problem of immigration to Palestine. By "selectivity" is meant the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes either in agriculture or industry and who are in other ways trained for life in Palestine, which involves difficulties and hardships for which they must be prepared physically and psychologically. Sentimental considerations are, of course, vital and everyone would wish to save every single Jew who could be rescued out of the cauldron of Europe.
But when one is dwelling with so delicate a program as unregistered immigration, it is, obviously, essential that those people sent to Palestine shall be able to endure harsh conditions under which they must live for weeks and months on the Mediterranean and the difficulties which await them when they land on the shores of Palestine.
· . . There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism, whether they be in the ranks of the British Government or the Arabs, or even in the ranks of the Jewish people, if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would insure a continuity of immigration. . . .
Until the resources of Palestine are adequately developed, immigration of from 30,000 to 60,000 a year may be possible.... Under these circumstances, therefore, is it not essential for responsible leaders to concern themselves with the necessity of selecting immigration, particularly under the arduous conditions that surround unregistered immigration at the present time . . . ?
Cordially yours,
Henry Montor
Executive Vice-Chairman
The Weizmann-Zionist credo that implemented the British aims in Palestine was possibly more a sin of bounderism than betrayal. It was the work not so much of conscious hypocrites as of the split personality of the assimilated Jew.
One more item about the Weizmann-Zionist accomplishment. In addition to being a half-conscious ruse to help the British, it was an ideological fraud. Granted there was charm in the notion of a high-falutin' Palestine, behind the charm was the voice of the con man. It was a shrewd spiel for money from rich Jews -- with no truth in it. There could never be any such elegant land for Hebrews.
Genius and glitter are not a corsage you import. They are a tree that grows with much difficulty out of the soil of a nation.
The millions of ghetto Jews of Europe were thrilled by this Zionist snobbery that chose to ignore them. They stepped up their contributions and doubled their prayers in the synagogues for the creation of such a noble and superior land of Zion.
This is a normal response for the lowly with dreams. Just as the poor skimp and save their pennies to send their children to a far-off university full of learning and glamour, so did Europe's Jews, prior to their extermination, finance the lucky ones of Palestine.
As for the rich, important Jews, they were as usual harder to get at. In those pre-Hitler days Jews were inclined to measure their importance by the fact that everybody had almost forgotten they were Jewish.
But such rich ones as had ears for the Zionist pitch dreamed along with Weizmann of a Buckingham Palace of a Holy Land. Who wants to be related to Chaim Yankel from the ghetto when he can re-claim kinship with Solomon in all his glory?
In 1939 the British realized that such Jewish oratory as Dr. Weizmann's was not enough to ensure an Arab Palestine. The Germans were promising to exterminate the Jews, and when this slaughter got going it would obviously take more than the fine speeches of Weizmann, et al, to keep the doomed ones from packing off to Palestine. Thus, the British White Paper.
THE LAWYERThe lawyer who may take the case, says Rina to her father, Malchiel Greenwald, is in that building across Jaffa Street. If her parent had consulted her in the first place, he would be out of trouble by this time. Rina is a divorcee with a child and a longing in her heart for her ex-husband. But she is always able to solve other people's troubles, even her father's.
Greenwald is impressed by the building, three stories high, fine Jerusalem stone, and rather new. It looks like a good building, says Greenwald, very promising. And the pair cross Jaffa Street to call on Attorney Shmuel Tamir, who is the most important of the three heroes in this history.
Unlike Greenwald, he is not a hero by accident. When the battle is joined it will not be a haphazard trouble-stirrer who mounts the barricades. It will be one of the boldest brains in Jerusalem since the prophets of old walked its streets, bawling the hell out of the Jews.
Lawyer Tamir's main office is in Tel Aviv. The branch office in Jerusalem was opened only a week ago. Expansion was necessary to meet a booming law practice, a good part of which entailed the defense of people who were victims of government discrimination -- Arabs included.
In 1953, Attorney Tamir, despite his youth, was one of Israel's brightest and most successful lawyers, and was already considered by the government as an important nuisance.
Attorney S. Tamir was born in Jerusalem as Shmuel Katznelson. He had led a rather full life in that city, including courtship, marriage, university education, and the blowing up of a number of buildings. These buildings were the armed headquarters of the British military forces under orders from the Crown to hang on to Palestine and turn it into an Arabian annex. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, which included Tamir, was opposed.
Shmuel Katznelson had joined the Irgun at the age of fifteen and been given the nickname Tamir, the Hebrew word for "tall and straight." Nicknames were necessary in the underground forces to keep identities hidden from the British. As did most of the Irgun youths, Shmuel later adopted his nickname as his family name.
The man who inspired and brought about the creation of the Irgun was the artist-soldier Vladimir Jabotinsky. Outside of Ireland, literary heroes are rare. Byron, Victor Hugo, Paine-Jabotinsky was of this elite.
He wrote novels, essays, poems, and battle hymns. He was also an exciting orator. His speeches had the effect of magic, and young people were ready to give their lives at his call. But Jabotinsky was no literary zealot or orator only. He organized the Zion Mule Corps that fought under British colours at Gallipoli. He created, also, the Jewish Legion, commanded by Col. John H. Patterson, that valiantly helped rout the Turks out of Palestine in 1917.Colonel Patterson remained a champion of the Irgun and one of its training officers.
Jabotinsky's right-hand man was the one-armed hero, Joseph Trumpeldor. Trumpeldor had helped him to recruit and organize the Zion Mule Corps for Callipoli. Trumpeldor led the Jews in that desperate battle. At his side in the fighting was his favorite sergeant and companion, Reuven Katznelson, father of Tamir.
Trumpeldor was an ex-officer in the Czar's army. This was an amazing place for a Jew -- the Russian Officers' Corps that regarded Jews as our Confederate officers looked on the negroes in 1862.
But Trumpeldor was amazing. This one-armed Jew would have been welcomed as a leader in any corps of fighting men. His gaiety bloomed in danger. He went leaping and laughing into battles as if heading for a swim in the surf.
He died defending the settlement of Tel Hai from the Arabs in 1929.
The war over, Jabotinsky's fIrst preoccupation was to ensure the self-defense of the Jewish community in Palestine. He organized a militia to guard Jewish settlers from the Arabs. He named it by the Hebrew word for self defense, Haganah.
In 1920,on the Passover, a fateful season for the Jews through the ages, the Arabs (with British leave) struck, in the first pogrom of the Holy Land, with all the ancient diversions of plunder, rape and murder. Jabotinsky fought, planned, Hew battle cries in the air, and the Jews heard Maccabeus again -- or, rather, some of them did.
The British looked with disfavor on this type of Jewish enterprise. They arrested Jabotinsky, tried and convicted him, and sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. A considerable uproar induced the British within the year to release Jabotinsky from his Acre prison cell and "commute" his sentence to exile from Palestine for life.
In 1936, an issue confronted the men of Palestine -- whether to shoot back or not shoot back at the Arabs who, with British connivance, were raiding and terrorizing the Jewish settlements. All the various parties, clans, and sects of the new land voted for Havlagah -- "self restraint" -- all except one group. This group detached itself from the Haganah, pledged to passivism, and called itself the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The Irgun remained, almost to the end, an underground. The political followers of Jabotinsky who did not go underground became known as the Revisionists.
The Revisionist movement, led by Jabotinsky, apart from opposing the British-inspired Arabs and other British chicanery, and arousing world public opinion for the cause of a Free Palestine, took one other daring decision of far-reaching consequences. This was to break the British blockade of Palestine. [8]
With the exiled Jabotinsky in this enterprise were two Homeric Jews, Abrasha Stavsky [9] and Joseph Katznelson (not to be confused with Ben-Gurion's chaver-Berl Katznelson). Joseph Katznelson was brother of Reuven. Abrasha and Joseph were as rough-and-tumble a pair of law breakers as ever disturbed the ports of the Mediterranean. They broke all the laws against Jews. As Jabotinsky's Chiefs of Illegal Immigration, they kidnapped thousands of Jews from under the Nazi noses and sent them bouncing off in ships to the Holy Land, ships that ducked the British Beet in fog and storm and dumped their contraband humans on the night-black shores of Palestine. They were the antidote to Ben-Gurion and his jittery Jewish Agency.
Tamir was their young disciple. At twenty-three he was acting Irgun Commander of Jerusalem, in charge of routing the British out of it.