A History of Zionism (94 page)

*
David Yisraeli, ‘The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement’,
Journal of Contemporary History
, April 1971.

†
Ibid.

‡
Documents on German Foreign Policy
, series C, vol 5, no. 664.

*
Stenographisches Protokoll
, speeches by Rubashov (Shazar), p. 258; Goldmann, p. 272.

*
Weizmann,
Trial and Error
, p. 359.

10
EUROPEAN CATASTROPHE

The situation of European Jewry continued to deteriorate throughout the 1930s. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws codified and extended anti-Jewish legislation in Germany. One year later official antisemitism was slightly relaxed; the Olympic Games were to be held in Berlin and the German government wanted to represent a respectable front. But the interlude was brief and repression became more intense once the foreign visitors had departed. In February 1938 an editorial appeared in the
Schwarze Korps
, mouthpiece of the SS, entitled: ‘What should be done with the Jews?’ The writer complained that emigration fever had obviously not yet infected the Jews. They were not behaving as if they were sitting on their luggage, ready to leave the country at any moment. To encourage them new draconian measures were adopted, culminating in the ‘
Kristallnacht
’ in November 1938, the burning of the synagogues, mass arrests, and a huge collective fine.

If during the first five years of Nazi power Jews had merely lost their livelihood and were reduced to second-class citizenship, they virtually became outlaws after November 1938. Yet Nazi policy in Germany was a model of restraint in comparison with their behaviour in Austria and Czechoslovakia. The process of eliminating Jews from German society and economic life which had taken five years in Germany was telescoped into as many weeks in Vienna and Prague. The stage of systematic extermination was reached only after the occupation of Poland and the invasion of Russia. Up to 1939 thousands of Jews were able to emigrate, but as the war spread the trap closed: At a high level meeting on 20 January 1942, at Grosser Wannsee in Berlin, it was decided to carry out the ‘final solution’, the extermination of European Jewry.

The rise of Nazism, at first limited to Germany, proved infectious. Fascist and antisemitic movements mushroomed all over the Continent. Even Italy, which had always proudly insisted that it was pursuing its own, the only genuine road to fascism, and had rejected antisemitism as alien to the Italian spirit, under German influence promulgated anti-Jewish laws in 1938. In Bucharest the Goga-Cuza government announced in January 1938 that the national status of all Rumanian Jews would be revised and that half of them would have to leave. Whether they would emigrate or drown in the Black Sea, was, as a government spokesman put it, a question of personal preference. According to the Teleki bill, introduced in the Hungarian parliament in 1938, three hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews were to lose their jobs within the next few years. They were no longer to hold any position in the state or the municipalities, in the trade unions or on public bodies, and all trade licences were to be withdrawn.
A numerus clausus
of 6 per cent was to be introduced in all professions except in commerce where it was to be 12 per cent. The position of Polish Jews also continued to deteriorate during the 1930s. There were three million of them, about 10 per cent of the total population, concentrated in the five largest towns where they constituted 30 per cent of the total. Pogroms took place in several Polish cities, and small- and large-scale boycotts. Jewish students were under constant pressure. It was the declared policy of successive Polish governments to make the position of Polish Jewry intolerable and compel them to emigrate.

For those who did not live through that period it is difficult to realise the depths of despair reached during those black years. The western democracies were suffering from a paralysis of will. They tried to ignore Hitler, and when faced with open aggression attempted to buy him off. Appeasement was costly, humiliating, and ultimately, of course, ineffective. By 1938 it seemed as if Hitler would gradually conquer the whole of Europe without even encountering resistance. If the policy of the western democracies was shortsighted and dishonourable, the less said about Stalin’s and Russia’s part the better. America was immersed in its own problems and had no intention of intervening in European affairs.

The Jews of central and eastern Europe, under growing pressure to leave their countries of origin, had nowhere to turn. In a more tolerant age nations and governments had been willing to extend help to the homeless stranger. Britain had taken in 120,000 French Protestants in 1685 after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. By March 1939, in contrast, Britain had given entry permits to barely nineteen thousand Jewish refugees from the Continent. It could be argued that the country was no longer capable of absorbing immigrants on a massive scale. But what of the less densely populated countries overseas? ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free’; but since Emma Lazarus’s poem had been inscribed on the Statue of Liberty attitudes had changed. The United States in 1935 accepted 6,252 Jewish immigrants, Argentine 3,159, Brazil 1,758, South Africa 1,078, Canada 624. In the same year the number of legal Jewish immigrants into Palestine was 61,854.

These figures speak for themselves: the European countries, however reluctantly, gave shelter to more refugees than those overseas with the exception of Palestine, which absorbed more than all the others put together. By the time the war broke out thirty-five thousand had found temporary shelter in France, twenty-five thousand in Belgium and twenty thousand in Holland. But there was no real security for Jews in Europe, for many of those who had escaped were overtaken by the advancing German armies. In October 1938 twenty-eight thousand Jews of Polish nationality living in Germany were rounded up and dumped by the Nazis at various points on the German-Polish border. A few months later thousands of Jews of Hungarian origin were expelled from Slovakia.
*
Big new Jewish communities came into being in places such as Zbonszyn, of which no one had ever heard before. They were located in a no man’s land, without shelter or food, suffering from cold and disease, exposure and starvation. There were floating Jewish communities such as those on
S.S. Sönigstein, Caribia
, or
St Louis.
These had left Hamburg in 1938 for Latin America with many hundreds of passengers on board, but were not permitted to land in their countries of destination. The Nazis were willing to take them back - into concentration camps. And so these ghost ships continued their macabre voyage between Europe and Latin America, between the Balkans and Palestine, treated as if they were carriers of the plague.

To bring some element of order into an utterly confused situation, and to coordinate help for German refugees, President Roosevelt invited representatives of thirty-two governments to a conference in Evian, in France in July 1938. The British insisted that Palestine, the most important country for Jewish immigration, should not be discussed. When Weizmann asked permission to appear before the conference his request was turned down flat by the American presiding over the conference.
†
The outcome was predictable. One speaker after another went to the rostrum and reported that there was no territory suitable for Jewish settlers. Some did so with expressions of regret. Others, such as the Australian delegate, said that they had no racial problem and were not desirous of importing one. The one surprise was the statement by the Dominican delegate that his country was willing to accept refugees. It was a generous gesture, even though it was not clear whether the area set aside for the refugees was suitable for any known form of settlement.

The conference resulted in the establishment of a permanent Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees headed by Lord Winterton, a leading British anti-Zionist. The delegates were not callous men. They were carrying out the instructions of their respective governments, and the position taken by the governments reflected the state of public opinion. On the eve of the Evian conference the American Veterans of Foreign Wars passed a resolution calling for the suspension of all immigration for ten years. In London the Socialist Medical Association at their annual reunion complained of the ‘dilution of our industry with non-Union, non-Socialist labour’; the Conservative
Sunday Express
proclaimed editorially that ‘just now there is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are overrunning the country’.
*

The outcome of the Evian conference was nil. Once the gates of Palestine had been all but closed, Jews from central Europe, unless they had close relations or special skills, could move without any restriction to only one place on the entire globe - the International Settlement in Shanghai. But the Japanese authorities, too, clamped down on Jewish immigration in August 1939. As the London
Times
in its ‘Review of the Year’ for 1938 succinctly put it, ‘the great surplus Jewish population remained an acute problem’. There were, in other words, too many Jews.

When Herzl had first thought of a Jewish state he had envisaged a gradual migration to Palestine; he had not imagined a catastrophe. Neither he nor any other Jewish leader after him, not even Jabotinsky, had claimed that Palestine could absorb all Jews. But the foundations had been laid in Palestine in the 1920s for the settlement of hundreds of thousands. In the middle 1930s, when ‘it was no longer a question whether Zionism was a good idea or a bad idea, whether it was desirable or not’, the community had grown to four hundred thousand; it was no longer a political theory but a fact.
†
British experts, who only a few years earlier had been concerned about the absorptive capacity of the country, now conceded that the big immigration wave of 1933-5 (134,000 legal immigrants) far from reducing that capacity had actually increased it: the more immigrants, the more work they created for local industry.
*
Palestinian imports and exports rose by more than 50 per cent between 1933 and 1935. The consumption of electric energy, always an accurate index of economic growth, almost trebled during that period. While other governments at the time had deficits amounting to billions of dollars, the government of Palestine had a mounting surplus. Thirteen hundred firms were represented at the 1932 Levant Fair at Tel Aviv, a rapidly growing city. In 1935 it had 135,000 inhabitants. There were 160 Jewish agricultural settlements in that year and more were being established every month.

Immigration would have risen even more quickly but for the restrictions imposed by the mandatory government. Under an ordinance issued in 1933 different categories of immigrants had been established, the two most important being Category A (‘capitalists’) and the ‘labour schedule’. A capitalist, according to the standards of those days, was a person who had £500 to his name; later, the figure was raised to £1,000. The labour schedule became the main bone of contention between the Palestine government and the Jewish Agency. In 1934 the Agency asked for 20,000 certificates for labour immigrants and received 5,600. For the year starting in April 1935 it asked for 30,000 and obtained 11,200. In 1936, after the outbreak of the Arab riots, the government severely restricted immigration. Of the 22,000 certificates requested by the Agency, little more than 10 per cent, 2,500, were granted. The upshot was that in the years when European Jewry needed Palestine most its gates were gradually closed.

Eventually, in the White Paper of 1939, it was announced that five years later Jewish immigration was to stop altogether. The reasons were political, not economic in character. They had nothing to do with absorptive capacity. The Arab national movement was growing in strength. After the abortive general strike of October 1933 there were two years of peace, but April 1936 saw the outbreak of a rebellion which petered out only in 1939. No one doubted that the Arabs had benefited from Jewish immigration. Their numbers had almost doubled between 1917 and 1940, wages had gone up, the standard of living had risen more than anywhere else in the Middle East. The Jews had certainly not dispossessed the Arabs. ‘Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased’, the Peel Commission reported. Malcolm MacDonald, the colonial secretary, and no friend of Zionism, wrote that ‘if not a single Jew had come to Palestine after 1918, I believe the Arab population today would still be round the 600,000 figure, at which it had been stable under Turkish rule’. But the Jewish immigrants had come, and they had been instrumental in generating a Palestine Arab national movement.

The Arabs were afraid of becoming a minority in Palestine, and while they were divided into half a dozen political parties, all of them agreed on opposing Zionism. The Arab character of Palestine had to be retained, the establishment of a Jewish national home resisted. The militants among them resorted to violence and carried the more moderate forces with them. The movement drew encouragement from the successes of Nazism and Italian fascism, and from the impotence shown by the western powers in their attempts to stop the aggressors. The ineffectiveness of the League of Nations’ sanctions against Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia had a notable impact in the Middle East. Egypt had made a big step towards independence following the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, and the Syrians and the Iraqis, too, had made a marked advance. The Palestinian Arabs did not want to lag behind their Arab brethren.

Britain was in no mood to resist. The riots had, of course, to be put down, but at the same time a decision was taken to liquidate the Zionist experiment, or, to be precise, to freeze it at the existing level. These were the years of appeasement in Europe. As the clouds of war thickened, Britain needed Arab friendship more than the goodwill of the Jews, which was assured anyway. For, unlike the Arabs, the Jews could not opt for Hitler and Mussolini, nor for Stalin. The majority of the generation of British statesmen which had sponsored the Balfour Declaration had disappeared from the political scene; those few who still survived had more urgent preoccupations.