Righteous Victims
Last read October 7, 2024
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Highlights
16 highlights added in October 2024.
The British were seen by the Arabs as the protectors of Zionism, and the bitter memory of the crushing defeat of the Palestinian uprising of 1936–39 was still fresh. Support for the Axis seemed only natural, especially as Italian and German propaganda promised the Arabs independence after Britain’s defeat
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“Not only the Palestinians rejoiced … but the whole Arab world, in Egypt and Palestine and Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, and not because they love the Germans, but because they dislike the English … because … of their policy in Palestine.”
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Ben-Gurion viewed the Holocaust primarily through the prism of its effect on the Yishuv. “The catastrophe of European Jewry is not, in a direct manner, my business,”
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The British viewed illegal immigration as a challenge to the White Paper and to their rule in Palestine, and consequently, as a threat to their position in the Middle East. Given the conflict that already strained resources to the utmost, it is little wonder that Whitehall resorted to severe, sometimes brutal, measures to stop the campaign.
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Whitehall adopted a policy of capturing and deporting the immigrants en masse to special island camps, in Mauritius and eventually Cyprus.
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By March 31, 1944, the number was still 20,000 short of the limit.10
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Ben-Gurion is said to have greeted the outbreak of war by saying: “We shall fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and we shall fight the war as if there is no White Paper.”
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“The conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State as a reward for Jewish military assistance is the objective.”
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On September 8, 1939, Ben-Gurion had told the commanders of the Haganah: “The First World War … had given us the Balfour Declaration. This time we must bring about a Jewish State.”
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“Dr. Weizmann said that if half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place. That, of course, would be a first instalment; what might happen afterwards was a matter for history.… Weizmann said that … they would be transferring the Arabs only into Iraq or Transjordan … conditions in Transjordan were not very different from those of the Palestine hill country.”
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Jewish survivors refused to remain anywhere near the killing fields, the Western European countries and the United States were unwilling to take them in, and the Zionists wanted them in Palestine.
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In Washington the battle for support was decisively won by the Zionists, because of the impact of the Holocaust, effective propaganda, and the electoral and financial clout of the five million American Jews.
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For Palestine’s Arabs the war passed without significant change. Their financial assets grew substantially as a result of Allied spending and investment,56 but militarily and politically, things remained much the same. Few—perhaps five to six thousand men—joined the Allied armed forces or otherwise gained military experience; there was no increment in local military force or organization. And the political (and military) leadership that had been shattered and scattered in 1938–39 remained in exile, neutralized or hors de combat.
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there can be no greater injustice and aggression than solving the problem of the Jews of Europe by … inflicting injustice on the Palestine Arabs.”
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In mid-1942 M16, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, had estimated, fairly accurately, that the Haganah had thirty thousand members, with arms for 50 to 70 percent of them.
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Jewish estimates put Haganah strength in 1944 at 36,000, with about 14,000 light weapons, including some two- and three-inch mortars and machine guns.68
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