Chapter 6: We shall fight Hitler
British views of Jews and Zionism
"The British regarded us as a singularly complicated breed of native, less charming than the humble and picturesque Arabs and much more pretentious and demanding...There had been another wave of Arab riots in 1929...and although the British had eventually restored peace, they did so in a manner calculated to impress upon the Arabs that no one would be punished very severely for murdering Jews or for looting Jewish property."
"I returned to London again that year for a week or two as a delegate to thc Imperial Labour Conference. Ranisay MacDonald was then prime minister. Although he himself was sympathetic to, even concerned with, the yishuv’s progrcss, it was his government that issued the notorious White Paper of 1930 (known as the Passfield Paper) whittling down Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Thirteen years after the Balfour Declaration, the British seemed to be more concerned with appeasing the Arabs than fulfilling their promise to the Jews. Someone in London said to me cynically: ‘YouJews wanted to own a national home, but all you are getting is a rented flat!’ The truth was even harsher, however. It was beginning to look as though our landlord now wanted to break the lease altogether, although in 1930, of course, no one imagined that it would only take eighteen more years for the British to declare that the Mandate was absolutely unworkable."
"Perhaps it was because I had lived in America for so long that I didn’t fall quite as thoroughly under the spell of the British as many of my colleagues did. I admired and liked the British people, including the leadership of the Labour Party, but I can’t honestly say that I was really taken by surprise when we were so badly let down by them, then or later. Many, if not most, Palestinian Jews were afflicted in those years by what turned out to be the pathetic belief— all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding —that Britain would keep faith with us after all, regardless of increasing Arab pressure and the traditionally pro.- Arab stand of the Colonial Office. I think that much of this reluctance to face up to the fact that the British government was in the process of changing its mind about its responsibility to the Zionists stemmed from the tremendous respect in which British democracy was held by Jews who had been brought up in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.
On the whole, for many years, most of my colleagues tended to regard British parliamentary and civic institutions and procedures as only a little short of miraculous, while I, who had actually lived in a democracy, was rather less dazzled. Incidentally, it is remarkable that despite the long, stormy, and often terrible conflict between us and the British, and the way in which that conflict ended in 1948, we Israelis still hold the British people in great and truly affectionate esteem and are more hurt by being let down by the British than by any other nation. There are various reasons for this. One is, of course, that it was Britain that gave us the Balfour Declaration. Another is that the Jews have never forgotten the lonely British stand against the Nazis, and yet another may he, I think, the in-horn Jewish respect for tradition. At all events, throughout the thirty-odd years of the Mandate, the yishuv always made a clear-cut distinction between the Palestine mandatory government and the British people, between the man in the street in England and the officials of the Colonial and Foreign Offices, and went on hoping to win unqualified British support. But on the political level, at least, it remained mostly an unrequited love."
Socialism
"To the extent that the Histadrut represented what was on the whole an extremely advanced form ofJewish self-government in Palestine, the Va’ad Hapoel was its ‘cabinet’—within which, for the next very stormy fourteen years, I was assigned various portfolios and responsibilities. None of these, as I look back, were either easy to carry out or likely to make me particularly popular inside the Histadrut itself. But they did have one great asset: they all had to do with what in fact most concerned and interested me —the translation of socialist principles into the down- to-earth terminology of everyday life.
I suppose that if times had been good economically and politically —or at least better —in the Palestine of the mid-193os and the 1940s, it would have been relatively easy to ensure a just sharing of burdens within the labour community. After all, other than what they did for a living, there really were no differences at all —either economic or social —between the so-called rank and file of the membership and the so-called Hzstadrut leadership. We were all paid a fixed basic living wage which varied only according to actual seniority and the number of dependants in each family, and there were no exceptions to this rule. I know that today people in Israel and elsewhere regard this kind of egalitarianism not only as old-fashioned but as downright unworkable. Perhaps it is, but I myself approved of it and have always approved of it. I still think that it made good sound socialist sense —which usually means good sound common sense —for the janitor of the Histadrut building in Tel Aviv who had nine children to support to get a considerably fatter pay envelope than I, who had only two children to support. Socialism in practice involved much more than my calling this janitor Shmuel and his calling me Golda. It meant also that his obligations to the other members of the Histadrut were the same as mine, and the economic situation in Palestine, as well as everywhere else, being as difficult as it was then, this aspect of trade unionism became the focal point of most of my battles within the Histadrut.
Payment of Histadrut dues was fixed according to a sliding scale, like income tax. It was paid every month in a lump sum that covered trade union funds, pension funds and the Kupat Holim (the Workers’ Sick Fund) and was known as the ‘singletax’. I was convinced that this single tax should be assessed not according to basic wages or average earnings or some theoretical sum, but on the full pay that each worker actually received. Otherwise, where was the ‘equality’ we talked about so much? Was sharing to be the sole property of the kibbutzim, or could give-and-take be made the way of life among the workers of Tel Aviv, too? And what about the Histadrut membership’s collective responsibility for comrades who were unemployed? Was it conceivable that the Histadrut should make its voice heard (and its presence felt) on each and every issue that vitally concerned the yishuv —immigration, settlement, self-defence —but avert its gaze from the men and women who were without jobs and whose children were barely getting enough to eat? If nothing else, mutual aid —one of the bases of the Histadrut —was certainly a prerequisite of socialism, however hard-up an employed member of the Histadrut might be and regardless of how painful it was to turn over a day’s salary each month to a special unemployment fund. But I felt very strongly about these fundamental matters and persisted in setting up an unemployment fund, despite the very vocal opposition to it. We called it Mifdeh, which means ‘redemption’, and when the number of unemployed increased (at one point during the 1930S about 10,000 Histadrut members were out of work, I pressed for an increase in the unemployment tax and we established Mifdeh B.
Some of my friends charged me with ‘destroying the Histadrut’ and ‘demanding the irripossible’, but Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson and David Remez all backed me, and the Histadrut nonetheless managed to remain intact. As a matter of fact, it turned out that the Mifdeh campaign served as a very important precedent for much heavier voluntary taxation that came not very long afterwards in the form of the Kofer Hajishuv (‘ransom of the yishuv’), established when the toll in life and property of the Arab disturbances of 1936 became so high that we were forced to levy a defence tax on virtually the entire Jewish population. And even later, during the Second World War, when we set up a War Needs and Rescue Fund, we relied again on experience gained in the days of those loathed Mifdeh drives."
Hitler comes to power
"Hitler had come to power in 1933, and however absurd his loudly proclaimed programme for world domination by the Aryan ‘race’ had seemed at first, the violent anti-Semitism which he had preached from the start was obviously not just a rhetorical device. One of Hitler’s very first acts, in fact, was the passage of savage anti-Jewish legislation that stripped Germany’s Jews of all usual civil and human rights. Of course, no one, myself included, dreamt then that Hitler’s vow to destroy the Jews would ever he literally carried out. In a way, I suppose, it should be chalked up to the credit of normal decent men and women that we couldn’t believe that such a monstrously evil thing would ever actually happen —or that the world would permit it to happen. It wasn’t that we were gullible. It was simply that we couldn’t conceive of what was then still inconceivable.
Today, however, no horror is inconceivable to me any more. But even before Hitler’s 'Final Solution’, the first results of Nazi persecution —legally enacted —were terrible enough. There was only one place on the face of the globe to which the Jews could come as a right, no matter what restrictions the British sought to impose on their immigration to Palestine and by 1934, thousands of up-. rooted homeless refugees from Nazism were making their way to us."
Haganah
"The riots started in April 1936. By the summer it was no longer safe for Jews to travel from one city to another. Whenever I had to go from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for a meeting —which was frequently —I kissed the children good-bye in the morning knowing that I might well never come home again, that my bus might be ambushed, that I might be shot by an Arab sniper at the entrance to Jerusalem or stoned to death by an Arab mob on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The Haganah was much better equipped and larger than it had been at the time of the Arab riots of 1929, but we had no intention either of turning it into an instrument of counter-terror against the Arabs just because they were Arabs or of providing the British with any excuse for further clamping down on Jewish immigration and settlement, as they tended to do whenever we visibly played too active a role in our own defence. Although it is always much harder to exercise self-restraint than it is to hit back, we had one paramount consideration: nothing must be done - even in the face of constant danger and harassment - that might provoke the British into slashing the number of Jews allowed to enter Palestine. The policy of self-restraint (Havlagah in Hebrew) was rigidly enforced. Whenever and wherever possible, Jews defended themselves from attack, but there were virtually no acts of retaliation by Haganah throughout the three years of what the British, with splendid understatement, chose to call the 'disturbances'.
This determination of ours to defend ourselves but not to retaliate was not, however, universally applauded in the Yishuv. A minority clamoured for counter-terror and denounced the policy of havlagah as cowardly. I was always among the majority that was absolutely convinced that havlagah was the one and only ethical course we could follow. The notion of attacking Arabs indiscriminately, regardless of whether or not they were the particular perpetrators of an outrage, was morally abhorrent to me. A specific attack had to be repelled and a specific criminal had to be punished - well and good. But we were not going to kill Arabs just because they were Arabs or engage in the kind of wanton violence that typified the Arab method of fighting us."
"In 1946 - he asked for a few month's leave from the Jewish Agency...so that he could learn exactly what the Haganah had at it's disposal and what it was likely to need for the struggle he was so sure lay ahead...After he had been back at work for a few days, he called me up. 'Golda,' he said, 'Come over. I want to talk to you.' He was walking back and forth in his big study upstairs, pacing the floor. 'I tell you,' he said to me, 'I feel as though I were going mad. What's going to happen to us? I'm sure the Arabs will attack us, and we're not prepared for it. We have nothing. What's going to happen to us?' He was literally beside himself with anxiety.'"
**Stolen land
"Let me at this juncture deal also - even if very briefly - with the ridiculous accusation that I have heard for so many years to the effect that we ignored the Arabs of Palestine and set about developing the country as though it had no Arab population at all. When the instigators of the Arab disturbances of the late 1930's claimed, as they did, that the Arabs were attacking us because they had been 'dispossessed', I did not have to look up British census figures to know that the Arab population of Palestine had doubled since the start of Jewish settlement there...Not only did the living standard of the Arabs of Palestine far exceed that of the Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, but, attracted by the new opportunities, hordes of Arabs were immigrating to Palestine from Syria and other neighbouring countries all through those years.
And let me add, there was no time during the thirties that I did not hope that eventually the Arabs of Palestine would live with us in peace and equality as citizens of a Jewish homeland - Just as I kept on hoping that Jews who lived in Arab countries would be allowed to live there in peace and equality. This was another reason why our policy of self-restraint in the face of the Arab attacks seemed so important to me. Nothing, I felt, must be allowed to complicate or embitter the future. It didn't work out that way, but it took us all a long time to accept the fact that the reconciliation we expected was not going to take place."
Peel Commission
"The proposed Jewish state was not my idea of a viable national home for the Jewish people. It was far too small and far too cramped. I thought it was a grotesque proposal and I said so, though most of my colleagues, led by Ben-Gurion, reluctantly decided to accept it in the end. 'Some day, my son will ask me by what right I gave up most of the country and I won't know how to answer him,' I said at one of the many party meetings at which the Peel proposal was debated...But we were wrong and Ben-Gurion, in his greater wisdom, arguing that any state was better than none, was right
Thank God it was not because of me that we didn't get that state in 1937 but because of the Arabs, who flatly turned down the partition plan - though had they accepted it, they could had a 'Palestinian' state forty years ago. The guiding principle behind the attitude of the Arabs in 1936 and 1937, however, was exactly what it has been ever since: decisions are made not on the basis of what is good for them but on the basis of what is bad for us. And in retrospect, it is clear that the British themselves never intended to implement the Peel plan. At all events, I certainly couldn’t have lived with myself all these years if I had thought —in the light of what happened afterwards —that it was I who was to blame for its collapse. If we had had even a tiny little mockery of a state only a year before the war broke out, hundreds of thousands of Jews —perhaps many more —might have been saved from the ovens and gas chambers of the Nazis."
Refugees
"In the summer of 1938 I was sent to the International Conference on Refugees that was called by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Evian-les-Bains. I was there in the ludicrous capacity of 'the Jewish observer from Palestine', not even seated with the delegates but with the audience, although the refugees under discussion were my own people, members of my own family, not just inconvenient numbers to be squeezed into official quotas, if at all possible. Sitting there in that magnificent hall and listening to the delegates of thirty-two countries rise, each in turn, to explain how much they would have liked to take in substantial numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so, was a terrible experience. I don't think that anyone who didn't live through it can understand what I felt at Evian - a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all, 'Don't you know that these "numbers" are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps, or wandering around the world like lepers, if you don't let them in?' Of course I didn't know then that not concentration camps but death camps awaited the refugees whom no one wanted. If I had known that, I couldn't have gone on sitting there silently hour after hour being disciplined and polite.
I remember at one point thinking back to the Socialist international I had attended the year before, when I had watched the Spanish delegation, weeping and imploring for help so Madrid might be saved. All that Ernest Bevin could find it in his heart to say to them was 'British Labour is not prepared to go to war for you.' Much later, I was to learn lessons of my own about socialist brotherhood, but at Evian I realised - perhaps for the first time since I was a little girl in Russia listening in terror to the hooves of Cossack horses thundering through town - that it is not enough for a weak people to demonstrate the justice of its demands.
To the question 'To be or not to be?' each nation must make its own reply in its own way, and Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive. A great deal has happened to the world, to the Yishuv and to me personally since 1938, and much of what has happened has been terrible. But at least the words 'Jewish refugees' are no longer heard anywhere because now there is a Jewish state that is prepared and able to take in every Jew - skilled worker or not, old or young, sick or healthy - who wants to live there.
Nothing was accomplished at Evian except phraseology, but before I left I held a press conference. At least the journalists wanted to hear what I had to say, and through them we could reach the rest of the world and try again to get its attention. ‘There is only one thing I hope to see before I die,’ I told the press, ‘and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.’"