Chapter 7: The struggle against the British
British views of Jews and Zionism
"As a matter of fact, it was only when the British government decided —in the face of all reason or humanity —to place itself like an iron wall between us and whatever chance we had of rescuing Jews from the hands of the Nazis that we realized that political independence was not something that we could go on regarding as a distant aim. The need to control immigration because human lives depended on such control was the one thing that pushed us into making the sort of decision which might otherwise have waited for much better (if not ideal) conditions. But the 1939 White Paper —those rules and regulations laid down for us by strangers to whom the lives of Jews were obviously of secondary importance —turned the entire subject of the right of the yishuv to govern itself into the most pressing and immediate need that any of us had ever known. And it was out of the depth of this need, essentially, that the State of Israel was founded, only three years after the end of the war.
What was it that we demanded of the British and that they so stubbornly refused to give us? Today the answer seems incredible, even to me. The truth is that all the Yishuv wanted from 1939 to 1945 was to take in as many Jews as could be saved from the Nazis. That was all. Just to be allowed to share the little that we had with men, women and children who were fortunate enough to not have been shot, gassed or buried alive yet by the very people to who downfall the entire British Empire was in any case totally committed.
We didn't ask for anything else: not for privileges of any kind, not for power, not for promises relating to the future. We just begged - in view of the death sentence that had been passed on millions of European Jews by Hitler and was being carried out - to be permitted to try and rescue as many of them as possible before they all perished and bring them to the one place where they were wanted.
...It was then that we all knew what many of us had always suspected: no foreign government could or would ever feel our agonies as we felt them, and no foreign government would ever put the same value on Jewish lives that we did. It wasn't a very complicated lesson to learn, but once learnt it wasn't likely that any of us would forget it, though just as incredibly the rest of the world, with very few exceptions, seems by now to have done so."
"Incidentally, it was not the only time I walked out of a room in that period. Only a few months earlier I had gone to see the government's chief secretary about something and was astounded to hear him say pleasantly: 'Mrs Meyerson, you must agree that if the Nazis persecuted the Jews, they must have had some reason for it.' I got up and walked out without a word and refused to see him again. Afterwards, I was told that he couldn't imagine why I was so enraged."
Haganah
"From the start, Eliahu conceived of the Haganah not as a guerrilla movement or as any kind of elite force, but as the most broadly based possible national response to the need of theyishuv to protect itself and as an integral part of the Zionist movement. Self defence, he believed, was neither less nor more important than the conquest of the desert or the ingathering of the exiles. This being so, the Haganah had both to grow out of and belong to the entire Jewish population and therefore it had to function under the supreme authority of the yishuv’s national institutions, regardless of how secret its specific functions might have to be. From this concept stemmed also Eliahu’s attitude towards the two dissident military organizations that eventually came into being —the Irgun Zvai Le’umi (IZL) and Lehi (the Stern Group), which evolved primarily because they disapproved of the Haganah’s policy of self- restraint, non-retaliation and avoidance, not to say abhorrence, of Jewish terrorism. But from the very beginning, Eliahu understood the need to prepare the Haganah for its ultimate role in the struggle for independence, and he always regarded it as the nucleus of a Jewish army able and entitled to defend the right of the Jews to come to Palestine, to settle in it and to lead a free life in it.
Defined in these terms, the Haganah had a truly unique role to play. Self-defence, in Eliahu’s eyes, meant that the yishuv used its always- meagre resources wherever and whenever they were needed most. The same young men and women who brought Jews to Palestine ‘illegally ’also guarded settlers putting up stockades and water towers in areas forbidden to Jewish settlement under the White Paper, manufactured and tried to stockpile arms against future attack and even parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe. He moulded the Haganah into a true instrument of national redemption, always keeping its component parts interchangeable and readying it so that in 1948, when it proved necessary, it could become the instrument of national redemption. He guarded and cherished this ultimate purpose so that it never became contaminated."
Haganah worked with British to fight Irgun and Lehi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saison
Terrorism/Fedayeen
"...In a world that has chosen to endow Arab terrorism with glamour and to admit to the so-called council of nations a man like Yassir Arafat, who has not one constructive thought or action to his credit and who, to put it quite plainly, is only a costumed multiple murderer heading a movement dedicated solely to the destruction of the State of Israel. But it is my profound conviction - and consolation - that the seeds of the inevitable failure of Arab terrorism lie in the very concept of terrorism itself. No movement, regardless of the money available to it or the appeasement upon which it feeds - and this case it is the sort of appeasement that has always brought disaster upon the world - can succeed for long if the calibre of its leadership is shoddy and if its only commitments are to blackmail and bloodshed. It is not by killing and maiming children, hijacking aircraft or murdering diplomats that real movements of national liberation accomplish their aims. They must also have content, goals that will serve them long after the immediate crisis has passed, and they must - to use an old-fashioned word - have some claim to intellectual and moral purity."
Relationship with Germany
"Interviewers have sometimes asked me what I feel about the Germans, and perhaps this is the time and place to answer that question. Post-war Germany was something with which the State of Israel had to deal, make contact and work. That was one of the facts of life after the Second World War, and facts of life have to be faced, however painful they are. It should go without saying that nothing will ever diminish the impact of the Holocaust. Six million murdered Jews are also a fact of life, a fact that must never be erased from the memory of man, and certainly that no Jew —or German —should ever forget. But although it took years before I forced myself— in 1967 —to set foot on German soil again, I was always in favour of reparations, of taking money from the Germans so that we could build up the State of Israel, for I believe that they owed us that much so that we could absorb the Jews who had remained alive. I also believe that Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.
And when the time was ripe, years later, I was in favour also of diplomatic relations with Germany, though I violently opposed that government’s choice of an ambassador and was outraged when I learned that Rolf Pauls had fought and even been wounded (he lost an arm) in the war. ‘Nevermind that he is a brilliant career diplomat,’ I said, ‘and never mind that he was not a member of the Nazi party. Let the Germans at least send an ambassador who has no war record at all.’ But the German government refused to change its mind Rolf Pauls came to Israel and there were demonstrations against him, and I was sure he would have to be rec4lled. Fortunately, however, I was wrong. Today, he is Bonn’s ambassador to Peking, but he is still one of Israel’s staunchest and best friends.
When Pauls first presented his credentials in Jerusalem, I was Israel’s foreign minister. Since I assumed that he had been told and thus knew exactly how I felt about his appointment, it was not an easy moment, but at least, I thought, it was a moment for truth. ‘Youhave a most difficult task before you,’ I said to him. ‘This is a country made up, to a large extent, of the victims of the Holocaust. There is hardly a family that does not live with nightmare recollections of the crematorium, of babies used as targets for Nazi bullets, of Nazi “scientific” experiments. You cannot expect a warm reception. Even the women who will wait at table, if you ever come to me for a meal, have Nazi numbers tattooed on their arms.’
‘I know,’ Pauls answered. ‘I have come to you now from Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the six million) and there is already one thing I can promise you. For as long as I serve here, I shall make it my business to see that any German who comes to this country goes first —as I did today —to that memorial.’ And he kept his word."
Eichmann trial
"Although nothing ever can or will bring the slaughtered back to life, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 5961 was, I believe, a great and necessary act of historic justice. It took place two decades after those desperate years in which we tried in every way possible to deny him his prey, but it is part and parcel of the record of the Holocaust nonetheless. I was (and I am) absolutely convinced that only the Israelis were entitled to try Eichmann on behalf of world Jewry, and I am deeply proud that we did so. It was not, in any sense, a question of revenge. As the Hebrew poet Bialik once wrote, not even the devil himself could dream up an adequate revenge for the death of a single child, but those who remained alive —and generations still unborn - deserve, if nothing else, that the world know, in all its dreadful detail, what was done to the Jews of Europe and by whom.
For as long as I live, I shall never forget sitting huddled in that courtroom with Sheyna, hearing the evidence of the survivors. Many of my friends had the strength to attend the trial day after day, but I must confess that I only went twice. There are not many things in life that I have knowingly dodged, but those living testimonies of torture, degradation and death —given in the chill presence of Eichmann himself —were literally unbearable for me, and instead I listened to the trial on the radio, as did most people in Israel. But that, too, made it impossible to go on normally with life. I worked, of course, went to the office every day, ate my meals, brushed my hair, but my inner attention was always fixed on what was happening in the courtroom, and the radio was always on, so that the trial dominated everything for weeks, for me and for everyone else. I remember listening to the people who gave evidence and wondering how and where they had found the will to live, to rear new families, to become human beings once more. I suppose the answer is that all of us, finally, crave life —regardless of what the past has held —but just as I cannot really know what it was like in the death camps, so I cannot really ever know what it was like to start all over again. That knowledge belongs to the survivors."
Post war British struggle
"Still, it seemed probable to most of us that when the war ended in an Allied victory, as it obviously would, the British would rethink their catastrophic Palestine policy. At the very least, we were sure in 1945 that whatever Jews had stayed alive in Europe would be let into Palestine. In the dawn of a new post-war era, the White Paper would certainly be abrogated, particularly since there was now a Labour government in Britain. For thirty years, the British Labourites had condemned the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and issued one pro- Zionist statement after another. It may have been extremely naïve of us to have believed that now everything would change, but it was certainly not unreasonable —especially in the light of the horrifying spectacle of hundreds of thousands of emaciated survivors tottering out of the death camps into the arms of the liberating British forces.
Of course, we were quite wrong. British policy certainly did change, but it changed for the worse. Not only did Mr Attlee’s government not revoke the White Paper, but it announced that it saw no need to honour any of the pledges it had made about Palestine —pledges made, even worse, not only to us but to millions of British workers and soldiers. Ernest Bevin, the new British foreign secretary, had a ‘Final Solution’ of his own for the problem of the Jews of Europe, who were now becoming known conveniently as ‘displaced persons’. If they pulled themselves together and made a real effort, they could settle down quietly in Europe again. Never mind that the continent was one great cemetery for millions of murdered Jews or that there was only one place in the whole world to which the wretched DPs wanted to go —Palestine.
It was hard, almost impossible, for me to believe that instead of helping us —as it had solemnly promised to do for so long —to lay the foundations for Jewish independence in Palestine, a British Labour government, come to power in the wake of a world war, was now prepared to send British soldiers to wage war against innocent people who asked only one thing: that they be allowed to live out their days among other Jews in Palestine. All things considered, it was not much of a request, but Bevin turned it down with unprecedented harshness and with a lunatic stubbornness, as though the fate and future of the entire British Empire depended on keeping those few hundred thousand half-dead Jews from entering Palestine. I couldn’t account then —and even today I cannot account —for the blind fury with which the British government pursued those Jews —and us. But it was that fury which left us with no alternative at all other than to take up the challenge, though we certainly weren’t well equipped to do so. Between the summer of 1945 and the winter of 1947, we transported some 70,000 Jews from the DP camps of Europe on those thoroughly inadequate ships of ours and got them through a blockade ferociously maintained by a government made up of men to whose stirring proclamations on Zionism I myself had listened at countless Labour Party conferences."
"...The British government's astonishing refusal to agree to an appeal made by no less a person than President Truman, who asked that 100,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria be allowed to enter Palestine - exclusive of the White Paper - in a one-time gesture of mercy and humanity. But Mr Attlee and Mr Bevin, who apparently thought that the 'problem' of European Jews was created only in order to embarrass the British government, said no to President Truman, too."
"On Saturday, 29 June 1946, the British government in effect declared war on the Yishuv. One hundred thousand British soldiers and nearly 2000 policemen broke into dozens of Kibbutzim and villages; raided the national institutions...slapped a curfew on all the cities in the country that had a Jewish population; imprisoned over 3000 Jews, including most of the Yishuv's leaders. The purpose of this was at least threefold. It was intended to demoralise and punish the Yishuv, to destroy the Haganah and to put a stop - once and for all - to 'illegal' immigration by jailing the people who were responsible. It failed on all three count, but from that 'Black Saturday' on, Palestine became, quite literally, a police state."
"I suggested that the Yishuv's response to the mass arrest of thousands of people could only be civil resistance. Not only was it impossible to take what had happened lying down, but unless we did something effective I was sure that the Irgun Zvai Le'umi and the Stern Group would take the matter into their own hands...I was and always have been unalterably opposed - both on moral grounds and tactically - to terror of any kind, whether waged against Arabs because they are Arabs or against the British because they were British. It was and has remained my firm conviction that, although many individual members of these dissident groups were certainly extremely brave and extremely dedicated, they were wrong (and thus dangerous to the Yishuv) from start to finish"
"But when I went to see him that day in 1946, he was still in his prime and very powerful. ‘Ifyou call upon the yishuv to adopt a policy of civil disobedience towards the government of Palestine,’ I said, ‘it will show the world that we cannot acquiesce in what has happened. Only you have the necessary authority to make this proclamation effective.’
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘But I must be assured by the Haganah that nothing will be done - no actions taken —until the Jewish Agency meets in Paris in August.’ I promised him to make every effort to secure such an assurance from the five people (I was not yet one of them) who decided these matters, and I went to Eshkol at once to find out whether this could be done. In actual fact, action had already been decided upon by a vote of three to two, but when Eshkol heard what Weizmann wanted he immediately said that he would change his vote. He, too, realized that if the national institutions failed to react, the Irgun Zvai Le’umi would certainly do something. Then Weizmann backed down. I think probably his friends in England talked him out of leading a civil disobedience campaign, but whatever his reason was, I was very upset and angry."