Moshe Arens, Netaniyahu's mentor, writes in HaAretz today and reveals something I didnt know: during Israel's War of Independence in 1948, Eretz Israel was not liberated because there was not enough Jews left alive to people it. I had pondered before the strange borders of Israel, why after defeating the Arab Legion, the Hachemite Kingdom was left occupying the West Bank and all of the East Bank of the Jordan. The answer I had received from the people in TAHAL who had actually fought the war was that the yishuv was too exhausted having lost about 10,000 people and needed peace. Although this surely is true, it never sounded right to me, since the yishuv was full of vitality in 1948 and only 8 years later attacked and fully defeated Egypt. Arens writes:
In the minds of some, the establishment of the State of Israel is linked to the Holocaust, or even seen as a direct result of the Holocaust. U.S. President Barack Obama, probably unaware of the history of the Zionist movement, implied as much in his speech in Cairo last year.
But the truth is almost the exact opposite. The extermination by the Germans of six million Jews during World War II came close to putting an end to the dream of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The reservoir of Jewish immigrants to Palestine was decimated. Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his testimony before the Peel Commission in London on February 11, 1937, spoke of the aim of Zionism as the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River in which there would be room for "the Arab population and their progeny and many millions of Jews." At that time, the Jewish population of Palestine was no more than 400,000.
By the time the war had ended, millions of Jews had been exterminated in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and the killing fields of Russia. To Zionist leaders, it became clear that not only were there not enough Jews to constitute a solid Jewish majority, which was the condition for establishing a Jewish state, on both sides of the Jordan River, but that Jewish immigration would not even suffice to establish such a majority in the entire area west of the Jordan.
7 comments:
So sad really. Today even the loss of a single Jewish soldier (Shalit) is a big deal but at one point 50,000 Hungarian Jews per day were going up the chimneys of Auschwitz and no one lifted a finger to help them. The American bombers flew right over and only took photos - in some you can see the people waiting in line for the gas chamber.
I have to tell you that some of the damage was self inflicted. After the war my father and his 3 surviving brothers all wanted to make aliyah. They sent the oldest on to pave the way. When he arrived, he was confronted not only with the poor conditions and war, but with the corrupt and socialist bureaucracy. The brothers had intended to set up a shoe factory and had invested a considerable amount in machinery. All sorts of customs duties and bribes were demanded at the dock. My uncle wrote to his brothers and the my father and the other 2 brothers went to America instead. How may times was this tale repeated?
K
K
Auschwitz took in 10 - 15 thousand Hungarian Jews per day. Horrible enough.
Israeli bureaucracy was and is socialist. But I doubt its being corrupt. There was a black market after the war, but soon it was eliminated. Pity your family is not here, maybe your children will.
Whether 15 or 50 it is horrifying beyond human comprehension - to lose each day or so what has been lost in all of Israel's wars together.
As for my children, well now we have put down roots in America and it is not so easy to uproot us again. You needed the threat that the junta would disappear you before you left the place where you grew up. So far no one is threatening to disappear the Jews of America.
K
But the Jews of Europe are now very threatened.
As I have said before, Bush invaded not only the wrong country, but the wrong continent; he should have invaded Europe.
Anon.
"But the Jews of Europe are now very threatened.
This is hyperbole based on sensationalist newspaper reporting. In the worst case in Western Europe, it may be dangerous for Jews to live in the banlieues of Paris, but it is somewhat dangerous for native middle class Frenchmen in those districts as well (think the Parisian equivalent of inner city Detroit). The government of France is not threatening the country's Jews.
I am a diaspora Jew born and bred, and I will take my chances with America over Israel any day, although I have goodwill towards Israelis. I can't imagine that I am alone among diaspora jews when I say that I wouldn't fit into the culture (too Middle Eastern for me already), wouldn't like the climate, and am a secular person immune to the religio-ideologic reasons given for making aliyah. K's relatives were quite shrewd to choose America over Israel in the '40's.
Re the last Anon. - I have often wondered how things would have turned out differently if they hadn't held that machinery at the dock. I have a more distant (2nd cousin) in Israel and he did OK - he became a doctor. I'm guessing for my parents generation and mine, America was better at least economically, but there were other downsides - one of my father's concentration camp buddies stayed in NYC (we went off to a chicken farm in NJ in the early '60s) and both of his sons became heroin addicts in the '70s and died. For my children's generation, I'm guessing that the economic prospects of a young Israeli are just as good.
Again, it's been decades since I visited Israel but my impression is the same as Anon's. Maybe if a higher % of the Ashkenazi Jews had been saved, the place would have had a different character, but between the high % of Sephardim and Arabs and the founder's rejection of Yiddish and anything having to do with the shtetl, the place did not have a haimish feel to it at all - it did not feel like a "homecoming" but like a visit to a very different culture. Perhaps a wonderful and vibrant culture but it did not feel like MY yiddishkeit at all.
K
Dear K
Your comment resumes the tragedy of the post WWII generation.
The tragedy of those who stayed in the Galuth was the decay of the second generation - their children. I have wrote here about the fate of many or most of my friends - some of them died of drugs, most married natives, many have no continuation.
The tragedy of us who came to Israel is that this is a Middle East country with Middle EAst population and culture, and we Ashkenazim are a minority, an opressed minority. Non Ashkenazim are favored in all State jobs, a discrimination worse than in the United States. The situation is not really bad, but it is clear that the people of this country will have little in common with what was once the East European Jewry.
The Jewish people is changing very fast. I dont like it, but except joining the yiddish speaking Haredim in Jerusalem or New York, nothing can be done.
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