John Grove is a seventy something, retired Brierley Hill (Worcestershire) headteacher, now living in Ledbury in Herefordshire. Here he replies to an open letter sent out to ‘friends’ by his nephew, a confirmed Brexiteer.

Dear Paul,

I thought at first that I would not respond as I am too out of touch with the detailed argument. But then I thought that I owe it to myself to say simply why

I will be voting  (by postal vote from Hungary)  to stay in the EU.

I also thought that you may enjoy a reply.

First a comment on your four main reasons for BREXIT. In principle, I AGREE  with them all, but still want to stay in…

• The EU ‘project’ is fundamentally flawed, and has been warped over the years since 1945 to suit political purposes.

Surely ALL large-scale human projects are fundamentally flawed and are warped by political purposes?  We call it human nature and politics.

I agree that ‘the vision of many’ is a Federal State, but Britain and the new countries are actively stopping this, and should continue to do so in necessary areas.

• It is fundamentally undemocratic and unaccountable.

I am sure there are many unsuitable careerists. Democracy is at best a frail plant, and we could all become interested in Europe and really activate our MEPs to properly represent our interests. Surely it is our fault that we have … remained at arm’s length and largely ignored most European news. Our own democratic processes are weak anyway. I remember Tony Blair setting up elaborate Policy Forums for ordinary people to have their say in New Labour, and he and the senior Labour politicians totally ignored them.

• It does nothing to improve our security

Agreed – it is interesting that you propose more regulations, British-style. As to migration, the real problem for me is not internal EU migration but Non EU ‘refugees’ and other economic migrants. It seems to me that there is no real political will to secure our borders and leaving the EU is unlikely to change this.

As to the EU not stopping all conflict – this is better than actively starting it, as Britain and America have done in Iraq and Libya.

• The UK needs to get its own house in order and faces massive internal issues that no politician has addressed.

YES… but can you see a Conservative government increasing taxes to solve ‘housing, good education, and free healthcare’ issues?  Is Jeremy Corbyn any more credible?  My guess is that these issues will be muddled through, whether in the EU or out.

Now my reasons for staying in:

• We subscribed to a EU vision in 1975. We must continue to try to make it work. To get out now because of problems will involve us in a loss of credibility as an untrustworthy small nation-state. It may lead us to be the cause of an EU collapse for which history will blame our selfishness;

• We need to participate in the ever-changing international and world order. Soon we will have 10 billion people – the massive changes brought about by new technology – the rise of multi cultural global thinking and travel – young people are on the move everywhere, all over the world;

• We need to participate in global solutions through the EU to life threatening problems like climate, water shortage, nuclear fusion needs, waste disposal, and world-wide migration;

• Britain has the financial clout / the international language / the cultural tradition / the educated population to make a real difference internationally and to play a greater part in improving EU performance;

• Should we retreat into an ‘island’ mentality – dealing with our own small-scale problems, and trying to find an isolated safe haven from the serious problems facing the Mediterranean countries? I don’t think so.

The trouble is that we are guessing the future, but I remain moderately optimistic that we can survive – inside the EU.

The Battle of Jutland happened exactly a hundred years ago, and was the only major naval engagement of the First World War. Both sides claimed victory, with the Imperial German Navy attempting to break through the Royal Navy’s lines in the North Sea, but despite some successes, this attempt was not decisive. British losses were greater, including the sinking of HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary by German shells. After being hit, both ships exploded and sank quickly. From Indefatigable, there were only two survivors from a crew of 1,119. Vice-Admiral David Beatty, after hearing this news, remarked:

 

There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.

From  A Sketch-map History of the Great War and After, 1914-1935 (London: Harrap, 1938).

In 1914, the German navy was more powerful than the combined French and Russian fleets, but the entry of Great Britain into the war had given the Allies a greater preponderance of sea-power.

Instant Readiness…

…has always been an essential part of the Royal Naval tradition, and at the beginning of August 1914 this meant that the Fleet went straight from its annual exercises to its war stations six days before hostilities began. By a fortunate chance the British navy was assembled at Portland for a practice mobilization in July 1914. When war became imminent it was ordered not to disperse and was therefore prepared to exercise its superiority as soon as hostilities began. The surprise lay in what followed: instead of the expected Trafalgar against the German High Seas Fleet, the Grand Fleet found its enemies locked in their harbours, behind their impregnable coastal defences where (except for occasional sorties) they would remain for nearly two years. This meant that German overseas trade had to be abandoned immediately, but is also resulted in the Grand Fleet itself very much being anchored to its base, Scapa Flow, a bleak, uninviting anchorage almost devoid on amenities on shore. One sailor remarked:

Scapa left its mark on all who served there. To go to Scapa was to join a club whose membership you could never quite disown… There were times when men spat the name out like a four-letter word…

(Brown and Meehan, Scapa Flow, 1968.)

A virtual blockade of the North Sea was instituted and all ships were stopped by search-parties from British warships. Germany had to rely on foreign supplies reaching her circuitously via neutral countries. By contrast, Allied shipping was hardly interrupted. There were a few German warships on the high seas when war broke out, and these attacked the principal trade-routes. The damage they did, however, was relatively slight, and the German raiders were practically all destroyed by 8 December 1914. After that the Allies were free to transport men and munitions to every theatre of war and to draw freely upon foreign food-supplies. Moreover, this freedom of movement was denied to the Central Powers, which was ultimately why, suffering such shortages of vital raw materials and food, they were unable to continue the war in 1918.

The situation on the seas was so favourable to the Allies that Admiral Jellicoe adopted a policy of extreme caution, refusing to risk losing these advantages even for a probable naval victory. Any defeat of the British navy would have reversed the tables, for Britain could be starved out within a few weeks by a blockade. Jellicoe therefore abandoned the Nelsonian tradition of seeking out the enemy and forcing him to give battle.  Admiral Beatty won a small victory in the Heligoland Bight, which confirmed the Germans in their decision to remain on the defensive. Three British cruisers were sunk by the submarine U9 off the Dutch coast, the first indication of the future role that these craft were later to play in the two world wars. Scarborough, Hartlepool and Yarmouth were bombarded by German cruisers, but a repeat attempt at this was thwarted by Beatty in the Battle of Dogger Bank early in 1915 and the Germans abandoned coastal raids thereafter, and with them discarded any thought of landing any troops on British shores.  At the beginning of 1916, Jellicoe was quite firm in his rejection of any attempt to draw the German Imperial Fleet into battle on the open seas:

Jellicoe knew that Churchill was correct in his assessment that he was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon. He would have liked to have fought another Trafalgar, but was well aware of the recent advances in mines, torpedoes and submarines, to which even the most modern Dreadnoughts were vulnerable. The German Admiral Scheer, on the other hand, was determined to hazard a fleet-engagement, since the pressure of the sea blockade made it necessary to take some risks. He planned to destroy Beatty’s cruiser-squadron by engaging it with the whole of the German High Seas Fleet. The battle which resulted took place off Jutland, the northern part of Denmark (see maps above and below). The course of the engagement was very confused, although we do have some eye-witness accounts from officers on board surviving British ships.

It was late afternoon on 31 May, at about 3.50 p.m. that the Navigating Officer of the New Zealand reported the action as having begun, almost simultaneously, on both sides. A few minutes later, the Admiral’s Secretary came across to where the Torpedo Officer was stationed in the conning tower and drew his attention to the Indefatigable. He crossed at once to the starboard side and laid his glasses on her:

She had been hit aft, apparently by the mainmast, and a good deal of smoke was coming from her superstructure aft, but there were no flames visible. He thought it was only her boom boats burning. We were altering course to port at the time, and apparently her steering gear was damaged, as she did not follow round in our wake, but held on until she was almost about 500 yards on our starboard quarter, in full view of the conning tower.

Whilst he was still looking at her through his glasses she was hit by two shells, one on the fo’c’sle and on the fore turret. Both shells appeared to explode on impact. Then there was an interval of about thirty seconds, during which time there was absolutely no sign of fire or flame or smoke, except the little actually formed  by the burst of the two shells. At the end of the thirty seconds the ship completely blew up, commencing apparently from for’ard. The main explosion started with sheets of flame, followed immediately afterwards by a dense, dark smoke, which obscured the ship from view. All sorts of stuff was blown high into the air, a fifty-foot steam picket boat, for example, being blown up about two hundred feet, apparently intact though upside down. 

The second report comes from the Commanding Officer of HMS Ardent, one of the destroyers lost during the action:

A terrible scene of destruction and desolation was revealed to me as I walked aft (with some difficulty). All boats were in pieces. The funnels looked more like nutmeg graters. The rafts were blown to bits, and in the ship’s side and deck were holes innumerable. In the very still atmosphere, the steam and smoke poured out from holes in the deck perfectly straight up into the air. Several of my best men came up and tried to console me and all were delighted that we had  at length been in action and done our share. But many were already killed and lay around their guns and places of duty. Most of the engine-room and stokehold brigade must have been killed outright.

The Ardent gave a big lurch, and I bethought myself of my ‘Grieve’ waistcoat. Another lurch, and the ship keeled right over, and threw me to the ship’s side. I could feel she was going, so I flopped over into the sea, grabbing a lifebuoy that was providentially  at hand. The ‘Ardent’s’ stern kept up a few moments, then she slowly sank from view. As the smoke and steam cleared off I could see many heads in the water – about forty or fifty I should think. There was no support beyond life-belts, lifebuoys and floating waistcoats, so I was afraid that few of us could possibly survive, especially  as I realised that all the destroyers had gone on, and that no big ship would dare to stop, even if they saw us in the water.

I spoke to my men, and saw most of them die one by one. Not a man of them showed any fear of death, and there was not a murmur, complaint, or cry for help from a single soul. Their joy was, and they talked about it to the end, that they and the ‘Ardent’ had ‘done their bit’, as they put it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Source:  H W Fawcett & G W W Hooper, The Fighting at Jutland (1921)                                         

The significance of the battle:

• The British fleet was prepared; the Grand Fleet was ordered to sea, and the German attempt to isolate and destroy part of it was frustrated.

• British caution and the fear of submarine ambush permitted the German fleet to make good its escape when it might have been cut off and destroyed.

• German tactics, ship-construction and gunnery proved in many ways superior to those of the British, who suffered more serious losses.

• The German fleet was once more driven off the seas.

• Most important of all, the battle gave the Germans no alternative but to renew and intensify their submarine campaign. This had momentous results in 1917.

Altogether 250 ships were involved in the battle, 25 of which were destroyed, fourteen British and eleven German. The RN suffered 6,094 fatalities, with 510 wounded. The Imperial Fleet suffered 2,551 fatalities, with 507 wounded. In addition to the ships already mentioned, a third battlecruiser, Invincible was also lost to the British, as well as three armoured cruisers (Black Prince, Defence and Warrior), and eight destroyers. The Germans lost one battlecruiser, Lützow, a battleship, Pommern, four light cruisers and five heavy torpedo boats.

RIP.

Despite their losses,  the Royal Navy was able to continue its operations, and the German High Seas Fleet mostly remained in port for the rest of the war. Admiral Jellicoe was, somewhat unfairly, heavily criticised if not scapegoated for the British losses, but the overall result was that the German Fleet was kept ‘at bay’ for the rest of the war, as this captioned map shows:

Above: Map from The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History, Harmondsworth: 2001

 

Sykes-Picot, Balfour, Imperialism & Zionism, 1916-36.

 

The row about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party rumbles on, with ‘Labour’ forums reduced to open censorship of criticism online in order to uphold its leaders’ line that this is mainly a problem of envy among long-established MPs and party members who do not like the amount of power and influence wielded by the ‘new’ members he has attracted to the party. Yet we know from the nature of the comments made that many of these new members are simply aping the discourse of anti-Zionists among the ‘Fabian Left’, dating back to Labour’s rise to power, which coincided with the emergence of serious tensions between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. I have already written about this elsewhere, so I don’t want to risk repeating myself here.

However, given that this week sees the hundredth anniversary of that ‘infamous’ agreement between two civil servants, Mr Sykes of Britain and Mnsr. Picot of France, I thought I would add a ‘tailpiece’ about the role of imperialism in the middle east in this era, having previously focused on the development of Zionism in Europe. Much of this context is drawn from Bernard Porter’s seminal 1984 work on British Imperialism, 1850- 1983, The Lion’s Share. This work should be on a bibliography given to new Labour members who may not have had the opportunity, as I did, to study this historical context to contemporary controversial issues. Before I read this, I was as keen as them to take sides in the Arab-Israeli Conflict and in other post-imperial conflicts, such as the Irish Question. Having grown up in a home where casual anti-Semitism was not rare, stemming from my father’s belief in ‘replacement theology’ (the doctrine that the Jews had foregone the right to be ‘God’s chosen people’ by their rejection of Christ), I remember (now with some sense of shame) my act of vandalism in the sixth form when, during the 1974 War I changed the word order of a sticker which one of the Jewish students had stuck on the board. It said Stand by Israel, but a strategic cut soon changed it into Israel, Stand by. I was young, and many of my ideas were inherited from my father. So, however, was my name (or at least my initials), since he was named after Arthur James Balfour, in 1914. This had always intrigued me, until I came to realise that Balfour’s protestant ‘restoration’ theology which fuelled his pro-Zionist stance could, ironically, be distinctly anti-Semitic in its view of European Jewry. This only goes to show that anti-Semitism can take many different forms and heresies, often quite deliberately passed on from one generation to another through somewhat subliminal ‘troping’, applying varying stereotypes to ‘the Jew’. Young people rarely become anti-Semites through reading and discussion with diverse people and viewpoints. It isn’t a logical, educational process, though its antidote may be. It is a poison spread from one generation to the next through the dominant cultures and ideologies, whether on the Right or the Left. I will attempt to apply the antidote again here.

The Sykes-Picot Treaty is usually referred to simply as ‘an agreement’ because it was a secret arrangement, first drafted in April 1916 and signed in mid-May. It was supposed to determine how the Ottoman empire would be partitioned after the war. The French were to rule directly or indirectly the area of a line running from Acre to a point on the Tigris some seventy miles south of Mosul, while the British were to have the same rights in the area south of that line extending as far as Aqaba and along the Saudi Arabian border. Palestine, defined in the agreement as the area bordered by the Jordan river in the east, the sea in the west, and from Acre in the north to a line from El Arish to Be’ersheva in the south would be governed by an international regime. However, most of Palestine was effectively earmarked for British control, as part of a ‘sphere of influence’ stretching from Jordan to the Gulf. In this territory was land which the Arabs understood to have been pledged to them in October 1915 by the Egyptian High Commissioner, Sir Henry MacMahon when he promised, with reservations, that Britain would recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in order to get the Arab Revolt going, which it did in June 1916, helping to turn the military tide for Britain in the middle east.

On the face of it, Sykes-Picot was a blueprint for a cynical piece of imperial plunder, and Britain was embarrassed by the look of it both to the Arabs and to the Americans, who had to be told of it when they entered the war in April 1917. It was then revealed to the world by the new Bolshevik government in Moscow towards the end of 1917. The USA preferred to believe that it was fighting for democracy and self-determination, while the Arabs believed that they were fighting for their own liberation and independence. To reassure both, the British government stepped up its promises to the Arabs in a series of ‘declarations’, which, though increasingly ardent in tone were no more specific than MacMahon’s statement.

At the same time, it had committed itself just as firmly to the Zionists, who wanted to found a middle eastern nation based on the biblical lands of Israel, Samaria and Judea. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 gave the British government’s blessing and support to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Like the MacMahon promise to the Arabs, it was a promise which could only have been made in wartime, when political geography was so fluid that so artificial a creation could be considered; when the government was so pressed and distracted as to be able to ignore or neglect its obvious drawbacks and pitfalls. For British ministers there were a number of substantial arguments in favour of such a declaration, including a genuine Zionism on the part of some, and a devious but ingenious imperialism on the part of others. Leopold Amery, who claimed to have drafted the Declaration, acknowledged that his main motive was…

… largely strategical. I was keen on an advance into Palestine and Syria on military grounds, and the idea of consolidating that advance by establishing in Palestine a prosperous community bound to Britain by ties of gratitude and interest naturally appealed to me. I already had doubts as to the permanence of our protectorate in Egypt.

The chief reason was, however, probably less grandiose, and more immediate: the need to gain the support of American Jews for the war effort, and perhaps to turn the German Jews against their government, a move which sadly backfired on them in the 1920s. Balfour himself remarked that…

… the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be in favour of Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.

Lloyd George also saw it as useful propaganda, and at that point in the war his coalition was desperate for some victories of any kind. Nevertheless, they knew that it was a big long-term risk to take for a short-term propaganda point. In the autumn of 1917, the young diplomat Harold Nicolson, later a Labour Party MP, was seconded to work with Sir Mark Sykes, the co-author of the infamous agreement, one of the two political secretaries to the Cabinet, the other being Leopold Amery. Sykes acted as the main channel of communication between the Cabinet and the Zionist movement. He had been negotiating with both Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolov, the two leading Zionists in Britain, since the beginning of the year, as they worked together to produce a pro-Zionist pledge. Sykes saw no contradiction between this and his staunchly pro-Arab outlook. Indeed, he told himself, one would complement the other. Both the Arab and the Zionist Palestinians, indebted to Britain, would serve British imperial interests. Later developments proved these presumptions wildly optimistic, but at this time most British policy-makers, not to mention both Arab and Zionist leaders, shared them. Harold Nicolson was among them, his pro-Zionism did not stem from anti-Semitism. He once said…

Although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews.

It’s interesting that Beatrice Webb made exactly the reverse of this remark, yet today the Labour Party seeks to draw a line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that few would have understood a hundred years ago. Nicolson, unlike Sykes, had no great knowledge of recent Jewish history, nor was he on intimate terms with any Jews. He certainly disliked the Hungarian Jews accompanying Béla Kun’s short-lived delegation, as a Paris Peace Conference envoy to Budapest two years later, and wrote to that effect in his diary. Although he did not acknowledge his dislike as anti-Semitism, it certainly fuelled his support for Zionism, as it did with many others who thought of themselves as ‘Gentile Zionists’, including some later Nazi leaders like Adolf Eichmann, (as I have mentioned elsewhere):

Zionism, they claimed, would repair perceived defects in the Jewish character. It would restore to the Jews their dignity, that corporate national confidence and self-respect they so clearly lacked: it would, so to speak, stiffen the backbone of the Jewish people. Once given a national home, they would no longer misuse their considerable gifts for mischievous ends. It ‘would be a nice place,’ Harold reflected, ‘in which to collect all the Jews of the world, as Butlin’s collects the noisy holidaymakers’.

There were other aspects of Gentile Zionism, more historical and theological, that appealed to people like Nicholson. Balfour himself expressed these aspects clearly in a speech to the House of Lords in June 1922 on the position of the Jews:

Their position and their history, their connection with world religion and with world politics is absolutely unique. There is no parallel to it… in any other branch of world history… deported, then scattered, then driven out… altogether into every part of the world, and yet maintaining continuity of religion and racial tradition of which we have no parallel elsewhere… Consider how they have been subject to tyranny, consider whether… our whole religious organisation of Europe has not from time to time proved itself guilty of great crimes against this race… do not forget what part they have played in the intellectual, the artistic, the philosophic and scientific development of the world… Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world.

Having supported Balfour, Sykes and Amery, Harold Nicholson was at pains to point out that the Balfour Declaration was not an ‘impulsive and ill-considered’ statement; nor could its authors be accused of ‘ignorance or cynicism’. It took months to negotiate, went through five drafts, and was debated at three sessions of the War Cabinet before it was finally approved on 31 October 1917. Writing in 1947, after almost thirty years of bitter experience, he admitted that it would now be drafted in different terms, but he continued to vehemently to defend Balfour against accusations of cynicism, of opportunism, of imperialism. In 1939, as a National Labour MP, Nicholson spoke out over the May White Paper affair. The government declaration of policy limited Jewish immigration into Palestine to a maximum of 75,000 over the next five years, afterwards any further immigration to be subject to Arab consent, or veto, as the Zionists saw it. Nicholson and other Zionist supporters naturally saw this as flatly contradicting the Balfour Declaration. Apart from his great admiration for Chaim Weizmann, he considered this to be the Chamberlain government’s reneging on its contractual obligations as part of its appeasement of the Nazi dictatorship. Having sacrificed the Czechs, it was now prepared to sacrifice the Jews by giving into Arab demands and leaving them to their fate in Europe. On the eve of the debate he and Leo Amery dined with Weizmann, who appeared ‘calm, dignified and wretched’ as, a master lobbyist, he put his case with his customary persuasive skill. Harold, however, felt ‘helpless and ashamed’, so much so that he did not speak in the two-day debate on the May White Paper, though he did call it a terrible act of treachery. In the Commons, the National Government suffered a massive cut in its majority, to just 89. It survived for another year until Chamberlain’s majority was cut again, this time to 81, forcing him to and his government to resign.

Returning to the end of the First World War, the middle east had become a tangle of promises which the British government had made to the Jews, the Arabs, the French and themselves. Despite Sykes’ early view, they were already becoming contradictory by the time of the Paris Peace Conference, though not perhaps irrevocably so. There was also a great deal of room for confusion in them, since words like ‘self-determination’ and ‘independence’ were capable of different degrees of interpretation. British diplomats, as we have noted, were able to believe that ‘independence’ for the Arabs was not inconsistent with them maintaining a ‘sphere of influence’ over them, and Curzon, Balfour’s successor as Foreign Secretary (1919-24) said, just after the war, that he was quite happy to accept the term ‘self-determination’ because he believed that most of the people would determine in our favour. In one of the ‘reservations’ in the MacMahon letter there was a genuine ambiguity in one of the arabic words used, which could be taken to mean either ‘district’ or a ‘province’, and on this interpretation depended whether the Arabs had been promised Palestine or not as part of their independent territory. The later declarations promised greater degrees of ‘independence’, still not defining these degrees either in terms of powers or territory. The most ambiguous statement of all was Balfour’s ‘national home in Palestine’, which he clearly meant to refer to a Jewish state of Palestine, but could be, and was, taken to mean that Jews would have to settle for federated territory within an Arab-controlled Palestine. As the differing interpretations of previous texts came under the pressures and frictions of settlement ‘on the ground’, they became widening contradictions, leading on to accusations of betrayal on both sides.

All the promises had the mark of expediency about them, being designed to reap some short-term advantage or respite, or to win favours from one side or the other. T E Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) claimed that it was obvious to him that Britain’s promises to the Arabs would become ‘dead paper’ after the war, and confessed that he had played a role in deliberately misleading them:

I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose. 

To those higher up who made the promises, the ‘fraud’ or ‘conspiracy’ might not have been so clear, simply because little thought was given as to whether the cheques so freely given out could actually be redeemed by the recipients. Things changed very rapidly in time of war, so that October 1915 was a long way away from November 1917. For the British government, every present moment might determine whether there would be a future for the Empire, so that it became vital to put every effort into seizing and controlling that moment. It could not be surrendered on consideration of a hypothetical future. The contradictions which were already emerging during the war itself would have broken a peace-time coalition, but in wartime dissidents felt obliged to give way under more pressing necessities. No doubt, however, the result was that irresponsible, inconsistent declarations were made.

The result of the war for Britain was a considerable augmentation of her empire. The middle east was divided up literally along the lines of Sykes-Picot. The Arabs were given the Arabian desert. Britain took Palestine, Transjordan, the Persian Gulf States and Iraq, adding to her existing protectorates of Cyprus, Egypt and Aden. Of course, the newly acquired territories were not considered ‘annexations’ or ‘colonies’. They were ‘mandated’ territories, entrusted to Britain by the newly established League of Nations, to be administered in the interests of their inhabitants with a view to their eventual independence. The irritation felt at this by more traditional imperialists had already been inflamed by the first serious Arab-Zionist clash in Palestine in April 1919.

As we have seen, Zionism was always a popular cause among British imperialists, though it was not supported by all of them, especially, like Curzon, by those more associated with India. Nor was it only an imperialist cause. It had many virtues, but two which endeared it especially to imperialists. Firstly, it was seen as a means of safeguarding British imperial interests in the middle east, especially as Egypt had been granted what effectively amounted to ‘home rule’. Secondly, Zionism, taking away its religious aspect, seemed to be a typically imperialist way of running and developing ‘primitive’ countries: by a European settler population with the energy and expertise to make more of them than the indigenous peoples. In many ways, the history of Palestine in the inter-war period closely resembled that of Kenya, where Labour’s Lord Passfield (the Fabian, Sydney Webb) successfully resisted the claims of the European settlers: the differences being that settler minority was always much larger in Palestine, that it had greater support from outside, and that the relations between settlers’ claims and natives’ rights became confused with the rights of Jewish refugees. Despite the obvious sympathy which the Jews earned so tragically during the Nazi persecutions which preceded the holocaust, there was considerable resistance to their immigration from the Palestinian Arabs. In addition to this, the British had the subsidiary duty under the mandate to safeguard the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine. This presented an immediate handover to the settlers of the country, even had there been enough of them to hand it over to. So the first years of Britain’s mandatory rule in Palestine were devoted to trying to reconcile Zionist and Arab claims, with neither urgency nor success. In fact, this was partly because between 1921 and 1929 there was very little trouble there. In 1929 there was an Arab rising against Jewish immigration, which led the new Labour government to appear to repudiate the Balfour Declaration. Although this was largely an illusion, the Passfield White Paper (1930) did threaten to restrict Jewish immigration and the sale of Palestinian Arab lands to Jews. This was provocative enough and was greeted with a furore of protest from Zionists worldwide, and Conservative imperialists and pro-Zionists Labour  in Britain. With MacDonald’s tacit approval, the MPs were able to sweep away Passfield’s anti-Zionist White Paper.

As the events of the 1930s unfurled, this proved to be a crucial decision because, although pro-Zionist feeling was never again so strong, matters were taken increasingly out of the British government’s hands. The Jewish population of Palestine, which had increased from 150,000 in 1926 to 172,000 in 1931, more than doubled by 1936, reaching 384,000. Most of these new immigrants were fleeing from Nazi persecution, and with their entry to countries like the USA and the UK being restricted, it seemed heartless to successive governments in Britain to deny them refuge in Palestine. Had they tried to do so, the international outcry would have been as deafening as it had been in 1930. The greater the number of refugees, the better they were able to assert their claims to settle the land, which they did, sometimes forcibly. Britain’s role was reduced to policing an already intractable situation, now with ever decreasing enthusiasm. Throughout the 1930s repeated attempts were made to find new ‘settlements’, but they failed. What determined the outcome in Palestine, the creation of the state of Israel on the left bank of the Jordan in 1948, and its subsequent expansion into Arab territory, was the balance of strength on the ground between the two populations, which had changed in favour of the Zionist settlers by 1936. Between the wars, however, Palestine had to remain a British mandated territory. The British were unable to delegate their responsibilities to the Zionist organisation, as many wanted them to do. It remained in the same state as the ‘dependent’ territories within the British empire, a colony ruled directly from London, like Kenya.

What emerges from these further portraits and documents concerning Zionism, imperialism and Palestine in the period 1916-36 is that there was no imperialist conspiracy to create the state of Israel as it existed after 1948. Certainly, there were good relations between leading Zionists and imperialist politicians in Britain, but it was the confusion of competing claims and rights in Palestine itself, together with the inability to control the flow of migrants and refugees under the terms of the British mandate which led to the development of the country through settlement into the self-governing state of Israel following the handover of the mandate to the United Nations in 1948. It is difficult to imagine how the outcome of these events could have been any different, especially given the refugee crisis created by the war. The idea that the state of Israel was an artificial creation, a ‘mistake’ as Ken Livingstone has called it in his recent interview on arabic TV, does not match the reality of the emerging patterns of population on the ground in inter-war Palestine. There was no rational alternative to the decisions that were made, and no other alternative humanitarian solution.

We need to accept the burden that history has given us to bear from the past hundred years. Either we support the creation of the state of Israel, whether we think it happened by accidental evolution or deliberate design, as Ernest Bevin and Clement Attlee finally did in 1949, or call for its dismantling and destruction, by one means or another, which is what the current leadership of the Labour Party, in the Fabian tradition of the Webbs, would like us to do. Of course, criticism of the government of Israel in its home and international relations is essential to it continuing to thrive as a modern democracy, but this should be given in the spirit of critical friendship. Otherwise, it can legitimately be taken as providing succour to Israel’s enemies, who would destroy it by violent means, given the chance, as they have tried to by warfare in 1948, 1967 and 1974 and, more recently by terrorist acts directed by Hezbollah and Hamas. The Labour leadership must make it clear that these organisations are not ‘our friends’ but our enemies who are sworn to commit acts of genocide against our true friends, the Semitic peoples of Israel, both Jew and Arab. To do otherwise would not eradicate the cancer of anti-Semitism which is multiplying in our midst every day.

Sources:

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico

Bernard Porter (1984), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1983. Harlow: Longman.

 

 

The British Labour Party & Palestine-Israel in the Past, 1919-49

This is my third contribution to the debate on anti-Semitism and Zionism in the Labour Party with reference to the documentary evidence of the early twentieth century. The Proclamation of Independence of the state of Israel was published on 14 May 1948, almost exactly 68 years ago. The Provisional State Council was the forerunner of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The British Mandate was terminated the following day, which was also the day on which the armed forces of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries entered Palestine. The Proclamation began with the Biblical claim of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, though it is worth noting that a state or kingdom of Israel only existed in the northern part of these lands for about four centuries before the Roman occupation of the time of Christ, Judea and Samaria being the other main territories in which the Jewish people lived. The diaspora of the Jews around the Mediterranean had also begun well before the first century, although it accelerated following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in circa 70 A.D.  The Proclamation  went on to trace the development of the Zionist movement from the First Zionist Congress of 1897, which was inspired by Theodor Herzl’s vision of The Jewish State, which proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national revival in their own country. This right was acknowledged by the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, and re-affirmed by the Mandate of the League of Nations following the post-World War One peace treaties which established the League. The Mandate, given over to British administration in 1920, gave explicit international recognition to the historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the right to reconstitute their National Home. 

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Above: Faisal IBN-Hussein, King of Greater Syria, 1920 & Iraq, 1921-33 (on the left with the Arab delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, including T E Lawrence, third from right).

During the Paris Peace Conference, which commenced in the Spring of 1919, relations between the Arab Delegation, led by Faisal IBN-Hussein, and the Zionists, led by Felix Frankfurter, were very cordial. Feisal wrote to Frankfurter at the beginning of March to reiterate what he had often been able to say to Dr Weizmann in Arabia and Europe:

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted… by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home… The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist… neither can be a real success without the other.

People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for cooperation of the Arabs and Zionists have been trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stages of our movements. Some of them have… misrepresented your aims to the Arab peasantry, and our aims to the Jewish peasantry, with the result that interested parties have been able to make capital out of what they call our differences… these differences are not on questions of principle but on matters of detail such as must inevitably occur in every contact of neighbouring peoples, and are easily adjusted by mutual goodwill.

Felix Frankfurter adopted a similarly conciliatory tone in his reply on behalf of the Zionist Organisation:

We knew… that the aspirations of the Arab and the Jewish peoples were parallel, that each aspired to reestablish its nationality in its own homeland, each making its own distinctive contribution to civilisation, each seeking its own peaceful mode of life.

The Zionist leaders and the Jewish people for whom they speak have watched with satisfaction the spiritual vigour of the Arab movement. Themselves seeking justice, they are anxious that the national aims of the Arab people be confirmed and safeguarded by the Peace Conference.

We know from your acts and your past utterances that the Zionist movement – in other words the aims of the Jewish people – had your support and the support of the Arab people for whom you speak. These aims are now before the Peace Conference as definite proposals of the Zionist Organisation. We are happy indeed that you consider these proposals “moderate and proper,” and that we have in you a staunch supporter for their realisation. For both the Arab and the Jewish peoples there are difficulties ahead – difficulties that challenge the united statesmanship of Arab and Jewish leaders. For it is no easy task to rebuild two great civilisations that have been suffering oppression and misrule for centuries… The Arabs and Jews are neighbours in the territory; we cannot but live side by side as friends… 

Above: Chaim Weizmann & Felix Frankfurter

As an essential part of their quest for a homeland in Palestine the Jews sought the active support of the British Government delegation and, in particular, that of the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur J Balfour, author of the 1917 Declaration which had given them hope that this would become a reality. In a memo by Felix Frankfurter of an interview with him and Justice Brandeis in Balfour’s Paris apartment on 24 June 1919, the Foreign Secretary is recorded as expressing entire agreement with three conditions that stated:

First that Palestine should be the Jewish homeland and not merely that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine… Secondly there must be economic elbow room for a Jewish Palestine… That meant adequate boundaries, not merely a small garden within Palestine… Thirdly… that the future Jewish Palestine must have control of the land and the natural resources which are at the heart of a sound economic life.  

However, Balfour pointed out the difficulties which confronted the British, especially the fact that Faisal was a ‘comrade in arms’ and that he interpreted British action and words as a promise of either Arab independence or Arab rule under British protection. Nevertheless, he added:

No statesman could have been more sympathetic… with the underlying philosophy and aims of Zionism as they were stated…, nor more eager that the necessary conditions should be secured at the hands of the Peace Conference and of Great Britain to assure the realisation of the Zionist programme.

However, as opposition to Zionism grew among the Arab population under British rule in the early 1920s, a new policy was drafted by Winston Churchill, then the British Colonial Secretary, which, while not explicitly opposing the idea of a Jewish state, redeemed the Balfour promise in depreciated currency, to quote a contemporary British source. Churchill’s White Paper of June 1922 made it clear that The Balfour Declaration had been subjected to exaggerated interpretations such as given in the phrase “as Jewish as England is English” in connection with the intentions of the British government. This, Churchill stated flatly, was not the aim of HM’s Government, which was neither contemplating the disappearance or subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine. He reminded those who suggested this to be the case, among both Arabs and Jews, that the Declaration did not state that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home,  but that such a Home should be found in Palestine. This clearly contradicted the conditions set down in Frankfurter’s memo of Balfour’s Paris interview, but Churchill went on to quote the resolution of the Zionist Organisation’s Congress held at Carlsbad in September 1921, which had expressed…

… the determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community, the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development. 

Churchill also clarified that the Zionist Organisation was to have no special role in the running of the administration of Palestine under the British Mandate and that the citizens of Palestine, whatever their ethnicity or religion, would remain Palestinian. Jewish immigration was to continue in keeping with the economic capacity of the country. The immigrants should not be a burden to the people of Palestine as a whole, nor should they deprive any section of the current population of their employment. Against this background, by the mid-twenties, there were those within the Labour Party, like Beatrice Webb, who began to question the aims of the Zionist movement:

… I admire Jews and dislike Arabs. But the Zionist movement seems to me a gross violation of the right of the native to remain where he was born and his father and grandfather were born – if there is such a right. To talk about the return of the Jew to the land of his inheritance after an absence of two thousand years seems to me sheer… hypocritical nonsense. From whom were descended those Russian and Polish Jews? The principle which is really being asserted is the principle of selecting races for particular territories according to some ‘peculiar needs or particular fitness’. Or it may be some ideal of communal life to be realised by subsidised migration. But this process of artificially creating new communities of immigrants, brought from many parts of the world, is rather hard on the indigenous natives!

Clearly, Sidney Webb (pictured right) shared views of his wife, Beatrice on Zionism, as five years later he was in the first majority Labour government of 1929-31, Sidney Webb as Colonial Secretary, by then under the title ‘Lord Passfield’. Following the Arab riots of 1929, the ‘Passfield White Paper’ was published in 1930, urging restrictions on immigration of Jews, and on land sales to them. When this was bitterly denounced by the Zionist leaders as a violation of the Mandate, Ramsay MacDonald wrote to Chaim Weizmann in February 1931 to reassure him of the good faith of HM’s Government. Although it did not openly repudiate the Passfield Report, the PM’s letter was rejected by the Arabs as the “Black Paper” as it clearly defined the mainstream Labour view of Zionism. The Report had been widely criticised for making ‘injurious allegations’ against the Jewish people and Jewish labour organisations. Today, we might describe these as being anti-Semitic. Quite clearly, as leader of the party and PM, MacDonald felt he had to act quickly to allay these concerns. In his speech in the House of Commons on 3 April 1930, MacDonald had given his ‘double undertaking’ to the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Palestine (see my previous post) which contained a promise to ‘do equal justice’ to both. This, he now declared, was the most effectual means of furthering the establishment of a national home for the Jews.

He emphasised that the government did not contemplate immigration controls beyond those introduced by Churchill in 1922, governed purely by economic considerations. There was to be a continuation of labour scheduling of Jewish wage-earning immigrants for private works which depended mainly on Jewish capital and the availability of Jewish labour. Public works were to be organised on the basis of private Jewish contributions to public revenue, to allow for a ‘due share’ of employment for Jewish workers. Otherwise, account was to be taken of unemployment among both Jews and Arabs. However, The Jewish Agency insisted that, as a matter of principle, asserted the policy that only Jewish labour would be employed by Jewish organisations. MacDonald asserted that the British government would seek to amend this policy if Arab unemployment became ‘aggravated.’ In words which could still be applied to the Labour Party policy today, MacDonald concluded his letter by reaffirming the government’s ‘unqualified recognition’ that no solution can be satisfactory or permanent which is not based upon justice, both to the Jewish people and to the non-Jewish communities of Palestine.

The MacDonald letter aimed to placate the Zionists while disturbing as the Arabs as little as possible. When many Zionists took the letter as a withdrawal of the white paper, however, it became labelled the ‘black paper’ by Arabs. By confirming that the policy of the Palestine Mandate was to continue to support Jewish immigration, the Letter in effect negated some of the implications of the White Paper and facilitated increasing immigration during the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s. Of course, the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism had already become a blurred one in British politics, as the Passfield White Paper shows. Webb was not the only baronet in the Labour Cabinet. Sir Oswald Moseley, sixth baronet, stuck out like a sore thumb in the House of Commons. At first he was a Conservative, but fell foul of the Tory establishment and joined the Labour Party. When he failed to get J H Thomas, the useless Minister of Labour, to do something about the unemployed, Mosley produced his plan for increased allowances and public works, but it was rejected in the crisis of 1931. Mosley walked out to form his ‘New Party’, taking with him some of the more left-wing Labour MPs like John Strachey. When the government fell in August 1931, Strachey and Webb wrote Marxist books and seemed to hover between Mosley’s growing support for National Socialism, which culminated in the founding of the British Union of Fascists, and becoming apologists for Stalin’s USSR which, in the early thirties, was at least as anti-Semitic as Germany. There was little the Labour Party could do to resist the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain, either on the streets of the East End of London, or within its own ultra-left ranks. In fact, in trying to formulate a clear-cut alternative to ‘MacDonaldism’ it strengthened its own left-wing and, for a time, its links with Soviet communism. It also took the British left until at least 1934 to realise that the title of Hitler’s National Socialist Party was extremely misleading, and that what Hitler himself stood for was paranoid nationalism, racialism and militarism , with the Jews as the internal scapegoats. Similarly, Mosley’s powerful corporatist ideas attracted considerable support among the middle and working classes in 1932, including from Labour and Conservative MPs, from Aneurin Bevan to Harold Macmillan. Even after his New Party merged with the BUF in that year, his protectionist policies continued to attract support until they were overshadowed by the thuggish actions of his blackshirts at the Olympia rally in June 1934, soon followed by the Night of the Long Knives in Germany, in which the Nazi Party clearly ‘purged’ itself of its socialist faction. This confusion between right-wing and left-wing politics is evident in journalist Rene Cutforth’s eye-witness accounts of the period from both the British and German capitals:

It was an age addicted to psychological explanations, but I never heard the nature of Mosley’s audiences satisfactorily explained. Who were these people who submitted themselves night after night to this exhibition of terrorism and tyranny?  They looked middle-aged on the whole and seemed to be enveloped in general and political apathy, yet they kept on coming.

The Communists and the Fascists met and fought from time to time, but the habit never became a public menace as it was in Berlin in the early Thirties, when it was extremely easy for anybody, particularly at night, to be caught up in some skirmish between Nazis and Communists and be beaten up or, quite often, never heard of again.

Nonetheless, this confusion of extreme, authoritarian politics of the right and left in British politics in the early thirties was, undoubtedly, a significant factor in the failure of the mainstream Labour movement to stem the growth of anti-Semitism among its own traditional supporters and voters. Similarly, much of the international socialist reaction to Zionism throughout the decade meant that, although the British people were very welcoming to the Kindertransport and to Jewish refugees in general, the National government was able to finally wriggle free from the terms of its Palestine mandate. Another White Paper was published in May 1939 giving into Arab demands and limiting Jewish immigration to fifteen thousand for the next five years. I have referred to this in more detail in my previous post, together with the furious reaction of the Jewish Agency, but this was a fury which did not abate during the following three years. During a visit to the United States by David Ben Gurion, Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Zionist policy was reformulated. At a conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942, the establishment of a Jewish state was envisaged to open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees escaping from Nazi terror and to lay the foundations for the future settlement of a Jewish majority.  The Declaration adopted by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference affirmed its rejection of the 1939 White Paper and denied its moral or legal validity. It quoted Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons from May 1939, in which he claimed that the Paper constituted a breach and repudiation of the Balfour Declaration. Furthermore, it stated,

The policy of the White Paper is cruel and indefensible in its denial of sanctuary to Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution…

The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened: that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands: and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.

Then and only then will the age-old wrong to the Jewish people be righted.

Following the war, and the holocaust, an Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry was appointed in November 1945 to examine the status of the Jews in the former Axis-occupied countries (see my previous post). The Labour Government decided to invite US participation in finding a solution. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, perhaps mindful of the reservations about abandoning the immigration controls of 1939, of his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, declared that the report would have to be considered as a whole for its implications. The report recommended that a hundred thousand Jewish refugees should immediately be awarded settlement papers in 1946, commenting that the actual number of Nazi and Fascist persecutions was well in excess of this:

Indeed, there are more than that number in Germany, Austria and Italy alone. Although nearly a year has passed since their liberation, the majority of those in Germany and Austria are still living in assembly centres, the so-called “camps,” island communities in the midst of those at whose hands they suffered so much.

In their interests and the interests of Europe, the centres should be closed and their camp life ended. Most of them have cogent reasons for wishing to leave Europe. Many are the sole survivors of their families and few have any ties binding them to the countries in which they used to live.

Since the end of hostilities, little has been done to provide for their resettlement elsewhere. Immigration laws and restrictions bar their entry to most countries and much time must pass before such laws and restrictions can be altered and effect given to the alterations.

Some may go to countries where they have relatives; others may secure inclusion in certain quotas. Their number is comparatively small.

We know of no country to which the great majority can go in the immediate future other than Palestine. Furthermore, that is where almost all of them want to go. There they are sure that they will receive a welcome denied them elsewhere. There they hope to enjoy peace and rebuild their lives.

From this report we can clearly see that Ken Livingstone’s recent assertion that the post-war refugees could all have been absorbed by European countries flies in the face of all the contemporary evidence revealing the reality of their predicament, even had they wanted to be resettled in these countries. Immigration to and settlement within Palestine was the only realistic option to spending years in camps. Thus, apart from their historic connection with the country, and their right of access, shared with Christians and Muslims, to its holy places, the Jewish people had, the report concluded, also secured the right to continued existence, protection and development.  

Various models were considered in the report for the future state(s) of Palestine, including a bi-national state, a federation of states, and partition into two or more states. Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary (pictured below), eventually announced on 14 February 1947 that the British government had decided to refer the problem to the United Nations. Bevin himself was against partition since, he said, the Arabs would never agree to two states being formed, so they would be unviable from the beginning. The United Nations duly set up a special committee of eleven member states (UNSCOP), which reported on 31 August 1947. The Jewish Agency accepted its partition plan as the indispensable minimum, but, as Bevin had predicted, the Arab governments rejected it. The UN General Assembly approved the recommendation in November 1947, by a two-thirds majority which included both the USA and the USSR, but not Britain. The British Mandate ended on 15 May 1948, the day after the Proclamation of the State of Israel, and on the same day as the armed forces of neighbouring Arab states entered Palestine.

In these immediate post-war years, Ernest Bevin had been regarded by many Jews in Britain, the United States and Israel as an ‘arch-enemy’ of the Jewish people; and his action on the report of the Anglo-American Commission, and again on the resolution of the United Nations Assembly in 1947, his delay in recognising the State of Israel until February 1949, and some bitter remarks he made in the House of Commons’ debates on Palestine, seemed to justify that contemporary view. However, Lord Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office for the greater part of Bevin’s term as Foreign Secretary, has suggested that his opposition to the State of Israel was due to his preoccupation with longer-term political, economic and strategic considerations:

He was disturbed by fear of active Soviet involvement in Middle East affairs, and foresaw that the persisting Arab-Jewish antagonism would be exploited by Moscow to the detriment of vital Western interests.

In this respect, Bevin’s analysis was correct, but this did not make him anti-Zionist, or by extension, anti-Semitic. Norman Leftwich, writing in 1962 about his Seventy Seven Years as a diplomat, argued that his talks with Bevin in London and Paris between 1946 and 1948, confirmed Strang’s judgement:

He was, I believe, anxious at the outset to find a solution to the conflict, and confident that he would succeed, as he had many bitter Labour disputes… But at least, when he did recognise the State in 1949, he did  his best to foster afresh good relations between Great Britain and Israel; and he made a vain attempt to bring Jews and Arabs together.

A Summary and Some Conclusions:

What lessons can we learn from these thirty years, which can inform the attitude and policy of the Labour Party today towards the Israel-Palestine question, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? Firstly, it does not serve the party’s needs to try to relate anti-Semitism to other forms of discrimination on either racial or religious grounds. If we want to deal will these evils, or diseases, at root, then we need to understand the distinct historical nature of those roots. We need to understand that Jews and Arabs are both Semites, in ethnicity and language, and that until 1919 they had both suffered equally at the hands of an imperial regime in Palestine, as Palestinians, and that the Jews had also suffered both formal and informal discrimination in a variety of European countries, while also being well-integrated into some, e.g. Austria-Hungary. Zionism, the determination to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the ambition of a minority of Jews in Europe and America until a policy of ethnic cleansing was adopted by some of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. For a time, the determination of Zionists to emigrate to Palestine suited many within the NSDAP in Germany, but there is no evidence to suggest that Hitler himself did more than temporarily to tolerate Zionist emigration schemes. To suggest that he actively supported Zionists or Zionism is not only factually wrong, but insulting to those Jews who saved many Jewish lives. In fact, it is a deliberate anti-Semitic distortion, with the aim of devaluing the brave role played by these people during the time of the Third Reich.

During the time of the second Labour government of 1929-31, Ramsay MacDonald upheld the right of the Jewish people to their own homeland in Palestine, as originally set out in the Balfour Declaration, while at the same time affirming the need for ‘equal justice’ for Jews and Arabs. He also sought to guarantee continuing Jewish immigration to Palestine, against the wills of anti-Zionists in his own party, ensuring an escape route for many thousands of refugees until this was all but ended by the National government in 1939. At the end of the war, the Labour government, led by Attlee and Bevin, eased the restrictions on immigration while seeking a permanent solution to the problem of Palestine. Unable to get the Arab representatives to agree to either a ‘bi-national’ state, or to partition, in conjunction with the US, they then handed over the question to the United Nations. They opposed partition, the solution pased by resolution in the General Assembly, because they feared its strategic exploitation by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War. However, in 1949, they recognised the State of Israel. Despite all that has happened since then in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I believe that, with the Cold War now over, the Labour Party has no obstacle to continuing to recognise Israel, to uphold MacDonald’s principle of ‘equal justice’ for the Jews and Palestnian Arabs and to support freedom of conscience and religious practice throughout Israel-Palestine. The best means of achieving these ends at present would seem to be through a two-state solution. Acts of terrorist violence or excessive use of force by any of the current governments within the territories are open to international scrutiny, critism and condemnation, as necessary, under the terms of UN resolutions passed since 1947. However, it should be clear that the Labour Party also opposes those who call for the destruction of the State of Israel, which would involve a further genocide against the Jewish people. Such statements are, in and of themselves, anti-Semitic. It is also anti-Semitic to hold, by word or action, Jewish people generically responsible for the actions of the Israeli government of any particular day, whether they are citizens of Israel or live elsewhere in the world. In our dealings with our sister party and Labour organisations in Israel, we also need to affirm the democratic nature of the country and its constitution.

Finally, the Labour Party’s history in the 1930s should perhaps be read as a warning as to what happens when it splits into wings and factions. In the 1930s, the collapse of the party as the constitutional means for working-class representation left a vacuum in which the extremists on the left and right were able to gain support, leading to attacks on Jews and other minorities. The party was no there to defend them against unemployment and discrimination.  Added to which many who started on the left ended up on the right because of their support for the corporativist or collectivist solutions demonstrated in Berlin and Moscow.  Following a backward path of statist centralisation in the diverse economy and society of the twenty-first century could be even more disastrous for the broad cross-section of society that Labour has always sought to represent.

Sources:

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought. Newton Abbott: David & Charles.

Walter Lacqueur (1976), The Arab-Israeli Reader. New York: Bantam Books.

Michael Clark & Peter Tweed, Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

The Problem with Ken Livingstone: Facts v Tropes

 

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone was interviewed on Sky TV on the day of the local council election results in England, despite having been suspended for his inflammatory remarks, made in a radio interview last week, that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’. In his Sky TV interview, he reiterated that his original statement was ‘historical fact’ and that all we need to do is consult the internet. I have done so, and I have also consulted reference books and textbooks used by teachers of this period in Germany’s history and can find no reference to Hitler or the NSDAP supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in the two 1932 elections to the Reichstag, or the Presidential election. Neither of these elections brought them to power, we need to remember. That only began to happen in January 1933 when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, but even then the German government was a coalition, and it was not until the summer of 1933 that the Nazis gained full control over the German state. What Livingstone is trying to do is to conflate Hitler’s coming to power with the NSDAP ‘policy’ in 1932, which was by no means clear on its ‘solution’ to ‘the Jewish Question’, and the later actions of the SS up to 1941. He is trying to suggest that Zionism and Nazism were, and are, common ideological bed-fellows. In doing so, he conveniently ignores the broader context of the development of both Zionism and anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the Middle East, both before and after the Nazis came to power. He is applying a politically motivated ‘trope’ to a complex set of historical events.

Doing Business with the Nazis? The Ha’avara Agreement

Part of Ken Livingstone’s argument no doubt relates to The Ha’avara Agreement, which allowed some German Jews fleeing to Palestine to recover some of their property by buying German goods for export to Israel, was made with the German government in March 1933, before the Nazis had full control over German society. These were Jews who had already emigrated or were in the process of doing so. It was not part of a government deportation scheme, though it was thought among some Nazi circles to be a possible way to rid the country of its supposed ‘Jewish problem’.  The head of the Middle Eastern division of the foreign ministry, the anti-Nazi Werner Otto von Hentig, supported the policy of concentrating Jews in Palestine. Hentig believed that if the Jewish population was concentrated in a single foreign entity, then foreign diplomatic policy and containment of the Jews would become easier. Hitler’s own support of the Havard Agreement was unclear and varied throughout the 1930s. Initially, Hitler criticized the agreement, but reversed his opinion and supported it in the period 1937-1939, as a legal means of ethnic cleansing before going to war. However, the programme was ended after the German invasion of Poland. It’s also worth noting that the agreement was heavily criticised by leading Zionists at the time, including Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist leader.

Most historians are very clear that, whilst a tiny minority of the Revisionists may have had some sympathy with Nazi ideology, especially its anti-Marxist elements, the vast majority of both the Revisionists and the German Zionist movement as a whole was totally opposed to it in all its elements. Only anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists believe otherwise because they want people to believe that the movement for the creation of the state of Israel collaborated with the Nazis to set up the conditions for the massacre of those Jews choosing to remain in Europe. The further implication, of course, is that Zionists, having aided and abetted the Nazis in the genocide against their own people, would have no compunction in conducting ethnic cleansing against Palestine’s post-war Arab population.

Reading Forward: The origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Anyone looking for documentary evidence on this period should consult Walter Lacqueur’s superb compendium, ‘The Arab-Israeli Reader’, first published in 1969, which I used as a reference book when teaching ‘The Arab-Israeli Conflict’ in schools in England in the 1980s.

Of course, the Labour Party has had a long history, and not always a proud one, in its dealings with Palestine. Following the Arab riots of 1929, the Labour government published a new statement of policy, the Passfield White Paper,  which urged the restriction of immigration and land sales to Jews. It was bitterly denounced by Zionist leaders as a violation of the letter and spirit of the mandate over Palestine given to Britain by the League of Nations in 1920. PM Ramsay MacDonald sent a letter in February 1931, which became known to the Arabs as the “Black Letter” in which he gave assurances to Dr Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist movement, that the terms of the Mandate would be fulfilled. In it, he quoted from his speech in the House of Commons:

Under the terms of the mandate his Majesty’s government are responsible for promoting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

A double undertaking is involved, to the Jewish people on the one hand and to the non-Jewish population of Palestine on the other; and it is the firm resolve of his Majesty’s Government to give effect, in equal measure, to both parts of the declaration and to do equal justice to all sections of the population of Palestine…

It is desirable to make clear that the landless Arabs,… were such Arabs as can be shown to have been displaced from the lands which they occupied in consequence of the land passing into Jewish hands, and who have not obtained other holdings on which they can establish themselves, or other equally satisfactory occupation. It is to landless Arabs within this category that his Majesty’s Government feels itself under an obligation to facilitate their settlement upon the land. The recognition of this obligation in no way detracts from the larger purposes of development… of furthering the establishment of a national home for the Jews…

MacDonald went on tho state in his letter that there would be a need for co-operation, confidence, readiness on all sides to appreciate the difficulties and complexities of the problem, and, above all, that there must be a full and unqualified recognition that no resolution can be satisfactory or permanent which is not based upon justice, both to the Jewish people and to the non-Jewish communities of Palestine.  It seems from this document that, from (at least) its second time in government, the Labour Party has favoured what has now become known as a two-state solution. 

A Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel was established in 1936, following the fresh outbreak of rioting by Arabs earlier that year. It found that Arab and Jewish differences could not now be reconciled under the Mandate and therefore suggested the partition of Palestine. The Arab leadership rejected the plan, but the Zionist Congress accepted it with qualifications, though with a substantial minority voting against. The British government eventually rejected the plan itself in November 1938. Jabotinsky’s evidence submitted to the Royal Commission is revealing in its definition of the evolution of Zionism by this stage:                                                                                   

The conception of Zionism which I have the honour to represent here is based on what I should call the humanitarian aspect. By that, I do not mean to say that we do not respect the other, the purely spiritual aspects of Jewish nationalism, such as the desire for self-expression, the rebuilding of a Hebrew culture, or creating some “model community of which the Jewish people could be proud.” All that, of course, is most important; but as compared with our actual needs and our real position in the world today, all that has rather the character of luxury. The Commission has already heard a description of the situation of World Jewry especially in Eastern Europe, … you will allow me to quote from a recent reference in ‘The New York Times’ describing the position… as “a disaster of historic magnitude.” … Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists among whom there were many great minds… have come to the conclusion that the cause of our suffering is the very fact of the “Diaspora,” the bedrock fact that we are everywhere a minority. It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer. Of course, there are ups and downs; but there are moments, there are whole periods in history when this “xenophobia of Life itself” takes dimensions which no people can stand, and that is what we are facing now…

… the phenomenon called Zionism may include all kinds of dreams – a “model community”, Hebrew culture, perhaps even a second edition of the Bible – but all this longing for wonderful toys of velvet and silver is nothing in comparison with that tangible momentum of irresistible distress and need by which we are propelled and borne. We are not free agents. We cannot “concede” anything. Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own Party, accused of asking for too much – Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes, we do want a State; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and humblest who do not claim any merit, any role in humanity’s development, they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same condition as the Albanians enjoy… then it is called too much.

We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of re-housing one-third… half… or a quarter of the Jewish race… Certainly the way out is to evacuate those portions of the Diaspora which have become no good, which hold no promise of any possibility of livelihood, and to concentrate all those refugees in some place which should not be Diaspora, not a repetition of the position where the Jews are an unabsorbed minority within a foreign social, or economic, or political organism.

I have the profoundest feeling for the Arab case… I could hardly mention one of the big nations, having their States, mighty and powerful, who had not one branch living in someone else’s State… but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation…

After the failure of the partition scheme and a subsequent attempt to work out an agreed solution at the London Conference (Feb-March, 1939), the British government announced its new policy in a White Paper published in May 1939. Arab demands were largely met: Jewish immigration to Palestine was to continue at a maximum rate of 15,000 for another five years. After that, it was to cease altogether unless the Arabs would accept it. Jewish purchase of land was also to be restricted in some areas and stopped altogether in others. Jewish reaction was bitterly hostile, but the Arab leaders also rejected the White Paper: according to their demands, Palestine was to become an Arab state immediately, no more Jewish immigrants were to enter the country, and the status of every Jew who had entered the country was to be reviewed. The Jewish Agency for Palestine, which had been coordinating the migration, led the Zionist reaction to the British government’s new policy:

1.  The new policy for Palestine laid down by the Mandatory in the White Paper now issued denies to the Jewish people the right to rebuild their national home in their ancestral country. It transfers the authority over Palestine to the present Arab majority and puts the Jewish population at the mercy of that majority. It decrees the stoppage of Jewish immigration as soon as the Jews form a third of the total population. It puts up a territorial ghetto for Jews in their own homeland.

2. The Jewish people regard this policy as a breach of faith and a surrender to Arab terrorism. It delivers Britain’s friends into the hands of those who are biting her and must lead to a complete breach between Jews and Arabs which will banish every prospect of peace in Palestine. It is a policy in which the Jewish people will not acquiesce…

3. The Royal Commission… indicated the perils of such a policy, saying it was convinced that an Arab Government would mean the frustration of all their (Jews’) efforts and ideals and would convert the national home into one more cramped and dangerous ghetto. It seems only too probable that the Jews would fight rather than submit to Arab rule…

4. The Jewish people have no quarrel with the Arab people. Jewish work in Palestine has not had an adverse effect upon the life and progress of the Arab people. The Arabs are not landless or homeless as are the Jews. They are not in need of emigration… The Jewish people has shown its will to peace even during the years of disturbances. It has not given way to temptation and has not retaliated to Arab violence. But neither have Jews submitted to terror nor will they submit to it even after the Mandatory has decided to reward the terrorists by surrendering the Jewish National Home.

5. It is in the darkest hour of Jewish history that the British have decided to deprive the Jews of their last hope and to close the road back to their Homeland. It is a cruel blow… This blow will not subdue the Jewish people. The historic bond between the people and land of Israel cannot be broken. The Jews will never accept the closing to them of the gates of Palestine nor let their national home be converted into a ghetto…

This document shows quite clearly that Jewish immigration to Palestine, which had been underway for at least a decade and a half before Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, was neither the product of a defeatist collaboration with them nor of some form of perverted ideological motivation.

Nazism & the Arab Cause: Hitler & the Grand Mufti

Further evidence as to the ideological distance between Nazism and Zionism, were it needed, is revealed by Hitler’s recorded statements made in the presence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in November 1941. In the previous year, following the German destruction of Poland and occupation of western Europe, Jewish emigration to Palestine from the Reich had all but halted, falling to 1,100 from a high of 9,800 in 1934, following the Ha’avarah Agreement, and from 9,200 between the Anschluss (reunification with Austria and the onset of war). Hitler’s true intentions, were they ever to be doubted, as to the means of achieving ethnic cleansing, are as clear in these statements as they are from the mass murders of Polish Jews that had already taken place and were common knowledge in those countries, like Hungary, which received large numbers of refugees who could no longer so easily gain passage to Palestine. Anna Porter’s book, Kasztner’s Train, contains details of this which I have summarised elsewhere on this site.

Haj Amin al Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the most influential leader of the Palestinian Arabs both before and during the Second World War when he lived in Germany. He met Hitler, Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders on various occasions and attempted to coordinate Nazi and Arab policies in the Middle East (Lacqueur). The Record of Conversation between him and the Führer in Berlin begins with his statement on foreign policies of what he termed The Arab Legion, including the Arab countries of North Africa which he said were ready to rise up, together with the Palestinians, against the ‘enemies’ they shared with Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists. He mentioned a letter he had received from the German government which stated that

Germany was holding no Arab territories and understood and recognised the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs, just as she supported the elimination of the Jewish national home.

Hitler himself then stated that Germany’s fundamental attitude was as stated in this letter:

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included opposition to the national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a centre, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the function of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work done there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.

Germany was at the present time engaged in a life or death struggle with the two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Theoretically there was a difference between England’s capitalism and Soviet Russia’s communism; actually, however, the Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal. This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself as in the main as a conflict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. It went without saying that Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle, because platonic promises were useless in a war for survival or destruction in which the Jews were able to mobilize all of England’s power for their ends.

Hitler went on to refer to Iraq, where Germany had been prevented from the rendering of effective practical aid so that the country was overcome by the power of Britain, that is, the guardian of the Jews. Germany was involved in severe battles to force open the gateway to the northern Caucasus region. Therefore, he argued, he could not make any declaration of intent about Syria, because this would be united by de Gaulle’s followers as an attempt to break up France’s colonial empire and lead to a strengthening of their common cause with the English. He then made the following statements to the Mufti:    

1. He would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.

2. At some moment… which… was not too distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.

3. As soon as this happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.

This would, he concluded, bring about the end of the British world empire and French influence in the Middle East. Significantly, however, he refused to make the kind of declaration the Mufti had asked of him at that time, which would provoke an immediate revolt against the British and the Jews in Palestine. Referring to the Anschluss with Austria, he remarked that,…

… he (the Führer) would beg the Mufti to consider that he himself was the Chief of State for five long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of liberation.                   

His point was clearly that, before ‘force of arms’ had been successful in extending the Reich’s territorial control to the south of the Caucasus, the Judeo-British link could not be broken. Nevertheless, he assured the Grand Mufti that his statements could be regarded as a confidential declaration or secret agreement between the two of them. Hitler’s reference back to his first five years after becoming Chancellor of Germany is an interesting one in the context of recent claims that he was not always determined to exterminate the Jews but also supported Zionist emigration as a means to the ethnic cleansing of Europe set out in his early writings. If he went along with the dealings of some of his leading SS men, Eichmann included, it was only until such time as the military conquest of the European conquest was all but complete, and perhaps as a temporary means of earning money from exports. As he told the Mufti, he had to speak coolly and deliberately, as a rational man and primarily as a soldier, as the leader of the German and allied armies. In addition, we cannot escape the fact that his clearly stated aim in this German State document was the destruction of the Jews, not just in Europe, but also in Palestine and the Middle East, even if he expected this latter genocide to be carried out mainly by the Arabs. Given the extent of his military ambitions in 1941, it is difficult to imagine that he ever seriously contemplated, let alone supported, the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine which, as he himself acknowledged, would become a thorn in his side before very long.

Creation and attempted strangulation of Israel

By the time an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee was appointed in November 1945 to examine the state of the Jews in the former Axis-occupied countries and to find out how many had been impelled by conditions to migrate, Britain, weakened by war, found itself under growing pressure from both Jews and Arabs alike. The Labour Government of Clement Attlee, therefore, decided to invite the United States to participate in finding a solution. President Truman welcomed the recommendation of the Committee to rescind the immigration and land laws of the 1939 White Paper, although Attlee declared that the report would need to be “considered as a whole on its implications.” Arab League reaction was hostile and threatening, refusing to consider a bi-national, federal solution. Those Arabs who would consider it were assassinated by supporters of the Mufti, leading others to drop out of talks. The Ihud Zionists put forward this solution, but they too found few supporters among the Jewish Community in general. Eventually, the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced in February 1947 that HM’s Government had decided to refer the Palestine problem to the United Nations. The tension inside Palestine had risen, illegal Jewish immigration continued, and there was growing restiveness in the Arab countries. Palestine, Bevin said, could not be so divided as to create two viable states, since the Arabs would never agree to it. This was how, under a Labour Government, the British Mandate was terminated, and the state of Israel was declared in May 1948 and was immediately and illegally occupied by the armies of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab states. They tried, and failed, to block the implementation of the UN Resolution establishing what they called “a Zionist State” by “Jewish usurpers”.

Our ‘Dr Livingstone’ would do well to remember these facts as well. His latest statement, made on an Arabic language TV station, is that “the creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong”, a statement made with all the presumptive self-assurance of someone with a PhD in the history of Zionism and the establishment of Israel. Three greater Labour giants from the period itself, Ramsay MacDonald, Clem Attlee and Ernie Bevin clearly did not see what they were engaged in as wrong, but so would the United Nations, yesterday and today. Of course, Dr Livingstone is again looking through the wrong end of his explorer’s telescope. Palestine before the Second World War was never recognised as an ‘Arab state’ (even in prospect) and many Jews had settled there long before the Second World War. In fact, for reasons already mentioned, the majority of those settling in Palestine had already done so before the War. It was the failed attempt by the neighbouring Arab states to “strangle Israel at birth” which led to it seizing, for its own protection, more land areas beyond those defined by the UN. Once again, Mr Livingstone is scapegoating the Jews for the Arab-Israeli Conflict of the last seventy years, in addition to making them, as victims of the persecutions of the previous seventy years, responsible for their own Shoah, or suffering.

Sources:

Walter Lacqueur (1969), The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict. New York: Bantam Books.

Richard Overy (1996), Historical Atlas of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

 

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TEFL Equity Advocates

Two days after Silvana Richardson’s brilliant plenary: The Native factor (read more about it here), there was an equally fascinating Q&A session. However, since it was impossible to address all the questions posed by the audience then and there, Silvana and I decided we would continue the discussion on this blog. We gathered all the questions and divided them into four groups according to the emerging topics:

1. NS and NNS labels: a false dichotomy? – read the questions, the comments, and join the discussion here.
2. Proficiency: is there a minimum level for a language teacher?
3. NS and NNS identity: issues of self-confidence, language ownership and authority.
4. What can we do to advance equality in ELT? How can I get involved.

This is the second post with questions on the topic of language proficiency. We’d like to invite you to answer the questions below in the comments section. We’ll then gather the answers…

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Why its time to part company with the past, and Ken, in British politics:

Not so long ago, I posted a criticism online of an extremist, ‘Zionist’ group that had obviously ‘photo-shopped’ a picture of a swastika flying above Hebron, claiming that it had been placed there by Palestinians to incite Israelis. I pointed out, as a historian used to looking at old photographs, that the part of the picture containing the swastika was obviously taken from a picture of a World War II Zeppelin, since the rope connecting to it was coming down from the sky and not up from the tower below. Someone then added an anti-Semitic remark, something about ‘typical Jewish tactics’ to which I reacted by adding the comment that it was possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. My co-commenter retorted that this was impossible, and that I needed to ‘grow some balls’ in the fight against ‘the Jewish state’. Leaving aside the slur on my manhood, I realised he was right – that it was now impossible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic, in that people like him were Jew-hating supporters of Jew-killers in the conflict in Israel-Palestine and would not rest until the state of Israel had been destroyed and its people, mainly Jewish, ‘driven back into the Mediterranean’. Since then, I have read, written and published extensively about the growth of Zionism in its historical context, especially in Hungary, where it began, and where I now live, having married into a part-Jewish Hungarian family. Let me be clear. I believe in self-determination for both Jews and Palestinian Arabs in a two-state Israel-Palestine with religious freedom for Muslims, Jews and fellow Christians.

For some time now, and notably since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in Britain, I have felt tired of having to reply to numerous posts on social media (mainly on sites purporting to support the Labour Party) from those using the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Zionism’ without knowledge of, or reference to, this historical context, and therefore, in my view, in a way which is either inaccurate or just plain wrong. Then I got the news that the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, ‘left-hand’ man of the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (his right-hand man being John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor), had been suspended for claiming publicly that Hitler was a Zionist when he came to power in 1932. So I decided to consult the sources I’ve been working on recently in connection with the Hungarian Holocaust to see what they can reveal about the development of these forces between the wars. I feel bound to state, before venturing further into this historical yet still very contemporary quagmire, that, whatever it reveals, can have only limited relevance to today’s ongoing global arguments about the management and resolution of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, since there is a ‘fault line’ running through the history of the last century which refocuses historical interpretation of the entire century in terms of what actually happened between the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938 and the setting up of the state of Israel a decade later. The displacements, dispersals, deportations and ultimate destruction of the European Jewish peoples have been fully documented are established facts of the highest order which are protected by law in many countries. Therefore, what politicians like Ken Livingstone try to do is to chip away at the bedrock of these events by seeking to re-contextualise them in order to make outrageous comments like those of Naz Shah seem mainstream, when they are far from it. There is, quite rightly, much debate over the role of Hitler’s ‘Aims’ and ‘Plans’ in determining the outbreak and course of the Second World War, comparative to a whole range of other factors, but what is indisputable is the course of what we have come to know as ‘the Holocaust’ enacted against the Jews, Roma and others whom the Third Reich and its Führer determined to be ‘undesirable’.

Additionally, we need to bear in mind that, correctly defined, both parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict are Semitic peoples in the original linguistic-cultural use of the term, and therefore much of what passes for ‘Islamaphobia’ is actually not directed against Islam, of which it is largely ignorant, but rather anti-Arab and therefore another form of anti-Semitism which also needs to be confronted and extinguished. There is therefore no rank order among the oppressed peoples of the middle east, and upholding the rights of one ethnic group does not mean trampling on the rights of another. Neither is there any need, as Corbyn has done, to conflate anti-Semitism with ‘Islamaphobia’ as a form of racism. The latter may turn into anti-Arab racism, or be confused with it, but it begins, as the term suggests, with an irrational fear of religion, and therefore has different causes to anti-Semitism. It should be treated with different remedies. We do not need an ‘independent’ enquiry to tell us this. Xenophobia is currently, sadly, rampant throughout European society, but it is its deliberate exploitation by racists that makes it so toxic.

Added to this, since former Assyrians and Persians are also Semitic peoples, a general solution to the conflicts inherent or active in the middle east cannot be found without respecting the identities of Kurds, Iraqi minorities and Iranians. At the moment, religion is being used to deny these identities in many cases, but their re-emergence and recognition is part of the secular and inter-faith campaign which is needed to defeat the tyranny and terrorism of ethnic cleansing in the region as a whole.  Zionism simply means what the name suggests, Jewish nationalism, which has a right to co-exist with every  other nationalism of Europe and the Middle East, including the legitimate demands for Kurdish and Palestinian self-determination in statehood. It’s only when such aspirations go unrecognised and get pushed into corners that they become potentially destructive.

I felt reluctant to write much more than this until Ken Livingstone’s remarks made me determined to delve back into the earlier part of the twentieth century. One reason for my initial reluctance was that I was hoping that wiser heads would prevail in the Labour Party, and would, by now, have come up with a framework for constructive discourse on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, providing parameters of acceptable uses of language for its members, many of them new to the party and new to this particular discourse. Jeremy Corbyn’s tendency to refer everything back to the ‘growth of the party at grass-roots level’ is patronising to those who have worked at this level for many decades and are more aware than he is of the challenges posed by the sudden influx of ‘unschooled’ proto-socialists. The fact that there is a concurrent conflict on anti-Semitism among students would suggest to a more pro-active or even reactive leader that this is not a problem which will simply settle down among the ‘grass roots’. His ‘Crisis? What Crisis?!’ response was also a complete abnegation of responsibility. A new fault line has opened up within the Party, and he opened it by making it clear that it was acceptable for party leaders, himself included, to appear on platforms with representatives of Hezbollah and Hamas, organisations which have as their stated aim the destruction of the state of Israel which, were they to succeed, would involve another act of genocide against Jewish people.

His election as leader has, as many of us on the mainstream Left predicted, opened a Pandora’s Box of the uglier tropes of ultra-Left ideology, and it may be impossible to get the lid back on it. However, it is not too late for him to express regret over the support implied in his own past actions, and also to distance himself from the ‘Stop the War’ campaign’s ‘Cairo Declaration’ which sought to justify attacks on British service people in Iraq. For the sake of his Party, if for no other reason, he needs to ‘draw a line in the sand’ for his fellow-travellers on its ultra-Left, whether old comrades like Ken, or new militants who have yet to come to political maturity. Unlike the other major political parties, the Labour Party has always had a set of familiar values and discourses which have to be learned by its members, sometimes the hard way. As Ken’s case proves, this is a process of lifelong learning. Just as an ‘old dog’ like Corbyn has shown himself to be capable of learning ‘new tricks’ as leader, so too all of us have gaps in our knowledge as well as our know-how, or ‘political nous’.

Understanding Zionism in its historical context:

So, having re-educated myself on these contemporary-historical issues, partly through living and working in the part of Europe that experienced them, let me attempt to offer a basis for genuine historical understanding. Reading Anna Porter’s book on ‘Kasztner’s Train’, together with more anti-Zionist sources from within the Budapest Jewish leadership of 1944-45, I began to understand that the British Left had failed to understand Zionism as a movement, both contemporaneously and subsequent to the Holocaust. This is because it mirrors the interpretation of ‘European Jewry’ as a monolithic collective culture and ethnicity within European society. Historically, the Left has tended to  refer to ‘the Jews’ as if they are somehow a homogeneous group, like other ethnic minorities which exist across national boundaries, when, in reality, they were just as culturally diverse as Slavs or Celts. What made, and still makes them, different, are their religious cultures, which also remain as heterogeneous as those found within Islam or Christianity, the other monotheistic faiths. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was not a foregone conclusion that their faith would continue to mark them out and marginalise them within mainstream European societies. It was their persecution in these host societies which prevented their further integration. Living in Budapest at this time, Theodor Hertzl, regarded as the founding thinker of Zionism, prophesied that what would make the case of Hungarian Jewry so tragic was that of all the Jewish populations of Europe, they were the most integrated. Like him, they tended to live close to the synagogues in the capital, but there were no ghettos to speak of. In the countryside, Jewish families were dispersed throughout villages, and the only difference between Christian and Jewish peasant children was that the first attended church and the second the synagogue. This had been the case for at least two centuries. Similar-looking children would swap places on Saturdays and Sundays, and no-one, not even their parents, noticed the friendly prank!

The Hungarian Jewish population had begun to increase significantly in the eighteenth century, after the end of the Ottoman occupation of a large part of Hungary’s crown lands, and by the mid-nineteenth century they accounted for 3.5 percent of the total population. They were mainly farmers and traders who were spread out very unevenly around the country. In Budapest twenty percent of the population was of Jewish faith and there were similar proportions in larger cities in eastern Hungary, which then included Transylvania. In the western cities of Transdanubia their number was much lower, while in the villages there it was insignificant. Unlike Jews elsewhere in eastern Europe, Hungarian Jews had had equal rights since the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, and by 1900 they seemed to have successfully integrated into wider society. Leading figures in the industrialisation and modernisation of Hungary were of Jewish faith. For decades Hungarian GDP grew at a faster pace than the European average as metropolitan Budapest grew at the same rate as Chicago or Detroit. Its Jewish people became assimilated within a growing bourgeoisie and were generally welcomed by the Hungarian political élite. The growing competition between the traditional noble hierarchy and the newer capitalist classes had not yet become a major threat to political stability, so that anti-Semitic movements were unable to attract significant support either in the capital or the provincial towns and villages. However, when the economic boom ended and capitalism began to go into crisis in the early years of the twentieth century, both Jewish and Schwabian (German-Hungarian) ‘alien’ elements began to be made scapegoats for its failures and shortcomings.

The growth of anti-Semitism and Zionism in Hungary in the 1920s:

Anti-modernity movements in Hungary first appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century and were closely associated with a gradual growth of anti-Semitism. However, as in Germany, it was the social fractures of 1918, 1919 and 1920 which brought it closer to the central focus of Hungarian national life. In 1919, a ‘Bolshevik’ Republic was proclaimed, led by Béla Kun. Unfortunately for all the Jews of Hungary, Kun and many of his associates were Jews. For the commanders who beat down the Republic of Councils (Soviets), Jews and Bolsheviks were the same thing. Traditional anti-Semites saw the whole Kun interregnum as a failed Jewish plot, ignoring the fact that Jews were also over-represented among its victims, many of whom were wealthy Jews, and that communism posed a deadly threat to the Jewish aristocrats who held 20 per cent of the nation’s wealth. This made no difference to those seeking someone to blame for the Communists’ few months in power.

As Anna Porter has pointed out, this began to change in the early 1920s when both peasants and factory workers in Hungary suffered extreme hardships, and Horthy’s new government hit on the perfect scapegoat for the country’s ills – the Jews. With the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, they became a natural target in every country, including Hungary. In Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine there were already pogroms, murderous rampages, against the Jews. In Germany, Juilius Streicher launched the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer in 1923 with the ominous headline, “The Jews are Our Misfortune”. The first anti-Jewish law, the Numerus Clausus Act, was introduced in Hungary as early as 1920, the first anti-Semitic legislation in twentieth-century Europe, long before Hitler came to power in Germany. It is a frequent mistake on the Left to equate anti-Semitism with Nazism in Germany or ‘Hitler going mad’ as Ken Livingstone has, and can be viewed as a grotesque reduction  of the entire Holocaust as the responsibility of Hitler and his henchmen. Of course, many Hungarians have also tried to promote this distortion of events.

The 1920 Hungarian anti-Jewish Law limited the number of Jews at universities, teachers and students, to the same small proportion, 6%, that they represented in the population at large. The cream of Hungarian intellectuals, including almost all of those who later won the Nobel Prize, were forced to study at western European universities. A similar law also existed in Poland, and in Romania Jews were granted equal rights due to the intervention of the western allies. The Hungarian Numerus Clausus was allowed to lapse eight years later, but many contemporaries saw it as a harbinger of tougher laws to come, and they were proved right. The Regent, Miklós Horthy, declared himself anti-Semitic, but his regime moderated its virulent growth and violent eruption throughout the inter-war period in Hungary. Although it was widespread and ever-present among the ruling aristocratic classes, the élite reached a compromise with the wealthy Jews, whose industrial capital they needed. Ferenc Chorin exemplifies those industrialists of Jewish origin who became part of the political élite themselves.

Rezső Kasztner declared himself a Zionist at the age of fifteen. For him, it was a romantic rather than a political notion. “Zion” was the biblical name of ancient Jerusalem, where King David had built the fortified temple that was later destroyed by the Romans. The fifteenth-century poet Yehuda Halevi was the first to apply the term to the people of the Diaspora. The idea that the Jews would one day return to their ancient lands in Palestine attracted Rezső even before he discovered Theodor Herzl’s writings. Herzl wrote of the ingrained, centuries-old anti-Semitism among Europeans and declared that he understood the reasons for it. Although Jews had endeavoured to blend themselves into their surrounding communities while preserving their faith, they had not, he wrote, been permitted to do so. They had continued to be viewed as ‘aliens’. Yet, he observed:

My happier co-religionists will not believe me till Jew-baiting teaches them the truth.

As early as 1896, Herzl foretold the disasters of National Socialism under Adolf Hitler and warned his fellow Jews to found their own homeland before it was too late. In 1919, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to administer and control Palestine. In 1920, following another resolution of the League, the British government agreed to the creation of a “national home for the Jewish People” in the mandate territory, as spelled out by the Balfour Declaration. The Yishuv, the Jews already living in Palestine would now be represented to both the British and the rest of the world by a new organisation, the Jewish Agency, which was composed of various Zionist factions  present in the pre-1930s World Zionist Organisation.

Rezső Kasztner had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in its first German edition, which German newspapers hailed as the brilliant work of a young genius who had a clear-eyed view of how best to solve Germany’s postwar problems. Kasztner found it to be the incoherent ranting of a poorly educated man, full of hate and ambition. Hitler’s one consistent thought was his identification of “the Jew” as the chief enemy of his herrenvolk, the Aryan master race. Like David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, Kasztner realized that if Hitler came to power, he would begin a war which the Jewish people would bear the brunt of. As a Hungarian journalist, Kasztner wrote about the likely effects of the era of Béla Kun’s short-lived Communist government on Hungarian politics. Kun was from Kolozsvár, then in Romania, the same Transylvanian city as Kasztner.

Porter has written that given his quick rise in society, it was surprising that Kasztner did not leave behind his Zionism. For a Kalozsvár (Cluj) Jewish intellectual in the 1920s, Zionism was unfashionable. The idea of emigrating to Palestine to live on communal farms, barely retrieved from the desert, did not appeal to urbane, integrated European citizens. Jews enjoyed public life, commerce, banking, the arts and sciences; some of them were noted scientists, writers, humorists and historians. Nor was Zionism popular among religious Jews, most of whom did not believe that Jews should return to their homeland before the advent of the Messiah. True, Rezső’s elder brother, Gyula, had emigrated to Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz, but at that time the younger brother had still been in high school, and any ideas he had of joining his brother were subsequently put on hold by his father’s death in 1928, when he was still only twenty-two. Even after having joined the Ihud, one of the main Zionist organisations, and having reading Mein Kampf, when Hitler became German Chancellor, the worst that Kasztner could predict was that he would demand was that all Jews leave the German territories.

Racism, anti-Semitism & Jewish emigration in Germany between the wars:

In Germany between 1919 and 1923 the state had been faced with coup attempts from right and left, of which the most serious, the army-backed Kapp Putsch of 1920, was only overturned by a General Strike in Berlin. German society was bitterly divided with the nationalist right completely irreconcilable to the parliamentary Weimar Republic. They blamed Jews and Marxists both for Germany’s defeat and the problems of democracy.  Anti-Semitism became the hallmark of the radical right and led to regular attacks on synagogues and the desecration of Jewish graveyards. The Nazi movement, in the form of the German Workers’ Party, had its origins in Bavaria. Hitler joined the party in September 1919 and the following February co-authored a 25-point programme which was both anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. In April 1920 the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and Hitler became its leader in July 1921. Two years later, at the height of the inflation crisis in November 1923, Hitler launched an armed coup in Munich which was crushed by the local police.

During his nine months in Landsberg prison he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf which became the ‘bible’ of the movement re-founded in Bamberg in February 1926. This new movement adopted a programme of ‘biological politics’ to create a ‘healthy German race’ and to stamp out ‘alien elements’.  The Nazi movement viewed the new Germany predominantly in racial terms, using the concept of biological purity which was present in the theories of racial hygiene (eugenics) popular in sections of the medical establishment throughout Europe and America. Eugenic theory suggested that human populations, like those in the animal kingdom, were subject to the laws of natural selection that Darwin had outlined in the previous century. A ‘healthy race’ required the elimination of those who had physical or mental defects, or who introduced ‘alien blood’ into the traditional ‘racial stock’. This pseudo-scientific view of racial policy was expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Once in power, Hitler established an apparatus of laws and offices whose task was to cleanse the race.

Anti-semitism intensified. Jews were hounded from office or imprisoned in the first wave of lawless anti-Semitism in 1933. In September 1935, the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were announced. The subsequent Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November defined ‘Jewishness’. The same day, The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour forbad inter-marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans, also those between Germans and blacks, Sinti and Roma (gypsies). These laws linked the eugenic programme with the regime’s anti-Semitism. Over the following four years, the Jewish community was gradually excluded from business and the professions, through the programme known as aryanisation. It lost citizenship and its entitlement to welfare provisions.

There can therefore be little doubt that, in its own terms, the regime embarked upon a programme of ethnic cleansing from the day it took power. In this ‘peacetime’ context, Jewish emigration helped to serve this purpose, and was therefore encouraged by the Nazi state. This cannot, however, be interpreted as ‘support for Zionism’ as Ken Livingstone has attempted to suggest. About half of Germany’s Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939, but only 41,000 of these ‘refugees’ from Nazism went to Palestine under the terms of the Ha’avarah Agreement made with Zionist organisations in Palestine on the transport of emigrants and their property from Germany. Twice this number, 102,200, found their own way to the USA, 63,500 went to Argentina and 52,000 to the United Kingdom. There was one unlikely ‘collaboration’ with the SS when training camps were set up in Germany for emigrants to acquire the skills needed in their new life in Palestine. However, by 1937 the whole process of emigration had slowed down as receiver states began to limit further Jewish immigration. The British in particular restricted the official influx into Palestine which they governed as a mandate under the League of Nations (I have written about this elsewhere on this site).

As Jewish emigration slowed, those left in Germany suffered an intensification of anti-Semitism sponsored by the Nazi state and movement. On 9 November 1938, at the instigation of leading racists, a nationwide pogrom destroyed thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses. In all 177 synagogues were destroyed and 7,500 shops. Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) did indeed signal a more violent phase in racial policy, but it was not a departure from previous practice orchestrated by the regime with the aim of driving Jewish people from their homes and out of Germany. Neither Hitler nor his henchmen cared much where they went, though if they could accelerate the exodus by encouraging Zionist emigration to Palestine, some of those henchmen saw it as a means to achieve their own ends. In ‘peacetime’, other means were not yet available.

The Racial War & ‘the Jewish Question’:

The conquest of continental Europe provided the circumstances for a sharp change in direction in German race policy away from discrimination and terror to the active pursuit of genocide. Whilst it is true that Hitler and the radical racists had no master plan for the annihilation of the Jews in 1939, their whole conception of the war was one of racial struggle in which the Jewish people above all were the enemy of German imperialism. When the Third Reich found itself ruling very large populations after the conquest of the east, it began to explore more extreme solutions to ‘the Jewish question’. The German New Order was viewed from Berlin in terms of a hierarchy of races: at the apex were the Germanic peoples, followed by subordinate Latin and Slavic populations, and at the foot of were the Jews, Sinti and Roma, ‘races’ deemed to be unworthy of existence. The policy towards them began with a programme of ghetto-building or imprisonment in camps, but in the summer of 1941 it became more violent, with Barbarossa including orders for the mass murder of Soviet Jews. In the Baltic States and Ukraine native anti-Semitism was whipped up by the German occupiers, leading to widespread massacres. There is strong evidence from the trial of Adolf Eichmann  that in July 1941 Hitler himself ordered the ‘physical extermination of the Jews’, six months before the Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942), which is often referred to as the meeting at which The Final Solution was agreed. The record from that meeting reveals that Heydrich’s plan was for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the whole of Europe, from Ireland to European Turkey.

The systematic murder of Jews began in late 1941, and was extended to the Sinti and Roma in 1942. In 1943 Germany put pressure on Italy to release its Jewish population in 1943 and Hungary in 1944. When both states were occupied by German forces, any remaining resistance to The Final Solution was quashed and hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported and slaughtered in the death camps even after it became clear that the Reich could not win the war. Hitler was determined to achieve what he had always seen as his own chief legacy for Europe, a ‘Jew-free’ continent. This had always been his aim, as well as that of the NSDAP from its re-founding in 1926, if not sooner. There was no point at which he ‘went mad and decided to kill six million Jews’ as Ken Livingstone suggested. What he needed in order to achieve it were war-time conditions, and especially the subjugation of occupied Europe.

The dilemma for the leaderships of the European Jewish populations in general and the Zionist movements in particular, is clearly illustrated in the case of war-time Hungary. From 1938, one law after another had been passed limiting the rights and wealth of Hungarian Jews.  The most important of these were Act XV (1938), the First Jewish Law, which restricted the proportion of Jewish workers to 20 percent in some professions, the Second Jewish Law (IV, 1939), that lowered this to 6 percent and redefined ‘Jewishness’ on racial rather than religious grounds, and the Third Jewish Law (XV, 1941), the law for “protection of the race” which banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews. A fourth law followed in war-time, which confiscated land owned by Jews (XV, 1942). These laws were not a copy of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, but were ‘tailored’ to Hungarian social conditions. To political leaders it might have seemed that the growing economic and political tensions could most easily be relieved by legal discrimination against the Jews, but those politicians whose declared aim, as in Germany, was to segregate and expel Jews from the country gained more and more room closer to the apex of power.

Hungary as an Axis Ally:

In 1941, in spite of all the laws passed and the measures taken against the Jews, Hungary still seemed to be a peaceful island among the stormy seas to its east and north. While the Jews of eastern Europe were deported to death camps or executed on the spot, in Hungary only those without Hungarian citizenship could be expelled. Most of these who were rounded up were executed by SS officers near Kamenc-Podolsky in Slovakia. In the early spring of 1941, Kasztner left Kolozsvár, now once more part of Hungary, as a result of Hungary’s alliance with Germany. Whatever was going on in the German territories, and despite the new Hungarian Jewish laws affecting Transylvanian Jews, the Jewish community was relieved to be outside the jurisdiction of the Romanian mobs. In January 1941, members of the Iron Guard had launched a rebellion to overthrow Antonescu’s Romanian government. The fascist guards hunted for Jews in villages and small towns, herded them into boxcars and left them there on the sidings for days without food and water. In Bucharest, bodies of Jews were hung on meat hooks and displayed in the windows of Butcher shops. In March, German troops arrived in Romania,  preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

The Hungarian government had closed down all the Jewish newspapers in Kolozsvár, including Új Kelet (New East), the paper that the thirty-six-year-old Kasztner had been writing for. He decided to go to Budapest, a cosmopolitan city, which he was sure would provide the assistance he sought for the Jewish refugees who were streaming over Hungary’s borders from the countries already occupied by the Third Reich. By now Kasztner had a broad-ranging knowledge of Hitler’s record on which he based his pessimistic predictions for the future of European Jewry. Budapest, he believed, would remain the safest place in eastern Europe. Nevertheless, he argued, the Reich, as a dictatorship of the Right, would not permit a dictatorship of the Left to continue as an ally, or even to continue at all. He had a letter of introduction to Ottó Komoly, the president of the Budapest Zionist Association and an author of two books about the future of the Jews. He was socially well-connected and a committed Hungarian patriot, despite his support for a Jewish homeland. “It is not a contradiction,” he insisted. “There must be a Jewish homeland, but I am not likely to live there myself.” Komoly had been introduced to Zionism by his father, a close friend of Theodor Herzl, bu he had not applied for an entry visa to Palestine. He felt comfortable in Budapest, though he warned Kasztner that the time would come when no Jew would find comfort in the city:

Too many of us have been in the window of social life. We have attracted the attention of other, less fortunate segments of the population. A person is inclined to believe in the in the permanence of favourable conditions and is reluctant to pay attention to warning signs.

That group, he thought, included himself. As in Kolozsvár, the Zionist movement divided along the same lines as in Palestine and, eventually, as it would in Israel. On the left were the Ihud (later the Mapai), the Israeli Labour Party that had been running the Jewish Agency, in effect the government in Palestine. This was the group that Kasztner had joined: the socialist Hashomer Hatzair, a youth organisation with small clubs, called ‘nests’, throughout Europe; the Maccabee Hatzair, another socialist youth movement that had been organised at Jewish high schools in the late 1930s; and the Dror (affiliated with the Ihud), which, with its leadership in Poland, had been active on Hungary’s eastern borders, helping to bring across refugees from both Poland and Slovakia. On the right was Betar, the youth wing of the Revisionists, which, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine, fought bitterly with the Mapai leadership. He fostered armed resistance to both the British in Palestine and to the Germans in Europe, though, like Kasztner, he too became involved in deal-making to save lives. The Klal, or general Zionists, focused on emigration to Palestine, and the Mizrachi, the religious Zionists, saw themselves as the intellectual leaders of the Zionist movement. Despite all the alarming outside threats, the Zionists remained deeply divided along religious and political lines, each passionately opposed to the others’ points of view. This open animosity among the various groups was difficult for even the Jewish leadership to understand, as was its continuance during the German occupation of 1944-45. Despite these divisions, Kasztner knew as early as 1941 that the only Zionist organisations left in eastern Europe were the ones in Budapest.

From the spring of 1941 to the spring of 1944 the Hungarian Jewish community, uniquely in Europe, remained more or less intact. In every other country, occupied by the Reich, Jews had already been taken to extermination camps or were gathered in ghettos working under inhuman conditions. The losses among Jewish men in forced labour units of the Hungarian Army from 1942 had been heavy, but this was true of the entire Army fighting on the eastern front. Against this back-drop, the Israelite Community of Pest had remained staunchly opposed to Zionism. Its president, Samu Stern, in his acceptance speech in 1929, had warned the members of the community not to fall for the tempting words of emigration and Zionism. He believed that for the Hungarian Jews the only possible route was not to leave their traditions and not to form a separate Jewish party, but to be present in all Hungarian parties. He maintained particularly good relations with many personalities in the political establishment, and regularly played cards with Regent Horthy in his role as a Hungarian Royal Court Advisor, a nominal post and title which he had been given in 1916. Following the occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 he was appointed president of the Jewish Council set up by the Nazis.

Hungary under Nazi occupation:

The Hungarian historian Krisztian Ungváry has pointed out how, within days of the occupation beginning, the prominent characters of the Hungarian Jewish community found themselves suddenly cut off from their former social connections in wider society. Those whom they could previously rely upon were either arrested or removed, as the Hungarian authorities had no choice but to obey the German High Command’s representatives. These included Adolf Eichmann who, together with his colleagues, made systematic use of the Jewish Council both to calm the victims and to make them carry out as many of the anti-Semitic measures as possible. Ungváry characterises the dilemma facing the Jewish leaders as follows:

In this situation you could only choose between bad and worse, and in many cases it was not even clear which choice would be more acceptable. The conditions for open resistance were totally missing. In Hungary, the Jewish community did not separate as much from the majority in the society as it did in other eastern European countries. The overwhelming majority of Jews considered themselves assimilated with only cultural ties to their origin. They considered themselves to be Hungarian nationals. On the other hand, the Christian middle class, the segment of the majority society that was mainly in contact with people of Jewish origin, mostly showed anti-Semitic behaviour. Good examples of this were the chambers of doctors or architects which were regularly biased against their Jewish members, even taking away job opportunities from them.

In the spring and early summer of 1944, those who were interested in what was happening to Jews throughout eastern Europe had relatively broad access to accurate information, whether from Hungarian soldiers returning from the front, or from refugees escaping from Galicia. However, the plain fact is that these pieces of information did not interest a significant part, perhaps the majority, of both the non-Jewish and Jewish population of Budapest. Hungarian Jews looked down on other eastern European Jews and were unconcerned as to their fate. In any case, open resistance on the scale seen in Warsaw seemed futile and their faith in Hungarian society was not completely dead. Stern himself had no illusions about Eichmann’s aims, as he later stated:

I knew about what they were doing in all the occupied countries of Central Europe and I knew that their operation was a long series of murders and robberies… I knew their habits, actions, and their terrible fame.

Nevertheless, in a meeting with Rezső Kasztner on the afternoon of 22 March, Stern had revealed his disdain for the Zionist cause. The two men met in an elegant, old-world café that Jews of any standing would soon be forbidden from entering. A record of the meeting was made by Ernő Szilágyi, and summarised in English by Anna Porter:

Kasztner leaned toward the older man, his hands resting on the table. He pleaded as before: “The gentlemen at the Astoria know everything about us, sir – they know who we are and what we have been doing. They have had dealings with Zionists before, most recently in Bratislava. They are expecting to hear from us – in fact, they would be astonished if we did not try to make contact. They know that we are tough bargainers and that we will try to save lives. They know we deliver on our promises. “

Stern sipped his espresso.  “We don’t need help from Zionists,” he said, “A few months, and the Germans will disappear.” 

“Exactly,” Kasztner replied. “But it’s those few months we are talking about-how to survive those months. Don’t imagine, sir, that those months will be uneventful. We know what they can do. You have heard from the refugees. You must know, as I know, that obeying every order, that delivering whatever they ask for, that begging and crying at their doorsteps is useless. We are looking for an alternative to committing suicide.”

“We don’t need advice from Zionists,”  Stern repeated.

Though Stern already knew the whole story, Kasztner persisted in telling him about Dr.  Adam Czerniaków, the Warsaw engineer who was president of the Jewish Council there when almost 400,000 Jews were stuffed into the ghetto. Czerniaków had been eager to please the Germans, fulfilling their every wish, responding to their calls, a good negotiator, a professional, “just like you, sir.” Late one night, the Jewish Council was told to appear before the German commander. Word spread through the ghetto like wildfire. Nobody slept. In the crowded one-room apartments, children and adults stood by the windows, waiting, talking about what it was the Germans wanted this time. They were frightened, hungry, exhausted, beaten. During the night, the Gestapo came for the doctors, the lawyers, the other prominent Jews and their families and murdered them where they found them. At dawn, the militia arrived with dogs, hunted down more people, and packed them into waiting trucks.

The next morning, the German commander gave Dr. Czerniaków this order: “Seven thousand Jews to be ready for transport to Treblinka tomorrow morning. Seven thousand more the next day. Seven thousand the day after tomorrow. ” The first seven thousand had already been collected by the Ukrainian militia the night before. Czerniaków knew what Treblinka meant, as did everybody else in the ghetto. The next day, the Jewish Council had a new president. Czerniaków had killed himself.

“This, sir, is the Jewish Council,” Kasztner said.

“I know the story,” Stern said, his voice hard and decisive. “It has nothing to do with us. I have my contacts with the Hungarian government, and they are confident these are temporary measures. If we keep our heads down, we shall survive. And I have my own contacts with the Germans.”

But Kasztner persisted: “Now I would like to tell you about the kind of contact Zionists in Bratislava had with the Germans.”

“I know that story, too,” Stern said, irritated…

“It is the Zionists they wish to deal with, sir. As they did in Vienna and Berlin, and Bratislava. And we are going to need money, sir, a lot of money, but more than that, we will need your trust. We must be able to represent you and the council when we go to meet Eichmann’s men…”

At that point, Stern is reported to have risen to his feet and left the café, with a dismissive glance towards Kasztner. In referring to ‘the gentlemen at the Astoria’ Kasztner meant the SS staff whom Eichmann had brought with him and who had set up a temporary HQ at the Astoria Hotel in ‘downtown’ Pest. In referring to deals in Vienna, Berlin and Bratislava, he meant the agreements the Germans had made with various Jewish leaders, including Zionists, in those cities, for the exit of large numbers of Jews to Palestine.  Over the next fortnight or so, Stern continued to call for calm, as rumours of deportations in the east began to grow. “But it’s only in the eastern provinces,” he rationalised, “You can see from the papers that there are saboteurs in these areas, and we can’t be sure that some of them are not working directly with the partisans.” However, even his daughter, Rózsa, felt increasingly nervous as the deportations from the provinces nearer by became a fact of everyday life in late April and May:

 Every day we heard the news about which town was being deported. A number of good friends and acquaintances disappeared like this. Meanwhile in Budapest, the Community, with an exact list from the Germans (lawyers, doctors, merchants, journalists, etc.) was supposed to collect people who were then interned to Csepel, Kistarca, and other places. Only through tremendous financial efforts was it possible to save some Zionists with highly respected backgrounds from the brick factories in certain towns. They were interned to Budapest until there would be an opportunity to take them to Palestine. 

The Zionist negotiations with the Nazis:

Despite the obvious fact that Kasztner was the undisputed leader of the Zionist Va’ada in the capital, on 25 April, it was Joel Brand whom Eichmann summoned to his new office in the Majestic Hotel, on the leafy Buda side of the Danube. He probably made this decision because he had seen the letters from Istanbul which were all addressed to Brand. They were concerned with the tyul, or ‘excursion’ to Palestine that Kasztner and Brand were planning together. Eichmann had decided to take over the negotiations over this ‘deal’, as Brand later testified at the SS commander’s trial:

He summoned me in order to propose a deal.  He was prepared to sell a million Jews – “goods for blood,” that was how he spoke at that time. Then he asked me a question… which sticks in my mind until today. He said: “Who do you want to have rescued – women able to bear children, males able to produce children, old people? Speak!

Kasztner asked Jozsi Winninger, the former Abwehr agent he’d known since arriving in the capital what exactly Eichmann wanted with Brand. Winninger told him that Eichmann had always dealt directly with Zionists, ‘selling’ the right-wing Austrian Zionists (or Revisionists as they were known within the movement) under Vladimir Jabotinsky’s leadership. He had also been invited to Jerusalem by Zionists, and Winninger thought that he ‘liked Zionists’. He added, jokingly, “doesn’t everyone?” When Brand and Eichmann met, according to Wiscilency’s testimony at Nuremberg, Eichmann stunned Brand by announcing that he was a Zionist and asking Brand if he had read Herzl’s book, The Jewish State. Brand nodded and thought to himself how the classic book offered the Jews the only happy solution, their own homeland, a place where they could be safe from men like Adolf Eichmann. Of course, the question was laced with heavy irony and designed to catch Brand off guard. “I know all about you!” Eichmann shouted, “You know nothing about me… I am in charge of the Aktion! In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, it has been completed. Now it’s your turn.” Herman Krumey explained that the German war effort needed trucks and that, if the Zionists moved quickly, ten thousand trucks would buy one million lives. “Not a bad deal,” he mused, “one hundred Jews for only one truck. One truck for every one hundred lives… a great bargain, don’t you think?” Brand protested that trucks would be difficult because the Allies might think they were military equipment. Eichmann promised to give his personal undertaking that the trucks would only be used on the eastern front. Brand returned to the Zionist Central Information Office in Pest, where he met Kasztner and Komoly. They agreed to try to meet the terms and immediately began writing to the Jewish Agency offices in Istanbul and Geneva.

After further lengthy negotiations, which involved other parties as well, Kasztner made a deal with Eichmann that in return for Jews getting to Switzerland, Zionist organisations would transport the required trucks through Switzerland to Germany. As a first step, Himmler was willing for a larger transport to travel with Kasztner to Switzerland. Kasztner had the right, and responsibility, to decide who would get on the train that meant survival. He selected mainly wealthier, educated people, and of course included many Transylvanian Jews. It is only fair to point out that by choosing people he could trust to keep the secret, he was also ensuring the success of the rescue mission. He also included some poor people, who paid nothing, and negotiated for a further 20,000 Jews to be kept alive – Eichmann called them ‘Kasztner’s Jews’ or ‘Jews on ice’.

The Deportations of 1944 and Kasztner’s Train:

Altogether, 437,000 people were deported by train from the provinces up until July 1944, when Budapest was supposed to be evacuated of Jews. Transportations were then suspended by Himmler to divert resources to the eastern front in order to resist the advances of the Red Army through Romania, which had abandoned the Axis cause and changed sides. Hungary’s Regent also tried to agree an Armistice with the Soviet Union, but was arrested and deposed by the SS, who installed a puppet government consisting of Arrow Cross (Hungarian Fascist Party) members. From mid-October, deportations recommenced on foot, with the Red Army now surrounding the Carpathian Basin. Rózsa Stern estimated that as many as half a million Jews in total were deported from Hungary. The remaining Jewish population of Budapest comprised about a quarter of a million, about half of whom we think were either murdered by the Arrow Cross, shot on the banks of the Danube, their bodies falling into it, or starved to death in the ghetto which they set up (I have quoted more about these conditions from Rózsa’s diary elsewhere on this site). The deportees on the Kasztner train numbered 1,684. Rózsa and Gyuri, her husband, were among the ‘privileged ones’ as she described them, those who ‘had a little hope to survive’:

One day my father told us that if we wanted to leave Budapest, there would be one more chance to make ‘aliyah’ to Palestine with the Zionists. This was the particular group I already mentioned. Gyuri, without any hesitation, decided to take the trip, even though this was also very dangerous. He couldn’t take all the stress and humiliation any more, or that so many of our good acquaintances had been taken into custody at Pestvidéki… We received news every hour: in Újpest and Kispest they are already deporting people, and on July 5th it will already be Budapest’s turn… In spite of the immunity that we were entitled through my father – and the protection of the German soldier who was ordered to live with us by the Gestapo (he was protecting us from the cruelty of the Hungarian gendarmerie) – Gyuri decided that we should take this opportunity and leave. 

Despite this decision, they were still hesitating on the eve of their departure, 29 June, when ‘Mr K.’, Resző Kasztner, ‘who started this aliyah’, came to see them and brought news that forced them to make a final decision. He also tried to persuade Samu Stern to leave, because, he said, “if there are no mice, there is no need for a cat either.” He reassured them that he had a firm promise that they would reach their destination, and that the best proof of this was that he and his whole family would be going with this ‘aliyah’. Unlike his family, Samu Stern decided to stay in Budapest, and somehow survived the terror of the Arrow Cross rule of the winter of 1944-45. However, when the Soviet troops arrived, he was accused of collaboration. The police started an investigation against him, but he died in 1946 before his case could go to court. His activity in 1944, maneuvering between cooperation and collaboration, is still controversial, but it is not the topic under discussion here. However, when considering the question of his anti-Zionism in relation to the potential for Jewish resistance, we need also to notice the total indifference of the Hungarian authorities in Budapest towards the fate of the Jewish population as well as the active involvement of the gendarmerie in the deportations which took place from the countryside.

Kastner’s train was taken on a round-about route to Bergen-Belsen and then in two groups to Switzerland. This group, comprising 318, including Rózsa Stern and her husband and relatives, arrived in Switzerland relatively quickly, while the other could only pass the German-Swiss border in December 1944. About a dozen people died on the way. His personal courage cannot be doubted, since he returned from Switzerland to Nazi Germany to rescue more people.

The aftermath of the Holocaust and its survivors :

After the war, Kasztner was a witness at the trials of major war criminals in Nuremberg, including defence witness for Kurt Becher, the SS officer who concluded the negotiations with him in 1944, who later settled in Israel. In 1953 Kasztner was accused in a newspaper article of collaborating with the Nazis. Since he wanted to have a political career in Israel, he decided to try to clear his name by filing a lawsuit. However, the court convicted him of libel, saying that he had “sold his soul to the devil”. The case turned into a scandal in Israel at a time when the domestic political scene was toxic. The survivors whose lives had not been saved by the train, and whose family members were killed in Budapest, saw Kasztner as a mean, calculating collaborator. As a consequence of the lawsuit, the Israeli government had to resign and the Israeli political right called their political opponents Gestapo agents. This was the first time that the general public in Israel and the world became aware of the negotiations that had taken place between the Nazis and Zionist organizations. Kasztner’s family were subjected to a hate campaign which included violence against his daughter, and it culminated with his shooting in front of his apartment in Tel-Aviv on 3 March 1957. He died twelve days later. In 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel acquitted him of all charges except one, that of helping Nazi war criminals to escape prosecution. Kasztner’s act of “making friends with the devil” in order to save Jewish lives still divides the shrinking number of survivors throughout the world, not just in Israel and Hungary.

For that reason, if for no other, the politicians of the later twentieth century, of whom Ken Livingstone is one held in high esteem by many, should know better than to associate the names of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen with Zionism. They are deliberately opening old wounds in order to encourage anti-Zionism and justify anti-Semitism in the process. They should leave it to the historians to examine and interpret the evidence, and hand over the task of ridding British society of xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism to a new generation in a new century with fresh moral challenges and choices.

Andrew James, May 2016   

Sources:

Zsolt Zágoni (ed.), (2012), From Budapest to Bergen-Belsen: A Notebook from 1944. Budapest: The Author.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

 

 

 

BEATING THE BOUNDS; SCANNING THE SKIES?

Andrew James

The ‘Rogation Days‘ are the days before Ascension Thursday, which is forty days after Easter Sunday in the Christian calendar. The days get their name from the Latin word ’rogare’ meaning ’to ask for’. For a long time these were ’petitions’ to the almighty which were chanted in processions around the church. In A.D. 511 the Council of Orleans declared that the three days before Ascension Day, commemorating Christ’s going up to heaven, should be holidays for prayer and fasting. The processions moved outside the church and circled the parish, pausing at the edge of fields where prayers were said petitioning for a good harvest of the particular crop growing there. These sojourns included a ’Gospel Oak’. A modern survival of these folk-customs is ’beating the bounds’, possibly originating in pagan Roman festivals, Terminalia and

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