By the spring of 1948, the ideological division of Europe into two rival camps was almost complete, except in Germany and the two capital cities of Vienna and Berlin, where Britain, France, the USSR and the USA each governed a separate sector. Agreements had been formalised in the autumn of 1945, guaranteeing the Western Allies free access to Berlin. The former capital of Germany was a special case in the four-power joint occupation and control of the country, a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone, and therefore a key strategic point for the Soviets to apply pressure on the Western Allies. Road and rail lines were designated for the supply of those areas of the city occupied by them. Air corridors across the Soviet zone between Berlin and the western sectors of Germany had also been agreed, and for three years there was free movement along the accepted routes of access to the city. Britain, America and France relied on the road, rail and canal links into the city, but in the spring of 1948, the Soviet authorities decided to make use of this vulnerability by making access from the west more difficult.

Added to these issues, Berlin had been subjected to an around-the-clock air bombardment in the war and the city had also endured a heavy artillery bombardment by the Red Army during the final battle. The destruction was almost total: whole districts had been flattened; entire apartment blocks had been demolished and almost every building in the city bore signs of damage. Food was perpetually in short supply and the official currency, the Reichsmark, had gradually become worthless. The black market was flourishing, and the cigarette had become the form of currency. The citizens had, literally, to dig into the rubble to find something with which they could barter in order to scratch out a living. They were joined by refugees arriving in the city, who faced an even more desperate struggle for food, warmth and light.

 

In January 1948 the British cabinet had discussed the situation in Germany. In the previous year, the three Western Allies had joined their zones of occupation together into one Western zone. Stalin had watched these events with mistrust. The British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had presented a paper to his government that argued for slow movement towards a West German government, and for action on currency reform to undercut the rampant black market. Bevin thought of Britain as an intermediary between the French, who were still fearful of German recovery, and the Americans, who were increasingly frustrated by what they saw as French obstructionism. The French were haunted by an ancient rivalry with Germany and bitter memories of recent defeat and occupation. On 23rd February representatives from the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, along with the United States, met in London to plan for the new West German entity, and for the participation of Germany in the Marshall Plan. News of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia added impetus to the urgency for creating the new state. On 12th March, the Soviet leadership was advised by its spies in the Foreign Office in London that the Western powers are transforming Germany into their strongpoint and incorporating it into a military-political bloc aimed at the Soviet Union. Molotov accused the Allies of violating the agreements of Potsdam and announced that decisions made at the London conference were invalid.

Worse was to follow on 20th March 1948, at a routine Allied Council meeting, when Marshal Vassily Sokolovsky, the Soviet military governor in Germany pressed his US and British counterparts for information about the secret London conference, already knowing, of course, exactly what had happened. When General Lucius D. Clay, the US military governor told him that they were not going to discuss the London meetings, Sokolovsky demanded to know what the point was of having a ‘Control Council’ at all. The Soviets then got up and walked out of the meeting, effectively ending joint control of Germany.

As a result, around Berlin, the Soviet authorities began applying a range of petty bureaucratic obstacles to the free movement of people and supplies in and out of the city.

Restrictions were placed on the use of the ‘autobahn’ between Berlin and the British sector to the west. The bridge over the Elbe at Hohenwarte, the only other road-crossing point, was closed for “maintenance.” The British offered to send engineers to build another to build another bridge, but Sokolovsky turned down the offer. The Soviets announced that they would search military passengers and their cargo on the rail lines, and stated that no freight shipments between Berlin and the western zones could be made without Soviet permission. On 1st April the Soviets halted two American and two British trains after their commanders refused access to Soviet inspectors. All this amounted to what was later called the “mini-blockade.” General Clay ordered a “baby airlift” to fly into Berlin enough supplies for forty-five days.

 

On 5th April a Vickers Viking of British European Airways took from an airfield in West Germany on a scheduled flight into RAF Gatow, one of the Allied air bases in West Berlin. As it came into Berlin, in one of the agreed twenty-mile-wide air corridors, the Viking was buzzed by a Soviet Yak-3 fighter plane. It was not the first time this had happened. For a few days, Soviet fighters had been carrying out mock attacks on Allied planes flying into Berlin. But this time, as the British transport plane took evasive action, it collided with the Yak fighter. Both planes crashed to the ground, killing all ten people on board the BEA plane and the pilot of the Soviet fighter. The Soviets blamed the British for the collision, and the British blamed the Soviet pilot. A joint investigation of the accident broke down when the Soviets refused to allow German witnesses to testify. The British and Soviets separately concluded that the mid-air collision was an accident, but thereafter both sides were more nervous that such accidents could bring open conflict.

With the situation in Berlin now alarmingly tense, the confrontation between the Soviets and the West spilt over into Berlin’s internal politics. The Berlin City Council was the scene of a fierce power struggle between the East German Communists and their political foes, led by Ernst Reuter, a powerful orator, and his Social Democrats. Reuter had been forced to leave Germany by the Nazis but had returned in 1946. hoping to rebuild the country as a democratic state. His election in 1948 as Mayor of Berlin (the whole city) was vetoed by the Soviets and the East German Communists, whose agents operated in both East and West Berlin, using a combination of intimidation, blackmail and kidnapping to get their way.

As far as the Soviets were concerned, East Germany was Stalin’s by right of conquest; for the West Berliners it was, and remained (until 1972), the Soviet occupation zone, SBZ. The old pre-war Kommunist Partei Deutschlands, boosted by sizeable numbers of Soviet-German agents who had spent the war in Moscow and had been sent back to Berlin as early as May 1945, merged forcibly with the socialists and created a new party, Socialist Unity, led by Walter Ulbricht. It took over the main offices of state and reduced the civil service and the other political parties which remained to the status of mere figureheads. Its constitution made it clear that all fundamental human rights were subject to the concrete conditions under which the proletarian revolution must triumph (Article 19). 

Although, by 1948, the Soviets had forced the Eastern ‘zone’ of Germany to accept Communism, in the Western zone elections they never gained more than eight per cent support for the Communists, and despite the level of intimidation, the Communists had failed to gain control of Berlin.  Around Berlin, tensions had worsened. Soviet military authorities threatened to close down the rail traffic with the West. By 15th June canal boats and freight trains were the only means left of supplying the city. In this explosive situation, the Western Allies decided to introduce their new currency, which was announced on 18th June. Sokolovsky immediately issued a proclamation denouncing their action as being…

…against the wishes and interests of the German people and in the interests of the American, British and French monopolists … The separate currency reform completes the splitting of Germany. It is a breach of the Potsdam decisions.

Sokolovsky also prohibited the introduction of the Western Deutschmark (above left) into the Soviet zone and into Berlin. On 22nd June, the Soviets announced that they would be introducing their own currency, the Ostmark (right) for the Eastern zone and, they hoped, the whole of Berlin. The Western military commanders declared the Soviet order null and void for West Berlin and introduced the B-mark, a special Deutschmark overprinted with the letter ‘B’, for the Western sectors of Berlin. General Clay, who made the decision without consulting Washington, insisted it was a technical, non-political measure. But Sokolovsky announced that the Western mark would not be permitted to circulate in Berlin, which lies in the Soviet zone of Germany and economically forms part of the Soviet zone. General Clay assured his staff that he was not concerned by these developments:

If they had put in a currency reform and we didn’t, it would have been (our) first move.   

Over the next twelve hours, Berlin endured an extraordinary spate of ‘midsummer madness’. On the evening of 23rd June, at a meeting of the Berlin City Council, which was located in the Soviet sector of the city, Reuter tried to persuade the Assembly to approve the circulation of both the Deutschmark and the Ostmark. As thugs beat up non-Communists to intimidate them from supporting Reuter’s proposal, Soviet officials and Communist-controlled police stood by and watched. Nevertheless, the Berlin Assembly voted to accept the Deutschmark in the Western sectors and the Ostmark in the Soviet sector.

Sokolovsky rang Molotov to ask what he should do; should he surround Berlin with tanks? Molotov told him not to, as this might provoke the Western powers into doing the same, and then the only way out of such an impasse would be through military confrontation. They decided instead to impose an immediate blockade around Berlin, and at 6:00 a.m. on 24th June, the barriers were lowered on all road, rail and canal routes linking Berlin with West Germany. The reason given was “technical difficulties.” That same morning, electricity from power stations in the Soviet sector was cut off to factories and offices in West Berlin. The official reason given was “coal shortages.” So the blockade of Berlin began. The Soviets’ purpose was clear; either the Western Allies must change their policies or be forced out of Berlin altogether. General Clay clearly identified this purpose:

When Berlin falls, Western Germany will be next. If we withdraw our position in Berlin, Europe is threatened … Communism will run rampant.

Berlin was effectively cut off from the West, with only enough food and fuel to last six weeks. In both London and Washington, there was a clear determination that the Western powers would hold on to West Berlin. President Truman vowed; We are going to stay, period and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced that the abandonment of Berlin would mean the loss of Western Europe. It was easy to make such statements, but much more difficult to decide what to do next. West Berlin did indeed have a symbolic status as an outpost of the democratic West inside the Communist East, but by an agreement made at the time of Potsdam, the Soviet authorities were not obliged to supply the British, American and French sectors of the city. So 2.3 million Berliners, and the Allied military garrison there were now cut off. The Western part of the city relied upon the arrival of twelve thousand tons of supplies each day. At the time, there was only enough food for thirty-six days, and enough coal for forty-five. The key to keeping a Western presence in Berlin clearly lay in finding a way to supply the citizens with their bare necessities. With rail, road and canal routes blocked, the only way to get supplies in was by air. However, the American C-47 transport, the military ‘workhorse’ of the day, could only deliver a payload of three tons. Initially, the prospect for an airlift to Berlin appeared to be bleak.

On 24 June, the West had introduced a counter-blockade, stopping all raid traffic into eastern Germany from the British and US zones. Over the following months, this counter-blockade was to have a damaging effect on the East, as the drying up of coal and steel shipments seriously hindered industrial development in the Soviet zone. On that same day, General Clay rang General Curtis LeMay of the US Air Force in Wiesbaden and asked him to put on standby his fleet of C-47s and any other aircraft that could be utilised. The RAF had come forward with an ambitious plan to supply Berlin by air, but Clay was sceptical. He favoured sending a convoy of US military engineers down the autobahn to force their way through the Soviet blockade, with instructions to fire back if they were fired upon. But in Washington, Truman’s advisers urged caution and restraint. The president was backed into a corner as it was an election year; the American people would never support going to war with the Soviet Union just to defend Berlin, the capital of a country they had been at war with only three years earlier. At the same time, Truman had to be seen championing a firm line with the Soviets, so he made no final decision that day, but Clay was told by telephone that the president did not want any action taken in Berlin which might lead to possible armed conflict.

Although both the British and Americans had experience with major air supply operations, neither had ever attempted anything on this scale. Clay warned Reuter that to begin with there would be severe shortages and hardships; initially, he did not believe that the Allies could fly in more than five hundred tons a day. Reuter assured him that the Allies could count on the West Berliners to grin and bear it. Then, without consulting Washington, Clay authorised the start of the airlift. On 26th June, the first American transport planes flew into Berlin from air bases in West Germany, following three narrow air corridors through the Soviet zone. The first flight brought in eighty tons of milk, flour and medicine. The Americans code-named the airlift Operation Vittles; to the British, it was Operation Plainfare. To begin with, about eighty C-47s flew two daily round trips into RAF Gatow and Tempelhof, air bases in the British and American sectors of Berlin. Soon the Americans were bringing fifty C-54 Skymasters, four-engined transports each containing nine tons, three times the payload of the C-47s. The Allies organised willing gangs of workers to unload the aircraft and turn them around quickly. Over time these workers learned to empty each plane in just seven minutes. The citizens of Berlin became increasingly confident that the Allies would be able to save their city. They had had few problems delivering bombs, they reminded each other, so why wouldn’t be able to deliver potatoes?

The Royal Air Force had fewer service aircraft available for the operation, and spare planes of any type were soon pressed into the airlift. British business executive Freddie Laker had begun to buy and sell aircraft parts after the war, and by 1948 he owned twelve converted Halifax bombers. He was asked to make them available for supplying Berlin and provided a team of pilots and engineers as well. As the operation grew over succeeding months, it grew into a ‘crusade for freedom’, with the pilots determined to keep Berlin alive, despite the hazards of flying old, rickety aircraft, often buzzed by Soviet fighters and frequently at risk when flying heavy loads in bad weather. Bevin set up a crisis-management team in London to supervise the effort, and early expectations were soon exceeded, as roughly a thousand tons per day were flown into the besieged city. The irony was not lost on many of the veteran fliers involved; instead of destroying Berlin, they were now keeping it alive.

In July, General Clay returned to Washington for talks with President Truman. He still favoured a military a military convoy to break the blockade, for he believed that the Soviets would back down rather than confronting the West. However, Truman did not want to chance it. If they chose not to let the convoy through, there would be war. Instead, Truman guaranteed more C-54s, and the two men talked of doubling the airlift to two thousand tons daily. The American intelligence community, knowing that the Soviets still had two and a half million men at arms, was convinced that in a conventional military confrontation the Red Army would walk right over the US forces. At the same time, they were equally confident that the Kremlin would not sanction direct military conflict with the Western powers, which might provoke the Americans to use nuclear weapons, as they had in Japan. To stop the airlift, the USSR would have had to shoot down British and American planes. Stalin was frightened by the USA’s nuclear capability, since, as yet, the Soviet Union had not developed its own capacity. Perhaps because of this overall military superiority, General Clay remained convinced that the Soviets would not risk a military confrontation:

The chances of war are 1 in 10. The Russians know they would be licked. If they cut our air route, they know it is an act of war.

Besides, the Soviet Union was not yet secure within its own accepted sphere of influence. Yugoslavia split away from the Eastern camp, a defection that made the Kremlin even more nervous about its support among its satellites, especially after events in Czechoslovakia in February and March of the same year. On 28th June, only four days after launching the blockade against Berlin, Moscow expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform and called on other Communist parties to isolate Marshal Tito, its charismatic partisan leader who had taken power after the war without Stalin’s help or support. An economic blockade was organised against Yugoslavia that caused great hardship, but Belgrade stood firm. Rejected by the Eastern ‘bloc’, Tito turned, albeit slowly and a little reluctantly, towards the West. Although not technically a member of the Marshall Plan, Yugoslavia went on to receive $150 million in aid from the United States. Threatened with invasion by Stalin, Yugoslavia remained the only independent state in Europe throughout the Cold War and a ‘thorn in the side’ of the USSR. Any attempt of an Eastern bloc country to establish its independence from Moscow was labelled ‘Titoism’, a heresy to be rooted out and purged.

Back in the ‘Berlin Crisis’ during July, attempts were made through diplomatic channels to bring about a settlement. On 2nd August, the British, American, and French ambassadors had a private meeting with Stalin to test his willingness to find a peaceful solution. Stalin made it clear that from the Soviet point of view the currency question was crucial, together with the London agreement to create a united West Germany. He argued that if there were now two German states then Berlin was no longer the capital, making the Western presence in the city no longer relevant. Stalin stated that the USSR was not seeking conflict with the West and would lift the blockade as soon as the West withdrew the B-mark from circulation and agreed to reinstate joint four-power rule over Germany. In point of fact, there was little that the Soviets could do in the face of the West’s superiority in the air and its determination to keep up the airlift. What became clear to the Western ambassadors was that the Soviet blockade had only one principal purpose: to prevent the creation of a West German state.

Pictured Above: On 19th August, A C-47 Dakota comes in for a landing while a huge C-74 Globemaster from Frankfurt unloads 23 tons of flour for the people of Berlin. With some difficulty, the enormous plane landed on a new runway at Gatow in the British zone. Below: Inside the Globemaster.

Throughout the summer of 1948, the British and American governments constantly reviewed their options. Military thinking concluded that the airlift could hardly continue through the winter; that October was to be the cut-off point. The British chiefs of staff prepared a contingency plan to withdraw their troops to the Rhine in case of an emergency. In Washington, the air force commanders were convinced that the airlift was doomed to fail and concluded that there was a high likelihood of war with the Soviets over Berlin. The question which arose from this for the administration was whether the United States would be willing to use nuclear weapons in the developing crisis, for there was still no clear policy emanating from the White House. Truman argued with his Pentagon chiefs that because they were so terribly destructive, atomic weapons could not be treated as conventional weaponry. He urged the military leaders…

…to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people.

In September, the US National Security Council produced a secret report designated as NSC-30: United States Policy on Atomic Welfare. This required the military to be ready to utilize promptly a and effectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons, in the interests of national security and to plan accordingly.  However, any decision about the use of nuclear weapons would be made by the president, when he considers such decisions to be required. Truman endorsed NC-30. In a briefing with his chief air force commanders, he…

…prayed he would never have to make such a decision, but … if it became necessary, no one need have misgiving but he would do so.

In a dramatic gesture that summer, a fleet of sixty B-29 ‘Superfortress’ bombers was flown into the United Kingdom. These were the latest American heavy bombers, designed to carry atomic weapons. The deployment of the B-29s established the US Strategic Air Command in the UK, and the arrival of “the atomic bombers” was widely publicised. The threat of nuclear retaliation was now made explicit. After a brief debate, at the height of the Berlin crisis, the British Government had formally invited Washington to station the bombers in Britain. The invitation neatly fudged the issue as to who would have his finger on the nuclear trigger; the US Air Force bombers would respond to orders from the United States, but their bases would be technically under the command of the RAF.

This theoretical ambivalence lasted for more than forty years. I remember going on a CND march to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk to demonstrate against the presence of the US bombers, and their bombs, in 1976. But in practice the real decision, if it ever came to that, would always be made as NSC-30 directed, by the president of the United States. The planes, in fact, carried no atomic weapons, but this was a closely guarded secret. There were not enough atomic warheads in existence to equip the B-29s in Britain. Their arrival was mainly a signal to Moscow that the West meant business over Berlin, and Washington took advantage of the crisis to get congressional approval for permanent overseas bases.  The British Government knew that the B-29s carried no atomic weapons, and through spies at the London Foreign Office, Moscow also, almost certainly knew too. The British, German and Russian people, of course, did not.

Meanwhile, the Berlin airlift was proving more successful than anyone ever expected. Tens of thousands of Berliners helped build a new airport at Tegel to reduce congestion at the other two airfields. With capacity for more flights, the Americans added another sixty C-54s to their fleet. Clay now spoke of bringing in 4,500 tons each day. By September, aircraft were landing in Berlin every three minutes, day and night. On 18th September, 861 British and American flights delivered a record seven thousand tons in a single day. By this date roughly two hundred thousand tons of supplies had been delivered, the ‘split’ between the USAF and the RAF being about sixty-forty in percentage terms. Coal, flour, drums of petrol, potatoes, medical supplies were all brought in by air. It began to look as if the airlift would be able to supply the city through the winter, after all. But West Berliners were still fearful that the West might not continue the airlift. On 6th September, another meeting of the City Council in East Berlin had been broken up by Communist agitators with violence and intimidation. The Western representatives decided that the Council was no longer functional, so they left and agreed to meet separately in West Berlin. Three days later, a huge gathering of three hundred thousand Berliners, mostly from the western zones, collected outside the ruins of the Reichstag (below). Standing on a pile of rubble, Reuter addressed the huge crowds, calling upon the Western governments not to abandon Berlin.

By October, many West Berliners were getting desperate. They were allowed only small amounts of fat, spam (tinned meat), potatoes, cereal and bread. Berlin’s people needed four thousand tons of supplies a day to survive. People had got used to the rationing, and even to feeling cold, since electricity was only available four hours a day. But the blockade was not, in any case, absolute, so a minority of West Berliners were able to register for food rations with the Soviet authorities, and about one in ten of them were, therefore, able to draw food and coal from the East. As there was no restriction on travel within the city, so many West Berliners regularly visited the eastern part of the city, where there were well-lit and heated dance halls.

The airlift became almost a way of life. Although expensive, its cost represented only a fraction of the total cost of American aid to Europe. Despite bad weather and constant harassment by Soviet fighters, the transports continued to bring their cargoes into West Berlin. By December, the goal of 4,500 tons flown in each day was reached. At Gatow and Tempelhof flights landed every ninety seconds. Enough coal was freighted in to keep West Berliners from freezing. The gamble had paid off. Production in the city picked up and output grew rapidly. The feared economic collapse did not materialise.

Below (left): A German child’s drawing commemorates the airlift: “We thank the pilots for their work and effort.” Right: A new game, “Airlift.”

By the spring of 1949, the weather improved considerably. Food supplies in Berlin could be built up and fuel stocks maintained at a sufficient level. The airlift ensured that eight thousand tons were being flown in each day. In one twenty-four hour period, on Easter Sunday, April 1949, a record number of 1,398 flights came into  Berlin, carrying a total of thirteen thousand tons of supplies. In all, two million tons of supplies had been flown in since the airlift began. As the counter-blockade of eastern Germany hurt more and more, the Soviets took the only course left open to them and tried to end the whole Berlin debacle. The Kremlin indicated that it would consider ending its blockade with minimal conditions imposed: The counter-blockade would have to be lifted and the Council of Foreign Ministers reconvened. The bellicose General Clay quietly returned to Washington, ceasing to be military governor and claiming that, in any case, after the tensions of the preceding year he needed a break. On 12th May 1949, the blockade was finally lifted, and the Western military authorities reciprocated by lifting their counter-blockade. Both sides claimed victory and Berliners were jubilant; many thought this would be the end of the conflict between the Great Powers. In reality, the blockades had resulted in the end of the war-time alliance and in the formation of two Berlins: West and East. Added to that, as the heavy transports continued to fly their daily missions, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany was being drafted. Stalin’s attempt to prevent the division of Germany had failed. President Truman commented:

When we refused to be forced out of Berlin, we demonstrated to Europe that we would act when freedom was threatened. This action was a Russian plan to probe the soft spots in the Western Allies’ positions.

Above: RIAS, Radio in the American Sector, American-financed, with a mix of popular music and upbeat news, kept up Berliners’ morale. Presenter and entertainer Christina Ohlsen became a celebrity.

The West did, indeed, secure a major propaganda victory through the airlift. It was a reminder to the Soviet Union, and the whole international community, of Western technological superiority, especially in the air. Conversely, the Berlin crisis showed the Soviets in a poor light: they seemed to be willing to threaten 2.3 million people with starvation. The Soviet view of the events was, not surprisingly, quite different:

The crisis was planned in Washington, behind a smoke-screen of anti-Soviet propaganda. In 1948 there was the danger of war. The conduct of the Western powers risked bloody incidents. The self-blockade of the Western powers hit the West Berlin population with harshness. The people were freezing and starving. In the spring of 1949 the USA was forced to yield … their war plans had come to nothing, because of the conduct of the Soviet Union.

The Soviets, operating outside the framework of American loan credits and facing the Western alliance, saw themselves to be increasingly threatened. We now know that Stalin privately felt far weaker than was known at the time, but in 1948 many in the West genuinely believed that Stalin planned to dominate the entire European continent. The US policy of ‘containment’ meant confronting Communism at all agreed critical points, and Berlin was one of these. Old wartime loyalties to Russia were being replaced by fear of Soviet ambitions; a “them and us” syndrome had emerged. As US Secretary of State, George C Marshall observed,…

There has been a definite crystallization of American public and Congressional opinion over the Berlin issue. … The country is more unified in its determination not to weaken in the face of pressure of an illegal blockade than on any other issue we can recall in time of peace.  

The Berlin blockade made clear to most Americans that the new enemy was definitely the Soviet Union. The Blockade and Airlift was the first open struggle between East and West. The tactics were designed not to start a war, but to threaten to go to war if necessary. This set the pattern for future Cold War conflicts, including further tensions over Berlin. 

Source:

Jeremy Isaacs & Taylor Downing (1998), Cold War. London: Bantam Press (Transworld Publishers).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 

The Trouble with Ken, Jeremy, Diane etc…

The British Labour Party is preparing to rewrite its definition of anti-Semitism to enable its members to continue to call into question the right of the state of Israel to exist, although the party policy is to support a two-state solution to the ‘problem of Palestine’. In recent weeks, the Party has been digging itself further into the hole that it began when it failed to expel the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, for claiming that “Hitler supported Zionism” in the 1930s. Only last week (18th May), we learned that the leader of the Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has nominated as a new appointee to the House of Lords.  Martha Osamor, who’s a Nigerian-born civil rights campaigner, has in the past shown public support of Labour members who were suspended over anti-Semitism, including signing a letter protesting against Ken Livingstone’s suspension. The letter claimed that all those suspended were victims of a conspiratorial campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.

Martha Osamor, a Nigerian-born British civil rights campaigner, has been nominated by Jeremy Corbyn to become a peer. Picture: Facebook

After demonstrations by mainstream Jewish organisations outside Parliament involving many MPs from his own Party and a deeply embarrassing debate in Parliament further exposing the anti-Semitic abuse those same MPs have been subjected to, Jeremy Corbyn finally met two Jewish charities, supposedly to resolve their differences. However, not only did they refuse to accept the proposals put forward by the charities for monitoring and eradicating anti-Semitism from the Party, but Corbyn and his colleagues used the meeting to announce that they were reneging on the Party’s adoption of the International Definition of Antisemitism. 

The definition, which has been widely accepted since its adoption at the Bucharest Plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) on 26 May 2016, is supported in the document by examples which, its authors have confirmed, are not merely optional guidance but are an inseparable part of the definition itself. This is common sense. As every high school student of Humanities is taught, any useful statement must be supported by explanations and examples. Otherwise, it can easily be rejected as mere assertion, of limited value. Its authors add that to suggest that the definition can be somehow detached from the rest of the document is “absolutely false or misleading.” Therefore, the Labour Party cannot claim to have adopted the definition whilst also seeking to discard an integral section of it. So why is it seeking to do this? The Campaign Against Antisemitism has analysed Jeremy Corbyn’s letter to the Jewish charities of 24 April 2018, published in the London Evening Standard. His letter seeks to omit the following examples from the definition document in its ‘adoption’ by his party:

• “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”;

• “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour)”;

• “Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

It appears that Jeremy Corbyn does not want to stop members of the Labour Party from questioning whether Israel should continue to exist, to deny the right of Jewish people in Israel/Palestine the right to self-determination, or from describing it, for example, as an “apartheid state”.  The Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbot MP has also implied that the definition does not allow criticism of Israel, despite the fact that it explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” We might respond to this by stating “the bloomin’ obvious”, i.e. that the status and history of this country, and indeed of Palestine before it, are not like those of any other country, but that Israel is often expected to demonstrate a higher standard of conduct than any other country in dealing with both internal and external terrorist threats. When this ‘standard’ is inherent in the criticisms of security measures, it often crosses a line into anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Therefore, all three examples given by the IHRA are clearly anti-Semitic and have a long history of being used to promote hatred of Jews.

‘Yid’ and ‘Zio’: Sins of Omission?

Andrew Gwynne MP has criticised the IHRA document for ‘omitting’ the use of specific abusive terms like ‘Yid’ and ‘Zio’ as examples which the Labour Party would itself include. However, as the CAA has pointed out, such abuse is well understood by the Jewish communities in the UK and are also covered by the example within the document which refers to…

…making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective – such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other social institutions… 

The CAA is right to point out how appalling it is that Andrew Gwynne and Jeremy Corbyn seem to be claiming that they know better than the Jewish communities, both at home and abroad, what constitutes anti-Semitism. Not only this, but they also seem to think that they know better than the IHRA’s thirty-one signatory nations. It also represents the height of arrogance in diplomatic terms, for the Labour Party to seek to rewrite an internationally agreed definition in its own interest and for the convenience of a hard-core of extremists within it.

Partition of Palestine: Divine Destiny or Great Disaster?

Above: Palestine before Partition (exact date unknown)

Since this month sees the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel, seen as a ‘great disaster’ by many Palestinian Arabs, it might be instructive to re-examine some of the international initiatives and agreements which led to its establishment, and the diplomatic reactions which followed in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War. In November 1945, an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee was appointed to examine the status of the Jews in the former Axis-occupied countries and to find out how many were impelled by their conditions to migrate. Britain, weakened by the war, found itself under growing pressure from Jews and Arabs alike and the Labour Government decided, therefore, to invite the United States to participate in finding a solution. The Report of the Committee was published on 1st May 1946. The report itself declared the following principles:

… that Palestine is a Holy Land, sacred to Christian, to Jew and to Moslem alike; and because it is a Holy Land, Palestine is not, and can never become, a land which any race or religion can justly claim as its very own. …

… the fact that it is the Holy Land sets Palestine completely apart from other lands and dedicates it to the precepts and practices of the brotherhood of man, not those of narrow nationalism.

… The Jews have a historic connection with the country. The Jewish National Home, though embodying a minority of the population, is today a reality established under international guarantee. …

Yet Palestine is not, and never can be a purely Jewish land. It lies at the crossroads of the Arab world. Its Arab population, descended from long-time inhabitants of the area, rightly look upon Palestine as their homeland.

It is, therefore, neither just nor practicable that Palestine should become either an Arab state, in which an Arab majority would control the destiny of a Jewish minority, or a Jewish state, in which a Jewish majority would control that of an Arab minority. In neither case would minority guarantees afford adequate protection for the subordinated group.

A Palestinian put the matter thus: “In the hearts of us Jews there has always been a fear that some day this country would be turned into an Arab state and the Arabs would rule over us. This fear has at times reached the proportions of terror … Now this same feeling of fear has started up in the hearts of Arabs … fear lest the Jews acquire the ascendancy and rule over them.”

Palestine, then, must be established as a country in which the legitimate national aspirations of both Jews and Arabs can be reconciled without either side fearing the ascendancy of the other. In our view this cannot be done under any form of constitution in which a mere numerical majority is decisive, since it is precisely the struggle for a numerical majority which bedevils Arab-Jewish relations. To ensure genuine self-government for both the Arab and Jewish communities, this struggle must be made purposeless by the constitution itself. 

The report recommended the ‘immediate’ admission of 100,000 immigrants from Europe, the victims of Nazi persecution, but refused to set a ‘yardstick’ for annual immigration beyond that. That, it said, should be the role of a trusteeship commission established by the United Nations. Until then, Britain, as the mandatory power, should continue to administer Jewish immigration under the terms of the mandate, ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced. But it concluded, even-handedly:

The national home is there. Its roots are deep in the soil of Palestine. It cannot be argued out of existence…

Palestine is a land sacred to three faiths and must not become the land of any one of them to the exclusion of the others, and Jewish immigration for the development of the national home must not become a policy of discrimination against other immigrants.

Further, while we recognise that any Jew who enters Palestine in accordance with its laws is there of right, we expressly disapprove of the position taken in some Jewish quarters … that every Jew everywhere merely because he is a Jew … therefore can enter Palestine as of right … We declare and affirm that any immigrant Jew who enters Palestine contrary to its laws is an illegal immigrant.

President Truman welcomed its recommendation that the immigration and land laws of the 1939 White Paper should be rescinded. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, however, prompted by Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary, declared that the report would have to be considered as a whole in all its implications. Ernest Bevin was regarded by many Jews in Britain, the United States and Israel as an arch-enemy of the Jewish people. Due to this, most unfairly, Bevin is still traduced as an anti-Semite. in fact, he had been numbered as a friend of Zionists during the Second World War, but afterwards was faced with the impossible contradictions in Britain’s position in the Middle East, where it was both in charge of Palestine and had wider links with the surrounding Arab countries. British officers ran the Jordanian Arab Legion, one of the instruments of Arab anger against Jewish immigration; yet British officers were in charge of Palestine as well, and had to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews who were fighting for a Jewish homeland. There is no doubt that the desperate migrations of Jewish refugees were handled very badly by Britain, determined to limit their settlement to a level that might be acceptable to Palestinian Arabs.

The worst example was the turning-round of a refugee-crammed ship, Exodus, as she tried to land 4,500 people in 1947, and the eventual return of most of them to a camp in Hamburg, an act which caused Britain to be reviled around the world. This was followed by the kidnap and murder of two British soldiers by the Irgun terrorist group, which then booby-trapped their bodies. But Bevin was pressed very hard by the United States, which wanted far larger immigration, and his instinct for a federal two-state solution rather than partition was seen sensible by many contemporary statesmen as well as subsequently. The British forces in Palestine were ill-equipped for the guerilla and terrorist campaign launched against them by Zionist groups. Bevin’s position was entirely impossible; it’s worth remembering that he was equally reviled by Arab opinion.

Nevertheless, to many Jews, it was his reaction to the report of the Anglo-American Commission and subsequent initiatives at the United Nations, and his delay in recognising the state of Israel until February 1949, together with bitter remarks he made in the House of Commons debates on Palestine, which lent support to their wholly negative view of his diplomacy. In his defence, Bevin was simply being cautious about relinquishing control in Palestine, as he was in the case of India, although these were clearly two very different cases in the process of decolonisation. He was no great imperialist, like Churchill, but he believed that Britain should take a lead in the post-war world, as the USA could not be trusted not to retreat into isolation, as it had done in the 1930s, leaving Britain to stand alone against fascism in 1940-41. The ‘socialist’ masters of post-war Britain were, in general, far keener on the Empire than one might expect. To a large extent, this was because without support from the USA, and with continental Europe shattered by six years of war, austerity Britain was dependent on its other overseas trading links with its dominions and colonies. In 1946, Bevin stated clearly that he was not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire because he knew that if it fell, it would mean the standard of life of the British people would fall further, and even more rapidly.

Bevin, like many ordinary Britons in the immediate post-war years,  hated the Germans, but he was also wary of the Soviet Russians, partly because he had fought many long, hard battles with Communists in the trade unions before the war.  He also argued, perhaps correctly in retrospect, that too hasty a colonial retreat would make a mockery of the long-professed policy aim of trusteeship. While Attlee himself was sceptical about the need for a large British force in the Middle East, his government thought it right to maintain a massive force sprawling across it, in order to protect both the sea-route to Asia and the oilfields which British companies worked and the country depended on. Restlessly active in Baghdad and Tehran, Britain controlled Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and, at the top of the Red Sea, the world’s second-busiest port after New York, Aden. In this context, Palestine, as a former Ottoman territory ‘mandated’ to Britain by the League of Nations, trusteeship needed to be handled carefully in conjunction with the United Nations. In this respect, Lord Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office during Bevin’s term, suggested in his memoirs in 1962, that his opposition to the creation of the State of Israel was due to his preoccupation with long-term political and strategic considerations, and perhaps to his strong anti-Soviet views, rather than to any innate anti-Semitism. Strang wrote:

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

Arab reaction was indeed hostile to the Anglo-American Commission; the Arab League announced that Arab countries would not stand by with their arms folded. The Ihud Association group led by Dr J L Magnes and Professor M Buber favoured a bi-national solution, equal political rights for Arabs and Jews, and a Federative Union of Palestine and the neighbouring countries. But Ihud found little support among the Jewish Community. It had, in the beginning, a few Arab sympathisers, but some of them were assassinated by supporters of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husaini, the de-facto leader of Palestinian Arabs, who had lived in Germany during the Second World War. He had previously met with Hitler in 1941 to hatch a secret plan for the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. 

The evidence submitted by the Arab Office in Jerusalem to the Inquiry in March 1946 was uncompromising in stating that the whole Arab people are unalterably opposed to the attempt to impose Jewish immigration and settlement upon it, and ultimately to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The statement went on to oppose Zionism in all its objectives, not only on behalf of the Arab Moslem majority but also claiming to speak for the Arab Christian minority, the other Arab countries and the recently formed Arab League, which had taken the defence of Palestine as one of its main objectives. Any solution of the problems presented by Zionist aspirations would have to satisfy certain preconditions, beginning with the recognition of the right of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine to continue in occupation of the country and to preserve its traditional character. Pending the establishment of a representative Government, all further Jewish immigration should be stopped. and strict measures enforced to taken to check illegal immigration. All further transfer of land from Arabs to Jews should be prohibited prior to the creation of self-governing institutions.

It further stated that, while irrevocably opposed to political Zionism, the Arabs were in no way hostile to the Jews as such nor to their Jewish fellow-citizens of Palestine. Those Jews who had already and who had obtained, or were in the due legal process of obtaining Palestinian citizenship would enjoy full civil and political rights and a fair share in government and administration. The Arab state, so called because Palestine was an integral part of the Arab world … would recognise the world’s interest in the maintenance of a satisfactory régime for the Moslem, Christian and Jewish Holy Places. At the same time, they rejected the concept of the ‘internationalisation’ of Jerusalem, or the need of the international community to protect and guarantee the rights of religious minorities. The Government of Palestine would also follow a progressive policy in economic and social matters, with the aim of raising the standard of living and increasing the welfare of all sections of the population and using the country’s natural resources in the way most beneficial to all. The idea of partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine was considered inadmissible both in principle and in practice. It would be impossible, they claimed, to devise frontiers which did not leave a large Arab minority within the Jewish state. Moreover, they predicted, partition would not satisfy the Zionists, who would inevitably be thrown into enmity with the surrounding Arab states … and would disturb the stability of the whole Middle East. Finally, the statement also contained a rejection of the proposal for the establishment of a bi-national state, incorporated into a Syrian or Arab Federation.

This Ihud solution, violently opposed by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian leadership, was put forward in the 1947 publication of Buber and Magnes, Arab-Jewish Unity (see above), which put forward a plan based on the principle of self-government for both Arabs and Jews within an overall state of the ‘Holy Land’ recognised by and represented at the United Nations Organisation. The authors pointed to the breakdown of the Versailles Settlement as proof that the only way to protect minorities in a bi-national or multi-national country was for the minority or minorities to have equality with the majority. The example of Transylvania was given as an example of the failure of such an age-old problem to be solved on the basis of either Hungarian or Romanian domination. The Soviet Union and the newly restored Yugoslavia were also given, neutrally, as examples of multi-national states. More positively, the hundred-year example of Switzerland was referred to as the most successful example of a multi-national state affording protection for national languages, cultures and institutions.

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced on 14th February 1947 that His Majesty’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, the mandate could not be administered in its present form, and Britain was going to ask the United Nations how it could be amended. The United Nations set up a UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) composed of representatives of eleven member states. Its report and recommendations were published on 31st August 1947. The Committee unanimously adopted eleven resolutions, beginning with an agreement that the British Mandate should be terminated and Palestine granted independence at the earliest practicable date. In summary, the other resolutions were:

• There should be a short, transitional period before this during which the authority for administering the country would be the United Nations;

• The sacred character of the Holy Places should be preserved, and the rights of religious communities protected, by writing them into the constitution(s) of the successor state(s);

• The General Assembly should see that the problem of distressed European Jews should be dealt with as a matter of urgency so as to alleviate their plight;

• The constitution(s) of the new state(s) should be fundamentally democratic and contain guarantees of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, protecting minorities;

• Disputes to be settled by peaceful means and the threat of force must not be used in international relations; this provision to be incorporated into the constitution(s);

• The states formerly territories of the Ottoman Empire to give up all rights, immunities and privileges previously/ currently enjoyed in Palestine;

• The GA should appeal to the peoples of Palestine to cooperate with the UN in efforts to settle the situation there and exert every effort to put an end to acts of violence.

In addition to these eleven recommendations, the majority of Committee members also approved a further recommendation that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution of the Jewish problem in general. Following on from the resolutions, the majority proposal of the Committee was for the Plan of Partition with Economic Union, with Palestine to be constituted as two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and the City of Jerusalem. The Arab and the Jewish States would become independent after a transition period of two years beginning on 1st September 1947. Before their independence could be recognised, however, they would have to adopt a constitution in line with the pertinent recommendations of the Committee and make a declaration to the United Nations containing certain guarantees and sign a treaty by which a system of economic collaboration would be established and the Economic Union of Palestine created. The City of Jerusalem would be placed, after the transitional period, under the International Trusteeship System under an agreement which would designate the United Nations as the Administering Authority. The plan contained recommended boundaries for the City, as well as for both the Arab and Jewish States. Seven of the ten member countries supported this plan, the three others, including India and Yugoslavia, supporting the minority proposal, the Plan of a Federal State in line with the Ihud solution (outlined above). This plan had an international solution for the supervision and protection of the Holy Places, but Jerusalem was to be the ‘shared’ capital of the federal state.     

The Jewish Agency accepted the majority Partition Plan as the “indispensable minimum,” but the Arab governments and the Arab Higher Executive rejected it. In its subsequent Resolution on the Future Government of Palestine (Partition Resolution), endorsed on 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly took note of the declaration of the United Kingdom, the ‘mandatory power’ since 1919, to complete its ‘evacuation’ of Palestine by 1 August 1948. The Resolution then set out a ‘Plan of Partition’ involving the setting up of both a Jewish state and an Arab state, each with a Provisional Council of Government. These were to hold elections, not later than two months after the British withdrawal. Jerusalem was to be a shared capital, with Arab residents able to become citizens of the Palestinian state and Jewish residents of the Jewish state. During the transitional period, no Jew was to be permitted to establish residence in the territory of the Arab state and vice versa. Each state was required to draw up a democratic constitution containing provisions laid down in the Declaration provided for in the third part of the resolution, but drawn up by the elected Constituent Assemblies of each state. In particular, these constitutions were to make provisions for:

(a) Establishing in each State a legislative body elected by universal suffrage and by secret ballot on the basis of proportional representation, and an executive body responsible to the legislature;

(b) Settling all international disputes in which the State may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered;

(c) Accepting the obligation of the State to refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations;

(d) Guaranteeing to all persons equal and non-discriminatory rights in civil, political, economic and religious matters and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion, language, speech and publication, education, assembly and association;

(e) Preserving freedom of transit and visit for all residents and citizens of the other State in Palestine and the City of Jerusalem, subject to considerations of national security, provided that each State shall control residence within its borders.

The Declarations of Independence to be made by both provisional governments were to include a prescribed ‘chapter’ guaranteeing mutual access to the Holy Places, Religious Buildings and Sites according to existing agreements. Access was also to be guaranteed to aliens without distinction as to nationality in addition to freedom of worship, subject to the maintenance of public order. The Governor of the City of Jerusalem was to decide on whether these conditions were being fairly observed. Religious and Minority rights, Citizenship, International Conventions and Financial Obligations were prescribed in the second and third chapters. Any dispute about international conventions and treaties was to be dealt with in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

On 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly endorsed the partition plan by a vote of thirty-three to thirteen. The two-thirds majority included the United States and the Soviet Union but not Britain. Norman Bentwich, in his memoirs My Seventy-Seven Years (1962), explains, on the basis of his first-hand evidence of talks with Ernest Bevin in Paris and London on the question of Palestine between 1946 and 1948, how the Foreign Secretary came round to the view that Britain should recognise the state of Israel:

He was, I believe, anxious at the outset to find a solution of the conflict, and confident that he would succeed, as he had in many bitter labour disputes. … 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.

The United Nations was resolution was bitterly resented by the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in the neighbouring countries who vowed to prevent with the use of force of arms the establishment of a Zionist state by the “Jewish usurpers.” The Proclamation of Independence was published by the Provisional State Council in Tel Aviv on 14th May 1948. The Council was the forerunner of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It began:

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.

Exiled from the Land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never-ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.

The Proclamation continued with a history of Zionism from 1897, when the First Zionist Congress, inspired by Theodor Herzl’s vision of the Jewish State, proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national revival in their own country. It then made reference to the to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, reaffirmed by the Mandate of the League of Nations. It went on to comment on the Holocaust and the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause in the fight against fascism in the Second World War. It then came to the UN Resolution of 29th November 1947, which, it claimed was a recognition of the right of the Jewish people to lead, as do all other nations, an independent existence in its sovereign State. The Proclamation continued with a series of declarations, including that:

• The State of Israel will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex; will guarantee freedom of religion and conscience, education and culture; will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and will loyally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter;
• The State of Israel will be ready to co-operate with the organs and representatives of the United Nations in the implementation of the Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the Economic Union over the whole of Palestine; …
• In the midst of wanton aggression, we call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions – provisional and permanent;
• We extend our hand in peace and neighbourliness to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to co-operate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole. …

The British Mandate was terminated the Following day and regular armed forces of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries entered Palestine. This attempt to strangle the State of Israel at birth failed, and Israel, as a result, seized some areas beyond those defined in the UN resolutions. In June 1948 Palestine west of the Jordan was not so much granted self-government as abandoned to whoever was stronger there, which happened to be – after some bloody fighting and a mass exodus of Arab refugees – to be Israel. The armistice of 1949 did not restore peace; an Arab refugee problem came into being, guerilla attacks, Israeli retaliation and Arab blockage of the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba led to the second and third Arab-Israeli Wars. As for Britain, after the disastrous conclusion to the Palestine problem in 1947-49, everything had conspired to undermine the influence it felt was essential to safeguard its interests in the Middle East, not least in its oil, which was by far Britain’s largest and, for what it did for the country’s industry, its most valuable import.

Did Hitler (ever) support Zionism?

Since I began this article, Ken Livingstone has resigned from the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn has commented that he did the right thing, but in an interview with Sky News, Livingstone has said that he remains unrepentant about his remarks of two years ago, denigrating the entire Zionist movement as one of collaboration with Nazism. He continues to twist the true historical narrative of Zionism to suit his own ends, despite being told that he is wrong, both historically and morally. So, what of his claims that Hitler supported Zionism in 1933? In his Berlin interview with the Grand Mufti of 30th November 1941, Hitler himself made it clear that…

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish 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. 

However, in response to the Grand Mufti’s call for a public declaration to be made of Germany’s support for the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs within six months or a year, Hitler replied:

He (the Führer) fully appreciated the eagerness of the Arabs for a public declaration of the sort requested by the Grand Mufti. But he would beg him to consider that he (the Führer) himself was the Chief of the German Reich for 5 long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of its liberation. He had to wait with that until the announcement could be made on the basis of a situation brought about by force of arms that the Anschluss had been carried out.

The ‘five long years’ referred to here were 1934 to 1939, following the merger of the office of Chancellor and President into ‘Führer’ in August 1934 and the plebiscite which gave him absolute power in the new Reich. The Anschluss took force in April 1938, though it took another year to integrate Austria into German state administration. It’s therefore important to note that anti-Semitism did not become the official policy of the Nazi Party until September 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws were announced. Although many Jews were hounded from office or imprisoned in the first wave of lawless anti-Semitism in 1933. The Reich Citizenship Law of 14th November 1935 defined who was and was not a Jew. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour published the same day forbade inter-marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans but also covered relations with blacks, and the Sinti and Roma (gypsies). These laws linked the Eugenics programme with the régime’s anti-Semitism. Over the next four years, the Jewish community in Germany was gradually excluded from business and the professions, through its programme of ‘aryanisation’, lost citizenship status and entitlement to a number of welfare provisions.

That the aim of the régime at this time was to encourage Jewish emigration does not mean that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’. The régime simply saw emigration, whether to Palestine or elsewhere in Europe and the world,  as a means to its end of ridding Germany of its Jewish population. Approximately half of Germany’s Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939, 41,000 of them to Palestine under the terms of the Ha’avarah Agreement made with Zionist organisations in Palestine on the transfer of emigrants and their property from Germany.

In an unlikely ‘collaboration’ with the SS, training camps were set up in Germany (see the map above) for emigrants to acquire the skills needed in their new life in Palestine. This process slowed considerably by the late 1930s as the receiver states and the British in Palestine limited further Jewish immigration. By the first year of the war (as the figures below show) it had virtually been brought to a halt. Whilst it might, in hindsight, be viewed as an act of ‘collaboration’, it was never part of Hitler’s war strategy or his long-term plan for the genocide of the Jews. Given what happened to the Jews in Germany from 1935 onwards, the attempt of one Zionist group to assist the emigration of people already facing unofficial discrimination and persecution in 1933 was a practical solution to an impending crisis for German Jewry, not one of their own making, and certainly not one driven by any form of ideological affinity with the Nazi régime that was still establishing itself at that time.

At the same time, anti-Semitic activity in Germany intensified. On 9 November 1938, leading racists in the SS instigated a nationwide pogrom destroyed 177 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish shops and businesses. Kristallnacht – the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ signalled the start of a more violent phase in Nazi racial policy. There is no evidence to suggest that Hitler changed his view, first published in Mein Kampf (1924) or his subsequent ‘line’ as party leader, Chancellor and Führer, that the Jewish people both in Europe and the Middle East, if not worldwide, had to be ‘eradicated’.

It is a travesty of the truth to suggest that Hitler saw Zionism as anything other than a creed which was the ideological polar opposite of Nazism. Again, this was confirmed in his statement to the Mufti in 1941 in which he said that…

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 and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia… This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself in the main as a conflict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. … He … would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist Empire in Europe. …  Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. … In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the operations which he had secretly prepared.     

Against this primary source evidence, Ken Livingstone’s claim that “Hitler supported Zionism until he went mad and decided to kill six million Jews” is clearly false, as is the implication in his statement that Zionism and Nazism were, and are, ideological bed-fellows as variants of nationalism. Hitler’s plan was as chillingly logical as it was hateful. It remained the same in 1944 as it had been twenty years earlier, but it was only after 1934 that he had the power to enact it within Germany, and only after 1938 that he could impose it on other European states.

Since Hitler never achieved his war objective of opening the road through Rostov and the Caucasus to Iran and Iraq, he was never able to carry out his plan to extend the genocide of the Jews to Palestine with Arab assistance led by the Grand Mufti. Instead, he continued his policy of extermination of the Jewish populations of occupied countries even when the Red Army was streaming over the Carpathians. He was no more ‘mad’ in 1944 than he had been in 1934, and no more mad in 1934 than he had been in 1924. He was certainly an opportunist in both home and foreign policies, and if he saw a way of getting what he wanted without using bullets and bombs, he was more than willing to take it. That applied just as much to the SS’s dealings with the Zionists as did to his own deals with Chamberlain at Munich and Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It was an opportunism shared by his High Command throughout the war, with Adolf Eichmann making deals with Zionists in the occupied countries for the facilitation of Jewish emigration, for example from Budapest, on Kasztner’s Train in 1944. Eichmann told the Zionists sent to negotiate that he had read Herzl’s writings and considered himself a Zionist. They felt that he was mocking them and those they were trying to save by any possible means.

The Right Thing to do…

Added to this, the contemporary fact is that those within the party who continue to spew out anti-Semitic bile, mocking the Zionist cause both past and present, are also those who would reject Israel’s right to exist as it was established in 1948. This a right which, according to its own declarations, was never intended to exclude the rights of Palestinian Arabs, as we have seen and read in the key documents quoted above. However much we may criticise Israel’s actions since 1948 as departing from its own script, we cannot deny its honest intentions. Neither can we lay all the blame on Israel for the failure of peace talks. Representatives of the Palestinian Arabs, including Fatah, have frequently refused to engage in a dialogue which might end the violence and bring the peace process to a successful conclusion in a two-state solution to the overall problem of Palestine. That, ever since Ernest Bevin changed his mind and recognised Israel in 1949, has been the official policy of the Labour Party.

Set against this we are still expected to tolerate the denial by some of the ‘hard left’ in Britain of Israel’s right to exist. This is not only against Labour Party policy but is also inherently anti-Semitic because it seeks to discriminate against the right of Jewish people to their own ‘home’ in Palestine. This right to a ‘homeland’ is enjoyed by most nationalities throughout the world and often taken for granted, in particular, within the multi-national and multi-cultural United Kingdom. British people can be justly proud that the rights of small nations have been upheld through devolution, and that diversity of language and religion is protected. Despite the dominance of one country, England, in terms of population, culture and language, Britons have been able to stay together in an economic and political union. Why then, would we seek to deny the right of Israel to peaceful co-existence with its neighbours? Since when have socialists of any description been against putting the principle of self-determination into action? Surely those who cannot accept these principles of self-determination and peaceful co-existence for Israel and Palestine have no place in the British Labour Party.

For its part, Israel must surely keep the promises it made, on its foundation, to the international community, to its own Arab minorities, and to its Palestinian Arab neighbours, and it is right to criticise it when it breaks these promises. But these breaches do not mean that Israel should forfeit its place among the recognised states of the world. Instead, all ‘parties’, internal and external, need to work together to help bring an end to the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews. After all, they still share common roots in the region as Semitic peoples, as well as similar aspirations to national independence and self-determination, free from interference from external powers. At the start of that century, they were not so far apart in their mutual national aspirations; they can close that gap again, but only if they agree to leave their trenches. Encouraging them to stay entrenched in their positions will not aid the peace process.

Sources:

Walter Laquer (1976), The Israel-Arab Reader. New York: Bantham Books.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed ( 1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

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

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.