When "Illegal" is Actually Quite "Legal"

Jeremy Ben-Ami is senior vice president of Fenton Communications and an adviser to MoveOn.org. He is a board member of the David S. Wyman Institute on Holocaust Studies and of Americans for Peace Now. Definitely to the "Left".

But his father, Yitzhaq, was way right, a member of the Irgun and the Bergson Group. I helped him research his book.

Here's an excerpt from Jeremy's tribute to his father:-

Soon after the Melk reached Palestine in safety, my father was sent to the United States to seek funds and political support for refugee-smuggling operations. At about the same time, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Labor Zionists in Palestine, arrived in the United States to persuade Jewish leaders to support an “aliyah war” — bringing large numbers of Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British — “and confront England with the need to combat aliyah with force.”

Neither my father’s efforts nor Ben-Gurion’s found much support among Jewish leaders. One opponent was Rabbi Stephen Wise, longtime leader of the Zionist Organization of America and the American Jewish Congress. Wise, who was deeply loyal to President Franklin Roosevelt, believed American Jews should support FDR’s pro-British policy, and refrain from “anti-British agitation” on the Palestine issue, “even if the Zionist cause suffered.”

My father did not know at the time that he had support in some very high places for his view that resistance to the British was justified. Recent research by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has uncovered documents showing that Louis Brandeis, then recently retired from the Supreme Court, supported the refugee-smuggling campaign. At a meeting of Jewish leaders in the summer of 1939, Brandeis slapped down a suggestion that bringing Jews to Palestine in defiance of the British was “illegal.” “It may be considered illegal by Great Britain, but we Jews consider it to be legal,” Brandeis said.

It may seem odd that a venerated Supreme Court justice would endorse breaking the laws of an American ally. But the “Jewish Underground Railroad” that my father and others ran in Europe in the 1930s was based on the same moral principle that energized the original Underground Railroad, which helped black slaves illegally escape the South. Even a former Supreme Court Justice recognized that sometimes the stakes are so high that we must have the courage to act in accordance with our moral principles, even at the cost of violating the law.

On this anniversary of Kristallnacht, the courage of those who resisted is also a lesson worth remembering.