That 1942 Lord Moyne Speech

Lord Moyne was serving as Britain's Minister for State for the Middle East from January 1944 in Cairo, Egypt and was assassinated by two member of the Lechi undergound on November 5 that year.

In a 2012 interview, Yitzchak Shamir, the main commander over the operation was adamant why he was killed:

because we fought against the British in this area, we took him for a target. This was the main reason for his assassination. Certainly, we had known about his hostile attitude towards Zionism, towards the idea of ingathering of the Jewish people here. He was against any Jewish aliyah, any Jewish immigration. He didn’t believe that there exists such a thing like a Jewish nation, or a Jewish people … and therefore, we decided to make this operation.

At the Lechi Veterans' web site, one can read this:

In the House of Lords in June 1942, he expressed his support for the White Paper and limitations on Jewish immigration. He found the Zionist vision narrow, advocating a solution of a federation of Arab lands.

When he came to serve as minister of state in Cairo, Lord Moyne launched extreme plans to strangle the Yishuv. He openly spoke of Palestine as an Arab land; Jews were a mixed race, and the Jews of Palestine could be relocated to another land in Africa.

Bernard Wasserstein, in a 1980 article, reprinted in Midstream ("New Light on the Moyne Murder," Midstream 26, March 1980: 30-38), sought to debunk the "racial" elements of that speech and wrote:

When Moyne states that Jews are racially mixed he is putting them into the same category as every other European people, including the British. To interpret his speech as signifying that he considered the Jews as inlerior alter the Nazi fashion is therefore nonsense. Indeed, by arguing that the most "primitive" of known races is racially "pure" whereas the most "advanced" are racially intermixed, he is precisely contradicting one of the basic premises of Nazi racialist ideology. From allthis it will be evident that there is no substance in the charge of racialist antiSemitism made against Moyne on the basis of his House of Lords speech.

What did Moyne declare on June 9, 1942 in the House of Lords? Here:

Since the Mahomedan invasion of 632 the Arabs have occupied Palestine for practically the same period. To these Arabs the Jews are not only alien in culture but also in blood. It is very often loosely said that Jews are Semites, but anthropologists tell us that, pure as they have kept their culture, the Jewish race has been much mixed with Gentiles since the beginning of the Diaspora. During the Babylonian captivity they acquired a strong Hittite admixture, and it is obvious that the Armenoid features which are still found among the Sephardim have been bred out of the Ashkenazim by an admixture of Slav blood.

The Zionist movement has its main spring among those Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe.

Be that as it is understood, or misunderstood, the speech is important in other ways.

The speech was delivered on the background of another speech, one delivered by Lord Wedgwood who was a strong supporter of Zionism and actually a supporter of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who had adopted Wedgwood's Seventh Dominion idea in 1927. The Irgun at the time of its reprisal raids during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 made effective use of a letter Wedgwood wrote on May 30, 1938 which advocated an armed Jewish civil revolt in Palestine. 

That May 1942 speech can be found in this file. And see here, on page 161.

It caused quite a ruckus. Wedgwood defended himself and Moyne participated in the debate.

It deserves to be quoted in its entirety.  The text is taken from Hansard.

Lord Wedgwood did not mean what he said. Anybody who heard the broadcast which Lord Wedgwood read out must attach the ordinary meaning to the language, and interpret it as a direct incitement to the Jews of Palestine to seize political domination and the land from the present inhabitants. I am always amazed at the attitude of Lord Wedgwood. He boasts of his patriotism and he parades his love of England, and I cannot see how he can reconcile himself to the role of abusing and libelling his own country and his own countrymen.

Lord Wedgwood's incitement to Zionists to seize the land of Palestine. In considering this treasonable appeal to the Jews to levy war on their own legal Government it is, of course, reasonable to consider whether the Jews have, as the noble Lord suggested, any well-founded complaint against the administration of the Palestine Mandate. The Zionist claim has raised two burning issues: firstly, the demand for large-scale immigration into an already overcrowded country, and, secondly, racial domination by these newcomers over the original inhabitants.

In 1922, when the present Prime Minister was Colonial Secretary, he issued a statement on British policy in Palestine which is very much to the point in regard to the Jewish claim to political domination and the swamping of the Arab population by immigration to-day. Mr. Churchill stated that His Majesty's Government had not at any time contemplated the subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine. Attention was further drawn to the fact that the terms of the Balfour Declaration do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine. It was also laid down that immigration cannot be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals. "It is essential," the statement went on, "to ensure that the immigration should not be a burden on the people of Palestine as a whole." It was stated that up to that time immigration had fulfilled these conditions, the number of immigrants since the British occupation having been about 25,000.

Your Lordships should bear in mind that figure of 25,000 immigrants, which Mr. Churchill considered reasonable for the four years after the end of the last war, and compare that with the demand, backed by the noble Lord, for bringing in 3,000,000 Jews immediately after this war to swamp the population of Palestine. The inhabitants of that small country—about the size of Wales, but much less fertile—are already threatened with conditions of grave congestion. At the present rate of increase, the Arab population will double within twenty-seven years. All the fertile soil is not only occupied but very closely cultivated. At the end of the last war, the Jewish community numbered 80,000. It now numbers about 450,000; and yet the Zionist Organization have indignantly refused the terms of the White Paper, under which further immigration should be allowed up to another 75,000 in five years. They have also rejected the proposal 1o co-operate in a Joint Government by taking over responsibility for certain departments in proportion to the respective populations, as they claim not merely equal citizenship but political ascendency.

There is certainly no basis for these demands under the Mandate. There is no question of this country having broken faith. The Mandate obliges the Mandatory to ensure that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced. Over and over again Commissions and White Papers have expressed the opinion that neither the Mandate nor the Balfour Declaration intended Palestine to be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population. The tragedy of the Palestinian question is, as was said by the Royal Commission, that it is a conflict between two rights. When Jerusalem was destroyed and its site ploughed up in the year 135 A.D., the Jews had occupied the country for about 1,300 years. Since the Mahomedan invasion of 632 the Arabs have occupied Palestine for practically the same period. To these Arabs the Jews are not only alien in culture but also in blood. It is very often loosely said that Jews are Semites, but anthropologists tell us that, pure as they have kept their culture, the Jewish race has been much mixed with Gentiles since the beginning of the Diaspora. During the Babylonian captivity they acquired a strong Hittite admixture, and it is obvious that the Armenoid features which are still found among the Sephardim have been bred out of the Ashkenazim by an admixture of Slav blood.

The Zionist movement has its main spring among those Jews of Poland and Eastern Europe. Their leaders demand that an already overcrowded Palestine should be trebled in its population by the admixture of another three million Jews immediately after the war. Now it is not a matter of putting a quart into a pint pot, it is a matter of putting exactly three pints into a pint pot. Successive inquiries have shown that immigration on this scale would be a disastrous mistake, and is indeed an impracticable dream. A far smaller measure of immigration led to the Palestine disturbances which lasted from 1936 to 1939, and showed that the Arabs, who have lived and buried their dead for fifty generations in Palestine, will not willingly surrender their land and self-government to the Jews. We may deplore it, but there is the stark naked fact, and you cannot get away from it by sentimental appeals to the hardship on the Jews. This country is responsible for law and order in Palestine, and we cannot possibly wash our hands of the country and let Jews and Arabs wage a civil war, as suggested by Lord Wedgwood.

But Lord Wedgwood's effort has a far greater power of mischief in being addressed to America. It must surely have a deplorable effect upon our Allies to be told by an ex-Cabinet Minister that the Palestine Administration do not like Jews, and that there are enough Anti-Semites in Great Britain to back up the Hitler policy and spirit. This suggestion is a complete reversal of the truth. If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis it is surely those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination. Lord Wedgwood's proposal that Arabs should be subjugated by force to a Jewish régime is inconsistent with the Atlantic Charter, and that ought to be told to America. The second principle of that Charter lays down that the United States and ourselves desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; and the third principle lays down that they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live.

Surely it is time for the Zionists to abandon this appeal to force, and to seek a settlement with the Arabs by consent. The Zionist leaders expect about 7,000,000 Jews to be surviving in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, and they reject the policy of re-establishing Jewish communities under civilized conditions in Europe. They apparently expect the loss of half this number if the other half can get control of Palestine. The war will end with the heavy problem of trying to resettle these most pitiable victims of Nazi abominations. Millions of people cannot be left indefinitely the objects of charity in refugee camps. A merciful settlement must be a quick settlement. We ought, therefore, to look at once in all directions to find means to re-establish these martyrs to Nazi oppression in a new life. The Zionists look only to Palestine. On May 25, at the annual dinner of the Anglo-American Palestine Committee, Dr. Weizmann again declared that Palestine alone could absorb and provide for the homeless and Stateless Jews uprooted by the war. It is to canalize all the sympathy of the world for the martyrdom of the Jews that the Zionists reject all schemes to re-settle these victims elsewhere—in Germany, or Poland, or in sparsely populated regions such as Madagascar.

But even in their wish to occupy the pre-Christian home of the Jewish race, the Zionists are far too narrow in their outlook. Palestine itself is but a small fraction of the ancient land of Syria. I do not believe that the problem of overcrowding applies to Syria and the Lebanon and Transjordan as it does to Palestine. It would be physically possible for those States, if they were willing, to absorb large numbers of Jews to mutual advantage, and without any threat to their own political independence. If the fear of Jewish domination could be removed they might indeed be glad to welcome the Jewish immigrants, with their well-known industry and intelligence and with their capital. So far as I know, no effort has been made to explore these possibilities, and we ought surely, without waiting for the peace, to see how far the regions to the north of Palestine can offer asylum for the Jewish immigration, within the old limits of historic Syria. I hope the Government will give serious consideration to the possibility of negotiations with the neighbouring States of the Levant to take part in re-settling the Jews. It is obvious that the fear of political domination by immigrant Jews will be decreased if they can be spread over a wider area and shared among different Administrations. A Federation of the Northern Arab States might well assist such a solution, but federation may be long in coming, and we ought at once to discuss with the Governments concerned to what extent and under what conditions they could admit Jewish immigration without swamping their own nationalities and independence.

I trust that the revelations in Lord Wedgwood's broadcast will have finished once and for all with the idea of arming the Jews in such a way as would encourage the attempt to seize the land of Palestine. This is quite a different matter from legitimate arming in their own defence, and I think it is hardly necessary for the Government to assure the Arabs that they would not be a party to such an assault upon their rights as has been suggested. But I hope there will be no mistake in America that Lord Wedgwood is speaking only for himself in the suggestion that we ought to give up the Palestine Mandate to the United States, in the hope and expectation that she would repudiate our binding obligations. It seems to me the broadcast of Lord Wedgwood is most of all deplorable because the salvation of civilization depends primarily upon a good understanding between us and the United States. All through his broadcast runs the suggestion that we are not only unjust but feeble and incompetent. I can imagine no greater disservice than to have planted such suspicions in the minds of millions of American listeners. How are we to plan the peace if British spokesmen are to sow distrust and contempt in the minds of our Allies?

Judge for yourselves how pro-Zionism was Moyne.

___________

See also my previous post regarding this here.

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Moshe Sneh's Role in the King David Explosion

Recently, a new biography on Moshe Sneh has appeared, authored by Nir Mann, dealing with the period of his life when he commanded the Hebrew Resistance Movement.

Based on a review by Yossi Kister that appeared in Ha'Umma, in its issue 234, I summarize some new material on the King David Hotel explosion, portions which appeared in various articles Mann published.

Sneh pushed a line that was termed "activist" in those days in the Yishuv which meant that the fighting forces would attack rather than respond. As a result, between the end of 1945 and the summer of 1946, relatively large-scale and well-coordinated insurgency operations took place against British installations, rail lines, bridges and othe targets.

Already in May 1946, Sneh managed to get its Committee 'X' to authorize a new series of objects, one of which included the King David Hotel's southern wing. It was that section of the hotel that had been appropriated by the Mandate Government already in 1939 for offices. In 1946, senior officials, both in the civil and military departments, were in that wing.

However, on May 8, 1946, David Ben-Gurion had written of his unwillingess to continue offense actions. Sneh's policy was saved, as it were, by Britain's unwillingness to permit increased immigration which undermined the position furthered by Moshe Sharett and other moderates. In reaction to the "Black Sabbath" operation of the British, a further decision was taken to act in a triple operation.

Some ten days prior to the King David operation, the personal political secretary of Chaim Weizmann, Meir Wesigal, visited Sneh and instructed him to cease all military operations. As a result, Sneh tendered his resignation on July 17. However, despite the initial authorization given to both the Irgun and the Lechi for the planned actions at the Hotel and the nearby Royal Air Force Intelligence offices, Sneh did not inform neither Menachem Begin or Natan Yellin-Mor regarding his resignation.

His handwritten note to Begin of July 19 simply asked Begin, a second time, to delay the operation for a few days. Begin waited a few days and the new date was fixed for July 22. However, Begin was not apprised of the resignation. Moreover, he was unaware that Sneh on the day of the explosion was in Haifa sneaking aboard a commercial ship and the next day left the country clandestinely for Paris, there to join Ben-Gurion for a Zionist conference.

In a sense, Begin, and the Irgun, were left "holding the bag". The Hagana-led United Resistance Movement had insisted that the Irgun assume all responsibility even though the regular policy was that only the URM would appear as the sponsoring organization in announcements.

If Sneh had informed Begin of all the background, had told him he was no long the head of the URM (to one interviewer in his later years he said he didn't tell Begin to further delay the operation as he was no longer in command (!)) or even ordered him to halt the plans, there may have been a difference although I am not sure. 

In any case, the King David Hotel explosion was a joint Hagana-Irgun operation authorized by the highest echelons.

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When the 'Right' Had Problems Rallying in Tel Aviv

On February 26, 1948, in the evening, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi sought to gather for a rally in support of raisaing funds for jtheir military operations against the Arabs.

The Hagana would not allow the event to pass quietly and intervened with the result that stun grenades were thrown and fisticuffs broke out.

Newspaper reports:

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The Jewish "Palestine Resistance"

When, in 1946, the term "Palestine Resistance" meant the Jewish fight for freedom and liberation from the repressive British mandatory regime:

Source

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Justifying Jewish Underground Actions 1947

Arthur Koestler, the famous author, was quite sympathetic to Jabotinsky, his Revisionist movement and the Irgun. I have blogged about him here and I reproduce here his 1975 letter to me.

Having enrolled in  the Vienna Polytechnic University to study engineering in September 1922, he became attracted to the more militant Zionist student fraternity, 'Unitas' which also included duelling. student fraternity, 'Unitas.' On 1 April 1926 he left for Mandate Palestine. As he recounts in Arrow in the Blue, in lived for a few weeks on Kibbytz Heftziba and then for the next year worked at menial jobs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. He also wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German, and credits himself for creating the first Hebrew crossword. In early 1927 he left Palestine briefly for Berlin, where he ran the Secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party. He then returned to Jerusalem as the Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. For the next two years, he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage and lived at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im.

However, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, the Yishuv, and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career in Hebrew.

In June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine, He later published Thieves in the Night, dedicated to Tedy Kollek and his wife, and Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949 which includes the forgettable line: "Within a generation or two Israel will have become an entirely un-Jewish country."

As for "Theives in the Night, the New York Times reviewer opined in comparison to Ben Hecht's play, "A Flag is Born", was as a "novel...just as sympathetic to the cause of the Jewish state, just as opposed to the objections of the British and the Arabs, just as convinced of the necessity of force to defend what it believes".

On August 16, 1947, Koestler published in the British New Statesman a "Letter to a Parent of a British soldier in Palestine". As the weekly explained when it reprinted it in 2007:

Sixty years ago British soldiers were trying to keep the peace in Palestine. The hanging of two captured British sergeants by Jewish terrorists was an especially horrific crime that incensed British public opinion. Arthur Koestler sought to justify such an act in this anguished piece, which is still of painful relevance for our own times. The argument to explain Jewish terrorism in 1947 could be applied equally to Arab terrorism in Palestine today.

Here it is:

Dear Sir,

Every morning when you open your paper you feel sick with fear that your boy might have been kidnapped or blown to pieces by Jewish terrorists. I am a person who sympathises with terrorists, and though I disapprove of their recent methods, I might have become one of them – by force of circumstances. I am writing to you to explain those circumstances.

I am not speaking lightly of terror; during several years I have lived in the same anxiety, for persons near to me, which you feel for your son. The persons were my mother and her family; the danger which threatened them, as Jews in German-controlled territory, was death by poison gas or quicklime. My mother was the only one who escaped. Her sister, her sister’s daughter and two grandchildren were gassed. My mother’s brother managed to commit suicide. Every single Jewish terrorist in Palestine has a similar story. This is the first fact you have to let sink in; without this background you will understand nothing.

Obviously you will answer that these regrettable deeds were committed by the Nazis and not by the British; that one of the reasons your boy fought this war was precisely to save those unfortunates; and that there is no excuse for the criminal madness of the thugs who, instead of showing gratitude, throw bombs at their benefactors. As against this, allow me to mention some facts, based on official British sources, which, I submit, prove that the Jews of Palestine have no reasons for gratitude to your country, and many reasons for bitterness against it. There is a legend that in 1917 Mr. Lloyd George’s government, in the kindness of their hearts, promised Palestine to the Jews; since then the Jews have insisted on this somewhat rash promise like Shylock on his pound of flesh; while the unfortunate British, caught between the conflicting claims and bullets of Arab and Jew, carried heroically the White Man’s Burden.

This is the legend; the facts about the motives which prompted the Lloyd George Cabinet to launch the Balfour declaration were explained by Mr. Lloyd George himself in his statement before the Royal Commission in 1937. In the autumn of 1917, at the time of the Russian collapse, the Allies were in a critical position. “In this critical situation it was believed that Jewish sympathy or the reverse would make a substantial difference one way or the other to the Allied cause.” Thus originated the promise of a “National Home”; the meaning of this term was interpreted by Lloyd George, President Wilson, Cecil, Smuts, Winston Churchill, etc., as equivalent to a future Jewish state (Royal commission Report, pp. 23-25). The Zionist leaders, according to Lloyd George’s statement, promised in exchange “to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the Allied cause. They kept their word.” (ibid., p.23). It was an honest deal, supported on both sides by long-standing sympathies, not an act of charity, and the question of gratitude does not arise.

The second part of the story is the period between the two wars. I have no space to go into details, only to point out some salient facts. It is not true that the Jews came to Palestine under the protection of British bayonets, or at the expense of the British taxpayer, or with British help under any form, as many countrymen seem to believe. The transformation of Palestine within twenty years from a malaria-infested stretch of swamp and desert into the most fertile country of the Middle East is due to Jewish labour and capital. The part played by the British Administration was to run the public services, on taxes mainly levied from the Jews.

“But,” you will object, “after all we did let the Jews come to Palestine in spite of Arab opposition didn’t we? We could just as well have locked them out, and saved ourselves all this trouble…” You are again misinformed. Palestine never was a Colony or Protectorate of yours: your job and raison d’être in that country was to administer a Mandate on behalf of the League of Nations and that Mandate put you under the obligation “to facilitate Jewish immigration,” to help the “close settlement by Jews of the land “ and finally the establishment of the “National Home.” The deal, concluded in 1917 and known as the Balfour Declaration, had been ratified by fifty-two nations and had become the legal basis, and the only basis, of your presence in Palestine.

The third part of the story starts in 1939, with the White Paper which Mr. Morrison, in the name of the Labour Party, called “a cynical breach of faith, a breach of British honour,” and Mr. Churchill “a base betrayal, the filing of a petition in moral bankruptcy.” You have probably heard about this famous document which, leaving details aside, amounted to the barring of Palestine to the Jews (after a last batch of 75,000) for ever, and led to the prohibition of the buying and cultivating of land by Jews in 95 per cent of the country’s total area (Land Transfer Act of February 1940). Thus at the very moment when the extermination of the European Jews began, the doors of Palestine were slammed in their faces; while those already inside Palestine were condemned to live in one more cramped, Oriental ghetto. This policy was not only inhuman, it was apparently also illegal in the terms of International Law, and this point is essential for the understanding of all further developments in Palestine. For legally, as already mentioned, Britain’s presence in Palestine was based on the Mandate. The League’s Permanent Mandate Commission met on June 16th, 1939, and found unanimously that the new policy contradicted the terms of the British trusteeship. Now according to Article 27 of the Mandate “the consent for the Council of the League of Nations is required for any modification of the terms of this mandate.” The Council of the League was to meet in September, 1939, but meanwhile the war broke out and it never met. As the Mandatory Commission (and leading politicians of all parties in this country itself) had found that the White Paper was not only a “modification” of the Mandate but directly contradicted it, it could only gain legal validity by the League’s consent; and this consent was never given. This is the reason why terrorists refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of British Military Courts and prefer to be hanged without defending themselves; and they claim that Britain’s status in Palestine is that of an occupying Power, based on force, not on law. For similar reasons the Jewish Agency denies the validity of any discrimination between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants.

I am not an expert in International Law, but it seems incontestable, as a matter of common sense, that the pretence of administering a Home which people are not permitted to enter, even when in danger of their lives, is a moral and legal perfidy. The story of Palestine from 1939 to this day is essentially the story of people struggling to save their skins, and of British efforts to prevent this by force and diplomatic pressure. Here are a few examples.

In March and April, 1939, three refugee ships – S.S. Assandu, Astir and Assimi, packed with Jews who had escaped, mainly from Germany, reached Palestine, and were refused permission to land. In the House of Commons Mr. Noel-Baker asked the then Colonial Secretary, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, what would happen to these people. Mr. MacDonald said that they had been sent back from where they came. Mr. Noel-Baker: “Does that mean to concentration camps?” Mr. MacDonald: “The responsibility rests on those responsible for organising illegal immigration.” (Debate in the House of Commons, April 26th-27th, 1939.)

Do you recognise the tune? It is unchanged to this day. The responsibility rests with the “racketeers” who tried to save these condemned people, not with those who sent them back to their death. There was also much talk in 1937 about the insanitary conditions on these hell-ships. The gas chambers, the quicklime – and the dry rot of the D.P. camps to-day, were and are doubtless sanitary.

Try to put yourself into the place of a Jew of your own age on the jetty of Haifa, shouting and waving to a relative – your son for instance – on the deck of one of those ships; he is not permitted to land; the ship lifts anchor to take its doomed hysterical load back to where it came from. The figure of your boy grows smaller; a few years later you hear that he has been gassed in Oswiecim. If, instead of Smith, your name were Schmulewitz, it might have happened to you. Something on the same lines happened, among others, to a man whom I met in Palestine two years ago; he told me that his mother and three brothers had been killed “by German sadism and the British White Paper.” His name is Friedman Yellin, and he is head of the so-called Stern Gang.

More examples? On November 24th, 1940, the passengers of the steamer Patria, who had been refused admission to Palestine, blew their ship up in Haifa harbour. Over two hundred people were blown to bits or drowned a hundred yards from the promised shore. They were not even to have been deported back to Europe, which, owing to the war, was impossible; only to a tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But these people had become allergic to barbed wire. When a person reaches that state, like the survivors in the D.P. camps to-day, he is past listening to the reasonable voice which tells him that he should never have escaped, or saved his wife and children, without a permit in triplicate to do so.

One last example. The year is 1942; the crematoria in Europe had started to work, when another hell-ship, the 180-ton cattle-boat Struma, hailing from Constanza, floundered into the harbour of Istanbul. There were 769 escapees on board, several of whom had lost their reason. The Turks were prepared to let them land in transit, on condition that the British would permit their entry into Palestine. This the Palestine Government, after consultation with London, refused; so the Turks sent the boat back to Rumania. The rest of the story you can guess: the ship blew up within a few miles of the Turkish coast; one man survived; all other passengers, including 250 women and 70 children were drowned.

The Black Sea was the Jews’ main life-line of escape from the European crematorium. The Struma cut that life-line. Those who, against law and morality, refused to grant its passengers entry into Palestine, did not want them to be drowned. They were presumably even sorry and surprised. All they wanted was that they should be sent back to their “port of embarkation,” where they could wash their hands of them, and thus discourage others from trying to save their skins. In the parliamentary debate of April, 1939, from which I have quoted, the Colonial Secretary had said that the Government had the fullest sympathy with Jewish refugees, but if they allowed one shipload, more would follow. This has been the guiding principle of British policy in Palestine from 1939 to this day. It was a policy of deliberately obstructing by active and passive measures, by force and by diplomatic pressure, the escape of Jews from extermination by a mass exodus into Palestine. I have quoted to you a few examples of this policy; they could be multiplied. Further evidence of the deliberate character of this policy is available, but cannot be published at this moment. But perhaps some future commission of inquiry into the administration of the Palestine Mandate will find it useful to ask, i.a., H.M. former ambassador in Anka to disclose the instructions he received during the critical period before and after the Struma episode.

The White Paper of 1939 has been described as the Palestine Munich. After the Labour victory of 1945 everybody expected that his last relic of Chamberlain’s policy would be wiped out. No party was so deeply committed to support Jewish immigration into Palestine as the Labour Party. On no fewer that eleven occasions, from 1917 to 1945, the Annual Party Conference had reaffirmed this obligation. In 1939 Philip Noel-Baker had prophesied that, if the White Paper was adopted, the only way to stop refugees would be “to tell those kindly British soldiers to shoot them down.” In 1944, the Party conference had affirmed that “there is surely neither hope nor meaning in a ‘Jewish National Home’ unless we are prepared to let the Jews enter if they wish.” In 1945, just before the Labour Government took office, this policy was once more confirmed, and Hugh Dalton declared that “it is morally wrong and politically indefensible to impose obstacles to entry into Palestine now of any Jews who desire to go there.” You know the rest of the story. It is the story of yet another broken pledge; of the triumph of a Foreign Office clique and Ernest Bevin’s pigheadedness over Labour’s honour.

But this time the Jews’ patience is exhausted. On practically every hell-ship which approaches Palestine one or two survivor are shot down because they resist the boarding parties which carry them off to yet another cage, in the name of a policy which is “morally wrong and politically indefensible”. As a result, the Jews have shown that they can fight as ruthlessly and as savagely as any other people driven to despair. Political terrorism has not been invented by them, as the penny press tries to make people in this country believe; it is as old as injustice and oppression, which is its cause. From the days of Spartacus to the French and Yugoslav maquis, the men who fought oppression by violence were called bandits by those who turned Law and Order into a mockery; and patriots and heroes if they succeeded. But this romantic halo is only given them by posterity, or distant sympathisers. Looked at from close to, the deeds of the Paris Commune, or the Russian Social-Revolutionaries, or Tito’s Partisans, all shows the same ugly and revolting details: retaliations, expropriations, armed robberies, bombs, execution of hostages. And it is always the innocents who foot the bill, like Sergeants Martin and Paice, like your boys, who have to carry out a loathsome and immoral policy; for they are under orders, and they know not what they do.

The reason, according to Mr. Bevin, for using men o’ war and paratroopers to fight the inglorious battle of the Palestine beaches, is Britain’s duty to protect Arab interests – another version of the White Man’s Burden. In fact, the situation between Jew and Arab in Palestine is much the same as between Moslem and Hindu in India. The proportion of Moslem to Hindu is roughly 1 to 3; of Jew to Arab roughly 1 to 2. In some fields, where their interests are parallel, they collaborate; in all major points their culture and political aspirations clash. As there is no hope of reconciling these for a considerable time, the inevitable solution is to partition the country. This is hard luck on the Arabs; but they have thrived on this hard luck and grown in health and prosperity as never before in history. It is also hard luck on the Jews; for the Mandate gave them Palestine including Transjordan, and now they will have to be content themselves with a fraction of one-half of it. It may be argued that it was wrong to promise in 1917 a predominantly Arab country to the Jews, but this argument leads nowhere; for to-day the Jewish third in Palestine is a fact which cannot be undone, nor can their fields and orange groves be reconverted into desert and marsh. Since the Royal Commission recommended partition in 1937, every level-headed observer has agreed to this – except the Labour Party, which urged a Jewish State in the whole of Palestine.

But, you will object, all this may be true and very regrettable; however, now that we have passed the whole problem on to Uno it is for them, and no longer for us, to decide. Again you have been misled. The Uno Commission is not the first which has been asked to suggest a policy for Palestine – it is, if I remember rightly, the seventeenth or eighteenth. The Royal Commission in 1937 suggested partition; the Chamberlain Government issued the White Paper instead. Last year we had the Anglo-American Commission; your Foreign Secretary pledged himself to carry out their suggestion if they were unanimous; they were unanimous; they were not carried out. The methods which Mr. Bevin used to sabotage any constructive solution, to get out of his Party’s, his Government’s, and his personal commitments, sounded more than anything like the subterfuges of a Jewish pettifogger. The terms under which he passed the matter on to Uno contain the same loopholes as the previous invitations to other bodies to make “suggestions.” He referred to Uno as an International Tribunal – but reserved the right to accept or reject the Tribunal’s verdict. In the light of their past experiences, it is not surprising that the Palestine Jews suspect this latest move of being another subterfuge to gain time and to continue a policy based on principles which Mr. Bevin’s colleagues in the Cabinet have branded as morally and politically indefensible. The one proof of the honesty of his intentions would be for him to state unequivocally that Britain will either accept Uno’s verdict or surrender the Mandate and clear out.

Meanwhile two things can be done to stop the vicious circle of terror and retaliation. The first is to go to Uno with constructive proposals for a just partition of the country, to be enforced if need be with international help – instead of presenting a record of impotency and bankruptcy. The second is to raise the monthly immigration quota from 1,500 to 5,000 during the period of transition without political conditions, as a minimum gesture of good will. I can assure you, on the strength of many years of experience in Palestine, that this alone would be enough to lead to an immediate suspension of terrorism and at least to a kind of armistice while Uno’s decision is pending.

Is it as simple as that? It is as simple as that. And if public opinion still has a say in your country, now is the time to stop disaster. For the Jews of Palestine fight for one thing only, for the oldest slogan in their history: Let My People Go. There were six million of them in Europe; only one of ten is left. Your countrymen are very fond of the word decency; if you have any left, let them go.

If you refuse, you will have to take the consequences, which may be more serious than you think. For you should understand that there is more at stake here than meets the eye. A great Empire which rules the seven seas can afford to flaunt the world’s opinion. But you are no longer that; you cannot afford to put might before right; and you have already antagonised on this issue public opinion in just the two countries you need most: the U.S.A. and France. The future of a country which is on the downward grade in terms of power depends more than on anything else on its moral integrity. Palestine is a test for your integrity; and in more than one sense your fate is linked with hers.

Yours truly,

ARTHUR KOESTLER

^

Correcting Cecil Bloom

Writing about the illegal immigrant ship Patria that arrived at Mandate Palestine shores in November 1941 in "Josiah Wedgwood and Palestine", published in Jewish Historical Studies, Vol. 42 (2009), Cecil Bloom errs.

He claims in his article that

While at anchor off Haifa, Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorists placed a bomb on the ship to prevent its departure, but the bomb exploded unexpectedly, sinking the ship with more than two hundred refugees being drowned

His source, in his footnote there, is Menachem Begin's The Revolt, p. 75. 

He errs because:

a) it was a Hagana operation.

b) on page 35, not 75, Begin simply writes "Jewish terrorists" - presumbaby quoting from official reports - placed a bomb to prevent its departure.  For Bloom to presume only Irgunists and Lechi members could have been considered "terrorists" is indicative of a certain mind-set.

Josiah Wedgwood

Bloom does, however, include the text of Wedgwood's famous pro-Irgun letter of 1938

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Why Did England Turn to the UN in 1947?

Einat Wilf, together with Adi Schwartz, has just had a new book published.  Entitled The War of  Return, it seeks to explain, as its subtitle reads: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. It seems to be an important contribution to the pushback against the maliciousness and malignant misrepresentations of Arab propaganda.

An excerpt can be found here.

There is a typo which caught my eye which reads that

the Mandate, which was given to Britain in 1920 by the newly created League of Nations

That should be, arguably, 1922. True, the Mandate was decided upon in 1920 by a decision of the Supreme Council of the League of Nations at its conference in San Remo but it was phrased in general language, that “a Mandatory” be responsible for putting the Balfour Declaration into effect but without formally naming Great Britain. It was only in 1922 that the British Mandate, with all its 25 Articles, came into force voted upon by the full plenum of the League of 50 countries.  There is even an opinion that it was only in 1923 that the mandates administrating the countries evolving from the vanquished Turkish Ottoman empire came into force. 

But what caught my brain was this

The violent intercommunal struggle between Jews and Arabs, which started almost at the outset of British rule in the 1920s, eventually exhausted Britain, which decided to refer the question of Palestine to the United Nations 

That surely is wrong.

Between August 1939 and August 1947, there was no “intercommunal conflict” between Jews and Arabs. The Arabs had already gained their political goals in 1939 with the publication in May of the infamous White Paper which unilaterally altered the terms of the 1922 Mandate from reconstituting a Jewish National Home to establishing a state in Palestine, restricted land purchaces and severely curtailed Jewish immigration.

As stated therein:

Palestine was not to be converted into a Jewish State...His Majesty's Government...objective is self government, and to see established ultimately an independent Palestine State. It should be a State in which the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in government in such a way that the essential interests of each are shared. 

There was, of course, normative Arab acts of murder, rape, theft and property damage against Jews but not in any organized fashion nor as part of acts conducted at the direction of a political command.  

The May 15, 1948 British White Paper is clear on who caused them to turn to the United Nations in early 1947:

a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organized Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman. Since the war, 338 British subjects had been killed in Palestine, while the military forces there had cost the British taxpayer 100 million pounds. 

That is, the underground war declared by Yair and the Lechi beginning in 1940, the revolt of the Irgun declared by Menachem Begin in 1944 and the United Resistance Movement of the Palmach and Hagana when they joined the Irgun and Lechi during 1945-1946.

I look forward to reading the book in its entirety.

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The Other Tale or What Matti Friedman Missed

Makor Rishon published an interiew-review with Matti Friedman now that his new book has been published in Hebrew. The book, `Spies of No Country` is based mostly on the reminisces of four former members of the pre-State Palmah`s “Arab Section”. It was first called the `Mista’arvim Unit` which engaged in intelligence gathering and sabotage operations both in the territory of the Palestine Mandate and in Arab countries.

The story is important, even if a Forward reviewer thinks negatively of  Friedman`s book (it avoids the `moral` question of killing and links up with the current `political` question) although he did express appreciation of the book. In fact, two of the protaganists have already published their memoirs, one almost 30 years ago and another 18 years ago.

I have not read the book (but commented on it briefly). But from what I have read, I do not think Friedman related to the issue of Jews spying and operating in Arab neighborhoods and countries, disguised as Arabs but simply the Shachar Unit of the Palmah.

If, indeed, that is the case, I would wish to make sure that the other two pre-State undergrounds also had their own Jews-as-Arabs agents.

On July 26, 1938, five years prior to the establishment of the Palmah unit, the Irgun sent Yaakov Raz, 

dressed as an Arab porter into Jerusalem`s Old City market area on a reprisal mission following Arab terror attacks on the Jewish population.

He took part in attacks against Arabs in reprisals for attacks against Jews, and in his last operation, he was suspected by Arab passersby who grabbed him and dumping his vegetable basket, revealing a bomb. He was severely wounded when they fell upon him nd stabbed him repeatedly. Arrested by the British, he was subjected to constant interrogations and at the beginning of August, he felt he was too weak to prevent an accidental divulging of secret information he was party to while delirious, and so, under the covers, removed his bandages and undid his stitches thus bleeding to death. Israel`s national poet Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote a poem in his honor:
  
...Does anyone know how his face shone in the Jerusalem dawn?
I know, I know his face, for I shine in its light
He was sent forth from Lachish and Betar
A single man, enemies felled by his might.
So once walked, in the early hours of Jerusalem...
...Among demeaned Jews, among Jewish slaves
The lone hero and most beautiful person.
As the attackers circled and pierced him through
Taking their meals or stretched out in bed,
The Jews of Zion, the listless Jews,
Did not know whose body fell dead.

Another Irgun fighter was Rachel Ohevet-Ami (Havshush), born of Yeminite and Moroccan parents. On June 9, 1939, she was given a 15-kilogram food basket with the bomb hidden underneath to be brought to the entrance of the Central Jerusalem Prison on the day it was full of Arabs coming to visit the Arab gang members imprisoned fpor anti-British and anti-Jewish terror. She donned traditional dress including a veil. It being too heavy for her, she requested a young Arab to help her. After being paid, he went to a guard and told him there was something suspicious as the girl`s Arabic was not local, the basket was unduly heavy and it contained Jewish-style bread. She was arrested despite a struggle. A British demolitions expert defused the time mechanism (a few days later, another Irgun bomb at the Central Post Office killed him as he dattempted to defuse it)

In a 1964 photograph

At her trial, the judges accept the testimony that she was not yet 18 years old and instead of the gallows - Emergency Regulations had supplanted normal legal procedures at this time - she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A third Irgunist was Baruch Mizachi. 

Born a Moslem Arab in Safad, he became a member of Betar, converted and joined its fighting ranks. He was detained and flown off to Eritrea where he was wounded by gunfire from the guards. He had insisted that he be allowed to take his tallit and tefillin with him to exile. 

Upon his return, he was sent on April 18, 1948 on an intelligence mission to Jab`a, a village near Jenin, the site of the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army whose commander, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, led during 1936 the Army of the Arab Revolution in South-Syrian Palestine. At a roadblock he was identified, taken to a cave near Jab`a and executed, his body found only after 1967 and reburied.

A Lechi fighter, Elisha Ivzov, was also operating in Arab districts disguised as an Arab. On January 4, 1948, he drove a lorry loaded with with explosives into Jaffa and parked it in an alley adjacent to the Sariah Building, headquarters for the Arabs military units attacking Tel Aviv and its environs. Dozens died and scores were injured in the blast.

On March 5, another truck was loaded with a ton or so of explosives and Elisha drove off 

to Jab`a to eliminate the ALA command center. At the Tannin roadblock, like Mizrachi after him, he was stopped. His guide gave him away. Two British Army deserters who had prepared bombs for the Arabs in Jerusalem, attempted to defuse the bomb but it went off, killing them and others. Elisha was then summarily shot dead and buried in nearby Kuffeir. In 1950, his body was exhumed and returned to Israel.


And so, there is another story to tell. Palmah undercover agents were not the only, and, indeed, not the first to so operate. 

^

The Irgun and MP John Platts-Mills

Moshe Phillips drew my attention to this item which appeared recently in the Camden Journal:

A READER’S email from Mireille Burton about a famous barrister, John Platts-Mills, sent me diving backwards into my memory – and the very first public meeting I attended in my life as a 16-year-old in Manchester.

It was a protest against the government’s policy in 1947 to hunt down the Jewish independence movement in Palestine led by a group called Irgun Zwei Leumi proscribed by Britain as “terrorists”.

On the platform in the small hall were two main speakers – a fiery Methodist minister, Amphlett Micklewright, who would bend at the knee and cry “Chuck it Bevin”, a sharp reference to the foreign minister Ernest Bevin; and the tall, elegant, handsome Labour MP John Platts-Mills, member for Finsbury, who also attacked Bevin and the prime minister, Clement Attlee.

That night John Platts-Mills became my hero. 

As for Micklewright, his memoir is here. He was an Anglican from 1935 then Unitarian in 1941, rejoined the Church of England in 1949 and became Roman Catholic Church in 1974. He has been described as a liberal and a humanist.

Platts-Mills 

is another story.

He was what I would call a hard-left politician from this obituary. Even pro-Soviet according to this  

he was a member of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR (SCR), a Labour party proscribed organisation. He also had close links with members of the International Brigade, the People's Convention and the Popular Front movement. It is possible that, during their association in the latter campaign, Cripps learned of his sympathies. Platts-Mills had also enlisted to fight in Spain, but was refused because he was married with a child. Equally he had been prominent during the 1930s in prosecuting cases against fascists and defending their Communist opponents following street fights, activities that had brought him to the attention of the League of Socialist Lawyers.

It seems his motivation to speak out on behalf of the Irgun was less a full understanding of what the Irgun was fighting for but more on viewing Bevin as bigoted, anti Semitic, and  horrible and Platts-Mills fundamental desire to end British colonialism.  

He was also involved in a number of international inquiry committees including the  International Commission of Inquiry into Israeli Crimes Against the Lebanese and Palestinian Peoples in the 1980s.  


In 1947, he displayed a general concern for anyone, including Arabs, who were being simply unfairly treated as this snippet on an incident of impounded documents discussed in the House of Commons on May 23, 1947 (vol 437 cc306-7W306W)

Mr. Platts-Mills asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether he is aware that on Sunday, 27th April, 1947, officers of the Palestine police force searched the baggage of Mr. Emile G. Thouma, a Palestinian citizen returning from Great Britain, where he had been attending a conference; that his papers, comprising notes on the labour, trade union and progressive movements in Britain, were impounded for censorship; that those papers are still retained at C.I.D. head-quarters, Jerusalem, in spite of protests; and if he will issue instructions for the release of those papers.

Mr. Creech Jones: The documents found in the baggage of Mr. Emile Thouma on his return to Palestine on 27th April were impounded by the Palestine Police and sent to Jerusalem for examination. After examination they were sent to the police station in Haifa, where Mr. Thouma resides, and were available for him to collect from 8th May. In spite of several requests, Mr. Thouma has so far neither called for the documents, nor has he made any protests concerning them to the Palestine Government.

Touma by the way

was a lifelong Communist, a leading member of the Palestine Communist Party.

The intervention of Platts-Mills on behalf of Touma is so much similar to what goes on today by EU and American politicians, with a false and misplaced sense of idealism, as well as various NGOs in favor of pro-Arab activity here in Israel.

^