Koestler, Jabotinsky and Begin

Christopher Hitchens reviews a book on Arthur Koestler in The Atlantic, entitled Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.

I have dealt with Koestler previously (here as well as his own letter to me here).

Here are two excerpts from the review:

most European Jews were drawn to Palestine by labor and socialist groups, but when Koestler set off for the Holy Land he did so as a consecrated follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the so-called Revisionists...

...Having temporarily abandoned Zionism for Communism, he resumed his engagement by covering (and participating in) the violent birth of Israel, initially taking the side of the Menachem Begin ultranationalists but eventually becoming sickened by the violence of the Zionist right and finally worrying whether there should be a Jewish state at all. Scammell is not quite in his depth here: he conflates the Stern gang and the Irgun and gives superficial treatment (as he also does, bizarrely, to Koestler’s part in producing The God That Failed) to a subsequent book, The Thirteenth Tribe. In this, his last semi-serious work, Koestler suggested that Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from the lost people of Khazaria, who before vanishing from the northern Caucasus a thousand years ago had somehow opted to Judaize themselves. One implication of that theory was that no authentic Ashkenazi Jewish tie to Palestine could ever be established. “Arthur just rather enjoys betraying his former friends,” I remember Patricia Cockburn snorting when this effort was published in the 1970s...

He leaves out that another book of Koestler's, Thieves in the Night, that is dedicated to Tedy Kollek, if I recall correctly as well as
Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949.


Here's on his Eretz-Yisrael stays:

Koestler arrived in Palestine in April 1926 and for a few weeks lived in an agricultural collective. However, his application to join the collective, (Kvutza Heftzeba), was rejected by its members.[14] For the next twelve months he supported himself by whatever menial work or commercial enterprise he could find in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but for most of the time he was penniless and starving, and frequently had to depend on the kindness of friends and acquaintances for survival.[15] His occasional involvement with the writing or editing of broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German, were all short-lived. In the spring of 1927 he left Palestine briefly, to run the Secretariat of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party in Berlin. Later that same year, through the intervention of a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem and for the next two years produced a succession of detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers[16] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. But by 1929 Koestler was tired of living in Palestine and in June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, he successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine.[17]...

...In December 1944 he travelled to Palestine with an accreditation from The Times newspaper. There he had a clandestine meeting with the head of the Irgun Gang, Menachem Begin, who was wanted by the British and had a £500 bounty on his head, but Koestler failed to persuade him to abandon terrorism and accept the prospect of a two-state solution for Palestine after the war. Many years later, Koestler wrote in his memoirs: “When the meeting was over, I realized how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence.”[31]

He stayed in Palestine until August 1945, collecting material for his next book Thieves in the Night, then returned to England...


^ Arrow In the Blue, p.125-132
^ AIB p.137, p.165
^ Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, p. 57
^ AIB pp.183-86

^ Stranger on the Square, p.37

Arthur Koestler

A recent essay/review by Patrick McGarth in the Times Literary Supplement (and now I can't find it), dealt with Arthur Koestler.

As Wikipedia has it

Arthur Koestler was a Jewish-Hungarian polymath author who became a naturalized British subject. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late 1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British anti-communists. He wrote numerous books, of which the most famous is the novel Darkness at Noon about the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, an indictment of Stalinism.

But, more importantly for me,

Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became President of a Zionist student fraternity. A month before he was due to finish his studies, he burnt his matriculation book and did not take his final examinations but made "aliyah" to Israel (then a British Mandate). From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate of Palestine, firstly in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley ("Heftzibah"), and later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where he almost starved. He left Palestine for Paris as a correspondent to the Ullstein group of German newspapers...even produced the first Hebrew language crossword puzzles and wrote the sketches for the first Hebrew cabaret ("HaMatateh").

To clarify that, he became a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He wrote for a Revisionist paper.

He also was a screamer, which recalls much of what I have been involved it:

Koestler and a minority of writers and public figures believed that if they sufficiently described the horrors being committed in Europe in news media and public meetings, it would spur the West to action. Despite their efforts, these protests often fell on deaf ears. Capturing their frustration, Koestler described these people as the "screamers". In 1944, he wrote:

We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing-by hot steam, mass-electrocution, and live burial-of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness.["On Disbelieving Atrocities", New York Times Magazine, January 1944 and reprinted in The Yogi and the Commissar, Macmillan (1945), pp. 88-92]

He wrote "Thieves in the Night", "Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949" and "Arrow In The Blue: The First Volume Of An Autobiography, 1905-31" all dealing with Zionism.

While in England, I tried to get him to speak to a group of Betar youngsters but did not succeed. By then he had published "The Thirteenth Tribe".

Here's his refusal letter:-

Koestler and Jabotinsky, Again

From this book review article, Yesterday's Man? by Anne Applebaum on the book "Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic" by Michael Scammell

...He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement...

...It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.

Nor were these shallow passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Spain and travel in the USSR. His Zionism led him to a kibbutz near Haifa. At different times, he advocated the use of violence, whether to bring about a Communist utopia or to create the state of Israel. Even when he turned against his previous causes (and against his previous friends who still believed in them) he did so with real fervor....His involvement with Revisionist Zionism is also probably less well known than The Thirteenth Tribe, a book that argues that modern European Jews are descended from the Central Asian Khazars, and not from the Jews who lived in the Palestine of antiquity—a thesis which, whatever its merits, is hugely popular among the enemies of Zionism...

Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky,

Again?

Yes. Here. And here.

"We cannot afford to see the other man's point."

And you thought all this post-modern/progressive anti-Zionism is new?

This, from a book review of Thieves in the Night by Arthur Koestler (also a movie), highlights my "that's old news" attitude:

Although he does not entirely come to life, Joseph's doubts, questionings and slowly achieved certainty do live, and they are provocative, disturbing and important to anyone interested in understanding the moral and emotional basis of Zionism, which makes it something more than a mere desire to find refuge from oppression, even though it has been ignited by that desire. They have the further interest of seeming to be the personal doubts and self-questionings of Mr. Koestler, whose sensitivity to moral values provides him with a conscience that is a literary instrument of great power and illumination.

Most of his bemused contemplations are self-scourging and have to do with qualities he finds unpleasant in his own people. To take a characteristic example, Joseph is worried over the quality of the younger generation of Zionists.

Their parents [he says] were the most cosmopolitan race of the earth- they are provincial and chauvinistic. Their parents are sensitive bundles of nerves with awkward bodies- their nerves are whipcords and their bodies are those of a horde of Hebrew Tarzans roaming the hills of Galilee. Their parents were intense, intent, over-strung, over-spiced- they are tasteless, spiceless, unleavened and tough. Their parents were notoriously polyglot- they have been brought up in one language which had been hibernating for twenty centuries before being brought artificially to life.

Although his criticisms of his people, both moral and esthetic, are based on a sort of hypercritical, exaggerated sensitiveness towards their flaws which grows increasingly savage in him as he prepares to join the direct-actionists, there is never a time when he questions the right of his people to dominate the land in which the Arabs are and have long been in a majority. He knows that Zionism can bring- and has brought- to the Palestine Arabs techniques in production, medicine, organization and sanitation which will raise the living standards of all the inhabitants of whatever race or religion.
He knows, too, that the primitive, as well as the new intellectual, among the Arabs has an answer to this, and the following passage indicates his reaction to it:

"I wish my Arabic was as good as yours," said Joseph. "What was the old Sheikh explaining so solemnly?""He explained that every nation has the right to live according to its own fashion, right or wrong, without outside interference. He explained that money corrupts, fertilizers stink and tractors make a noise, all of which he dislikes.""And what did you answer?""Nothing.""But you saw his point?""We cannot afford to see the other man's point."

As a political tract for the Zionist cause, "Thieves in the Night" might have gained in persuasiveness for the sympathetic reader still troubled in his mind by one or two aspects of the movement if Bauman, the terrorist, had replied to the Sheikh. Such a reader, disturbed by the thought that the right to be master in a land through superiority in technical skill was, ironically enough, once asserted by the English when they transported the wild Irish from vast districts in their country and it to the more socially advanced Britons, may be inclined to feel that the old fellow made a point worthy of an answer. As a tract it suffers, too, from its failure to treat the ferment among Arab intellectuals as seriously as it deserves to be taken, since it is a very living thing.

But Mr. Koestler, although he is sympathetic to Zionism and a little intolerant on the subject, is not primarily concerned with his defense of it. Chiefly what he has set out to do is to probe and dramatize the emotional tension of the sensitive, highly civilized Jewish intellectual, who finds himself fighting for a national state in Palestine while the memories of European oppression are still bitterly fresh in his mind. Brilliantly and with deep passion Koestler has captured the hope and the dream, the hard emotional intensity, the terror and heroism, the violence and the mysticism that dominate the Jewish struggle in Palestine. The mood and spirit of that struggle, given added poignance by the tragic irony of fratricidal strife between Hebrew and Arab, are portrayed in such human and comprehensible dramatic terms, and the pity and the terror of it are so powerfully captured that "Thieves in the Night" becomes another unforgettable Koestler document on the desperate sickness of our time.

^

Discussing Zionism...in 1945

The following dialogue is from Arthur Koestler's "Thieves in the Night", 

published in 1946 (and which every serious Betari has read).

Arthur Koestler, who was a follower of Jabotinsky in the 1920s, has the character Kamel Effendi represeting the local Arabs of Palestine engaged in conversation and debate with Dick Matthews, an American journalist.

From pages 213-215:

They all refused except Matthews, who took a balloon-glass of brandy. “What was wrong with old Balfour?” he asked, thrusting his big untidy head towards Kamel Effendi.

“He gave our house away,” said Kamel Effendi, who liked to stick to the same metaphor.

“More boloney,” said Matthews, tasting the brandy and finding that it was good. "There never was a house here. There was a desert and a stinking swamp and pox-ridden fellaheen. You were the pariahs of the Levant and to-day you are the richest of the Arab countries. Your population was on the decrease for centuries because half your babes were dying from filth in their cradles, and since the Jews came it has doubled. They haven’t robbed you of an inch of your land, but they have robbed you of your malaria and your trachoma and your septic childbeds and your poverty. . ."

“Come, come, Mr. Matthews," the A.Ch.C. said, putting on his harassed air, though secretly he was enjoying himself. “This is rather strong language, and a bit unfair too.”

Kamel Effendi had jumped up from his seat. He was gasping for words.

"Bbah!” he brought out at last. "Now we know where we are. You come here as our guest, saying you are a journalist from America — but you are just one of those people whom they ...” He made a frantic gesture of rubbing his index against his thumb, and his face underwent a rather unpleasant change.

"Yeah,” Matthews said calmly. "I am one of the Elders of Zion — huh?”

“I think it is time we joined the ladies,” said the A.Ch.C. [Hon. Patrick Gordon-Smith, the
Assistant Chief Commissioner], and the Professor [Shenkin of the Hebrew University] obediently got to his feet, but Kamel paid no attention to him.

"I care not who you are,” he shouted. "You come here as our guest and then you abuse us. That is what we receive for our hospitality. . . .”

"Come off it, Mr. Kamel,” said Matthews. "I am not your guest, I am paying my keep, and I haven’t asked your permission.”

"I care not whether you pay,” cried Kamel Effendi. "And I care not for their hospitals and their schools. This is our country, you understand? We want no foreign benefactors. We want not to be patronised. We want to be left alone, you understand! We want to live our own way and we want no foreign teachers and no foreign money and no foreign habits and no smiles of condescension and no pat on the shoulder and no arrogance and no shameless women with wriggling buttocks in our holy places. We want not their honey and we want not their sting, you understand ? Neither their honey nor their sting. This you can tell them in your America. If they are thrown out in other countries — very bad, very sorry. Very, very sorry — but not our business. If they want to come here — a few of them, maybe thousand, maybe two thousand — t'faddal , welcome. But then know you are guests and know how to behave. Otherwise — to the devil. Into the sea — and hallass, finished. This is plain
language. You tell them.”

There was a painful silence while Kamel Effendi wiped his forehead and the A.Ch.C. stood hovering over the group like an unhappy flamingo. Then Matthews said unexpectedly:

“Yeah — I see your point, Mr. Kamel. I guess you are wrong, but wrong in your own right.”

The A.Ch.C. gave him a curious little stare with his two-coloured eyes ; he seemed on the point of making a remark, and on second thoughts didn’t. But Kamel Effendi laughed stertorously and without transition.

“Ho ! — ho!” he shouted. “Wrong within your own rights. It is a profound saying, my friend — very profound.”

He appreciatively clicked his tongue, and spontaneously grasped Matthews’ hand, pumping it. “No offence, Mr. Matthews,” he said. “Here we all get a little heated sometimes. It is our climate, you know — the khamsin.”


Nothing new under the sun.

^

Koestler as a Freak Oddity

In his "Promise and Fulfillment", Arthur Koestler, former Revisionist Zionist, former Communist and almost former Jew wrote:

The appearance of the freak-movement of Zionism on the political scene was bound to produce a series of freak-reactions. It culminated in the famous Balfour Declaration, one of the most mprobable political documents of all time. In this document one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third. 

Let's sort this out.

While the Balfour Declaration was a one-nation promise, it was discussed at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference attended by many nations.  It was also the basis of the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement.

It was then adopted at the San Remo Conference in April 1920.  And in July 1922, 55 nations agreed to include the Declaration's text in their decision to award Great Britain the mandate over Palestine.

To compare nations, as if the Jewish history and connection to the Land of Israel is equal to that of a community of Arabs - and note: "Arabs" was never in those decisions, only "non-Jews", and for a very good reason -,  is insulting in addition to be totally in error.

The "country" was only that of the Arabs living in it by force of armed invasion, conquest and occupation and underwent the rule of Muslim Arabs (Ommayads, Abbasids, etc.), then Crusaders, then Mamelukes, then Ottomans.  Never did the Arabs establish a separate identifiable polity in the Land of Israel. 

Freak?

Koestler is the oddity here.

^

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

^

Koestler's Letter from 1947

There is a new documentary being produced here in Israel on the hanging of the two British sergeants by the Irgun and I am helping out.

In the course of my work, I came across this, and want to share it with you.

Taken from the New Statesman archive, 16 August 1947

Letter to a Parent of a British soldier in Palestine
Arthur Koestler

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.

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

What Has a Map of the Khazar Empire to Do with "Palestine"?

If you visit this site, you'll observe a list of maps of Palestine.

And at the bottom you can see one of the Khazarian Empire:

Background:

In 1976, Arthur Koestler...in The Thirteenth Tribe, argued that most Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars, a Central Asian people who ruled a large kingdom on the Black Sea and apparently converted to Judaism in the 8th century. This hypothesis has been taken up more recently by Shlomo Sand in a book called The Invention of the Jewish People. Koestler, one of the oddest and most extraordinary public intellectuals of the 20th century, wanted to weaken anti-Semitism by demonstrating that many Jews weren’t Semites at all. Sand, a self-avowed post-Zionist who teaches at Tel Aviv University, is apparently driven by the desire to prove that Ashkenazi Israelis are interlopers in the Middle East. 

An anti-Semitic canard, it has been going through yet another revival.

Al Jazeera and many other Arabs believe it as it would justify their claim of European Jews being a foreign entity as it is for Russian nationalists, a:

pretext for arguing that Jewish intrigues and dominance were to be found from the very beginning of Russian history. In this context the term “Khazars” became popular as a euphemism for the so-called “Jewish occupation regime.”

That's why you will read of pro-Palestine propagandists demanding Jews of Israel 'go back to Europe'. 

^

Who Had Fascist Sympathies?

I discovered this (how I did that, ask not) in a book review of Seth Lipsky's biography of his predecessor at the editor's helm of the Forward, Abraham Cahan, written by a D.D. Guttenplan, who writes from The Nation's London bureau, is the author of American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone (site):

Similarly, in describing Cahan’s bitter dispute with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism—the ideological ancestor of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and a tendency denounced by Cahan as appealing to “extremist chauvinists”—Lipsky airbrushes Jabotinsky’s fascist sympathies, the better to embrace his “stark assessment of the coming struggle” with the Arabs.

Jabotinsky had no "fascist sympathies", despite studies.  He had fascist opponents, disguised as liberal socialists, who tried, quite successfully, to portray Jabotinsky that way. 

I translated Dr. Israel Eldad's article on the subject, originally published in the Jerusalem Quarterly.

And here is Colin Schindler:

Jabotinsky was scathing about fascism and those of his supporters who purported to have "an understanding" of it. "Duce is a translation of that most absurd of all English words, 'leader'," he wrote. "Buffalos follow a leader, civilised men have no 'leaders'."

...Benjamin Akzin, for many years, one of Jabotinsky's closest associates in the Revisionist movement, described him as someone who united "a first-rate logical mind with the soul of a poet dissatisfied with the humdrum of daily life".
On Jabotinsky's death in New York at the age of 59, Zalman Shazar, later a President of Israel, commented: "Jabotinsky always thought of himself as a beloved child, destined to be the first violinist, not needing any orchestra and not needing to be bound by one." Yet even his bitterest rivals in the Labour movement paid tribute to his uniqueness and his ability to move masses by his eloquence and passion.
The writer, Arthur Koestler, rightly depicted Jabotinsky as a "national liberal" in the great 19th-century tradition, "a successor to Garibaldi and Mazzini". Yet it is often the case that the founders of influential movements such as Lenin or the Baal Shem Tov have their histories revised to align them with current beliefs and expectations. The fate of Jabotinsky is therefore no exception. But students of Zionist history deserve better.

Here's another description:

...some even called him a “Jewish fascist.” Rabbi Stephen Wise was unhappy about what he considered to be fascist tendencies in Revisionism, and he believed that under Jabotinsky’s guidance, his movement was becoming a Yiddish or Hebrew species of fascism. A number of Jabotinsky’s political opponents, at one time or another, who accused him of being a fascist, spread rumors that in 1932 Jabotinsky was in favor of passing the Mandate over Palestine to Mussolini.

His youth movement, moreover, did have militarist tendencies. This movement, Betar or Brit Trumpeldor (named in memory of Joseph Trumpeldor), was created in 1923 with the objective of molding a new generation to Jabotinsky’s views. But he was no fascist. He disliked totalitarianism, dictatorships, and police states and once wrote: “I believe in the ideological patrimony of the 19th century….Today’s ideological fashion is that a human being is essentially dishonest and stupid and should not be given the right to govern himself; freedom leads to perdition, equality is a lie, society needs leaders, orders, and a stick….I don’t want this kind of creed; better not to live at all than to live under such a system.” 

His movement did, however, have some things in common with Italian fascism in its view that national interests transcended class interests and, like the fascists, it favored compulsory arbitration of labor disputes. Unlike Weizmann who met Mussolini on three occasions, Jabotinsky never met the Italian dictator. The advent of Hitler did, however, lead him to some co-operation with Ben-Gurion. In his youth, he had flirted with socialism under the influence of two Italian philosophers, and he had contributed some articles to an Italian socialist journal. He had even tackled Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at that time.

What did Jabotinksy think about the concept of a "leader", so crucial to the fascist doctrine?

Here, from a 1934 article on Herzl:-

...When I was young it was absolutely different. We believed that every movement consisted of people of the same worth and standing; each one of them a duke, each one of them a king. When the time of election came, a programme and not people were chosen; the elected persons merely had to carry out the said programme. We, the mass, would follow them not because they were our "leaders", but because they were our "slaves". If you, voluntarily, elect a group of people and order them to work for you, then you are obliged to either aid them or to cast them off, as in this way you are not being subjected to their will, but merely following your own inclinations,  expressed in the elections. Much contradiction was contained in the theory of my youth, sometimes it was only fictitious, but I like it best, it has more pride, more majesty. “Hadar”, even though it bears a name detracting from its literal meaning “democracy”... 

I can't find this one online: “Jews and Fascism, Some Remarks — and a Warning,” The Jewish Echo, May 10, 1935.


And another appreciation:

Jabotinsky early on in the 1920’s and 1930’s saw the looming threats of Fascism and Nazism to the European Jewish community and urged their mass immigration to Israel. Often accused of being a Fascist by leaders of the Yishuv and Zionist leaders in America, he was anything but that, as we shall shortly see...American Zionist Leader Rabbi Stephen Wise suggested that: “To the Revisionists, like the Fascists, the State is Supreme – the individual nothing.” Jabotinsky replied in "Answer to Rabbi Wise" in The Jewish Call, May 5, 1935: Where, in what resolution or declaration, or authoritative article have you read it? Personally, I hate the very idea of a ‘totalitarian state,’ whether Communist or Fascist, call them all Polizei-Staat and prefer old fashioned parliamentarism, however clumsy or inefficient; and 99 percent of my hardy comrades share this attitude…the fact that we maintain and will go on maintaining – that the striving for the creation of a Jewish state should be, to all these who accept it as their ideal, miles above any class or individual interest…. So did the unity of America, which does not mean [Lincoln] wanted an America where the State would be everything and the Individual nothing.

In the end, his prognosis of what was required of the Jewish nationalist movement was vindicated as was many of his political, economic and social ideas.

It was just jealously that caused the criticism. 

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Antifa in Palestine or, When Avigdor Hameiri Turned on Jabotinsky

Avigdor Hameiri (1890-1970) was born in Hungary, then ruled by the Ukraine, as Avigdor Feuerstein. He published his first poem in Hebrew in 1907 and his first book of poetry five years later. 

For approximately two years he fought in Galicia against the Russian army and at the end of 1916 was captured. For six months he was transported to, and tortured in, various prison camps in Asiatic Russia, until he was set free in February 1917 as a result of the Russian Revolution. 

Hameiri immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1921, joined the staff of the daily Haaretz, and was editor of several literary and cultural journals. In 1932, he founded the first social satirical theater in Hebrew in Tel Aviv, Ha'Metateh. Hameiri wrote over 30 books, including poetry, novels, short stories, non-fiction and children’s books. He was awarded the Bialik Institute Prize (1936) and the Israel Prize (1968).

Among his works are the documentary novels Ha-Shiga‘on ha-gadol (The Great Madness; 1929) and Be-Gehinom shel matah (Hell on Earth; 1932); three compendia of surrealistic-fantastical short stories (1925–1928); and an anthology of poetry, Sefer ha-shirim (The Book of Poems; 1932), which includes some of his best lyrical poems. These latter works are Hebrew literature’s most important contributions to pacifist literature, a genre that flourished in the wake of World War I. 

During the late 1920s, he befriended Ze'ev Jabotinsky with whom he conducted a correspondence preserved in the Jabotinsky Institute Archives and was partially employed in two of the newspapers then associated with the Revisionist Movement - Doar HaYom and Ha'Am. Together with Jabotinsky and Itamar Ben-Avi, they thought to romanize the Hebrew alphabet.

Jabotinsky and Hameiri articles highlighted in Doar Hayom April 5, 1929:

On March 12, 1929, Hameiri and Jabotinsky are advertised to appear on the same stage for a Trumpeldor Memorial on behalf of Betar in Jerusalem:

In his own biographical entry that he authored for David Tidhar's Encyclopedia of Eretz-Yisrael Pioneers, he erases all mention of his links with Jabotinsky and Revisionism. On January 14, 1929, it was reported that he had spoken to a group of Betar members in Tel Aviv on the topic of "slogans' amongst the youth. Much earlier, on April 30, 1924, a letter appeared in the conservative Doar HaYom, responding to an article in Ha'Aretz (here), 

complaining about insults that were published in the left-wing socialist weekly HaPoal HaTzair against Hameiri (the letter - ).

What happened? (As for Jabotinsky's fall-out with Bialik, see here.)

Although the Zionist socialists and German Zionists had begun, already by 1925, to refer to Jabotinsky as a 'fascist', the big break came as a result of the 1929 riots which some viewed as resulting from the efforts of Jabotinsky and Betar to assure Jewish rights at the Western Wall as well as the economic confrontations over the role of the Histadrut dominance in which Mapai-linked groups initiated violence towards Betar at strikes and meetings. The 1933 murder of Chaim Arlosoroff was a further event that led to socialist anti-Revisionist extremism and could have been decisive for Hameiri.

In a letter that Jabotinsky sent him on December 11, 1929, it is possible to grasp the indications of the beginnings of Hameiri's transformation (in another letter, Jabotinsky remarks as to Hameiri bit of a peacock character): 

"I am sorry that here you are writing about a 'broken heart.' Perhaps you meant the wounded heart of a Jew who saw the events, then I understand. But if there is a hint in your words of a personal wound of a friend who was insulted by his closest friends - I am sorry. The heads of the square do not understand insults between friends. Both I am insulted and I insult: Schwam Drieber (forget about it) and there are no accounts. It is impossible to work in any other way. I would be very happy if you would accept this philosophy despite all the personal obstacles."

By this time, Hameiri's pacifism had increased. I found a January 25, 1931 new item reporting that there were official Zionist complaints about speeches Hame'ri was making in Czechoslovakia as he was on an official Keren HaYesod speaking tour. Again, ,ost of 1932 he was abroad and probably was influenced by the events there.

Not long after, in Germany, a new anti-Nazi/fascist movement developed: Antifa, Antifaschistische Aktion, founded in 1932. It was a Communist storm troop group based on  paramilitary organisation, Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters), established by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in 1929.

Its Palestine branch was established in 1934. They, too, engaged with the Zionist Right. In 1936, it presented its own Memorandum of the violent Arab 'disturbances'. Some of its members went off to volunteer in Spain's civil war. It resurrected form, it is active today in Israel.

On April 12, 1935, a ceremonial opening of the Second National Antifa Conference took place at the Mugrabi Theater in Tel Aviv. Hameiri spoke. An English translation has been published of that speech. The relevant excerpts to Hameiri's attitude at that time to Jabotinsky and Revisionism is evident and follows:

During one of my discussions with my friends, the creators of Jewish fascism in Israel, I asked their leader if he has ever felt the double responsibility implicit in war: 1) responsibility to himself, to his own life, that is to say those whom he loves and whose love depends on him—his wife, sons, mother, brothers, and friends who fear for his life; 2) responsibility to others—the simple, upright men under his command who risk dying a gruesome death at any moment. I knew that he had never felt this in his life. I knew that he had never in his life stood face to face with awful death and never experienced the grisly death of others. It was enough for me to read his book about the Jewish Legion, to sense that he had never been at the front in his life. It is difficult to deceive us on this point—we, who came so close to death, not once but several times during the war. It is sufficient for us to hear a short sentence from someone about the war to recognize that, for him, it is only a theoretical concept...

Only when a quarter of my life had passed did I gradually realize for whom and for what I had given up everything for which my sacred soul had wailed and wondered: it was for the new Hebrew fascism that copies all the impurities in Europe in all its details!

...have carefully preserved my socialist ideal even at a time when I was forced to work for non-socialist newspapers, who, by the way, never thought of equating Marxism with infamy. My socialist ideal always seeks its counterpart in every party and movement, in the same way it sought it in revisionism until it became too right wing. I speak here in the name of the deep inner revulsion that damages my  entire life, I speak about the human impurity called war, about which Fascists shamelessly boast, and which our Hebrew Fascists imitate with buttons and straps, confusing our youth who haven’t tasted war even in their dreams...I will rise up from my grave to warn you against this loathsome poison that your children soak up without proper knowledge of what is happening by their parents and teachers, who have not yet trodden the path on which fascism steals into young, impressionable brains...

...I wish that you could inoculate your children with an antidote against the plague called “culture of the homeland,” whose sole purpose is to sacrifice them like sheep on the altar of the unappeasable appetite of the Capitalist Moloch!......We must scream with all our strength, and whisper burning words in each other’s ears, against a war for such “culture” and “ideals”: Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go! Better to die on the spot than go and die over there or even to return like a leprous dog, living for generations for the next war like a leprous dog and then dying like a leprous dog!

Learn the bitterest, most obstinate slogan of all: Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!"

What is obvious from this is that Hameiri both errs as to facts and has made a political volte face. Jabotinsky actually did fight on the front, leading his men in an enagagement at the Jordan River and it is in the book he mentions.

On September 23, 1918, the Fusiliers were ordered to capture the Umm esh-Shert crossing and Jabotinsky led the first company to cross the River Jordan for which he was praised for his courage in leading the Fusiliers during the difficult action under firs from the enemy Turks.

Using the terms "Marxism", "socialist" and "Capitalist" points to a turnabout in his political orientation or to gross hypocrisy for money during his work with the Revisionist press. Another similar instance is that of Arthur Koestler.

Having to recourse to a diary of Hameiri and the limited sources I have so far located, I am inclined to limit myself to assuming that personality aspects played much upon his mind, that is, the horror of war, and perhaps, also, his own battlefield experience, not to mention the obvious hypocrisy his previous employments reveal.

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