The Holocaust Had Many Victims–The Palestinians Among Them

Increasingly, the treatment of the Palestinians by the government of Israel is coming under extensive international scrutiny. In July, for example, over 600 intellectuals from more than 45 countries signed a declaration calling for the dismantling of what they called “the apartheid regime” set up “on the territory of historic Palestine” and “the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that grants all its citizens equal rights and duties.” The signatories include Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina, and Mairead Maguire of Ireland, legal expert Monique Chemallier- Gendreau and Richard Falk, economist and former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations Sir Richard Jolly, South African politician and veteran anti- apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils, and Canadian peace activist and former Green Party leader Joan Russow. Among the academics signing the declaration are Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley; Neve Gordon, of Queen Mary University, London; Adi Ophir, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, and Alice Rothchild, professor emeritus at the Harvard Medical School. When we discuss the Holocaust and Hitler’s slaughter of six million European Jews, we often forget the fact that the Holocaust had other victims as well, namely the Palestinians, the indigenous inhabitants whose country was taken from them. They, of course, played no part in the Holocaust, but saw their country taken from them as the world sought to make a place for Jews who had been displaced by the Nazi tyranny. The world wished to do so in a way that did not involve inviting Jewish refugees into their own countries.

Zionism: A Minority Movement Among Jews From the beginning, Zionism was a minority movement among Jews. It was created, notes Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper, by “…Jews with little knowledge of Palestine and its people, who launched a movement of Jewish return to its ancestral homeland…after a national absence of 2,000 years…In their eyes the Arabs of Palestine were mere background…Palestine was, as the famous Zionist phrase put it, ‘a land without a people.’ The European Zionists knew the land was peopled, but to them the Arabs did not amount to “a people.” Halper, a Jewish American anthropologist who emigrated to Israel and heads the Israeli Committee Against House demolitions, points out that from the beginning, “Zionism…attracted but a tiny fraction of the world’s Jews in its formative years. Only 3 per cent of the 2 million Jews who left Eastern Europe between 1882 and 1914 went to Palestine, and many of those subsequently emigrated to other countries.” Ironically, the leading Jewish voices in the late 19th and early 20th century rejected Zionism, while it was embraced by anti-Semites as a way to remove unwanted Jews from their own countries. For Reform Jews, the idea of Zionism contradicted almost completely their belief in a universal prophetic Judaism. The first Reform prayerbook eliminated references to Jews being in exile and to a Messiah who would miraculously restore Jews throughout the world to the historic land of Israel. The prayerbook eliminated all prayers for a return to Zion.

“America is our Zion” In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared, “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope for the future. America is our Zion.” While most Jews opposed Zionism, many anti-Semites embraced it. Peter Beinart, an editor for Jewish Currents, writes in The Guardian: “Some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain ‘views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,’ Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish emigration to the United Kingdom…Two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body (the Jews) which it too long regarded as alien or even hostile , but was equally unable to expel or absorb.” In England, most Jewish leaders opposed the Balfour Declaration. A Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, insisted that Jews be regarded as a religious community. He used the term “anti-Semitism’ to characterize the sponsors of the Balfour Declaration. A document he issued on August 23, 1917 was titled, “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government.”

Anti-Semites Welcome Zionism In an essay entitled “The Perils of Zion,” the British Jewish leader Claude Montefiore stressed the theme that “those who have no love for the Jews and those who are pronounced anti-Semites all seem to welcome the Zionist proposals and aspirations. Why should this be, unless Zionism fits in with anti-Semitic presumptions and with anti-Semitic aims?” Writing in The New York Times, Henry Moskowitz, in an article entitled “Zionism Is No Remedy,” described the curse of nationalism which hung over the world as World War I raged, “in which the idea of dominion has given certain nations a form of megalomania.” He had no wish for the Jews to join this enterprise. The whole nature of Jewish nationalism was reactionary and an unsatisfactory philosophy of life, he argued . Instead, what Jews needed was a revival of the Hebraic spirit which gave birth to the visions of the Prophets, to David’s psalms and to Spinoza’s God. At the same time, an even more militant form of Zionism was emerging, that of Revisionism. Its leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, embraced the negative view of Jews he imbibed from anti-Semites. In his autobiography, he describes how he first came into contact with the Zionist movement when he was studying in Bern, Switzerland. He announced on the spot his adherence to the cause: “I am a Zionist because the Jewish People are a very nasty people and its neighbors hate it, and they are right; its end in the Dispersion will be a general Bartholomew’s Night, and the only rescue is general immigration to Palestine.”

Affinity for Fascism Jabotinsky had an affinity for fascism and was ready to form a tactical alliance with groups such as the anti-Semitic Ukrainian national Petliura after World War I. Jabotinsky’s spirit lived on as young Revisionists like Menachem Begin, Abraham Stern and Yitzhak Shamir fought against the British during World War II. In his book “The Controversy of Zion,” Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes, “In his struggle for a Greater Israel stretching as far as the Euphrates, Stern led a violent group called Lehi in terrorist acts against the British…He met a representative of Mussolini…He sent an agent…to talk to talk to a representative of the Third Reich, Otto von Hentig, of the Berlin Foreign Office. He expressed sympathy with National Socialists, whose goal of removing the Jews from Europe he understood, spoke of ‘the good will of the German Reich Government…towards Zionist activity.’” Because Zionism remained a minority view among Jews until the advent of Nazism and the Holocaust, it is unlikely that a Jewish “homeland” or state would have been established in Palestine after World War II if it were not for these horrors. What is clear is that the Zionist leaders did not envision sharing Palestine with its indigenous population. From the very start of Jewish settlement in Palestine, Zionist leaders were quite open in making it clear that they wanted to remove the country’s indigenous population. As far back as 1914, Moshe Sharett, a future Israeli prime minister, declared, “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture…If we seek to look upon our land , the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate—-all context and meaning will be lost to our enterprise.”

“Leave Palestine Alone” Even earlier, in 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, former mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to transform Palestine into a Jewish state, wrote a letter aimed at Theodor Herzl, the leading Zionist of the 19th century. He pointed out that Palestine had an indigenous population that would not easily accept their displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “In the name of God, leave Palestine alone.” In his book “The Hundred Years War on Palestine,” Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s grandnephew and professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, notes that in Herzl’s response to Yusuf Diya, the Zionist leader assured him that the arrival of European Jews in Palestine would improve life for the indigenous inhabitants because of Jewish “intelligence” and financial acumen. He declared, “no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.” Herzl’s response, notes Khalidi, concealed Zionism’s real intentions: “With the smug self-assurance so common to nineteenth century Europeans, Herzl offered the preposterous inducement, that the occupation, and ultimately the usurpation of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. Herzl’s thinking…appears to have been based on the assumption that the Arabs could ultimately be bribed or fooled into ignoring what the Zionist movement actually intended for Palestine.”

Herzl Didn’t Practice Judaism or Believe in God In his biography of Herzl, “The Labyrinth of Exile,” Ernst Pavel notes that the Zionist leader did not practice Judaism or believe in God. Indeed, he once considered mass conversion to Christianity the best resolution of the Jewish “problem.” He regularly denigrated Judaism and in one letter declared, “Just think what the Jews have suffered over the past two thousand years for the sake of this fantasy of theirs.” Herzl wrote: “I consider religion indispensable for the weak. There are those who, weak in willpower, mind or emotions, must always be able to rely on religion. The others, the normal run of mankind, are weak only in childhood and in old age; for them, religion serves as an educational instrument or a source of comfort…Which religion, or which god , really makes no difference…Any Jew who has children and decides to get baptized has my blessings.” Pavel shows that Herzl had every reason to understand the Arab population of Palestine, their numbers and their point of view. Prior to the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, he sent the young Zionist activist Leo Motzkin on a tour of Palestine. One passage in his report, Pavel declares, “deserves the special attention it failed to receive at the time.” In that passage, Motzkin reported: “Completely accurate statistics about the number of inhabitants do not presently exist. One must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs…”. (Protocol of the Second Zionist Congress).

Irony of Referring to “Our country” Ernst Pavel points to the irony of referring to “our country” when discussing a land already inhabited by others. When Herzl himself visited Palestine in 1898, he seemed to ignore the local inhabitants almost completely. Pavel points out that, “The trip took him through at least a dozen Arab villages, and in Jaffa itself, Jews formed only 10 per cent —-some 3,000—-of the total population. Yet not once does he refer to the natives in his notes, nor do they ever seem to figure in his later reflections. In overlooking, in refusing to acknowledge their presence —-and hence their humanity—-he both followed and reinforced a trend that was to have tragic consequences for Jews and Arabs alike.” In his book “The Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought,” Rabbi David Goldberg, a leading spokesman for Progressive Judaism in the United Kingdom, points out that one of the great shortcomings of the early Zionists was their indifference to the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. Some other Zionists, however recognized that a potential injustice against those living in Palestine was being perpetrated and warned against it. Unlike his fellow Zionists who persisted in fantasizing about “a land without people for the people without a land,” Ahad Ha’am, the Russian Jewish writer and philosopher, refused from the very beginning to ignore the presence of Arabs in Palestine. Ahad Ha’am paid his first visit to the new Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1891. In his essay “The Truth From The Land of Israel,” he says that it is an illusion to think of Palestine as an empty country: “We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a non- cultivated wilderness and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow.”

Primacy of Jewish Ethics Jewish ethics were the heart and soul of Ahad Ha’am’s philosophy and to the end of his life he denounced any compromise with political expediency. In 1913, protesting against a Jewish boycott of Arab labor, he wrote to a friend: “I can’t put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people, and unwittingly the thought comes to mind: If this is so now, what will our relations to the others be like if, at the end of time, we shall really achieve power in Eretz Israel? And if this be the Messiah , I do not wish to see his coming.” In 1923, Albert Einstein toured Palestine. He believed that Jewish settlers should be fair to their Arab neighbors and on November 25, 1929, he wrote to Chaim Weizmann: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering, and deserve all that will come to us.” Later, in January 1946, testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Einstein was asked whether, in his view, refugee settlement in Palestine demanded a Jewish state. He replied: “The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow- mindedness and economic obstacles. I believe that it is bad. I have always been against it.” He lamented that the concept of a Jewish commonwealth was “an imitation of Europe, the end of which was brought about by nationalism.” In 1952 in a message to a “Children of Palestine” dinner, Einstein spoke of the need to curb “a kind of nationalism which has already arisen in Israel if only to permit a friendly and fruitful coexistence with the Arabs.” Discussing this incident, Alfred M. Lilienthal in “The Zionist Connection,” writes: “When the portion of the Einstein message was censored in the organization’s press release so as to impart the impression of all-out support for Israel, I went to Princeton to seek the Professor’s views on the incident. Einstein then told me that he had never been a Zionist and had never favored the creation of the State of Israel. It was then that he also told me of a significant conversation with Weizmann. Einstein had asked him: ‘What of the Arabs if Palestine were given to the Jews?’ And Weizmann replied: ‘What Arabs? They are hardly of any consequence.’”

Policy of Reconciliation A small number of thoughtful and sensitive Zionists sought a policy of reconciliation with the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. In 1925, under the leadership of Arthur Ruppin, an association called Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace) was established in Palestine and proposed binationalism as the proper solution to the conflict between Zionists and Arabs, two peoples claiming the same land. In their credo, issued in Jerusalem in 1927, Brit Shalom said it was intent on creating in Palestine “a binational state , in which the two peoples will enjoy totally equal rights, as befits the two elements shaping the country’s destiny, irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any given time.” Its spokesmen included such respected figures as Judah Magnes, chancellor and first president of the Hebrew University, and such university faculty members as Martin Buber, Hugo Germann, Ernst Simon and Gershon Scholem. For these men, Zionism was a moral crusade or it was nothing. Brit Shalom’s leader, Arthur Ruppin, was saddened by the growing disparity between universal moral values and narrow Jewish nationalism. “what continually worries me,” he wrote, “is the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine… the two peoples have become more estranged in their thinking . Neither has any understanding of the other, and yet I have no doubt that Zionism will end in catastrophe if we do not succeed in finding a common platform.”

“No equivalent in History” What Zionists we’re doing, he argued, “has no equivalent in history. The aim is to bring Jews as a second nation into a country which already is settled as a nation—-and fulfill this through peaceful means. History has seen such penetration, by one nation into a strange land only by conquest, but it has never occurred that a nation will fully agree that another nation should come and demand full equality of rights and national autonomy at its side." As far back as 1930, Albert Einstein had warned in the Palestinian newspaper Falastin that “oppressive nationalism must be conquered,” and that he could “see a future for Palestine only on the basis of peaceful cooperation between the two peoples who are at home in the country …come together they must in spite of all.” We have become familiar with the term “ethnic cleansing” in recent years, but until recently, few have used it to describe the Zionist efforts to remove Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants. David Ben-Gurion advocated for “compulsory transfer” of Palestinians. In 1937, he established a Committee for Population Transfer within the Jewish Agency. “Transfer,” of course is the euphemism for “ethnic cleansing,” and was carried out at a mass level in 1948 and again in 1967. One of its perpetrators, Yosef Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Department, wrote: “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples. The only solution is a Land of Israel without Arabs…There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here…”

Indifferent To Jews Who Did Not Come to Palestine Ben-Gurion was not only not concerned with the fate of the Palestinians, but was indifferent to what might happen to Jews who did not emigrate to Palestine. In 1938, he declared that if he knew he could save either all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England or only half by bringing them to Palestine, he would not hesitate to choose the latter, because, “Before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.” Israeli historian Tom Segev notes that, “Disappearing the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream , and was also a necessary condition of its realization… With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer—-or its morality.” Another Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, writes: “By 1945, Zionism had attracted more than half a million settlers to a country whose population was almost two million…The local native population was not consulted…nor was its objection to the project of turning Palestine into a Jewish state taken into account…As with all earlier settler colonial movements, , the answer to these problems was the twin logic of annihilation and dehumanization. The settlers’ only way of expanding their hold on the land beyond the 7 percent, and ensuring an exclusive demographic majority, was to remove the natives from their homeland. Zionism is thus a settler colonial project and one that has not yet been completed…Israel is still colonizing …dispossessing Palestinians , and denying the rights of the natives to their homeland…the crime committed by the leadership of the Zionist movement, which became the government of Israel, was that of ethnic cleansing.”

Final Victims of the Holocaust The reason that the Palestinians may properly be seen as the final victims of the Holocaust is that growing anti-Semitism in Europe caused many Jews, who had previously opposed Zionism, to begin to look positively upon the idea of creating a Jewish state in Palestine as a refuge for those being persecuted. Jewish organizations in the U.S. that had always opposed Zionism, slowly began to view it more favorably. Without Hitler, there would have been little support from Jews in the U.S. or Western Europe for the creation of a Jewish state. Without the Holocaust, the United Nations would have had little reason to establish the State of Israel. Now, the victimization of the Palestinians, who had no role in the Holocaust, is becoming more widely understood. Both the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch have characterized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid.” The groundswell of international opposition to Israel’s occupation and mistreatment of Palestinians is being widely compared to the movement which grew in opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Jeff Halper points out that, “The Palestinian cause has attained a global prominence equal to that of the anti- apartheid movement. Palestinians have become emblematic of oppressed peoples everywhere. Israel is an established and strong settler state just as South Africa was, yet neither was able to defeat or marginalize an indigenous population with state-national aspirations. Now, the Palestinian struggle has achieved the level of significance of the anti-apartheid struggle in the world.

Those Who Had Been Oppressed Then Mistreated Others These facts were eloquently enunciated many years ago by the late Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Israel after World War II and had a distinguished career as a professor at the Hebrew University. He was chairman of the Israel League for Human and Civil Rights and lamented that Jews, who had been so horribly oppressed, would then be guilty of oppressing others. Dr. Shahak was particularly critical of American Jews, many of whom, he argued, had made the State of Israel a virtual object of worship, flying Israeli flags in synagogues, and ignoring completely the treatment of the Palestinians. He wrote: “I want to argue that this behavior…has no support in historical Judaism…It is contrary to what is in my opinion the best part of Judaism, the prophetic tradition, the exhortations of the Great prophets of ancient Israel. When Amos said: ‘But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’ (5:24), against whom did he intend this? It is not said against the Assyrians or the Egyptians. It was intended, to use modern terms, against the government of Israel of his time..when Isaiah represents the Jews of his time …as saying ‘for we have made lies our refuge and under falsehood have we hid ourselves’ (28:15), he stands in glaring contrast to what is condemned by the American Jewish organizations, that is a critique of Jews themselves.” In Shahak’s view, “If a Jew would suggest now what I believe to be true—-that the majority of American Jews have made lies and falsehoods their refuge when they discuss Israeli affairs or the injustice done by Israel, with their support, to Palestinians—-he would be described as a ‘self-hating Jew,’ a definition applicable to not only all Jewish prophets , but to many (perhaps most) other great Jewish figures as well…The best part of historical Judaism is not only critical of the power of the Jewish state and of the Jewish religion itself when during times of corruption it supported the Jewish state. When the power of the official Jewish religion was exerted in support of injustices committed by the Jewish state, the prophets did not hesitate to condemn not only Jewish kings…but also Jewish prayers, holidays and temples. When Isaiah concluded that ‘Your hands are full of blood’ (and it is about Jewish hands that he said this), he continued and told the Jews of his generation to cease to pray on Sabbaths and not to make assemblies: ‘your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates, they are a trouble unto me…when you make many prayers, I will not hear’ (1:14-15).”

Worship of a Jewish State Should be Condemned One of the most important duties of Jews, Shahak argues, “…is the critique of the Jewish state when it commits a wrong…in the absence of fulfilling this duty , Jewish religious observances become an abomination and an idolatry. Temples and synagogues, whether during the time of Amos and Isaiah or now, which are devoted to worship of a Jewish state (or of any other state) should be condemned in the same terms as every other totalitarian institution..It should be…asserted that those who support the injustices committed by Israel are not its true friends, but its worst enemies.” More and more Israelis, concerned about their country’s treatment of Palestinians, lament its departure from Jewish moral and ethical values. Professor David Shulman of Hebrew University writes: “We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion exile. I find it astonishing that we of all peoples have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.” Making a direct connection between the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians, Jane Hirschmann, whose family fled Germany at the time of the Holocaust, writes this in a June 14 post in Truthout: “I am a first generation American. My Jewish parents fled Germany as the horrors of the Holocaust were unfolding. They left behind family who perished in the camps…Once the war was over, Germany gave my father reparations for the loss of his business as well as for the crime of persecution. Both of my parents were welcomed back by the German government and told they could get their passports and citizenship returned…I wonder why the 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes and land in 1948 when Israel was founded are not entitled to the same treatment my family received after World War II ended.”

Reparations for Palestinians. Hirschmann concludes: “But the war against the Palestinians was never over. Instead, Israel continues to this day its policy of ethnic cleansing…I ask myself how is it possible that the victims of the Holocaust and their progeny can so brutally victimize another people on racial grounds? I ask myself why the Palestinians don’t have the same rights to reparations and return afforded my family after Germany accepted responsibility for their crimes. Shouldn’t Palestinians be entitled to reparations and the right of return? Shouldn’t they have the same right to self-determination that Israel itself claims? I am deeply ashamed and angry that these acts are committed in the name of the Jewish people and that my government provides the money and arms to support these Israeli crimes.” The Holocaust casts a long shadow. The declaration “Never Again” is one all of us should take to heart. But it should apply not only to attacks on Jews but on any religious, racial,or ethnic group. Today, it is the Palestinians who are being threatened with continued ethnic cleansing, ironically as a result of the Holocaust itself. They are, sadly, its final victims.