A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (51 page)

One of Hitler’s most vocal supporters in Palestine was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. A grand mufti is a religious official with considerable prestige but, traditionally, little power. Al-Husseini was the exception. The British had appointed him to the post because they saw him as a potential “troublemaker” and hoped his new position would keep him quiet. They even enhanced his power by placing him on the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee—a group that spoke for Palestinian Arabs in much the way the Jewish Agency spoke for Palestinian Jews.

Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He traveled to Germany during the war and gave speeches on the radio that called on Muslims to support the Nazis.

Al-Husseini made no secret of his admiration for the Nazis. He had particular praise for
Mein Kampf
, a book that combined Hitler’s life story with his political views. In the book, Hitler insisted that Jews “do not at all intend to build a Jewish state in Palestine…. They only want an organization center for their international world-swindling.”
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It was a view the grand mufti embraced.

In the 1930s, Al-Husseini and many other Palestinians were alarmed by a sharp rise in Jewish immigration to Palestine. They did not place the blame on Adolf Hitler and his efforts to push Jews out of Germany for the increase; instead they blamed Palestinian Jews and the British. In 1936, anger over this issue had turned violent. Although Britain stopped the rioting, the fighting between Jews and Arabs never really ended.

In 1939, in an effort to quiet Arab protests, Britain limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 15,000 people each year for a period of five
years. That decision horrified those who were aware of the threat that Hitler posed to European Jews. Despite their protests, restrictions on Jewish immigration remained in effect even after the war.

With the publication of the Harrison report, many people in Britain and the United States urged British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to reconsider immigration policies in Palestine. He countered those demands by suggesting that the United States and Britain form a binational committee to determine the future of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the mandate. President Truman agreed.

Between January and April of 1946, this new binational committee heard testimony in Europe and the Middle East and reached a conclusion similar to the one Harrison had outlined. The committee also called on Britain to issue 100,000 certificates of immigration to Jewish DPs. And it urged other nations to accept at least some Jewish immigrants. In addition, the group recommended an end to British rule of Palestine and the creation of an Arab-Jewish state—an idea rejected by almost everyone in Palestine. In a letter to a London newspaper, Richard Crossman, a British representative on the committee, defended those recommendations:

The tragedy of Palestine is that our obligations to the Jews and the Arabs are contradictory. We cannot do justice to the one without doing injustice to the other and at the moment we are doing grave injustice to both
.

When I weighed up the political objections of the Arabs against the human needs of the homeless survivors of Polish Jewry, I felt that the issuing of 100,000 certificates was a lesser injustice than the refusal to do so.
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Although the committee’s recommendations were never carried out, Americans praised the plan. British officials responded by accusing the United States of hypocrisy at a time when the country itself was unwilling to increase its own immigration quotas. So did many Arab nationalists. Truman took the criticism seriously and issued an executive order that gave DPs preferential treatment under U.S. immigration laws. But that order had little impact, because most of the approximately one million DPs in Europe in 1946 were from eastern Europe. U.S. immigration laws limited the number of Poles who could settle in the United States in a single year to 5,982. Other eastern European nations had even smaller quotas—Romania, 603; Hungary, 473; and Lithuania, 344.

With violence in Palestine growing, the British decided in 1947 to turn over their mandate to the newly formed United Nations. In May, the General Assembly set up the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to recommend a solution to the conflict. Its 11 members were from Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia.

All 11 members traveled to Palestine to interview Jews, Arabs, and British officials. The British and the Jewish Agency cooperated, but the Arab Higher Committee refused to do so. Instead, committee members met informally with Palestinian Arabs.

In July, a dramatic incident altered the way some committee members saw the crisis. On July 11, an old American ferry boat that Zionists called the
Exodus
sailed from France with more than 4,500 Jewish refugees on board—including about 600 children. Those refugees had fled Germany and were planning to enter Palestine illegally because they had no other place to go. On July 18, four British destroyers surrounded and stormed the
Exodus
. The unarmed passengers and crew fought back with sticks and cans. The British killed 3 people and injured 28 others. They then brought the boat into the port of Haifa and transferred the passengers onto navy transports to take them back to Germany.

Four members of UNSCOP were in Haifa when the
Exodus
entered the port. As they watched in horror, the wounded and the dead were carried to shore. They saw the gashes the British had made in the ship and observed frightened children peeking out of portholes. And they heard the cries of anger and fear as passengers were shipped back to DP camps in Germany.

On August 31, with memories of the incident still fresh, UNSCOP sent its report to the UN. It recommended that Palestine be divided into two separate states, one a Jewish state and the other an Arab state. As UN delegates debated the proposal, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee warned that if the resolution passed, the position of Jews in the Arab world “will become very precarious.”

Despite that warning, on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted to create two states. The slightly larger one, about 56 percent of what was left of the mandate after the creation of Jordan, would be a Jewish state, with a population of about a million equally divided between Arabs and Jews; the smaller state, about 43 percent of the territory, would be an Arab state with a population of about 750,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews.

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan, but the Arabs did not. Hassan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood, an ally of the mufti, viewed the division of Palestine as “an international plot carried out by the Americans, the Russians, and the British, under the influence of Zionism.”
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He called for a holy war against the Jews. So did some members of the Arab League—which then consisted of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and what is now Yemen.

Many Jews in Palestine and elsewhere viewed those harsh statements as antisemitic, particularly the false claims of an “international plot.” But the strong language did not have the support of all Arabs. Neither Arabs nor Jews were completely united on any issue, including the proposed division of Palestine. King Abdullah of Jordan saw division as the “only realistic solution.”
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So did the prime minister of Iraq. He privately remarked that Iraq would have to accept Israel eventually but that “for now it is politically impossible to acknowledge this publicly. To do so would cause a revolt in Iraq.”
³⁶

On May 14, 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine, headed by David Ben-Gurion (soon to be the new nation’s first prime minister), proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. Within hours, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon attacked the new nation. Other members of the Arab League supported the war financially but did not send troops.

European Jews came to Palestine in large numbers in the 1930s to escape antisemitism. They cleared land for farming, built new industries, and established schools and hospitals.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to divide Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. In December, Britain announced that it would end its rule of Palestine on May 15, 1948. On May 14, David Ben Gurion and other leaders established the state of Israel.

Why were some Arab leaders willing to fight for a single Palestinian state even though they thought partition was a more practical solution? One answer lies in their strong commitment to nationalism. Arab nationalists believed that the Arab people were bound by more than a common language, religion, and history. They also shared a goal—ending Western influence in the Middle East. They saw a Jewish state as a continuation of Western influence.

Many Jews in Palestine had only recently been victims of European antisemitism. They found it difficult to understand how anyone could regard them as European colonists in what they considered their ancestral home; after all, many Jews traced their roots to the Biblical Israelites. At the same time, the anti-Jewish feelings on the Arab side were often mirrored on the Jewish side. Some Jewish settlers regarded Palestinian Arabs as “backward” or “treacherous.” Both sides were outraged by the violent acts committed by the other. And gradually, each side came to view
its own people as victims and its opponents as powerful, aggressive, and dangerous. Those views made reaching a compromise extremely difficult.

Yet another force driving the Arabs’ decision to go to war rather than accept a Jewish state was the unrelenting effort of leaders like the grand mufti and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In speeches, books, and radio broadcasts, they repeatedly labeled “the Jews” as “the enemy of Islam.”

When the fighting in Palestine ended in January 1949, Israel controlled all of the territory the UN had allotted to it plus about half of the land set aside for an Arab state. The other half of that land was divided between Jordan and Egypt. Jordan held east Jerusalem and the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and Egypt controlled Gaza (a strip along the Mediterranean Sea that lies on Egypt’s eastern border).

By the spring of 1949, Israel had signed cease-fire agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Even though the four agreed to a truce, they refused to recognize Israel, negotiate borders, or set terms for a lasting peace. Even the hint of a peace agreement could be dangerous. On July 16, 1951, such rumors led to the assassination of Riad Bey al-Solh, a former prime minister of Lebanon, and, four days later, to the murder of King Abdullah of Jordan.

In the course of the fighting, many Palestinian Arabs became refugees. There is no agreement on their numbers—the lowest number is 520,000, an Israeli estimate, and the highest is 800,000 to 850,000, an Arab estimate. United Nations agencies in 1948 placed the number at 726,000. There was no agreement then or now on how they came to be refugees or how best to repatriate or resettle them. For more than 60 years, the two sides have struggled to negotiate solutions to these and a host of other problems.