The Transfer Agreement (33 page)

Arlosoroff was instructed to proceed to Jerusalem and establish an official institution to supervise the Liquidation Bank. Rosenbluth and Senator would coordinate the program in Berlin. Arlosoroff would control the entire operation.
²⁸
There was no time to enjoy the triumph. With his instructions and authority clearly laid out in writing, Arlosoroff left the conference for a meeting across town with Colonial Secretary Cunliffe-Lister.

At 5:00 P.M.
in an office at the stately House of Commons, Professor Brodetsky and Arlosoroff met Cunliffe-Lister and A.C.C. Parkinson. Speaking in a clear, forceful manner, Arlosoroff impressed upon Cunliffe-Lister that Jews were finished in Germany. Their only way out was his transfer plan: children first—this captured Cunliffe-Lister's sympathy the most; laborers second—Cunliffe-Lister understood the need for this advance group and was receptive to bending the immigration-certificate system to the emergency.
²⁹

Arlosoroff then began to explain how the transfer would work. The Liquidation Bank would gather in Jewish assets and use them to export German goods to Palestine. Cunliffe-Lister's facial expression changed. His reaction to a flood of German wares displacing British wares on the Palestinian market was as Professor Brodetsky feared. Cunliffe-Lister interrupted, "Where do we come in? You will be increasing German exports at our [British] expense."
³⁰
Throughout all the secret meetings with Weizmann, Arlosoroff, and Arab leaders in Palestine during April, Cunliffe-Lister had been willing to cooperate on a glorious new plan for the area, a plan of binational self-determination that would solve a host of Arab and Jewish problems and produce a modern Jewish State in the process. There would be commerce, technology, and prosperity for all. Great Britain would reap the financial benefits, selling basic materials and consumer goods to a developing Palestine. The notion of Germany replacing Britain as Palestine's greatest commercial partner had not even occurred to Cunliffe-Lister.

Arlosoroff tried to minimize Cunliffe-Lister's bad reaction. Perhaps the League of Nations, in overseeing the Liquidation Bank, could structure things so as not to harm British commercial interests. Cunliffe-Lister stopped the discussion cold and snapped, "Do what you like, but don't tell US!"
³¹

Arlosoroff realized that opposition to trading with Germany would
be
everywhere. But he was convinced that economic inducements were the only way to prompt Germany to cooperate in the transfer. Next, it was necessary to contact Sam Cohen.

Exactly how the Zionist Executive explained the withdrawal of support for Cohen is unrecorded. Cohen had already set things in motion under the Zionist Organization's preliminary May
30
authority. Meetings had been scheduled in Palestine between Hanotaiah, Yakhin, and other companies. But ultimately, Cohen was forced to step back and allow Arlosoroff to assume control of the transfer. The difficult negotiations must have stretched over several days, because not until June 4 was a cable dispatched to Hanotaiah Ltd. in Palestine:
"JOINT IMPLEMENTATION OF SAM COHEN PROJECT REQUIRED UNDER NATIONAL CONTROL. DISCUSSION BY ALL PARTICIPANTS NECESSARY. DELAY MEETING FOR ARRIVAL COHEN ON 12TH [JUNE], ARLOSOROFF 15TH."
The cable was signed
"ARLOSOROFF/COHEN."
³²

Arlosoroff intended to use the Hanotaiah agreement as a springboard for formal negotiations with the Reich that would produce a transfer controlled by the Jewish Agency. However, Arlosoroff quickly learned that the German government, believing Cohen and Hanotaiah represented the Zionist movement, had indeed granted Hanotaiah complete responsibility for Jewish emigration to Palestine.

On May 19, the day the Reich confirmed Cohen's deal in writing, the British Passport Control Officer in Berlin received new instructions governing the issuance of capitalist certificates for Palestine. Previously requiring evidence of £1,000 in hand, he was now told "not to insist on the production by the applicants of a currency export permit." Instead, the passport officer was "to accept as evidence" proof of capital in "reputable banks in Holland, Switzerland, etc." And he was to "take into consideration as capital the value of machinery, stock, immovable property, etc."
³³
What's more, whenever Jews applied for their currency permits at Reich offices, they were handed a notice referring them to "the finn Hanotaiah Ltd. (the solicitor Siegfried Moses), on the basis of an agreement which has been concluded, sells settlement sites, etc., against payment of the purchase price into a blocked account."
³⁴
The cashless or near-cashless transfer was formally in place. And Hanotaiah was totally in charge.

Quickly the word reached the ZVfD in Berlin from prospective emigrants all over the country. Hanotaiah did indeed hold a monopoly, despite the assurances of Sam Cohen. Emigrants found they could leave Germany—but only if they left behind most of their holdings to be divided between Hanotaiah and the Reich. By June 9, Landauer was forced to concede in a letter to a colleague in Breslau that he had been deceived by Cohen. Landauer promised to intervene at once to strike down the Hanotaiah exclusive.
³⁵
He knew that non-Zionist, middle-class German Jews would simply not leave everything behind for a new life in Palestine.
If
they were to be convinced to start a new life in the Jewish national home, they must be allowed to take some of their old life with them.

Palestine was ready to explode. Internal Zionist politics had produced a dangerous undercurrent to the German emergency. Revisionist forces led by Jabotinsky were challenging the entire leadership of the Zionist Organization—which was becoming increasingly Mapai-dominated. Jabotinsky planned a dramatic appeal for floor votes at the upcoming Eighteenth Zionist Congress to oust the existing leadership and install himself and his circle.
³⁶
At stake was the very philosophy of Zionism.

In simplified terms, Mapai, or Labor Zionism, saw Palestine as a home for a Jewish elite that would toil in the noble vocations of manual work and farming. Their orientation was communal, socialist. They wanted collective farms and villages. Moreover, Labor Zionism desired the many, but not the multitudes. Mapai's Israel would not be for every Jew—at least not in the beginning. At first Israel would be for the approved cadre of pioneers. And Mapai wanted gradual "constructive programs" to build the Jewish Homeland—dunam by dunam.
³⁷

Revisionist Zionism rejected Jewish exclusivity. They wanted a nation of ordinary Jews in a mixed urban-rural society. The system would be free enterprise not socialism. And Revisionism believed that Palestine could not be acquired a nibble and a shipload at a time. Only by rapidly transferring the largest number of Jews in the shortest amount of time would the Jews constitute a sudden majority in Palestine that could declare the State. With specific un pleasantries about starvation and exposure deleted, Revisionism was very much an updated version of Max Nordau's catastrophic Zionism.
³⁸

All the conflicts of Mapai-dominated Zionism and Revisionism became life-or-death issues with the rise of Hitler. How many Jews to bring to Palestine, how quickly, from which socioeconomic-national category, and by what means were all fighting questions. Whether to work with the Hitler regime, or combat it through an economic boycott, only heightened the confrontation.

The battle techniques of. Revisionism and Mapai also differed. Mapai was expert at political warfare—not so much
by
the rules as
for
the rules. Preoccupied with legalisms, they favored sudden organizational and government meetings that would yield repressive regulation. For example, in December 1931, a Mapai-engineered Zionist Organization decree urged all registered Zionists to avoid membership in Jabotinsky's Revisionist Union.
³⁹

Revisionists, on the other hand, were heavily Fascist and profoundly influenced by Mussolini. Neither Vladimir Jabotinsky nor Benito Mussolini approved of Hitler's twisted version of Fascism. Nonetheless, Jabotinsky's legions were wrapped in many of the same fabrics. The paramilitary Betar youth corps trained in military camps and wore the same characteristic brown-colored shirts found in Germany. Revisionists claimed their brown was the color of the earth. But a German brown shirt and a Jewish brown shirt were practically indistinguishable when laid side by side. On one occasion, in mid-April 1933, a Betar parade through Tel Aviv was attacked by Labor Zionists who claimed the brown outfits were so reminiscent of Nazi uniforms (even though nothing resembling a swastika was displayed) that the march itself was a provocation to violence.
⁴⁰
True to Fascist ideology, the fist and the shout were the preferred methods of achieving Revisionist goals. Labor Zionists, especially David Ben-Gurion, were fond of calling Jabotinsky the Jewish Hitler.
⁴¹

During the spring of 1933, every Zionist decision was calculated for its impact on the coming elections for control of the Eighteenth Zionist Congress. As the sniping intensified, Revisionist sympathizers were increasingly shut out of the Mapai-controlled Histadrut labor exchanges. Palestinian Revisionists found they could not earn a living. Revisionists in turn became professional strikebreakers, available for Palestinian employers suffering from Histadrut labor actions. This was especially true in the vast orchard business, where a strategic strike could forfeit a harvest and cripple an entire settlement.
⁴²

While Revisionists were trying to topple the Mapai labor monopoly in Palestine, Labor Zionist leaders were touring hundreds of East European towns and villages, hoping to convert traditional Revisionist voters. Typical was the May 5,
1933,
visit of Ben-Gurion to Riga, Latvia. No sooner had Ben-Gurion stepped from the railway station than a band of Betarim pelted him with rotten eggs. Mapai supporters rushed to Ben-Gurion's aid. Police were called to disperse the fight.
⁴³

Politics was in fact a vital factor when the Zionist Executive in London persuaded Cohen to merge his Hanotaiah deal with Yakhin, the Mapai-controlled land firm. Whoever controlled the German Jewish money and immigrants, directed votes and financial resources that could be wielded in the war for control of Zionism.

Advocating the anti-Hitler boycott became part of Revisionism's campaign for popular support. On April 28, despite official Zionist calls to abstain from anti-Hitler agitation, Jabotinsky delivered a forceful condemnation of Nazi relations with Palestine. It was the first speech by a foreign Jew ever broadcast by Poland's state-controlled radio. Speaking alternately in French and Polish, Jabotinsky called for a rigid worldwide boycott of German goods, to be led by Palestine.
⁴⁴

By May
I0
,
boycott agitation in Palestine was so severe that the Executive Committee of the Vaad Leumi (Zionist national council in Palestine) threw into open debate its official ban on anti-Nazi boycott activities. On May
16,
German Consul Heinrich Wolff—unaware that Sam Cohen's deal had already been approved—warned Berlin of the Vaad Leumi action, and urged acceptance of the Hanotaiah arrangement as a quick countermeasure. Wolff's cable cited anti-German violence, including a recent arson at the Jerusalem consulate, as proof that the Reich should move fast.
⁴⁵

On May I7, Consul Wolff, still unaware of the deal, again openly implored his government to approve the Hanotaiah arrangement. Wolff explained that when Jews in Palestine read about
300
American Jewish organizations actively engaged in boycott and the failure of the Leipzig fur auction, they cannot resist joining the movement. Only by linking the export of German goods to Jewish agricultural settlement, argued Wolff, would Palestinian Jews learn that boycotting Germany would hurt their own interests.
⁴⁶

On May
I8,
Mapai stepped up its antiboycott campaign. Pointing to the arson at the German consulate, they claimed boycott and terrorism were part of the same Revisionist platform. In a saccharin editorial on Kol Israel radio, Labor proclaimed, "Screaming slogans calling for a boycott ... are a crime. . . . We are all anxious about our brethren in Germany, but we have no quarrel with the representatives of the German government in Palestine."
⁴⁷

Ironically, the intrigues and alliances crossed all logic and labels. Revisionism urgently sought the mass influx of Jews from rural and urban classes. Yet it was the Mapai leader Arlosoroff who was working to transfer hundreds of thousands of German Jews to Palestine. Transferring with them would be the money and merchandise needed to establish the very mixed society Revisionism wanted but which Mapai was philosophically opposed to. Obstructing this transfer was the boycott, most staunchly advocated by the Revisionists.

But to the Zionist movement, the realities were not as important as the perceptions. Secrecy and distrust kept the movement polarized and paralyzed at the very moment when world Jewry needed it most.

Zionist attitudes toward Germany were not the only flashpoint in Palestine. Of equal ferocity was the controversial binational question. Many Zionists were motivated by a sense of fair play, but far more were convinced that Jews would for the foreseeable future constitute a minority in Palestine unable to thrive without the cooperation of their Arab neighbors.

Almost all binational talking was done by Zionists as they put forth endless plans of ethnic parity—as opposed to numerical equality—in a national government, or in side-by-side federated national states, or in some compromise thereof. Zionists perceived limited successes when Arabs would even listen in silence to such proposals—and even then Arabs listened in secret, fearing reprisals by Arab extremists.
⁴⁸